A voice without a body: the phonographic logic of Heart of Darkness. (book) Ivan Kreilkamp
Abstract: Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1887 immortalized the technologically reproduced voice and opened new doors for literary innovations in both form and style which were embodied in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ written in 1898. Although the novel did not discuss the phonograph, it created distinctions between text and voice. It asserted that the disembodied voice provided new philosophical insights while representing undertones of horror.
Full Text:
As Leopold Bloom muses to himself, there’s nothing quite like the phonograph (or gramophone or graphophone, to name a couple of the competitors that followed Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention) to keep alive the memory and voice of those dear departed:
Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohelloamarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face.
Otherwise you couldn’t remember the face after fifteen years, say. (114)
"Eyes, walk, voice": James Joyce enumerates those quintessentially modern fragments - snapshots, recordings of voice - which are taken to stand for the whole of a person. By the time radio had made the technological reproduction of voice relatively familiar, a line like T. S. Eliot’s "she smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone" (255-56) would suggest that a certain logic of modernity as governed by mechanical reproduction was already there for the taking in the culture. But in 1898, when Joseph Conrad began work on the novel which would provide the original (unpublished) epigraph for Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the possibilities of a voice amplified and multiplied by technological means were newly available for exploration. Those lines from Heart of Darkness - "The horror! The horror!" - announce the dawning of an awareness that language might function with no clear connection to its human source; their transit from Conrad’s novel to Eliot’s poem exactly reveals their "quotability," their status as autonomous, detachable phonemes.
Unlike the literature written by Eliot and Joyce in 1922, Conrad’s 1898 Heart of Darkness contains no representation or discussion of a phonograph. The novel’s inscription of human voice nevertheless refigures sound and voice much as the phonograph - "sound writer" - and its successors did in the 1880s and 1890s. Critics have long observed how Conrad’s novel problematizes the distinctions between speech and writing, voice and text; what have not been noticed are the similarities between Conrad’s literary staging of these distinctions and their technological instantiation in such a device as Edison’s phonograph. One might wonder why, at precisely this moment, the difference between speech and writing - the difference which, from Ferdinand de Saussure’s first lectures on general linguistics in 1906-07 to Jacques Derrida’s work, would provide the basis for the twentieth century’s most important reflections on language - suddenly erupts in Conrad’s novel as a problem, an allegory, an opportunity for literary innovation. While not the answer to this question of literary and cultural history, the links between the discourse of the phonograph and Heart of Darkness do suggest a new model of the relations between innovations of literary technique and scientific technology in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Some recognition of the interconnections between this landmark literary work and Edison’s technological device should revise some of our reigning assumptions regarding the status of mass culture and literature at this period.
Richard Terdiman’s diagnosis of what he calls a "memory crisis" afflicting European culture, an increasing sense that memory had become "a site and source of cultural disquiet" (vii), provides an important context for a consideration of the significance of the phonograph. "Beginning in the nineteenth century," Terdiman writes, "we could say that disquiet about memory crystallized around the perception of two related disorders, too little memory, and too much" (14). Terdiman’s focus on memory aligns him with a much earlier critic, Walter Benjamin, whose analysis of the attenuation of storytelling in his essay, "The Storyteller" (1936), relies on an argument about individual and collective memory. Information, which Benjamin suggests has taken the place of storytelling, has no history: "The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time" (90). Benjamin argues that a culture of information has rendered archaic the experience of listening to stories "passed on from mouth to mouth" (84), an experience which relies on communal recollection: "Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation" (98). These reflections on the historical transformations in the practice of memory suggest how rich and yet troubling the possibilities introduced by the phonograph must have seemed at first: for what is the phonograph but a startling mechanism of artificial memory, a means by which that which had seemed most ephemeral - the voice - might be recorded for the ages? Of all literary forms, Terdiman argues, it is the novel "that most organizes itself as a projection of the memory function and its disruptions" (25); and of all nineteenth-century technologies, it is indisputably the phonograph - heralded by many commentators as a guarantor of the permanence of formerly fleeting cultural memories, damned by some others as a threat to the process of selective memory which grants meaning to our own history - that most refigured and disrupted the memory function. It should not surprise us, then, that Conrad would draw on the discourse of the phonograph in order to address the links between speech, writing, voice, and memory in a novel.
Edison’s phonograph - invented in 1877, "perfected" in 1888, first widely available commercially in England in 1898(1) - was greeted as a radically strange device by its early auditors, who viewed with disquiet and astonishment the capture and reproduction of a distinctive human voice by a machine. Those who witnessed early phonographic demonstrations were disconcerted by the sound of a human voice re-articulated again and again by a machine, a sound that seemed to efface the distinction between a human speaker and a "talking machine." But if the phonograph seemed at first to spell the death or evacuation of the presence of the human voice, it eventually promised eternal life for a recorded and technologically reproduced voice. Heart of Darkness draws on new representational possibilities suggested by the phonograph - possibilities to which, as we shall see, Conrad was especially sensitive - in order to depict the effects of a disembodied voice, speech lacking the corporeal ground of a speaker’s body.(2) For Conrad, the perception of disembodied voice pointed the way to groundbreaking innovations in literary style and form, but it also seemed to represent a grave danger to human agency and authorship. The discourse surrounding the invention of the phonograph claimed that, in seizing a human voice as a thing apart from its origin, one might resist mortality itself. Heart of Darkness draws on this celebratory strain in thinking about sound and voice at the end of the century, asserting that the voice without a body might offer access to new philosophical insights, new literary innovations. But this novel also offers a pessimistic vision of the voice without a body as a demonic agency, a sign not of progress but of an altogether new kind of inhuman "horror."
In acknowledging this undertow to the optimistic view of scientific innovation, we should not be too quick, however, to associate the "horror" ascribed to the phonographic, disembodied voice with the demystification that Walter Benjamin and others later associated with the machine’s destruction of the aura of the work of art. Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) is the essay that comes first to mind in relation to the phonograph, but it is, in fact, less useful than "The Storyteller" for thinking about this technology and its historical moment. Insisting that mechanical reproduction shifts the artwork out of the realm of religious aura into a potentially more democratic but profoundly demystified zone of distracted cultural consumption, Benjamin expresses a modernist nostalgia for originals. But in the late nineteenth century, before phonographic recording and reproduction of sound had become associated with the entertainment industry, phonography was understood less as a popularizing technology than as a magical one, astonishing and unnerving in the way it transformed language into the eerie sound of an impersonal, mechanistic universe.
The wonder and terror of the phonograph at this moment, then, is not that of the machine come to life as degraded and uncontrollable mass culture, but of the disembodiment of the storyteller, the separation of the voice and the body. The early phonograph did not demystify so much as it remystified voice;(3) in severing the link between a human agent and speech, the phonograph opened the way to a new conception of voice not as the sign of presence but as the fragmentary material phonemes of a circulating, authorless language. It is this conception of voice, language, and technology - one altogether distinct from and prior to a later modernist paradigm of "mechanical reproduction" as the abjected other of the production of high art - which Conrad stages in Heart of Darkness.
In drawing a parallel between the late-nineteenth-century innovations of a work of technology and a work of literature, I hope to show that during this period, similar questions regarding mimetic realism and its limits were being raised in quite separate discursive fields. It is my contention that Conrad’s simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of the scientific discourse of sound technology offers one important answer to the question of how his fiction changed the terms of a realism that had been and still is the indication of serious - as opposed to merely popular fiction. Heart of Darkness, a novel in which an enigmatic story-teller describes his fascination with a man who was "very little more than a voice" (48), marks a change in the way fiction understood its relation to speech. Conrad’s depiction of the voices of Kurtz and of Marlow refigured the drift of articulation away from agency, of text away from author. The novel consequently was, as critics have long recognized, an important precursor to the stream-of-consciousness technique of later modernists.(4) But what this novel did to language, and why it sits so uneasily between mimetic realism and modernism, becomes most apparent when we examine Heart of Darkness in the context of technological modernity, and specifically in the context of the phonograph - a device which finds its way into a number of the most canonical works of literary modernism as a mechanism of disembodied voice.(5) While it is true that Conrad’s novel and Edison’s invention occupy very different cultural spaces, both can be seen to grapple with surprisingly similar issues concerning the cultural implications of the disembodied voice. This similarity should be seen as symptomatic of a broader cultural shift of which both the novel and the phonograph were a part.
II
The eerie effect of heating a machine reproduce disembodied human voice -
speech apart from a human subject - suggested to many listeners an entirely
new sense of what the memory of voice might from now on mean. Voice, heard
emerging from a phonograph, seemed not the natural emanation of a human
subject but a piece of that subject, broken off as an autonomous thing. As
Scientific American reported in 1877,
certainly nothing that can be conceived would be more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead. Yet Science now announces that this is possible, and can be done. That the voices of those who departed before the invention of the wonderful apparatus described in the letter given below are for ever stilled is too obvious a truth; but whoever has spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling. A strip of indented paper travels through a little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren or posterity centuries hence hear us as plainly as if we were present. Speech has become, as it were, immortal. ("A Wonderful Invention" 304)
If this editorial celebrates a momentous technological advance, it also uneasily describes this advance as a fundamental shift in paradigms of human experience. To hear a voice speaking when the body from which it emerged has "turned to dust" is wonderful but also "startling," eerie. Jacques Derrida has demonstrated the centrality of the presence of voice to Western epistemology;
Edison’s phonograph suggests that an individual voice might bear no permanent attachment to any particular moment in time, might be made to re-articulate itself again and again, thus destabilizing the traditional structures of knowledge and subjectivity. And the phonograph works its magic with a simple strip of paper, offering a reconfiguration of the very notion of inscription and writing.
Although the recording and playing of music turned out to be the primary function of the phonograph and its descendants in the twentieth century, in the years following its invention nearly all uses suggested for it involved not music but language. In an 1878 essay, "The Phonograph and its Future," Edison followed the lead of his commentator at Scientific American in focusing on the importance of the phonograph’s capacity to save a human voice after the death of its speaker: "For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family - as of great men - the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph" (533-34, emphasis in original), he writes.(6) This emphasis is crucial in the definition of the signifying system of the phonograph, the importance of which is insistently linked to its capacity to record final words and voices from the grave.(7) Just as earlier consumers made photography an element of the "ghost industry" of spiritualism, so late-Victorian phonograph users treated it as a technology able to save the trace of the living and so defy mortality.(8)
This defiance is, however, only partial. Something strange happens to a
person’s last words when they are recorded on the phonograph. Last words may
always have had more authority than what might be called everyday speech. Such
language acquires a ceremonial significance, and can even be regarded as a
comment on one’s entire life. Consider, for example, the story of Alfred
Tennyson’s deathbed scene in 1892: having demanded a volume of William
Shakespeare containing Cymbeline, he
fumbled with it, then put it face down with his hand laid heavily on it, cracking the spine, so that today it still falls open to the speech of Posthumus to Imogen: "Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die," a passage that had always moved him to tears. . . . Tennyson then spoke his last words, calling out, "Hallam, Hallam," and whispering indistinctly to Emily, "God bless you, my joy." (Martin 581)
Tennyson augments his actual, relatively commonplace final utterance with an act of reading and literary citation; his manual impress on the volume of Shakespeare, marking the place of favorite lines, serves almost as a final speech act, one which satisfies the cultural and literary expectation of a great author’s final summing-up. But in introducing a phonograph to the deathbed, one threatens the possibility of such an aesthetically crafted final scene. Promising to provide a technological buttress to familial or national memories of the last words of great men, the phonograph’s exact mimesis in fact undermined the myth-making which finessed such memories into satisfying form. When last words are recorded and re-played, they acquire the potential to be something altogether disconnected (even alienated) from the person who first spoke them: autonomous, detached phonemes, fragments of sound waves given material form on a tape or phonograph cylinder and, like printed texts or any other mechanically reproduced item, subject to unpredictable effects and itineraries. Edison lists as one of the essential features of the phonograph, "[t]he captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin" ("The Phonograph and Its Future" 530); in the presence of a phonograph, a speaker’s language becomes no longer only his or her own, and is subject to "captivation" and possibly unwanted reproduction. It was as if speech were now, for the first time in history, subject to those same dangers and vagaries which we have known since Plato to be the lot of writing. In marking a speech from Shakespeare with his hand, Tennyson asserted control over his own relationship to language, positioning himself as an author in a national literary tradition; it is this control, this authorial possession ("knowledge or consent") of final words, which the phonograph threatens by defining a speaker as no more than the "source" or "origin" of a voice.
The connection between the recording of sound and writing or authorship is more direct than it might appear, for the phonograph’s repetition of sound is an inscription, the marking of sound on wax, tinfoil, or paper, and therefore a materialization of both sound and a kind of writing. What the phonograph made very clear was that the material voice could be understood altogether without reference to its speaker or author. Edison first observed the principle of sound’s materiality by noticing patterns of grains of sand on a beach:
We have all been struck by the precision with which even the faintest sea-waves impress upon the surface of a beach the fine, sinuous line which is formed by the rippling edge of their advance. Almost as familiar is the fact that grains of sand sprinkled on a smooth surface of glass or wood, on or near a piano, sift themselves into various lines and curves according to the vibrations of the melody played on the piano-keys. ("Perfected" 642)
This description draws an implicit analogy between "the fine sinuous line" of sound-writing in nature and a line of cursive handwriting. To his own eventual commercial disadvantage, Edison always insisted on the technology’s uses as a substitute for and an aid to writing rather than as the device for recording and playing music that it eventually became. In the first two decades or so of the phonograph’s existence, it was used exclusively as a supplement to or a substitute for written records of voice: its first commercial application was as an aid to office stenographers, as a machine to record the voice of an employer dictating a letter. The phonograph was, then, a new technology of inscription which threatened to render pen-to-paper writing obsolete. While tinfoil and wax were eventually chosen as the substances on which the phonograph inscribed sound, in Edison’s first prototypes strips of paper were used, so that the phonograph made good on its name: it was a machine that reproduced sound by literally inscribing the page.(9)
The phonograph’s early auditors recognized its potential to disrupt traditional oral experience with its mechanical repetition, to put seriously into question the presumed natural connection between voice and a speaker. Harper’s Weekly jocularly predicted the eventual replacement of "great men" and performers with phonographic replicas, offering a proleptic version of the now-popular genre of the cybernetic jeremiad (in which a commentator foresees the day when humans will be rendered obsolete by one or another technology of recorded memory): "There is no reason why we should not have all the great men of the age, as well as the brilliant singers and actresses, taken possession of and driven off the course by the phonograph" ("The Phonograph" 249-50). Edison himself elaborated on the threats posed by his invention to traditional notions of authorship. In "The Phonograph and its Future," Edison describes the machine’s "foundation principle" as "the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will" (527). He notes, in a list of the essential features of the phonograph, the new possibility of "[i]ndefinite multiplication and preservation of such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source" (530). "Without regard to the existence or non-existence": thus Edison casually suggests the fate of the speaker of the disembodied, reproducible voice, the speaker whose language may be "captured," manipulated and multiplied without his or her own consent or participation. By way of advertising his new invention, Edison inadvertently signals a profound threat to the figure of the speaker - or, we might say, the author - of a voice.(10)
Yet in his 1888 essay "The Perfected Phonograph," Edison further suggests that the institution of authorship will only be strengthened by his device:
"Authors can register their fleeting ideas and brief notes on the phonograph at any hour of day or night, without waiting to find pen, ink or paper" (647). Scientific American reported that "Mr. Edison informs us that the whole of Nicholas Nickleby could be recorded upon four cylinders" ("The New Phonograph" 422): as if in order to quell any fear of the device leading to the obsolescence of literature, Edison hastened to stress the phonograph’s uses as a handmaiden to it. But even as he suggests that the phonograph would be a boon to authors, he implies that the use of the technology radically refigures the meaning of "writing," which now might entirely bypass the process of manually inscribing words with "pen, ink or paper." The phonograph, by receiving the impression of sound on tinfoil or paper, makes an inscription that appears not to be an inscription; by recording and reproducing sounds, it appears to do no less than revive the dead, bring back the lost moment of oral presence. For Edison, phonography was a technology of vocal reincarnation, a scientific magic by which the moment of verbal utterance might be extended into the future and, potentially, reproduced infinitely. This fantasy of reincarnation is a technologically updated version of the original dream of writing, which promises to render immortal the trace of those who write. But while writing gains immortality only in the death of oral utterance, the phonograph writes sound, and thus makes the utterance live forever in a machine.
