Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 143
implausibly sensational plot, but his ‘imperfect censorship leaves
blanks we are bound to fill, which means we in our turn are contaminated
by the narrator’s epistemophilia’. 9
For Cave, the confession at the climax of Under Western Eyes is
indeed a confession of an (intended) sexual crime and an illicit desire:
The very fact that Razumov articulates this further confession (the
‘true’ one), and thus writes into the story a narrative future forestalled
by the confession scene itself, sufficiently demonstrates that
some such ultimate twist is the object of our narrative desire . . .
The imaginary rape, the violence that would have made Natalia
‘[cry] out aloud with terror and disgust’, is the melodramatic scene
that the narrative conjures up without having to take responsibility
for it. 10
So the knowledge which is ultimately revealed to Natalia has something
in common with that which is forever withheld from Kurtz’s
Intended. Like ‘Heart of Darkness’, Under Western Eyes is a fiction
about men’s knowledge and understanding of themselves and
other men, and the ways in which such knowledge circulates, articulating
relationships between men. And again women serve as
objects of male competitiveness and as such mediate relationships
between men. However, several factors operate to modify and
complicate the homosocial male economy, resulting in a work
which is ultimately more rich and satisfying than ‘Heart of
Darkness’, less in thrall to a certain masculinist ideology and more
able to explore and question it.
As indicated in the Introduction, the basic model of the male
homosocial economy is established in the various, but to some extent
convergent, work by Gayle Rubin, René Girard, Eve Sedgwick and Luce
Irigaray:
If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give
and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship
rather than a partner to it.
(TW, 174)
The impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the
mediator; in internal mediation this impulse is checked by the
mediator himself since he desires, or perhaps possesses, the object.
(DD, 10)