Conrad and Masculinity

116 Conrad and Masculinity
others? Within the text itself the only suggestion of such an
acknowledgement comes from reading, as Guerard does, the inconsistencies
or waywardness of the narrative voice as a form of
self-betrayal by Conrad. If the novel is read in relation to other texts
by Conrad, including the non-fictional, then some wider sense of
anxiety about embodiment and complicity is revealed. The link
seems to be immobility and passivity, desired as forms of indulgence
and feared as forms of subjection. Guerard suggests that Conrad
unfairly projects his own scepticism onto Decoud and proposes that
Nostromo ‘was written by an even more skeptical Decoud who recognized,
to be sure, the immobilizing dangers of skepticism’. 37 In The
Secret Agent, as I have already shown, the narrator attacks laziness in
an excessive and obsessive manner. In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Victory
Conrad associates himself with his protagonist Heyst by describing
an experience of observing an attractive and perhaps victimized
female, an experience which provided material for Heyst’s rescue of
Lena from the orchestra. In the novel Heyst learns too late to overcome
passivity, but he does at least rescue Lena; Conrad admits to
having been too idle to take any active interest in the women he saw
(‘Author’s Note’, V, xvii). Here lack of activity is presented as part of
the pleasant indulgence of a sophisticated flâneur. However, in
many passages of Conrad’s fiction lack of activity is sinister. 38 The
apotheosis of this sinister passivity in Nostromo is the body of
Hirsch, an uncanny, abject corpse, initially taken for a living man
by Nostromo, when the latter sees ‘the distorted shadow of broad
shoulders and bowed head. He was apparently doing nothing, and
stirred not from the spot, as though he were meditating’ (423–4).
Later Nostromo perceives ‘his constrained, toppling attitude — the
shoulders projecting forward, the head sunk low upon the breast ...
The rigid legs ... the feet hanging down nervelessly’ (427). In a
passage from a letter of 1891, Conrad complains that he is vegetating
and not thinking, and plays with the idea that he does not exist.
His image of himself here partakes of the black humour of his
fictional descriptions of Hirsch and comparable dead figures (such
as Kayerts at the end of ‘An Outpost of Progress’). He imagines
himself as a Punch doll:
l’échine casée en deux le nez par terre entre les pieds; les jambes et
les bras raidement écartés, dans cette attitude de profond désespoir,
si pathétiquement drôle, des jouets jétés dans un coin.