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

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

PS. This letter missed this morning's post because an infant of male

persuasion arrived and made such a row that I could not hear the

Postman's whistle. It's a fine commentary upon this letter! But

salvation lies in being illogical. Still I feel remorse. (Letters to

Graham 65)

The truth of this odd postscript outweighs, if only by the smallest of margins, the apocalyptic tone of the letter. Conrad, we know, had chosen to turn away from the dead end of his own lethal skepticism, to attend to the tiny voice of the infant and all it stood for rather than listen for the postman's whistle. A convict of his own making, he had apparently chosen--as if it were a matter of choice--to join the company of "the elect," those cursed with the "infernal and divine privilege of thought," "who understand and who lament." Salvation, it seems, does lie in being illogical. (1) See Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad . . . 1-24, 139-56.

(2) One exception to this unanimous critical silence is a comment made by Daniel Schwarz who, in trying to redeem the story from critical oblivion, describes it as "a penetrating study of emotional and moral idiocy," where "the blighted offspring are stark symbols of a community where family, clerical, and political structures are undermined by the hypocrisy, selfishness, and vanity of those in positions to provide moral leadership," and argues, with very little support from the text, that the narrator's "values" are "a humanistic alternative" to those of the Ploumar parish that fails "to provide responsible care for the helpless children" (Schwarz 23-24). Schwarz's commentary itself is a case in point, for in providing the story with a didactic message, a moral that is obviously not to be found in the text, it exposes a sense of acute readerly discomfort that does not derive from an aesthetic weakness in the text but from what is clearly an ethical issue.

(3) On the ambivalence of Bakhtin's early work see Erdinast-Vulcan, "Narrative . . ." and "Bakhtin's Homesickness. . . ." (4) Vattimo uses the phrase in his "apology for Nihilism," with reference to the "resistance to the accomplishment of nihilism," which he defines as the "reduction of Being to exchange value" in the absence of the "terminal, interrupting instance of highest value (God)" (21). My own use of the phrase, in a somewhat extended sense, denotes the substitution of religious with other forms of metaphysical ballast.

WORKS CITED

Bakhtin, M. M. "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1919). Art and Answerability. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: U Texas P, 1990. 4-256.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller" (1936). Illuminations. Ed. and Intr. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. 83-110.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984.

Conrad, Joseph. "The Idiots" (1896). Tales of Unrest. Dent Uniform Edition. London: Dent, 1923. 56-85.

--. "Henry James: An Appreciation" (1905). Notes on Life and Letters. London: Dent, 1921. 13-23.