Conradiana

Claude Maisonnat offers a wide-ranging study of at least seventeen of Conrad’s fictions, including all of the major novels except Chance. Grounding his central argument in the Lacanian concept of the “object-voice,” Maisonnat seeks in Conrad’s work what he calls a “textual voice” peculiar to literary expression. It is not precisely a voice of the unconscious “because it is a function of the signifier, located within language itself,” and operates beyond the control or instigation of anything at the level of the symbolic. The textual voice is primarily disruptive of the authorial voice, “which consciously appeals to reason and emotions.” Challenging “the construction of clear meaning,” the function of the textual voice is to “sublimate effects when they threaten to overwhelm character, narrator, author alike, and therefore readers too” (35–36).

These disturbances emerge primarily through competitions of voice and genre within the literature itself. Contrary to a poststructuralism that one might suppose such a project to assume, wherein a shattered univocality has always been a chimera, Maisonnat sees multivalence and polyvocality as the signs of disruption—perforce, the disruption of a primordial unity—the necessary consequence of which is a struggle for supremacy. The textual voice can be seen, for instance, in the multiple voices that “compete for authority” in “The Secret Sharer,” where over the course of the tale “even the very voice of the narrator undergoes obvious changes” (212); in the tension between “the forces of romance” in Nostromo and “the forces of modernity” (286); in the “underhand intrusion of French into the dominant language” of Conrad’s narration (35); or in the frame narrative of “A Smile of Fortune” as it “undermines the core narrative” (401).

The book does not concern itself with any debate or evolution within psychoanalytic criticism, which is not necessarily a drawback. In such an extensive work on a single figure, however, it is remarkable that the opening chapters do not situate the book within any strand or development in Con-radian criticism. A notable exception comes unexpectedly in the fourteenth chapter’s extensive attention to “Heart of Darkness.” The mystery of this essay’s sudden consideration of a critical landscape is resolved when it becomes clear that it had been presented in another forum without integration into the larger study we have been following. Here in part 4, the concept of the “textual voice” is again introduced and elaborated as if we had never before heard the term. [End Page 205]

At least as much as its textual analysis, what underwrites the argumentative strain of Maisonnat’s book are the life narratives enabled by Conrad’s letters and biographers. These are trusted for the most part as transparent windows, and the overwhelming reliance on such sources for argumentative purposes will strike some readers as slightly archaic, although one could argue it com-ports with the book’s psychoanalytic project. In order to demonstrate, for instance, the textual voice within Conrad’s purported struggle with English prose, the book finds support in Ford Madox Ford’s report that Conrad’s dislike of English was “extreme” and “his contempt for his medium unrivalled.” Even if one accepts Ford’s extravagance, however, it hardly seems borne out in the habitual self-deprecation of Conrad’s letters, as when the novelist complains “the more I write the less sure I am of my English” (32).

This is not a study that exiles itself for long periods of time to a wide theoretical scope. Its willingness to dive into the nitty gritty of specific scenes and passages is satisfying. The results are often astute and thought-provoking, as in a late chapter on the instrumental function of female characters in some of the short fiction. Elsewhere the close reading relies a bit too much on assumption over observation, as in the familiar conclusion that “[i]t is enough to think of the proliferation of images of obscurity, darkness, of all shades to form an idea of the extent to which...