Belaboring the Maritime Novel: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Sea Fiction, and Constituent Power

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Joseph Conrad’s revision of popular maritime fiction in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) stages the anachronistic nature of romantic adventure in modernity in order to recuperate its own recognition of the revolutionary capacity of the body and collective labor. Throughout his work, Conrad participates in a range of popular genres, often engaging with, and drawing on, multiple genres in the space of a single novel. His formal flexibility at least partially accounts for his complex critical legacy as a writer who exposes the imperialist ideology in which he participates. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, however, demands that we partially amend our notion of Conrad’s deconstructive aesthetic. This approach helps to clarify how the novella engages in critical self-reflection as it reveals the fragile constructedness of both genre and history. In adapting the genre of sea fiction, Conrad places pressure on extant tensions within the genre, especially around labor, and nearly renders the romantic adventure untenable. However, this pressure ultimately becomes an adaptive strategy to confront growing anxiety around imperial interdependency, including the rejection of commodified labor. At a moment in imperial history when the recognition of global interdependence and antagonism threatens the ideological, economic, and political underpinnings of imperialism, Conrad adapts the flexibility of sea fiction to confront this mounting pressure on the imperial consciousness and thus to reconstruct a more flexible representation of imperial relations.