[Summary of work]

The chasm between Richard Rorty, twentieth century philosopher, and

Joseph Conrad seems pretty wide: there is no period when they were
contemporary, and ConradPolish gentry, homo-duplex, late Victorian
and early modernistseems rather different to Rorty, self-proclaimed
post-modernist bourgeois intellectual and American patriot. We all know
Conrad, but Im not sure how familiar everyone here is with Rorty. Simon
Blackburn described him in 2003 as arguably the most influential
philosopher of our time, and he developed a controversial pragmatism
which critiqued representationalist epistemology and tried to imagine
what a post-epistemological and post-metaphysical culture would look
like. So not lacking in scope

Today, I am going to focus on the notion of community in Chance, focusing

on the relationship between protagonist, Flora de Barral and the primary
narrator, Marlow, and both their relationships to the rather exclusive (and
exclusively male) brotherhood of the sea.
My argument hinges on two particular aspects of Rortys thought.
The first is his sense of our contingency, on our communities and the
vocabularies we articulate to make sense of the world. The second is his
idiosyncratic definition of ethnos, which is those who share ones beliefs
enough to make fruitful conversation possible.i I will examine the
brotherhood of the sea in Chance as a Rortyian ethnos. This makes the
fellowship of the sea porous in a rather unexpected way, which allows
Flora partially to enter.
However, typically Conrad introduces notes of scepticism and black
humour which challenge the utopianism of Rortys vision. I hope to show

that Conrad gives us a more nuanced sense of the constraints which

contingency places on our individuality, and also the difficulty of knowing
ourselves and others. But I will also suggest that this Conradian
uncertainty is as essential to Rortys philosophy as it is to as Conrads
writing, and that the differences between them are not incommensurable.

Like Conrad, Rorty is a particularly evasive writerindeed he [Rorty]

suggested evasion as a particularly appropriate strategy for dealing with
those who disagreed with him. (though more in the sense of countering a
question with a question than diving behind bushes). Consequently it is
difficult to capture his ideas in summary. But of course this isnt going to
stop me from trying.
To understand Rortys sense of the contingency, we need to grasp his
metaphor of final vocabularies. These are like tools for understanding the
world,ii and are contingent upon factors such as culture or experience.
They are final because if we are asked to defend them, we can do so only
in circular terms.iii Some important nuances of Rortyian contingency are
captured in his account of what happens when we critique a position [first
quotation]:
For ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary
save another such vocabulary; there is no answer to a
redescription save a re-redescription. Since there is nothing
beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice
between them, criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and
on that, not of comparing both pictures with the original. Nothing
can serve as criticism of a person save another person, or a
culture save an alternative culture for persons and cultures are,
for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own
characters or our own cultures can be resolved or assuaged only
by enlarging our acquaintance.

Here we find a slippage between the idea that we use vocabularies and
that we are vocabularies. This reflects Rortys sense that we create rather
than discover coherent selves, and that we dont have beliefs or desires,
but rather are contingent webs of belief and desire. And it is clear that
our identities are contingent upon the vocabularies we use to describe
ourselves, but it is also clear that they are contingent upon the terms in
which we are framed by others: Nothing can serve as a criticism of a
person save another person, or a culture save an alternative culture. We
also find in this quotation the key notion of enlargement: the sense that
we can expand our frames of reference, that is our vocabularies and our
communities, through encounters with the unfamiliar.
Yet we also need to be aware that for Rorty, the self is also a
potential other. He frames this in an interpretation of Freud (the second
quotationIve reproduced whole passage, but have italicised the
sections of particular relevance). So according to Rorty, the what is
essential to appreciating Freud is:
a sense in which it [the unconscious] stands for one or more
well-articulated systems of beliefs and desires that are just as
complex, sophisticated, and internally consistent as the normal
adults conscious beliefs and desires; and What is novel in
Freuds view of the unconscious is his claim that our
unconscious selves are not dumb, sullen, lurching brutes, but
rather the intellectual peers of our conscious selves, possible
conversational partners for those selves.
So the self for Rorty is a divided self: divided into the conscious and the
unconscious, which in turn are themselves subject to potential
multiplication. It is also a conversational self: both inwardly, and if we
recall the economy of redescription and re-redescription, the interplay
of vocabularies which are also persons and cultures, we can see the self is
conversational outwardly as well. There is a further dimension to Rortys

