“To Make You See”? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn

Abstract

The chapter utilizes sight as a gauge with which to trace the transition from a philosophy of Being to a philosophy of Becoming. The cultural expressions of the anti-ocular turn observed in the nineteenth century provide the framework for a testing of Conrad’s use of the witness-narrator in Lord Jim, a novel that dramatizes the oscillations between an aesthetics of Being and one of Becoming. Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will inform the philosophical backdrop to the discussion, the anti-ocular turn of modernism its cultural complement, and narratology’s concept of the witness-narrator, the fictional measure against which these discourses strain. The three coalesce in an attempt to think the relation between sight, experience, and comprehension, between the demise of visual perception and its figurative, scientific, and philosophical expressions in the failure of categorical thinking and instrumental logic.