INTRODUCTION: UNCANNY TEXTUAL RESEMBLANCES

For this chapter, I have chosen to compare two novellas – or, perhaps more precisely stated, récits – which have an exemplary status as Modernist texts: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and André Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902). Both works possess the inwardness characteristic of the Modernist era – Marlow's serpentine hesitations about the sense and value of Kurtz's life and pronouncements; Michel's tortuous self-analysis – while, at the same time, they exhibit a remarkable formal complexity and virtuosity of style. To use the terms that frame my analyses in this book: aesthetic brilliance envelops an ethical labyrinth. The mode of this envelopment will be the main topic of the current chapter.

If I have chosen to juxtapose Conrad to Gide in an essay that appears to be “comparative” in the most traditional sense of a comparative literature study – an examination of authors whose texts resemble each other in some thematic sense but who write in different languages and within different literary traditions – it is not so much because strong thematic similarities, in outweighing linguistic or cultural differences, allow me as critic to bridge a cultural gap that had previously been unbridged, but rather because Heart of Darkness and L'Immoraliste bear what can only be called an uncanny resemblance to each other, a resemblance that challenges the critic, that unsettles him or her as reader.