"Mr. Kayerts. He is Dead": Literary Realism and Conrad's "Outpost of Progress"

In "Outpost of Progress," a savagely comic story about two Belgian incompetents at a Congo trading station, Joseph Conrad offers the first postcolonial critique of Heart of Darkness, two years before it existed. The sardonic and innovative literary realism of "Outpost" connects imperial causes to horrific but intelligible colonial effects. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad mystified his earlier story, smudging its anti-imperial clarity, detaching causes and effects, turning both into free-floating modernist intensities. Renewed attention to "Outpost" helps us understand the continuing dialogue of realism and modernism in Conrad's fiction (for instance, in Nostromo) and in world literature.