Time of Agreements in Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands

This article examines the temporality of human agreements on the basis of Joseph Conrad’s novel, An Outcast of the Islands, and in reference to John M. Taggart’s thesis about the unreality of time. The execution of contracts is a mastery over time, but since, as Conrad’s contemporary, the philosopher J.M. McTaggart proclaimed in his work The Unreality of Time, time is not part of the real world, contracts cannot be so either. Commercial contracts, civil contracts, gentlemen’s agreements, and marriage contracts – although they concern very specific matters that are fraught with consequences and they are a kind of farce precisely because of their temporal aspect. Making alliances and taking up responsibilities turns out to be, in the light of McTaggarts’s theory, not only a contractual, but also hazardously ambivalent action, because it never stops time, nor does it lead to eternal duration, but contradicts it entirely. From such a perspective, knowledge of the explicit and hidden terms of the contract becomes more important than the struggle for its duration.