Conrad and Masculinity

122 Conrad and Masculinity
nized’ position, the fiction offers some critical purchase on these
structures of exploitation, without ever fully analysing or stepping
outside them.
Many of Conrad’s novels and short stories can be understood in
terms of a circulation of various types of knowledge. These include, for
example, knowledge of the sea, of ‘the world’ (i.e. social practices), of
oneself, of specific other people, of human nature in general and
various forms of professional knowledge (such as that of the merchant
officer, the policeman, the spy, the entrepreneur). All these forms of
knowledge are evoked at what one might term a mundane or pragmatic
level, the level of facts, insights and opinions. But all are seen at
some point or other in the texts as leading towards an ultimate form
of knowledge or metaphysical truth: that form of knowledge which is
the most highly-valued and the most charged with stylistic and
emotional intensity. This inscrutable truth is evoked through rhetorical
questions, professions of incomprehension, references to what is
better not considered, gestures towards an ultimate experiential truth,
refusals of apparent common sense:
Is he satisfied – quite, now, I wonder? ... Was I so very wrong after
all? ... Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart.
(LJ, 416)
What sort of peace Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov expected to find in
the writing up of his record it passeth my understanding to guess.
(UWE, 5)
Yes, that’s what it amounts to ... Precious little rest in life for
anybody. Better not think of it.
(SL, 132)
Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a
meaning from our sinful lives?
(NN, 173)
Yes; I see it . . . but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as . . . as the
other thing . . . say, Karain’s story.
(K, 55)
As critics have pointed out, the nature of Conrad’s rhetoric is both to
evoke the idea of ultimate, metaphysical truth and to question its