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Behind th e enemy', dying glare,
Lo\'l' raging ror the perwnal glory
That reason's gi rl would add,
The libera l appetite and power.
The righlness or a God.
PARTISAN REVIEW
The "rightness of a God" was a role almost automa ti ca ll y con–
ferred on the white European when he left home and went out to
govern coloni es. "All Europe," we are told, " had c011lributed to the
mak ing of Kurtz," and hi s mo tives, as well as hi s fa te, are deeply
represe11lative. H e goes o ut, first of all , to make money; he is thvs a
representative of economi c individualism, a protagonist of the career
open to ta le11l in th e free marketplace; and because he find s a more
effective way of exploiting the ivory of the Congo he is na tura ll y
expfcted to become a power in the grea t Trading Company. Paradoxi–
ca lly, however, the Benthamite, Utilitarian , and Imperiali st modes of
thought tllrn o ut to be not the hi stor ica l contrari es but th e comple–
ments of Romanti c individualism as it had been transformed into its
later Bohemi an , Decadent, and Symbolist embodiments. Kurtz is a
poet. a pai11ler, above all a man with the power of words; and his final
quest for abso lute liberati on from a ll the constraints o f civiliza ti on
makes him a symboli c parallel to the career of Arthur Rimbaud, who
had turn ed his back on European civiliza tion in 1875, and ended up as
a trader and expl orer in Abyssinia.
The representative importance of Kurtz's surrender to the drives of
th e un conditi oned ego has bfen analyzed by Li on el Trilling in hi s
essay "The Modern Element in Litera ture." Conrad's " strange and
terrible message o f ambivalence towa rds tIl(" life o f civiliza tio n ,"
Trilling writes, "continues th e tradition of Bl ake and Nietzsche";
and Kurtz is a portent of the future, fo r " nothing is more characteri sti c
of modern lit era ture th an its discovery and canoniLa tion o f th e prima l,
no neth ica I energ ies."
Kurtz, however, does no t consciously seek to libera te these ener–
g ies; he goes out as a member of the "gang of virtue, " the benevo lent
liberal reformers who are goi ng
to
bring the light of modern educa–
ti onal, political, moral and religious progress to the da rk places of the
earth . Unlike Rimbaud, or Gauguin la ter, Kurtz is an envoy of
civilization , not a voluntary exil e; he is "an emi ssary," as the brick–
maker says, "of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what
clsc." But in Africa Kurtz meets the ape and th e ti ger within himself.
and e\'t'ntuall y lets them loose. Given the opportunit y, it appears, the
autonomous indi vidu al will indeed "submit all things to desire," and
far deeper than hi s social instinct, it appears, is the des ire
to
do