To support my claim, I will examine two later novels Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), that both demonstrate significant revisions adding depth and nuance to each heroine’s personality and appearance from the serial version to the novel’s publication.
In this paper I counter longstanding accusations regarding Joseph Conrad’s supposed literary misogyny and blatant sexism towards women by asserting that Conrad did not prioritize the development of his male characters to the detriment of his female characters. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. “The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic.
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