It is thus fair to say that the invention of the phonograph was understood by some as a fortification of speech and of the institution of authorship for now the human voice could be preserved indefinitely, even long after the death of the speaker. But what Edison implied and did not directly address were the problems raised for authorship and agency by a new understanding of the voice as part-object. Prior to the phonograph, the exact correspondence or simultaneity of orator and voice was taken for granted: it seemed incontestable that the sound of a voice implied the necessary presence of its speaker. But in saving the voice apart from the presence of a speaker, the phonograph broke this formerly whole signifying unit into two, the speaker and the voice. As Edison himself implied, the connection between the two becomes more a matter of convention than nature or necessity; the human source of a recorded voice need neither know of nor consent to the reproduction of his or her utterance, as the phonograph makes possible the reproduction of "sound-waves. . . . with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time" ("The Phonograph and Its Future" 530). For a voice to gain immortality is, then, decisively not the same as for a whole person to do so, and in some cases the immortality of a voice after the decease of its speaker might seem less reassuring than horrifying. Edison insisted that in listening to a recording of the last words of a loved one, one would experience the revived or even immortal presence of that person. But others who experienced the phonograph commented on the distinctly discomforting effect of hearing one isolated part of a person, his or her voice, preserved, as Edison put it, "without the presence or consent of the original source." "It sounds more like the devil every time," one observer commented at Edison’s demonstration of the phonograph at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington in 1877 (Conot 109); that is, "it" - the voice - begins with each reproduction to seem less and less the signifier of human presence, more and more an independent, autonomous material fragment with a disconcertingly inhuman resonance.
The phonograph offered to its first auditors both the euphoric promise of extending speech, agency, and authorship beyond the limits of the body, and also the disquieting threat of undermining the authority of the speaking, authoring body. Another way to think about the promise and threat of the phonograph is in terms of the competing epistemologies of nineteenth-century mimetic realism and an emerging counter-discourse which considers all knowledge to be part-knowledge, all access to the "real" limited by partial perspective. Edison and many of the commentators on his invention stressed the phonograph’s uses as an aid to realism. After all, in order to be recorded by the phonograph, one must be in the presence of it. The moment of recording and inscription sits easily with a realist epistemology of reference: "[W]hoever has spoken . . . into the mouthpiece of the phonograph," as Scientific American put it, "has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones" ("A Wonderful Invention" 304). Any sound reproduced by a phonograph, therefore, may be understood as the sign of or reference to something in the world. On the other hand, there was also something about the phonograph that struck many observers as disturbingly antimimetic, putting some of the truisms of realism into question. What seemed particularly so was the way the phonograph’s recording process broke up the whole object or sign into synecdoches: part-objects, signs standing for the whole. The whole person is not made immortal; one limited piece of that person, the particular pattern of sound which his or her voice makes on a phonograph cylinder, outlives the individual who was its original source and ground for meaning. From a less celebratory point of view than Edison’s, the immortality and mechanical reproduction of such an imprint - "without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source" - seemed not a boon to human presence and realism, but a disturbing fragmentation of the human subject into circulating bits of sound (if not yet sound bites).
Although Edison was an American culture hero, England also had its own phonograph enthusiasts. In an 1890 letter to The Times, H. R. Haweis reported a gathering to listen to a recording of the voice of the recently deceased Robert Browning:
Today was the anniversary of Robert Browning’s death at Venice, and at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, in singular commemoration of it, an event unique in the history of science and of strange sympathetic significance took place at Edison-house. The voice of the dead man was heard speaking. This is the first time that Robert Browning’s or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave. (10)
A correspondent for The Times wrote in 1888 that the phonograph "will be in many respects a source of joy to novelists as an entirely new source of startling disclosures and of unexpected denouements" ("Mr. Edison’s Phonograph" 5). But if some applauded the phonograph as a boon to England’s own national literary and cultural tradition, others warned of the technology’s potentially pernicious influence. One of the most openly pessimistic early journalistic accounts of the phonograph dates from an 1888 issue of The [London] Spectator, from around the time Edison first engaged in publicity for his invention in England. This account of the phonograph, warning of the danger of embracing its false promise of immortality, evinces a perhaps distinctly British view of the technology as enacting an excessive (and perhaps distinctly American) desire to accumulate an excess of information:(11)
What are we to expect from this wonderful invention? Mainly, we fear, an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying off into nothingness what deserves only temporary life. Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifying and embalming every little ripple of human energy, that we tremble for the consequences. The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech; and unless man suddenly takes a great spring into a moral greatness worthy of all this careful storing, we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions. . . . Shall we not come to regard it as a singular virtue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purposes of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered? . . . Are not men daily becoming less and less massive, - less and less impressive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them, and recording delicately all the outcome of their much-fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives? ("What Will Come of the Phonograph?" 881)
This anonymous editorial makes a case for the dystopian view of the phonograph, by way of seriously questioning the usefulness and value of mimetic realism. "Are not men becoming . . . less and less impressive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them?" the writer wonders, succinctly and acidly capturing the threat to the "human" in such a technology of inscription. The withering description of the process of "recording delicately all the outcome of their much-fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives" makes a claim that would not, I think, have been made in the heyday of nineteenth-century mimetic realism: that the increasingly efficient and capacious potential for "recording" traces and details of human life may have gone too far; that "all this careful storing" has produced not a useful record of the voices, images, and memories of human history, but only "a museum of odds and ends of form and speech," a linguistic junk-yard overflowing with words and phrases that should have been left to die in peace. The use of the word "embalming" sums up this writer’s view of the phonograph’s recording process. What the phonograph preserved, this choice of vocabulary suggests, is not a trace of human essence but something more along the lines of a body part kept in ajar: say, a nose or a finger.
