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콘래드, 조지프/진보의전초기지

Jim Holstun - "Mr. Kayerts. He is Dead": Literary Realism and Conrad's "Outpost of Progress" 1(2018)

by 길철현 2018. 12. 10.

ELH, Volume 85, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 191-220 (Article)


[인용]


I. SELECTIVE TRADITIONS

191) Raymond Williams calls modernism a “selective tradition.”

[1 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 32.]

when “a highly selected version of the modern . . . offers to appropriate the whole of modernity,” it reduces premodernist literature to a naive vision of natural language, transparent representation, fixed forms, and authoritative, nonreflexive authors, while neglecting the continuing and formally innovative practice of realist writing.

[모더니즘과 리얼리즘의 논쟁.]

[선택적이라는 것은 어떤 의미일까? 파편화, 시점의 복합성 이런 것을 포함하는 말인가? 리얼리즘과 모더니즘에 대해서 좀 더 읽어보아야 한다. 백낙청의 글을 읽긴 했는데 정리를 해두지는 않았구나.] (민족문학과 세계문학 II)

192)  In 1977, Fredric Jameson suggested that “the ultimate renewal of modernism” might be “realism itself,” in a “more totalizing” version aimed at correcting an exhausted modernist obsession with estrangement and fragmentation.

[Fredric Jameson, “Afterword,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books,1977), 211.]

- 리얼리즘이 변화를 도모하는 가운데 힘을 얻고 있음.

Laura Marcus says Heart of Darkness “revolves around ambiguity, ambivalence and the unsayable. This has been one of the most significant conditions for its various rewritings, and for the fact that it has created a literary and cultural legacy both complex and unresolved.”

[8. Laura Marcus, “The Legacies of Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiach (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 90.]

- HD를 다시 쓰는 경향.

Even Conrad’s postcolonial critics affirm the centrality of his novel, as when Edward Said defends its modernist closure:

For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aesthetically but also mentally unassailable. . . . Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than an imperialist world-view, given what was unavailable for either Conrad or Marlow to see of the non-European at the time.

[10 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 24.]

[비유럽적인 방식으로 보는 것이 불가능하다는 말, 에 주목할 필요]

Conrad and Marlow could never have acted otherwise, because “imperialism has monopolized the entire system of representation.” (25)

[제국주의가 재현의 전 체계를 독점화했다, 는 말]

Conrad gains an unsystematic distance from imperialism only by leaving realist narration, hopelessly tainted with imperial urges, for “the easily recognizable, ironic awareness of the post-realist modernist sensibility” with its “extreme, unsettling anxiety” about empire. (188)

I will focus on his 1897 story, “Outpost of Progress,” a ferocious realist critique of colonialism and even of his novel, published two years later.

- Kayerts (a Flemish prototype for Kurtz?) and his assistant Carlier (a Walloon Charlie Marlow?). 왈론 - 벨기에에 거주하며 프랑스 방언을 사용하는 언어집단.→ 플라망족(네덜란드어 사용?)과 왈론족.

- Makola :  He is unscrupulous, as we will see, but unlike the Africans in Heart of Darkness, he is fully human, with accounting skills, fluency in several languages, and a beloved wife and children (see “O,” 77–78).
- 루카치의 비판 - 콘래드는  novels that were actually inflated short stories 쓴다.
[Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin,1962), 71.]
In Heart of Darkness, the “manager’s boy” speaks to Marlow in a pidgin that would tickle T. S. Eliot’s fancy: “‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’” (H, 117). When Kayerts finds he has killed Carlier, Makola cajoles him in precise Standard English: “‘Come along, Mr. Kayerts. He is dead’” (“O,” 96).
[머콜라가 문명화된 원주민이라는 점은 아체베의 비판을 상당 부분 잠재울 수 있는 증거이다.]
194) Albert Guérard calls it a “cold adumbration,” complaining of its “essay-like explicitness.”15 A. T. Tolley finds it “undeniably inferior” to Heart of Darkness. 16 For Rob Nixon, it’s a “trial run”; for Linda Dryden, a “segue”

(1. [음악] 세구: 악장·악부(樂部)에서 사이 두지 않고 계속하는 .

