Self As Region: The Case of Conrad

Abstract

To Kill the Voice? To make it recede, at least into a ‘presque disparition vibratoire’ a Mallarmean or diacritical poetics. Or to have the notion of the author — and with it, possibly, of authority — disappear. No wonder that obverse simplifications assert themselves: on the one hand, the insistence that there is no meaning without a certifiable authorial intention; and, on the other, that there is no authority except by imposition. There is also the device of shifting much of the burden onto a reader who now becomes a co-author, as in the recent revival of Rezeptionsgeschichte on a structural basis. I am myself guilty of simplifying here, but I wish to suggest how troubled the contemporary spectrum of aesthetic theories is by the often unacknowledged issue of literary or spiritual authority. (Geoffrey Hartman, ‘The Fate of Reading’, 1975)

Study of regional literatures must quarrel, unavoidably, with homogenising urges at work in the study of national and international literatures and programmes for literature. Similarly, biographical study of art and artist will quarrel with views of creativity that subordinate individual to collective authority, whether linguistic, aesthetic, or socio-economic. When parole dissolves into langue author into subject, text into discourse, regional or biographical consciousness feels something generative, distinctive, and precious has been lost.