Charlie Marlow, whose given name we hear on only two occasions,
is one of the most celebrated of Joseph Conrad’s creations. Narrator
and character in four texts, “Youth”, Heart of Darkness, Lord
Jim and Chance, he has often been regarded as Conrad’s autobiographical
alter-ego. The aim of this article is to examine the narrative structure
of Conrad’s Marlow texts with relation to the oral tradition of storytelling
as it is described in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”.
This will be undertaken with specific reference to Chance. The implications
of this narrative technique will then be further examined with reference
to the readings of death offered by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and
Maurice Blanchot.
As I will examine with reference to Chance,
Marlow plays a complex part in Conrad’s fiction. The nature of his
role is neatly summed up by Wayne C. Booth who asks:
Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s
experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for
heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented
in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo?
Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question
“Who is the protagonist?” is a meaningless one. (Booth 346)
Meaningless or not, the designation of Marlow as a character or narrator,
or as both, has been the subject of much critical debate. Pierre Vitoux,
in “Marlow the Changing Narrator”, emphasises the narrating act, arguing
that Marlow “is part of the tale not as a character in it, but as the narrator
of it, merging into his role” (94). In contrast, Alan Warren Friedman’s
“Conrad’s Picaresque Narrator”, reads the four Marlow texts together and
argues that Marlow should be read as the character central to the quartet:
“Read as a unit, Conrad’s Marlovian fictions [. . .] differ markedly from
what they are in isolation. In the four works taken together, Marlow
himself becomes the moving centre of an episodic, larger fiction in which
characters and incidents spin off and revolve around him” (8). Despite
their apparent polarity these two readings of Marlow are not mutually exclusive;
rather it is possible to situate Marlow in either position, as narrator
or character, or as occupying both positions simultaneously within a single
text. It is the dual nature of Marlow, which results from the structure
of the texts, that prompts Booth’s rejection of the over-simplistic, and
often reductive, question, “who is the protagonist?” and it is this dual
nature that makes the texts in which he appears so rewarding to narratological
study.
Frederick R. Karl remarks “Chance is,
for all its trappings, thematically one of Conrad’s most straightforward
novels” (242). 1 Its story (here as elsewhere I am using Gérard
Genette’s terminology) is certainly straightforward. Flora
is the daughter of the disgraced financier Mr de Barral who, at the start
of the story, has been jailed for fraud. The destitute young woman
subsequently elopes with Captain Anthony, the brother of one of her protectors,
the feminist Mrs Fyne. At the behest of his wife, Mr Fyne attempts
to intervene in the marriage and as a result Captain Anthony comes to believe
that Flora does not love him whilst Flora remains under the impression,
gained during a painful childhood, that no-one could possibly love her.
At this point, Flora’s father is released from prison and joins the couple
aboard the Ferndale, and for a time there is an atmosphere of despair as
the young couple retreat into their own worlds of isolation and depression.
Events come to a head when Mr de Barral attempts to poison Captain Anthony
and, when this fails, drinks the poison himself and dies. Freed from
the shadow of de Barral Flora and Captain Anthony discover their love for
one another and live happily together until the time of Captain Anthony’s
death in a shipping accident six years later.
Despite its relatively straightforward story Chance is an extremely
complex text and there is, perhaps, a certain disingenuousness in Marlow’s
remark that “The means don’t concern you except in so far as they belong
to the story” (Chance 326). The apparent mismatch of subject
matter with technique has attracted a great deal of critical interest and
generally negative comment. The majority of this comment comes from
critics who would agree with Marlow about the primacy of story over narration.
The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad summarises one of the questions
many critics address when considering Chance: “Does such an apparently
melodramatic and highly contrived romantic situation deserve to be treated
with so much effort and attention, or is the novel merely an exercise in
technique for its own sake?” (Knowles and Moore 60). Voicing just
such concerns, Robert Lynd wrote in the Daily Mail (15 January 1914):
“if Mr. Conrad had chosen to introduce us to his characters in the ordinary
way, he could have told us their story in about 200 pages instead of the
406 pages of the present book” (Conrad, Chance 457). Jocelyn
Baines concludes, “there are only rare occasions when anything is gained
from this cumbersome method of presentation” (382). Similarly
Karl responds, “the vast scaffolding of method is perhaps more distracting
than edifying, more detrimental than constructive” (242). Karl’s
comment deserves consideration as it can be seen as being at once justified
and unnecessarily pejorative. Karl sees Conrad’s method as both distracting
from, and detrimental to, the “story” and in a sense this is true.
