Conrad and Masculinity

Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity 121
She does so on the basis of Foucault’s view that, in Sedgwick’s words:
modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more
and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized
constructs of individual identity, truth and knowledge ... [so that]
the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms
the other languages and relations by which we know.
(EC, 3)
Sedgwick also points out that ‘ignorance and opacity collude or
compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire,
goods, meanings, persons’ (EC, 4). This observation serves to emphasize
the need to attend to complementary structures of knowledge and
ignorance in Conrad’s fiction. 13 Luce Irigaray’s analyses of patriarchal
structures of exchange have identified the functional need for women
to be deprived of knowledge (or placed in the role of the ‘ignorant’):
‘In a relationship established between (at least) two men, the ignorant
young woman is the mediation prescribed by society’ (TS, 199).
Drawing some of these threads together, I would suggest that the
epistemology of Conrad’s work is explicable in terms of (social) structures
of male power and (psychic) structures of male desire. A
discourse of knowledge, truth and ignorance plays a crucial part in the
maintenance of these structures, reinforcing both masculine identity
and male access to empowering knowledge, while enabling the
symbolic, psychic and social exploitation of women. This discourse
does not simply attribute knowledge to men and ignorance to women
but variably associates women with particular forms of ignorance and
knowledge in such a way as to make them available as symbols of a
mysterious truth and objects of a secret knowledge while largely
depriving them of the role of knowing subject. Conrad’s texts participate
in an ideological discourse which both produces ‘truths’ about
women and produces a concept of femininity constructed as the
Other of male knowledge. This Other is simultaneously, and paradoxically,
the complementary ignorance against which male knowledge
defines itself and a symbol of the ultimate truth which, though unattainable,
represents a structurally important horizon of metaphysical
knowledge. This discourse, like many discourses which evoke ‘woman’
as an archetype, is sustained by a willed ignorance concerning particular
women. Conrad’s work does not always uncritically reproduce
such a discourse. In inviting the reader to empathize with women
characters and with male characters who temporarily occupy a ‘femi-