<i>Silence, Space and Absence in Conrad’s Works: Western and Non-Western Worlds</i>, by John G. Peters

Critics have long analyzed the relevance of both visual and sonic regimes in the writings of Joseph Conrad; they have also been vociferous about his fraught colonialism. In Silence, Space and Absence in Conrad’s Works, John G. Peters brings together these lines of inquiry to question the “communicative characteristics of silence in Conrad’s stories” (14). Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Conrad, Peters writes a short yet pointed book on how silence delineates the empty space of otherness for Europe, with significant implications for scholars who wish to understand the European relationship to its colonies in Conrad’s images of Africa. Across Conrad’s works, silence becomes a “metonymy for a larger absence: the absence of the familiar geography, order, values, and meanings” (25). Yet, instead of making the point that such moments reveal Conrad’s view of the non-Western world, Peters’s nuanced reading of the vast Conradian corpus concludes that these moments represent Europe and its inability to listen to the other.Part of Palgrave’s Pivot series, which includes shorter manuscripts, Peters’s latest book on Conrad offers both an overview of Conrad’s works and scholarship as well as a sharp argument about the use of silence to mark the difference between Western and non-Western space in the late nineteenth century. In five chapters, three of which are considerably short, it would seem impossible for anyone to summarize the entirety of Conradian scholarship and oeuvre—especially in its troubled relation to the issue of coloniality. However, for Peters, such constraints become an opportunity to offer a succinct, scholarly informed, and direct analysis of silence and empty spaces in Conrad’s works. Case in point, chapter 1 becomes a tour de force that both situates the book in relation to the larger colonial scholarship and serves as a pedagogically accessible introduction to Joseph Conrad and his critics. Admittedly drawing on his earlier Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception (2013), Peters condenses a long discussion about coloniality from the early scholars who focus on Conrad’s Malaysian fiction to the outburst of scholarship on Conrad’s Africa in the 1970s, to Chinua Achebe’s landmark essay disowning Conrad from the canon, to the famous literary scholars to productively follow and question Achebe’s approach, up to recent scholars who reawakened the debate of race and colonialism. This chapter could be helpful to both the seasoned scholar who might need a refresher on Conrad and the junior scholar who requires a map of the debate.As the strongest contribution of the book, Peters explores how the connection between silence and space in Conrad’s works comes to bear on the issue of coloniality. In chapter 3, Peters analyzes European enclaves within non-Western spaces, such as trading stations and ports, which erect a distinct barrier between the organized sound of the colonizer and the empty and silent domain of the colonized. Reading this pattern through Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim, among other of Conrad’s late nineteenth-century fiction, chapter 3 focuses more specifically on what Peters has termed the “narrative of benefit” that upholds the imperialist endeavor. When Europeans arrive in the non-Western world, they shroud their plight in self-aggrandizing narratives whereby the West brings light to non-Westerners. Conradian captains Almayer, Marlow, and Willems, in Almayer’s Folly, Heart of Darkness, and An Outcast respectively, believed that in disseminating their values, “the Western world benefited the non-Western world” (34). However, as Peters is fast to point out, such belief is merely a veil that falls apart as each narrative progresses. Marlow proudly admits wanting profit in his exploits, whereas Almayer and Willems both hold a “dogmatic insistence on racial superiority” (43). At the end of each narrative, the non-Western world silences and subsumes the Western territory and, in the case of Almayer and Willems, “aid[s] in revealing the illusory boundaries between the Western space of the trading post and the Eastern space of surrounding Sambir” (43).Thus, in the liminal space of contact between West and non-West, in the moment the bustling sound of Europe encounters the silent and dark continent of the Other, a transformation happens in the colonizer. Chapter 4 chronicles how silence, its semblance in the empty space, and their joint representation of non-Western space as empty of demarcations effect a noted change in several of Conrad’s characters because “silence is not meant merely as a contrast with the sound of Western space; nor is it merely the ontological state of the