Joseph Conrad’s Imperial Indian Ocean

Abstract

Drawing on Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea, this chapter sets out the relationship between the nineteenth century novel in English and the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean was in the nineteenth century known as the British Lake, dominated by British maritime imperialism. At the same time, the rise of the novel is linked to the sea—but in literary history, the Indian Ocean has been overlooked in favour of the Atlantic and Pacific. Touching on Defoe and Melville, the chapter turns to Joseph Conrad as the most prolific European writer of Indian Ocean space. Conrad’s Indian Ocean is tropical and exotic, but also haunted by “human elements,” like the indentured labourers in Typhoon and the pilgrims in Lord Jim. These speak of a submerged awareness of the pre-existing Indian Ocean world, despite a stubborn focus on imperial travellers. Still, Conrad’s travellers, who are largely white and European, are often the “poor whites” of empire—drifters, beachcombers and criminals. The fiction produces a troubled imperial map of the Indian Ocean world, radiating out from Europe yet shadowed by the tracks of drifters who map instead a disorienting cobweb of routes. This disorientation is mirrored by the maritime modernism of Conrad’s fictional form, which can be found reflected or refracted in postcolonial writing.