"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

I make my remonstrance-for I do remonstrate-bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form.... Save in the fantastic and the romantic ... it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force-its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested.... There is, to my vision, no authentic ... report of things on the novelist's ... part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part.... (Henry James 500)

The authority of a novelistic statement hinges at the outset on a disavowal of its status as testimony, even as that authority retains its own "interpreting mind" that would "intervene" in our quest for the "reality and truth" it grasps. Hence the axiom in "The Younger Generation" that the lack of true authority in Conrad's Marlow is entirely due to his status as "a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular." Authority can reside only in a non-responsible narrator, a "single ... impersonal and inscrutable ... omniscience, remaining indeed nameless" ("Younger" 157).

As it pretends to cite bvit actually inscribes into orthodoxy "the general law of fiction" that Conrad disobeys, James's essay begins by explaining that the scene of deposition Conrad habitually keeps in view should rather be suppressed; the reader should remain unconscious of the interrogative or confessional arrangements that are the precondition of testimony.

It has been the course ... of [Conrad's] so multiplying his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers, as to make them almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves. We take for granted by the general law of fiction a primary author ... [who] works upon us most in fact by making us forget him. Mr. Conrad's first care, adversely to this, is expressly to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular. (157)

The language of law serves to preempt inevitable questions about why we should "take it for granted" that the "primary author" of, say, The Ambassadors remains "nameless" and non-locatable. For in fact this refusal in Conrad to let his "projected" storyteller disappear as a responsible intervener confronts James with something that inevitably precludes his law: the inescapable possibility that what a reader takes for granted is precisely a historical determination of this author-e.g., a determination of a Mr. Henry James, of various facts and lore constituting his public persona. To ensure that we "forget" this author, and to establish that its "observant and recording and interpreting mind" is categorically distinct from Marlow's-that "beautiful and generous" interpreter of events (157)-what is available to James is no law, but only his own decree. As we will see, however, it is a decree that will become the very foundation of a later "narratology," the only means of establishing both the discretion and totalization of a given "structural" schematic for a novel, as well as that structure's independence from "content."