Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading

Abstract

Chapter One is a study of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and it concentrates on the first two words of the novel, neither of which are in English. The chapter approaches the novel through the filters of these words’ racial and colonial sound effects, which become a basis for reappraising canonical tropes of voice in narrative theory, media theory, and the phenomenology of reading. Conrad’s novelistic writing becomes critical when read in relation to emergent sound technologies, the phonograph and ethnography, both of which simultaneously depended on the oral while superseding it through a different mode of technological mediation. But the novel, as a form, only becomes a “modern” technology of voice in its discovery of free indirect discourse, which is premised upon an exclusion of the colonial sonic traces of sexual violence. The chapter concludes with Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Conrad using lip-sync as a postcolonial strategy.