In what critics label Joseph Conrad’s first accomplished work, he produces a text at once revered and criticized. Conrad asked W. E. Henley, poet and editor of The New Review, to publish the novel in his magazine. Conrad hoped that its inclusion in a publication that had showcased work by American author Stephen Crane, Henry James, Arthur Morrison, and poet W. B. Yeats would legitimize his work.
The novel’s plot appears deceptively simple. Aboard a craft named the Narcissus, an intelligent black man named James Wait becomes an invalid, creating tension between two different generations of accomplished seamen: Captain Alistoun and veteran sailor Singleton, and their crew. While the crew remains dedicated to saving Wait’s life, Alistoun and Singleton are reticent to endanger the ship to do so. Although Wait survives the voyage, at one point rescued by five crewmen who risk their own lives to save him from drowning in his bunk, he dies before the ship reaches its destination.
Conrad sought to feature, as did one of his models, Rudyard Kipling, the tensions that grow in organized, purposeful groups between those in charge and the workingmen they supervise. The two groups often do not share motivations or ideology, and the “good” leader must determine a way to cross the social gulf that divides him from his crew. When one crewmember, named Donkin, confronts Alistoun over whether Wait may return to duty, their argument escalates, and Donkin hurls a belaying pin at the captain. Alistoun knows his reactions will prove crucial, as the entire crew is looking on, and he responds with a calm that allows him to again command authority. Conrad, like Kipling, celebrates the importance of unity among patriots and the value of everyday labor to build character and advance a cause. It is that hands-on labor that qualifies the common man to know more regarding the reality of his cause than his remote leader.
Another inspiration for Conrad’s tale was American author Stephen Crane, an impressionist writer who also wrote of a community of men united in battle in his novel The Red Badge of Courage, published in England in 1895. Their shared theme, what the reviewer W. L. Courtney labeled “the psychology of the mass” in the December 8, 1897, edition of The Daily Telegraph, was solidified by Conrad in an acute, intense, sometimes inconsistent narrative, which occasionally played on racial stereotypes. Critics sometimes question his unusual narrative structure, whereby the first-person narrator seems at one point a part of the crew, at another point a simple onlooker standing apart from the action. Other questionable aspects include what some view as an overabundance of detailed description that occasionally burdens the plot, and what Cedric Watts terms “marked tensions within its thematic structure.” He points out that many readers accept the detail as Conrad’s inheritance from previous sea novels, such as those by Captain Marryat, and enjoy the tensions as paradoxes imitating those encountered by all humans as they tend to the business of life. Whatever their complaints, most critics agree that Conrad did accomplish the famous objective that he states in his preface to the novel as “to make you see.” Readers accept his wish for them as one of insight, as well as an understanding of Conrad’s own vision for his novel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kimbrough, Robert, ed. “Racism, or Realism? Literary Apartheid, or Poetic License? Conrad’s Burden in The Nigger of the Narcissus.” The Nigger of the Narcissus. New York: Norton, 1979, 358–68.
Watts, Cedric. Introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Penguin Books, 1988, xi–xxx.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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