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everything he wants to do and claim "the rightness of a God" for doing
it.
This "rightness" finds a powerful sanction in Western industrial
progress. Kurtz achieves supernatural ascendancy primarily through
his monopoly of firearms; the idea is prefigured, ironically enough, in
his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage
Customs, where Kurtz begins from the premise that "we whites ...
must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural
beings-we approach them with th e might as of a deity ." The harle–
quin confirms this basis for Kurtz's power: " He came to them with
thunder and lightning, you know-and they had never seen anything
like it." So, Marlow tells us, Kurtz later presided "at certain midnight
dances ending with unspeakable rites, which-as far as I reluctantly
gathered from what I heard at various times-were offered up to him–
do you understand?-to Mr. Kurtz himself."
Marlow is horrified, and so, just before his end, is Kurtz, to
unders tand what happens to a man who discovers his existential
freedom under circumstances which enable him to put into practice the
ultimate direction of nineteenth-century thought: to bestow on the
individual all those powers and freedoms which had formerly been
reserved for God. Man's last evolutionary leap was
to
be up to the
throne that he had emptied; up, and yet, at the same time, it seemed, far
down, and far back.
Heart of Darkness
embodies that view of human destiny which
Sartre summed up in his definition of man as "the being whose plan it
is to become God." Conrad enacted the unreal exorbitances of the plan
in the fate of Kurtz; for himself he tentatively preferred the humbl er
and irresolute moral alternatives of Marlow. Conrad's vision had no
use for Christianity, mainly on practical grounds: "Christianity," he
wrote in 1916, " is the only religion which, with its impossibl e stan–
dards has brought an infinity of anguish to inumerable souls-on
this earth. ,. The cardinal lesson of experience is a full rea lization of our
fragile, lonely, and humble status in the natural order; and here any
theoretical system, whether philosophical, scientific or religious, is
likely to foster dangerous delusions of independence and omnipotence.
Thus in "Youth" Marlow prefers Burnaby's
Ride to Khiva
to Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus,
the soldier to the philosopher, on the grounds that:
"One was a man, and the other was either more-or less." So, against
all the unreal psychological, social and religious hyperboles of his
waning century, Conrad decisively rejected both the more and the less;
and in
H eart of Darkness
affirmed the necessity, as Camus put it, "in
order to be a man
to
refuse
to
be a God."
