The necessary voyage: Voice and authorial presence in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’

Abstract

In the past three decades the influence of the New Criticism and Wayne Booth’s seminal The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has made those fiction critics who rely on formalist methods reluctant and even embarrassed to speak of authorial presence within a text. But it is often necessary to understand the relationship between the artist and his creation if we are to understand the text. The author’s personal circumstances may not only inform a text, but often become embodied within its plot, language, characterisation, and form. The intensity and importance of that presence vary from writer to writer and from work to work. Like Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) must be understood in terms of its creator’s efforts to develop an authentic voice. In all three relatively early works, the author freed himself from past constraints and created a personal and artistic self which made future work possible. As a crucial passage in A Personal Record indicates, Conrad knew that an author’s presence became embodied in the finished work of art.