This editorial’s suggestion that the phonograph might prohibit the attainment of a peaceful closure for language, might preserve what would be better carried "off into nothingness," strikes a presciently Conradian note. The article, in fact, in its discussion of "the benefits of oblivion," the "steadily accumulating piles of human rubbish" in which we all must make our way, resonates with Conrad’s own commentary on the phonograph, displaying a modernist suspicion that the device does not preserve the most significant language but instead cancels out meaning.(12) Although it is unlikely that Conrad read this Spectator article, I do wish to argue that he joined it in contributing to a new, anti-mimetic counter-discourse. Within this discourse, the phonograph was recognized as representing the nineteenth century’s most important innovation in what has been described as "mechanical memory."(13) To those who were beginning to wish for new epistemologies and narrative strategies, the phonograph at once embodied the doctrine of mimetic realism at its most overweening, and offered an appropriable model of new representational alternatives.
III
Conrad often expressed mordant skepticism about science and technology. His frequently-cited 1897 letter describes the universe as a malign machine:
There is a - let us say - a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! - it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. (1: 425)
I have no argument with the critical truism that Conrad’s work casts a cold eye on Victorian trust in scientific progress and that he embraces a more pessimistic understanding of the existential plight of a universe-machine headed for heat death.(14) I do have reason to think that Heart of Darkness intervenes more specifically in contemporary representations and arguments about technology than Conrad criticism has acknowledged, in large part because scholars place him among the modernists and not in the context of Victorian thought, where his early work belongs. Both at the level of plot and in the micronarratives of sentences and paragraphs, Heart of Darkness engages precisely the same problem defined by the technology of the phonograph, which reproduces a voice long "turned to dust" with a mere "strip of indented paper." In the rest of this essay, I will consider how Conrad’s novel ponders the Victorian conventions of adventure narrative and the role of an author in a print culture just beginning to understand itself in terms of the threat and opportunity of new technologies of inscription. I wish to suggest an analogy between the famous phrase which was Kurtz’s last utterance - "The horror! The horror!" - and those "last words" which Edison claimed the phonograph was uniquely equipped to reproduce. In a manner that reminds us of Edison and the journalistic commentators on the phonograph, Conrad explores the effects and consequences of a new understanding of language and speech as autonomous fragments of sound, detachable phonemes which may be understood, in Edison’s words, "Without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source."
Conrad began writing his novel in December 1898, exactly the time when the
phonograph and gramophone were first widely advertised in Great Britain
[ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1 AND 2 OMITTED].(15) On 29 Sept. 1898, he wrote to
his friend Edward Garnett describing a visit in Scotland to Dr. John McIntyre, a radiologist who showed Conrad an early x-ray machine and one of the first British models of commercially-manufactured phonographs. Conrad took the opportunity to make an x-ray of his hand (reproduced in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad) and to hear the music of his countryman, the great Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski:
All day with the shipowners and, in the early dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about the secret of the universe and the nonexistence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are at the bottom of all states of consciousness. . . . all matter being only that thing of inconceivable tenuity through which the various vibrations of waves (electricity, heat, sound, light etc.) are propagated, thus giving birth to our sensations - the emotions - then thought. Is this so? (2: 94)
Conrad gives an ironic account of the doctor’s claim that all works of human art and culture - including the piano music and Conrad’s own recently published story, The Nigger of the "Narcissus " - are essentially no more than configurations of sound vibrations and waves of electricity:
It was so - said the Doctor - and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood, there is only the eternal something that waves and an eternal force that causes the waves - it’s not much - and by the virtue of these two eternities exists that Corot and that Whistler in the dining room upstairs (we were in a kind of cellar) and Munro’s here writings and your Nigger and Graham’s politics and Paderewski’s playing (in the phonograph) and what more do you want? (2: 94)(16)
Conrad’s uneasy response to the doctor’s description of a universe composed of sound and waves of electricity suggests how his own prose style engaged such upbeat scientific discourse. The stylistic vagueness for which he is remembered may be understood as a logical response to the claim that sensations, emotions, and thought are the byproduct of vast impersonal forces of electricity and sound. Indeed, this letter allows us to imagine Conrad pondering his own status as author in precisely these terms: can the cursive script of handwriting compete with the inscription of sound waves on a gramophone record or a phonograph cylinder? Can the timbre of the human voice differentiate itself from the general "vibration" of sound and electricity waves that modern science has claimed to constitute the "secret of the universe"? What would it mean to write a work of literature, a novel, within this new paradigm of sound and inscription?
As critics habitually notice, Conrad introduces Heart of Darkness with a scene of "storytelling," where a group of men engage in that sort of oral communication that Walter Benjamin, in his essay "The Storyteller," describes as a casualty of the information systems of modernity.(17) Fredric Jameson is simply more explicit than most when he suggests that "the representational fiction of a storytelling situation organized around Marlow marks the vain attempt to conjure back the older unity of the literary institution" (220). Certainly, the opening of Heart of Darkness fleetingly permits a comforting and even sentimental alliance of the reader with the represented figures of story-listeners, as if to read the novel were to join this verbal Community. Mythic overtones of structures of authority and hospitality provide a sense of firm linguistic/social structure: "[T]he Director of Companies was our Captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward" (7). The detail of the Captain’s "back," however, immediately heralds a narrative strategy Conrad uses throughout the rest of the novel, not to comfort a reader in the persistence of familiar structures of realist narrative, but to question those structures.
What is this, I want to consider, but a version of the synecdoche that also governs the representation of phonographic sound?(18) Edison boasted that for "preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family - as of great men - the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph" ("The Phonograph" 53334; emphasis in original): in "capturing" certain pieces of a human being, the phonograph made clear that "sayings," "voices," and "words" were not irreducible elements of the human whole, but autonomous fragments which might be represented and preserved apart from their source. Conrad’s literary technique similarly puts into question the link between a represented detail and the whole person to whom it would normally be presumed to refer. To stare at the Captain’s back with affection is one thing, when the reader is soon to be treated to a full description of his person. It is quite another thing to offer but a piece of him, when that is all we can ever expect to see. It is the difference between what might be called a successful synecdoche, in which the part evokes the whole, and a more skeptical use of the trope - indeed a more skeptical use of representation - where the part does not allow us to conjure up the whole, but leaves it shrouded in mystery or points to its inaccessibility.
Roman Jakobson observes that realism is characteristically "fond of synecdochic details":
The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism
and Symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently
realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually
predominates the so-called Realist trend. . . . Following the path of
contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the
plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space or
time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina’s
suicide
Tolstoj’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" and "bare shoulders" are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong. (111)
Conrad could be said to fulfill this definition of "the Realist author," given the "artistic attention" he too devotes to minor details of appearance. At the same time, however, Conrad pushes the trope of synecdoche to a limit-point where it begins to undermine Victorian realism. Conrad evidently discovered that synecdoche would lose its capacity to conjure a referent as a part does a whole if the details observed were forced to bear more narrative weight than they could stand. Thus in Heart of Darkness, we find a disconcertingly synecdochal narrative working against the aims of realist storytelling. Conrad repeatedly depicts the human body as a collection of parts. The secretary at the Company is observed as a head and a finger: "A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary" (14). The Company’s chief Accountant is described as a collection of sartorial details: "I saw a high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat" (21). Such statements simultaneously explore the perceptual consequences of seeing the world as a collection of fragmentary parts and display the stylistic consequences of understanding language as a collection of fragmentary phonemes. The Accountant’s wardrobe, described as if so many items on a department store dummy, and the secretary’s "compassionate expression" - curiously isolated and detached, worn like the Cheshire cat’s grin - suggest one such consequence to be an attenuation of human presence. In Tolstoy, according to Jakobson, "hair on an upper lip" or a handbag serve as evocative embodiments of the entire characters to whom they belong; for Conrad, however, the "expression," "skinny forefinger," "white cuffs," and "varnished boots" are, instead, merely perceived details, signs failing to evoke anything or anyone beyond themselves.
