Conrad and Masculinity

164 Conrad and Masculinity
position (or at least a possible position) for the reader. Furthermore
one of them relays and frames Marlow’s story. Is the implied reader,
then, someone who would fall into the category of ‘you fellows’?
Will he see more than Marlow? Is there any possibility of a female
implied reader? The use of ‘see’ to mean ‘understand’ or ‘realize’ is a
familiar idiom; this and a whole set of related metaphors (such as
‘perceive’, ‘perspective’, ‘illuminate’, ‘insight’) are a product of a
tradition in Western thought that privileges sight as a model for
knowledge and understanding. 3 Marlow’s use of the metaphor of
vision not only evokes this tradition but is also indicative of the
important role played by metaphors of sight and vision in Conrad’s
fiction and critical writings.
Marlow’s comment is part of a major area of philosophical concern
for Conrad, that of the problematic relations between experience,
truth and interpretation. In Chance, Marlow makes the same assumption,
though he himself occupies the inverse subject-position:
referring to another man’s experience which he is recounting at
second hand, he claims for himself the greater penetration of the
retrospective gaze: ‘The inwardness of what was passing before his
eyes was hidden from him, who had looked on, more impenetrably
than from me who at a distance of years was listening to his words’ (C,
426). Conrad’s most characteristic metaphor for the problems of interpretation
and understanding is that of vision, particularly the
metaphor of seeing into things, but also, for example, the famous
image of the ‘haze’ in ‘Heart of Darkness’, where the quest for the
meaning of a story is figured as looking at ‘one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine’
(48). Ideas of penetrative vision (‘insight’) and of the mental
‘vision’ of understanding are frequent in Conrad’s fiction. Examples
include: ‘And then my eyes became opened to the inwardness of
things and speeches the triviality of which had been so baffling and
tiresome’ (SL, 26); ‘I strained my mental eyesight only to discover
that, as with the complexion of all our actions, the shade of difference
was so delicate that it was impossible to say’ (LJ, 197). It is, however,
in Conrad’s comments on his own writings that the visual metaphor
for understanding is most pervasive. His ‘Author’s Notes’ refer
frequently to his ‘vision’:
It was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country
which was to become the province of Sulaco.
(‘Author’s Note’, N, ix)