Through the Eye of Surplus Accumulation: Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Typhoon

Abstract

Mishra contends that typhoons and high seas in Conrad’s novels serve to hinder the project of capital accumulation bound closely to sanctioned social relations of officer and crew aboard ships. When lumpen types disrupt maritime social relations, they collaborate with storms and seas to obstruct the ship’s progress. The sanctioned social relations, on the other hand, are sustained by an abstract redeeming idea (variously ethical, stoical, epical and deontological) which sustains and yet precedes the time of capital. Conrad supplies an intangible idea that sustains capitalist social relations whenever they face a crisis from elemental and lumpen energies. Ideology, thus, becomes self-proliferating and decoupled from the social relations of the market system. Mishra draws his examples from The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Typhoon.