By G. W. Stephen Brodsky, Royal Roads Military College (retired) 

John G. Peters. Joseph Conrad and the Narration of Silence (Edinburgh UP, 2024). 213 pp. hardback & epub: UK £90; US $120 to $142.00

Every chapter is bolstered by references to a formidable international host of thoroughly established scholar-critics, the titles of their major books alone, while not necessarily cited as sources in this study, resonating in its themes. For instance, just in the opening chapter we find Katherine Isobel Baxter (Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance), Richard Ambrosini (Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse), Allon White (The Uses of Obscurity), James Guetti (The Rhetoric of Joseph Conrad), Terry Collits (Postcolonial Conrad), Terry Wasserman (The Illusion of Language in ‘Heart of Darkness’), the famous late Edward Said (Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography), and towering over all of these, the hoary FR Leavis (The Great Tradition), who found in Conrad’s oeuvre ‘inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.’

Those names, mostly staples in Conrad scholarship, can be no more valid as credentials for this book than the track record of its author John G. Peters, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, prolific scholar and critic who needs scant introduction to Conrad scholars internationally. General Editor of Conradiana, his output as author and editor has been—and continues to be—innovative and prodigious. A sampling: Joseph Conrad's Critical Reception; The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad; Conrad and Impressionism; the Norton critical edition of The Secret Sharer and Other Stories; and a host of journal essays in Philosophy and Literature, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Studies in Short Fiction, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Victorian Review, English Language Notes,
and more.

Joseph Conrad and the Narration of Silence fulfills the promise implicit in that list of achievements. Peters’s approach is refreshingly explorative from the outset, because it eschews the trammels of a predetermined critical approach. Rather, as Peters points out, his method is to proceed inductively, open to textual evidence wherever it leads, rather than deductively, exploring only a preconceived critical narratology. The author is too politic, we surmise, to voice in less oblique terms inferential impatience with the imposition of any preconceived template of critical theory’s many old and new -ists and -isms—Marxist, Formalist, Structuralist, New Criticism, Modernism, Postmodernism—all the procrustean racks and hatchets of theory resulting only in circulus in probando vindications of their own premises, rather than adumbrations of text.  

Narration of Silence is a critical atavism in the best sense, implicitly retrograde by a century, when literary scholarship embraced a broader range to include linguistics under the mantle of Philology—a time when I.A. Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning (1923) dealt with the linkages of the noumena of language and the phenomena that they signify (or don’t).  Yet, while the prose in Narration of Silence remains that of the literary scholar with none of the linguist’s technical jargon, the book also appears to be on the crest of brief resurgent ripple of what I shall call psycholinguistic criticism, exemplified by Xinxin Zhao’s Form Is Meaning: An Iconic Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form, both published in 2020.

However, while their critical currency has been the semiotics of form and voice, Narration of Silence’s absence of voices is the voice of absence in ‘a wilderness of words,’ the epithet coined by the teacher of English in Under Western Eyes to describe the abyss between ‘the great foe’ and reality (13). In his wake, Notre Dame University’s esteemed late critic Ted Billy in his study, A Wilderness of Words (1997), is plumbed profitably by Peters while finding (and not finding) meaning—linkage between idea and thing.  

As if in lockstep with Billy and Leavis, Peters draws attention to Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz, whose speech is recalled by Marlow as a ‘deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness’ (26). So, we are dealing, it seems to us, not only with the meaning of words or their absence, but the paradox of words which themselves are pellucid in meaning an opaque absence of meaning.

The Unsayable, be it noted, may be either what a character is incapable of voicing, or simply what the author, Conrad himself, is frustrated in being at a loss to express. For instance, Peters cites the Author’s Note to Within the Tides, in which Conrad defends his portrayal in ‘The Planter of Malata’ of Geoffery Renouard’s bond with Felicia Moorsom: ‘To render a crucial point of feelings in terms of human speech is really an impossible task’ (26). That instance is only one of so many in this book, the sheer heft and density of narrative examples ranging widely across Conrad’s tales and novels, and a near-surfeit of critical sources, preclude our taking more than a few random soundings of further cases in point; so, we shall stick mainly to the form, nature and themes of Narration of Silence.

The book’s structure imposes a welcome order on this wilderness of silences. In a work of this complexity themes, instances and chapters perforce overlap and interpenetrate; but the subjects of its two Parts respectively, the Unsayable, and The Unsaid, are distinct. The variations of the Unsayable in Part I are essentially twofold: the insufficiency of language, and the ‘gap between referent and signification’, language blocked by consciousness. These forms of cognitive and affective ‘silence’ are explored in chapters on narrative ‘speech’, the ‘arbitrary attribution of words to their referents (15)’ (summoning for this reviewer Humpty Dumpty’s (in)famous line in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’); ‘experience’, ‘the expanse between experience and expression’ (29): and ‘consciousness’, the ‘buffers’ [. . .] in the multiple consciousnesses an object or event must pass through before reaching the reader’ (58).

If this reviewer has any less than adulatory commentary, it is this: the opening argument in Chapter 1 for the narration of silence is unconvincing. Conrad’s signalling a cultural ‘disconnect’ in the reader’s likely incomprehension illustrated by Almayer’s Folly’s opening words, ‘Kaspar! Makan!’ (3) is not a silence of incomprehension inhering objectively in the narrative. Almayer of course understands. It is not a property of the narrative like the silence of the cultural and linguistic dissonance of protagonists such as, for instance, in ‘Amy Foster’ Yanko Gooral’s ‘limited command’ of English (19) compounding the silence of the unsayable ‘beyond words’ (18). Rather, this is simply a question of the reader’s incomprehension external to the narrative, its silence, its absence of meaning, dependant wholly on the reader’s subjective experience of silence if unfamiliar with a particular argot. For the informed reader there is no silence. So, unlike other kinds of silence discussed, it is what we may call a silence of reception.

