Chapter 5 - Distraction and Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes

Summary

Conrad eloquently wrote about his inability to write; he stuttered his way through his texts with nonlexical grunts, snarls, howls, murmurs, gurgles, snorts and hems; and he sought to stay true to “the stammerings of his conscience” (xliii), a working method alluded to in the Preface of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). In this chapter, I argue that distraction – usually a writer’s enemy – is another one of these unexpected features that Conrad used to propel his writing; his seemingly rambling digressions are part of a quest for verbal precision. Although he is frequently conceived of as a methodical and philosophical writer, distraction was a fundamental and serious part of his literary enterprise. By allowing distraction, inattentiveness and absent-mindedness to become part of his fiction, he was able to stay productive, steal the reader’s attention and add a level of everyday realism to his texts. Conrad, I maintain, writes in medias distractionis and consistently pays attention to those who do not pay attention.