Conrad and Masculinity

104 Conrad and Masculinity
Province of railroads, tramcars, organized industry and domination by
American capital). 16 The disciplining of the body – and specifically the
male working body – is crucial to this process and the silver mine,
which is the central symbol of the novel, provides the clearest
example of this. Foucault distinguishes discipline from slavery: slavery
was based upon ‘a relation of appropriation of bodies’ whereas discipline
‘could dispense with this costly and violent relation by
obtaining effects of utility at least as great’. 17 Rather than violent
appropriation of the bodies of others, deploying physical force and
punishment, discipline is
a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation
of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour ... so that they [the
bodies of others] may operate as one wishes, with the techniques,
the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline
produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. 18
It is the difference, say, between flogging men to make them work, and
using time and motion studies, training, rules and human resource
policies to induce them to employ their bodies to maximum productive
effect. The San Tomé mine does not get as far as time and motion
studies during the period depicted in the novel, but Gould’s transformation
of the mine, and hence of the society of Costaguana, is
precisely achieved through a move towards such disciplinary methods:
Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of
slaves, its yield [i.e. that of the mine] had been paid for in its own
weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in
the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with
this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no
matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw.
(52)
In contrast, Gould transforms the mine into an economic success and
a political power base through the creation of a disciplined body of
men: disciplined in both the normal sense and in Foucault’s sense. He
introduces numbered villages (100), an informal uniform emerges
(97), and the miners are subject to surveillance and categorization by
the representatives of Capital, Church and Medicine in the persons of
Don Pepé (‘El Se ~ nor Gobernador’ (99)), Father Roman and Dr
Monygham: