Conrad and Masculinity

136 Conrad and Masculinity
the Intended and his hinting at an undisclosed or unconscious reason
for visiting her. Number 1 (‘I do not love him – I hate him’) has always
been implicit in Marlow’s mixed attitude of fascination, admiration,
fear and disgust towards Kurtz. Number 4 (‘I do not love him; I do not
love anyone’) would illuminate Marlow’s continuing bachelor status,
which becomes a theme and problem only in Chance. Most evident of
all, however, is a fifth transformation which Sedgwick adds, observing
that it is characteristic of Nietzsche and underlies Freud’s project so
intimately that it does not occur to him to make it explicit: ‘I do not
love him, I am him’ (EC, 162). Sedgwick’s perception that the emergence
in the nineteenth century of a definition of the ‘homosexual’ in
terms of sameness offered a way of concealing and expressing samesex
desire through images of self love (EC, 160–1), opens the
possibility of alternative interpretations of many of the pairs of male
doubles that are found in Conrad’s work. In the case of ‘Heart of
Darkness’, Marlow’s placing of the Intended as one of Kurtz’s possessions,
comparable to the ivory in which he traded, is revealed as part
of an economy of repressed same-sex desire, complicit with both the
structures of patriarchy and with the economies of empire. This link
is elucidated by Irigaray:
The use of and traffic in women subtend and uphold the reign of
masculine hom(m)o-sexuality, even while they maintain that
hom(m)o-sexuality in speculations, mirror games, identifications,
and more or less rivalrous appropriations, which defer its real practice
... The exchange of women as goods accompanies and
stimulates exchanges of other ‘wealth’ among groups of men.
(TS, 172) 26
Conrad’s text continues this traffic on the level of epistemology, by
offering to male readers a rich series of mirror games and identifications,
involving the exchange of women as the objects of knowledge.
‘Heart of Darkness’, then, suggests a possible symbolic structure or
paradigm in which the key terms are: women, men, knowledge or
truth, confession or revelation, lying or concealment. This structure
can be found in many of Conrad’s works, although it is by no means
invariable or omnipresent. The next chapter will consider some of the
ways in which subsequent works of fiction by Conrad repeat this
structure but in ways which are more critical, more inclined to question
its validity.