Conrad and Masculinity

5
Epistemology, Modernity and
Masculinity: ‘Heart of Darkness’
Conrad’s exploration of the epistemological uncertainty of the
modern condition has been discussed by many critics, who vary in the
degree of scepticism which they attribute to his work. Ian Watt
describes Conrad’s use of disrupted chronology as reflecting his ‘sense
of the fragmentary and elusive quality of individual experience’ and
analyses what he terms Conrad’s ‘subjective moral impressionism’ in
‘Heart of Darkness’: that is to say, his use of a narrative form which
asserts ‘the bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding’.
Watt suggests a moderate form of modernist uncertainty,
involving subjectivity, fragmentariness and ambiguity. 1 J. Hillis Miller
goes further in suggesting that ‘the special place of Joseph Conrad in
English literature lies in the fact that in him the nihilism covertly
dominant in modern culture is brought to the surface and shown for
what it is.’ 2 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues plausibly for a pervasive
tension in Conrad’s work between, on the one hand, a quest for epistemological
and ethical certainty and, on the other, a relativistic
scepticism about the possibility of such certainty. 3 There is general
agreement, however, that Conrad’s fiction emphasizes the problematic
nature of questions of what we can know, how we can know it
and what degree of certainty is possible. These questions are raised in
particular in terms of the relationship of language to truth and reality
and in this form locate Conrad’s work within literary modernism. 4
However, until recently relatively little attention has been paid to how
epistemological issues in Conrad’s work are inflected by gender: the
ways in which knowledge, ideas about knowledge and symbols of
truth are differentially distributed among male and female characters
(and implied readers) and the ways in which such knowledge, ideas
and symbols are themselves used to set up, construct, reinforce or
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