Flora’s story is repeatedly buried beneath the weight of voices that, whilst
purporting to tell it, more often than not simply talk about telling it.
However, for any study that concerns itself with the primacy of narrative,
Conrad’s method is both edifying and constructive because it directs attention
away from the story towards the “scaffolding of method” that is its narrative
technique and, if my reading is accepted, a story in itself. This
second story, a story of narration, is to my mind far more compelling than
the stock romance plot of Flora de Barral. For readers unfamiliar
with Chance a brief survey of its structure may prove helpful in illustrating
the extent of its vast scaffolding of method.
Chance bears the subtitle “A Tale in
two Parts” and correspondingly the novel is divided into two sections:
“The Damsel” and “The Knight”. As with Conrad’s other Marlow narratives
this story is presented by an unnamed narrator who presents Marlow’s oral
narrative in readable form, including in his narrative the scene of its
original transmission. Like Lord Jim, Chance contains
the narratives of several other characters but employs the frame narrator
to a larger extent, commenting extensively on both Flora’s story and Marlow’s
narration. Uniquely, in Chance two narrators are introduced:
Marlow and Charles Powell. In the first chapter Powell delivers a
second-level narrative about his early days as a sailor. The significance
of Powell’s story lies in the effect it has on Marlow, who shortly begins
his own second-level narrative about a character mentioned in Powell’s
story: Captain Anthony. This narrative is introduced in the same
way as Powell’s: it is initially recounted by the first narrator before,
after a few pages, he yields, at least partially, to Marlow. Marlow’s
narrative is homodiegetic (he appears as a minor character in the story)
and narritized (there is little attempt at verisimilitude by the way of
minimising the evidence of the narrating act). Marlow’s narritized
narrative contrasts with the first narrator’s reported narrative (his narrative
pretends to reproduce Marlow’s narrative accurately without drawing attention
to its own status as narrative). What links the two narrative levels
is that, like Marlow in the second-level, the first narrator is also homodiegetic,
frequently appearing in his narrative as a character that interacts with
Marlow, but only in this first-level narrative. To be able to say
this is to identify two stories in Chance, the story of Flora and
the story of transmission enacted variously at the “river-side inn” and
in the first narrator’s “rooms” (3, 257). In the second section of
the novel, “The Knight”, the first narrator reproduces Marlow’s continuation
of the tale taken from a later time of telling. In this section,
pieced together by Marlow from his discussions with Powell, Marlow is absent
as a character and so the narrative would be classed as autodiegetic, the
only such section in any of the Marlow texts. This is significant
in that the narrative is a reproduction of an earlier reproduction.
The first narrator reproduces, in this second half of Chance, Marlow’s
narrative, which is itself taken from the story told by Powell. Thus
the second section of the novel has three levels of narrative which might
be diagrammed:
First narrator’s narrative [Marlow’s narrative [Powell’s narrative
Flora’s story is then concluded in a rather perfunctory style when Marlow
rejoins it as a character to arrange the marriage between Powell and Flora.
What should be evident from the description
above is that whilst Flora’s story may be simple, the narrative structure
of Chance greatly complicates that story with the addition of a
second-level story – that of its subsequent narration and reception.
Recalling Marlow’s dismissal of the “means” in favour of “story” a close
reading of the novel’s narrative structure reveals the distinction between
these two elements of narrative to be problematic. Or rather, what
is at one point the means can be at another the story and Marlow is at
once a creator of, and the subject of, narrative. There is a certain
irony in the fact that when Marlow is described as “nearly invisible” it
is at this very moment that he appears to the reader (Conrad, Chance
359). Similar moments occur in Heart of Darkness where he is described
as “sitting apart [. . .] no more than a voice”, “sat apart, indistinct
and silent” (Conrad 58, 121). At these points of apparent disappearance
Marlow appears as a character, as a narrator and as the physical embodiment
of narrative technique. At such moments, which tend to occur when
the story reaches a point of particular significance (here in Chance
Mr de Barral has just discovered that Flora is married) there is an incongruous
emphasis on Marlow’s narration, the competing story. To identify
these two stories as the “two parts” of Chance might be a more productive
reading of the novel’s subtitle than the more obvious division of the text
into its two sections: “The Damsel” and “The Knight”.
