Approaching Joseph Conrad's Carnival World In The Secret Agent

As one of the most influential writers of modern English literature, Joseph Conrad is regarded as the pioneer of taking the complex moral and psychological examinations of the ambiguity of good and evil and human beings'struggle between mortal and immortal. Conrad's special identity as a sailor and alien and the time he was in jointly shape Conrad's insight of life and the way he expresses his understanding of life in his literary work. The Secret Agent, which belongs to Conrad's political trilogy, investigates the profound meaning of life and discusses moral issues with the background of domestic dynamism in England at the beginning of 20th century.Carnival is a term coined by the Russian critic M. Bakhtin to describe various manifestations of popular humor and cultural resistance to the restraints of official cultural hierarchies. Carnival originates from the medieval ritual celebration. Carnival embodies a kind of folk wisdom that celebrates the body and opposes all forms of authority. Carnivalization emphasizes the playful effects of literature, mocking the authorities and releasing the real nature of human beings.Conrad's works are always regarded as the representation of darkness and deep crisis of life. Nevertheless, the profound darkness in Conrad's fictional world always appears in a comic way. Similarly, this comic darkness can also be found in The Secret Agent in terms of the gloomy atmosphere and the ironic description of the main characters. It is Fogel who first combines carnivalization with Conrad's literary works, regarding his novels as dialogic works and containing struggles among words. Fogel's point of view provides inspiration for my reading of Conrad and his The Secret Agent. Although Bakhtin's theory has been adopted for the studies on Conrad's works, there are very few works devoted to the special study of The Secret Agent, whose complexity has elicited so many diverse responses.Therefore, this thesis attempts an exploration of the complexity of The Secret Agent in terms of carnivalization. Searching for the bonding points between carnival and The Secret Agent, this thesis will first give a general review of the carnival spirits reflected in Conrad's fictional world as a whole, demonstrating the inner connection between Conrad's writing style and carnivalization. More elaborations are devoted to the analysis of the carnival spirit in The Secret Agent with the discussion of the carnival hero, the carnival hell and the carnival collective. As an important concept in Bakhtin's theory, dialogicity is the way of realizing carnivalization. "Joyful relativity" successfully removes the boundaries between different social groups. The "free dialogues" among people from different hierarchies demonstrate the dialogic nature of truth. The free dialogues between justice and evil, between the wise and the stupid are elaborately studied so as to manifest Conrad's profound understanding of life, specifically his concern for moral issues.This thesis comes to the conclusion that the complexity of the theme in The Secret Agent originates from the carnival spirit embedded in the story. This thesis also presents the dialogic nature of human thinking about truth. Man's cognition is open, truth is open, so is the whole complex world.