The year 1989 saw the publication of Jakob Lothe’s Conrad’s Narrative Method. Its multiple areas of investigation include an exhaustive study of Conrad’s narrative inconsistencies,  an analysis that has rendered the attempt to identify uncharted curiosities in the work almost futile. My return to these infractions stems from the need to reconsider them in light of radical discursive shifts that have upset classical narratology’s assumptions about narrative voice. The way we read, interpret and unpack Conrad’s narration and point of view has changed in response to the emergence of new directions in literary theory, philosophy, culture and aesthetics. I will pick up Lothe’s and Watts’s discussion of narration in Nostromo and bring it to bear on current methods of assessing authority and legitimacy. My reading will be framed by the planetary turn in critical thought, a theoretical direction that values connection and engagement over separation and disinterest. This changed emphasis raises important questions about which narrators we trust and which we suspect, questions that have become urgent in popular culture and academic debates both. In A Preface to Conrad Cedric Watts ties Conrad’s eloquence to the donning of a mask. Current critical thinking shows no narrative gesture could be more alienating to a contemporary audience. The legitimacy to speak is seen as a product of lived experience, a fact of engagement that runs counter to neutrality and distance, traditional markers of authority in fiction. Conrad’s narrative gestures need to be thought anew to accommodate the implications of such a changed slant in reader response.

The planetary turn signals a change of perspective, a reconfiguration of the way we view and relate to the world. Min Hyoung Song sees this as an attempt to entertain “a different order of connection,” one that cancels out the “royal epistemology” of globalization, a nomos that divides, restricts, hierarchalizes, and criminalizes” (“Becoming Planetary” 568). In The Planetary Turn, Amy Elias and Christian Moraru suggest that such a “reorientation” would bring about a significant change of perspective, one that should lead “to notably different outcomes in and for the world” (xvi). They explain that “to comprehend the planetary must entail grasping the relationality embedded in it. Consequently, relatedness, dialogue, and interactivity are central to major aesthetic initiatives stirring at this stage in world history” (xii). Literature is instrumental in bringing about such a change of perspective. It allows us to imagine ways of being there and being with that might be unlike our existing modes of engagement and orientation. It is in the work of the imagination that Gayatri Spivak anchors her definition of the ethical imperative underlying a transition to the planetary. She writes: “If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away” (An Aesthetic Education 339). If we need to call on the imagination as a path to alterity it is because, unlike the global, the planetary is not the instantiation of the same everywhere. The planetary is an awareness of difference that does not demand that it conform to what we know. To be planetary is to recognize, to acknowledge and to allow for difference. It is a method of living with difference rather than eradicating it. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is poised between these two cultural moments: between the global and the planetary, between the different and the same, between flights of the imagination and the reassertion of the known. Though the novel launches a critique against the brutality and indifference entailed in neocolonial imperialism, it remains committed to a globalist ethos when it gestures toward the abject quality of the different. My reading will show where the novel insists on the same and where it stages an encounter with alterity that can be read with the moral imperative announced in the ...

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’ presents a series of frustrations: the misleading focus of its title, Yanko’s failed absorption in his new home, the encounter with an inhospitable culture. This paper will read the story against the backdrop of the fiction of immigration to the new world in order to tease out a generically determined frustration that merits consideration. My claim is that in bringing his protagonist back to the familiar and reassuring spaces of agricultural life, the author deliberately rejects the conventions of the fiction of immigration that were definitive of the age. The story offers a glimpse of these conventions in the abrupt and fast-paced shifts that accompany Yanko’s journey through the modern and industrial West. The sinking of Yanko’s ship, however, spells the abandonment of this plot trajectory. In place of the sensory confusion associated with the experience of a late nineteenth-century port and the metropolis that it feeds, Yanko and the narrative are led to a small rural town in Kent. This jarring turn confronts the reader with an economic and cultural xenophobia that cannot be marginalized by the alienations of the dizzying and distracting experience of modern life. Conrad’s story undercuts the assimilations to which Ford Madox Heuffer alludes in The Soul of London and returns to a more traditional exploration of cultural encounter. The omission of the modern-city tropes may be read as Conrad’s deliberate decision to eschew what Ford describes as the anesthetizing effects of technology, its razing of cultural and national nuances. ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s After Bread (1880) are read here side by side in order to show how modernist writing anticipates recent debates on the role of technology in the creation of blind-spots to cultural difference. The representation of attention, pace and memory will be used to demonstrate where modernism is complicit in the marginalization of cultural difference and where it demands, stages or resists the reconfiguration of immigrant subjectivity. Such an investigation will serve not only to test tensions within modernist thought, but as a counterpoint to similar tensions in recent critical debates on migrant subjectivity, between universalizing gestures and the emphasis on difference, between the position that all subjects are created in movement and the critique of...

The book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad's contribution to literary history. It utilizes emerging critical modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction, to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition. It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad's writing and uncover the author's exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito. Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction: character, narration, focalization, language and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer conceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and interdependent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavours have long been held separate from Conrad's. In the spirit of current re-examinations of modernism and critical endeavours to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad's art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand and evaluate information. Thematic, stylistic and philosophical instantiations of the slow are offered here as a gauge for this meaningful transformation.

 

Reviews on Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism

• Review by Charlotte Jones, Oxford Univesrity Press
• Review by Richard Ruppel, Oxford University Press
• Review by Riccardo Capoferro, Oxford University Press
• Review by Cristopher GoGwilt, Indiana University Press