Conrad and Masculinity

208 Conrad and Masculinity
succeed. 29 Lacan’s idea of lack as constitutive of desire is a fruitful one,
but not wholly new and there seems no good reason to call it castration,
other than as a way of perpetuating phallocentrism. Even if it be
demonstrated that Lacanian theory, fully and correctly understood, is
opposed to phallocentrism, the theory is so formed as to restrict such
understanding to a very few, and one of the effects of its influential
status is to ensure that issues of desire, including a supposedly nongender-specific
lack, continue to be discussed in terms of the presence
or absence of a structure metaphorically named after the male organ.
The idea that the Symbolic (the social and linguistic order) marks the
female as lacking or castrated is, however, one which can be widely
supported from a wide range of discourses and representations. If one
understands a general ‘Symbolic castration’ as the way in which a
patriarchal society represents to itself an experience of self-division,
then this may serve a critical and feminist analysis.
I would suggest, then, that there are situations, moments, aspects of
Conrad’s texts which could appropriately be described in terms of the
fear of castration. One of the significations of the absence or loss with
which these and many other Conrad texts end may be the experience,
by certain characters, of a threat to their sense of masculinity, for
which threat castration is the conventional metaphor. However, the
concept of castration seems to me limited as a way of analysing the
processes that generate that threat, precisely because it installs the
presence or absence of the phallus as ultimate signifier. If one seeks to
move from analysing the self-representations of masculinity (the way
in which men have traditionally understood their masculinity) to
proposing models for current reinterpretation, then a Freudian or
Lacanian model is liable to be unhelpful, and even reactionary in the
sense of serving to smuggle in the same old ideology in a new guise.
As Stephen Heath argues:
Where the conception of the symbolic as movement and production
of difference, as chain of signifiers in which the subject is
effected in division, should forbid the notion of some presence
from which difference is then derived, Lacan instates the visible as
the condition of symbolic functioning, with the phallus the standard
of the visibility required: seeing is from the male organ.
The constant limit of the theory is the phallus, the phallic function,
and the theorization of that limit is constantly eluded, held off ...
for example, by collapsing castration into a scenario of vision. 30