The Fact of Resonance

Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form

Julie Beth Napolin

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823288168
  9780823288175
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823288182
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism's question "who speaks?" in the hidden acoustical questions "who hears?" and "who listens?"

For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature's ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. "Resonance" opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that "drift" through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music.

A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for "resonance" as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of "voice" and "sound" across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book's engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

I wish to search out that single sound which is in itself so strong that it can confront silence.

—Toru Takemitsu

I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby.

—Trinh T. Minh-ha

1

VOICE AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE AUDIBLE: FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE AND THE COLONIAL SPACE OF READING

THE POWER TO BEGIN

He begins with the shout of a woman:

“Kaspar! Makan!”

I leave the quotation suspended, lingering on its interruptive power of beginning. Who is speaking? What is the voice saying? Where is the voice coming from?

The woman who calls will be referred to by the narrator simply as “Mrs. Almayer,” a married name, Dutch and paternal. The name bears no trace of her Sulu origins yet showcases her rank within the colonial household: She is by Dutch law a proper wife yet not separable conceptually from a “concubine,” “mistress,” “maid,” or, in colonial Malay, a nyai.¹ We will never know by what name she might have been originally called. She calls out a first name, but she is not herself called by one. The name is uninscribed.

The shout, the reader quickly learns on its heels, is addressed to Kaspar Almayer, a Javanese Dutch trader who gazes out absentmindedly at the Pantai River. The anonymous, third-person narrator obeys Almayer’s desire and ignores the woman, floating into his reveries. For Almayer, the shout’s only significance is its nonsignificance. Left untranslated on the page, the phrase appears as a mere signifier, a racial linguistic mark. It takes approximately eight pages for the shout to be translated and even then, obliquely, when Almayer awakens from his day-dreams of gold and wealth: We learn that “he had a hazy recollection of having been called some time during the evening by his wife. To his dinner probably” (AF, 11).

One anticipates that a Victorian work of fiction will begin with some sort of utterance that is in close proximity to authorial speech, an authoritative “voiceover” in the third person that overlays the world of the novel, establishing a time and place.² This shout, quickly followed by the consciousness of someone who refuses to listen, is a puzzling beginning for a writer who would worry so much about reaching and convincing his English readers.

Yet something of Conrad’s beginning flouts late-nineteenth-century conventions. The shout erupts onto the page as the return of the repressed of the modernist doxa of showing—the belief, epitomized by James, that the writer “should recede into the background” to narrate “a succession of dramatically presented fictional scenes.”³ For James, the novel is illustrative, driven by the artist’s “power to guess the unseen from the seen” and to “convert” the impression of the moment into the reality of the “concrete image.”⁴ It is as if Conrad predicts a much later moment, one memorably described by Mark McGurl as the period in which Anglo-American fiction writers abandoned the Jamesian ideal to advocate writing as an act of “miming the emotional, improvisational rhythms of a spoken voice … necessarily an embodied voice.”⁵ Yet Conrad’s opening shout, his first words as a published novelist, is neither “impersonal” nor “improvisational.”

The shout, issued across a colonial fictional space, forces us to confront an aesthetic principle for which impersonality has no descriptive power.⁶

What if, in pursuit of this colonial fictional space, we were to presume for this shout a series of textual sound effects? These effects send us not to the quantum of Conrad’s “voice,” an ethical causality of his identity and exoticism, but to sensorial contact with the page. As an optical artifact, the words “Kaspar! Makan!” are invested with some ability to communicate a phonemic sound to the English-speaking reader. The words are syllabic. I sound them out, recognizing the first as a name. But the second remains without sense, untranslated from a language unknown by me.

