Heart of Darkness and the Phenomenology of Voice

After Derrida, one might say, texts no longer speak to us. Like Prufrock before his mermaids, we can hear the of our literary canon singing, each to each, but we rarely say they sing to us. To a large extent, the modern critic has become, for better or worse, and without the anti-semitism perhaps, a literary Gerontion: Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' 1 But it would be superficial to maintain that an alternative exists among already available options. Rather, the detached belatedness that Eliot diagnoses, and the subversion of human voices that Derrida effects, are intimately related aspects of a modern consciousness that one does not circumvent simply by adopting different critical methodologies, or by carrying on in a blissfully myopic attention to detail. Indeed, it would appear that the problem of voice-both literary and human-is absolutely central to the whole phenomenon commonly called modernism in Western literature. This is not to imply that, for example, narrative voice is uninteresting or unproblematic in literature before the late nineteenth century: one could easily read Auerbach's Mimesis, not as an account of the representation of reality in Western literature that finds its paragons in nineteenth-century realism, but as an elaboration of narrative voice in the West that finds itself unable to move beyond the nineteenth century with any confidence. Auerbach's belief that the Christian tradition provides the motivating force behind the breakdown or commingling of stylistic conventions would be equally tenable in either reading. When he asks Is it still 'people' who are speaking here? at a certain point in his commentary on Woolf's To the Lighthouse, his tentative response is the most telling sign that the text he is examining has already moved outside