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

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

But narrative is not only a structure of aesthetic production. Narrativity is, as most postmodernist thinkers have come to realize--paradoxically at the moment when all master-narratives have been invalidated--a cognitive structuring category of a Kantian magnitude. The very idea of selfhood, of a coherent sense of identity, is related to the possibility of narrativization:

We are forever telling stories about ourselves. In telling these

self-stories to others we may, for most purposes, be said to be

performing straightforward narrative actions. In saying that we

also tell them to ourselves, however, we are enclosing one story

within another. This is the story that there is a self to tell

something to, a someone else serving as audience who is oneself

or one's self. When the stories we tell others about ourselves

concern these other selves of ours, when we say, for example, "I

am not master of myself." We are again enclosing one story

within another, On this view, the self is a telling. (Shafer 345;

emphasis added)

A fuller treatment of the interdependence of human subjectivity and narrative constructions is beyond the scope of the present inquiry, but it is arguable that the distinctive Modernist enterprise is precisely that search for a "narrative order," to use Musil's phrase, a construction that would endow the subject with a sense of coherence. As we shall see, the protagonist of "The Idiots," like its author, is a citizen of a world that has been stripped of its narrative framework.

If textual closure is the ultimate goal of the text, its "desire," to use Brooks's psychotextual terminology, the road leading to it often goes through the detour of "repetitions serving to bind the energy of the text so as to make its final discharge more effective" (108). Folk stories, fairy tales, mythological narratives and other formulaic literary genres are typically structured on serial principles that generate a sense of significance through sameness and variation. The protagonist of "The Idiots," desperately trying to place his fife within some significant framework, is temporarily deluded by the apparent pattern that seems to emerge out of the recurrent disasters that hit him. It is precisely this need to find some narrative order in life that moves Jean-Pierre Bacadou to the point of religious conversion. A man of strong anti-clerical convictions, he breaks down at the suggestion that there may, indeed, be some mechanism of reward and punishment that has determined his fate:

Jean-Pierre felt the [Republican, anti-clerical] convictions imbibed in the

regiment torn out of his breast-not by arguments, but by facts. Striding

over his fields he thought it over. There were three of them. Three! All

alike! Why? Such things did not happen to everybody--to nobody he

ever heard of. One yet--it might pass. But three! All three . . . Forever

useless, to be fed while he lived and ... What would become of the land

when he died? This must be seen to. He would sacrifice his convictions.

One day he told his wife--