Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 105
[Don Pepé] was in charge of the whole population in the territory
of the mine ... He affirmed with humorous exaggeration to Mrs
Gould—
‘No two stones could come together anywhere without the
Gobernador hearing the click, se ~ nora.’
... Even when the number of the miners alone rose to over six
hundred he seemed to know each of them individually ... He
seemed able ... to classify each woman, girl, or growing youth of his
domain ... He and the padre could be seen frequently side by side,
meditative and gazing across the street of a village at a lot of sedate
brown children, trying to sort them out, as it were, in low, consulting
tones.
(99–102)
However benign, such surveillance and categorization, constituting
the individual as object of detailed control and knowledge, is, according
to Foucault, typical of the operation of power in a modern
‘disciplinary’ society, in contrast to the relative anonymity of traditional
society, where ‘power was embodied in the person of the
monarch and exercised upon a largely anonymous body of subjects’. 19
In the disciplinary society, effects of power circulate ‘through progressively
finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to
their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions’. 20 Don Pepé’s
work of surveillance is described with detailed reference to the body,
in a passage which has affinities with the descriptions of fragmentary
bodies in Lord Jim (the pilgrims on the Patna), and ‘Typhoon’ (the
‘coolies’ on the Nan-Shan):
He could distinguish them not only by their flat, joyless faces ... but
apparently also by the infinitely graduated shades of reddishbrown,
of blackish brown, of coppery-brown backs, as the two
shifts ... mingled together with a confusion of naked limbs.
(100)
They [Don Pepé and Father Roman] would together put searching
questions as to the parentage of some small, staid urchin met
wandering, naked and grave, along the road with a cigar in his baby
mouth, and perhaps his mother’s rosary ... hanging in a loop of
beads low down on his rotund little stomach.
(102)