Conrad's Avant-Garde Sublime: Spectacular Language, Nature, and the Other in Typhoon

Conrad's spectacular sublime in Typhoon (1902) aligns his ethical and political ideas more closely with contemporary stances than has heretofore been presumed. While the aesthetics of the sublime has received much attention recently, its implications have not yet been fully assimilated in Conrad studies. In Typhoon, Conrad looks to Schopenhauer for his aesthetic and ethical theory, prefiguring Jean-François Lyotard's postmodern sublime differend and a vital materialism that horizontalizes relations between humans, biota, and abiota. While Conrad believes our spectacular universe exists for its own sake, the novel demonstrates his credo that the purpose of the artist is to discover "the feeling of fellowship with all creation." Typhoon entangles natural terror and human horror with implications for both environmental and postcolonial studies. A more radical Conrad, one who criticizes imperial ideology and pursues an Enlightenment agenda of human rights, emerges from this often overlooked but ground-breaking modernist text.