The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice

The theory and history of the modernist novel traditionally emphasizes a shift away from "telling" towards "showing." The project argues that the overly visual account of modernism misses a crucial opportunity to "hear" modernist narrative and composition. The project is an acoustics of modernist narrative backed by two case studies, the work of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. These writers propose a way of listening to the modernist novel and to the neglected importance of sounds and voices within it. I attend to Conrad's peculiar transnational voice, Faulkner's regional, southern voice, and their shared sensitivity to the physical, rhetorical, and musical properties of speech and writing. In Chapter One, "The Incanted Image: Vision, Silence, and Belonging in Conrad's Theory of the Novel," I pose an alternative reading of Conrad's famous 1897 preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus". I argue that Conrad's theory articulates his struggle to realize a form of narrative vision that might neutralize the most troubling effects of embodied voice. His theory of the novel, his struggle with voice, isolated him from his contemporaries while opening up new possibilities for the genre. Chapter Two, "Waiting for the Voice: Echo, Trope, and Narrative as Acoustic Displacement," recuperates the acoustical and rhetorical dimension of Conradian narrative voice, largely illustrated by his famous storyteller, Marlow. I argue that in Conrad's early narratives, a dramatic voice is separated from the speaker's body in order to occupy the listener's own. This voice is one effect of Conrad's attempts both to theorize and craft a narrative that might appeal to his English reader's sense of kinship. Exterior to that voice, however, is a pulsing world of sound. On the one hand, Conrad's problems concerning his perceived foreign voice appear in "displaced," racialized form through the sonic register of his novels, particularly those of non-European domains. On the other hand, there is a sonic imaginary "echoing" throughout letters, memoirs, and early novels that allow us to rethink the phrase, "the author's voice." In Chapter Three, "An Unorchestrated Voice: Faulkner, Song, and The Politics of Archival Listening," I argue that Conrad's sense of readerly involvement with the acoustical influenced Faulkner to a radical extent. Faulkner develops the novel as what I call an "archival" phenomenon, a haunting of narrative and the act of composition by sounds and voices. He registers the echoes of any one voice as it is accompanied by other voices that condition it, Faulkner tarrying in particular with sonic legacy of slavery. In his practice of composition, Faulkner revisits several voices and sounds that move between bodies, across gender and race. At the level of acoustics, this movement composes a compelling, modernist critique of racial identity. In that way, I conclude the project with a theory of an acoustical approach to literary history, one with significance beyond modernism.