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콘래드, 조지프/진보의전초기지

Jim Holstun - "Mr. Kayerts. He is Dead": Literary Realism and Conrad's "Outpost of Progress" 4(2018)

by 길철현 2018. 12. 12.


VII. VICTIMS OF PROGRESS

207) Conrad further removes himself from big bourgeois contempt for petty bourgeois stupidity by attributing that contempt to Kayerts, making him, briefly, an aristocratic modern amoralist who has plumbed the depths and moved beyond good and evil—like Raskolnikov, Dorian Gray, or the mad genius Kurtz, who “kicked himself loose of the earth” (H, 113).

[K와 [죄와 벌]의 라스콜리니코프의 생각에서 유사한 점이 드러난다는 것은 나도 짐작한 부분]

208) 마지막 장면

The Passion of Mr. Kayerts sounds a sardonic chord that combines anticolonial, anticapitalist, antimilitarist, and antichristian notes, blowing a dead raspberry at the Managing Director and the civilizing mission he serves.65

[ I don’t know if Achebe read “Outpost,” but Things Fall Apart also concludes with a colonial official gazing at a hanged man, Okonkwo, another “victim of progress,” to quote Conrad’s original title for his story (“O,” 170). on Conrad’s literary suicides and his own attempt, see C. B. Cox, “Joseph Conrad and the Question of Suicide,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 55.2 (1973): 285–99. Conrad returns obsessively to moments of horrific isolation tinged with suicidal yearning, culminating in his own mordant epitaph, taken from Edmund Spenser’s Despaire, who tries to cajole lonely Red Cross Knight into killing himself: “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please” (The Faerie Qveene [Harlow, England: Longman, 2001], book 1, canto 9, stanza 40).] [The Rover Epithet]


VIII. CONRAD, KIPLING, AND GRAHAM

208) In Heart of Darkness, struggling not to be conflated with Kipling on formal or with Graham on ideological grounds, Conrad changed Africa from a human ecology under colonial stress into a site for metaphysical reflection and absurdist excess, creating in the process a highly influential idiom of racist but obliquely anti-imperial narration.66 

[ Terry Eagleton says Heart of Darkness presents “the whole imperialist enterprise . . . as essentially absurd” (The English Novel [Malden: Blackwell, 2005], 242). With its defining mix of traumatized horror and black humor, Conrad’s novel prefigures both modernist shellshock literature and gonzo[독단과 편견으로 가득 찬] war narratives (film, fiction, and journalism). The Congo traumas of Conrad, Marlow, and Kurtz, born of reluctant participation in asymmetric imperial warfare, have inspired writers taking up America’s wars in Southeast and West Asia. Their fixation on American PTSD responds to a genuine horror, but it also transforms the violence visited primarily on other peoples into an aesthetic intensity experienced vicariously by American narrators and readers. See my “Shoot and Cry: Modernism, Realism, and the Iraq War Fiction of Kevin Powers and Justin Sirois,” forthcoming in Cultural Critique.]

- In October 1895, the Spectator prophesied that he might become “the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.”67

209) reviewing Tales, the Glasgow Herald called “Outpost” a “successful imitation” of Kipling.71

[Lawrence Graver emphasizes young Conrad’s strong
tonal debt to Kipling and plot parallels between “Outpost” and The Man Who Would Be King (see 13–14).]

- This sort of comparative criticism and praise, which casts the literary universe as a fixed order, helped push Conrad from the realism of “Outpost” to the high modernist sentences of Heart of Darkness, which have been called many things, cruel and kind, but never “Kiplingesque.”

210) In January 1898, when Graham invoked Kayerts’s inadvertent atheist defiance at the end of “Outpost,” Conrad responded with late Victorian entropic pessimism: “‘Put the tongue out’ why not? one ought to really. And the machine will run on all the same. . . . The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from the cold is not worth troubling about” (L, 2:16–17).75

[그레엄과의 친교. 두 사람의 사상적 차이 이런 것들이 이 부분에서 많이 언급되고 있음]

[K가 십자가에 목매달아 죽었다는 것은 기독교에 대한 비판이나 풍자라는 측면도 있다]

[콘래드의 비관주의는 빅토리아 시대 말기의 엔트로피, 즉 열역학 제2법칙과 밀접한 연관이 있다. 이것도 명심해야 한다.]

