The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “The Fact of Blackness”

Abstract

Chapter Two searches for a mode of reading that might repair the sonorous after-life, or echoes, of racism in narrative and text. Echo is defined by slap-back, or a doubling. This doubling locates, as a counterpart to the Freudian subject (the ego ideal), a “voice ideal.” It is defined by the melancholy of race in relation to foreign traces, colonial accent, and slurs. The instantiating case of the study is Conrad’s third novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, but as a counterpart to psychoanalysis in Sigmund Freud’s “On Narcissism” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness.” The chapter concludes with William Faulkner’s intensive engagement with Conrad in The Sound and the Fury, as it amounts to Faulkner finding his “voice” as a writer of the American South through the echo of Conrad’s racial melancholy.