sense of conversation, since for him, prime candidates for this process of
self-redescription are vocabularies with names like Hegel, Kierkegaard or
Nietzsche. Rorty delights in putting often controversial interpretations of
various thinkers in conversation with one another as part of what he calls
his dialectical method.
The dimension of contingency that is my primary focus today is termed
ethnocentrism by Rorty. This is defined in the third quotation on the
handout.
To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race into those to
whom one must justify ones beliefs and the others. The first
groupones ethnoscomprises those who share enough of
ones beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible. In this
sense, everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual
debate, no matter how much realist rhetoric about objectivity he
produces in his study.
What is particularly important is Rortys sense that ethnos is defined by
fruitful conversation and how this reflects on the notion of enlargement
of community. For Rorty, to enlarge the boundaries of community is to
include more and more people in our conversation, by expanding our
vocabularies, by enlarging the scope of ones favorite metaphors.
So essential to my approach to Conrad are the following Rortyian
notions. Firstly, the notion of our selves as contingent, internally divided
and constituted by vocabularies; secondy, of communities as also being
constituted by vocabularies, thirdly of the hope for solidarity that
motivates enlargement of ethnos, and finally of conversation as the
metaphor for the intersubjective processes of re and re-redescription by
which give us coherence and by which our vocabularies and communities
can be enlarged.

Rortys thought resonates with Chances complex set of conversational

narrators. The three primary narrators dramatise the contingency of
communal and individual identity by blending their voices and also at
times other sources for their narratives. Consequently, the interpretation
of Chance in light of the Rortyian notions of contingency, community and
conversation is highly productive, particularly in examining the way that
the polyphonic Marlow is both conversational in a number of ways, and
also engaged in a conversation. Like all narrators, Marlow is an incarnated
vocabularyhis body is a body of text, but Marlow is also in conversation
with the novels frame narrator, both literally and metaphorically.
So Marlows identity is contingent and conversational in a Rortyian
mode. He is comprised of multiple, often conflicting identities, and he is
understood in relation to the narratives of others, both within and without
the text. But he is also contingent upon a very specific audience of sailors
and by extension a particular community: the fellowship of the sea.

In Chance the relationship between final vocabulary and community is

explored through the metaphor of the sea. On one hand, as so often in
Conrads work, it is used as a badge of membership: for example, the
narrators in Chance define themselves as seamen in opposition to the
shore gang.iv On the other hand, it undermines attempts to erect clear
and solid boundaries around this fellowship. Furthermore, the fellowship of
the sea is marginal in Chance along several lines. Ironically, it is marginal
to the sea: much of the novels action takes place either away from the
sea, or at other kinds of limits. Much of the novel takes place in a liminal
space at the mouth of the Thames. v Marlow and Powell are both

described as retired from the sea.vi And later in the novel, location acts
as a neat metaphor for identity: when Marlow solves the mystery of the
vanishing Powell, we discover he sails the narrow tidal creeks on the
Essex shore.vii This kind of waterway varies in salinity depending on the
ebb and flow of tides, forming a strange and shifting border between land
and sea; often they dry up at low tide. Furthermore, at the end of the
novel, Flora resides in a village in the adjacent marshes, a type of terrain
which further compounds the sense of being between land and water.
Additionally, in the sections of the novel which take place away from the
water, the action is marginal: Marlow and the Fynes live on the outskirts of
a village and are notably all outsiders. No one is ever really at home in
Chance.
Thus, although the narrators have the strong bond of the sea, the
boundaries of their community are not solid. The sea is a key metaphor in
a story that this narrative community tells itself. But the setting of the
novel highlights the shifting and uncertain nature of the sea as a basis for
that identity, and thus of identity itself.
So what defines this fellowship? The narrators of Chance share a sense of
community which is contingent upon their shared experiences of the sea,
and this is expressed in their common vocabulary. It is appropriate that
they recognize one another through a shared idiosyncrasy of seafaring
language: the first time he [Powell] addressed the waiter sharply as
steward we knew him at once for a sailor. viii But the novels multiple,
shifting and liminal locations suggest that these identities themselves are
subject to change and negotiation. In this space, where one identity shifts
back and forth into its other like the tide, there is fertile ground for
Rortyian redescription. This redescription is ironic: Chance repeatedly

highlights that conversational compatibility is contingentnot only on

person but also on circumstances. Frequently the same metaphor will
have ironically conflicting meanings. Thus the sea can be used by different
people for opposite purposes.