Not taken into account is the sociolinguistic practice of code-switching, particularly common among Europeans in the imperial colonialist period. In Malaya and the Indian subcontinent, for example, during Britain’s imperial colonialist period, Europeans accommodated indigenous culture with a Hobson Jobson argot, which in turn was exported to the homeland by returning soldiers, civil administrators and entrepreneurs. For instance, even Britons who had never left home knew—and still know—tuan, bwana, jeldi jeldi and chop chop; most knew a box wallah from a punkah wallah, and that Kipling’s Guna Din, told to pani lao was a bhisti (water carrier). Similarly, in World War I soldiers quickly learned from old regular army NCOs to clean their bandooks (Hindi: Bandúk: rifle); and few Britons would experience silence of incomprehension in hearing the Tommy slang ‘blighty chit’ (from Hindi Bilyati: home; chitthi: note), a medical report for a wound requiring evacuation back to Britain. No silence there.

But, that is a single minor quibble, and we move on. The Unsaid, the realm of silence explored in Part II, is parsed as narrators’ cessation or pauses of speech in recollections of past events making the preterite narrative of memory seem present time, imparting ‘immediacy’ for the reader. Part II’s opening chapter, ‘Silence and Absence’ gives us ‘permutations of the silence of the unsayable’ as a ‘hauntingly expressive spectre to speech’ when ‘narrators delay, withhold or obscure information’ (89). Examples are drawn from ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ and ‘The Brute’; predictably Ian Watts’s ‘delayed decoding’ figures in the description of the withholding of information. In Conrad’s traumatic Congo adventure fictionalized as Heart of Darkness; e.g., Marlow’s tardy awareness of the meaning of a sense experience—a rain of arrows, and the unfolding of narrative knowledge as both literal and metaphorical mists lift (a narrative technique, we may add, characteristic of Conrad’s stylistic Modernism). Adverting to Nostromo and its protagonist’s shifting perceptions Peters coins the phrase ‘circumstantial delayed coding’, as a refinement describing instances in which ‘unusual or unexpected circumstances bring it about’ (40-44). (Abject Hirsch clings to an anchor in hope of survival, only soon to learn that he has embraced the bravery of despair in dying.)

Chapters on silence as ‘embodiment’ and ‘disembodiment’ treat respectively ‘the unsaid as it appears in the cessation of speech’, as ‘breaks [in] narration’ or ‘succeed[ing] speech’ (111), and ‘disembodied frame narratives’ whose narrators ‘can know things a first-person narrator cannot know’ (155), and able to ‘stress the significance’ of silence in what a protagonist does not say (156). Peters cites, for instance, a salient example in Heart of Darkness of Marlow’s hesitations and self-interruptions ‘to steel himself’, and another when Marlow pauses in his thought about ‘sacrifice’ to an idea. The explanation credited to Robert Hampson is the savage ‘implication’ of what he has said dawns on Marlow in media res as he speaks (117); for the image it summons may itself be an unspeakable rite. Would that Conrad had lived to admire the title of his former friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford’s novel of World War I, A Man Could Stand up— (1926), its stark em dash signalling a sudden terminal silence of death in the trenches.

A chapter on ‘faux-frame forms’ of narrative discusses ‘conversations [. . .] so one-sided’ that they are effectively frame narratives, their ‘nested faux-narrators’ silences ‘signalling’ moments of crisis. In Outcast of the Islands Almayer ‘shifts to the role of disembodied faux-frame narrator’ Interruptions by Lingard and Almayer’s own “breaks in narration” are silences revealing Almayer’s “increasing fervour” (169).

In a chapter on oxymoronic (but only apparently so) ‘unsilent narration’, the silence is in the ‘transformative’ ‘life-altering’ nature of the experience recounted by some ‘mediating’ or ‘unmediating’ narrators (185-86). Peters’s detection of this kind of silence in eight of Conrad’s tales is percipient; for most readers can think of some event in our own lives which we may recount, leaving unsaid—as either unsayable or secret or even unknown—its epiphanic life-changing significance for us.

After a concluding summation in his chapter ‘Silences Redux’, Peters ends with a flourish in a coda describing ‘coercive Silence’—personal despair occasioned by absence of response to words (e.g., Hervey in ‘The Return’), disillusionment of cultural superiority (Almayer’s Folly), and other kinds of silence, coercive or coerced, literal or psychological, in Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes—inducing the protagonist’s inner silence.

The paramount virtue of the Narration of Silence for this reviewer is that it sensitizes both the critic and teacher to subtleties in Conrad’s narratives not always readily apparent. We are shown nuances in narrators’ speech and silences, revealing dimensions of their thought and feeling unsaid and easily missed even on close reading. Joseph Conrad and the Narration of Silence is a significant achievement, silently signified in its title. This reviewer regards it as an important working tool for scholars of Conrad’s narratology and for teachers of Conrad—yes, especially teachers. Of its author, we need only say, he’s done it again.

Some Salient Works Cited

Billy, Ted. A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad s Short Fiction. Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press,1997.
Ford, Madox Ford. A Man Could Stand Up—. V 3, Parade’s End (1926). New York: Vintage
Books, 1979, pp. 503-674.
Hampson. Robert. ‘The Late Novels’. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge
University Press, 1996, pp. 140-59.
Napolin, Beth. The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form. Fordham UP,
2020.
Watts. Cedric. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion. 2nd ed.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012.
Zhao, Xinxin. Form Is Meaning: An Iconic Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Trier:
Wissenschafflicher Verlag, 2020.

© 2025 G. W. Stephen Brodsky