In spite of Jonathan Sterne's optimistic anointing of the “sound student” in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader (2012), the rendezvous of modernist sound studies and literary studies has been a dawdling affair. Individual monographs have made strides into this inter-discipline—for one, Angela Frattarola's Modernist Soundscapes (2018)—and impressive collections such as Sounding Modernism (2017) promise good things to come, but it remains a theoretical mélange, with as many methods as committed scholars, and what methods have emerged are often outsourced to apparent critical intermediaries such as musicology, the history of technology, and, most often, media studies. Discussions of literary sound largely have continued to labor with borrowed tools, notably with the lexicon of what Jay Martin calls “ocularcentrism,” which is perhaps most apparent in close-reading strategies that gravitate toward intensive, momentary observations of a perspicacious narrator. Whereas the eye accrues knowledge of a subject's immediate surroundings (and its literary critical methodology follows), the ear tends to gather fleeting traces of many distant, disparate sources. But what method could proceed from this diffuse sensory mode, and what formal patterns might it impute to the text? If sound is to engender a viable critical approach to literature, then its implications must be realized in “form, content, and method” as Julie Beth Napolin endeavors in her trailblazing The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (5).One need not look far to see these elements of criticism working in concert in Napolin's project. In what should go down as one of the most engrossing and intensive close readings in recent memory, she founds the first third of her study on the opening line of Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895). “Kaspar! Markan!”: The first word is a name, the second is the Malay imperative “eat,” and the speaker is (after Antonio Gramsci's ascription of social exclusion to indigenous peoples) a “subaltern” woman. Upon these two words, Napolin sets forth her argument, which nominally reaffirms Conrad's formulation of novelistic voice but, more ambitiously, proposes “resonance” as the most salient framework for listening to a novel speak. Under the purview of resonance, “Kaspar! Markan!” reads not as a physical event that the reader will detect like so much scientific data, but as the impetus to pursue the voice's enduring significance, over and against its speaker's narrative invisibility and cultural subordination.These two words will also preside over the formation of Napolin's method, which will draw especially on theories of the novel, the philosophy of technology, and postcolonial criticism. The sheer breadth of her attention can be intimidating; readers may expect significant engagements with theories, including Jacques Lacan's mirror stage, Friedrich Kittler's discourse network, Gérard Genette's narrative discourse, Sigmund Freud's repetition compulsion, W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness, and Socrates's dialogue. This breadth guarantees that readers will find both points of familiarity and periods of disorientation, but a potentially productive disorientation that should be embraced. The author recommends that readers indulge the performative structure of the book, which features an overture, two codas, a reprise, and various refrains. This structure should encourage nonlinear (or, more to the point, reverberant) thinking: much of the monograph's later philosophical hypothesizing and sonic figuration enlivens earlier points of similarity.The theoretical stakes of the project are as grand and challenging as these diverse lines of inquiry imply, but Napolin opens with a succinct distinction that should prove transportable. On the one hand, Napolin posits a “consolidated voice, soundless and implicitly neutral” (3). Although this point of departure invites comparisons with empirical modes of observation, Napolin's preferred idiom for The Fact of Resonance is the colonial. Following Edward Said's “consolidated vision,” this vocal mode presumes to recount visual and auditory phenomena decisively and thoroughly and is aligned with a distinctively imperial epistemology (3). She defines resonance against consolidated voice and as a dynamical mode of novelistic audition that swerves away from the presumption of the temporally immediate, the spatially proximate, the linguistically fluent, and the culturally lucid. Methodologically, this means that her thinking will emanate from such diminutive textual origins as “Kaspar! Markan!” and radiate into increasingly comprehensive analyses. Practically, it means that she will move outward from such elegant cases toward expansive questions such as, “What can be enunciated, articulated, and said when the speaking subject has been constituted through its occlusion?” (38).Yet, Napolin is not content to lament the occluded subject; she will treat sound as a valid sign of a narratively displaced physical event; she positively asserts facts of resonance. To give form to these ephemeral speaking subjects, she turns to a few key theories of auditory technology, which long have wrestled with the difficulties of acousmatic sound and the disembodied voice. Her most apparent theoretical precedent is Melba Cuddy-Keane's influential albeit brief proposal of “auscultation, the action of listening” in contradistinction to the visual idiom of “focalization” found in the work of Gerard Genette (Cuddy-Keane 71). Napolin theorizes the novel as a “sound technology—in its production of space and an imaginary acoustics—and an acousmatic technology of voice” (16). She builds her case for the “technicity” of the novel upon Kittler's theory of the discourse network and Genette's concept of the “focalizer” but critiques both as bound up with a distinctively colonial speech mode that involves the mass concentration of data through a singular observational aperture (30, 31). She will instead favor a “negative recording” (38). Her exciting proposition is that certain novelistic forms will function as a phonograph that, rather than (ethnographically) reproducing speech, will account for the enunciations that colonizing observers have prejudicially excised from the narrative.One feels the applicability of negative recording acutely when, in her second chapter, Napolin posits a complimentary concept of “echolocation”: a “form of reading” that “seeks to restore narrative—to the act of writing and to Conrad's “voice”—some scarcely noted dissent, exilic voices, and sounds that Conrad's novel both designates and suppresses” (73). Through the echo, the reader seeks to recover a voice that Conrad has permitted the vicissitudes of colonial power to expel from the narrative. While fascinating in its own right, echolocation's broader usefulness is that it gives a conceptual space to the bodies of invisible and displaced narrators. Readers may centralize this space and its inhabitants, even though they lack the perspicacious vision typical of the narrating colonist. Take the relationship of James Wait of Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Quentin Compson of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Napolin wonders, “Does not Quentin's suicide restage the appearance