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 ...