[요약]
'공간성'(spatiality)이 사람의 행동이나 운명에 미치는 영향력이라는 측면에서 이 단편을 분석한 글. 최근의 연구 성과나 푸코의 'heterotopia' 등의 개념을 원용하여 문명과 야만이라는 이분법의 경계(?)에 위치한 주재소에 위치한 인물들이 파멸하는 과정을 통해, 콘래드가 제국주의의 이념이나 선전이 부조리한 것임을 아이러니하게 보여주고 있다고 주장한다. 하지만 공간성과 관련된 이야기보다는 작품 자체에 대한 상세한 분석에 오히려 주목하게 된다.
[Abstract]
- Conrad’s tale employs an ironic narrator in order to highlight the tale’s distinctive spatiality, particularly with respect to a geopolitical system that too neatly divides the spaces of the globe into civilised and barbaric regions.
- Conrad produces an ironic, spatial narrative that highlights, in both content and form, the absurdity of the imperialist ‘civilising mission’ in Africa.
(1) They will form themselves there.
- the inept station manager and his assistant become ever more dull, lazy, irritable, immoral, and ultimately murderous.
- Indeed, the ‘outpost’ determines the shape of these characters during the six or more months of their residency there, and the irony of its ‘progress’ is strongly connected to the station’s spatiotemporal position, its location in both geography and history, as Conrad’s ironic narrator almost revels in observing. (장소가 두 사람의 운명을 결정한다는 것)
(2) The spatiality of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ can be seen in the geographical aspects of the narrative. The specific site or heterotopia of the ‘outpost’ situated at the edge of a territory coded as ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilised,’ thus connecting the colonised domain in central Africa to the metropolitan society of northwestern Europe, largely unseen, but implicitly present throughout the story. (이 주재소의 위치가 문명과 야만이라는 이분법의 경계에 놓여 있다는 사실--그것의 정당성은 차치하고라도--은 충분히 지적할 수 있는 부분이다. 고립감이 두드러지는 부분이다.)
- we read Conrad’s story as a spatial narrative that combines a literary cartography of a representative location in Africa with an ironic perspective on the colonial system at large, while also exploring the psychological spaces of its characters, especially Kayerts and Carlier. Conrad’s critique of the ‘civilising’ rationale of imperialist conquest and exploitation is thus tied to the interior and exterior spaces of the system in which it flourish.
- The distinctive narrative voice in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ functions as perhaps an even more significant presence than the characters, as it persistently engages its targets in satirical critique.
- As Lawrence Graver notes, the tale is ‘a work of ruthless belligerence,’ and he adds that its interest rests less in the people than in the quality of the narrator’s attack. The targets themselves are worth aiming at (greed masquerading as philanthropy and colonizers shielded from their natural impulses by the dead hand of custom), and the assault is carried off with verve and decisiveness.
- Conrad and the Spatial Turn
(3) Space matters, ‘not for the trivial and self-evident reason that everything occurs in space, but because where events unfold is integral to how they take shape.’
- More recently, in ‘Joseph Conrad and the Epistemology of Space’, John G. Peters argues convincingly for the pervasive spatiality of Conrad’s entire canon – Peters had previously analysed the distinctive space of Russia in Under Western Eyes – as he demonstrates the manner in which subjective space in Conrad leads to questions of knowledge in general, which in turn points to the conclusion that all knowledge is contingent, dependent on the spatiotemporal context in which it is experienced. (이런 글들을 읽어나가야 한다. 그래야 보조를 어느 정도 맞출 수 있다.)
(4) Conrad places two white, ostensibly ‘civilised’ men, Kayerts and Carlier, in an unfamiliar territory deep in the interior of what would seem to them to be a savage land. Their presence is itself supposed to be a sign of the civilising ‘progress’ sardonically alluded to in the title. The narrator takes pains to demonstrate the irony of the situation, as, for example, when the narrator facetiously refers to ‘the Great Civilizing Company,’ which was earlier called the Great Trading Company, and then adds, parenthetically, ‘since we know civilization follows trade’
- Here there is no fictional intermediary, a character like Marlow, who can interpret what he has seen for the audience, and the foolish civil servants Kayerts and Carlier do not in any way resemble the magnificent and terrible Mr Kurtz. Additionally, in ‘An Outpost of Progress’, Conrad narrows the geographical scope of the tale to a discrete space, that of the outpost itself, and examines its effects upon these characters. By extension, Conrad’s ironic narrative indicates the degree to which a place shapes one’s character, which is as true in the ‘civilised’ parts of Europe as it is in the colonial outposts of Africa.
