Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 113
As I indicated in the Introduction, a consideration of masculinity in
Conrad’s work is by no means limited to the question of Conrad’s
opinions on the issue, nor even to those opinions in combination with
any reactions and assumptions which he might betray unconsciously
(though all of these are of course of interest). Fictional texts of the
complexity and richness of Conrad’s reveal meaning on many different
levels and in many different ways other than as an expression of
the author’s intention. Furthermore, since masculinity is, among
other things, a way of relating to others and a way of conceiving of
oneself, the voices and narrative personae which Conrad projects and
the way in which these interact with characters and (implied) readers
are crucial. Both Klein and Wollaeger are led by their discussions of
Nostromo to address the author’s attitude to his characters. Klein, as we
have seen, accuses Conrad of a patronizing attitude towards Mrs
Gould. Wollaeger, who deals interestingly with what he terms ‘the
attack on the body’ (FS, 150) in The Secret Agent, does not look at issues
of gender, but like Klein considers subjection and the author’s attitudes
to his characters in Nostromo. Pointing to the occurrences of
torture in the novel, and to the way in which the narrative tends to
impose on characters the author’s moral scheme (outlined by the fable
of the gringos in Chapter 1), Wollaeger, again like Klein, reads the
torture of Hirsch as an instance of loss of autonomy. Arguing that
characters strive for an autonomy (in relation to economic forces, to
historical change and to other individuals) which the author seems
unwilling to grant them, he claims that Conrad’s vision insists on the
power of external determination, but that ‘making the text turn back
on itself, Conrad criticizes his own complicity in the many instances
of torture his text recounts, and this reflexive commentary saves the
story from becoming reductively fatalistic or even sadistic’ (FS, 141).
Wollaeger’s evidence for such a reflexive critique lies in the ‘verbal
and structural connections ... between Decoud’s suicide and Hirsch’s
murder [which] suggest the author’s awareness of the extent to which
the narrative machinery of Nostromo may exist in order to torture its
characters’ (FS, 140–1). I find this a compelling reading of the novel,
but would wish to introduce both the issue of gender and the fate of
the body considered in more specific terms than merely as indicative
of autonomy or its lack. For the voice which narrates much of the
novel, whether considered as an implied or ‘secondary’ author, or as
an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator, is crucially disembodied,
and therefore not subject to the risk of bodily subjection. 30 The
Bakhtinian ideal of polyphony, to which Wollaeger alludes, imagines