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

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

"See what your God will do for us. Pay for some masses." (66-67)

Jean-Pierre Bacadou capitulates to the illusory significance of his tragedy, the narrative force generated by mere repetition, by the magic number of three. It is the repetition of the event that turns the calamity into a story that might yet end--as stories do--on a note of recognition and a reversal of fortune.

Bacadou's "new credulity" is soon belied. Three black-soutaned priests come to the christening of the new baby, and Mme Lavaille, with her unique combination of piety and avarice, serves as her godmother. But the fourth child, too, turns out to be an idiot. It is at this point that Bacadou, cheated out of his precarious narrative, is moved to a gesture of hollow defiance. Rattling the iron bars of the church gates, he calls out: "Hey there! Come out!" He, too, is a convict, realizing that the transcendental Being that is supposed to "be there" is, like himself, a nobodaddy.

But the question of origins and ends--the question of metaphysics--is not merely a conspiracy of the clergy, a "swindle of the crows," as Jean-Pierre naively believes, along with a number of quite sophisticated intellectuals much closer home. In the narrative of human continuity the question of origin and destination is transformed into a question of paternity. It is this inescapable fact of life that smuggles the Trojan Horse of metaphysics into the very heart of a thoroughly disenchanted, secularized civilization.

Robert Con Davis, who proposes a Lacanian "psychoanalytic anthropomorphism of the text," focuses on the structural role of the father, or rather the absence of the father, in narrative. Davis argues that "a Freudian theory of certain laws of transformation suggests a paradigm for textuality--for the structural relations within a text. Since the operations of the psychoanalytic subject and the text are synonymous--rather, since textuality is an inscription of the subject--many of the same laws govern both" (3). Davis discusses the paradigmatic status of The Odyssey in terms of this Lacanian psychopoesis: the father's absence, the son's quest, the recognition scene and the re-assertion of the law of the father are "laws of transformation" that operate within the subject and the text alike.

Just as in Lacanian theory where the initial absence of the father

inaugurates a desire for the father's function, and the child thereby

becomes the embodiment of knowledge about the father (and the

absence associated with him), the Odyssean son begins the epic as he

gazes toward a fatherless horizon and answers Athena's question about

what it is to know a father. The paternal absence at the beginning of The

Odyssey, then, has a necessary structural function in the evocation of a

lack, but this lack is not irrevocably bound to father figures. Absence

can also be indicated in complex and indirect ways. . . . The

development of narrative . . . is fully dependent on the structural

absence that initiates it. . . . This lack . . . is an originary feature of