For example, Marlow and Captain Anthony, members of the masculine

fellowship of the sea use the sea itself as a metaphor to capture Floras
feminine inscrutability. Marlow finds in Floras eyes an expression of
dreamy, unfathomable candour. He continues: I have seen the sea wear
such an expression.ix Similarly, Captain Anthony evokes the same image
when he asks Flora trust herself to him and also to the seawhich is
deep like your eyes.x Marlows attempt to capture Floras expression and
Anthonys attempt to capture her heart are both examples of Floras
entanglement in patriarchal narratives, and they both evoke the familiar
trope of the feminine as impenetrably other.
We should note that when Marlow and Anthony use the sea to
describe Flora, however, they are also capturing a bond of affection. And
they are using the same terms they use to delimit the strong bond of the
sea that underpins their masculine fellowship. But the irony itself deepens
because Flora remains unfathomable. As Susan Jones argues in Conrad
and Women, Flora is inaccessible in different ways to both Marlow and
Anthony. Anthony

withholds his desire from Flora, xi who becomes the

distant damsel of chivalric romance. And Flora is inaccessible to Marlow

because he cannot evade the patriarchal terms of representation which
shape his ability to depict her.xii In Rortyian terms, he cannot escape his
own vocabulary. Thus ironically, both he and Anthony are also constrained
by the patriarchal terms which oppress Flora. And they are ethnocentric,

because their vocabulary is limited by the chivalric metaphors they use to

make sense of her.
But (ironically again) it is in the metaphor the sea that Flora finds
the opportunity for enlargement, thus widening the bonds of solidarity.
Near the end of the novel, she says to Marlow:
The most familiar things appeared lighted up in with a new light,
clothed with a loveliness I had never suspected. The sea
itself! . . . You are a sailor. You have lived your life on it. But do
you know how beautiful it is, how strong, how charming, how
friendly, how mighty . . .
I listened amazed and touched. She was silent only a little while.xiii
Flora appeals to Marlow as a sailor, and pointedly in a diction reminiscent
of Marlow and his fellow narrators. [She reminds me of Marlow at the end
of Youth: By all thats wonderful, it is the sea I believe, the sea itself].
Flora

has

adopted

their

language,

and

the

normally

ironic

and

misogynistic Marlow, is simply amazed and touched. Though the precise

nature of the sea is mystical and unclear, it is apparent that it has given
Flora a new and positive perspective on life. Floras appeal to the sea as a
metaphor is also typical in another fashion. In Chance the sea is at times
depicted as both perilous and a refuge, inconstant and unchanging, xiv but
always it is evoked as a symbol of difference.

In Floras case, however, it casts the familiar in a new light,

changing her view of the world, and as such is analogous to Rortyian
redescription itself. The sea, a symbol of the other, is not the deep,
unfathomable other evoked by Marlow and Anthony, but is now
accessible: it is charming and friendly as well as strong and mighty.
This is an enlargement of the metaphor of the sea, but also a substitution
of

charming,

friendly

vocabulary

for

an

old

discourse

of

impenetrability. This recalls Rortys assertion that a part of redescription

is the gradual, tacit substitutions of a new vocabulary for an old one, and
also as the enlargement of the scope of ones favourite metaphors. Flora
is not inventing an entirely new language, but casting an old metaphor in
a new light, and consequently both the vocabulary and its novelty are
contingent upon her individual experiencewhich provides the new
meaningand prior communal understandings, which provide the frame
of reference that enables her conversational compatibility with Marlow.

So we see that Chance promotes a sense of the contingency of language,

and of individual and communal identity. The sea is a key metaphor in the
conversation that enables the shared identity of Chances narrative
community. Thus for Marlow and Anthony, it remains both a symbol of
feminine inscrutability and the basis for a masculine fellowship, and for
Flora it is at times a barrier to entry into the community of sailors but also
the mechanism by which she eventually gains partial acceptance.
Chance paints contingency with finer detail than Rortys broad
philosophical brush strokes can achieve: its framing of self and community
enables Conrad to draw distinctions inaccessible to Rortys philosophical
generalization. What Conrad also brings is a darker sense of irony. Though
Rorty is explicitly ironist and often playfully ironic, Conrad gives a much
clearer view of the potential cruelty of irony. Rortys liberal project is in a
sense designed to mitigate what he sees as the potential for redescription
to be cruel, while Conrad is profoundly aware of the ways in which
contingency limits our freedom.

