The Imperial Archive

Subverting the Colonial Hero: Joseph Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’

 

“Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and civilisation and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned…” (Conrad: 24).

 

First appearing in Cosmopolis in June and July of 1897, Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ presents an intrinsically ironic perspective on European colonial administration and the pretensions of the “civilizing mission.” Published in the same year as the triumphalist national celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ was publicly aired at a time of great national pride, patriotism and imperialistic zeal in Britain, when the unchecked belief in the invincible force of civilization’s progression readily prevailed. With the Queen’s rule extending across manifold regions of the globe, the Empire thrived vigorously with almost a quarter of the world’s population subject to British colonisation. Paradoxically, Conrad’s short story was initially published in an issue of Cosmopolis dedicated to the celebration of the very jingoistic, imperialist myth-making that ‘An Outpost of Progress’ sets out to debunk. With grave irony then, the July number of Cosmopolis contains both the second instalment of Conrad’s story in which Gobila’s people are massacred and their villages burnt, and Kayerts shoots the unarmed Carlier before hanging himself symbolically from a cross, and a commentary by Henry Norman on the Jubilee celebrations extolling the virtues of Britain’s territorial expansion and the prodigious benefits of the civilizing mission, in which he remarks:

 

“The Jubilee celebration, however, was more, much more, than homage to the Queen’s person. The British nation rejoiced as much over its own triumphs as over the virtues and the happy lot of its Sovereign. It seemed deliberately to determine to regard its vast power, its colonising success, its vital unity, its world wide territory (…) The ‘Little Englander’ has wisely decided to efface himself. The political party which should talk of reducing the navy or snubbing the Colonies would have a short shrift. We are Imperialists first, and Liberals or Tories afterwards” (Cosmopolis 7, July 1897: 81).

 

 

Rabidly partisan, imperialist creeds such as Henry Norman’s are precisely Conrad’s target in his story about Kayerts and Carlier, the inept colonial administrators of a desolate outpost in the Congo, three hundred miles away from the nearest trading post. As John Goode has suggested, this publishing context emphatically “emphasizes by contrast the sardonic radicalism of Conrad’s tale,” a deeply ironic subversion of the patriotic concerns of its historical moment, accepted more as ominous eccentricity by most of its contemporary readers (xii). Preceding the publication of his much-lauded novella Heart of Darkness by two years, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ presents a radical subversion of the generic imperial adventure narratives typified by the stories of the heroic white man in the tropics by Ballantyne and Henty, or the imperial adventure novels of Haggard. Kayerts and Carlier also represent a radical deconstruction of the exploration and travel narratives about real life adventurers and explorers like Mungo Park and David Livingstone, which were ubiquitous in newspapers and periodicals of this time. The famous meeting of explorer-missionary David Livingstone and the New York Herald journalist Henry Morton Stanley in Africa in November of 1871 fervently captured the imperial imagination of the British public. Livingstone had entered the “dark continent” in 1864 to mount an expedition through the centre of Africa, in a bid to trace the source of the Nile. Over the next few years, little was heard from the explorer: the public clamoured for information and newspapers took up the cause of the missing national hero, headlining the question, “Where is Livingstone?” The explorer, (whose imposing form is memorialised in a statue overlooking Prince’s Street in Edinburgh, clutching a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other) came to embody all of the publicly admired virtues of the heroic, eminent man of Empire. Conrad’s story radically undermines the familiar trope of the colonial hero imbued with imperial ‘light’, presenting instead a narrative of physical and moral degeneracy by two incompetent, self-interested European emissaries of ‘progress.’

 

Conrad cannily juxtaposes this initial portrait of the two men’s unreserved uselessness with their own self-aggrandizing reading of the fictional adventures of d’Artagnan and Father Goriot, and their digestion of conflated heroic newspaper accounts of “Our Colonial Expansion”:

 “It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilisation, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith, and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves” (Conrad: 9).

Conrad’s depiction of Kayerts and Carlier’s self-congratulatory views of their own complicity in the grand scheme of the ‘civilizing mission’ is deeply ironic. Categorically self-deluded, the two men, who envisage themselves “as heroic white men bringing about a glorious future,” are as far removed from the heroic portraits depicted in the novels and newspapers they greedily consume, as is possible (White:160).

 

 

 

Conrad’s presentation of Kayerts and Carlier is a deeply ironic subversion of the traditional imperial trope of the heroic white man bringing “light, and faith, and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Conrad: 9). The ineptitude of the former bureaucrat and soldier is radically contrary to the notions of heroism perpetrated by the imperial adventure novels and the non-fiction narratives of explorers and travellers so popular at this time. The story of the moral and physical degeneracy of Kayerts and Carlier is a slamming indictment of European colonialism, in a more forceful and less ambiguous manner than in Heart of Darkness. The text’s final image, that of a dead Kayerts hanging from a cross, sticking out his tongue symbolically in defiance of his colonial superior, encapsulates this denunciation perfectly:

 “His toes were only a couple of inches above the ground; his arms hung stiffly down; he seemed to be standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director” (Conrad: 25).

 

 

Works Cited

1. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

2. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. John Goode ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

3. White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

© The Imperial Archive 2006