A Sinister Resonance: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad's Marlow

"6 Conradian "rhetoric," opposed to Flaubertian (and by extension, Jamesian) "style," determines Marlow's sentences as among those that "emerge and disappear with all the permanent provisionality of spoken communication, telling, digressing, repeating, exclaiming, rambling, and apostrophizing" ("hc," 3 5).7 Marlow continues to confront us, above all, as a voice, a storyteller haunting what Walter Benjamin once called "the realm of living speech," the communal bond between mouth and ear.8 If Conrad's early emphasis on the storytelling voice marked a turn away from the Jamesian category of point of view, it has not placed him outside of canonical visual terms of modernist studies.