Readers unfamiliar with Malay only learn later, as Almayer’s reverie draws to a close in the first chapter, that the opening shout is a command (makan, “eat”). Yet the exclamation mark in the text allows the English-speaking reader to call upon an imperative verb and, with it, the modal dimension of grammar, that is, its “mood.”⁷

When Gérard Genette begins the chapter in Narrative Discourse dedicated to mood, he returns to the famous section on poetry in Plato’s Republic to account for the origins of the distinction between telling and showing, diegesis and mimesis. It is a foundational distinction between the poet who speaks as himself and the poet who speaks “as if he were someone else.”⁸ All of narrative comes down to “two data,” Genette writes, “the quantity of narrative information” and “the absence (or minimal presence) of the informer.”⁹ It’s on the basis of this data that Genette critiques the cardinal distinction between showing and telling, finding them to be interrelated: “Pretending to show is pretending to be silent.”¹⁰ But really, Genette should have said “pretending to be ‘silent,’” for he never entertains a sonic trace, a claim upon writing and reading for sounding. This “voice” is haunted by a displaced acoustics (making chōreō, or the opening of space for sound and movement, its Greek twin). But so, too, is modernism. When James and Lubbock argue that the art of the novel is not to tell but to show, a series of aural events get cast out, such as voices that do not tell but shout, cry, or scream, and voices that are never actually vocalized.

Though Genette begins with textual effects, he never sheds a dependence on orality, which becomes in his system what Hale argues to be an ontological referent, neutral and transcendental.¹¹ His sense of writing is attenuated by an oral paradigm that achieves a priori autonomy: The storyworld is a totality whose vocal qualities writing simply represents. Genette’s system presumes that one knows what the words on the page mean, what they say, what they sound like. In relation to narrative theory, then, we find ourselves on unfamiliar ground.

With the exclamation point, I imagine a shout, even if I do not yet fantasize its timbre; it is a kind of shape of a sound that calls across a distance. Untranslated, unattributed, and unnarrated, a vocal shard simply erupts into the world that, in that same instant, claims to create it. In imagining the shout, I imagine it has been transliterated and inscribed. (One could just as easily claim that from an inscription, one imagines a shout and that it has been transliterated.) If the exclamation marks, for the English-speaking reader, the existence of the imperative mood, then it marks a demand for immediate presence, that is, an absence, a paradox heightened by the delayed translation of Malay into English.

It is through punctuation and grammatical mood, then, that text becomes sound. “Hear me! Hear that I am addressing you!” says the exclamation and the imperative. It also says, “Listen! Listen to what I am saying!” There is an elliptical movement between inscription and sound, sound and inscription. It would seem, then, that from the moment we try to think the untranslated shout within Genette’s system, it thrusts us outside: The oral is not a stable referent outside of the text but caught up in a transposition or sliding between text and sound.

The demand is to “hear” difference, to recognize its imperative on the scene. “Conrad confronts his readers with these unexplained foreign sounds at the very threshold of his first work to emphasize the radical difference of what is to follow,” writes Michael North.¹² For North, Conrad inaugurates a “dialect modernism” but also a studied reflection on the transformations and standardization of English. By this logic, Conrad “speaks,” as it were, through the foreign woman; he speaks “as if he were someone else,” announcing the difference of his modernism, the foreignness of his “voice.” The shout would then be akin to Gustave Flaubert’s famous announcement “Madame Bovary c’est moi.” But to make such a claim would be to overleap the ambiguously erotic-affective dimension—a hegemonically gendered and racialized dimension—of Conrad’s announcement (if, indeed, it is an announcement at all). It is precisely the dimension that the shout, in its textual sound effects, demands we consider.

Such a consideration will prove to be significant to the theory of the novel as a sound technology—in its production of space and an imaginary acoustics—and an acousmatic technology of voice—in the invention of free indirect discourse, the writer “speaking” as if he were someone else. Someone, a subaltern woman, is narrated into existence. A narrator simultaneously voices itself; it “speaks” in her borrowed sound and name.¹³ Though we take Conrad as our point of departure, we will find that such an invention cannot be thought outside of colonial difference. This difference is not a “content” that can be removed from or added to the novel: The novel and its sound are colonial-racial forms. The question “who hears?” is never far from “who speaks?” or from “who can speak?” and “who can hear?” and “where is the voice heard?”

Writing himself into existence as an English author, Conrad already gives up some authorial impulse. He abandons the armature of both showing and telling. Conrad once fantasied that his pseudonym could be a Malay one, “Kamudi” (Malay for “rudder”). One wonders if he wanted the English to believe that he was a Malay writing to them, and what kind of voice they would have imagined themselves to “hear” “behind” or “within” his written tone. To annotate the shout, then, we have to annotate the threshold between text and sound. This threshold creates the pseudo-three-dimensional space of narrative but also the fiction of the space of reading, the space through which voices on the page arrive in consciousness. Where there is “world,” there is relation to space and place—an acousticality.