The figure which above all defines Heart of Darkness as something other than realist in its epistemology and style is the synecdochal representation of "voice." Like the "expression," "forefinger," "cuffs," and "boots" in the passage just cited, "voice" in Heart of Darkness is not an expressive trace of the fully human, but a material sign, a part-object standing for nothing beyond itself.(19) Few critics of Heart of Darkness have failed to comment on its embedded narrative structure, in which an unnamed frame narrator introduces Marlow, the narrator whose spoken tale constitutes most of the novel. To the already copious commentary on this doubled narrative structure, I would add only the observation that the two narrators offer very different representations of the problem of writing’s relationship to speech, and of the relationship of speech and writing to a referent. The novel begins by establishing a sharp distinction between its two narrators, the frame narrator who is not actually a speaker but a scribe, and Marlow, who speaks the story which the frame narrator records within quotation marks. Speech had always, in the western philosophical and literary tradition, promised greater access to human presence than writing. In modern western cultures, it appears to come from a source within the body which can only be the self itself. In the era of the phonograph and telephone, however, speech begins to lose this transparency. The frame narrator, like all narrators in nineteenth-century mimetic fiction, offers writing as an unproblematic imitation of speech. In writing that "[b]etween us there was as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea" (7), he suggests that speech comes straight from the body and is simply captured in writing. Literary realism relies on such a conventional trust in the mimetic relationship between writing and speech. In Marlow’s narrative, on the contrary, the relationship between writing and speech devolves from the answer to a problem which had been solved by the time of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen,(20) and becomes itself a distinctively late-nineteenth-century problem. That there may indeed be no natural relationship between speech and the body, as Marlow’s narrative suggests, poses a new problem for authorship. The interruption of the frame narrator by Marlow’s words in quotation marks - "’And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’" (9) - thus stages the conflict between two competing theories of representation: one the lingua franca of the nineteenth-century novel, the other emergent, inchoate, its effects and consequences still undefined.
Conrad’s utopian scene of communal storytelling in the novel’s first pages is
soon disturbed, as the frame narrator interrupts Marlow, some way into his
narration, to observe that
[i]t had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. . . . I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by the narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (30)
In contrast with the Accountant, Lawyer, and Director, Marlow is named and his personality evoked. As he becomes the narrator, however, he turns into what a member of his audience describes as "no more to us than a voice." In this way, Conrad evokes a model of language and speech in which the "voice" drifts from the body, articulates "without human lips," and so provokes something like the same "faint uneasiness" with which Conrad responded to the demonstration of the phonograph. The "faint uneasiness" is an auditor’s perception of the eeriness of a voice that may be understood "without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source," as Edison puts it. The frame narrator’s narrowing of focus from "the sentence" to "the word," in his effort to pull from Marlow’s speech a "clue" that will operate as a traditional synecdoche and conjure the whole, seems a necessary response to a narrative technique which disavows the natural connection between a speaker and his words. Faced with such a self-shaping narrative, a listener must weigh each word, each linguistic fragment, as a separate unit of information. Thus, it is fair to say, Heart of Darkness begins with an exemplary representation of "storytelling" in Benjamin’s terms. As the narrative advances, however, an auditor’s experience of others listening empties out into a solipsistic, isolated perception of voice-without-body that is only occasionally interrupted by fleeting reminders of the shipboard community. As Marlow retraces his own journey toward the voice of Kurtz, he gradually disembodies his own narrating voice, denying the reassurance of a ground of corporeal identity or a community of listeners.
Surely the only truly memorable voices in Heart of Darkness are the voice of Marlow’s narration and the equally eerie voice he describes, that of Kurtz. But it is worth noting that the work also describes in passing many others, the native African speakers who "shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany" (66). There is little doubt of his culture’s racism in Marlow’s - and perhaps Conrad’s - reduction of the Africans’ language to senseless bits of noise, but the representation of these voices serves another important purpose as well. The speech of the Africans stands as the limit-point of Conrad’s perception of language as fragmentary, detachable phonemes, patterns of sound waves.(21) Marlow’s description of the utterances of the Africans on shore represents speech as simply one synecdochal fragment among many - like "feet," "hands," or "eyes," pieces of the human perceived as isolated fragments, as in a Cubist painting:
But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roots, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless fatigue. (37)
In 1898 a writer could reduce the bodies and language of Africans to a collection of isolated parts without too greatly shocking his readers with the attenuation of the "human" in such a discourse, since Africans were not considered fully human to begin with. But Conrad did not reserve such treatment only for those shadowy figures along the side of the Congo.
The voice that Heart of Darkness privileges as its narrative destination belongs to Kurtz, Conrad’s portrayal of whom tests the limits of realist intelligibility in the condensation and reduction of a character into pure voice and speech. When Marlow initially tells his listeners about the rumors he heard circulating about a certain mysterious figure named Kurtz, Conrad appears to be using the social mechanism of rumor and reputation in a manner familiar to any novel reader.(22) But the subsequent depiction of Kurtz reveals these rumors as speech about speech - speech that fails to provide any access to the person himself. We find that rumor lacks any connection to extra-discursive reality, which calls into question mimetic realism itself in a way that earlier fiction did not. If the "horror" ascribed to Kurtz has something to do with his status as an individual who becomes nothing more nor less than his voice, then his representation suggests the experience - new to Conrad and his readers in the late 1890s - of hearing someone’s voice reproduced by a phonograph.(23)
"I made the strange discovery," Marlow says about his initial disappointment at the thought that he may never meet Kurtz, "that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will never see him,’ or ‘Now I will never shake him by the hand,’ but ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man presented himself as a voice" (48). It is in these terms that Marlow explodes in a frustrated outburst to his listeners regarding the man, whom he describes as "very little more than a voice":
I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard - him - it - this voice - other voices - all of them were so little more than voices - and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like the dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, savage, or simply mean without any kind of sense. (48-49)
Conrad represents Marlow’s stuttering perception of a "voice" that fails to articulate or lead back to a clear identity, a voice that seems almost to "mean without any kind of sense." "Hearing" hesitates in its desire to attach itself to a stable object, stumbles and backs away from a personal identity ("him") to "it," and then to "voice" and "voices." The designations "I," "him," "voice," "other voices," function as part-objects that fail in their expected role as signifiers of the human source from which they were supposed to issue forth. Conrad represents these words as exchangeable linguistic fragments, non-mimetic phonemes detached from any represented objects or persons.
In his refusal to confirm any natural relationship between speech and writing, he suggests that his culture has left far behind a (nostalgically recalled) scene of storytelling framed around a storyteller who can be grasped as simultaneously a member of the community and as an author-function. Storytelling eventually gives way to an "immense jabber," a "dying vibration," recalling those "various vibrations of waves" he alluded to in his letter to Garnett. I do not think it is too much to say that Marlow’s lament, "the memory of that time lingers around me, impalpable, like the dying vibration of one immense jabber," like his curse of too much senseless memory, owes a precise debt to the new paradigm of sound, voice, and memory introduced by the phonograph: the device that promised to create "an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying into nothingness what deserves only temporary life" ("What Will Come of the Phonograph?" 881).
