The panel starts with Jay Parker's nuanced philosophical approach. His paper, "There are sacred things in life, after all": Typee, An Outcast of the Islands, & Benjamin's "mere life," develops Benjamin’s concept in relation to the “state of nature” reflected by Melville and Conrad. In Typee, Melville displays a proto-anthropological fascination as his narrator finds a “state of nature” in the Marquesas, whilst Conrad’s Outcast focuses upon a character who flees in disgrace to an Indonesian island described as “Nature’s workshop.” These imagined states turn out to be crucial for the way both authors contemplate the limits of social and political life in the face of the natural world.
Justina Torrance moves the discussion of “mere life” into the realm of individual ethics and the politics of storytelling. “A Tale of Two Leaps: Benito Cereno, Lord Jim, and Unreliable Narration in Art and Life” considers the infamous leaps by the respective protagonists of Melville's and Conrad's texts. The paper compares how the two leaps are retold in the temporal structure of the narratives, and how such deluded self-justifications operate within the contexts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Both leapers are white officers responsible for transporting a ship full of “human cargo” - enslaved persons in the one, and subaltern pilgrims in the other. By inviting readers to interrogate these unreliable tellings, we are forced to confront self-deceiving cultural narratives about the diversity of human life.
The final paper continues the discussion of race and life through Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics.” Bassam Sidiki’s “‘A Passing Phase of Life’: The Biopolitics of Empathy in Joseph Conrad’s Narcissus” considers Conrad’s story about a dying Black sailor who elicits complex reactions from the ship’s crew. Sidiki contends that critical appraisals (“sympathy tinged with narcissism”) pass over the ways in which Conrad’s text evokes “empathy,” or Einfuhlung, the projection of the self into works of art. Drawing upon Vernon Lee’s late 19thC work on aesthetic empathy, Sidiki shows how Conrad envisions a multiracial or transracial biopolitics of aesthetic empathy where readers may infuse life, sorrowful or joyful, into scenes of imagined death, thereby transcending more narrowly conceived cultural outlooks.
The respondent, Christian Haines, has already carved out a powerful place for himself in the discourses of biopolitics in relation to Melville, and so is perfectly placed to review out three discourses of “life” in relation to environmental humanities and the biopolitical fallouts of human aesthetic discourses. His interventions into panel themes will therefore invite a productively theoretical range of interrogation.
This panel represents the long overdue joint effort of two Allied Organizations, the Melville Society and the Joseph Conrad Society. Including a titular position for each society (Chair and Respondent), we decided that three papers would offer not only a rich triangulation of views, but, with two of our speakers, an effort to foster inclusivity and support of junior scholars. By including three papers and a respondent, we firmly commit to a strict time limit of 15 minutes per paper/response in order to allow for a full question period wherein both societies will engage in lively and substantive discussion.
More largely, the panel has been designed to dovetail, but not overlap with the Melville Society’s panel on “Melville and Human Ecology.” Both societies agree on the importance of these topics and hope that the two panels together press us to better comprehend how ecological realities and notions of human life must be understood as existing within a synergetic continuum. It is for this crucial reason that we have focused the present panel proposal upon the discursive, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of the concept of life itself, so better to raise, together, the human processes, sorrowful, joyful, or otherwise, at the heart of these two major contemporary writers.