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“All Our Stammerings”: Two Kinds of Inarticulateness in Conrad

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Joseph Conrad’s work is its pervasive linguistic skepticism, a “disturbing recognition of the insubstantiality of words” (Billy 278) that is also a feature of his modernism. Conrad’s skepticism toward language has at least two aspects. First, a deep distrust arising from the ease with which words, particularly when used with facility, can generate illusions and cast ennobling veils over base motives; the exemplary instance of this is the spellbinding rhetoric of Kurtz. Second, a sense that even when one sincerely attempts to make language cleave to experience, to sensation and perception, its resources are ultimately insufficient. This experience of running up against the limits of linguistic signification produces what we can call a metaphysical inarticulateness. It either marks the rift between homo significans and a nonsignifying universe or (depending on one’s reading of Conrad) registers a truth that can be intuited but which language, ultimately, can only gesture toward. Metaphysical inarticulateness is embodied in the prodigiously loquacious Marlow, whose narratives intermittently sputter out on protestations that his words will always be “missing innumerable shades” and who dramatically abandons hope for “that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention” (Lord Jim 60, 136). Taking their cue from statements such as these, critics have examined in detail the ways Conrad’s works manifest, fear, and attempt to control or compensate for linguistic insufficiency and instability.1 As Conrad himself often does, these analyses work with a conception of language that is highly abstract—a notion of linguistic signification independent of specific contexts, practices, and speakers. Lost at this level of abstraction are the social and material aspects of language, including the circumstances and processes of its acquisition and its relationship to social and economic power. Conrad’s fiction, I suggest here, also examines more concrete and socially particularized instances of linguistic limitation—a degree of practical inarticulateness that connects language to class and politics as much as to epistemology and metaphysics. In Romantic literary discourse, language, when considered in social rather than philosophical terms, has been typically correlated, in contradictory ways, with class. The laboring masses, entirely or relatively unschooled, are either held to be the very wellspring of linguistic vitality, or, alternatively, their lack of political “voice,” in the sense of effective representation, causes them to be imagined as literally inarticulate, as poor in words are they are in material means. Conrad’s fiction often appears to exemplify the latter tendency, reinforcing, as Martin Ray puts it, the “traditional division between language and labor,” although with a distinct valuation of the second term, opposing “immoral eloquence” to “silent efficiency” (20). The famous preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ in its single reference to the substance of the novella, invokes a human substratum of silent toilers: “the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless” (NN 146).