Since Kurtz is language and speech, it is only logical that Marlow should describe him physically by seizing upon his mouth as the partial detail which stands for the whole. In this case, however, the part displaces that whole:
I saw him open his mouth wide - it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. . . . The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. (59-60)
Kurtz has been associated from the beginning with a charismatic flow of language: "of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness" (48). To represent his anti-hero’s mendacious eloquence, Conrad draws on a scientific vocabulary of electricity and sound waves, those "vibrations of waves (electricity, heat, sound, light etc.)" he discusses in his letter. Kurtz produces a "magic current of phrases" (51), a "stream of light." In this Edison-haunted, electrical text, Conrad depicts Kurtz’s language as, quite exactly, a "stream" or "flow," human utterance distilled to the components of technologically-reproduced sound. Kurtz "electrified large meetings" (71). His voice is "profound, vibrating" (60). It sounds "far off and yet loud like a hail through a speaking-trumpet" (64). The power of the man is inextricable from an uncanny verbal ability that vacillates between presence and absence, distance and terrifying clarity. This is also the vacillation of the phonograph.
As the novel proceeds, the reader begins to understand that Marlow’s long narration - dazzling in its own right - is an extended rumination over the problem of what to do with Kurtz’s words, which have been, as it were, entrusted to Marlow. Heart of Darkness resolves into a plot concerning the fate of Kurtz’s final words, "The horror! The horror!" as Marlow returns to civilization bearing the memory of Kurtz and the obligation to convey the memory to his fiancee, the Intended. When Marlow proclaims, "He lived then before me, he lived then as much as he ever did" (72), he could almost be contemplating the possibility that the human voice was now immortal. If last words carried special significance before the phonograph, I would argue, they carry another kind of burden afterward. Last words were no longer the end of voice but the beginning of its reproduction as voice alone. Kurtz is, in a sense, a test case for the Edisonian project of recording and passing on the last words of "great men," a social practice that relies on the faith that the meaning of such words, which has its source in their human origin, can be successfully transmitted. Such optimism is ruled out by Conrad’s representation of speech as sound which, once spoken, acquires the status of the authorless "vibrations" of an impersonal universe.(24)
Heart of Darkness concludes with Marlow returning from his journey to encounter an audience eager to consume his story not simply as language but as the traces of the human presence of Kurtz. The final scene with the Intended restages the problem posed by the novel’s opening, where Conrad posed storytelling in contrast to a new kind of disembodied transmittal of narrative. Prior to the era of the phonograph, up to the 1880s, the novel’s relationship to speech seemed a dormant issue, if not a problem solved. Around the time of the phonograph’s introduction, however, the issue of the relationship between literature, writing, and speech reemerged as a problem. Conrad represents and reproduces voice much as his readers imagined the phonograph did. In doing so, Conrad may seem to reincarnate the pre-modern figure of the storyteller for a modern age. But his mimesis of a storyteller is far from nostalgic or regressive, suggesting, finally, that voice is itself a kind of writing, and that like writing, voice lacks any natural or stable connection to the identity or author-figure from whom it emerged. Heart of Darkness begins in the voice of an unnamed frame narrator whose words acknowledge no distinction between voice and writing, a storyteller/scribe in whom those two identifies do not seem to be in conflict. He is the kind of narrator that nineteenth-century fiction since Jane Austen had consistently produced, a seamless author/speaker in whose "voice" the novel passes itself off as a sort of storytelling in print. Yet when this narrator introduces Marlow, Heart of Darkness veers off in a new direction, seeming precisely to mimic a pre-modern oral storytelling situation, yet also revealing a new understanding of speech as itself equally disembodied and ungrounded as writing.
The painful irony of the novel’s conclusion, then, lies in its staging of a confrontation between two understandings of language. One, embodied in the Intended, assumes that speech sums up a person’s life and intentions, stands as a successful synecdoche of the whole person. The other insists instead on the autonomy and materiality of language, its status as what we might call failed synecdoche: a piece of a person which no longer bears any natural connection to its human origin. In this understanding of language, "his voice" or "my voice," once articulated, enters a circulation of utterances in which authority and embodiment are swept away: "I heard - him - it - this voice - other voices - all of them were so little more than voices." From Conrad’s perspective, the new understanding of language not only points the way to literary innovation but also represents a frightening erasure of the human source and ground of language.
The Intended, in her sentimental yearning for a verbal memento of Kurtz in a conventional deathbed ending, seems to stand for the feminized Victorian reader, a consumer of language whose desire for narrative is indistinguishable from a desire for the preservation of lost human presence. In Marlow’s exchange with her, Conrad dramatizes a conflict of expectations regarding the reproduction of speech, as she insists on a kind of reproduction Marlow will not provide:
"’I heard his very last words. . . .’ I stopped in a fright.
"’Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want - I want - something - something - to - to live with.’
"I was at the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them.’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us. in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’" (75)
The command to "repeat them" begs for the revival of a lost presence promised by the reproduction of speech, and her stuttered "I want - I want - something - something - to - to" seems almost to enact such a reproduction. Conrad foregrounds the desire in her reception of language, figuring her as a consumer with grandiose "want[s]." What she so desires is a verbal reproduction of a deathbed scene resembling Tennyson’s, in which a great man’s final words may be reproduced and disseminated as tokens of the entire man, the entire life. But Marlow finally cannot bring himself to pronounce Kurtz’s "whispered cry" (72): "I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether" (76). In that ominous "first whisper of a rising wind," one hears the sound of the mechanistic universe Conrad described in his letter, a sound which brings new understanding to Marlow’s final speech act, his refusal to reproduce Kurtz’s last words.
Conrad’s novel began with a scene of communal storytelling, and both the novel and Marlow’s story end with another scene of oral transmission, as Marlow must decide what to pass on to Kurtz’s fiancee. Marlow refuses to make his voice the means of the repetition the Intended yearns for, but he does, in a sense, give her what she wants all the same - a comforting (if untrue) representation of Kurtz’s last words: "your name" (75). That is, he gives her what Edison promised the phonograph would provide, a gift of final or otherwise significant words preserved forever in recorded memory, words which would satisfy a need for special language transcending the contingency of everyday speech. By substituting "your name" for "the horror," Marlow effectively reinstates human presence at the site of its erasure,(25) suggesting that there is no social space for actual last words. No one really wants an exact phonographic reproduction of the last syllables - garbled, pathetic, or frightening - uttered by a man, great or otherwise. What is desired is, rather, an improved version of such an utterance, a representation of last words as a satisfying summary of a life - like Tennyson’s citation of Shakespeare - to ward off the autonomous sound waves both Conrad’s novel and the phonograph suggest them to be. In order to deliver the commodity of a deathbed scene, Marlow has to lie - thus exposing the lie that speech can convey the presence and identity of its speaker.
Heart of Darkness travels away from an idealized scene of storytelling toward the disembodied voice of a circulating textuality. Yet ultimately the novel does not fully embrace such an understanding of language as anonymous and fragmentary circulation. Instead, it seeks to reimpose a new kind of storytelling and authorship on that textuality. Marlow’s final refusal to reproduce Kurtz’s phrase "The horror! The horror!" at one level signals Conrad’s ambition to resist technological reproduction, to craft a literary prose which will retain the aura of non-reproducible language in a world of repetition. By offering the Intended a comforting deathbed scene that conjures human presence, Marlow distances himself from the workings of a mechanical universe and its authorless, inhuman language. But unlike Marlow, who draws away from the "horror" of disembodied phonographic language, Conrad hears the "first whisper of a rising wind" and does not close his ears to it, recognizing the sound of such a universe as the harbinger of a new literature, a transformed realism. In writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad adapts a new mode of representation from the realm of mechanical reproduction for his own literary purposes.
