Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 209
Defenders of Lacanian theory usually rely on the radical distinction
between phallus (a structure) and penis (an organ), a defence which
Heath describes as ‘pure analogical rationalisation’ and which de
Lauretis persuasively undermines by quoting Lacan’s association of
lack with a ‘particular organ’. 31
What is at issue when applying such theory is the performativity of
literary critical discourse (or film criticism, or cultural studies): the
extent to which, in writing about masculinity, one may be enacting a
version of masculinity, putting it into circulation, or recirculating it. I
have already quoted (in Chapter 2) elements of Gayle Rubin’s analysis
of such a process: ‘In the cycle of exchange manifested by the Oedipal
complex, the phallus passes through the medium of women from one
man to another ... women go one way, the phallus the other. It is
where we aren’t’ (TW, 192). There is a danger that analyses of
masculinity in terms of the phallus and castration will, in performative
terms, act as a continuing circulation of the phallus, a continued
marking out of a place of critical discourse where women are not. This
brings me back to the need for a reflexive self-awareness in a male critical
discourse on masculinity. The risk is that such a discourse, even
(or especially) if inspired by feminist thought, may put feminism in
the position of ‘woman’ and circulate it through homosocial discursive
structures. 32 The concepts of the phallus, of castration and of lack
are necessary to an understanding of much feminist theory and film
theory, yet a male critic needs to try to stand outside the paradigm
they support even while writing from within it (a women critic is, in
one sense, always already outside it).
I would, then, like to conclude by returning to one of the most
intense moments of Heyst’s desiring look at Lena, and to the observation
about masculinity that accompanies and props up his pleasure in
possessing and seeing her: ‘for a man must feel that, unless he has
ceased to be masculine’ (201). Here the abyss opens under the logic of
the same: a woman serves to constitute and confirm a man’s
masculinity, but through a painfully apparent tautologous logic:
Heyst feels vanity (in ‘possessing’ a woman) because he is masculine
and he is masculine because he feels vanity. Psychoanalytic theory
provides us with a way of naming this abyss but perhaps, in a utopian
spirit, we should leave it unnamed. Margaret Whitford defends
Irigaray’s utopianism on the grounds that ‘imagining how things
could be different is part of the process of transforming the present in
the direction of a different future’. 33 She quotes Irigaray’s answer to
someone who claimed not to understand the meaning of ‘masculine