| This thesis demonstrates that the characteristic insubstantiality at the core of Conrad's writing is an effect of his belief that the relationship between words and their referents is inherently arbitrary. This belief is paralleled by his concern with a perceived lack of any fixed ethical center around which one could arrange one's beliefs and actions, a lack that he located in the uncertainty of language. He felt, however, a desire for order, for reference points, for a world of linguistic certainty, and he felt that words, if used properly, might create such a world. This belief and this desire are both issues of "referentiality." Conrad's work reflects a systematic investigation of, and simultaneous undermining of, various traditional referential systems. An introductory chapter looks at Conrad's preoccupation with words as words. Chapter 2 analyzes Conrad's simultaneous approval and critique of romance as a reference point in "Youth," Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, and The Rescue. Chapter 3 looks at the way Nostromo demonstrates the constructedness of history, exploding our complacency in the truth of history at the same time that it reveals our need to believe in history as "what really happened." Chapter 4 shows how Conrad's A Personal Record reveals that the self, like history, is a construction. Chapter 5 is an investigation of authority, authorship, and writing in Under Western Eyes, which is the culmination of Conrad's simultaneous quest for and denunciation of fundamental systems of meaning. Here he confronts, for the last time in his career, the fundamental ambiguity inherent in language, and the absolute uncertainty of the writer's task. |
