Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Maurice Ebileeni (review)

• Published in: Partial answers 2017-06, Vol.15 (2), p.393-397
• Main Author: Levin, Yael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brooks, Peter (1938-); Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924); Faulkner, William (1897-1962); Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981); Narratives; Novels; Plot (Narrative); Poetics; Reading; Subjectivity; Truth
• ISSN: 1565-3668; 1936-9247; 1936-9247
• DOI: 10.1353/pan.2017.0023

While the frustrating reading experience that comes of the co-presence of these two contradictory strains has generated many critical studies, Ebileeni's turn to the Lacanian Real as a source of non-meaning or "nonsense" allows us to rethink the difficulty that underlies the two authors' poetics: their eschewing of authoritative narration, the prevalence of representations of sense impressions, and their turn to circularity and repetition rather than the realist conventions of linear development and plot design. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, a pioneer in Lacanian readings of Conrad and a significant precursor of The Problem of Nonsense, delimits the terms in which one might apply such a theoretical framework to critical analysis. The world Faulkner represents is one of dysfunctional fathers; the narrative design is likewise missing the extradiegetic narrator, that figure of authority who will allow for an overarching truth to emerge amidst the din of the competing narrative voices that fill his novels. [...]in using the authority of the extradiegetic narrator as a method to cement the differences between the two writers, Ebileeni begs the manner in which Conrad's works undermine the authority of a hetero-extradiegetic narrator.