White Fragility & Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

Posted By Raymond E. Midge On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]2,294 words

First, a word on words. (No, not what you are thinking.) How can you take the following sentence seriously: “Captain Allistoun could be seen on the poop, watching the sky . . .”? (p. 233)[1] [2] If you are familiar with archaic nautical terminology, you know that the term “poop” means the section of elevated deck at the stern of a sailing ship where the compass and the wheel are located. Nowadays, of course, it means “shit,” but even worse, it’s got an annoying baby-talk quality about it. And of course it comes up over and over again, destroying the mood of every sentence it appears in. If I were going to bowdlerize this book, “poop” is the word I would change.

And now to go where you thought I was headed in the first place: the word “nigger” in the title. That has certainly not changed in its meaning over the past 125 years, but it has acquired so much baggage that it should probably have seven or eight syllables by now. As in Lord Jim, one of Conrad’s later works, the title reflects what the character is called by those around him.

I suspect that Conrad thought that the title would really grab your attention, and it sure does. The publisher of the first American edition persuaded Conrad to change the title to Children of the Sea. Wikipedia [3] says that the original title was controversial, but that seems way too woke for 1897. At the time, as throughout its history, the nigger-word was used disparagingly and never in polite conversation, but had not yet achieved anything like the status of most sacred taboo that it has today. My guess is that the publisher was worried that the public might think the book was something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was a major bestseller in 1852, written to induce pity and guilt in whites over the enslavement of black people.

After the horrors of the Civil War and the first Reconstruction, when unpleasant everyday encounters with emancipated blacks freely and proudly expressing the same social pathologies that they exhibit today became commonplace, the whites in the South — and maybe even most Northern whites — were probably in no mood for what they likely assumed was another heartrending depiction of the plight of blacks. (At 10% of the population and with their lower literacy rate, blacks themselves would not have been a significant part of the book market.) In any case, Conrad would have had to yield. He had not yet achieved the stature that he would eventually enjoy, and the American market for books was two and a half times larger than the British. Later, once Conrad had established himself, the publisher began using his preferred title.

The other n-word in the title, Narcissus — or rather its derivative, narcissism — has been so popular from the sixties onward that it is now little more than a general-purpose pejorative. Conrad was using it in its fuller, original sense, as shown in this description of the title character, which could serve as a definition of the word:

The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. The men had approached and stood behind him in a body. He overtopped the tallest by half a head…He enunciated distinctly, with soft precision. The deep rolling tones of his voice filled the deck without effort. He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and made up his mind not to be too hard on it. (p. 24)

I would bet that Conrad never publicly uttered the nigger-word as an epithet during his entire adulthood, and probably his entire life, considering that he didn’t speak English until his twenties. Nonetheless, for the title alone, not to mention its frequent use in this novel as well as The Heart of Darkness, he would be branded a racist today despite the fact that it was realistic everyday language in his day. And maybe there is something to that.

The novel is about a lone black man in an otherwise all-white crew. In Lord Jim the roles are reversed, i.e. there is a lone white man amidst a tribe of coloreds. Thus, according to Conrad, a black in a group of whites is a nigger and a white man among coloreds is a lord (and they both have the same first name). Furthermore, in 1897 the idea that whites were supreme in this world was about as controversial as saying that elephants are large animals. Whites had reached all parts of the globe and had dominated every color of humanity they encountered. What sane man would not have believed in white supremacy? Conrad must pose quite a dilemma for modern cultural elites, however; he is clearly a rare genius and an enormously talented writer, but also a white supremacist in his outlook — at least, what we can deduce of it.

Surprisingly, the book is not primarily about the title character, who is sort of like a black hole (I know, bad pun) in that mostly what we see of him is the effect he has on the surrounding characters. The novel could be considered as a laboratory experiment in which a large black rat is placed in a cage full of white rats and the group is then subjected to stress. What is the result? The whites do not respond to this situation by ganging up on the lone black, as might be expected, nor by ignoring his differences and accepting him as just another crewmember, nor by making him their leader (like the natives did with the white man in Lord Jim), but rather by splitting into quarreling factions. You might say, “We already knew that would happen. Remember the Civil War?” But the war was also about states’ rights, and it wasn’t the presence of blacks but rather their enslavement for the benefit of a relatively small number of wealthy planters that caused all the trouble.

A good experiment isolates the phenomenon under study, and this story does just that. At the time this novel was written, the status of a negro on a ship was the same as that of any other member of the crew. The conditions were the same for everyone: a sort of temporary slavery for the duration of the voyage, during which the entire crew was exposed to the same hazards. Some common social factors were also absent under such conditions; there were no women or money to fight over, and the hierarchy was absolutely totalitarian. There were elections or pandering politicians. Clearly, Conrad intended to explore how even a single black can affect a group of whites at a fundamental level. If not, he could have written a similar story with a white man at the center of it and called it The Voyage of the Narcissus.

Conrad’s experiment suggests that all it takes to split a group of whites, if they really are fragile, into quarreling factions is to put a negro into their midst. This is also extremely ironic; whites can go out and conquer the world, but put one black into a white environment and it fractures. (Note the difference in Lord Jim, where the white man places himself into a pre-existing conflict and becomes the leader of one of the warring tribes — but they are not fighting over him. Think of Lawrence of Arabia).

