Maurice Ebileeni's Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense reads like an oddly dated book. Ebileeni proposes that both Faulkner and Conrad focus on the problem of “nonsense” and deal with it in different ways. What is the problem he cites as “nonsense”? Basically, Ebileeni is referring to what he terms “the possibility of chaos behind the mirage of European rationalism” in a “bleak post-Darwinian era” (3), or, alternatively stated, “humanity's existential crisis” (8) in an era where Nietzsche has declared that God is dead. This terminology exemplifies the outdated quality of the book. The “nonsense,” or disintegration of a foundation for our meanings, to which Ebileeni refers defines the postmodern era. While Conrad and Faulkner pre-date postmodernism, both literary geniuses anticipate the movement. Both were modernists, and modernism is intimately connected to postmodernism; but Ebileeni never mentions modernism, postmodernism, or post-structuralism in his study of the two writers' responses to the “abyss.”

The project of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense is to trace the differing responses of Conrad and Faulkner to “the new desolate landscape” (8). According to Ebileeni, Conrad “offers ways to relate to the chaotic from a relatively safe vantage point,” as opposed to Faulkner, who “relentlessly engages it, exploring the entropy of modern life” (1). To make this argument, throughout the book Ebileeni turns to the same novels, three by Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1899–1900), and Under Western Eyes (1911), and two by Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). This structure leads to redundancy. For example, in chapter 1, he compares the narrative techniques of the three Conrad novels with the two Faulkner novels and concludes that the narrators of Conrad's novels “promise to deliver a point that may explain it all, well aware that it [the “point” that might “explain”] resides outside contemporary epistemological frameworks,” while Faulkner's novels “evacuate the notion of the authoritative hetero-extradiegetic narrator altogether” (37). In his second chapter, he examines the narrative intentions of the same Conrad and Faulkner novels to make the point that the cynicism of Conrad's narrators is rooted in neurosis, while “Faulkner's decision to eradicate narrative authority produces a conceptual space whose structure is not dissimilar from the structure of psychosis” (15).

In his third and fourth chapters, Ebileeni introduces Jacques Lacan into the mix. To distinguish his Lacanian reading from the vast archive of psychoanalytic scholarship on Faulkner's and Conrad's novels, he states that, whereas previous psychoanalytic readings have been based on theories from Lacan's earlier phase, he will apply concepts from Lacan's later writings, the symptom and the sinthome. As explained by Ebileeni, the symptom is essentially a conventional Freudian concept. It is a manifestation of neurosis or a reaction to it: “a ciphered message of a latent deviation” (54). The sinthome, on the other hand, is Lacan's rewriting of the symptom, and Lacan turns to the archaic French spelling, sinthome, to distinguish the sinthome from the symptom. According to Ebileeni, the sinthome “is a sublimation that fills the void of the Real” (55), which “serves as an ongoing infrastructure in the absence of paternal authority” (56).

Ebileeni employs the concepts of the symptom and the sinthome to reinforce his thesis that Conrad's narrators work to distance “nonsense,” while Faulkner's narrations engage with it. In Conrad's works, Ebileeni points to the “narrators' compulsive need to constantly produce additional layers of narrative” as symptomatic of their neurosis. It is a “compulsive reaction to ward off the chaotic” (63). For example, in Heart of Darkness, Marlow's lie to the Intended about Kurtz's last words, which were “The horror, the horror,” function as a way to cling to safety and to avoid facing “the horrific effects of acknowledging the force of nonsense” (84). Turning to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Ebileeni argues that Benjy Compson's howl and Darl Bundren's laughter are both sinthomes or “symptomatic configurations of nonsense” (125); that is, both represent an engagement with the nonsensical force that “transforms it into a sinthome that brings a semblance of order to a world devoid of an all-governing authority” (124).

In the end, Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense persuasively makes the case that Conrad's narrations fend off “nonsense,” while Faulkner's engage it. That said, this insight adds little that is original to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the novels of these authors.