Thus, although we see the enlargement of the metaphor of the sea,

old understandings of metaphors exert pressure too, and threaten to
engulf new understandings. Flora is neither fully accepted nor totally free.
Furthermore, throughout the text Marlow maintains an unacceptable
misogyny which undermines his relationship with Flora. And, ironically the
frame narrators challenge to Marlows sexist remarks actually compounds
them. The frame narrator is such a chivalrous masculine beggar, xv and
thus he accommodates Flora in an alternative patriarchal vocabulary
that of chivalric romancewhich in fact supports Marlows assertion that
women are passive. Both he and Marlow are thus also restricted by
generic discourses on gender. They are incapable of representing Flora
outside of the terms of their own final vocabularies which. And though by
using Marlow, Conrad distances himself from the novels representation of
Flora, this does not allow him to escape these constraints, but only
permits him to acknowledge them. Similarly, though Flora manages to use
the metaphor of the sea, she cannot exclude its former applications, but
rather adds another irony to its already formidable repertoire of
contradictions.
Generic constraints are themselves subjected to scrutiny by Chance.
Early in the novel, Marlow is uncertain as to whether he is taking part in a
farce or in a tragedy.xvi Though he soon decides that it is neither, we are
reminded of his confusion at the end of the novel, recalling Byrons ironic
distinction in Don Juan: All tragedies are finished by a death, / All
comedies are ended by a marriage. xvii The novel ends with Marlows
anticipation of Floras impending marriage to Powell, but this news follows
the revelation of Anthonys death. And of course the novels climax
involves the death of Floras father. Furthermore, Floras marriage to

Powell is a second marriage, and also the consummation of a hidden love,

which germinated while Flora was still married to Anthony. Thus it
undermines the sense of comic closure to which it also contributes. Like
Byrons refrain, the end of Chance is deeply ironic. Indeed, one can easily
imagine Marlow agreeing with Byrons negative portrayal of marriage,
which itself plays on the boundaries between genre and reality, on a
slippage between our knowledge of comedys generic conventions and a
cynical portrayal of the humourless nature of wedlock.

The discomfort this causes fits well with the Rortyian worry that they
have been taught to play the wrong language game. xviii Furthermore like
Rorty, Chance blurs the boundaries between the fictional and the real. It
links the issues of genre, authorship and textuality with wider notions of
identity and self-narrative. And Conrads redescription of feminism is
situated within his engagement in a wider discussion of the question of
being in a community. The novels implicit attention to the relationship
between gender and genre,xix as Susan Jones puts it, is part of its
engagement with text and identity. The constraints that genre places on
text are analogous to societal norms. Thus, examining Chance in light of
Rortyian notions of conversation supports an expansion of Rortys
metaphor of self as story. It shows how experimentation with genre and
intertextuality shed light on the contingency of self and community.
Whether cast as conversation, redescription, or otherwise, these are
communal behaviours, contingent upon the shared language in which we
imagine

them.

Chance

reminds

us

that

perfect

reconstruction

is

impossible, that imagination is inescapable, and that we use an inherited

language. It is alive to the gradualism which attendance to contingency

necessitates. And it is also communicates a sense of our ethnocentrism:

that the language in which we create our redescriptions defines the
audience to whom we can speak.

i Rorty, 2010: 235

ii Rorty, 1989: 11. From hereon, references to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
will take the form CIS followed by the page reference
iii CIS: 73
iv Chance: 4
v Chance: 3
vi Chance: 4, 33
vii Chance: 258
viii Chance: 3
ix Chance: 234
x Chance: 227
xi Jones, 1999: 108
xii Jones, 1999: 103
xiii Chance: 444-45
xiv Chance: 4, 365, 288, 292
xv Chance: 53
xvi Chance: 55
xvii Byron, 1973: 159
xviii CIS: 75
xix Jones, 1999: 161