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PARTISAN REVIEW
authority, by reintroducing the hesitations of the speaking voice, the
uncertaimies and fadings of memory. This is not necessarily part of a
philosophical attempt to impugn completely the capabilities of lan–
guage as such.
This is borne out, to my mind, by the unusually detail ed descrip–
tions in
Falk,
not of what people say, but of how people speak. Seldom
if ever is reported speech introduced or concluded with the simple
conventional "h e said." The tone, timbre, volume, are often given, and
the physicality of speaking is constantly brought home to us. In
addition, the narrator has varying degrees of troubl e with the some–
what Germanic English of the Hermann family-th ey offer a sort of
spectrum of degrees of intelligibility-and he reports that Falk 's speech
"was not transparently clear." In the central scene the niece says
nothing, Falk is reluctant to speak, while H ermann says too much (he
makes Falk's story seem unreal-i .e., language can vaporize action and
destroy truth). It is the narrator who tries to say what is necessary, and
this brings in the whole activity of "translation": literall y of one
language imo another (as when the narrator has to look up "mensch"
and "fressen" after listening to Hermann 's ramings), but more gener–
ally the translation of sounds into meanings, grunts into words, si lence
into significance, substance into semamics, or, in the light of my titl e,
the translation of food into narrative, food here comprising the
experience consumed through the sense.
Narration takes on a special importance in Conrad as part of the
constituting process of man. We must eat to live, but we must also
narrate to live. Sartre's Roquemin poses the question in
La Nausee–
live or tell. In Conrad these are not mutually exclusive alternatives;
rather, telling is a crucial component of living, at leas t li ving with "a
sense of corporate existence." The idea of living being dependent on
narrating may be found in other writers; for instance, John Barth in
Chimera
sees it as the basic meaning of the situation of Scheherezade.
and the French critic Todorov makes a similar poim about th e whole
subj ect of the
Thousand and One Nights
and other story col lections,
poiming out that from the point of view of the characters "narration
equals life: the absence of narration, death. " For Conrad it is not a
matter of biologi cal survival, but of communal survival, though after
this study of "break-down" the very idea of communality can never
recover its old stability. But as far as possibl e experience has to be made
ass imilable and shareable through narration , even though as it ap–
proaches th e central core of the experience language fails into silence.
