Abstract:

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.