Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 175
association is itself part of the male-dominated cultural history that
has been described by Irigaray. 26 The use of the words ‘charm’ and
‘glimpse’ in the passage quoted earlier from the Preface hint at a feminization
and eroticization of truth which, as I suggested in Chapters 5
and 6, is a frequent configuration of truth and vision in Conrad’s work
(again drawing on a long tradition in male writing, especially male
Romanticism). Just as there is a tension between Conrad’s ideal of
clarity and light and his sense of working in the darkness, so his aspiration
to vision as a faculty of sharing and mutuality is shadowed by
patterns of rivalry, structures of power and the gendered history of the
aesthetic discourses which he evokes.
In specific fictional texts or films the details of construction determine
whether these general ideological features of the visual are
reinforced or resisted. Whether a look objectifies or establishes a
caring reciprocity must depend on a complex range of material and
psychological conditions. The most obvious condition is that of
equality: whether a mutual look on equal terms is possible. But here
the question of medium intervenes. Mulvey’s article has been very
influential because it identifies a tripartite structure of looks in
conventional cinema, involving camera, characters and spectators. In
fiction there is a similarly complex structure, rendered more oblique
by the verbal medium. The writer wishing to evoke visual images is
likely to think in terms of the mind’s eye, since he or she must depend
in part on the imagination of the reader. The duality identified by
Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine Grontowski between physical and
mental ‘sight’ is peculiarly present to the reader of fiction, who looks
at the physical page while imaginatively ‘seeing’ the content of the
story. 27 Perhaps the difficulty of controlling the conditions of such
looking and seeing prompts a certain anxiety in Conrad’s tone and
slipperiness in his words in the Preface. Can the artist really work
‘unquestioningly’ (especially a sceptic such as Conrad) or ‘without
choice’? Whose ‘sincere mood’ is claimed or requested by the phrase
‘in the light of a sincere mood’ – that of writer or reader or both?
Looking from a distance and a one-way gaze are likely to involve a
power differential, while a close, mutual regard is more suggestive of
care and communication. It is uncertain which category embraces the
work of the fiction writer as Conrad represents himself. Writing alone
and in the darkness of introspection, any sense of closeness and mutuality
felt by the writer must depend on imaginative projection. That
Marlow, as narrator, is partly a dramatization of this dilemma is a
familiar idea. Marlow’s rhetoric and his sense of difference and