Conrad, Ideology and Utopia

Abstract

Abstract: This chapter argues for the centrality of the dialectic of ideology and utopia in Joseph Conrad’s novelistic work. Unlike Jameson (1981), I argue that grasping this dialectic neither presupposes jettisoning the traditional categories of plot and character nor challenging the established consensus on skepticism and pessimism as the twin cognitive and psychological pillars on which Conrad’s oeuvre rests. On the contrary, I contend, grasping the reflexive nature of skeptical and pessimistic negation in Conrad—the dimension of a “negation of the negation”—allows us to relocate the functions of the ideological and the utopian within the “traditional” categories of narrative structure and character function. After establishing the precise form that ideology and utopia take in Conrad’s work—tortuous reaffirmation of the established order and the radical intrusion, within that order, of an alien and collective subjectivity, respectively—I proceed to demonstrate their relevance for reading Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and Victory (1915).