Conrad and Masculinity

Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity 135
grounds that Africa is used here only as a symbol of the European
psyche is to replicate a racist discourse.
The central instance in the story of the structuring of homosocial
relations by the problematics of homosexual/heterosexual definition
is the doubling between Kurtz and Marlow, which has been extensively
discussed by critics. 25 Doubles are a recurrent feature of
Conrad’s fiction, crucial to the symbolic meaning of this and other
stories, most notably ‘The Secret Sharer’ and Under Western Eyes. In the
triangular situation which exists in Marlow’s mind after Kurtz’s death,
and especially during the scene with the Intended, there is a notable
confusion between identification and desire. His fantasy that he
possesses Kurtz, body and soul, is also a fantasy of being Kurtz, echoing
as it does Kurtz’s own obsessional possessiveness:
All that had been Kurtz’s had passed out of my hands: his soul, his
body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained
only his memory and his Intended.
(155)
You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory’ ... ‘My Intended, my
ivory, my station, my river, my— ‘everything belonged to him. It
made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness
burst into a prodigious peal of laughter ... Everything belonged to
him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he
belonged to.
(116)
This fantasy is enacted in the ambiguity of Marlow’s wish to surrender
‘his memory’ (155): does this mean Marlow’s memory of Kurtz, or
Kurtz’s own memory? To Marlow they have become almost the same.
Does Marlow know what he himself ‘belonged to’? Sedgwick refers to
Freud’s list of the transformations, under a ‘homophobic regime of
utterance’, of the sentence ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’ (EC, 161): (1)
‘I do not love him – I hate him’; (2) ‘I do not love him, I love her’; (3) ‘I
do not love him; she loves him’; (4) ‘I do not love him; I do not love
anyone’. All of these seem to be in play in Marlow’s scene with the
Intended. Number 3 (‘I do not love him; she loves him’) is readily
available as a defence, since it happens to be true that the Intended
loves Kurtz (though Marlow seems keen to stress the enduring and
transcendent power of her love on limited evidence). Number 2 (‘I do
not love him, I love her’) is implied in Marlow’s talk of the beauty of