Joseph Conrad’s Departures

Abstract

Joseph Conrad promoted precision as a principle of quality in literary writing, and an epitome of sailorly ethics and good practice. But he simultaneously insisted that haziness and indeterminacy were indispensable to his novels. Accommodating this apparent contradiction, this chapter argues that precision does not equate to a denial of vagueness. Instead, reading Conrad shows that precision as an epistemological practice and fictional method must accommodate inaccuracy, mostly in its mediations between particularity and abstraction. The split quality of precision relates to the sea by way of shifts in the practice and regulation of shipping, which accelerated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The maritime history of Conrad’s precision suggests an underexplored vector for the widely acknowledged modernist aesthetics of exactitude, usually allied to mechanization. Precision, for Conrad, is a way of thinking and writing in intimacy with error.