"The Apotheosis of the Voice in Alberto Moravia's "Vita interiore

gent society. Conrad writes in his 1920 preface that Verloc's gesture is in fact so inane and fatuous that it cannot be explained even with the key of irrationality and that the unforeseen heroism of Mrs. Verloc only stands to demonstrate the chance nature of the act of liberty generated in her by contemplation of the death of a loved one. This ironic observation around which Conrad constructs his novel (life does not stand up under close inspection) not only presupposes la sotie (Lafcadio's absurd proof in Les Caves du Vatican); it extends the definitive death sentence for characters such as Stavrogin or Kirilov. Even the ethical function of irony, the terroristic rhetorical figure par excellence in its quality of permutatio ex contrario ductal, is short-lived when novelistic terror as a metaphysical dare and a demand to be placed outside history no longer succeeds in guaranteeing the reincarnation of the great negative utopias. Nor is it enough that, in the history of the twentieth-century novel, the requirements of devilish characters are assumed in the first person by the Author, who, in the metanovel, becomes an accomplice of the spy who tells the story, with the result that the novel once again does not succeed in fulfilling its historical function as a critical conscience in moral questions. The disintegration of the narrative's ability to intervene in great ethical and political events cannot be arrested. In

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