Conrad and Masculinity

114 Conrad and Masculinity
a degree of equality between author and characters in which ‘each
character embodies an autonomous perspective that carries the same
authority as the discourse of the author’ even though ‘each character
is at the same time determined by the all-encompassing intention of
the author as realized in the design of the fiction’ (FS, 131). In
Wollaeger’s summary here, the language encodes an inequality
between the characters who can only ‘embody’ a ‘perspective’ (subjectivity
as residing in the body and comprehension metaphorically
represented as vision) and the author, whose authority is that of
discourse and is ‘realized’ through a grand ‘design’. One might make an
analogy with film here. Kaja Silverman argues that:
There is a general theoretical consensus that the theological status
of the disembodied voice-over is the effect of maintaining its source
in a place apart from the camera, inaccessible to the gaze of either
the cinematic apparatus or the viewing subject – of violating the
rule of synchronization so absolutely that the voice is left without
an identifiable locus. In other words, the voice-over is privileged to
the degree that it transcends the body. Conversely, it loses power and
authority with every corporeal encroachment, from a regional
accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to definitive localization in the
image. Synchronization marks the final moment in any such localization,
the point of full and complete ‘embodiment’. 31
This formulation is very suggestive in relation to the Marlow of ‘Heart
of Darkness’, who becomes a voice speaking in the darkness, as he talks
of Kurtz, whom he describes in turn as ‘A voice! a voice!’ (147). ‘Heart
of Darkness’ might be considered as a text where the embodiment of
the homodiegetic-intradiegetic narrator Marlow (the most important
narrator in that text) varies in degree in a way which is symbolic of his
identification with Kurtz and his confrontation with a loss of self. In
that case the shift from ‘Heart of Darkness’ to Nostromo would be rather
in accord with Wollaeger’s suggestion that the lack of a Marlow-type
figure interceding between Conrad and his characters leads to a more
coercive attitude on the part of the secondary author. The textual
equivalent of synchronization would be a correspondence between the
narrating instance (the time in which the telling of the story takes
place) and the narrated instance (the time of the story which is
narrated). In ‘Heart of Darkness’ there is a temporal distance between
these two, but it is fairly regular and stable, whereas in Nostromo it
varies wildly, so that in Silverman’s terms the narrator of Nostromo is