Conrad and Masculinity

172 Conrad and Masculinity
an Arab character in Fassbinder’s film Fear Eats the Soul (MS, 137–45).
As I have suggested in Chapters 1 and 2, such an effect comes into
play in Conrad’s Malay fiction, where the racial otherness of male
characters both signifies castration (in the Lacanian sense) and
enables fetishization of the male body as the absence of castration.
Neale’s stress on the mobility of fantasy also assists a more nuanced
account of how effects of narrative focalization offer shifting possibilities
of gender-identification to the reader of Conrad’s fiction. The
technical means are different (verbal narrative as against camera) but
fruitfully analogous at many points. By reading elements of narrative
technique through analogies with film theory I hope to import into
my interpretation of Conrad’s fiction some of film theory’s sensitivity
to the power/vision nexus, while avoiding a reductive a priori identification
of masculinity, power and the gaze.
Kaja Silverman distinguishes between the gaze and the look,
emphasizing the alterity of the gaze and its independence of any
particular viewer. According to Lacan, she argues, the male voyeur
may possess the look, but he is at risk of being shamed by his sense of
the gaze, which remains outside desire and constitutes the subject as
someone perceived (MS, 129–30). Thus she argues that particular individuals
or groups may temporarily act as carriers of the gaze in relation
to some other person, but that the gaze is never the property of a
person, nor of a gender. The gaze, in Lacan’s words, ‘determines [the
subject], at the most profound level, in the visible’ and is therefore a
manifestation of the power of the social, or the symbolic order, in
constructing subjectivity. 20 Silverman’s distinction between gaze and
look is helpful for distinguishing the manifestations of collective
social power-systems from the manifestations of individual desire. It is
then possible to analyse how these two sorts of vision converge when
the look masquerades as the gaze (in the desiring look of a character
whose desire is reinforced by the power to name the subjectivity of the
desired person) or diverge (for example when the desire of a relatively
powerless character is given expression in looking).
Both Neale and Silverman seek to complicate a simple identification
of the viewing subject with the male and the seen object with the
female, without denying that looking constitutes a crucial form of
patriarchal power. At certain points in her argument Silverman is in
danger of allowing the abstract intricacies of Lacanian theory to
obscure the pervasive presence of power differentials: the extent to
which the gaze, even if it cannot belong to any individual, implicates
the power of men in society. For example, she attacks as a ‘gross