In his book on gossip in nineteenth-century fiction, Jan B. Gordon discerns, on the margins of a society where value is vested in the written word (marriage contracts in Jane Austen, legal documents in Bleak House, the erudite tomes under composition in Middlemarch), an ‘oral community’ whose discursive share in informational transfer is consistently negated by authority as mere ‘idle talk’. Orality in these fictions, as in Conrad, can simultaneously be grasped both as ‘metaphysical Origin’ (the Voice as temporally and ontologically prior to writing) and as a subversive interruption of written master-narratives. I have already argued that Conrad's fiction subscribes to the former conception of the Voice, that the pseudo-orality of much of his fiction betrays an allegiance to the ‘phonocentric’ tradition of western thought. But in ‘Falk’ and Victory, texts that anathematize the subversive babble of gossip, Conrad might appear to have repudiated the naïve myth that meaning is immanent in the spoken word. On closer examination, however, gossip in Conrad bears many of the defects traditionally ascribed to writing: it is a dangerous supplement to authentic language, a groundless, parasitic discourse, propagating itself freely in the absence of an originating Voice. In its use of ‘rootless’ gossip as a foil for its own claims to linguistic authenticity, Conrad's fiction closely echoes Martin Heidegger's philosophical denunciation of ‘idle talk’: