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Although numerous critics have discussed the impressionist aspects of The Secret Agent, they have focused primarily on the novel's visual imagery and given little attention to Joseph Conrad's extensive descriptions of sound. Both painters and musical composers influenced literary impressionism, however, and Conrad uses aural imagery in the novel both thematically and descriptively. For a novel about secrecy - secret agents, secret meetings, secret feelings - silence is essential. Thus, sound functions as a disruptive force, indicating the revelation of destructive secrets. Conrad's sound imagery also fulfills his desire to make readers "hear" through the written word and to evoke the suggestive power of music. This article analyzes Conrad's aural descriptions in The Secret Agent in an attempt to broaden the critical understanding of the author's impressionist techniques.
Keywords: Joseph Conrad / impressionism / The Secret Agent / sound imagery
The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
- JOSEPH CONRAD
"A FAMILIAR PREFACE"
Although a number of critics have discussed the impressionistic aspects of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), they have done so primarily in terms of the author's descriptions of visual perception (e.g., Dowden, Gillon, Watt, Epstein).1 Both impressionist painters and composers, however, influenced their literary successors, and critics have largely neglected Conrad's extensive descriptions of sound.2 Such aural imagery is integral to The Secret Agent. For a novel about secrecy - secret agents, secret meetings, secret feelings - silence is essential. Thus, sound functions as a disruptive force, indicating the revelation of secrets, which proves destructive. Conrad also uses sound imagery to allow readers to experience the same auditory sensations his characters do, "to make you hear," as he declares in the oft-quoted preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," "by the power of the written word" (147). In addition, by employing musical terminology and describing speech in terms of its tonal qualities, Conrad fulfills his goal of creating fiction that aspires to "the magic suggestiveness of music," which he considers "the art of arts" (Nigger 115). Sound imagery thus serves to enhance the novel's themes and impressionistic sensibility, and to evoke the resonant power of music.
Conrad builds his motif of sound by creating stark contrasts between silence and noise, and the silence is...