Conrad’s complex narratives clearly resist
the formal constraints implied by terminology such as that set out by Genette,
or at least they make it clear that narratives and narrators can occupy
more than one position within a single text. Within the narrative
of the first narrator Marlow is a character of the diegesis. It is
as a character of this story that Marlow provides a second narrative; a
metanarrative with its own metadiegesis: this is Flora’s story. This
is the case made by Friedman: his reading emphasises Marlow’s story, situating
him primarily as a character of his own metadiegesis. On the other
hand, if Marlow’s acts as a character of the diegesis are emphasised over
the story he relates, then it is easy to situate Marlow as a character
and this is the line Vitoux pursues. The contrasting readings offered
by Vitoux and Friedman make it clear that in texts with several narrative
layers emphasising certain elements over others can result in radically
different interpretations. However, neither critic undertakes to
situate Marlow as a character of the first narrator’s narrative in a story
that is about narration.
The primary concern in the remainder of this paper
will be with the relation between narrating and story. This is the
relation between the events recounted in the texts, the story, and the
telling of these events by Marlow and his first narrator, the narrating.
The question I wish to ask is what happens when narrating becomes story?
In order to study the implications of the curious narrative of Chance,
where narrating becomes story, I intend to begin by considering it with
reference to some of the comments made about oral narrative by Benjamin
in “The Storyteller”. This move is made in the awareness that Chance
is not an oral narrative (although it purports to repeat one) and secondly
that the storytellers of the oral tradition that Benjamin discusses are
not, in fact, confined to the oral mode. Notably, Benjamin finds
“the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in
Poe as in Stevenson” all of who produced written texts (107). It
becomes clear that Benjamin uses his discussion of oral storytelling as
a way of approaching written narrative, a realisation that recalls Marie
Maclean’s claim that the study of narrative has “convinced so many distinguished
theorists of the genre (Propp, Todorov, Brémond, Prince, Greimas),
that the basic problems of narrative can, in the first instance, be better
understood in relation to oral narration” (1). This claim will be
expanded towards the end of the paper when I will explore further the meaning
Benjamin gives to the term “storyteller”.
It should be recalled that each of the Marlow texts is presented
as a written account of the reception of an earlier oral narrative.
Marlow is a narrator in the oral tradition whose listeners come to expect
a story; he has, according to the narrator of Heart of Darkness,
a “propensity to spin yarns” (Conrad 30). My intention is to begin
this section by looking briefly at the ways in which Marlow conforms to
Benjamin’s definition of a storyteller before looking at the more problematic
aspects of his definition as it relates to what Benjamin calls the wisdom
of death.
Benjamin associates storytelling proper
with the artisan class and, as sailors, both Marlow and Conrad resemble
his idealised storyteller perfectly, “peasants and seamen were past masters
of storytelling” (85). Marlow’s technique fits well with Benjamin
as he continues his description of the tradition, “Storytellers tend to
begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they
themselves have learned what is to follow” (91). This recalls Marlow’s
presentation of his information gathering in Chance, which can at
times appear to be a series of interviews with the principal characters.
This description also encompasses the narrative of the first narrator whose
written narrative always follows the same pattern, beginning by introducing
the scene in which he first heard the story he later commits to paper.
These details are almost incidental
to what Benjamin views as the central feature of storytelling. The
key to storytelling is to be found in the transmission of stories from
one narrator to another and the repetition of this process. “[S]torytelling”
writes Benjamin, “is always the art of repeating stories” (90). If
Marlow, as he appears in the four novels, has one defining characteristic
it might be this: he is clearly a character who likes to tell stories.
There is almost an audible groan when, in Heart of Darkness, the
narrator says, “we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to
hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences” (Conrad 32).
