SOURCE: “Darker and Lower Down: The Eruption of Modernism in ‘Melanctha’ and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” in Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 67–84.

In the following essay, DeKoven addresses the modernist meaning of race and class in “Melanctha” and Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus.”

Neither Irigaray nor Theweleit considers race, a category of otherness crucial to the formation of modernist narrative. As Jameson has made clear, Conrad occupies a privileged position in the history of that formation; quite possibly because he does consider the issue of race. Plato's cave is dark; the masculine subject moves from the dark maternal cave into the brilliant white sunshine of the father's truth. Dark race and low class (the cave, like the womb, is under, lower; the sun is above, higher), together with the maternal itself, erupt in a troubled conjuncture at the birth of...