A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language in Heart of Darkness

Chapter Three is a study of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel narrated in single night aboard a ship when a man remembers his journey to the Congo. The chapter seeks a critical form for this novel that Chinua Achebe argues should no longer be read. Searching for a way to describe it, Conrad wrote that it was like “a sinister resonance” and “continued vibration.” These sound figures, based in his memories of music, issue a profound challenge to the transcendental signifier that supports narrative levels: “voice.” At the same time, the chapter seeks out linguistics in the material substratum of vibration. It argues that the linguistic sign and the history of telecommunications—sharing in a dream of lossless and perfect communication—cannot be thought outside of the colonial extraction of sound in its ongoing violence.

Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading

Chapter One is a study of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and it concentrates on the first two words of the novel, neither of which are in English. The chapter approaches the novel through the filters of these words’ racial and colonial sound effects, which become a basis for reappraising canonical tropes of voice in narrative theory, media theory, and the phenomenology of reading. Conrad’s novelistic writing becomes critical when read in relation to emergent sound technologies, the phonograph and ethnography, both of which simultaneously depended on the oral while superseding it through a different mode of technological mediation. But the novel, as a form, only becomes a “modern” technology of voice in its discovery of free indirect discourse, which is premised upon an exclusion of the colonial sonic traces of sexual violence. The chapter concludes with Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Conrad using lip-sync as a postcolonial strategy.

Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound (Absalom, Absalom!)

The Reprise takes up among his most sensitive readers, Faulkner and his Absalom, Absalom!. Through Conrad, Faulkner was seeking a literary racial form for the historical present of a segregated and unreconstructed South: “reverberation.” Bringing sound studies to bear upon narratology, the Reprise argues that Faulkner’s difference from Conrad lies in the place of history: as action at a distance, reverberation in narrative involves one actor completing in the present what another could not in the past. The Reprise brings the traces of Polish in Conrad’s grammar to bear upon Faulkner’s continuation of Conrad’s project of listening, a project that also complements Du Bois. Ultimately, the novel becomes in Faulkner’s hands a technology for recording history and its negativity.

Overture: The Sound of a Novel

The Overture introduces the major terminology of the book grounded in sound studies, narrative theory, novel theory, and modernism, as well as the book’s major figure, Joseph Conrad. Asking “what is the sound of a novel?” the overture argues that we cannot turn so easily to novel theory to answer this question, that we must instead go to sound studies. However, sound studies is often premised upon the suppression of the linguistic. The question, then, demands that we carve out a new territory between the available discourses of sound, narrative, and the novel. The Overture rehearses the methodology of the book in miniature, which involves making connections across difference.

Coda: Literary History as Miscegenating Sound: The Sound and the Fury

The ideal name would resemble water. Denise Riley In interviews, Faulkner credited the fantasied image of Caddy Compson climbing up a pear tree as the origin of The Sound and the Fury (1929). Caddy was his “heart’s darling.” Faulkner avows this image and elevates it in memory and autobiographical discourse. Yet the title of the novel directs us to its neglected beginnings in “sound and fury,” an echo of James Wait’s sonorous “despair and fury.”...

Coda: Chantal Akerman and Lip Sync as Postcolonial Strategy

… and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past. Joseph Conrad, ...

Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness in The Souls of Black Folk

The chapter takes up Du Bois as a contemporary of Conrad and Freud, but one who was listening to memory, song, race, and the unconscious in ways that they could not. It reads Du Bois as a theorist of sound through his strategies of resonance, asking how music, for Du Bois, is a sonic trace of slavery. Using musicology and archival documents, the reading is an intensive engagement with the aurality of Du Bois’s strategies of composition, including musical notion and collage. Ultimately, the reading recuperates gender and the feminine at the heart of The Souls of Black Folk as a work of listening and mourning.

The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “The Fact of Blackness”

Chapter Two searches for a mode of reading that might repair the sonorous after-life, or echoes, of racism in narrative and text. Echo is defined by slap-back, or a doubling. This doubling locates, as a counterpart to the Freudian subject (the ego ideal), a “voice ideal.” It is defined by the melancholy of race in relation to foreign traces, colonial accent, and slurs. The instantiating case of the study is Conrad’s third novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, but as a counterpart to psychoanalysis in Sigmund Freud’s “On Narcissism” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness.” The chapter concludes with William Faulkner’s intensive engagement with Conrad in The Sound and the Fury, as it amounts to Faulkner finding his “voice” as a writer of the American South through the echo of Conrad’s racial melancholy.