"Signifying nothing": Conrad's idiots and the anxiety of modernism

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

The reader of novels . . . [looks] for human beings from whom he

derives the "meaning of life." Therefore he must, no matter what,

know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if

need be their figurative death--the end of the novel--but preferably

their actual one. . . . The novel is significant, therefore, not because

it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but

because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which

consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our

own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of

warming his shivering life with a death he reads about. (101)

The same etiological relationship between authoring and authority is perceived as the very condition of the aesthetic relationship in Bakhtin's early work. The creative position of the author (defined as "a principle of seeing"), a position of outsideness or transgradience that enables him to enframe his characters "can be founded only upon a deep trust in the highest level of authority that blesses a culture--upon trust, that is, in the fact that there is another--the highest other--who answers for my own special answerability, and trust in the fact that I do not act in an axiological void" (206; emphasis added). The position of ultimate transgradience is that of God, and "the divinity of the artist consists in his partaking of the supreme outsideness" (191). The sense of an ending, that meaningful death which should warm our shivering life is attainable, according to the early Bakhtin, only when the omniscient human author derives his authority from the transcendental Auctor Mundi.(3)

It is, of course, not a coincidence that the omniscient, enframing narrative mode that characterized the novel throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be perceived as obsolete when the death of God was publicly diagnosed by Nietzsche. The "wisdom" of the storyteller, the authority that he derives out of his knowledge of the end, the retrospective illumination that is brought about by the closure of the narrative frame are only viable within a metaphysical frame of reference. That omniscient authorial consciousness which transcends the sphere of action and consciousness within which the characters act, and views the narrative as a temporal and axiological whole, is analogous to and dependent on the conception of metaphysical grounding.

Conrad, too, is well aware of the desire for "the sense of an ending." In his essay on James he wistfully comments on the "usual methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death," which, he says,

are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for

which our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than the longing

for the loaves and the fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true

desire of mankind, coming thus to fight in its hours of leisure, is

to be set at rest. (18-19)

The desire for the end is not only the motor of narration. It is the incurable need for a final significance, appropriately related to the loaves and the fishes, and--just like them--no longer available in a secular world.