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Unlike Ernest Hemingway’s stark, simple, and direct style, Conrad is subtle and roundabout. He likes to create tensions between characters based on misunderstandings that are unclear at first both to the characters and the reader, but which become apparent later, somewhat like a comedian setting up a punch line. For example, the first appearance of the title character occurs the night before the ship sets sail, while the Narcissus’ Chief Mate is concluding the newly-assembled crew’s muster. One seems to be missing. Then, from the shadows, a man yells out “Wait!” (p. 22). The Mate takes umbrage at being ordered to wait by this unseen stranger, which is a clear violation of shipboard protocol, and a tense exchange follows until it is revealed that the stranger is James Wait, the missing crewman, who is arriving late (it seems that this stereotype was already well-established in 1897). This raises a question in the reader’s mind: Is the Mate being unreasonable (make that racist today) in his reaction to this black man, who was not really insulting him? Or did James Wait create the situation by being late and not apologizing for it? (Does this sound vaguely familiar — sort of like a present-day white cop/black man encounter?)

Conrad adds another factor. On a sailing ship, especially a sparsely-manned merchantman (as opposed to an overstaffed naval vessel), each crewman is very important. Every change in the weather or alteration of the ship’s course necessitated adjustments to the sails, usually requiring crewmen to climb aloft on the riggings. One crewman missing from the watch would significantly increase the burden on the rest. Shortly after getting underway, everyone notices that James Wait is not working very hard. The narrator remarks, “We thought it was simply the outcome of his philosophy of life” (p. 63). Then Wait explains that he is sick, perhaps dying, and unable to perform his duties. When the Chief Mate learns of this, he confronts Wait: “‘Then why the devil did you ship aboard here?’ ‘I must live till I die — mustn’t I?’ he replied” (p. 64). James Wait signed on as a crewman simply for paid passage home, knowing he wasn’t fit for duty and that everyone else would have to take up the slack. (More of the n-word — narcissism, that is.) Again, contrast this with Lord Jim, where Jim gives his life while defending a group of natives while on a quest to regain his self-respect after a cowardly act. (Maybe we should call this the a-word: altruism.) Conrad definitely seems as if he is guilty of white supremacy by dealing with concepts like punctuality, duty, bravery, and sacrifice.

The ship runs into serious trouble in a storm while rounding Africa and rolls onto its side for more than a day. James Wait is mostly absent from this central event in the story, being stranded in a cabin which had been converted into a makeshift sickbay for him. His response to his rescuers, who had risked their own lives in an excruciatingly difficult effort to extract him from where he was trapped, is to reproach them for not reaching him sooner: “What kept you back? Hey? Funk?” (p. 107). The ship eventually rights itself, as its unflappable Captain had maintained it would, and resumes its course to England, bearing a dying James Wait and a crew in which the divisions are multiplying beyond the pro- and anti-Jimmy factions. These include class warfare as instigated by Donkin, a scrawny, conniving Cockney who is something of a proto-Communist. His agitating fails to turn the Narcissus into the battleship Potemkin, however.

James Wait finally succumbs to tuberculosis and is buried at sea. During the ceremony, when the plank bearing his corpse is tilted, his shroud catches on a nail, preventing his body from sliding into the sea, much to the chagrin of Belfast, a pugnacious, maudlin Irishman (is that redundant?) who had befriended Wait and who is ready to fight anyone who shows him disrespect. His pathetic reaction is to shriek “Jimmy, be a man!” (p. 238). The plank has to be raised higher and higher until the body finally falls. The voyage resumes, the factions disintegrate, and the crew lapses into eager anticipation of payday, good food, booze, and whores awaiting them in London.

This book is not a page-turner. The scenic descriptions are beautifully hypnotic, but sometimes it is like cutting tall, thick grass with a manual push-mower, requiring multiple rereadings to finally understand what the author is saying. Try to comprehend this sentence the first time through: “The latent egoism of tenderness to suffering appeared in the developing anxiety not to see him die” (p. 205). There are plenty more like that as well. Even during the action scenes, the intricate metaphors and nautical terminology can make it a difficult read.

There is one important surprise/mystery/twist at the end that I wish I could call a bombshell without cringing, since that word is so overused. I failed to see it coming the first time that I read the book. It concerns one of the main characters, Singleton, the quintessential old salt. If this were made into a movie, Clint Eastwood would be a good choice for the part. His first appearance is while he is reading in the noisy crew’s quarters. The narrator very carefully draws our attention to the details of Singleton’s reading style: He is wearing spectacles, holding a book at arm’s length, and is “lost in an absorption profound enough to resemble a trance” (p. 7). The narrator pushes this further, commenting on the curious popularity of the novel he is reading among seamen.

Then, after all this talk about Singleton’s reading style and taste in the opening scene, in the book’s final scene at the pay table, we are told that as he was signing for his pay, “Singleton painfully sketched in a heavy cross” (p. 252). Conrad either made a huge blunder (don’t bet on it), or he deceptively set us up for this surprise: Singleton’s reading at the beginning must have been merely an act. Maybe this reveals another type of white fragility: the tendency to place too much trust in authority figures and heroes. And perhaps Singleton is the equivalent of the device that some painters employ where they include themselves in their paintings.

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[1] [7] Page references are to Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea (Franklin Classics, 2018).