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By Root 4745 0

the several months that Marlow spends in the Central Station (modern Kinshasa, then named Leopoldville), he becomes intrigued by the reputation of the one company agent who appears to be a genuine humanitarian. The chief of the Inner Station (modern Kisangani, then Stanley Falls), Kurtz is, moreover, an accomplished painter, poet, musician, and essayist; in short, he is a consummate example of the best that European civilization has to offer. As Marlow sets out on his thousand-mile, two-month-long steamship journey upriver to retrieve Kurtz, the spectacle of rampant hypocrisy among his colleagues has led him to be curious to see how someone fortified with what appear to be genuine “moral ideas” (p. 69) has fared under these circumstances. Toward the end of the journey, when the ship comes under native attack, Marlow assumes the violent episode to indicate that Kurtz must be dead, but he subsequently finds that this is not the case. (Later, Kurtz’s young Russian worshiper will confide in him that it was actually the great man himself who ordered the attack on the ship.) By the time Marlow reaches the compound and sees human heads displayed on stakes, he realizes that Kurtz is not at all the enlightened altruist he had been hoping to meet. These impressions are confirmed later when Marlow learns of the appalling circumstances of Kurtz’s rule, which have included “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (p. 92) over which he has presided.

Marlow becomes acquainted with Kurtz in person during the brief remainder of the emaciated ivory trader’s life (he presumably has dysentery, an illness that Conrad himself contracted while in Africa) and concludes that he has undergone a reversal of the instinctual renunciations upon which civilization is based: “the wilderness,” Marlow observes, “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p. 111). What Marlow finds particularly illuminating in documenting this reversal is the manuscript of an essay that Kurtz has entrusted to him. Before coming to Africa, Kurtz has been asked by “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to write up “a report, for its future guidance.” (Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L‘Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique—the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa—which was headed by King Leopold.) The essay, which he has evidently written before his breakdown, describes how Europeans, allegedly further along in the evolutionary process than members of other races, “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to non-Europeans as “supernatural beings.” It continues for seventeen pages that are “vibrating with eloquence” but ends startlingly with a phrase that has been “scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand... : ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (p. 92). By devolving from expansive, refined eloquence into terse, primal utterance, the document thus reflects the atavistic transformation of this paragon of European civilization that ironically renders him more savage than the so-called savages. A major theme of Conrad’s writings generally is the notion that the fallibility of human nature leads idealistic people to fall short of their aspirations—in fact, to fall a distance that is directly proportional to the loftiness of those aspirations. This principle is exemplified in the career of Kurtz, whose airy idealism is represented as equal and opposite to his bestial cruelty, a tension neatly captured in the disparity between his eloquent report and its barbaric postscript.

Marlow reflects on the significance of Kurtz’s career while recounting the moments preceding the latter’s death, which occurs as they are making their way back downriver:

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face