Josiane Paccaud-Huguet Université Lumière-Lyon 2 Lyon, France Preface This book is the product of its author s long years of practice and expertise of Joseph Conrad s fiction. In this innovative reading of ten major novels and seven stories, Claude Maisonnat focuses upon the presence of the textual voice whose rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity was already audible to Virginia Woolf. 1 It is a voice loaded with a whole range of aesthetic and affective intensities declined here: it is equivocal, polyphonic, aporetic, melancholy, feminine, subversive, venomous, threatening, alive. How can a text have a voice, unless we accept that it is a silent presence, immaterial yet unmistakable in other words, spectral? It has nothing to do with the materiality of sound which disappears in the transition from pen to paper, or when the reader takes a book. Indeed, the abstraction required by both writing and reading is the very condition for its emergence. Maisonnat s working hypothesis is that the textual voice is simultaneously what produces the text and is produced by it: it is both an agency and a logical function that can be verified through its effects. As such, it can therefore be raised to the status of a critical concept inferred from specific instances and occurrences, actually quite familiar to the Conradian reader: sophisticated linguistic and narrative structure, intertextuality, heteroglossia. Maisonnat brings them together under the umbrella concept which he has forged for the purpose and which sheds new light on their significance. And the constant references to the Collected Letters that seem to anticipate the very issues raised by this book also suggest that Conrad knew what he was looking for, as a committed artist in search of his own voice. The textual voice first defines itself negatively, in relation to its counterpart and antagonist, the loud authorial voice. 1
2 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet Maisonnat convincingly argues that when the former prevails, we have masterpieces like The Secret Sharer, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim or Under Western Eyes. The latter produces a kind of romantic ingenuity, an over-simplification often found in the texts of Conrad s minor phase, and quite damaging for their suggestive power. Unlike the authorial voice which looms as if from above to offer the reader a unified bird s eye view, our spectral agent tunnels its way in the dark like a mole. And where gaps, blanks, missing links appear in the text s fabric, we should not try to fill the resonant vacuity they produce. Indeed, it is the very condition appealing to our own interpretive ability, and responsibility. In short, the textual voice also produces the critical, self-conscious reader as voice. The purpose of this book is to map out its symptomatic manifestations, most visible and audible in the present selection of novels and stories. We are led to realize that it is a site, rather than an object. First and foremost, it is a shadowy zone. We know that Conrad took great care in the construction of his narratives and in the effects produced. The variations in narrative distance in Typhoon, the recurrence of free indirect discourse in Under Western Eyes, the perspectival splintering already at work in an early novel like An Outcast of the Islands: all contribute to the de-territorialization process that makes it impossible to calculate a safe origin to discourses. The figure of Marlow also comes as a convenient device to dramatize the gap between narrative frame and core, to outline the discrepancies between on the one hand the simple, utilitarian language of the sailor and on the other hand the sophisticated storyteller, aware of the void behind the word. The textual voice, then, emerges from conflicting modalities of the word, between incompatible representations of the world and the self. In this sense, it is akin to the Lacanian Real that bites into symbolic articulations and imaginary figures, thus limiting the empire and impact of whatever doctrine or figure of authority. The site in question is also a battleground where the forces of ideology are seriously shaken at their roots. Marlow s presence in Youth problematizes the strange marriage which the old
Preface 3 romance and its ideals has contracted with material interests in the commercial conquest of the earth, a tension which of course reaches its climax in Nostromo. Sneaking in-between the voices that circulate in Heart of Darkness, the textual voice is prompt to defeat the sirens of philanthropy, it is the agent of most unpalatable truths. The cardboard image of the Western settler in An Outpost of Progress does not hold out long against the forces of interior Otherness: the mirror of civilization is cracked, if not broken. Maisonnat s innovative reading of The End of the Tether shows the textual voice at work in Captain Whalley s predicament: what if the ideal image of himself as the unfailing provider to his daughter were just one face of the paternalistic ideology which means to keep the forces of the feminine under control? As might be expected, another symptomatic manifestation is the zone of turbulence between the centrifugal and centripetal energies of language itself, between its masculine and feminine poles. This appears nowhere better than in the reading of The Secret Agent that is given here. In The Secret Sharer the captain s meeting with Leggatt who embodies the whispering ghost from the darkness, the disruptive forces at work on the very idea of command of the ship, of the word curiously produces an effect of feminization on the shipmaster s authorial voice. What is so profoundly disturbing and challenging in The Secret Agent is that the anarchist trait dormant in Winnie Verloc does not disappear with her, it migrates into the very substance of the text to become its subversive ingredient, its absolutely unique brand of irony. A new significance to the political dimension of the novel thus comes into light, the textual voice being its chief agent not transcendent but translinguistic, active ( The Secret Sharer, TLS 195). Such action is of course manifest in the friction between languages, whether it be between registers (the oral and the written word), or between different tongues. The Nigger of the Narcissus, a novel full of sound and fury stages the conflict between oralization and de-oralization, ultimately to find an
4 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet outlet into the poetic, vibrating quality of the prose. One of this book s most innovative arguments consists in revisiting Conrad s relation to the French language, considered here as part and parcel of his voice as an artist. The French voice of Joseph Conrad may be silent, Maisonnat argues, yet it structures his narrative art like a Trojan horse in the citadel of the English novel. The countless gallicisms which he excels in pointing out and discussing constitute another active centre making language foreign to itself, and often bringing together the themes of womanhood, language and subversion. The language that emerges is neither standard English nor standard French, but another area of indetermination contributing to the text s aesthetic and affective surplus value. The presence of foreign tongues is indeed a correlate of the emergence of the affect s unspeakable voice, as suggested by the discussion of the title of Almayer s Folly: the saxon genitive binds together a Dutch name and a French word which introduces obliquely the motifs of madness and excess. The whole drama in Victory begins when a man of reason is deeply touched by a woman s immaterial voice, and this reads like an inbuilt warning about the moving power of sound. Actually, where the signifier prevails over the signified, the textual voice will operate as the best transition zone between body and text. In his brilliant concluding chapter, Maisonnat discusses the melancholic voice of the sea, whose low sounding note this time is not frictional. Rather, it sounds like a basso continuo indifferent to meaning or to a national language, truly archaic therefore, against which the polyphony of Conrad s prose rings. The word author, we are usefully reminded, refers to the ability to augment (Lat. augere). There are many extra benefits which the reader can draw from the present volume. Concerning Conrad s texts, we must thank Claude Maisonnat for awakening us with such force to the immaterial textual voice which is undoubtedly their surplus value, the free gift that endows his writing with the authority of an act subversive, instructive but never destructive. In its task of
Preface 5 permanently challenging the authorial voice, it is action: an energetic thrust making the dialectic rite of passage from innocent to critical reading possible. The shadowy voice also brings another benefit that we had perhaps not asked for, but which is all the more valuable. Whether it be in the case of the forces of anarchy, of the inarticulate territories of the human affect, it operates as the sublimating process, the filtering zone that transmutes the truth about some traumatic, excessive jouissance into the reader s surplus enjoyment: in this respect it undoubtedly works as a civilizing factor, without giving up on the necessity of telling that truth. Concerning the present volume it is already invaluable to the Conradian reader, needless to say that it offers the general reader an extremely valuable surplus: a working and workable concept that can easily be exported to the reading of any literary text. NOTES 1 In an essay first published in the Times Literary Supplement on the death of Conrad in August 1924 and later collected in the posthumous volume The Common Reader, vol. 1.