But, I must quickly add, this scientific appropriation does not observe the rule usually thought to govern the relationship between modernism and mass culture. It is a truism that modernists developed formal techniques across the arts in order to transform the material of mass culture into forms that would preserve aura, presence, and elite tradition from its degrading homogeneity and repetition. This formula, generated by modernism itself, has dominated the way we understand the relationship between high and low culture around the turn of the century. But this definition of "technique" and its objectives does not account for the relationship I have described between Conrad’s novel and Edison’s phonograph. We have to consider the common etymological origin of "technique" and "technology" in the Greek root of "art," if we are to rethink the relationship I have been pursuing in late-Victorian terms. To say that the formal technique of literature appropriates and transforms mass culture is to imply a cultural hierarchy, whereby the art of technique trumps the mechanics of technology.
At Conrad’s moment, however, the art of fiction had in no way achieved authority over technology. Such a formal technique as Conrad’s figure of disembodied voice - a use of synecdoche that became even more pervasive in the later modernist fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, as well as the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound - has imaginative and cultural roots in technology. Despite their very different materials, both Edison and Conrad are technicians of meaning and inscription. Thus it is more accurate to consider Edison’s technology as another act of the imagination, one motivated by the same individual and cultural drives we are accustomed to restrict to production of literature and the fine arts. Nor does Conrad’s own art stand aloof from the workings and discoveries of technology, then, but positions itself exactly within the discursive problematics that technology had created by the end of the nineteenth century.
Brown University
NOTES
This article has benefitted from the suggestions and criticisms of Mary Ann Doane, John Plotz, Tamar Katz, Jay Clayton, Garrett Sullivan, James Eli Adams, and two anonymous readers for Victorian Studies. For generous readings of multiple drafts, special thanks to Nancy Armstrong. Earlier versions were presented at the 1995 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference, "The Exhibition of Cultures," at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, and at the 1995 Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, "Information and Entropy," at Indiana University.
1 For the clearest and liveliest account of the early history of the phonograph, see Roland Gelatt. Read and Welch’s book offers more detail, especially about the complex legal battles surrounding patents for the phonograph, graphophone, and gramophone; V. K. Chew gives a concise overview. Both Robert Conot’s and Wyn Wachhorst’s biographical works on Edison are very useful. Also see Theodose Du Moncel (1879) for a contemporary commentary on the phonograph and related technologies.
2 Dave Laing argues that the advent of the phonograph marked an epistemic shift in the culture’s experience of music: "[P]opular music in this century has been so dominated by records and radio that we are in danger of overlooking what must have been a vital shift in the experience of listening to music: the replacement of an audio-visual event with a primarily audio one, sound without vision. . . . Unlike vaudeville performances or family recitals, the phonograph offered a disembodied voice" (7). My argument is that the experience of this "disembodied voice" was not only a musical phenomenon, but extended throughout the culture.
3 See Jennifer Wicke on "disenchantment" and "re-enchantment" in modernity.
4 Fredric Jameson has influentially argued that "[a] case could be made for reading Conrad not as an early modernist, but rather as an anticipation of that later and quite different thing we have come to call variously textuality, ecriture, post-modernism, or schizophrenic writing" (219). He points to "the first half of Lord Jim . . . [as] one of the most breathtaking exercises in nonstop textual production that our literature has to show, a self-generating sequence of sentences for which narrative and narrator are mere pretexts" (219).
5 Other important representations of phonographic devices in British and American modernism include the graphophone at the conclusion of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), and the gramophone in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) that makes "the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong" (76). There is an entire French novel, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s fascinating Tomorrow’s Eve, narrated by a fictional Thomas Edison who, among other things, complains about the public’s impatience with his failure to improve the phonograph (the novel was published in 1886, nine years after the phonograph’s invention but two years before the "perfected phonograph" of 1888). For a discussion of Tomorrow’s Eve, see Miller-Frank, who argues that "the importance of the phonograph in Villiers’s novel reveals much about its role in the history of the times and about the cultural reception of technological innovation" (144).
6 I owe thanks to James Lastra for drawing my attention to Edison’s two important essays, "The Phonograph and its Future" and "The Perfected Phonograph."
7 One finds echoes of Edison’s comments on the recording of last words throughout contemporary writings on the phonograph. See, for instance, Frederick Garbit’s 1878 monograph: "As a means of preserving the last words, the words of wisdom, the best thoughts of our nearest and dearest friends; of retaining and reproducing the oratorial and literary gems of our great statesmen, philosophers, poets and philanthropists, it will outvie in economy, accuracy and safety, all previous conveyances" (12).
8 Nineteenth-century photography is, of course, a vast topic in its own right, and one to which far more critical attention has been devoted than to the phonograph. See Barthes and Cavell on photography’s links to death and absence; Davidson on death, memory, and photography in the context of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Suffice it to say here that in the last decades of the nineteenth century, doubts were overtaking the photographic image, doubts which were in some senses parallel to those assailing phonograph recordings. Such a novel as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) capitalizes on the perception that the link between photographic image and object was beginning to seem increasingly tenuous. In comparing the two technologies in terms of their claims to representational realism, I would suggest this important difference. While a photograph of a person reduces the individual to a surface, it does in some way seem to represent (or, to use Cavell’s term, transcribe) the entire person; no phonograph recording, on the other hand, does more than transcribe the voice, one part of the person.
9 Mark Seltzer writes that "the entire question of the referentiality of later nineteenth-century writing might be reconsidered in terms of . . . technologies of automatic and immediate registration" in "[p]ractices of dictation, registration, and material impression, such as that of the typewriter key on paper or the spoken sound on the phonographic plate" (196). He claims there were "radical recompositions of writing and information-technologies at the turn of the century" (197), and calls for a reconsideration of the literature of the period in the light of these recompositions. I think of my argument in similar terms.
10 As Friedrich Kittler argues, "phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase" (Discourse 237). Also see Kittler, "Gramophone."
11 See Thomas Richards’s discussion of the idealism of a Victorian imperial archive - an imaginary collection of all possible knowledge - and its eventual disillusionment as "the possibility of positive knowledge . . . [began] to be eclipsed by an explosion of too much positive knowledge" (76).
12 See Andreas Huyssen, who argues that for modernism, mass culture and women were linked as embodying that which must be excluded from artistic production:
"[T]hus the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the ‘wrong’ kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tries to stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture" (196). I should note that much as I admire Huyssen’s analysis of the abject status of mass culture within modernism, I do not find this analysis fully adequate to an understanding of Conrad’s relationship to the technology, of the phonograph - as I argue at the close of this paper.
13 Wyn Wachhorst discusses the phonograph in the context of the shift from what Lewis Mumford calls the "paleotechnic" to the "neotechnic" phases of technology. "The former, associated with coal and iron, was based primarily on the steam engine. The latter, associated with such things as alloys, synthetics, elasticity, electricity, and automation, was born with the dynamo. . . . With much justice, Edison came to be viewed as the father of the new electrical age. . . . [H]is phonograph [was] the precursor of all modern forms of mechanical memory. . . . The phonograph seems to have been the first machine to awaken the mass mind to the potential of the neotechnic revolution" (22-23).
