THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS by Joseph Conrad

Largely owing to the second word in its title, linguistic relic of a much more racist time, this novel is rarely read today, and that fact is even more unfortunate than Korzeniowski's titular N-bomb (which was problematic even in its day: the first US edition was re-titled The Children of the Sea (lose the first definite article and you have a name under which Star-Kist would sell tuna to cannibals), not, apparently, because publishers deemed the N-word offensive, but because they feared white readers wouldn't buy a book with a black title character--to which someone might've objected that many, many white readers purchased copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin...). It's unfortunate--as I was saying before that rudely interrupting parenthesis--because The Nigger of the Narcissus, while not one of Conrad's greatest works, is a thoroughly enjoyable, sometimes beautiful, sometimes cleverly ironic, ultimately enigmatic tale of the sea. The novel's showpiece, a long storm scene in which the boat nearly capsizes and the crew must lash themselves to the tilted deck, is realized with near-hallucinatory vividness, demonstrating the aesthetic goal stated in Conrad's much-quoted preface: "...to make you see." Elsewhere in Narcissus, Conrad's rhetoric tends to get in the way of his representations, a criticism that might also be applied to Heart of Darkness, but there the rhetoric is so beautiful that any objection seems almost churlish. In Narcissus, Conrad has not yet brought his prose style to the Wagnerian symphonic grandeur it would achieve just a few years later. Here the lyrical passages seem self-consciously 'grand,' and he annoyingly overuses the adjective 'resplendent.' The Heart of Darkness comparison points out another weakness of Narcissus that the author would very soon overcome: his failure to characterize the narrator. Conrad's invention of Marlow as the ridiculously long-winded tale-teller of Darkness and Lord Jim both grounds and complicates those narratives in ways that Narcissus, with its seemingly arbitrary shifts from third-person point-of-view to a collective 'voice of the crew' to an invisible first-person singular (an "I" who never appears as a character), fails to achieve. The Nigger of the Narcissus often reads like a tale told by a Marlow not yet birthed from the Conradian brain.