Similarly there is a certain sense of good natured weariness when the narrator
of Lord Jim remarks, “And later on, many times, in distant parts of the
world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at
length, in detail and audibly” (Conrad 67). It is not the repetition
of story by the same storyteller that is significant so much as its transmission
to another storyteller: “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience
– his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the
experience of those who are listening to his tale” (Benjamin 87). Up to
this point I have made little mention of the anonymous narrator who recounts
Marlow’s story, but, like Marlow, he is a seaman and, again like Marlow,
he continues the telling of tales that he has heard, effectively performing
the same act as Marlow at a higher narrative level. What is clear
in Chance is that a large number of voices present Flora’s story
and, as I have suggested, the narrating of that story is a story in itself.
Benjamin’s claim that “the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers
of a variety of retellings” could find few better examples than those provided
by Conrad which, employing numerous narrative layers, clearly display the
marks of their retelling (92). The key to storytelling is to be found
in the transmission of stories from one narrator to another and the repetition
of this process. It is the presentation of this process of transmission
as the first-level story that connects Chance, and indeed the other
Marlow narratives, so clearly to Benjamin’s essay.
This emphasis on the transmission of the story,
Genette’s narrating, is the defining feature of the storyteller for Benjamin,
and it is this that he claims distinguishes oral narrative from written
narrative. The contrast he draws between oral storytelling and the
novel is directly comparable to the contrast drawn by the narrator of Heart
of Darkness between the “yarns of seamen” which have a “direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut” and
the narrative technique of Marlow for whom, “the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which bought
it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that are sometimes made visible by the spectral illumination
of moonshine” (Conrad 30). Understood in narratalogical terms Marlow’s
words suggest that meaning will be found not in the story so much as in
that which surrounds it, in the narrating act. According to
Benjamin the very nature of the printed text as a finite object, which
he regards as being self-contained like the story within the nut of Conrad’s
analogy, ensures that both writer and reader must exist in solitude, at
a remove from one another. This is in contrast to oral narrative
where storytelling is defined by its relational aspect. It clear
that this is what distinguishes Benjamin’s storyteller from the novelist,
but the question that this poses is what does it mean to say that the novelist
is “isolated”?
In distinguishing between the storyteller
and the novelist Benjamin outlines the historical factors that have contributed
to the decline of storytelling. These include not only the rise of
the novel (which is identified as a symptom rather than a cause), but also
the decline of the artisan class and a move towards “information”, noting
that “it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation
as one reproduces it” (89). By “information” Benjamin is referring
to the presentation of events in a pre-interpreted form, typified by newspaper
and television reporting. This point is important and I will return
to it later in my reading of Chance. It is in these historical
and social factors that “The Storyteller” most clearly reveals what have
been identified as the Marxist theory behind much of Benjamin’s work.
More significant than these factors, however, is the idea that “in the
general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence
and vividness” (Benjamin 93). This changing relation to death is
central to Benjamin’s essay for it bears on the possibility of the transmission
of narration, and access to what Benjamin terms variously the “authority”
or “wisdom” of death is central to his understanding of narrative.
Accordingly, in order to properly interpret Benjamin it is necessary to
understand the significance he attaches to death.
In his use of the term death Benjamin would fall prey to the
same criticisms that Derrida levels at Philippe Ariès in Aporias,
namely that he assumes an empirical knowledge of what “death” means: “The
question of the meaning of death and of the word ‘death,’ the question
‘What is death in general?’ or ‘What is the experience of death?’ and the
question of knowing if death ‘is’ - and what death ‘is’ -
all remain radically absent as questions” (Derrida 25). Nonetheless
it is on the understanding of this term that Benjamin’s thesis rests for
it is in the relation to death that he differentiates between the storyteller
and the novelist. In the remainder of this paper I intend to work
through the distinction that Benjamin makes between the storyteller in
the oral tradition and the novelist, a distinction that he makes in terms
of their respective possibilities for accessing death. Such a study
necessitates a move from the general notion of death that is empirically
demonstrable in the observation that “people die” towards a more rigorously
philosophical approach to death. I will undertake this ambitious
project with reference to theories of death as they appear in Heidegger’s
Being
and Time, Derrida’s Aporias and Blanchot’s “Literature and the
Right to Death”.
