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콘래드, 조지프/진보의전초기지

Brian W. Shaffer - "Progress and Civilization and All the Virtues" I (219-222)

by 길철현 2018. 12. 6.

Brian W. Shaffer - "Progress and Civilization and All the Virtues" : Teaching "Heart of Darkness" via "An Outpost of Progress."

                           Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies. Vol 24, No.3 (Autumn 1992): 219-31


[인용]

219) 아체베의 비판, Apocalypse Now. Ian Watt - Conrad in the 19th

- To these major new perspectives on thinking about and teaching HD, I add a theoretically old but in practice much neglected one : the novella's "Ur-text," Conrad's short story "An Outpost of Progress." Not only does this tale, originally published in a 1897 issue of Cosmoplis, usefully introduce and illuminate numerous aspects of HD, it also helps clarify how such disparate narrators as we encounter in these two texts can nevertheless support the same critique of culture, and shows why Achebe's claim that HD "projects the image of Africa" as "the antithesis of Europe and therfore of civilization"(314) is a misreading of Conrad's text, however useful it is in promoting debated over the place of Conrad's novella in the literature curriculum. 

- Moreover, while it is true that the two texts "teach" well together in the classroom, this approach to HD via OP is not presented simply as a pedagogical tool, but as part of a comprehensive reading of Conrad's novella--as a means of elucidation this text's fundamentally subversive rather than conformist orientation toward the culture of its production and initial consumption. 

(1. Eloise Knapp Hay - The Political Novels of JC - [어둠]의 실용적 효과는 유럽 "civilizers'들을 주제넘은 가정(presumptions)을 끝냈다는 것. 

-주3. Avrom Fleishman: "Conrad's African tales, even more than his Asian ones, demonstrate that the contact of Europeans and natives encourages the submerged barbarism of the superficially civilized whites" to reveal itself:that the whites in face become more savage than the "savages" (90) [Conrad's Politics]

주4. Watt - OP has many important anticipations of HD [Conrad's HD] 34

      Tolley - OP throws light on its companion tale of the Congo. HD(315) [Tolley A. T. "Conrad's Favorite Story." Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966) 314-20

- 차이점 - 플롯, 인물구성, 서사시점(narrtive point of view) (OP - anti-imperialist / HD - pro-imperialist)

[HD가 proimperialist의 관점이라고 못박는 것에는 쉽게 동의할 수 없다.]

- the two text ultimately tell the same story of civilization and unmask the same duplicitous rhetoric of "Progress and civilization and all the virtues" (OP)

220) 말로, 커츠 - 길고 복잡한 이야기/ 칼리에, 케이처츠 - 짧고 단순한 이야기. 

- the murder and suicide respectively of two Europeans left alone for eight months at an African trading station, owing to altercation over a lump of sugar for coffee.

- Carlier and Kayerts - in comic caricature/ Marlow, Kurtz - more psychologically realistica terms.

[커츠의 경우에는 그렇게 실감나게 그려지지 않음.]

- 두 작품의 주된 차이점 : what they suggest about the distinction between Civilization and Jungle 보다 how they suggest it

- Jamesian distinction : tells its story(OP) / shows it (HD)

(5. Trolley _OP "is a much more usual and a much more explicit story than HD. OP makes "explicit comment" while HD "aims to make the reader feel the situation to the maximum." (319) 

- HD exploits modernist notion of the ambiguity of language and the impossibility of fixing meaning and interpretation

OP exploits more conventional 19th techniques of irony which direct the reader to understand the story in a particular way. 

- OP - ironic fiction(The Secret Agent도 마찬가지) [Fraser and Hilson & Timms]

Fraser, Gail Conrad's Irony: OP and The Secret Agent (확보/ 원래 있음) / The Conradian. Vol 11, No. 2(Nov. 1986): 155-69

Hilson, J. C. and David Timms "Gobila in London: A Note of "An Outpost of Progress "and The Secret Agent. Conradiand 9(1977): 189-92 (확보)

- Flaubert : Bouvard et Pecuchet/ Kipling- The Man Who Would Be King[make-up]

- the two(K and C) are comic buffoons who can only uncritically absorb mainstream Euroepan imperialist thinking about "improving" Africa and Africans[much like Marlow's "excellent aunt" in HD) while they hypocritically and cruelly pursue personal advantage.  

[두 사람은 무능하고 어리석은 사람이기에 상대적으로 덜 위선적이고 잔인하다고 보여진다. 상황이 그들을 몰아붙이는 면을 생각하지 않을 수 없다.]

- In the "fellowship of thier stupidity and laziness," and in their solitude and "weakness," the two beome more and "more like a pair of acomplices than like a couple of devoted friends." 

- co-conspirators in a crime rather than as the inncent and virtuous agents of civilization they take themselves to be. 

- "the sagacious Carlier" - anything but sagacious.

-  Kayerts: very new thoughts. in his new wisdom / arguing "with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics." 

(221) [HD] emphasizes : the difficulty and tenuousness of interpretation

- the narrator-Marlow relationship, which foregrounds the complex process of interpretation, distinguishes this novella from its satiric "Ur-text," which is devoid of any such modernist complexity. 

- 화자와 말로의 관계로부터 인종과 제국에 대한 콘래드의 입장이 무엇인지에 대한 혼동이 생김. 

- 바깥화자 : Watt와 Watts가 관심을 가짐. 

- a spokesman for the imperial mission of Europe: a mission shown to be based not only on the "profit" motive, as Marlow notes, but on racism (that the European must wean "those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.") 

[콘래드는 대체로 바깥화자를 통해 제국의 영광을 이야기하지만 다른 한편으로는 바깥화자의 입장을 너무 단순화하는 면이 있다. 부정적 용어들이 등장한다는 것을 명심해야 한다. 그리고 바깥화자는 말로의 이야기를 들으면서 뭔가 진실을 추구하고 있다.]

- 이 바깥화자는 ironic orientation이 없음 (말로나 OP의 전지적 화자와 차이)

- Marlow's story of civilization and race deflates the narrator's understanding of them. (바깥화자. 그 밖의 청자. aunt)

- Marlow의 입장 (race 간의 차이) : a group's superiority is not a question of metaphysical or divinely ordained superiority but one of superior technology and power, based on accident. 

- Marlow와 콘래드를 동일시 할 수 없듯이, text(implied author)와 바깥화자(unreliable)를 동일시 할 수 없음. 

(222) 두 작품 다: virtually the same story of civilization. 

- the goings-on of various Europeans at one or more "trading stations" on a river deep inside Africa

- atrocities committed by Europeans against Africans - all in sharp contrasts to the rhetoric of civilization. 

- "the noble cause"  "the cause of progress" the "pioneers of trade and progress." 

- "trading" and "improving" are code words for "grubbing" and "enslaving"

- 신문 : "Our Colonial Exansion"

- this press rhetoric attempts to justify the imperialist venture using the metaphor of bringing light into the darkness. 

- 두 작품 다 : native Africans in animal terms(as "brutes" and "creatures") who have only a very faint notion of time"(OP). who have no "clear idea of time" (HD), and who belong to a "natural" realm ultimately more powerful than the European "cultural" one. 

- Shelley's Ozymandias :  nature will ultimately reclaim and overpower culture, that we "live" . . . .merley "in the flicker" of a culture's glory.