Conrad and Masculinity

206 Conrad and Masculinity
homosexuality in Conrad’s work are important primarily because of
the pressure they exert on the homosocial structures which dominate
the narratives. As Sedgwick points out, patriarchal homosexual structures
are often homophobic as well: in her terms, ‘the potential
unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual’
(BM, 1) is obscured or rendered invisible within structures of power
involving the exchange of women among men. The hints of homosexual
feeling in Heyst’s relationship with Morrison unsettle the
homosocial structures present in plot and narrative, as do the suggestions
of a feminization of Heyst and the presence at certain moments
between Heyst and Lena of a gaze of mutuality rather than of power.
Visual processes, of looking and being looked at, of self-confident
scrutiny and anxious self-consciousness, play a major part, together
with the articulation of gendered antitheses, such as that of activity
and passivity. While the interaction of Heyst and Davidson in the
penultimate chapter fits a pattern of homosocial exchange, notably in
their contemplation of the dying Lena, the Morrison–Heyst–Lena
triangle is not one in which the men exchange the woman or her
image, but one in which a man (Heyst) relates in comparable ways to
another man and to a woman. At this stage of the novel Lena is more
a substitute for Morrison (or vice versa) than a token of exchange.
Both Victory and The Arrow of Gold end with nothingness, absence
or loss. Victory ends in death: ‘There was nothing to be done there ...
Nothing!’ (412) and The Arrow of Gold with M. George’s loss of both
Rita and the arrow, symbol of romantic love. These endings reflect the
strong strains of scepticism and pessimism in Conrad’s work: a scepticism
that doubts the possibility of knowing either reality or oneself
and a consequent pessimism as to the achievement of fulfilment or
tranquillity. A common and persuasive reading of these endings
would therefore be in existential or epistemological terms. For
example R. W. B. Lewis stresses epistemological concerns when he
suggests that Victory is ‘intimately concerned with questions of truth
and reality, as it is with lies and illusion’ and that it ‘achieves the
conditions of art; for the manifold and unitary truth of things is just
what Conrad succeeds in making real and visible.’ 26 At the same time
his account focuses on the fate of characters considered in broadly
existential terms. For example: ‘Between the two kinds of failure,
Lena’s victory is squeezed out in a way that is a victory both for her
and for the novel in which she has her being’, a novel which ‘never
fails to take account of the variable and highly unpredictable character
of individual human beings’. 27