(5) Like cartographers, writers have to choose what to include in their stories, and what to leave out. Of course, ‘real’ mapmakers do not have any say about the relative truth of the actual geospace figured on their maps; if, for example, they choose not to depict a mountain or lake on their map, that does not mean the mountain or lake doesn’t exist in the ‘real world’. However, the map – like the literary text – might work well without these details, depending on its functions and uses. (Road maps, for instance, frequently omit topographical details unrelated to the needs of motorists.) A writer arguably has even more freedom, since the willing suspension of disbelief might allow readers to forgive a patently ‘unrealistic’ literary map. They create new places and spaces; they decide how a story must function; they determine what should be part of their stories and how it will affect their readers. In so doing, they construct an image of the world of the narrative, effective plotting the spaces inhabited by the characters and in which the events take place.
[작가를 지도 제작자에 비유. 작가는 자신의 필요에 따라 자신의 세계를 채워 넣음. 콘래드가 자신의 작품을 어떻게 창작하는지를 이야기하는 부분이 있었는데, 그것도 찾아볼 것.]
- The Heterotopia of the Outpost
(6) the outpost. This new space represents a distant and remote station within a colonised territory at a particular moment, presumably, King Leopold’s Congo in the 1890s
- The story is less about Kayerts, Carlier, or even Henry Price, and more about the location in which their fates are decided.
- At the beginning of the tale, the reader is introduced to the men who are to manage this outpost, Kayerts and Carlier, who represent ‘civilised’ Europeans, although they are also introduced as utterly incompetent and ill-suited to the task. Sherry notes that Conrad himself had travelled with a commercial agent named Alphonse Keyaerts to Stanley Falls in 1890, and the captain of that steamer was named Carlier.20 Whether these characters were modelled on them directly or Conrad merely borrowed the names, the Kayerts and Carlier of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ are depicted in an almost wholly negative light.
- Each is deeply flawed, with questionable motives and goals. As noted above, the managing director of the Trading Company, their nominal supervisor, is fairly disgusted by their stupidity and incompetence, characteristics that Conrad’s narrator foregrounds right at the beginning of the narrative. It is clear that their character is both suited to the place – a ‘useless’ outpost, as the director calls it – and likely to be made worse by dwelling there.
- At first, the men appear to have high hopes about their new job and both glow with pride at being part of the civilising mission in this savage territory. Moreover, they do not see much value in the various people around them, including the friendly native Gobila and their officious assistant Henry Price, also known as Makola. They care only about trade, or rather, about their own professional success in running this trading station, and they take for granted their superiority over anyone else at the outpost. In ‘Conrad’s Irony: “An Outpost of Progress” and The Secret Agent’, Gail Fraser observes that ‘Conrad can view his protagonists with aloof detachment because they represent a society determined to sacrifice ethical values for material profit.’21 However, after a few months of being so far away from civilisation, Kayerts and Carlier’s characteristics and behaviour change.
- Because of their boastful personalities and arrogance towards each other and those around them, it does not take readers much to foresee the demise of both men. While at the outpost, Kayerts and Carlier believe themselves superior to all others. With such mentality, they do not take the ‘respectful position’ seriously. Rather, they lounge on the porch, smoke tobacco, and watch as the strikingly named Henry Price performs the daily labor involved in maintaining the trading station.
(7) ‘Contemplating his future within a shadow of unrelieved darkness,’ as Said puts it in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, ‘Kayerts takes his own life.’22
- Like Kayerts and Carlier before him, but with a much greater and more terrifying efficaciousness, Kurtz reveals a significant change in behaviour after months of isolation.
- In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s irony is leavened with pathos, as well as a broader sense of the human condition, but the author’s critique of the civilising mission of imperialism is clearly on display in ‘An Outpost of Progress.’ Using a variety of narrative techniques, including realistic description, editorial commentary, irony, and free indirect style, Conrad attempts to expose the violence, brutality, rapacity, and selfish greed that lay behind the rhetoric of the civilising mission. In so doing, he demonstrates that nearly all involved with the imperial project, from exalted leaders to hired functionaries, are corrupted by the enterprise.
