Conrad and Masculinity

174 Conrad and Masculinity
There is, then, a well-established body of theory and criticism which
links the dominance of vision to male power. However, to equate pleasure
in looking with masculinity would be simplistic and the
association of seeing with mastery needs to be treated with some
caution. The configuration of vision and power varies in different
periods and cultures. Foucault distinguishes in Discipline and Punish
between a mode in which ‘power was what was seen, what was shown
and what was manifested’ while ‘those on whom it was exercised
could remain in the shade’ and the disciplinary mode of power, which
‘is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on
those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility.’ 23 The
former would characterize, for example, a Renaissance court, while the
latter would be more typical of bureaucratic systems of control such as
modern penal and educational practices. This distinction is of some
relevance to Conrad’s portrayal of non-Western cultures.
Psychoanalytical and feminist theories of the gaze which stress its
masterful, sadistic and objectifying nature can themselves be placed in
a historical context, a project undertaken by Martin Jay in his study of
the denigration of sight in twentieth-century thought (especially
French thought), in contrast to its earlier celebration as ‘the “noblest”
of the senses’. Jay comments that Foucault (one of the key figures in
the linkage of power and vision along with Freud, Sartre and Irigaray)
‘resisted exploring [vision’s] reciprocal, inter-subjective, communicative
function, that of the mutual glance’. Jay notes that ‘le regard’,
strongly associated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness with ‘the alienating
and objectifying power of the Other’s gaze’, ‘never assumed [in
French] its alternative meaning in English of caring or esteeming’. 24
Furthermore, the Lacanian distinction between eye (or look) and gaze
supports the view that ‘true reciprocity is only an illusion’: the look of
the Cartesian eye can never harmoniously balance the gaze of the
‘objective other’. 25
It is precisely a ‘communicative function’ and a mood of caring or
esteem with which Conrad seeks to invest vision by his references to
sincerity and solidarity in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.
He evokes hearing (‘to make you hear’) and feeling (‘to make you feel’)
– omitting smell and taste which are, indeed, not greatly in evidence
in his fiction – but privileges sight (‘to make you see’) as the culmination.
While this is no doubt partly because of a particular interest in
the visual image, it also results from the traditional Romantic association
of ‘vision’ with genius, understanding, power, knowledge. Here
there is again a point of purchase for a feminist critique, since that