Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 91
the displacement of the spectacular physical subjugation of the body.
Stevie is always subject to surveillance; there is, or should be, always
someone keeping an eye on him, as when he sits at the kitchen table
drawing circles, while Winnie ‘glanced at him from time to time with
maternal vigilance’ (10). He is, however, incapable of fully internalizing
the rational constraints of bourgeois normality, and is liable to
succumb to a revolutionary and explosive indignation at cruelty or
injustice, shrieking, stuttering or (on one occasion) letting off fireworks
(9). His cruel fate is, then, in part a symbolic destruction of the
indisciplined and undisciplinable body. His remains yield up meaning
only in the form of his address, inscribed on his coat by the loving
care of his sister. Initially Inspector Heat, despairing of identifying the
body, characterizes it specifically as ‘unreadable’ (89), but the address
on Stevie’s coat does indeed lead Inspector Heat to the unravelling of
the mystery, so that in narrative terms Stevie’s dead body does provide
meaning. Yet Stevie’s remains are also described as ‘a heap of nameless
fragments’ (87, emphasis added). This paradox – that Stevie’s remains
yield up both the marker of an identity and the nameless – points
towards the aporia of the body, towards the sense of the body as
enigma articulated by Jane Gallop. Stevie’s name is the marker of his
marginal but nevertheless acknowledged social and legal identity. The
body, as what Braidotti terms ‘one’s primary location in the world’, is
the site of this identity. 50 Yet, as philosophical speculations and
science-fiction fantasies about organ-exchange have revealed, we
remain uncertain about precisely where and how that identity inheres
in the collection of organs and parts which in a physical sense constitutes
the body. Borrowing the structuralist distinction between sign
and index, we might argues that as index Stevie’s remains are meaningless
(they are no longer recognizable in ordinary terms as the
location of a person). Only through the arbitrary sign of the address,
as bureaucratic identification of location, does the trace of the meaningful
body remain. 51
Banting claims that the body resists in some measure society’s
constructions of it: ‘As material substance, that is, as non-name and
nonsense, the body resists and displaces the official order’. 52 The
death of Stevie separates his location in society from his material
substance, as if violently to wrench apart the discursive meaning
granted by subjectivity from the recalcitrance of the material. Banting
cites hysteria as a prime example of the body which ‘goes on strike’. 53
We may detect elements of the hysteric in the figure of Stevie: ‘his
attention being drawn to this unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled his feet.