2. 앞의 프로그램 끊어지지 않고 계속되는 프로그램.); and for Michael Gorra, an un-Conradian tale employing the “cracked-nut method of storytelling” that Marlow wisely avoids.17


[17Rob Nixon, “Preparations for Travel: The Naipaul Brothers’ Conradian Atavism,”
Research in African Literatures 22.2 (1991): 189n1; Linda Dryden, “The Penguin
Editions of Conrad’s Novels: A Review Essay,” English Literature in Transition,
1880–1920 52.2 (2009): 203; The Portable Conrad, ed. Michael Gorra (New York:
Penguin, 2007), xii]
- In his early Conrad book, Said mentions it only in passing, mislocating it in “an Eastern jungle.”20
[Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1966), 142.] (141-43)
[머콜라의 이름이 Price라는 점을 사이드는 지적하고 있다. 이 지적은 명료하면서도 중요하다]
- OP를 다룬 좋은 논문들
J. C. Hilson and David Timms, “Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’ or, the Evil
Spirit of Civilization,” in Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, ed. Robert Hamner
(Washington: Three Continents Press, 1990), 107–16; Andrea White, Joseph Conrad
and the Adventure Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 151–66; Harry
Sewlall, “‘Masquerading philanthropy’: Conrad’s Image of Africa in ‘An Outpost of
Progress,’” English Academy Review 23.1 (2006): 4–14; and Robert Hampson, “Joseph
Conrad—Postcolonialism and Imperialism,” EurAmerica 41.1 (2011): 1–46. [접속이 안 됨]
Gene Moore, who includes “Outpost” in his Heart of Darkness casebook, first noted its “uncanny textual echoes,” as if the first work came second, calling it “the same tale in a more condensed and accessible form, like a brisk overture preceding a symphony.”22
[Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: A Casebook, ed. Gene Moore (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2004), 8; see also17–42. Similarly, the Cambridge edition says “‘Kayerts’
. . . perhaps recalls ‘Kurtz’” (“O,” 303n77.3).]
- Robert Hampson uses “Outpost” to insulate Conrad from Marlow’s racism by comparing him to the story’s narrator.23
[Robert Hampson, “‘An Outpost of Progress’: The Case of Henry Price,” in
Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness,” ed. Attie de Lange (Boulder:
Social Science Monographs, 2002), 211–30.] (아마존)
- Jakob Lothe finds in “Outpost” an ironic distance between narrator and implied author reminiscent of that between Marlow and Conrad in Heart of Darkness. 24
[Jakob Lothe, “Irony and Narrative Distance: Imperialist Critique in Conrad’s
‘Outpost of Progress,’” in Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-
Colonialism, ed. Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorne, and Lothe (Capetown: UCT Press,
2015), 171–85. Despite the title, only two of the other twelve essays in this collection
take up “Outpost” seriously. See particularly Kai Weigandt’s “Humans and Animals in
Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress,’” in Outposts of Progress, 3–17.]
- V. S. Naipaul pronounces “Outpost” “the finest thing Conrad wrote,” but beyond calling it “brisk and tough,”
[V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” in The Return of Eva Perón, with The Killings
in Trinidad (New York: Knopf, 1980), 215.]
194) Realism

- It includes Erich Auerbach on the serious representation of everyday life, Mikhail Bakhtin on the synthesizing dialogue of high and low genres, Lukács on the mutual formation of subject and object in the dialectic of literary types and social crises, and Williams on the mediated literary encounter with lived experience and the reproduction of real material existence.

-  In comparing Conrad’s two works, I will use all of these approaches, giving them an etiological nudge: the sardonic realism of “Outpost” connects imperial causes to horrific but intelligible African effects, producing a remarkable critique of European colonial capitalism. Heart of Darkness smudges this anti-imperial clarity, detaching causes and effects, turning both into free-floating modernist intensities.

- The stunning impressionism in Heart of Darkness derives partly from Conrad’s Congo trauma, but mostly from his literary and political bad faith: his semi-successful semi-lie to himself and others about his story’s realist power in analyzing the depredations of Belgian imperialism in the Congo.

[필자는 OP가 명백하게 반식민주의를 보여주는데 반해, HD는 지나치게 인상주의에 치중]