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“The Best of a Seaman's Care”: Community and Forced Hospitality in Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

This essay explores the communitarian dynamics articulated in Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” from the perspective of forced hospitality. The novel has been traditionally read in terms of a multilayered conflict between the title character, James Wait, and the crew of the Narcissus, represented as an ideal community based on shared responsibility and common toil. My reading of such dynamics draws on recent theorizations by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, in order to argue that the crew constitutes an “operative” community threatened by the arrival of Wait. I present two working hypotheses. One, the hermeneutic ambiguity surrounding James Wait is subservient to an ethical dilemma, articulated in terms of the adequacy of the crew's behaviour toward him. This is enacted through the discourse of hospitality and charity as opposed to duty. Two, this ethical impasse is ingrained in a rhetoric of domesticity and emasculation that serves the purpose of dramatizing the nature of the threat represented by James Wait for the imagined community of the crew.