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콘래드, 조지프/진보의전초기지

Brian W. Shaffer - "Progress and Civilization and All the Virtues" II(222-226)

by 길철현 2018. 12. 8.


(222) HD is explicit concerning all Europe's reationship to Africa / OP is implicit(there is no European frame in the tale) 

-  두 작품 다, 아프리카의 희생자들보다는 유럽의 victimizer들이 더 초점에 있음.

- [급료로 받는 brass wire가 쓸모 없는 것이라고 하고 있는데 이것은 오해임] - 일종의 화폐 역할을 하고 있음. (물론 당장에는 그들에게 쓸모가 없는 것도 사실이긴 함.)

- 유럽인들 - indolent and inefficient worshippers of the golden calf - as ivory grubbers in pursuit of "percentages"

(223) 필그림들. 벽돌 만드는 사람. 이들은 모두 일을 제대로 하지 않고 돈벌이에만 급급. 

- 아프리카인들에 대한 관심이 없음: savage - no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. 

-OP: Africans speak "gibberish" in their "land of darkness and sorrow." 

- K &C. 주변 환경에 대해 전혀 이해가 없음. (lived like blind men)

- The river, the forest, all the great land trhobbing with life, were like a great emptiness. 

- "powers of darkness" -HD/ hopelessness and savagery - OP

- Kurtz : an amplification and elaboration of K (& C) 

-  [Kayerrs와 Kurtz의 발음의 유사성.] - without the "ay"(Kertx), would be pronounced in the same way as Kurtz.

[이 점은 나도 예전에 생각했던 것.]

- both have been financially or socially unsuccessful in Europe, and so have sought fame and fortune in Africa

[케이어츠에게 그런 욕망이 있었다고 말하기는 힘들다. 커츠의 경우 중요한 동인 중의 하나가 경제적인 이유라는 점은 생각할 필요가 있다.]

[Kurtz - he wasn't rich enough or something/ And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life./ his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there]

- 죽은 첫 번째 주재소 chief: 실패한 화가 - all attempt to secure in Africa the prestige and wealth they cannot attain in Europe. 

(224) Hannah Arendt - superfluous men/ luck hunters -

 

- not distinctly outside civilized society but, on the contrary, [are] very clearly a by-product of this society, an inevitable residue of the capitalist system and even the representatives of an economy that relentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital (189)

 

[11. They were nothing of their own making. they were like living symbols of what had happened to them, living abstractions and witnesses of the absurdity of human institution. They were not individuals like the old adventurers, they were the shadows of events with which they had nothing to do. (189) The Origins of Totalitarianism.)

- 세 사람 모두 원주민에게 supernatural beings / harbor genocidal intentions toward them.

[Carl - the necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country could be made habitable.]

- the pretense of omnipotence tempts these "superfluous men" to extreme acts of violence. 

[12. Arendt - "Outside all social restraint and hypocrisy, against the backdrop of native life," these men feel " . . . the impact of a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter, that is for the full realization of their own phantom-like existence. Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against all consequencess. . . . " (190)

- Kay: life had no more secrets for him. . . . He seemed to have broken loose of himself altogether.

[Kay가 자살 직전 깨달음을 얻은 듯이 독백하는 것. Kurtz가 죽기 직전 - Marlow imagines "a veil" having "been rent" through which Kurtz at last sees the truth. [Did he live his life again -]

- In both Kayerts's and Kurtz's case, visions of "highest wisdom" or "complete knowledge" involve "horror" and "despair"--involve glimpses at a brute reality presumably hidden from most Europeans.

- these protagonists have truly seen the nature of the jungle (한 것이 아님)

they have truly seen through the veneer of a deceitful and duplicitous civilization.

(225) Ian Watt : HD - Conrad's nearest approach to an ideological summa. (148)집대성

- HD의 3가지 문명 비판

1) 아프리카와 아프리카인보다 유럽 혹은 유럽인에 초점을 맞춤

2) the novella deconstructs the language by which the West has claimed moral and intellectual superiority over the non-West.

3) 언어가 어떻게 거짓말을 하는가? / how language systematically obscures rather than illuminates that which it claims to describe

- OP에도 이러한 비판이 들어 있음.

- OP gestures toward conflating the distinction between Civilization and Jungle

[Eloise Knapp Hay - The Political Novels of JC] HD : repeated reversals or inversions of normal patterns of imagery. [일반적인 우리의 이분법을 전복시키고 있음.] (137)

- African language ; resemble "the speech of civilized men" / whistle - steamboat [19세기 서구 문명의 상징] / "a shriek inhuman vibrating and sudden" like "the yells of some exasperated and ruthless creature." 

[이분법을 전복시키는 예] - 좀 빈약하다. 그렇게 와닿지 않음. 그 바로 다음 부분에 tha land of sorrow라고 하고 있기 때문에

[A shriek inhuman, vibrating and sudden, pierced like a sharp dart the white shroud of that land of sorrow.]

226) 안개가 갖는 상징성 : 흰 색깔 .모든 것을 가림. 문명. (이 부분에 대해서도 몇 마디 쓸 수 있을 듯.)

- the "heavy mist" (civilization spreading and invading) is depicted as descending "upon the land: the mist penetrating, enveloping, and silent . . . the mist that clings and kills; the mist white and deadly, immaculate and poisonous." Deemed a "white shroud" which precludes sight in its "shifting purity," the deadly "fog-wreaths" are depicted as rolling on uninhibited.

- Thus, even atmospheric description contributes to the subversion of the comfortable distinction between civilization and savagery. 

- [Patrick Brantlinger] - this short story "clearly implies that between civilizaton and the savagery that worships fetished and practices cannibalism there is little to choose." (138)  [Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay] (1983)