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Joseph Conrad’s “Strange Air of Finality”: Negative Affect and the Politics of Fear in “The Tale”

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Joseph Conrad and Postcritique

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Abstract

Conrad’s “The Tale” is far removed from the sublime ideals of Felski’s postcritique. The story compels readers to reflect on how different types of literature may offer different modes of affect. “The Tale” works within the negative affect register and mediates experiences that may be more pronounced in times of trauma. Conrad shares the negative affect of dread by placing his commander in a position that feels rather like our own: as a critical, even paranoid, reader of his environment. I conclude by maintaining that if scholars are going to think about literature in a postcritical way, they must view the space that Conrad opens up as one in which fear and terror are presented as serious affect and a real, concrete condition of modernity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ian Watt, “Conrad’s Preface to ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus,’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7, no. 2 (1974): 103.

  2. 2.

    Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea, (London: J. M. Dent, 1923), ix.

  3. 3.

    Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus, x.

  4. 4.

    While scholars have noted the impressionistic undertones—both in terms of aesthetic value and European visual arts—within Conrad’s oeuvre, John G. Peters claims that Conrad’s impressionism has little to do with technical form and more to do with underlying philosophical concerns that generate not only aesthetic but also ideological questions.

  5. 5.

    Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 30, 36.

  6. 6.

    Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus, ix.

  7. 7.

    Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus, preface.

  8. 8.

    Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus, x.

  9. 9.

    Felski, Limits of Critique, 179.

  10. 10.

    Felski, Limits of Critique, 179.

  11. 11.

    Felski, “After Suspicion,” Profession, 2009, 32.

  12. 12.

    Felski, Limits of Critique, 180.

  13. 13.

    Peters, John G. “Conrad’s Literary Response to the First World War,” College Literature, vol. 39, no. 4 (2012): 39, 40.

  14. 14.

    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” in Touching Feeling, ed. Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 2003): 145.

    In an extended passage clarifying her views, Sedgwick offers an “old joke” to help explain theories that seem “explicitly to undertake the proliferation of only one affect … whether ecstasy, sublimity, self-shattering, jouissance … may be problematic.” She writes: “It’s like the old joke: ‘Comes the revolution, Comrade, everyone gets to eat roast beef every day.’ ‘But Comrade, I don’t like roast beef.’ ‘Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll like roast beef.’ Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink by those deconstructive jokes; you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the state apparatus; you’ll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You’ll be mournful and militant. You’ll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Not tonight, dears, I have a headache,’” 146.

  15. 15.

    These works include Victory, The Shadow-Line, “The Warrior’s Soul,” “The Tale,” and a variety of nonfictional pieces, including “The Unlighted Coast,” “The Dover Patrol,” “Flight,” “Tradition,” “Well Done,” and “Confidence.”

  16. 16.

    Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Oxfordshire, England: Routledge, 2004): 65.

  17. 17.

    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962): 179.

  18. 18.

    Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum, 2002): vii.

  19. 19.

    Sarah Dunant and Ray Porter, The Age of Anxiety (London: Virago, 1996).

  20. 20.

    For a detailed account of how narrative form functions in the story, please see my article “‘What Could His Object Be?’: Form and Materiality in Conrad’s ‘The Tale.’” Conrad and Nature, edited by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, et al., Routledge, 2019, 211–31.

  21. 21.

    Joseph Conrad, “The Tale,” in Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1955): 63.

  22. 22.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 64.

  23. 23.

    Peters, “Conrad’s Literary Response,” 38.

  24. 24.

    Peters, “Conrad’s Literary Response,” 43.

  25. 25.

    Dan Van der Vat, Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994): 30.

  26. 26.

    Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 23.

  27. 27.

    Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 24.

  28. 28.

    Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 24.

  29. 29.

    Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 24.

  30. 30.

    As I have argued elsewhere, the Lusitania served as an appropriate catalyst for Conrad, and he used many of the narratives that emerged from the ship’s demise to craft his thoughts on the nature of modern warfare and the changing face of the fear experience. Jarica Linn Watts, “Submerged by Fear: The Politics of Wartime Hysteria in Conrad and Conan Doyle,” Conradiana 49, no. 1 (2020): 17–42.

  31. 31.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  32. 32.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 63.

  33. 33.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 63.

  34. 34.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 63.

  35. 35.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 63–64.

  36. 36.

    Both Siegfried Sassoon and Richard Aldington have written about the paralyzing fear felt by soldiers on land as they sat and waited for a pending attack—“crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, / Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror.” Siegfried Sassoon, “Counter Attack,” The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. George Walter (London: Penguin, 2006), lines 22–23. For Aldington, it is the unknown, the “rush and crash/of mortar and shell,” and the “cruel bitter shriek of bullet,” that ultimately breaks the soldier’s spirit. Even the sound of the bitter shrieking bullet was enough to “wound” the soldier and “sever” the “fabric” of his “frail soul.” Richard Aldington, “In the Trenches,” The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. George Walter (London: Penguin, 2006), lines 6–8, 12, 13, 14.

  37. 37.

    Jeremy Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (New York: Routledge, 1990): 263.

  38. 38.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 62.

  39. 39.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 64 (emphasis in original).

  40. 40.

    Celia Kingsbury, The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Literature of World War I (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002): 159.

  41. 41.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 63.

  42. 42.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 64.

  43. 43.

    At the end of the nineteenth century, Col. Lowdale Hale, of the Royal Engineers, used the phrase “fog of war” to describe “the state of ignorance in which commanders frequently find themselves as regards the real strength and position, not only of their foes, but also of their friends.” Lowdale Hale, “The Fog of War,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 19 (1896): 522–37.

  44. 44.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 67.

  45. 45.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 67.

  46. 46.

    Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 126.

  47. 47.

    Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 130.

  48. 48.

    Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism, vol. 52, no. 2 (2010): 237.

  49. 49.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 65–66.

  50. 50.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 65, 66.

  51. 51.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 68.

  52. 52.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 69.

  53. 53.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 69–70.

  54. 54.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 70, 71.

  55. 55.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 73.

  56. 56.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 74.

  57. 57.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 74.

  58. 58.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 75.

  59. 59.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  60. 60.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  61. 61.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  62. 62.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  63. 63.

    Conrad, “The Tale,” 80.

  64. 64.

    Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zahn (New York: Schocken, 1955), 84.

  65. 65.

    Conrad, “Unlighted Coast,” 57.

  66. 66.

    Felski, “After Suspicion,” 34.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Jarica Linn Watts

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Correspondence to Jarica Linn Watts .

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  1. Department of English, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Siu Lek Yuen, Hong Kong

    Jay Parker

  2. Department of English, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Joyce Wexler

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Watts, J.L. (2021). Joseph Conrad’s “Strange Air of Finality”: Negative Affect and the Politics of Fear in “The Tale”. In: Parker, J., Wexler, J. (eds) Joseph Conrad and Postcritique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72499-3_5

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