The first necessary move in attempting to
work through this distinction is to consider in more detail the claims
that Benjamin makes about death. I will begin this with reference
to two quotations. In the first Benjamin writes,
Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. (Benjamin 93)
And in the second:
His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. (Benjamin 107)
The first quotation prompts the question, how does death become the
sanction of everything the storyteller has to tell? Benjamin’s answer
is contained in the second quotation: death grants the storyteller’s the
ability to tell his “entire life”. The authority granted by a life
that has been “consumed completely” can be equated with the authentic Being
of Dasein, which Heidegger defines as Being-towards.
Death is central to Heidegger’s study of Being,
he famously defines it as “the possibility of the absolute impossibility
of Dasein” (294). By this he understands death to be the final possibility
for Dasein, which has itself been defined in terms of possibility.
Death is the possibility unique to the individual Dasein to no longer exist.
Heidegger writes: “death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost
possibility - non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be
outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the
Being of this entity towards its end” (303). By referring
to death as Dasein’s “ownmost” possibility, as non-relational, Heidegger
makes it clear that the death is utterly isolating. In other words
“my death”, as an event to which only I have access, guarantees the possibility
of my individual actions. In the light of this, it might be said
that of all possibilities death most intensifies the “mineness” of experience.
The awareness of the inevitability of its own death, it is that which cannot
be outstripped, guarantees Dasein the ontico-ontological priority that
makes it unique: it is the omnipresent threat of annihilation that makes
Dasein aware that its Being is at issue and it allows the assumption of
responsibility for each individual’s life. The acceptance of death
as Dasein’s ultimate possibility, a possibility that exists in the Being
of Dasein towards its end, leads Heidegger to conclude that Dasein can
be grasped in its wholeness, and thus play its role as the cornerstone
of his exploration of the meaning of Being.
It is this relation to death that allows
Being to appear, as Joshua Schuster remarks: “Heidegger does not posit
a mere linear connection between beginning and end but rather implies the
complicity of both in allowing for the thinking of Being to appear” (Schuster
par. 19). By its everpresent threat of annihilation death makes clear
not just the particulars of Dasein’s existence but the fact that existence
itself is an issue for Dasein. Without what Schuster terms the “mineness”
of Dasein, that is the ownmost possibility of death which relies on an
always already present, pre-theoretical understanding of “mineness” and
“death”, there can be no access to Being.
In Aporias Derrida undertakes a close
reading of Heidegger’s problematic formulation of death as “the possibility
of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (Heidegger 294) and poses the
question: how can one think this aporia? His response deserves quoting
at length: “We will have to ask ourselves how a (most proper) possibility
as impossibility can still appear as such without immediately disappearing,
without the ‘as such’ already sinking beforehand and without its essential
disappearance making Dasein lose everything that distinguished it”
(71). In other words, Derrida is asking how Dasein, as that which
is distinguished by its unique access to death, can remain distinct from
other orders of being when at the moment that it would realise its ultimate
distinguishing possibility it is, being dead, no longer present to do so.
Whilst Heidegger regards death as the possibility of the appearance of
the impossibility of possibility as such, Derrida regards this formulation
of death as the primary and originary example of the aporia. Derrida
sees the aporia that is death lying in the impossibility of experiencing
one’s own death: it is the disappearance of the “as such”. In posing
the question: “What difference is there between the possibility of appearing
as such of the possibility of an impossibility and the impossibility of
appearing as such of the same possibility?” Derrida argues for the
denial of any difference, and concludes that the distinction between Dasein
and other entities cannot be sustained and that Dasein never has a relation
to death “as such” (75). Derrida suggests that death is in fact Dasein’s
least proper possibility in that, at the moment of its realisation, that
before which it would appear is no longer there. With this introduction
of a non-access to the “as such” of death Derrida turns it from being the
most proper possibility of Dasein to the most improper and inauthenticating
one.
Thus two readings of the same sentence
emerge, “the possibility of impossibility” is read by Heidegger as the
possibility (of Dasein) guaranteed by its impossibility (death) and by
Derrida more straightforwardly as the impossibility of possibility, in
other words the impossibility of accessing “my death”. Derrida’s
deconstruction of Heidegger’s crucial sentence instigates an aporia at
the heart of Being and Time which relies on Dasein’s relation to
death to distinguish it from other orders of being. Derrida’s reading
of Heidegger introduces an almost parallel aporia into Benjamin’s “The
Storyteller”, where the storyteller relies on access to death in order
to access wisdom. Recognising that the authority of the storyteller
can only be derived from a misrecognition of death, can at best be what
Benjamin recognises as a “borrowing” of authority, it is useful to introduce
Blanchot’s work on literature where he develops a “double death” that maintains
both Heidegger’s death, the first death, alongside a second death which
is the impossibility of that first death.
