Begging the Question of Confession: Joseph Conrad's A Personal Record

Abstract

Most scholars consider A Personal Record, the memoir Joseph Conrad wrote at age 50, strikingly evasive and self-protective. However, a re-evaluation from the perspective of confessional theory reveals the content and rhetoric through which it exposes its author's secrets. A thinly veiled apology for Conrad's desertion of his native land and language, the text adopts a hyper-interactive style to coach internal and external audiences in their role as his confessor. The work's confessional nature is particularly evident when viewed in conjunction with two related pieces of semi-autobiographical fiction, Under Western Eyes, the novel he wrote while completing A Personal Record, and Almayer's Folly, the novel whose composition forms the cornerstone of the memoir. Read together, these works suggest Conrad's coded disclosures as useful examples of confessional narrative in their ability to render audiences complicit with his simultaneous profession and denial of guilt.