Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 199
not take my soul down into the street to fight there. I started off to
wander about, an independent spectator—if that is possible’ (196).
Rejecting ‘the streets’, Heyst nevertheless becomes a sort of flâneur of
the world in general. 17 He sees his involvement with Lena as ‘his latest
departure from the part of an unconcerned spectator’ (185), but ‘at the
same time he could not help being temperamentally, from long habit
and from set purpose, a spectator still’ (185). He tells Davidson: ‘At
one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best
way of cheating the time which is allotted to us ... but now I have
done with observation, too’ (54). However, it is his ‘faculty of observation’
(71) that leads to his involvement with Lena and he continues
to observe her intensely (if not always intelligently).
While Heyst’s previous detachment from the world had been a
matter of observation and speculation, his involvement, with the
mine and then with Lena, is a matter of new forms of speculation and
observation: financial speculation and sexual observation. When the
mining company collapses, Heyst tries to reconvert commercial speculation
into philosophical speculation, staying on Samburan no
longer as manager but as a hermit philosopher lounging on his lonely
veranda. However, the two forms of speculation are re-enmeshed by
the presence of a woman. Heyst’s lone presence on the island was the
subject only of idle speculation among the European community, not
exactly philosophical speculation but without a profit-motive (unless
one counts Schomberg’s resentment at Heyst’s failure to patronize his
restaurant). However, once Lena is with him, the pair become the
subject of malevolent and interested speculation. Schomberg invests
his jealousy in the greed of Jones and Ricardo, setting them going on
a speculative journey to rob Heyst of his supposed wealth and of Lena.
The plot manifests the homology between a psychic economy of
masculinity (with woman as the object of exchange) and the financial
economy of imperial capitalism (in which money or commodities are
exchanged). The possibility of the reader (specifically the male reader)
being drawn into this specular economy is indicated by Robert Secor’s
observation that the novel’s narrative method (beginning with narration
by an unspecified European man) makes the reader ‘share the
cognitive methods of the Schombergian world’, with Heyst and Lena
as enigmatic objects of speculation and investigation. 18
Victory involves a contest between philosophy and ‘woman’, more
specifically between Schopenhauerian pessimism and detachment
and a woman who is symbolically identified with sexuality, passion,
involvement, life – and death. 19 The philosophical scepticism of Heyst