Conrad and Masculinity

142 Conrad and Masculinity
my heart, you would have cried out aloud with terror and disgust.
(359)
In a brilliant analysis of the novel, Terence Cave shows how the reader
is drawn into complicity with ‘Razumov’s almost unspeakable fears
and desires’. 4 This complicity is established through the mediating
role of a male narrator, the restrained and middle-aged teacher of
languages. The function of his narration as a ‘medium of transference’
for those fears and desires depends upon Conrad’s intricate disposition
of knowledge and ignorance in relation to narrative voice (who
speaks, when they speak, and their relation to the action) as well as
narrative tense (particularly order, the relationship between the
chronological order of events and the order in which they are
disclosed in the narrative). 5 Cave summarizes it thus:
The language-teacher is a first-person narrator whose discourse –
the novel as it stands – is written in retrospect, from a position of
full knowledge and saturated interpretation. Within that discourse,
he appears as a participator in the action, ignorant of Razumov’s
imposture until the last moment. Even after the confession, it is
still necessary for him to read Razumov’s diary. 6
The language-teacher’s ignorance, during the course of the action, of
Razumov’s betrayal, allows him to indulge vicariously his own desires:
‘He depicts Natalia as a woman ripe for seduction and clearly regards
Razumov as a likely candidate; his own sexual interest in Natalia
endows him with the prurience necessary for him to act as a kind of
pander.’ 7 Yet his knowledge of Razumov’s betrayal, at the time that he
writes his narrative, makes his discourse a sort of trap for the reader’s
own vicarious pleasure in reading the story:
The language-teacher as a character in his own story is already
contaminated; his narration doubly so, since it knows what the
language-teacher didn’t then know, namely that Razumov has
betrayed Haldin. And because it knows, we know, so that if we
want Razumov to seduce Natalia, we side with treachery and moral
violation. This is where the lure of evil is most deeply ingrained in
the plot. 8
Not only do the language-teacher’s restraint and avowed imaginative
limitations draw us into accepting what might otherwise seem an