Conrad and Masculinity

168 Conrad and Masculinity
blackness with irrationality, falsity, ignorance and evil. This
metaphorical binary has appeared in many different forms of
discourse and has been inflected in various ways. 7 Building on the
contradiction that Said notes between the Preface and the letters, one
might note that the light and clarity invoked in the former suggest
Enlightenment ideals of writing as transparent, lucid and communal,
whereas Conrad’s fictional style is modernist, elusive, ambiguous and
suggestive of epistemological isolation. In the nineteenth century the
light/darkness binary gave support to the discourse of racist imperialism:
a philosophical metaphor made it easier for Europeans to identify
Africans with ignorance or evil. Conrad’s appeal to ‘the light of a
sincere mood’ appears in the Preface to a novel the title of which (The
Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) immediately evokes such racism. Furthermore,
the story deploys a metaphorical rhetoric of dark and light, with a
black man as a symbol of dissolution and death. As noted in Chapters
1 and 2, the power relations of looking crucially implicate gender with
race in Conrad’s early work, and traces of this remain in his late
fiction, as when the hero of The Arrow of Gold remarks of a (European)
woman that her face ‘made you think of remote races’ (66): a crosssubstitution
between forms of constructed ‘otherness’. The dark/light
binary has a particularly prominent place in Conrad’s fictional
metaphorical register. Much feminist theory, notably post-1960s
French feminism, has linked ocularcentrism and phallocentrism and
such arguments would imply that Conrad’s ideal of clear visual
presentation in the Preface has its roots in a specifically male
discourse. 8 Similarly, Conrad’s rhetoric of darkness, uncertainty and
scepticism is, on one view, a projection of the fear of the Other,
comparable to Freud’s allusion to ‘the sexual life of adult women’ as ‘a
“dark continent” for psychology’. 9
Fredric Jameson identifies a class politics of the visual in Conrad’s
fiction. The significance of the visual in Conrad’s work is often seen
in terms of ‘impressionism’, a concept which has been carefully
charted by Ian Watt in art historical and literary historical terms. 10 He
also considers what he terms ‘subjective moral impressionism’, which
serves to indicate ‘the bounded and ambiguous nature of individual
understanding’. 11 Jameson introduces political questions into this
discussion. Analysing a passage from Lord Jim, he points out that, as
Jim contemplates the factory chimneys of urban capitalism from the
apparently external location of a sea-going ship, Conrad’s style serves
to transform material realities into aesthetic impressions (PU, 210).
Thus Jameson sees impressionism as contributing to a displacement,