Conrad and Masculinity

210 Conrad and Masculinity
discourse’: ‘Of course not, since there is no other. The problem is that
of a possible alterity in masculine discourse – or in relation to masculine
discourse.’ Whitford comments:
Irigaray is trying to ‘imagine the unimaginable’ and it is in this
light that we should understand her view that to aim for a state
‘beyond sexual difference’ without rearticulating our present organization
of male and female would only maintain the deceptive
universality of the male. 34
This view combines the aspiration towards a presently unimaginable
future with an imperative to rearticulate the social institutions of the
present. Such a rearticulation must rest on an understanding of the
history and development of those institutions. A re-examination of
the work of Conrad, some of which is now a century old, in terms of
how it represents, is shaped by but also refigures the institution of
masculinity, may contribute to that understanding and thus to the
imagining of a different future. On the other hand, anyone who reads
Conrad with attention and appreciation will be particularly wary of
imagining that words have the power to transform social reality, and
similarly wary of seeking utopias, since these two activities are particular
objects of Conrad’s corrosive scepticism. 35 Yet, paradoxically,
Conrad is also a champion of the need for ideals, even while he shows
the tragic tendency for such ideals to be degraded in action. 36 Indeed,
Victory ends with two forms of ‘last words’ corresponding to these two
aspects of the Conradian world-view. The first is the often quoted
words which are almost Heyst’s final words before his death: ‘woe to
the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—
and to put its trust in life!’ (410). The second is the last word of the
text: ‘Nothing!’ (412). Perhaps we cannot at present imagine the
absence of masculinity without evoking ideas of lack or loss, a formation
which seems to lead only back to the phallus. I am inevitably
writing a masculine discourse, in Irigaray’s sense. When the male
critic’s act of seeing, examining, representing is so firmly trapped
within the gendering of the aesthetic, how can he claim to see, or try
to reveal, an alterity in masculine discourse? At the risk, then, of what
may seem a gesture of transcendence, I would like to offer an imagining
of the Conradian abyss or nothingness, not as negation, death or
loss, but as an alterity of the masculine which was for Conrad, and
remains for many men today, unspeakable.