Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James, and the Contest for Modernism by Brian Artese (review)

Testimony on Trial is an extremely ambitious book. Not only does it contrast the different deployment of omniscient narration and quoted stories told by characters in James and Conrad, but it also situates these practices on a major faultline of modernist fiction. Artese argues that at the origin of modernism most new fiction took on one of two forms: 1) the fallible accounts of unreliable tellers, and 2) an omniscient mode that infallibly revealed the inner thoughts of multiple characters. Henry James is a seminal figure in this transformation, a transformation that he both performed in his fiction and theorized in his essays and prefaces. Conrad, on the other hand, resisted this dichotomous practice and instead made his stories out of numerous layers of testimony: oral stories, letters, journals, and so forth, which, when sorted through attentively, would disclose exactly what events occurred and what the various principals felt. Conrad’s practice thus eludes some of the problems that have been attributed to standard modernist (that is, Jamesian) kinds of narrating, such as epistemological relativism. Artese situates Conrad’s practice within an impressive genealogy of testimonial narratives in the history of the novel, in particular, eighteenth-century autobiographical and epistolary forms that similarly provide accurate testimony without resorting to omniscience. Ultimately, Artese makes even further assertions of the importance of testimonial narratives, claiming that “the very intelligibility of the novel as a cultural artifact is dependent on the question of testimony” (10).

The book begins with a bracing historical and theoretical introduction that sets out the author’s central theses. It goes on to discuss several works by James and Conrad in alternating chapters. The Jamesian texts treated most extensively are The Portrait of a Lady, The Reverberator, The Aspern Papers, and The Ambassadors; the primary Conrad texts are The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Lord Jim, Notes on Life and Letters, and Heart of Darkness. Given his thesis, one is naturally quite curious to see how he will handle The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, a very strange work in respect to its narration, as limited, first-person plural modes (“we thought”) alternate with omniscient, third-person plural passages (“they thought”); these forms are both negated by a turn to a first-person singular narration in the final pages of the work. Rather than finding this a fascinating fusion of testimonial and omniscient narration, or even testimonial narration guaranteed by omniscience, Artese sees this work as a transitional one, moving toward the more purely testimonial Lord Jim: “Although the narrative explicitly speaks on behalf of the ship’s crew, the bulk of it comes from no source [i.e., character] locatable in the fabula” (109).

Artese’s most compelling chapter is his final one, which juxtaposes Marlow’s narrative of his quest for Kurtz with the contemporary newspaper accounts of Stanley’s search for Livingston. This is an especially illuminating study that is filled with revealing quotations and suggestive juxtapositions as it shows how Conrad’s narrative “recalls the powerful transformation, accomplished through the Anglo-American newspaper, by which the ‘hidden’ Livingston became the hidden truth of Africa itself” (13). My own reading of Heart of Darkness has been modified by this analysis, and I’m sure many others’ will be, too. One wishes this book were a little longer and included some discussion of Conrad’s later move to omniscient, third-person narration in works like Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Victory, and The Rescue; it would be especially interesting to see Artese’s take on the strange, brief intrusion of a first-person voice in the eighth chapter of Nostromo.

Artese’s study is thoroughly historicized and it meticulously traces the analogous transformation occurring at the same time in the realm of journalism, as signed pieces by individual authors gave way to the anonymous authority of the newspaper itself. Artese has cunningly sought out and sifted through period debates over...