II. HIS GHASTLY BEST
195) Maria Tyszkowa - Kasai 강을 탐사한다고 했으나, 실제로는 못 감.
[Conrad to Maria Tyszkowa on 26 September 1890, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad]
- He wrote “Outpost” in a “sardonic” humor and a “somewhat savage mood,” beginning while “still weak and very shaky,” and ending by urging Jessie to copy the manuscript quickly, saying “I want it out of the house.”30
[Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 38, 109, 37, 109.]
[Directly after his bad attack of gout, still weak and very shaky, Conrad began and finished the short story, "OP." During the three weeks or so it took him to do this, his humour was sardonic. 37-38]
[Con이 통풍으로 고생한 것과 K가 다리가 부어서 잘 걷지도 못할 정도가 된 것도 어느 정도 연결 고리가 있다.]
[The OP was written in somewhat savage mood. It was the one story --] (109)
196) In the July 1896 issue, Sir Charles W. Dilke attacked the hypocrisies of Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa, with scathing criticism for the Conference of Berlin and King Leopold II’s Congo state, with all “the ivory-stealing, the village-burning, the flogging, and the shooting, which are going on in the heart of Africa now.”32
[Charles W. Dilke, “Civilisation in Africa,” Cosmopolis 3.1 (1896): 22.]
- 콘래드 자신의 이 작품에 대한 평: vacillated wildly.
( In a letter to Edward Garnett on 14 August 1896, Conrad accepted his criticisms, calling the story his “ghastly masterfolly” (L, 1:301). But in March 1906, he allowed Grand Magazine to reprint it under a note titled “My Best Story and Why I Think So,” though he never really delivers the explanation. He says it almost attains a “scrupulous unity of tone,” but only almost, and he doesn’t say what that tone is, while the story’s “imperfections,” also unspecified, “stand there glaring, patent, numerous, and amusing” (“O,” 285). on 10 August 1910, Conrad told Geneviève Séligmann-Lui that Tales of Unrest was the volume he liked “least of all my work,” and “more than reasonably derivative” (L, 4:357–58). In 1913, he told Lady Ottoline Morrell that he “didn’t think very highly” of “Outpost” because “it was too much derived from Guy de Maupassant.”33)
III. TWO MICROCOSMS
197) 일꾼으로 온 흑인들이 느끼는 정신적*육체적 고통.
- the narrator’s account of the African station men in “Outpost,” we move from racism to anticolonial humanism:
- The gently misanthropic narrator of “Outpost” shows the mundane humanity these African contract workers share with his European readers, their ache for particular persons.
- 쌀을 좋아하는 흑인과 그렇지 않은 흑인 구분한 것.
[Hampson notes the sympathetic portrayal of Africans in “Outpost” and their
regional variety: Gobila’s Kasai River villagers, Makola from Sierra Leone, his wife
and the slave traders from “Loanda” or “Luanda” in distant Angola, and the homesick
laborers from elsewhere on the coast (“Joseph Conrad,” 29–31).]
- This passage attains formal realism not because it feels particularly transparent—whatever that might mean—but because it slips dialogically (à-la-Bakhtin) from the language of the racist adventure story into the language of everyday life, seriously rendered (à-la-Auerbach).35
198) J. C. Hilson and David Timms note that the narrator connects the nostalgic station men of “Outpost” to nostalgic Carlier and Kayerts, with the former “regretting the festive incantations of home” (“O,” 87), while Kayerts “regretted the streets, the pavements, the cafés,” and Carlier “regretted the clink of sabre and spurs on a fine afternoon” (“O,” 81). All sign up for six-month contracts, all are forgotten, and all waste away on a diet of plain rice, exploited by imperial capitalists with a practiced eye for profit taking: the Director and Makola.36 (109)
[They were not happy, regretting the festive incantations, the sorceries, the human sacrifices of their own land, where they also had parents, brothers, sisters, admired chiefs, respected magicians, loved friends, and other ties supposed generally to be human]
- The narrator extends to Africans both the privilege of national culture and the potential for capitalist degradation, with Makola and the slave traders surviving the story as adept early versions of a national bourgeoisie, functioning smoothly alongside a metropolitan bourgeoisie.37
[On the national bourgeoisie, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New
York: Grove Press, 2004), 97–144; and Sewlall, 8–9.]
- All these effects, and the story as a whole, depend on the omniscience of an intrusive Victorian or Flaubertian narrator—a point I make not to sneer, but to highlight the supple virtues of such narrators in moving from themselves to character to character to reader, setting all into critical dialogue with each other: an effect strikingly distinct from that created by the solipsistic vertigo-wracked interlocking narrators of Heart of Darkness: Kurtz, Marlow, the frame narrator, and Conrad himself.
199) When Kurtz sacrificed his victims and mounted their decorative heads at his compound, was he being aggravated and selfish or idealistic and selfless? Is Marlow ironic about idol sacrifice? Is Conrad ironic about Marlow?
[로마가 영국을 침공했을 때를 상기하는 장면. 말로의 이야기는 종잡기가 상당히 어려움. 혼란을 가중 시킴]
- “The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea” (L, 2.139–40). Does Conrad justify only his particular take on the “civilizing work,” or also the work itself, in its more efficient and selfless versions? In leading us away from what happened in Africa to fretting about what we can know and say about it, Conrad leaves us snagged in a determinate indeterminacy that suggests modernism, even postmodernism.