Conrad and Masculinity

Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity 131
Sedgwick’s argument that the visibility of the homosocial–homosexual
continuum has been ‘radically disrupted’ in the case of men in
modern Western society (BM, 1–2). So if we follow Straus in seeing
Marlow’s fascination with Kurtz in terms of desire between men which
excludes women from a secret knowledge, this is not necessarily to say
that the story is primarily about repressed homosexual desire. Rather
the argument is that the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz takes
place within a whole matrix of inter-male relationships involving
competitiveness, desire, bonding, the sharing and appropriation of
power and knowledge, and that this matrix of relations has characteristically
functioned in modern Western society through the
setting up of powerful barriers between sexual and other forms of
inter-male relationship. Women, by functioning as objects of
exchange (literal or psychic) and of shared desire, have been used to
maintain such a barrier, male desire being channelled through
women. This involves the exclusion of women from the subject positions
of power, knowledge and desire. They are established as that
which is desired, that which is the object of knowledge, that which is
exchanged or controlled.
However, an interpretation of ‘Heart of Darkness’ in terms of male
homosexual desire can undoubtedly be made, building on Straus’s
article. The secret knowledge which Marlow and Kurtz come to share
(or rather, which Marlow comes to imagine he has shared with Kurtz),
the metaphors of transgressing a boundary with which Marlow glosses
the relationship of this knowledge to death, the ‘unspeakable rites’
(HOD, 118) which Kurtz has practised, all have distinctively sexual
overtones within the discourse of sexuality/knowledge that Sedgwick
identifies in late nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, certain of
Sedgwick’s observations on Billy Budd (written in 1891, the year
following Conrad’s own visit to the Congo but before his own novella
was written) are strikingly relevant to the rhetoric employed by
Marlow: 23
In the famous passages of Billy Budd in which the narrator claims to
try to illuminate ... the peculiarly difficult riddle of ‘the hidden
nature of the master-at-arms’ Claggart ... the answer to the riddle
seems to involve not the substitution of semantically more satisfying
alternatives to the epithet ‘hidden’ but merely a series of
intensifications of it. Sentence after sentence is produced in which,
as Barbara Johnson points out ... ‘what we learn about the masterat-arms
is that we cannot learn anything’: the adjectives applied to