Responses to Intellectual Revolutions: Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and Chr

Responses to Intellectual Revolutions: Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and Chr

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...