“What Could His Object Be?” Form and Materiality in Conrad’s “The Tale”

Joseph Conrad begins his 1917 short fiction “The Tale” with the image of a “large single window” which neatly frames “a long room” equipped with a “deep, shadowy couch” and a “low ceiling”. The new relation presented in “The Tale” is a shift from Conrad’s previous attention to the materiality of the natural world as symbol or uncaring backdrop. Conrad’s story does tantalize readers with such flattening, as the narrative channels an impressive roster of moments that cross and conflate. Imprecise suggests that in order to read Conrad properly, one must acknowledge Conrad’s own awareness of the material reality of the world—those objects and things—and his wrestling with the best ways to present that world in narrative form. Strides in neo-formalism and neo-materialism illuminate Conrad’s attempts to navigate ontological fields of both human and nonhuman. W. J. T. Mitchell supplies evidence that both human and nonhuman materials have long had a reciprocal association in which each has influenced the other.