By Patricia Pye, PhD, Royal Holloway College

John G. Peters Silence, Space and Absence in Conrad’s Works: Western and Non-Western Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) XIV, 113 pp. £34.99

As John Peters describes, the space of Africa was for Conrad the ‘catalyst for a life-altering existential journey’ (13). He told Edward Garnett that ‘Before the Congo I was just a mere animal,’ a powerful declaration which Peters takes as the epigraph for this book. The idea of transformation provides the organising narrative for Peters’ exploration of Conradian encounters with sound and silence in Western and non-Western spaces. The subject-matter suggests a longer book, but this is a short study, consistent with the Palgrave Pivot series, which publishes research that is under the length of a traditional monograph. The format helps to frame and contain the terms of the study, and without the space to theorize about space, Peters signposts readers to other sources. Amongst these Space, Conrad, and Modernity by Con Coroneos is probably the most familiar to Conradians. Peters concentrates instead on the textual detail from an extensive range of Conrad’s fiction, arguing that its non-Western spaces are characteristically silent, while those in the West are imbued with sound.   

The first chapter, ‘Conrad’s Colonial Spaces’, is a literature review of critical works on colonialism. Tracing these back to Hugh Clifford’s review in the Singapore Free Press (1898), this section offers a detailed guide to different interpretations, including Chinua Achebe’s famous essay ‘An Image of Africa’ in 1977, which accused Conrad of racism. A section on this usefully surveys the subsequent debate. As Peters notes, in appropriately spatial terms, this review ‘outlines the borders of the conversation that exists as the backdrop to my study’ (9).  While the review did not aim to start the conversation, I thought Christopher GoGwilt’s The Invention of the West (1995), could have been mined for more background on the emergence of a unified West as a relentless space invader. However, Peters’ critical time travel is informative and revealing. It notes, for example, the surprising fact that ‘prior to the 1970s, Conrad’s relationship to the colonial world drew little attention’ (2).

In Chapter 2, ‘Silence, Sound, Space’, Peters demonstrates how non-Western spaces like the Malay Archipelago and the Congo are characteristically silent in Conrad’s work. Through enumeration of examples alone, his argument is very persuasive, and it is fascinating to ‘hear’ the variety of those Conradian silences. To cite just a few: these are  ‘solemn and impressive’ in Almayer’s Folly;  ‘brooding’ in ‘The Black Mate’, ‘eloquent’, ‘great’, and ‘formidable’ in ‘An Outpost of Progress’; ‘absolute’ in The Rescue. As an archetypal, sound-filled, Western space, London is Peters’ main point of comparison, and I found this a less persuasive example. Does the ‘subdued rumble’ of London in The Secret Agent ‘project sound in the absence of silence’ (18), or suggest a more nuanced representation of the city’s topographics? In ‘London Impressions’ (1897), Conrad’s friend Stephen Crane perceives a comparatively silent city, by dint of all the sounds merging together. The ‘murmurs’, ‘rumbles’, ‘rumours’, and ‘shuffles’ of London in The Secret Agent and ‘Karain’ suggest Conrad perceived a similarly subdued city. The aurality of his Strand is particularly grim, and out of tune with the popular mythology surrounding this iconic thoroughfare.   

However, as Peters asserts in a later chapter, these sounds signify a ‘heterogeneous’ space, with clear demarcations, unlike Conrad’s non-Western spaces which are characteristically ‘homogenous’ (65), like the open ocean. The absence of sound can also signify the ‘absence of familiar geography, order, values, and meaning’ (25).  Crane’s London was ‘silent’ in cultural terms, because to an American it seemed to lack New York’s vibrancy and impression of noisy self-assertion. As Peters illustrates here, sounds go unheard when they lack meaning for the listener.  For Kayerts and Carlier in ‘An Outpost of Progress’, ‘the silence of Africa is the absence of sound, but it is also the absence of what they perceive to be meaningful sound’ (26).  

The focus of Chapter 3 is ‘Western Space in Non-Western Space’, as signified by the trading stations and posts that recur in Conrad’s fiction. Here the colonial powers exerted what Peters terms as a ‘narrative of benefit’ (34), through the dissemination of Western governance, customs, religion and morality. This is a wide-ranging and stimulating chapter, which includes some brief but helpful contextual detail about Western-influenced Eastern cities like Singapore and Bangkok. The background detail about Leopold II’s idea of ‘benefit’ is also just enough to contextualize Conrad’s texts, without repeating material available elsewhere. Peters notes how distinctions between Western and non-Western space were complicated by the temporality of slave trading, which became ‘a prominent point of comparison that Westerners used to distinguish Western space from African space’ (48). Boundaries ‘dissolve’ and the trading stations exist in varying states of moral and material decay, signifying a kind of ‘ethical devolution’ that is either in progress, or as Marlow encounters in Heart of Darkness, ‘already accomplished’ (55).   

The textual significance of sound impressions is challenging to interpret when the narrative point of ‘view’ / ‘listening’ is ambiguous. In Chapter 4, ‘Transformations: Silence, Space, Absence’, Peters includes a helpful and welcome discussion about Conrad’s ‘narrative of immediacy’ (64), whereby the narrators ‘already know the conclusion to the characters’ existential journeys, but they narrate their tales primarily from the characters’ perspective’ (64). This brings an immediacy of experience to their transformative journeys. The change can be transient, as for Edith Travers in The Rescue, whose ‘ties to the West are too strong’ (72).   Elsewhere, the journeys evolve from ‘life-changing to life-ending’ (84), as in Nostromo, where the silence of the Great Isabel debilitates and derails Decoud into an existential crisis. This chapter foregrounds the rich diversity of Conrad’s characters, some of whom are impervious to change.  Conversely, Marlow in Heart of Darkness, and Kayerts in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ undergo poignantly transformative journeys. As these take place in the Congo, parallels may be drawn, as Peters suggests, with Conrad’s own experience.

Chapter 5, ‘Russia’s Ontological Absence’, makes for an engaging and appropriate conclusion, given Conrad’s representation of Russia as an ‘entity unto itself, associated to be sure with silence but even more pervasively with absence’ (102). As ‘Autocracy and War’ reveals, Conrad perceived Russia as something of a void, a ‘chasm’ between East and West, which lacked the spirit of either. Peters illustrates how in ‘The Warrior’s Soul’, The Duel and Under Western Eyes, impressions of whiteness prevail, which foreground the idea of Russia as an ‘empty expanse, both in its spatial extension but also in its essence’ (103).  Peters’ ideas and arguments come full circle here, in a rather circular study, which revisits texts across the chapters. These have journal-style abstracts, and hopefully AI-sabotaging ‘keywords’, like ‘Joseph Conrad’, ‘Absence’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘Emptiness.’ However, these ideas will appeal to anyone interested in new perspectives on Conrad’s Western and non-Western worlds, and this is an invaluable new book for researchers in the related fields of space and sound.

© 2024 Patricia Pye