Critical Histories of Omniscience

“A dying vibration”

“…As a witness (in both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim ), Marlow has trouble translating what he has experienced into a coherent story precisely because unrecorded speech has, at this juncture, little testimonial value. The Victorian “mythology of the storyteller,” by means of which “Victorian print culture grants special authority to forms of writing that pay homage to, or even pass themselves off as, transcriptions [of voice]” (Krielkamp , 6) and puts what twentieth‐century critics identified as the “omniscient” – or perhaps more accurately, “privileged” (Booth , 160) – narrator in the position of the ultimate witness (Buurma , 122–123), uneasily aware of its immateriality and fully dependent on literacy, has begun to evolve. Krielkamp identifies a particular “figure of the storyteller” (Krielkamp , 7) that emerged in the nineteenth‐century novel and attempted to recuperate a lost oral tradition through the mass consumption of the written text.…”

“…Krielkamp identifies a particular “figure of the storyteller” (Krielkamp , 7) that emerged in the nineteenth‐century novel and attempted to recuperate a lost oral tradition through the mass consumption of the written text. Through Marlow, however, Conrad challenges this possibility, offering instead a speaker whose insistent interiority challenges “the nearly‐undetectable expression of the personal and institutional operations of power” (Buurma , 121) that marked the visible expression of Victorian storytelling in printed form.…”