The Prose of the World: Everyday Life, Specialization and Conrad’s Descriptive Style

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the relationship between the novel and everyday life. Rather than focusing on the qualities of routineness and mundaneness that are often taken to typify the everyday, I approach everyday life here as a form of experience that is defined in opposition to expert knowledge. In doing so, I draw on the theories of everyday life articulated by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, but I also suggest that Hegel’s description of the prosaicness of civil society in Aesthetics anticipates these later accounts of the everyday as a corollary of the modern division of labor. In this perspective, the everydayness of the novel consists in its own unspecialized amateurishness as a genre of discourse, but also in its ability to represent a social world fragmented into expert fields. For some nineteenth-century observers, I suggest, including Hegel, the novel’s ability to describe such complex modern societies was also one of the characteristics of prose itself. I examine this conception of prose style more closely in the essay’s concluding section, which focuses on two scenes from the maritime fiction of Joseph Conrad. Conrad is often associated with technical nautical expertise, but the episodes that I discuss emphasize the porous boundaries that separate expert fields from one another and from their chaotic surrounding environments. In dwelling on these liminal moments, Conrad’s fiction bears witness to the condition of everyday life as Lefebvre and de Certeau describe it—a medium that is constituted by the enclosures of modern expertise, but which also exceeds and envelops them.