"Whirr" is King: International Capital and the Paradox of Consciousness in Typhoon

Abstract

Much critical reception of Typhoon-which pits a ship's captain incapable of figurative speech against a "great wind" that "disintegrate[s]" the linguistic economy of his vessel into "shreds and fragments of forlorn shouting"-has focused on its remarkable, and perhaps prototypically modernist, insight into the twentieth century's theoretical interest in the contingency of the linguistic sign (Conrad 31).As Sooyoung Chon notes, the story can be read as "a parable about narrative art" wherein Captain MacWhirr's effort to "maintain [ . . .] civilized order on a ship in crisis" reflects how the "imaginative language [of] good narrative" struggles to maintain "contact with the humane and the real" that lie at the elusive heart of what a narrative endeavors to convey (34-5).Similarly, for Joseph Kolupke, Typhoon is about "a ship of state, a political microcosm" whose pragmatic leader arrests "the natural drift to nihilism and anarchy" in a "universe [in which] there is no transcendental signifier" (81-3).Such interpretations are well deserved, for the text clearly demonstrates Conrad's effort to draw an extended parallel between the great storm encountered by the unimaginative and "literal" Captain MacWhirr and a turbulent, knowledge-threatening slippage between utterance and understanding (Typhoon 19).After all, at the height of the storm at sea, the fierce swirling winds fragment the dialogue (at times stealing speech at the moment of utterance), leave the crew "whirled a great distance" from their central voice of authority, and cause the first mate to consider "the very thought of action utterly vain" until he hears Conradiana, vol.39, no.

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