Conrad and Masculinity

Notes 223
cal scepticism are reflected in struggles for personal autonomy in Nostromo
and The Secret Agent, ‘played out as the revolt of characters against how
others within the fiction attempt to define or control them and . . . as the
resistance of characters to the narrative design itself’ (FS, 122). Albert
Guerard notes the uncertain status of the narrator of Nostromo, and offers
an interesting metafictional reading when he suggests that there is ‘a
marked discrepancy between what Decoud does and says and is, and what
the narrator or omniscient author says about him’ and that ‘Conrad may
be condemning Decoud for a withdrawal and skepticism more radical than
Decoud ever shows; which are, in fact, Conrad’s own’: A. J. Guerard,
Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp.
199–200. Jameson suggests that ‘Conrad is here premodern in that he has
not been able to discover the transpersonal standpoint of, say, Joycean
narrative, or even that of Flaubert’ (PU, 271).
8 Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness
(Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1979), p. 61.
9 Arnold Bennett, letter of 22 November 1912 to Conrad, in Twenty Letters to
Joseph Conrad, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London: The First Edition Club, 1926),
quoted FS, 125.
10 See PU, 269–80; Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-
Consciousness p. 56; Reilly, pp. 133–71.
11 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 137.
12 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 135–69.
13 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, p. 92.
14 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, pp. 94–5
15 Holroyd might seem the exception, but as Gould observes, the ‘great silver
and iron interests’ will continue their progress even if Holroyd dies or has
to give up (N, 82).
16 See N, 95. My argument is broadly in accord with Jameson’s view that
Conrad’s work can be seen as the product of what Weber identifies as the
‘crucial transitional stage’ between traditional and rationalized forms of
social institution (PU, 249).
17 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 137.
18 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 138.
19 Sandra Lee Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
Patriarchal Power’, in Feminism and Foucault, eds Irene Diamond and Lee
Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 61–86 (p. 79).
20 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 151–2.
21 Chronologically this would seem correct: Bongie states that the period of
exploration was largely over by the 1880s; Ian Watt suggests 1890 as a
plausible date for the main events of the novel: Ian Watt, Joseph Conrad:
Nostromo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chronology (no
page number).
22 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 161, 30.
23 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 138.
24 Buci-Glucksmann, pp. 203–4.
25 See Introduction, note 18.
26 Bartky, p. 64.
27 Bartky, pp. 75–6.