"Speech Was of No Use": Conrad, a New Journalism, and the Critical Abjection of Testimony

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2003 by Artese, Brian

It is a familiar and still-venerated truth that the novels of Joseph Conrad despair at the insurmountability of subjectivity, and consequently effect a retreat "inward," away from the real; but without much notice, this truth is usually said to be a necessary consequence of these works' narrative structure alone, regardless of whether it is also expressed in their thematics or explicit discourse. Ursula Lord's recent formulation is paradigmatic:

Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim disclose in narrative structure the relativism of modern epistemology.... Conrad's creation of Marlow and his embedding of Marlow's narrative within another acknowledge that we always perceive the world many times removed, filtered through our own consciousness and that of others, as through a glass darkly. (63-64)

The notion that the mere existence of an "internal" narrator necessarily puts the reader at a remove from a reality and a truth that would have revealed itself in the absence of his mediation might seem to have been exhumed from a theoretical debate that died out years ago. We might not find it surprising that there has never actually been a thorough poststructuralist analysis of the narratological foundation of this idea, since it seems just another iteration of a well-traversed "metaphysics of presence." The still-tenacious presumption that an "embedded" narrator necessarily occludes a transparency that would otherwise be available is not, however, simply the effect of a depth model exerting its centuries-old influence from within Western intellectual discourse. What I would like to demonstrate with a review of the twentieth century's criticism of Conrad's narrated narrators is that its general suspicion of a reporter like Marlow-as a "filterer" of truth and an obstacle to the real-is an expression of an historically traceable cultural politics of attestation. From this vantage it will become clear that Conrad's famous break from prevailing narratological norms is inextricable, for instance, from his constantly reiterated loathing of the daily press. Both the politics and the metaphysics of what might be called anonymous versus testimonial authority have been disseminated most effectively, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, by a ubiquitous and solidly institutionalized public journalism. Conrad's novelistic theater, in which the social or even juridical forums of all narration are insistently located, and where no interrogator escapes visibility or responsibility, is deliberately opposed to an increasingly influential power of anonymous authority at the fin de siecle, one that has been sustained most effectively by what the author calls "the perspectiveless manner of the daily papers" (Notes 141). Not simply a recoil from the "devouring publicity" of newsprint that haunted a figure like Henry James, Conrad's opposition is more precisely to the "new journalism" emerging concurrently with his writing career. The former "age of verbatim report," in Harold Herd's words, was now in decline; the series of testimonials that had formerly constituted the newspaper were now being sifted, readily paraphrased, and framed with commentary to "help [the reader] in absorbing the news." "The journal" was thus being elevated more distinctly above its constituent elements, and had attained an extradiegetic purchase from which it could claim "comprehensive coverage of ... modern life" in general (Herd 223). As I hope to show, the promise of comprehension that had come to be demanded of the newspaper, the most popular and pervasive disseminator of narrative norms the modern world had known, would also henceforth be demanded of the novel.

In an 1889 edition of London's The New Review, Tighe Hopkins initiated a colloquium on anonymity in the newspaper. Unsigned articles had long been the norm in the English press, and another discussion of their efficacy in combating the suppression of reformist voices would have been unremarkable. But here at the twilight of the century, Hopkins and several journalistic and literary allies argue at length against anonymity. The progressive voices that had once feared the blunt power of crown and title now see a new enemy: anonymous authority itself, a power said to be conjured by the very organs of mass communication that had been weapons against the old order. "The power of the press," writes L.F. Austin, who will ultimately oppose Hopkins in the debate, "is a purely impersonal force.... The Times is the power, not the men who write in it" (I: 517).1 William Archer also calls it an "impersonal force," one that exerts itself

from behind a mask of superhuman, ineffable wisdom which imposes so ludicrously on the multitude.... Men tell each other with bated breath, "The Tribune says this, the Oracle says that; the Reverberator is of such an opinion," forgetting that Tribune, Oracle, and Reverberator are only Hobson, Dobson and Jobson speaking grandiloquently through a resonant mouthpiece. (1: 530)

The New Review debate is not about whether the use of an anonymous voice really does effect a distinct and instrumental authority: all of its participants, including Bernard Shaw, agree that anonymity creates an identifiable, autonomous authority with an operative power. At issue, rather, is whether the press ought to wield the "mysterious power," as James Runciman puts it, "which the anonymous article gives" (1: 528).