- In writing “Outpost” for Cosmopolis, Conrad began mastering his African experience, but he also scared himself. Pushing against Graham, he could repress his earlier realist radicalism, clearing some space to begin writing Heart of Darkness in a much different mode for Tory Blackwoods and a larger British readership less inclined to radical satire.

[콘래드의 작품 전반이 제국주의와 불가분의 관계라는 점은 명백하다. 그것이 직접적인가, 간접적인가 하는 정도의 문제는 있지만]

- 다음 부분은 Nostromo에 대한 논의. 논문이 좀 더 압축적이지 못하고 지나치게 방만.


IX. MODERNISM, REALISM, AND COLONIALISM

212) critical interest in global realism is established, persistent, and increasing. We can trace it back to postwar resistance literature and Sartrean committed writing, which maintains a space for realism, even socialist realism, alongside experimental anticolonial modernism.82

[On committed writing and anti-imperialism, see Sartre, What Is Literature?
(London: Routledge, 2008); Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London: Routledge,
2006); Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Paige
Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
(London: Verso, 2010).
83 See Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”
Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88.]

- Any model of modern literary history will exhibit greater richness and explanatory power if it makes room for a dialogue and struggle between the two modes rather than repressing or degrading one of them, or putting them into a reductive sequence of progress or degeneration.

213) While its realist dimension has not lacked for acknowledgement, its modernist dimension continues to hold center stage, and Heart of Darkness, the center of that center. In trying to render Conrad essentially a modernist, the very concept of a unified oeuvre becomes a selective tradition on the level of a single author.

- In “Conrad and Modernism,” Kenneth Graham acknowledges Conrad’s debt to the form and the themes of the “nineteenth-century realist tradition,” but goes on to characterize Heart of Darkness as a “modernist manifesto” that represents “what is strongest and most characteristic in Conrad.”90

[Kenneth Graham, “Conrad and Modernism,” The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 204, 214.] [읽을 것]

- Daniel Just locates the virtues typically attributed to modernism in Heart of Darkness alone, saying that it represents the only moment in modern English literature that fully confronts “the anxieties and societal contradictions inherent in the Western colonial culture.”91

[91 Daniel Just, “Between Narrative Paradigms: Joseph Conrad and the Shift from
Realism to Modernism from a Genre Perspective,” English Studies 89.3 (2008): 282.]

- In an argument reminiscent of Said’s, he says Conrad’s sheer “failure to tell a story” in Heart of Darkness represented, for him, “the only ethically acceptable response to the historical experience of colonialism.”92

- For the modernist and realist components of Conrad mediate each other, and so do Heart of Darkness and “Outpost of Progress.”93

[Conrad’s novel itself takes on a new interest if we see it methodically rewriting
his story, with the melancholia and self-inveigling that form so much of its narrative
power registering the temporary loss of certain narrative possibilities. Thanks to Joewon
Yoon for this point.]

214) “[I]f Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire (완충지대)  between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.”94 “[94 Achebe, 174–75. “An Image of Africa,” ] [N3 256] 아체베의 콘래드 리딩은 OP를 생각해보면 순진하고 일면적인 면이 다분하다.
- Responses to Achebe emphasize the frames formed by the novel’s internal fractures, or by its external postcolonial rewriters. But “Outpost” gives us an eminently Conradian external frame. We shouldn’t overlook it just because the frame preceded the picture.

- We might even take the frame for the picture, the picture for the frame. A former student recalls that Naipaul taught “Outpost” as “Heart of Darkness demystified.”95 A reordering tweak puts the tongue out: Heart of Darkness is “Outpost of Progress” mystified.

[95 M. Banning Eyre, “Naipaul at Wesleyan,” South Carolina Review 14 (1982): 36.]