For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”: Marlow Goes to a Wedding

Abstract

The chapter tests the relation between the novel’s titular theme, its handling of plot, and its commercial appeal. The emphasis on chance serves Conrad’s attempt to performatively resist the pervasiveness of determinism in nineteenth-century thought. At the same time, a set of motifs that serve as counter-indications to contingency offer coherence and the familiar. The ambivalent treatment of chance is read as an indication of Conrad’s oscillation between two different artistic commitments and the philosophical paradigms that generate them. What is at stake is not only the nature of the audience he chooses to address and the authorial responsibilities that such a choice dictates, but the very question of his artistic legacy. The method with which chance is to be treated in the novel will determine if Conrad is a “modern” writer or a panderer to public opinion; whether he chooses an art of Becoming or of Being.