“Racial Stereotypes as Narrative Forms: Staging the English Gentleman in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim”

Abstract

“Racial Stereotypes as Narrative Forms:Staging the English Gentleman in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim”1 Marta Puxan-Oliva (bio) It still seems that it is a problem for literary criticism to find ways of understanding the complex relationship between the linguistic craft of a literary text and its expression of historical and cultural problems. If Edward Said warned us long ago to beware the “worldliness” of literary texts, it appears that we are still struggling to provide critical paths to comprehending its formal specification. As a modality of the philosophical relationship between Art and Life, this question is almost certainly one to which criticism will keep returning. For the past three decades, postcolonial literary critics adopting Said’s definitions of alterity have considered racial conflicts and racial discourse as important historical and cultural dimensions in literature, and have assigned historical specificity a prominent place in the study of the different spheres in which colonial and racial discourse operate. However, it appears that the technical strategies used to mold this historical context, which have endowed these texts with the force and impact they have produced, are still awaiting our full attention. Literary critics like Dorrit Cohn, J. Hillis Miller, and Brian Richardson have remarkably advanced the interrelations between historical context and narrative technique, further research on which Sue Kim has called for in the JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory special issue “Decolonizing Narrative Theory.” This difficult enterprise entreats us to read across disciplines, the [End Page 333] intersections of which are not always clear. Nonetheless, it might be precisely at these intersections where we should search for integration specific to the craft of fiction. In this essay, some insights on Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim serve as guide to finding one of these intersections through which to read the technical shaping of racial issues and the discourse of race in fiction. If we understand “race” as a discursive social and cultural construction historically intended to draw lines of distinction between human beings, it is not surprising that its literary representation should be tied to recurrent representations, whether positive or negative, used to define oneself or others. I would refer to these codified representations as stereotypes. Even when attempting to reject them, it might be the case that writers who struggle with the representation of racial difference and racial conflicts cannot completely ignore the stereotypes, since the disappearance of codified representations in a literary work risks the removal of the very issue of “race” itself. Indeed, if we reject the notion that “race” corresponds to any essential biological distinction, then we are implicitly attributing “race” to a cultural construction that only makes sense when the set of established beliefs and images that shape this historical distinction are present in the representation of characters, since those beliefs are the only basis—even if socially active—for any definition of “race.” For the writer, therefore, the representation of race might well be perceived as a negotiation with stereotypes. To fully apprehend this negotiation, however, we should move beyond the superficial consideration of the stereotype which colonial discourse mostly presents, and we as readers tend to accept. In fact, from a theoretical perspective—as Homi Bhabha suggests—its fixity reveals a dual structure that implies the negative image or absent side in the form. In other words, the stereotype implies much more than it displays and that should also be part of any reading, simply because it is an integral part of the literary work. While subscribing to this perspective of the stereotype, which is historical on the one hand and discursive on the other, I would like to take a step forward in our comprehension of this form in literature. My claim in this essay is that we might view stereotypes in fiction as narrative forms, or, as a strategy for telling stories. The stereotype is neither fixed in content nor merely a secondary assumption used to advance the narrative, but it is a mode of narration that unfolds in, and has specific functions within the [End Page 334] narrative, which completely determines the representation of race in our particular case. We find outstanding examples of such deployment of the stereotype in Modernist...