Madness and fiction in Conrad, Woolf, and Lessing (Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Zimbabwe)

This dissertation is an inquiry into the possibility of a poetics of madness in modern fiction. It is divided into three parts: an introduction to the philosophical background of modern literature, detailed analyses of Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Golden Notebook, and a brief conclusion. The philosophical introduction delineates Nietzsche's, Foucault's, and Derrida's views of madness and literature. Nietzsche's Dionysian irrationalism subverts the western logocentric metaphysics through art. Foucault advocates the necessity of "thinking the unthought" and that of "thinking through fiction." Derrida also affirms the literary access to the Other. As modern thought persues the Other against "the imperialism of reason," modern fiction becomes a site of struggles between reason and madness, limitation and transgression. In Heart of Darkness, the traditional dualistic, hierarchical basis of representation is reversed. In Mrs. Dalloway, the linear nature of realistic narrative is reoriented into "a spider's web." In The Golden Notebook, schizophrenic minds engender schizophrenic texts. All of the three authors place madness in a center of the Derridean "non-site," where the metaphysical reason and the mimetic poetics are marginalized. As a result, reason becomes madness, whereas madness, the locus of truth, remains half-concealed. Thus madness designates the formless form of the self-questioning of fiction, of the literary transgression against any totalization.