Benjamin’s claims for the storyteller
recreate the relation that Blanchot describes as existing between the first
and second deaths. The storyteller, or writer, attempts to write
the definitive work that will “relate” the story that has the authority
granted by death, and yet what is ultimately produced as a book, to use
Blanchot’s term, only serves to reveal the lack of such authority or wisdom.
This is because Blanchot’s double death reverses the authentic death of
Heidegger, that which give Dasein the authority to say “I”, to the passivity
of dying in which the “I” becomes “One”. Paradoxically, “my death”,
approached for authority, becomes the very thing that denies any authority.
The impossibility of dying becomes a reversal of the guarantee of individuality
that Heidegger finds in death. In other words it becomes impossible
to say “I die” but only “one dies”. In his suggestion that the proper
experience of death can only ever be to the death of the other Blanchot’s
thoughts can be seen to diverge from those of Heidegger who regards death
only in terms of the individual Dasein.
With this in mind Benjamin’s claims for the
storyteller come into focus. The authority granted by death can only
function in relation to the death of the other, and thus the storyteller’s
power is correctly situated in the relaying of his message rather than
in the message itself. Literature’s power, and I would equate Blanchot’s
notion of literariness with the wisdom of Benjamin’s storyteller, lies
in its connection to death which it reveals through a language that precedes
the individual, mirroring the experience of death which is characterised
by the passivity with which it transforms the individual “I” to the “one”.
To better understand this passivity it is necessary to consider Blanchot’s
concept of language. Blanchot follows Hegel in regarding negativity
as the essence of language. 2 This negativity explains the way the
name functions to negate the reality of the object named: “For me to be
able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality
away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives
me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being” (Blanchot 379).
This process, which Blanchot describes as “deferred assassination”, functions
by naming (380). Whilst language does not literally kill anyone it
does announce real death. The woman of the example above is not killed
by words, but the act of naming her. The phrase “this woman” announces
that she can be detached from herself, from her actual existence, and “plunged”,
to use Blanchot’s term, “into a nothingness in which there is no existence
or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this
destruction; […] if this woman were not really capable of dying […] I would
not be able to carry out that ideal negation” (380). The nothingness
of which Blanchot speaks is the nothingness of the “I” becoming “one”,
a change that is exemplified when “this woman” is spoken in universal language.
Whilst the negation at the heart of language is masked in “everyday” language,
replacing the absent thing with a concept, literary language refers only
to itself, revealing the absence that is at its heart. It is this
relation of language to nullity that connects language to death.
Language raises existence into being, and it reveals that death is the
most human quality.
Following Blanchot, a re-reading of the first
quotation from “The Storyteller” would place a useful emphasis on the “borrowed”
nature of the authority granted by death. The first death that would
provide the guarantee of meaning refuses ownership, and yet it is from
ownership that the first death derives its nature. This refusal is
emphasised by the aporia of the second quotation in which the storyteller
is identified by the ability to tell his “entire life”. Continuing
to read the second quotation, the emphasis is placed on the “gift/relate/tell”
which characterises storytelling as a transaction or transmission.
For Blanchot this transmission, so central to Benjamin’s definition of
the storyteller, is the essence, or truth, of literature. In this
the two writers approach a similar conception of literariness and there
is a direct comparison to be drawn between Benjamin’s statement, in “The
Task of the Translator”, “For what does a literary work ‘say’? What
does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand
it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information”
with Blanchot’s “literature’s ideal has been the following: to say nothing,
to speak in order to say nothing” (Benjamin 70; Blanchot 381). Storytelling
is the appearance of language as language. In other words, the authority
or wisdom of the storytelling of which Benjamin speaks is the appearance
of death in language.
Returning, after this long diversion, to Conrad’s
Marlow texts it is possible to continue the reading of Chance as
a novel that displays an acute awareness of the way in which narrating
and story interact. The nature of this transmission requires the
close reading of a quotation from Benjamin’s essay that was introduced
early on in this discussion: “it is”, he writes, “half the art of storytelling
to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it” (89).
