Conrad and Ecocriticism

Abstract

Vancouver, BC, 9 January 2015Chair: Lissa Schneider-RebozoThe year 2015 saw the Modern Language Association turn broadly toward ecocriticism and environmental humanities (the Vancouver conference was the first to host a recognized forum on such topics). Contributing to this momentum was the timely and well-attended panel, "Conrad and Ecocriticism," which was sponsored by the Joseph Conrad Society of America and moderated by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo.Panelists Mark Deggan, Nidesh Lawtoo, Aleksandr Prigozhin, and Jeffrey McCarthy discussed the complex interaction of bodies, natures, and politics within Conrad's vast oeuvre, showing, above all, that the way these discourses interact is essential to the process of emancipation and liberation. The panelists demonstrated that a deeper understanding of nature-of weather, catastrophe, and atmosphere more specifically-can expose a structural interplay between the human and the non-human, and thus each of the presentations were at least tangentially involved in the material turn toward ecology, agency, and space.Mark Deggan's presentation, "Joseph Conrad and Weltiliteratur's Environmental Consciousness," expanded an ecology of "consciousness and world," where there is a clear symbiosis between the natural "out there" and the "atmospheric landscape within." Deggan retrieved a German Romanticist tradition that includes Goethe's Weltiliteratur to establish a link between language consciousness and environmental consciousness. Whereas Goethe's ecology exposes the intersection between language and cultural consciousness, for Deggan, Conrad's emphasis falls on consciousness and environmental space. This notion, in Deggan's view, is instrumental to pushing the ecocritical concept of place in directions that go toward environmental materiality. Of particular importance is, as one might expect, the implications of such an intersection on literary criticism-and Deggan accounted for that, too:Conrad, a century later [than Goethe], sees [the] global "whole" collapsing before modernist skepticism no less than the dynamics of nature, yet by simultaneously holding open consciousness alongside the mobilities of nature, he plays a central role in Weltiliteratur's environmental mode of thinking and, thus, the ecologies of literary consciousness in a manner not yet fully traced.Compared to Deggan, who used images of reflection in Lord Jim, to, again, display an interior dynamic between the self and one's presence in the landscape, Nidesh Lawtoo landed on the mimesis of reflection to describe an ecology of contagion which "ties environmental actions to human reactions in catastrophic events." The ethics implied by this perspective emphasizes that the relation between human and non-human is not one between an "internal" self and an "external" place, but rather a complex and unitary field of existence." For Lawtoo, this means that Conrad's fiction (Lord Jim, The Shadow-Line, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," and "Typhoon") encourages readers to trace how "nonhuman forces in the background have the physical and affective power to decenter human actions in the foreground." This non-binary perspective encompasses "typhoons" and "terrific storms," sailors and seaman, each of which shape and condition each other through a game of social and natural forces. Lawtoo concluded by returning to reflection, claiming that Conrad "makes us see the contagious effects of environmental forces on human mimetic behavior along lines that transgress the binary that divide nature from culture, environmental actions and human reactions. It is, in fact, the "maddened sea" that generates a "crazed" human behavior, and this crazed behavior, in turn, retroacts via a feedback loop on the small planet of the ship, accentuating the possibility of catastrophe." Drawing on Conrad's fictional world, pervaded by cataclysms that intersect with and reflect back on human life, Lawtoo made a compelling case for Conrad's position in the age of the Anthropocene: "Conrad's narratives of disaster do not only emphasize cultural difference," he writes, "they also use the sea as a mirror to reflect on the possibility of communal survival. …