Denegation, Textuality and Intertextuality in ”The Idiots”
Epistemological Transformation of Conrad’s Tale
Abstract
“The Idiots,” published as part of Conrad’s first collection of short stories Tales of Unrest (1898), is, by far, the most minimalist of all his tales, therefore dubbed “pointless” by one of his critics. As such, it has mostly occasioned contextual readings to date, purely literary approaches to the story being few and far between. The present article offers a transformative reappraisal of this deprecated Conrad tale, in considering its artistic texture. A combined textual and intertextual approach proposed here reveals the presence, also in this Conrad story, of the modernist device of denegation (assertion of presence by absence, and vice versa) usually ascribed to William Faulkner, which helps resolve the issue of the tale’s ambiguous ending by defining it as the main heroine’s accidental drowning rather than suicide as it is usually seen in Conrad criticism. In its epistemologically transformative role, denegation likewise removes the odium of senselessness from “The Idiots” by identifying its covert, because denegatively construed, taboo theme of incest. The intertextual (Bakhtinian) reading of the story in Kristeva’s understanding of the term, and therefore through recourse to a later writer, i.e., Faulkner, does not only confirm the presence of the theme of incest in “The Idiots” but also reveals the American modernist’s unacknowledged indebtedness to this Conrad tale for some of the key motifs, if not its overall theme, of his most famous novel The Sound and the Fury (1929).
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