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

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

every narrative. (7-8)

I would suggest that the Negative Theology of the Lacanian formula is merely the obverse of the same metaphysical paradigm. If the absence of the father--a metaphoric extension of the primordial manque--a-etre--is the lack that produces discourse, that triggers all narratives into motion, it is the assumption of an eventual homecoming that is ultimately the enabling condition of narrative closure. Predicated on a secure relationship of origins to ends, the analogy between the textual dynamics of narrative and the psychic dynamics of paternity ultimately depends on a metaphysical frame of reference. In the absence of that framework, the analogy collapses.

However, the need to insert oneself and one's private narrative into some "transindividual order," a metanarrative that would contain and unify the incoherent private one, is not obviated in the absence of religion. That need for grounding--the primary metaphysical need--becomes painfully real with the fact of parenthood.

The individual, we might say, makes raids on a putative master plot in

order to remedy the insufficiencies of his own unsatisfactory

plot--unsatisfactory because unclosed and thus not fully coherent,

unilluminated. It is as if the individual, in order to be able to

narrate his life story to himself in such a way as to make it coherent

and significant, had to reach back toward the idea of a providential

plot which, for better or for worse, would subsume his experience to

that of mankind, to show the individual as a significant repetition of

a story already endowed with meaning. (Brooks 280)

The sense of a totality larger than the self, a family, a community, or a nation, is the obvious alternative to religious faith. But Jean-Pierre Bacadou is not offered the comforts of any such alternative master-narrative, communal or familial. One by one, all the conventional idealizations of peasant life--Nature, Community, Tradition--are demolished in the telling. There is no sense of significance to be found in the bleak landscape, the cynicism, the greed and the indifferent callousness of the characters. The "pathos of authenticity," to use Vattimo's phrase, fails to work.(4) Even "the land," that altar at which Bacadou religiously serves, which seems to be invariably capitalized in his thoughts, can offer him nothing but its heavy, indifferent silence, It is the state of "the land" that motivates him to get married soon after his return to the village:

"It is not for me that I am speaking," insisted Jean-Pierre. "It is for

the land. It's a pity to see it badly used. I am not impatient for

myself." The old fellow nodded over his stick. . . . The mother was

pleased with her daughter-in-law. (59)

There is no transition from the discussion of the badly-used land to the wedding, not a word about the courtship or the bride, not a word about love. The marriage is an offering to the Land that is the ultimate, terminal value against which the lives of individuals are measured. It is also in terms of the service of the land that Jean-Pierre thinks of his retarded children a few years later: