‘A sinister resonance’: Vibration, sound, and the birth of conrad’s Marlow

Abstract

A formalised theory of modernism finds one pronouncement in the 1909 critical preface to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which James lauds a new sense of vision: ‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million - a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.’2 These windows do not ‘open straight upon life’. Each is equipped with ‘a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other’ (PL, 7). James invokes neither biography nor the psychology of the writer but rather the ‘posted presence of the watcher’, a centre of consciousness positioned within the novel itself. As Douglas turns his back upon the group of listeners around the hearth in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), one might say that the Anglo-American novel lost its voice, an orally based aesthetic being, as it had been for Flaubert, synonymous with all that prevented the novel from achieving aesthetic freedom. In his 1921 study of French and English fiction, The Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock ratified this aesthetic to argue that the modern novelist resists ‘a long and sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must establish definite terms’.3.