- Heterotopias ‘are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.
(8) They had been in a vast and dark country only a very short time and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness, a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. (본문의 이 부분에서 이들은 이곳에 오면서부터 아무로부터의 지시를 받지 않는 위치에 놓이게 되었다는 점. dull이라는 용어로 이들의 부정성을 강조.)
- The suggestively named Henry Price is the only one who appears to adapt well to his environment. ‘He spoke English and French,’ according to the narrator, ‘wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping,’ and generally comports himself as the most competent person at the outpost (77). Price’s commercial savvy, his ability to speak other languages, and most of all, his general survival skills, are the driving forces in making this trading station a successful operation, to the extent that it is successful. (His willingness to evade the rules, for example, is likely the reason he and the station can thrive in this place.
- Ever pragmatic, Price knows what must be done to keep the trade going; most importantly, he knows that if the outpost thrives, so does he.
(9) The distinctiveness of civilisation and savagery breaks down as the two fold in on one another, and the formerly held beliefs in clear light and dark, right and wrong, amity and hostility, to name a few, become problematic. As the narrator explains, ‘the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble to the heart’ (79).
- The narrator of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ appears to be an omniscient third-person, yet the narrative voice shifts frequently in the text, moving from the wide-ranging, distant overview of an omniscient storyteller to more pointed, ironic commentary, and even into variations of a free indirect discourse that places the reader closer to the characters themselves. Arguably, this movement is a key aspect of the narrative’s spatiality, since the stylistic choices replicate the various levels of distance between the individuals at the outpost and the world at large.
- Fraser, for example, astutely examines the author’s style and indicates that ‘Conrad explores political and moral issues by constructing a network of ironic parallels, juxtapositions, and allusions.’28 The narrator of the story actively engages the reader, exhorting the reader to view Kayerts, Carlier, and the outpost in a particular way, and unambiguously highlighting the absurdity of situation in the context of the high-minded rhetoric of Empire.
(10) Fraser : The ironic narrative perspective seeks to control and persuade us by inviting our recognition of significant incongruities and parallels. We are not asked to interpret, to fill in the gaps, but to discover the author’s meaning and to take a moral stand with him – in ‘An Outpost of Progress,’ against the imperialist writers in Blackwood’s Magazine and journalists in the daily papers.
- (Kayerts and Carlier had discovered an old newspaper with an article detailing ‘Our Colonial Expansion’, which fills Carlier with pride, as he imagines that one day he and Kayerts will be renowned as ‘the first civilized men to live in this very spot!’) Conrad’s narrator, employing irony with a sometimes heavy hand, does not encourage the reader to side with Kayerts, Carlier, or the propagandists of the civilising mission.
- The narrator, without any hesitation, discusses important topics of the time, especially imperialism and its ludicrous impact, not only on the colonised peoples, but also on those who are presumably part of civilised society.
- Individuals like Kayerts and Carlier, who are supposed to represent ‘the very foundation of an “enlightened” social order,’ as Fraser puts it,30 are depicted as weak, incompetent, and almost totally dependent on the natives for survival. The reader, therefore, is forced to silently participate in the narrator’s stern evaluation of the regime. only later does Conrad give his audience access to the minds of his protagonists through the use of free indirect style, but even then, the reader likely does not doubt which side of the political and moral divide to take.
- In ‘An Outpost of Progress,’ the narrator persistently criticises society, imperialism, and those who are part of the imperialist regime.
(11) Civilisation moulds a person into a fine tool; a tool used for its own benefit. Additionally, as mere parts of a machine, the individuals lose their ability to function or even survive once outside the machine.
- Foucault : This enclosed space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, … in which power is exercised without division, according to a continual hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.31 [감시와 처벌]
- In order to ensure that Kayerts and Carlier perform their tasks adequately, society disciplines them. However, once outside society’s disciplinary mechanisms, which ironically is also the zone in which they are most comfortable and secure, both men are incapable of caring for themselves.
- Adding to the irony, literature itself plays a role, as Conrad indicts the culture industry, which provides ideological support for the imperialist project.
- They also found some old copies of a home paper. That print discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves. (이 부분에도 화자의 아이러니가 있다. 신문이 제국주의의 이념을 전파하는 수단이 되고 있는 것.)