and disappearance of Wait? Wait is buried at sea, and in this moment, the Atlantic Ocean and the Charles River touch” (109). At face value, this minor congruity of space and character feels too tenuous to be freighted with such significance, but echolocation grants enduring relevancy to the aspects of these characters that have been formulated through the language of racialized deprecation. What might have been relegated to the dustbin of coincidence gains a critical vocabulary. Ultimately, Napolin convinces that acoustical theorizations are a valid and much-needed armature upon which to rebuild our thinking about the literature of empire and audition.Against the sage criticism of Chinua Achebe, perhaps Conrad's most notable detractor, Napolin presents what are certainly the book's most ambitious arguments. In Napolin's reading, the voices of indigenous Africans in Heart of Darkness are not so much expunged from the colonialist's (Conrad's) literary record, as Conrad cunningly withholds the understanding of indigenous speech from the ears of the colonists that narrate his novel. The unintelligibility of the forms that the Africans' speech takes should be read not through the hermeneutics of empire or the epistemology of mastery, but through the hermeneutic initiated by an unnamed Black woman who, early in the narrative, talks Kurtz in circles. Napolin echoes the mantra of her first chapter, “Kaspar! Markan!” as evidence that a “feminine principle” governs the auditory models that appear in Conrad's later work (155). Some readers may wonder if, as Napolin proposes, “Conrad's corpus and, with it, a theory of modernism can be unfolded from its acoustical beginning, the shout of an ignored, subaltern woman,” then what text—even one more outwardly shaped by empire than Conrad's—might not be redeemed from afar by the resonant administration of a similarly obfuscated narrator (152)? This understandable point of incredulity might lead a reader to a more incisive question: is “resonance” a bit of sleight of hand that dazzles as Napolin slips the severe material realities of colonialism out of sight?However, these questions would betray a trained presumption (a presumption to which this reader is susceptible too) that novels should render the subjects of colonialism visible and comprehensible. While many authors indisputably have endorsed the displacement of indigenous and subaltern speakers by rendering their bodies invisible in the novel, and while Conrad should be measured against this possibility, the mere representation of invisible speakers does not close the case. Such speakers may still be performing vital work in their narratives. The indictment of invisibility may be so quick to hand because, as Napolin argues, occularcentric critical practices countenance no other form of validation than the visual. If, instead, the voice is given ascendancy, the invisible and displaced narrators of colonial fiction will gain a tenable acoustical space—one which would facilitate the analysis of effects other than visual focalization. If Genette's critical posture is most pertinent to literary studies in its construction of a narrative through the vocalized sensations of singular spectator, then surely the applicability of resonance lies in its refusal to gather evidence from any singular narrative locale; instead, it will articulate itself in longitudinal approaches to the novel, and its veracity will be proven in the mutual-authentication of many disparate voices. This is yet to be tested fully, and I eagerly will wait to see Napolin's lexicon make waves in a larger archive.The grand figuration of sound applied to textual questions can have some dizzying side effects. Adopting Napolin's theory, I am perhaps less certain what to make of the colonial sounds represented in such paradigmatic scenes as the disembarkation of Conrad's Marlow, when he observes the “objectless blasting” of a cliff face (23). The reverberant detonation, the railway it presages, and the emaciated laborers that enact this project together epitomize the notion of “resonance” presumed by many students of colonial auditory culture. Conrad confers an “ominous voice” to this resonance, a totalizing signal that emanates from a single point and that proclaims an imperial economic imperative, one that compels the physical resonance of an emblematic colonized space and the conscripted Black bodies that occupy it (23). In this instance, I think the technical denotation of “sympathetic vibration” pertains: a source of vibration compels the physical resonance of proximate bodies. By contrast, Napolin's concept aligns more closely with the optimistic, semi-metaphorical usage of “sympathetic vibration” (popularized particularly in Enns and Trower's Vibratory Modernism [2013]), which implies an intimacy of disparate bodies and the transgression of social partitions. Even the “sinister” resonance featured in her fourth chapter refers to the perspective of the colonialist who regards with suspicion the indecipherable sounds of the subaltern voice. How then should a reader understand novelistic sounds, such as the “objectless blasting,” that are sinister indeed? I am with Napolin in the supposition that scholars have declined many of the critical opportunities that literary sound invites; “sound” still generally serves but a few cramped ethnographic and historical roles in literary studies. Yet, I worry that Napolin's smart theorization sidelines more explicit instances of novelistic resonance and their necessity to colonial aggression.Napolin's ambition to furnish the critic with the language necessary for thinking novelistic voice comes at the expense of the conventional presumptions that the novel records historical-fictional audible scenarios. In trade, she offers an intervention that may run deeper than the critical reception of Conrad or even than the acoustics of subaltern narration. When teaching, I identify an absence of evidence in my students' writing, and I direct them to the text: I ask them where, specifically, do they see this claim illustrated? They must be able to point to the text—there it is! The Fact of Resonance apprehends something quite like this most basic deficiency of literary analysis but celebrates it as a critical opportunity. When understood as evidence of absence, resonance lays the groundwork for fresh modes of analysis that comprehend narrative agency as a distributed and collective force in the novel rather than something proportionate to the visual acuity of a singular observer—narrator or reader. The invisibility of the displaced speaker, the indecipherability of indigenous language, the sounds not selected by the colonial ear—each of these supposed absences accrue form and significance to a critic furnished with the terminology of “resonance,” “echolocation,” “negative recording,” and “unclaimed voices” (39). Yet, inasmuch as resonance is taken not just as content, but as form and method, it will discomfit theories of the novel in which narrative voice is presumed to circumscribe complete social and cultural realities, and its terminology will meet criticism on grounds that its analyses refuse to focalize densely lucid narrations of a fictional world. For these same reasons, it should guide the vocabulary of scholarship on literature and sound for years to come.