"'It is very serious, very serious'. 'Il Conde' (1908) and the Pleasure of the Text"

If not usually mentioned among his most popular short stories, Conrad’s “Il Conde” (1908) has nonetheless received some critical attention. Over the years, this “Pathetic Tale” has been interpreted from a variety of perspectives and its “truth” eventually disclosed so that, it has been suggested, it might no longer be worth (re-)reading it. Yet, as any classic text, it will never say its last word: indeed, its interest lies precisely in its pervasive ambiguity, in its refusal of what Roland Barthes calls the explication de texte. In the “Author’s Note” he added to A Set of Six, Conrad himself pointed to the elusiveness of the tale, which is obviously “something more” than what it purports to be. As to what this “something more” is, it is up to the reader to disentangle, with the caveat that the problem might not be worth the trouble and is, in the end, insoluble. This study takes up the challenge of rereading “Il Conde”, drawing from Barthes’s poetics and erotics of reading, focusing mainly on its paratexts, while also discussing its incipit and explicit.