Language and the Subject

The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.

Losing the Plot, Finding Time

An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue share a fictional and historical story world. A fundamental difference emerges against the backdrop of this resemblance. Grounded in a conceptualization of time that originates in antiquity, the first novel is obsessed with measurement and accounting. The Rescue is more neatly squared with modern philosophy and its attempt to conceive a time that preexists numerical evaluation. The two ontologies of time find their narrative expression in two distinct plot designs. The first hinges on action, the second, inaction. Deviating from the conventions of emplotting we find in earlier works, the late novel presents a time of suspension and waiting, a time out of joint. For philosophy and narratology both, such a transition marks an attempt to think outside determinism and court the indeterminate—to think the new.

“To Make You See”? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn

The chapter utilizes sight as a gauge with which to trace the transition from a philosophy of Being to a philosophy of Becoming. The cultural expressions of the anti-ocular turn observed in the nineteenth century provide the framework for a testing of Conrad’s use of the witness-narrator in Lord Jim, a novel that dramatizes the oscillations between an aesthetics of Being and one of Becoming. Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will inform the philosophical backdrop to the discussion, the anti-ocular turn of modernism its cultural complement, and narratology’s concept of the witness-narrator, the fictional measure against which these discourses strain. The three coalesce in an attempt to think the relation between sight, experience, and comprehension, between the demise of visual perception and its figurative, scientific, and philosophical expressions in the failure of categorical thinking and instrumental logic.

Introduction

The chapter traces the difference between two artistic impulses in Conrad’s writing. The first is aligned with a philosophy of Being or mind; its signposts include the spatialization of time, telos and logic; it is fueled by the need to know. The second is aligned with a philosophy of Becoming. It is characterized by the experience of duration, the principle of univocity and the unknown. The chapter argues that our appreciation of Conrad has been blind to the latter because of the predominance of the first in modernist scholarship. It also posits two different definitions of the new that follow this division—the first assumes the form of defamiliarization; it changes how we see. The second attempts to capture the unforeseen—it transforms what we see. The chapter traces the evolution of the slow in literary history in order to trace and unpack Conrad’s inauguration of a new literary tradition.

For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”: Marlow Goes to a Wedding

The chapter tests the relation between the novel’s titular theme, its handling of plot, and its commercial appeal. The emphasis on chance serves Conrad’s attempt to performatively resist the pervasiveness of determinism in nineteenth-century thought. At the same time, a set of motifs that serve as counter-indications to contingency offer coherence and the familiar. The ambivalent treatment of chance is read as an indication of Conrad’s oscillation between two different artistic commitments and the philosophical paradigms that generate them. What is at stake is not only the nature of the audience he chooses to address and the authorial responsibilities that such a choice dictates, but the very question of his artistic legacy. The method with which chance is to be treated in the novel will determine if Conrad is a “modern” writer or a panderer to public opinion; whether he chooses an art of Becoming or of Being.

Conclusion

The chapter reads the tensions observed throughout this study with recent critical re-evaluations of human experience. Conrad’s art, and the modernism with which it is associated, have long been read as centering on questions of knowledge and truth, concealment and revelation, doubt and the desire to know. A more ontologically-driven thinking of modernism shows that the oscillations between Being and Becoming are meaningful not only as competing forces in critical practice and philosophical discourse, but as a gauge for significant changes in the way we engage with and represent the world. Conrad’s writing unmoors time from its chronological measure, frees the subject of the limits of the Cartesian cogito, and abandons telos in the charting of narrative form. Where conceptual logic cancels out difference in an attempt to create a coherent, recognizable picture, Conrad’s work repeatedly returns to the life force of difference.

From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now

Nostromo is anchored in historical forces that undermine the notion of human agency: whether it is the power of capitalism and revolution or the inevitability of family inheritance and psychodynamic repetition, the individual conducts a life that is always already scripted. The novel is action heavy; the twists and turns of the plot performatively mirror the historical or libidinal forces that draw the heroes into a predetermined future. Moments of deceleration and hesitation that punctuate the narrative nevertheless interrupt the rush of history with the suggestion of accident, the unforeseen, and the new. The chapter turns to stylistic and thematic articulations of suspension in order to think the possibility of recurrence with difference, of an escape from an inevitability that is not only historically but also generically determined.