Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 115
less embodied and more transcendent. The narrative voice of the novel
flirts with embodiment when it speaks the popular wisdom of
Costaguana, analogous to a ‘regional accent or idiosyncratic “grain”’,
but it retains the ability to transcend the body at will. Silverman notes
that disembodied female voice-overs are virtually unknown in
Hollywood film. 32 This marks the distinction between a disembodied,
transcendent, unsynchronized male voice and the speaking from and
with the body which Cixous describes as characteristic of a woman
who ‘physically materializes what she’s thinking’. 33
Disembodied writing is of course precisely what French feminism
has identified as a male form of discourse, in response to which écriture
féminine seeks a writing closer to the body of the author. Does
Conrad in any sense write his own body? As we have seen, while
Cixous argues that it is possible for male writers to do so (instancing a
gay male writer), Heath argues that there can be no equivalent for
men of the political validity of writing the body (though tentatively
excepting gay male writing). Not only have men been less likely to
write in an embodied manner, but if they do it does not have the same
political meaning, since, as Gallop points out, ‘men are more able to
venture into the realm of the body without being trapped there’. 34
Certainly if one thinks of the narrative voice(s) of Nostromo in terms
of the distanced superiority of Higuerota, towering in somewhat
phallic manner over the characters, or if one takes the force of
Wollaeger’s analysis of the coercive, controlling stance of the
implied/secondary author, then Conrad’s strategies here would seem
in accord with Gallop’s point that ‘men have their masculine identity
to gain by being estranged from their bodies and dominating the
bodies of others’. 35 We might ask, though, whether the reflexive
critique which Wollaeger detects in Nostromo embraces a critique by
Conrad of the power which he gains from being disembodied. Reilly
argues that
Nostromo is not merely a self-conscious, but actually a self-critical
text. It acknowledges a possibly debilitating paradox at the heart of
its own project in that it attempts to analyse the historical development
of capitalism and its correlative colonialism, while being
itself a strand within the discourse of capitalism/colonialism and
hence disposed to endorse its values. 36
Does the novel similarly acknowledge its complicity with a
masculinist denial of the body in order to subjugate the bodies of