This statement initially seems to be at odds with Benjamin’s suggestions
that the story will exhibit the “fingerprints” of its many tellers, however
on closer inspection these fingerprints turn out to be evidence of the
repeated transmission rather than the reduction of story to information.
This can be witnessed in Chance where the insertion of the Marlow
story has the surprising effect of making interpretation not easier but
harder. Counter to the expected clarity, the great number of commentators
in the text makes the informational aspect of the story recede. Leslie
Hill notes a similarly paradoxical effect at work in Blanchot’s Thomas
the Obscure where, “The bizarre result is a writing in which everything
already seems to possess somewhere in the novel its own implicit or explicit
interpretation, except for the process of commentary itself, which remains
uninterpreted and, one might add, boundlessly uninterpretable” (65).
The polyphonic structure of Chance affords the numerous characters
involved with ample opportunity to interpret, filter and translate the
events they recount, explaining everything away except for the very activity
of their narrating – an act comprised of their constant commentary on and
critiques of events.
This emphasis on narrating over story manifests
itself in the way that Marlow’s narrative act is littered with doubt.
The lack of narrative stability is exemplified when, towards the end of
the novel, Marlow is trying to describe Captain Anthony’s first meeting
with his father-in-law, Mr de Barral:
“Why Anthony appeared to shrink from the contact […] is difficult
to explain. Perhaps […]. Possibly […] he may
well have been [. . .].
“In Short, we’ll say if you like that for various reasons [.
. .]. [my emphasis] (Conrad, Chance 350)
Marlow’s listener replies by challenging this failed narration and refusing Marlow’s attempt to make him party to the creation of the narrative that is implicit in his “if you like”: “‘Why do you say this?’ I inquired” (350). Marlow is frequently challenged by the unnamed narrator who retells Marlow’s narrative, his reactions of disbelief recurring throughout the text: “‘Come, Marlow,’ I said, ‘you exaggerate surely – if only by your way of putting things. It’s too startling’”; “‘You have a ghastly imagination,’ I said with a cheerfully sceptical smile”; “‘How do you know all this?’ I interrupted” (80, 102, 264). Marlow’s usual reaction is one of irritation: “No! I don’t exaggerate”; “You smile?”; “What the devil are you laughing at?” (136, 145, 353). The disputes between Marlow and his narrator are well illustrated by an early exchange:
“Do you expect me to agree with all this?” I interrupted.
“No, it isn’t necessary,” said Marlow, feeling the check to his eloquence,
but with a great effort at amiability. “You need not even understand
it.” (Conrad 63)
Marlow’s assertion that his narrative requires neither agreement nor
understanding is remarkable. What Marlow demands, and here he is in accord
with the storyteller, is that his story is transmitted. Comprehension,
in terms of what Benjamin would call information, is not necessary.
The realisation of the inaccessibility of information, equated with the
negation that is central to literary language, is what marks out Chance
and
the other Marlow texts as works of storytelling.
Susan Jones’ study of Chance provides
a good example of an approach that moves away from the reading of stories
as purely informational. According to Jones’ interpretation, the
result of the numerous narratives that surround Flora is that she recedes
from the reader with the increasing attempts to bring her to the fore:
“In the final version [of Chance] it is Flora herself who has become
the ‘text’, the location of endless interpretations of the ‘damsel’s’ part.
Yet her failure to inhabit fully the role of heroine simultaneously creates
an ellipse at the centre of the narrative” (159-60). In this reading
of Chance, Flora disappears; or rather the impossibility of adequately
representing woman within the genre of romance appears. Flora appears
in Chance as her own refusal to appear. Jones reads Conrad
as deliberately dramatising the male-constructions of language and genre
and examines the ways in which his technique, whilst clearly belonging
to male-centred discourse, explicitly questions its own foundations:
“by limiting Marlow’s voice so that it never achieves final authority,
Conrad registers the dilemma of women who are unable to form identities
untrammelled by plots, poses, gestures that have not already been invented
for them, and that are not already entrenched at a cultural level” (115).
This dilemma, which neatly recalls Blanchot’s announcement of the death
of “this woman”, is the result of the negation inherent in a language that
precedes the individual.
