Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

"An Outpost of Progress"

(1897)

 

Joseph Conrad

(December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924)

 

Notes


347  Sierra Leone:


347  Loanda:




 

The Short Fiction


[page 28] [...] Conrad pointed to the aesthetic opportunities offered by the short form because of its ability to 'show forth' the characteristic elements of a writer's style: 'It takes a small-scale narrative (short story) to show the master's hand' (Letters, I, p. 124). [...]

when we look at his own writing from this perspective, we can see that some of the earlier short fictions served as testing grounds for the very techniques that make his work recognizably 'Conradian'. In 'An Outpost of Progress', for example, he exploited grotesque images and sudden shifts in perspective to create an ironic style that sets him apart from Flaubert and Maupassant.


[page 30] Written in less than three weeks in July 1896, 'An Outpost of Progress' earned £50—as much as Conrad had received for the copyright to An Outcast of the Islands, which had taken a year to complete.


When Conrad learned that 'An Outpost of Progress', his first story to be published, would be printed in two instalments, he objected that its division would damage the cumulative effect of his ironic method: 'I told the unspeakable idiots that the thing halved would be as innefective [sic] as a dead scorpion. There will be a part without the sting—and the part with the sting—and being separated they will be both harmless and disgusting' (Letters, I, p. 320).


Gail Fraser, "The Short Fiction," The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 25–44.



The African Fictions


[page 190] After its serial publication, 'Karain' was republished in Tales of Unrest (1898) along with 'An Outpost of Progress', Conrad's first African fiction. In the 'Author's Note' to that volume, Conrad speaks of 'An Outpost' as 'the lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course "The Heart of Darkness"' (TU, p. ix). Although he justifies his own plunder as 'very small' and not 'of much use to anybody else', his irony works here to unmask the purported benevolence of European incursions into Africa and reveal their actual self-serving nature as commonplace.


Andrea White, "Conrad and Imperialism," The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 179–202.

 

 

At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he [Edmund Dene Morel, employee of a Liverpool shipping line] sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor.


Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner, 1999): 2.


 


 

Study Questions

  • In the short story's introductory description of the people and place leading up to calling the entire set-up an "outpost of progress" for the first time (347), what evidence of progress do you see?
  • Explore a change or changes in Conrad's "An Outpost of Progress."
  • Conrad's irony often manifests itself in the usage of individual words. Choose a word that recurs multiple times throughout the story and examine its meanings. Consider, for instance, these words and their various forms: progress, savage, perfect (also perfectly, imperfect), civilization, and fever.

            

 

 

Review Sheet

Characters

Kayerts – "the chief, was short and fat" (347)

Carlier – "the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs" (347)

Makola – "a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price" (347); "the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck" (347)

Gobila – "the chief of the neighboring villages. He was a grey-headed savage, thin and black, with a white cloth round his loins and a mangy panther skin hanging over his back....skeleton legs" (353)


 

Places 


 

Time 



 

 

 

Sample Student Responses to Joseph Conrad's "An Outpost of Progress"

Response 1: 

 

            

 

 

 

Reference

 

Link

 


 

Joseph Conrad

 


Reference


Conrad, Joseph. "An Outpost of Progress." The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad. London: Hutchinson, c1933. 347–68. Print.


Further Reading

Joseph Conrad


Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore, eds.  Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.  (Arts PR6005.O4Z459 K73O; CL 823.912 O98)

 

Meyers, Jeffrey.  Joseph Conrad: A Biography.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991. (CL 823.912 C754M)


Stape, J. H. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Stape, John. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. New York: Pantheon, 2007. Print.

The Congo

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Mariner, 1999. Print.



 

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Last updated February 1, 2013