Conrad and Masculinity

166 Conrad and Masculinity
(‘Author’s Note’, UWE, ix). Conrad identifies with a male figure and
hints at a certain rivalry with him: who will see more, who will be
afforded those exciting glimpses of the female? A statement from
Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, often taken as his
artistic credo, refers to the role of the novelist in terms of vision:
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make
you see! That—and no more, and it is everything! If I succeed, you
shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation,
fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask ... The task ...
is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the
rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood ...
One may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last
the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall
awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable
solidarity.
(x)
Edward Said contrasts the ideal of community and clarity evoked here
with the agonized sense of writing alone in the darkness that emerges
from some of Conrad’s letters. Said also points to the way in which
Marlow, in the act of narrating, fades into darkness in ‘Heart of
Darkness’ (and in Lord Jim), so that his listeners lose sight of him. 4
Marlow’s comments, quoted above from ‘Heart of Darkness’ and
Chance, about the relative understanding achieved by himself and
others, are also indicative of a more problematic relation of narrator
and narratee than the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ might
suggest. The idea of a fragment of life held up ‘before all eyes’ suggests
a free sharing of vision, unobscured and unmediated. In fact, the
evocation of the visual in Conrad’s fiction generally occurs within
mediated and fractured narratives, involving a differential circulation
of the image and of the truth it is held to embody. Certain characters
have greater insight (or claim to have greater insight) than others;
there may be an impulse of solidarity but there are also impulses of
competitiveness and these, I shall argue, extend to implied author and
readers. A politics of the visual is involved, in the sense of a power
differential between seer and seen, subject and object of the act of
vision. In Conrad’s fiction the act of seeing frequently serves to establish
a power relation, because this act is a product of the desire,