14 In the critical literature, Conrad’s fiction, and Heart of Darkness in particular, tends to be read in terms of late-Victorian anxiety following Lord Kelvin’s formulation of the second law of thermodynamics - as in Ian Watt’s discussion of the novel’s "astrophysical pessimism" (154).
15 In 1888, a representative of Edison had demonstrated the "perfected" phonograph in London and received some publicity, but little effort was made to market the technology for yet another decade. "Until the mid-Nineties, Europe remained on the periphery of phonographic affairs and depended solely on exports from American factories" (101), Roland Gelatt writes, but "with the arrival of shipments from Hanover and Camden in the fall of 1898, [gramophone promoter] William Barry Owen proceeded to treat Great Britain to the kind of shock tactics he had learned at home. . . . He was one of the first advertisers to take full pages in London newspapers, and he observed none of the customary British reticence in his layouts and copy" (106).
16 Bette London also discusses Heart of Darkness in the context of this letter, by way of very interesting reflections on the novel as a sort of proleptic meditation on the not-yet-invented technology. of the polygraph (29-58). I wish to argue for a more literal reading of the letter’s relationship with the novel. London uses the letter as a point of departure for a reading of Heart of Darkness in terms of twentieth-century technologies of voice which the novel seems almost to prefigure; this essay considers Conrad in terms of the Victorian technologies with which he was in fact familiar.
17 In a discussion of Conrad in the context of Benjamin, Edward Said writes, "Conrad had the dubious pleasure of witnessing within his own double life the change from storytelling as useful, communal art to novel-writing as essentialized, solitary art" (125). See also Brooks 238-63, and White 108-29.
18 There are, of course, important precedents for Conrad’s use of synecdoche. Almost fifty years ago, Dorothy Van Ghent first characterized "the Dickens world" as governed by a process of reification in which people become things, and vice versa. "[S]eeing the parts of the body as separable and manipulable" (421), Dickens renders characters as assemblages of autonomous pieces, Van Ghent argues, so that, for example, in Hard Times "the Coketown ‘hands’ have become approximately reduced to those members for which they are named" (424). More recently, Eve Sedgwick has argued that in Dickens "one thing that goes on when the human body is taken as a capitalist emblem is that the relations of parts to wholes become problematic; . . . the parts swell up with accumulated value, they take on an autonomous life of their own" (170). Andrew Miller links Conrad to Dickens in terms of both authors’ deployment of a literary technique registering "social and psychological processes particular to the fragmentation resultant from a routinized life" (156-57). I cite this precedent in order to call attention to the difference between Conrad’s synecdochal representation of "voice" and Dickens’s use of compulsive behavioral tics - including verbal ones - to suggest what Victorian industrial culture does to individuals. The logic of Dickens technique might be described as that of the commodity fetish, under the spell of which things and people become, as commodities, exchangeable and indistinguishable. Within Conrad’s time frame, however, "voice," far from entering the circulation of commodity fetishism as just another autonomous, decontextualized thing, gains an eerie power all its own.
19 For other discussions of voice in Heart of Darkness - arguments with which my own to some degree overlap - see Said, Pecora, Brooks 238-63, J. Hillis Miller, London 29-58, and Kahane 127-50. In an early poststructuralist account of Conrad, Edward Said argues that "what Conrad discovered was that the chasm between words saving and words meaning was widened, not lessened, by his talent for words written" (116), and that the role of speech and voice in Conrad’s narrative is typically to mediate between "saying" and "meaning." "[T]he dramatic protocol of much of Conrad’s fiction," Said notes, "is the swapped yarn, the historical report, the commonly exchanged legend, the musing recollection" (119). Vincent Pecora argues that "in modernism the problem of voice is implicitly tied to the problem of the philosophical subject . . . as it is explored by nineteenth-century philosophy" (994), and discusses voice in Heart of Darkness in the context of the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida. Brooks, although he is less interested in speech and voice as such than in storytelling, retelling, and narrative, observes that "[l]ike Kurtz himself, Marlow has become a disembodied voice" (259). J. Hillis Miller speculates and comments valuably on the "disembodied voices" of Heart of Darkness, focussing on some of the same passages that I do here. See my footnote above on London. In a recent book, Claire Kahane assays a psychoanalytic approach to speech in Heart of Darkness, arguing that in it "the circulation of the voice becomes an ambivalent means of sustaining the fraternal bond that is civilization, the symbolic order" (136). She focusses on Conrad’s representation of the Intended in the novel’s conclusion to argue that Conrad depicts and participates in "a desire for an omnipotent language, the desire to speak to a listener, and specifically a male listener, who will totally understand" (138).
20 The aspiration of eighteenth-century authors to control vernacular language by the means of writing is perhaps most vividly exemplified in Samuel Johnson’s "Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language" (1755). Johnson describes the state of confusing disarray in which he found his native language: "When I took the first survey of my undertaking," he writes, "I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated" (277). "As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written" (278), he admits, describing his own task as the bringing of order and authority to the "arbitrary representation of sounds by letters" (278). In the work of the eighteenth-century novelists who were the inheritors of Johnson’s Dictionary we see the fruits of his labors: the chaos of oral vernacular mastered by the writing of literature.
21 See Michael North for a discussion of non-European and non-white speech as "murmur, rumor, mutter, or tumult" (42) in Conrad. North reads Conrad’s The Nigger of the "Narcissus" in terms of the threat posed to linguistic meaning by vocal sound, and to standard English by non-European speech.
22 Gossip and rumor, as Patricia Spacks and other critics have shown, are central discursive strategies of realist fiction.
23 I want to acknowledge here that my initial thinking about the relevance of phonographic reproduction of voice to Heart of Darkness was, in part, inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), which brilliantly mobilizes scenes of the recording and reproduction of voice. Long before we see his grotesque physical form, for example, we hear Marlon Brando’s voice, captured uttering mad pronouncements on fugitive radio waves, re-played as evidence for Martin Sheen on a handheld tape recorder: Coppola thus renders Conrad’s delayed presentation of Kurtz through rumor and hearsay prior to his representation as a body. In one of the film’s most notorious scenes, a formation of U.S. helicopters swoops over the waves as a recording of Richard Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkyries" blasts over the water towards the Vietcong village about to be destroyed. And when the young rock-and-roll fan who is one of Marlow/Sheen’s companions on the trip toward Kurtz/Brando is killed by an arrow, we hear an audio letter from his mother which he had just put into the tape recorder, the halting, loving words emerging horrifyingly as the film’s soundtrack to the boy’s death.
24 Vincent Pecora makes a similar point, arguing that Kurtz’s final words are "overdetermined by the cultural expectations of the dying man’s ‘last words.’. . . [T]he hermeneutical dilemma these words provide for Marlow needs to be understood for what it is: Marlow is faced (as are we) with words that could mean any number of things, but are supposed to mean something fairly important and, in the end, justifying, reassuring, edifiying" (1001).
25 We might consider Marlow’s gift to the Intended of a supposed reproduction of the sound of her name in the light of Theodor Adorno’s comment on the narcissism of gramophone listening: "What the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself, and the artist merely offers him a substitute for the sounding image of his own person, which he would like to safeguard as a possession. The only reason that he accords the record such value is because he himself could also be just as well preserved. Most of the time records are virtual photographs of their owners, flattering photographs - ideologies" (54).
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IVAN KREILKAMP is completing a dissertation on Victorian literature, storytelling, and oral performance at Brown University.