JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE FICTIONS OF SKEPTICISM

This dissertation studies authorial skepticism as it is expressed, forestalled, mitigated and suppressed in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. The force of Conrad's radical skepticism is equalled only by his desire to affirm whatever his skepticism undermines, and an insistent metaphysical impulse establishes a dialogic tension that structures the fiction of his middle period. Tracing a continuity of concerns from Descartes through contemporary philosophical debates, the dissertation argures that the distinctive features of Conrad's best fiction--from "Heart of Darkness" to Under Western Eyes --should be understood in the context of the philosophical idealism of Schopenhauer and the skeptical discourse established by Descartes and Hume.;The introduction maps out issues later pursued at length in early short stories and the major novels by suggesting literary and historical contexts for Conrad's skepticism. It also proposes Bakhtin's narrative poetics as a model for discussing the operations of authorial skepticism. Chapter 1 discusses Schopenhauer as an analogue and possible model for the metaphysical dimension of Conrad's thought, and then investigates the pressure of the noumenal in the ghostly stories of Tales of Unrest. Picking up the displaced religious impulse that registers in Tales of Unrest, Chapter 2 studies how the noumenel shades into the numious in "Heart of Darkness" by examining it in the context of melodramatic and Gothic modes. Chapter 3 focuses on Lord Jim, where the dialogic tension between metaphysical and skeptical impulses produces, I suggest, a sustained interrogation of the value of literacy defences against the potential corrosiveness of authorial skepticism. Chapter 4 attempts to trace the relationship between moral skepticism and the status of characcter in Nostromo and The Secret Agent, as well as the connection between epistemological skepticism and problems of agency. Glancing at Conrad's late work, Chapter 5 offers a brief epiologic treatment of Chance, Victory, and Under Western Eyes, arguing that the decline in Conrad's fiction results from both the reductive containment of skepticism as theme and its suppression through recourse to inferior forms of romance.