Author | Joseph Conrad |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Nautical fiction |
Set in | A ship on the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean |
Publisher | Heinemann |
Publication date | December 1897 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 120 |
OCLC | 843064325 |
823.912 | |
LC Class | PR6005.O57 |
Preceded by | An Outcast of the Islands |
Followed by | Heart of Darkness |
Text | The Nigger of the "Narcissus" at Wikisource |
The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Forecastle [a] (sometimes subtitled A Tale of the Sea), first published in the United States as The Children of the Sea, is an 1897 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad. The central character is an Afro-Caribbean man who is ill at sea while aboard the trading ship Narcissus heading towards London. Due to the offensiveness of the word nigger in the title, it was renamed The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle for the 1897 US edition. [2] [3]
Some critics have described the novella as marking the start of Conrad's major or middle period; [4] [5] others have placed it as the best work of his early period.
Conrad's preface to the novel, regarded as a manifesto of literary impressionism, [6] is considered one of his most significant pieces of nonfiction writing. [7] It begins with the line: "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line". [8]
The title character, James Wait, is a dying West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus, on which he finds passage from Bombay to London. Suffering from tuberculosis, Wait becomes seriously ill almost from the outset, eliciting suspicion from much of the crew, though his ostensible plight arouses the humanitarian sympathies of many. The ship's white master, Captain Allistoun, and an old white sailor named Singleton remain concerned primarily with their duties and appear indifferent to Wait's condition. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship capsizes onto her beam-ends during a sudden gale and half her hull is submerged, with many of the crew's rations and personal belongings lost; the men cling onto the deck for an entire night and day, waiting in silence for the ship to turn over the rest of the way and sink. Allistoun refuses to allow the masts to be severed, which might allow the hull to right itself but would prevent the ship from making use of her sails. Five of the men, realizing that Wait is unaccounted for, climb down to his cabin and rescue him at their own peril. When the storm passes and the wind returns, Allistoun directs the weary men to catch the wind, which succeeds in righting the ship.
The voyage resumes but eventually drifts into the doldrums, where the headwinds diminish and the ship is becalmed for many days. Rations grow even scarcer and the men become anxious to return home. Wait eventually confesses to a lazy Cockney sailor named Donkin that he is not as sick as he first claimed: that he is feigning illness to avoid having to participate in the laborious work required of every healthy seaman. Many others had already grown suspicious of him, and Captain Allistoun reveals Wait's charade before the entire crew. Wait claims he feels well enough now to work, but the captain orders that he be confined to the forecastle for the remainder of the voyage, a decision which quickly polarizes much of the crew between Wait's supporters and detractors. Allistoun prevents a near-mutiny encouraged by the conniving Donkin. Forced to stay abed, Wait grows increasingly frail as his condition deteriorates. The ship continues to drift without a breeze and some of the crew, including Singleton, begin to whisper that Wait himself is responsible and that only his death will bring favourable winds.
As the ship passes the Azores and Wait nears death, Donkin discreetly plunders Wait's personal belongings from his sea chest. Wait eventually succumbs and dies—the first proof that he was genuinely ill. This occurs within sight of land, as Singleton had predicted, and a strong wind returns immediately after Wait's body is committed to the sea. The Narcissus soon arrives in England.
The work, written in 1896 and partly based on Conrad's experiences of a voyage from Bombay to Dunkirk, began as a short story but developed into a novella of some 53,000 words. As it grew, Conrad began to think of its being serialized. After Smith Elder had rejected it for the Cornhill Magazine , William Ernest Henley accepted it for the New Review , and Conrad wrote to his agent, Edward Garnett, "Now I have conquered Henley, I ain't 'fraid o' the divvle himself!" Some years later, in 1904, Conrad described this acceptance as "the first event in my writing life which really counted". [9]
In the United States, the novel was first published under the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle. The original had proven controversial in England, with one reviewer calling it "the ugliest conceivable title"; [2] American reviewers were mixed, with one praising the new title for "superior refinement" and another arguing it "insulted the public by imputing prudery to the American reader." [3]
In 2009, WordBridge Publishing published a new edition with the censored title The N-Word of the Narcissus, which completely excised the word "nigger" from the text. [10] According to the publisher, the offensive word may have led readers to avoid the book, and thus by getting rid of it the work was made more accessible to modern readers. [11]
The novel has been seen as an allegory about isolation and solidarity, [12] with the ship's company serving as a microcosm of a social group. Conrad appears to suggest that humanitarian sympathies are, at their core, feelings of self-interest [5] and that a heightened sensitivity to suffering can be detrimental to the management of human society. [12]
In 2006, in his critical study of Conrad, John G. Peters said of the work: [13]
The unfortunately titled The "Nigger" of the Narcissus (titled The Children of the Sea in the first American edition) is Conrad's best work of his early period. In fact, were it not for the book's title, it undoubtedly would be read more often than it is currently. At one time, it was one of Conrad's most frequently read books. In part because of its brevity, in part because of its adventure qualities, and in part because of its literary qualities, the novel used to attract a good deal of attention."
Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing, the Congo Free State—the location of the large and economically important Congo River—was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.
Narcissus may refer to:
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard is a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, set in the fictitious South American republic of "Costaguana". It was originally published serially in monthly instalments of T.P.'s Weekly.
The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port, but doomed to sail the sea forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and of Dutch maritime power. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a 17th-century cargo vessel known as a fluyt.
Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad originally published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900. An early and primary event in the story is the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with himself and his past and seeking redemption and acceptance.
Morgan Andrew Robertson was an American author of short stories and novels, and the self-proclaimed inventor of the periscope.
Ship of Fools is a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter, telling the tale of a group of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German passenger ship. The large cast of characters includes Germans, Mexicans, Americans, Spaniards, a group of Cuban medical students, a Swiss family, and a Swede. In steerage is a large group of Spanish workers being returned to Spain from Cuba. It is an allegory tracing the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity".
Alan John Villiers, DSC was a writer, adventurer, photographer and mariner.
"The Secret Sharer" is a short story by Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, originally written in 1909 and first published in two parts in the August and September 1910 editions of Harper's Magazine. It was later included in the short story collection Twixt Land and Sea (1912).
Typhoon is a short novel by Joseph Conrad, begun in 1899 and serialized in Pall Mall Magazine in January–March 1902. Its first book publication was in New York by Putnam in 1902; it was also published in Britain in Typhoon and Other Stories by Heinemann in 1903.
Nigger is an ethnic slur typically directed at black people.
The works of Joseph Conrad encompass novels, short stories, nonfiction, and memoirs. Although he was born in Ukraine and spoke Polish and French fluently from childhood, he wrote in English, which he did not learn until his twenties. Philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining this, saying "I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread."
"Youth" is an autobiographical work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1898 and collected in the eponymous collection Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories in 1902.
An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization, fig-leaf edition or censorship by political correctness is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties, and always with a marked Polish accent. Before embarking on writing, he had a career sailing in the French, then the British, merchant marine. Of his 19-year merchant-marine career, about half that time was spent actually at sea.
The role of the sea in culture has been important for centuries, as people experience the sea in contradictory ways: as powerful but serene, beautiful but dangerous. Human responses to the sea can be found in artforms including literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, and classical music. The earliest art representing boats is 40,000 years old. Since then, artists in different countries and cultures have depicted the sea. Symbolically, the sea has been perceived as a hostile environment populated by fantastic creatures: the Leviathan of the Bible, Isonade in Japanese mythology, and the kraken of late Norse mythology. In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolises the personal and the collective unconscious in dream interpretation.
Nautical fiction, frequently also naval fiction, sea fiction, naval adventure fiction or maritime fiction, is a genre of literature with a setting on or near the sea, that focuses on the human relationship to the sea and sea voyages and highlights nautical culture in these environments. The settings of nautical fiction vary greatly, including merchant ships, liners, naval ships, fishing vessels, life boats, etc., along with sea ports and fishing villages. When describing nautical fiction, scholars most frequently refer to novels, novellas, and short stories, sometimes under the name of sea novels or sea stories. These works are sometimes adapted for the theatre, film and television.
This article treats the usage of the word nigger in reference to African Americans and others of African or mixed African and other ethnic origin in the art of Western culture and the English language.
Children of the Sea may refer to: