Responses To Intellectual Revolutions Joseph Conrads Heart

Responses To Intellectual Revolutions: Joseph Conrad.s Heart Of Darkness And Christopher Marlowe.s T Essay, Research Paper

Responses to Intellectual Revolutions:

Joseph Conrad.s Heart of Darkness and Christopher Marlowe.s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Joseph Conrad.s Heart of Darkness is a view of a revolution . not a political one, but a scientific one: the Darwinian revolution. Conrad was writing two generations after Darwin, in his monumental work Origin of Species, had disrupted one of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world: that there was a divinely ordered and created Great Chain of Being with man as the highest level on this Earth. This chain was destroyed, replaced with a seemingly random and incomprehensible evolution. While at first this change may seem inconsequential, it is only because we.ve grown so used to it. It is difficult to imagine the shock one would have reading a book and discovering that, contrary to what you had been taught from your very earliest of years, the world was not wholly made for man, that a divine creator hadn.t placed everything in a specific place on the Earth to be useful for man, but that it had all evolved from some primitive cell. The huge belittling that accompanied this would have major repercussions on the collective psyche, and in Heart of Darkness, Conrad struggles to understand these repercussions.

In his effort to write a book exploring life after a major revolution in the way of thinking, Conrad turned to another author who.d faced the same problem almost three hundred years earlier: Christopher Marlowe, author of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, which explored man.s relationship to the cosmos after Copernicus had moved its center from the Earth to the Sun. Conrad was clearly acquainted with the Faustus legend: he refers to an agent as a .papier-mache Mephistopheles. in Heart of Darkness. And so he used it, both with direct allusions and indirect imitations, in his own novel, to provide himself some model for writing about a major intellectual revolution. Just as Marlowe.s Dr. Faustus is destroyed for using his sorcery (an application of astronomical and astrological knowledge) to become .a mighty god. so too is Kurtz removed from his post for attempting to .appear… in the nature of a supernatural being.(50) Both authors also stress moderation as the escape from damnation. Marlowe creates the sorcerers Valdes and Cornelius as examples of how one might explore cosmic knowledge and yet escape damnation, and Conrad uses Marlow to show how one endowed with the ability to survive as he was might escape the condemnation of the company by not attempting anything more than survival. Marlowe and Conrad both condone the study and use of knowledge that upsets the established order as long as the users do not seek personal gain in upsetting the natural order.

Christopher Marlowe believes that Faustus. damnation lies in his desire to transcend the limits of his power and his place in the world by gaining a greater depth in the field of study which has just changed the world. Marlowe.s Faustus needs to be .grounded in astrology.(7) in order to access .a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence.(5) The images in his conjuring circle include .Figures of every adjunct to the Heavens, / And characters of signs and erring stars..(11) With his astronomical/astrological knowledge, Faustus summons Mephistophilis, and proceeds to make a contract with him stating .that Mephistophilis shall do for him and bring him whatsoever [he desires,]. and in exchange Faustus will .give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the East… and… that twenty-four years being expired, the articles above written inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus… into their habitation wheresoever..(22) Marlowe could not make it any clearer that the end result of Faustus. knowledge of the stars was damnation. However, not all sorcerers are damned, for Marlowe also creates Valdes and Cornelius, friends of Dr. Faustus and practitioners of .that damned Art,. who are .infamous through the world.(10) for their skill. Yet no mention is made of their ultimate doom or damnation, nor is any reason given for why they escape Dr. Faustus. fate. Perhaps it is because their ambitions are smaller than Faustus. ambitions, and aimed more towards material wealth and security than towards forbidden knowledge and great power. Faustus says .A sound magician is a mighty god,.(5) while his two companions are more concerned with .huge argosies, / And from America the golden fleece / That yearly stuffs old Philip.s treasury,. and .the treasure of all foreign wracks, / Ay, all the wealth that our forefathers hid / Within the massy entrails of the earth..(7-8) Marlowe may be using these different motivations, and the resulting different outcomes, to indicate that, as long as the ultimate end is material gain and earthly things, necromancy is safe, and that Faustus. desire to transcend his place in the natural order of things is the cause of his damnation. Note the similarity between this and between what Copernicus. theories had done: both unsettled the natural order. However, Valdes, Cornelius, and even Faustus. slave Wagner meddled in the same world-shaking astronomy/astrology, yet they were not damned for it as Faustus was; Marlowe suggests that this is because they did not seek to rise above their