« To remember [...] audibly » : la voix accidentée dans Lord Jim

Abstract

The paper addresses the centrality and the singularity of Conrad’s treatment of the voice in Lord Jim. A major mimetic means to individualize characters and determine spaces, its inflexions or its silence also serve to dramatize modes of discourse as shown from the contrast between the scene of justice enacted by disembodied voices and the transference scene between Marlow and Jim where the former makes himself the addressee of Jim’s silent « phrase-affect ». Throughout the novel, voices are dramatized as corporeal efforts at making sense, bearing traces of drives within the workings of the symbolic when they do not tear the fabric of the symbolic under the pressure of the affects of anguish and terror. The text explores relentlessly their imaginary powers, dramatizing split subjectivities or imaginary enthralments and resorts to voices yet again to express its historical and ethical concerns. The very power of Marlowe’s narrative is also conveyed through this issue to such an extent that the whole text seems to be sustained by a desire for the voice, to turn into a prosopopeia of the voice as lost.