Abstract
A formalised theory of modernism finds one pronouncement in the 1909 critical preface to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), 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 centre 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’ (1898), one might say that the Anglo-American novel lost its voice, an orally based aesthetic being, as it had been for Flaubert, synonymous 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
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, 29 September 18981
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Achebe, Chinua, The Image of Africa: Racism’, in Heart of Darkness, edited by Paul B. Armstrong, 4th edn (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 336–49.
Benjamin, Walter, The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1968), pp. 83–109.
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1988).
Caverero, Adriana, For More than One Voice, translated by Paul Kottman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Conrad, Joseph, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Edward Garnett, 9 vols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928).
—, The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad, 25 vols (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1925).
—, Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958).
Fogel, Aaron, The Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
GoGwilt, Christopher, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Greaney, Michael, Conrad, Language, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady, edited by Robert D. Bamberg (New York: Norton, 1975).
—, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948).
Jameson, Frederic, ‘Criticism in History’, in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, edited by Norman Rudich (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1976), pp. 31–50.
—, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
Krielkramp, Ivan, ‘A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness’, Victorian Studies 4(2) (1997): 211–44.
—, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Krishnan, Sanjay, ‘Seeing the Animal: Colonial Space and Movement in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 37(3) (2004): 326–51.
Levenson, Michael, The Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
London, Bettye, The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction (New York: Scribner, 1921).
Mallios, Peter, Our Conrad: The Making of American Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Pecora, Vincent, ‘Heart of Darkness and the Phenomenology of Voice’, ELH 52(4) (1985): 993–1015.
Said, Edward, ‘Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7(2) (1974): 116–32.
Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Toop, David, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New York: Continuum, 2010).
Watt, Ian, ‘Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7(2) (1974): 101–15.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Julie Beth Napolin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Napolin, J.B. (2013). ‘A Sinister Resonance’: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad’s Marlow. In: Enns, A., Trower, S. (eds) Vibratory Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027252_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027252_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43952-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02725-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)