non-West. Instead, silence is infused with significance” (68). Whether implicitly, such as Marlow, who in Lord Jim likens silence to “immensity still as death” (LJ 128, qtd. in Peters 68), or explicitly, such as the captain in “The Secret Sharer” who “links the silence of the sea to the long passage that will measure their existences” (68), such moments of silence mark important changes in each character when they reassess their Westernized view within the non-Western space. In these instances of encounter, “silence often emerges as one of the primary signals of their questioning the foundations of Western space, ultimately causing them to experience an existential crisis” (70). From such crises, characters who engage with the empty and silent space come to realize the sound of Europe to be mere noise—equally devoid of meaning. In Nostromo, for example, just before the Europeanized journalist Martin Decoud loses his mind and ends his own life off the empty Great Isabel island, he confronts the silent world of the Americas. From that silence, Peters argues, Decoud “comes more and more to see the Western world as illusory and devoid of meaning or value, eventually arriving at the conviction that all space, Western and non-Western, is a silent and empty space” (85). As the narratives of European superiority in the imperialist folly begin to dissolve, Conrad’s characters realize that Western values are not transcendent: “All the West’s sound, activity, and heterogeneous demarcations have become for them contingent, psychological shelters imposed upon an absence” (97).The noted exception to the silence/sound divide in Conrad’s works appears in his representation of Russia, which is not non-Western in its disregard for Western values or the “tabula rasa of other non-Western spaces” (106). Even though chapter 5 focuses almost exclusively on Under Western Eyes (1911) and Conrad’s later interest in the Russian Empire and its dissolution, the argument will still suit Victorianists interested in Conrad’s colonial history, especially as Peters compares Russia to the profile of non-Western space that other African and Asian spaces sketch. Citing “Karain” in the eponymous tale and Babalatchi in An Outcast, Peters makes the daring yet justified argument that some of Conrad’s earlier non-Western characters “exhibit a concurrent confidence in their cultures and complementary critique of the West” (106). Babalatchi accuses the European colonizers of their greed and, in the process, affirms his culture. The Russian exception, which the chapter concludes is “an absence unto itself” (108), helps solidify Peters’s earlier point that silence does not represent the “ontological state of the non-West,” as scholars have sought to read into Conrad’s works; rather, the projected view of non-Western spaces as empty is simply a European projection.Because of its short length and focused scope, Silence, Space and Absence in Conrad’s Works leaves room for continued investigations on several of the issues Peters opens with his analysis. On the one hand, those who continue to question the troubled relationship between imperialism, race, and aesthetics in the late nineteenth century might find in this book another meaningful piece of this puzzle. Peters refuses to conflate Conrad and Marlow, or any other of his characters, and instead puts more pressure on how Conrad’s works are a testament to and a critique of the grotesque European folly. On the other hand, scholars who wish to read Conrad in light of the emergent media ecology of the late nineteenth century might find that this book, albeit not overtly referencing sound studies, could add another set of questions to the conversations on what Ivan Kreilkamp terms Conrad’s “phonographic logic.”1As most of the scholarship on Conrad, including John G. Peters’s previous work on impressionism, focuses on sound as an alternative to the changing regimes of visual culture—with impressionism as the main influence, of course—this book hints at a different dichotomy in sound studies: not sound as opposed to visual, but silence as opposed to presence. In line with recent scholarship to consider sound and presence in Conrad,2 this book enables us to ask why we have a seeming conflation of sound and space in Conrad’s aesthetics. Could we consider the equations of sound with delimitations and silence with the lack thereof as signs of the emergent information culture that has reconfigured sound/silence in terms of signal-to-noise ratio? The focus on silence—and by extension on the regime of the audible as distinct from the visual—may be another testament to Conrad’s place in the literature of transition into an electric modernity or, more precisely, as late Victorian fiction anticipating the emergent information society of the twentieth century.