- Neither Kayerts nor Carlier, even after reading and discussing literary works, are capable of formulating an opinion about the regime and their own position within it. Although the narrator indicates their interest, opinion, and criticisms about the stories they read, both men fail to see the irony of a civilising mission that simultaneously serves as an excuse for a foreign power to invade other territories, subjugate their populations, and systematically replace the native culture and society with new institutions.
(12) Kayerts and Carlier, who – we are persistently reminded – are neither intelligent nor active, are almost ideally susceptible to this pro-imperialist rhetoric, for the reality that they witness at the trading station cannot compare to the glorious imagery of the colonists’ grand mission to bring light to the darkness.
- For much of the story, the narrator serves as a distant overseer, an omniscient narrator who occasionally editorialises, providing readers with opinions and criticisms of the characters in the tale and of the broader social or cultural formation in which they find themselves. At times, however, Conrad’s narrative style allows readers to have an idea of what is in Kayerts’s and Carlier’s minds. For the most part, one does not have direct access to the characters’ thoughts and emotions until later in the short story.
- stingy old slave dealer : 상아 사건이 있고 난 뒤에 그들은 자신들의 정체를 알게 되었고, 그것이 결국 두 사람을 죽음으로까지 몰아간 것으로 볼 수 있음.
- He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither did death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last! – appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He reveled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. … Incidentally he reflected that the fellow dead there had been a noxious beast anyway; that men died every day in thousands; perhaps in hundreds of thousands – who could tell? – and that in the number, that one death could not possibly make any difference; couldn’t have any importance, at least to a thinking creature. He, Kayerts, was a thinking creature. He had been all his life, till that moment, a believer in a lot of nonsense like the rest of mankind – who are fools; but now he thought! He knew! He was at peace; he was familiar with the highest wisdom! (97) [이 부분이 갖는 의미는 또 무엇인가?]
- one finally sees the protagonist’s mental instability and the terrifyingly formative effects of the place upon his character. 독자적인 생각을 하기 시작했다?]
(13) Kayerts becomes the quintessential civilised fool. Through this brief narrative, Conrad telescopically shifts the frames of reference from European society to the colonial outpost to the individual himself. This movement makes Conrad’s critique of imperialism all the more meaningful, as the reader can see its horrific results manifest themselves in recognisable characters.
- Conclusion
(14) Nils Clausson examines the ways in which Conrad’s use of irony in the story serves his more generalised criticisms of both colonialism and racism.
- Clausson argues that, not only is Conrad not racist, but he is not even Eurocentric in his representation of Africans or Africa. In making his case, Clausson also challenges the claim, in this case by A. James M. Johnson, that ‘An Outpost of Progress’ endorses ‘an unexamined binary opposition between a “superficially ordered but ultimately false realm of culture (signified by Europe) and an anarchic realm of nature (signified by Africa).”’
(14) ‘Conrad’s irony reveals that the role of Makola in the story is to undermine the myth of a natural racial difference that was used to undermine the myth of a civilised Europe in opposition to a primitive Africa, which in turn justified European intervention in Africa in the name of Civilization and Progress.’ Clausson believes that many readers still tend to mistake the narrator’s voice for Conrad’s, and thus ‘ignore the subtle but unmistakable shifts in focalization in the story.’35
- the better question is how race or racism connects to place, and more particularly to what Said in Culture and Imperialism referred to as the ‘attitudes of structure and reference’,36 which underlie the elitist, racist, and imperialist ideologies that shape men like Kayerts, Carlier, and even Henry Price. (The latter could perhaps be seen as an early representative of what Frantz Fanon called the national bourgeoisie, whose ‘psychology … is that of a businessman.’)37
- The relative distance between the metropolitan or ‘civilised’ space of Europe and the benighted realms of ‘savage’ Africa is both highlighted and suppressed, as the agents of civilisation are shown to be fools, then becoming slavers and murderers, while the purported beneficiaries of the civilising mission (here, especially, Gobila’s villagers) come to ruin and grief.
- The title itself, ‘An Outpost of Progress,’ expresses at once both the idealism of the European ideology and the acerbic recognition of its hypocrisy when faced with the facts on the ground at the trading station.
- Conrad makes clear that their formation, much like the form of European imperialism in Africa writ large, was one of absurdity and horror.