Testimony on trial: Conrad, James and the contest for modernism (Joseph Conrad, Henry James)

This dissertation examines the concept of testimony and how it has shaped both the modernist novel and our understanding of narrative in general. I argue that literary criticism has been governed by a peculiar epistemology that degrades the authority of personal testimony. Focusing especially on how it has affected our understanding of Joseph Conrad, whose fiction is often shaped by the testimonial narration of characters within the story, I trace this distorted conception of testimony through twentieth-century criticism all the way back to Henry James. I situate James's rejection of the "accurst autobiographic form" in the novel within a broader intellectual trend that instigated the "new journalism" of the late nineteenth century. Both the novel and the newspaper had been striving to assume a narrative posture that would transcend "mere testimony." Intellectual authorities then and now insist that the use of testimonial narration in fiction embodies "the relativism of modern philosophy," as one critic puts it. Remarkably, however, the various precepts of this relativism---that we cannot escape subjective perception, or that we cannot know historical reality---are never attributed to eighteenth-century epistolary novels, although these employ the same structures of "embedded" testimony that Conrad uses. Because eighteenth-century fiction is crucial to the development of testimonial narration in the novel, this study also examines how Conrad and James actively respond to this tradition, especially its "sentimental" strain. My analysis demonstrates that testimonial narration is indispensable to the major political task of the sentimental novel: to create and disseminate a publicly acceptable conception of privacy. After investigating works such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Lord Jim, as well as James's The Reverberator, The Portrait of a Lady and The American Scene, I close by examining Conrad's expose of the nineteenth century's most famous journalist-testifier, Henry Morton Stanley. I argue that Heart of Darkness reveals Stanley's abuse of the "witnessing" authority of the testifier and shows how his journalism helped European powers to devour central Africa.