"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

For a rigorous engagement with such questions we can appeal to Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, which gives a name to this continuity. Lord Jim is said to create a "sensorium" that makes its depiction of "working life at sea ... available for consumption on some purely aesthetic level" (213-14). The sensorium is said to be effected primarily by the text's sensory signals toward point of view. As if alerted to the inadequacy of founding the sensorium entirely on a mode of presentation-a foundation solidly in place when the narrator reports Jim "seeing" or "hearing" an event, but which would disappear in the absence of such terms-Jameson posits additionally an active motion of narrative "displacement." The novel's "intermittent vision of the sea's economic function," which exhibits both the "reality of production" and "Conrad's unquestionable and acute sense of the nature and dynamics of imperialist penetration," is an authentic "content" occluded by the aestheticized content in the interstices of this intermittence (215). The trope of displacement seems to locate the otherwise elusive activity of aestheticization-the exhibition, then derealization of "content"-in the temporal progression of narrative; that is, over the course of "the nonstop textual production" of this, "the first half of Lord Jim" (214, 219). Jameson thus protects the working reality of aestheticization by affixing it to the reality of textual production; he rescues its operation from the very "abstract structure of temporality" he claims to be endemic to modernism itself (261). The authentic content of Jim's relation to the production of imperial capitalism, the like of which appears in the early rendition of the firemen aboard the Patna, is said to be displaced by the subsequently rendered "vision of the ship" (214).

Jameson carries us to the question: If authentic content in a narrative is placed, then displaced, can it be re-placed upon further textual production? In its wideranging appeal to other works "in Conrad" wherein displacement takes place, The Political Unconscious answers affirmatively: displaced in one text in the Conradian arena, authentic content can be re-placed in a subsequent work. If we were to allow this re-placement across works, but disallow it "within," we would have a critical project governed by precisely the strategy of "aesthetic containment" Jameson would expose in Conrad. The questions that inevitably ensue, about the attribution of comprehensive governance to one but not another "place" in this chain of textual displacement-i.e., to the aestheticization that appears in one passage, but not to the "authentic content" that will inevitably arise in a subsequent one, whether within this or the "next" authorial production-are too many for us to host here; they must be submitted ultimately to the crucial and ongoing debates within Marxist thought about the univocality of ideology, about its place or khora. For Jameson's reading of Lord Jim and Conrad in general, these questions are posed rather insistently by the very existence of a further Conradian production I will examine at the end of this discussion. Two 1912 essays on the Titanic disaster, which angrily name specific corporate and industrial interests that the author sees poised against sea laborers, force us to ask: Given the chain of content-displacement that had begun (again) in a novel of 1900, what could halt that chain-and suspend it finally in the purgatory of "aestheticization"-before it reaches the depiction of labor and capital in these English Review essays?