Conrad and Masculinity

150 Conrad and Masculinity
inadequacy to the task of creating for the reader an impression of
Razumov’s personality, and his distaste for words themselves (‘Words,
as is well known, are the great foes of reality’ (3)). His incomprehension
of Razumov’s need to write passes up to the next diegetic level,
posing for the implied reader the mystery of the language-teacher’s
need to narrate. Indeed, since this mystery is implicitly raised by the
carefully structured ironies of the book as a whole, it resounds up a
further diegetic level, to implicate Conrad, or more strictly speaking,
the implied author of the text as a whole. Why has the author written
a book about the language-teacher misunderstanding Razumov? The
answer may lie in the nature of the confessional mode. The languageteacher’s
inability to understand Razumov’s confession is in itself a
confession of his own feelings, his own desires. It is, indeed, in the
nature of the confession that communicative success and failure are
closely bound together. This appears, for example, in the interpretative
work of the psychoanalyst, who interprets the analysand’s failure
to communicate as a form of communication. The perpetual deferment
of the total revelation of inner truth that is the ultimate and
unreachable goal of the confession is represented metonymically in
the novel as Razumov passes from being a character who listens but
does not speak (when he is a student) to being one who speaks well
but cannot hear (after he is deafened). He thus moves from one
subject position of the confessional situation to the other, from the
silent interpreter who allows others to disclose themselves (even while
they misinterpret that silence) to the garrulous discloser who (if we
take Razumov’s deafness symbolically rather than realistically) is
unable to interpret. The temporal rupture that allows Razumov to
occupy these positions only separately, across a chronological divide,
figures the impossibility of ideal self-presence, of simultaneously
confessing and interpreting one’s own confession, so that one might
know exactly to what one was confessing.
In several respects, Under Western Eyes addresses explicitly the topic
of gender roles. One such is via the person of Peter Ivanovitch, the
Russian revolutionary and visionary ‘feminist’. Like Conrad’s other
portrait of a ‘feminist’ (the governess in Chance), this is a savage caricature.
Peter Ivanovitch exploits and bullies women and his mystical
idealization of ‘woman’ is presented as typical of a deluded Russian
love-affair with hollow words. As regards the theme of knowledge –
what women know, what they should know, and how they stand in
relation to ‘ultimate’ knowledge – the effect is, however, more subtle.
Peter Ivanovitch’s idealization of women serves as a self-parodic