Confessional Dilemma And Self-Constitution

To confess, or not to confess: that is the question of the protagonist in Conrad's masterpiece Lord Jim, a work of extraordinary modernity, standing out at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as a kind of milestone. In light of Michel Foucault's theory of "Confessions and Subject", the thesis analyzes this masterpiece with regard to three stages of Jim's confessional dilemma in his self-constitution. Also touched upon are the social and cultural variants affecting his confessional dilemma.Chapter One gives an introduction to Conrad and Lord Jim and provides the developing history of criticism on Lord Jim at home and abroad as well as the motive and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two makes a brief survey on "Confessions and Subject" in western history, and then have a concise summary of Foucault's theory of "Confessions and Subject" including such notions as power, subject, confessions, Panopticon, and the rules of discourse and their functions in self-constitution.Chapter Three mainly analyzes three stages of Jim's confessional dilemma in his self-constitution, namely, prelude, torture and liberation. In Foucault's eyes, power is ubiquitous. The micro-physics of power-knowledge makes the whole society a Panopticon. Living in it, Jim is not only constituted to be the subject as an effect of power-knowledge, but also gets to know about various rules of social body including the rales of discourse, especially the rules concerning the role of subject, social appropriation, rituals, doctrines and fellowships of the discourse. Meanwhile, because of the invisibility of observation which causes the gaze of him to turn inward and then to propel Jim to constantly examine himself, he is urged to confess the truth. Thus Jim is approaching to confessional dilemma since his birth. The diffusing instrument of power-knowledge—social appropriation, his father's edification, seafaring training and light literature play an energetic role in Jim's prelude to confessional dilemma. Constrained by the rules concerning the role of subject in discourse, once he peers into the secret truth of himself in the Patna affair, Jim gets trapped in his torture in confessional dilemma at such gradual states: outset, deterioration, reprieve and temporary redemption. He never gives up constituting a complete and true self through confessions. Finally, Jim tries his utmost and really liberates himself from the dilemma through offending those rules, but lays down his life as the price. The process from his birth to his growing up, up until his death is just a journey from the prelude to dilemma up to liberation in a poetic way.Chapter Four, based on the unique view of "an artist's task" advocated by Joseph Conrad in creation, explores the application of his concept "to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see", in which the interactions are analyzed among plots, characters and confessional dilemma. The author holds that confessional dilemma is reflected by different characters in some of Conrad's works. Besides, Marlow, the famous intertextual character, helps to fulfill his artist's task. Confessional dilemma of a series of characters not only embodies Conrad's meditation on self-constitution, but also reveals his quest for secret truth.The last chapter makes a conclusion that confessional dilemma has a long history in western philosophy, religion and literature: from the Sphinx's riddle to Augustine's Confessions, then to Rousseau's Confessions, from Hamlet's "to be, or not to be", to Jude's "no way-out", then to Humbert's "confession of a white widowed male". Meditations and confessions become one part of western traditions. Thus many writers or literary characters have developed themselves from pleasure to self-exposure. The author believes that so long as the torch of intelligence is passed from generation to generation, so long as discrepancy exists between Self and Other, man will go on struggling as well as enjoying himself in confessional dilemma.