| Confession is a narrative mode invested with particular cultural weight and freighted with a set of assumptions that are rarely explicitly stated, primary among these an expectation of sincerity in the confessant. The presumed transparency of the speaker implies that the narrative he generates is also transparent, a natural expression of guilt devoid of artifice or aesthetic strategy. This study examines a set of nineteenth- and twentieth-century first-person narratives that defy these assumptions; these confessants use the confessional form neither to ask for absolution nor to acknowledge their own sinfulness, but to express a remorseless will to self. In place of the transparent sincerity that is the hallmark of confession, these protagonists deploy a range of aesthetic and rhetorical strategies designed to protect the autonomy of their self-design, thereby distorting the confessional form.;Fyodor Dostoevsky ruptures the equation of narrative transparency with confession and establishes the template of the empty confession in Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and Demons , whose confessants turn to the confessional form to shore up endangered self-constructions. The aesthetic complications and apparent failures of narrative design in these works are expressions of the distorted confessional impulse driving the narrative production. This work explores manifestations of Dostoevsky's template of empty confession in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Albert Camus's The Fall, and Walker Percy's Lancelot. While this is not an influence study, all of these authors share with Dostoevsky the same basic understanding of evil as a turn inward that seeks meaning and power in an autonomous self-construction, rather than in a relationship with an other, whether human or divine, that escapes the limits of self. This work explores the various ways in which these confessional narratives invoke Dostoevsky's template, narrating not a rebuilding of self in the resolution of the ontological crisis of self, but a collapsing self, enclosed in an ever-shrinking narrative space. The aesthetic distortion in these narratives reveals the failure of the confessional enterprise as an effort at self-authorization. |