This Blanchotian reading of “The Storyteller” opens up the possibility
of approaching the Marlow texts from what are extremely profitable angles
and recovering meaning from what Blanchot identifies as the double negation
of literary language. Identifying the various ellipses in the stories
- Flora in Chance, the wisdom of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness,
or Jim’s absent jump from the Patna in Lord Jim - allows meaning
to emerge from the narrating act itself. My conclusion is a return
to the question of what occurs when narrating becomes story: it would appear
that it is in this intersection that the work of the storyteller is located,
where the meaning of the literary emerges.
Notes
1 The narratalogical terminology that is employed in this paper is drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. Genette identifies three distinct ways in which the word “narrative” is commonly used. The first refers “to the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse [. . .]. A second meaning has narrative refer to the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse [. . .]. A third meaning “has narrative refer once more to an event: not, however, the event that is recounted, but the event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself.” (Genette 25-6) To avoid the confusion that might result from the inherent ambiguity of the word “narrative” Genette develops his own terminology. The first version of “narrative” retains the title “narrative”, the second becomes “story” and the third “narrating”.
2 The ideas central to this aspect of Blanchot’s thinking are
introduced by Hegel in “Sense-Certainty”, the first chapter of Phenomenology
of Spirit. (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. pp. 58-66). Given the context of this
discussion it is worth noting that whilst the thought experiment Hegel
employs in the Phenomenology of Spirit uses the written word its results
are applied to both written and spoken language.
Works Cited
Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. London: Wiedenfeld, 1993.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton. Ed. George Quasha. New York: Station Hill Press, 1999.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1961.
Conrad, Joseph, Chance. 1913. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
---. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
---. Lord Jim. 1900. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
---. “Youth” & “The End of the Tether”. 1898, 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. 1807. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. 1927. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge, 1997.
Jones, Susan. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Karl, Frederick R. A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997.
Knowles, Owen & Moore, Gene M., Eds. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Maclean, Marie. Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment. London. Routledge, 1988.
Schuster, Joshua. “Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.” Other Voices (1997). 14 Dec.1999 http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~ov/jnschust/death.html
Vitoux, Pierre. “Marlow: The Changing Narrator of Conrad’s Fiction”
in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 2 1975, pp. 83-102.
***
This is a lively and challenging appraisal of Marlow's ambiguous
positioning in several of Conrad's texts, notably CHANCE. The theoretical
insights
are generally illuminating, although it seems to me that the boundaries
between oral and written storytelling are unfortunately blurred, despite
the disclaimers made with respect to Benjamin's essay on 'The
Storyteller'. (The tensions and interactions between orality and print
forms of
literature have become an important field of scholarly investigation
over the past few
decades; subtler, more comprehensive discriminations need to be
offered - if only by way of clarification.) Perhaps the analysis of
death in
relation to storytelling might also have been nuanced by moving from
Derrida's
APORIAS to THE GIFT OF DEATH, in which Heidegger's claims are revisited
through
comparisons with Kierkegaard and Levinas. However, the writer's
mediation of this debate through Blanchot is effective. It highlights
the complex
negativities and silences of literary language, while providing a
fresh perspective on the shifting processes which occur when 'narrating'
becomes 'story'. This opens up intriguing ways of understanding what
is at stake for both novelist and reader in the selection of narrative
designs or strategies, sometimes with the result that the very process
of
storytelling becomes its own disconcerting and aporetic outcome.
Despite its theoretical innovation, the article is a little
disappointing as an account of CHANCE. By keeping textual detail at
arm's length and
avoiding focused specificity, the narrative form of the novel
is justified by
assertion rather than clearcut demonstration. From this perspective,
the discussion would have benefited from some engagement with Henry
James's double-edged, yet searching, appraisal of Conrad's frequently
contested method in 'The New Novel' (1914). Closer comparisons and
contrasts
might also have been drawn with the other fictional works in which
Marlow
feautures; there is at least one tantalising glimpse of storytelling,
as seen in
HEART OF DARKNESS, which is not fully elucidated. Yet the paper remains
suggestive; if it does not altogether deliver on its promises, readers
may be
persuaded to apply the prevailing model more broadly to Conrad's related
endeavours.
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