The entirety of the narrative, its linguistic, acoustical, and temporal effects, rests on the fact of Almayer’s refusal to listen. The shout opens the possibility of narrative, of the novel’s relationship to space, time, and perceiving and remembering consciousness. We learn of Almayer’s disregard for his wife as “a slave” but also something of the geopolitical coordinates that have brought him here to the present hour, coordinates that organize the novel’s space and time.

Later, when the third-person narrative enters the consciousness of Mrs. Almayer, we learn little of her story, only an outline or simple trajectory. When still a young girl among Sulu pirates (perhaps, though we can’t be certain, in what is now called the Philippines), she had been captured by Captain Lingard, an English trader. Lingard sent her to school with the nuns in Samarang to learn religion and the English language. Coming of age, she returned to Borneo not to be married to her English “father,” as she had hoped, but to be brokered in a marriage to a man she had never met, Almayer.

On the heels of the call, in the novel’s second sentence, Almayer snaps out of a reverie filled with elliptical and proleptical temporal and geographical coordinates. But this reverie had already been underway long before we arrived on the scene, such that the novel’s “present,” its first instance, is set in sharp relief against an uncoverable ellipsis:

“Kaspar! Makan!”

The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the unpleasant realities of the present hour. An unpleasant voice too. He had heard it for many years, and with every year he liked it less. No matter; there would be an end to all this soon.

He shuffled uneasily, but took no further notice of the call. (AF, 3)

“Shrill.” The voice is a woman’s and grates his bodily being.¹⁴ The subject who is called seeks distance from some haunting figure of “woman, native, other,” as Trinh T. Minh-ha might say (“Easy enough to dispose of a Malay woman, a slave after, after all,” Almayer later thinks to himself in his reveries [AF, 10–11]).¹⁵ But is not something of “woman” imputed from the moment the shout appears, even before any predicate? If I immediately recognize that “Kaspar” is a name (a foreign name) and that what follows is a verb (a foreign verb), imperative or at least commanding, do I not immediately recognize the presence of a listener who occupies a space defined by physical distance (calling from afar) and, with it, an emotional demand? If not a mother calling to a child, demanding belief, then Mother, a vocalic figure who does not in this moment soothe but occupies a terrifying and castrating place merged with the Orientalized body of the other: the robber of dreams.

In Discourse Networks, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler describes at length the place of the “mother’s mouth” in Romantic discourses of the nineteenth century. She is Nature and not “the woman,” or even “a woman,” but Woman, whose “function consists in getting people—that is, men—to speak.”¹⁶ Metaphysically, the maternal gift is language itself in a pure, nascent state. This organizing discourse of 1800 mandates that Woman initiates the opening for speech and culture but that she not herself speak. Here, that nascence is all the more charged by its Orientalizing and primitivizing inflections, as if the shout were a natural or virgin artifact, unexplored and issuing directly from the source.

As a quotation, however, the shout has been heard by someone in some hypothetical space. That is where the novel gains its importance as a technology of sound: A sound in narrative space is always as heard, as reported. The narrator that mediates the shout is never described; it simply arrives in narrative space through an anonymous power of citation and, more implicitly, audition. The shout thus creates the literary fiction of space, the space in which all other subsequent events will or can take place. She makes space. The vocal signifier summons what James was among the first to posit as the novel’s exceptional capacity to build a “world.”¹⁷ Again, where there is “world,” there is an acoustical relation to space and place.

But between Conrad and this woman intercedes the third voice, the third-person narrator. In beginning with the citation of a voice, the narrative begins with a kind of vocal imitation or impersonation, as if the shout has simply landed on the page, unmediated. The third-person narrator, in this way, claims to seize completely its object, to merge with it—but that is simply part of the fiction or mimetic illusion in which Conrad’s novel involves us. The mimetic illusion, integral to the realist novel in Conrad’s moment, is also a colo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Abbreviations
• Overture: The Sound of a Novel
• 1 Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading
• 2 The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “The Fact of Blackness”
• 3 A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language in Heart of Darkness
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index