Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 167
control or supervision of the one who sees (or, in certain cases, of the
one who is seen). Since the visual image is here encoded in narrative
discourse, a politics (and an economics) of narration are also involved:
in so far as value is invested in the visual, that value circulates between
characters, narrators, author, readers. Such circulation is not open and
frictionless, but works according to laws of desire and repression. So,
especially in a situation where the one who sees is also the one who
narrates, while the object of the look remains silent, the power relation
of the look is itself put into circulation.
For example, the presentation of the African woman in ‘Heart of
Darkness’ embodies such a power-relation. Informed by the projection
of cultural and sexual fantasies, Marlow’s description of her as ‘savage
and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’ (HOD, 135–6) is overtly about
her power – the power over Kurtz which she shares with the wilderness.
But her lack of comprehensible voice within his narrative – the
one time she is heard we are told only that she ‘shouted something’
(146) – combined with the elaborate description of her visual appearance,
renders her the passive object of a masterful gaze, and
transforms her into an image which Marlow makes available to his
listeners and Conrad to his readers. The status of the visual in
Conrad’s fiction is a matter of the conjunction between the metaphor
of vision as knowledge and the way in which the narrative seeks to
convey visual impressions or describe the process of looking. Indeed,
the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ seeks to unite these: to
suggest that by offering the reader a representation of the seen, the
text can also present inner truth. As Ian Watt notes, this is a philosophically
weak part of Conrad’s argument, since the basis for this
link is not articulated. 5 Furthermore, Conrad presupposes a universal
subject of vision although, as has been noted, in the case of several
novels the ‘Author’s Note’ distributes the roles of subject and object of
the gaze according to gender. By the same token, it is frequently
women who, in Conrad’s fiction, are presented as aestheticized
objects of desiring contemplation. However, as has been noted in relation
to the early fiction, such a gaze is directed towards certain male
characters, presenting a more complex sense of gender roles.
Furthermore, as Wayne Koestenbaum has noted, Romance (a collaborative
novel written jointly by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford), is full
of seemingly eroticized visual images of ‘near-naked men, in postures
of threat and repose’. 6
Much Western thought since Plato has tended to link reason, truth,
knowledge and goodness with light, while associating darkness or