Virginia Richter

“The whole China Sea had climbed on the bridge”: Oceanic Agency in Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon

In Western culture since the beginning of industrialization, the ocean is regarded as “indisputable nature” (Corbin 1994: 62), in other words, as that part of the natural world that cannot be domesticated and made subservient to economic exploitation. This view of the ocean as vast, wild, infinite, eternal and hence, epistemologically challenging, is stressed in many recent scholarly contributions (e.g. Mentz 2009, Gillis 2012). However, an exclusive emphasis on the ocean as an untamed and untameable nature space does not give due consideration to the fact that various ways of instrumentally using the ocean, from whaling on a global industrial scale to maritime trade and traffic in the context of colonialism, closely linked the seas to industrial production and consumption on land. In this sense, the ocean is not the land’s other, even if it is framed as such in poetical and philosophical representations. Aesthetic conceptualizations of the ocean as an aquatic wilderness and instrumental approaches focusing on the harvesting of resources and the circulation of goods appear at first glance as antithetical. By contrast, in my paper, I want to explore how the ocean as a powerful site of nature, imagination, and as a contact zone for people, goods, and capital, interact in literary texts.

Taking my cue from recent maritime literary studies (e.g. Cohen 2010) and postcolonial theory, I will use Joseph Conrad’s novella Typhoon (1902) as a case study of the interplay between colonialism, the mariner’s craft exemplifying human agency, and uncontrollable forces of nature – the agency of the ocean. In Typhoon, the SS Nan-Shan, a steamer under British command, is transporting two hundred Chinese laborers “after a few years of work in various tropical colonies” back to their home country, when they are caught in a cataclysmic tropical storm. While the crew’s various responses to the typhoon are determined by their epistemological and imaginative relations to the ocean, the Chinese “coolies” are given the status of cargo, and are therefore treated as a further source of chaos, aggravating the effects of the storm, when they try to secure their lives and possessions. Based on an analysis of the various discursive levels and spaces (port, open water, ship, bridge/deck/engine room/cargo hold) of Conrad’s narrative, it is my aim to show how the ocean emerges as a dynamic zone that disrupts hierarchical, anthropocentric and Eurocentric, notions of knowledge, agency, and rationality.