“A Sinister Resonance”: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad’s Marlow

I shall vanish into space (there’s no space) and the vibrations that make up me, shall go to the making of some other fool.

—Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett, September 29, 1898¹

Another Art Altogether

A formalized theory of modernism finds one pronouncement in the 1909 critical preface to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1884), in which James lauds a new sense of vision: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.”² These windows do not “open straight upon life.” Each is equipped with “a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other” (pl, 7). James invokes neither biography nor the psychology of the writer but rather the “posted presence of the watcher,” a center of consciousness positioned within the novel itself. As Douglas turns his back upon the group of listeners around the hearth in “The Turn of the Screw” (1896), one might say that the Anglo-American novel lost its voice, an orally based aesthetic being synonymous, as it had been for Flaubert, with all that prevented the novel from achieving aesthetic freedom. In his 1921 study of French and English fiction, The Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock ratified this aesthetic to argue that the modern novelist resists “a long and sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must establish definite terms.”³ The writer “is so far from telling a story” (cf, 63) that “the scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and there it is,” for we now “follow the direction of his eyes” (cf, 113). The novel becomes “an object that you fashioned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving him alone with it” (cf, 112).

The shift from telling to showing provides the most immediate terminology by which to understand the place of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow-narrated fiction within the modernist novel.⁴ Marlow was a “familiar spirit, a whispering ‘daemon’” whose origin and function Conrad was never willing to discuss fully or directly.⁵ As Frederic Jameson argues in an early study, Marlow “marks the vain attempt to conjure back the older unity of the literary situation of which narrative transmission was but a part.”⁶ Conradian “rhetoric,” opposed to Flaubertian (and by extension, Jamesian) “style,” determines Marlow’s sentences as among those that “emerge and disappear with all the permanent provisionality of spoken communication, telling, digressing, repeating, exclaiming, rambling, and apostrophizing” (“hc,” 35).⁷ Marlow continues to confront us, above all, as a voice, a storyteller haunting what Walter Benjamin once called “the realm of living speech,” the communal bond between mouth and ear.⁸

If Conrad’s early emphasis on the storytelling voice marked a turn away from the Jamesian category of point of view, it has not placed him outside of canonical visual terms of modernist studies. Resuscitated within the printed book, the task of storytelling is, as Conrad famously proffers in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”⁹ This axiom grounds canonical accounts of impressionist perception in Conrad, marking his importance in the history of modernist visual aesthetics. In a pivotal reading, Michael Levenson redeems the 1897 preface as the origin of Marlow, showing how Conrad was among the first modernists to derive value from heightened perception. The storytelling subject brings meaning to the “muteness of the mere event,” visible surface alone being “insufficient.”¹⁰ In contrast, Jameson expands his earliest position on Marlow to argue in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1980) that Conrad’s “regressive” oral aesthetic also marked a “new...