Conrad and Masculinity

106 Conrad and Masculinity
The organization of the mine also extends to a system of watchmen,
themselves watched over by Don Pepé (103) and regular structured
convoys for the transportation of the silver (86–7). As Foucault shows,
the humanitarian liberal claims of such modern institutions enable
more subtle and efficient forms of coercion over the body. Through
organizational structures, routines of behaviour, markers of identity
and control, combined with self-interest and a sense of belonging, the
miners become an organized and unified body of men, capable of
marching on the town to intervene in a political crisis and the mine
becomes ‘an institution, a rallying point for everything in the
province that needed order and stability to live’ (110).
A comparable but lesser process takes place with the Cargadores or
dockworkers led by Nostromo, whose effectiveness under his influence
is contrasted with the ‘revolutionary rabble’ of the Monterists
(12). The evolution of modern industrial practices leads eventually to
what the narrator, with a hint of mock pride, terms ‘quite serious,
organized labour troubles’ (95). In the early days, however, the effectiveness
of the Cargadores is crucially dependant upon the prestige of
Nostromo: that is, it works by a more traditional model, centred on
the display of the body of the leader (rather than on the disciplining
of the body of the followers) and crude physical coercion. These are
dramatized in the scene where Nostromo cuts off his buttons to
placate the Morenita, at the centre of an admiring crowd (127–30),
and in the description of Nostromo’s methods for rousing the
Cargadores after a fiesta (95–6). So Nostromo’s realization that he has
been exploited and is regarded as ultimately disposable (what Klein
terms his fall into the feminine predicament) can be seen in
Foucauldian terms as his discovery that a changing social order has
rendered his methods of control outdated: the old order in which
prestige and punishment were both written on the body has been
displaced by a bureaucratic modernity of disciplined, docile bodies.
What Gould discovers is not that his methods are outdated (quite
the contrary) but that they are, in respect of his personal (partly
unconscious) aims, self-defeating. The events of the novel clearly
belong to what Chris Bongie terms the age of the ‘New Imperialism’
when, the opportunities for exploration as such being more or less
exhausted, the Great Powers competed for control over lands which
had already been mapped out (EM, 17–18). 21 Gould himself is an
agent of New Imperialist ‘progress’, helping to establish the dominance
of the USA over South America. He affects to understand and
accept this from the start: ‘the great silver and iron interests shall