Conrad and Masculinity

Notes 225
(pp. 31–40); Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 1985); Alison M. Jagger and
Susan R. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of
Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University
Press, 1989); Gabriele Griffin, Difference in View: Woman and Modernism
(Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
8 Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of
Modernity’, in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew
Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 141–56, 141, 146.
9 Griselda Pollock quotes Jules Michelet’s La Femme: ‘How many irritations
for the single woman! She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she
would be taken for a prostitute’: Oeuvres completes (Vol. XVIII, 1858–60)
(Paris: Flammarion, 1985), p. 413, quoted Griselda Pollock, Vision and
Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New
York: Routledge, 1988), p. 69.
10 John Rignall, ‘Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism’, in The
Problems of Modernity, pp. 112–21 (p. 112).
11 The flâneur is the stroller or idler whose home is the streets and arcades of
the city and who ‘goes botanizing on the asphalt’: Walter Benjamin,
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Jarry
Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 36. On the association of
the flâneur with the alienated individual and with victims, murderers and
detectives, see pp. 40–6, 170.
12 Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1981), pp. 48–78 (p. 56).
13 On the complementary nature of truths and errors within a discourse, see
Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, p. 60.
14 For example, Jacques Berthoud argues that Conrad is ‘dramatizing the
need for a metaphysics that can’t exist’: Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad:
The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 190.
Edward Said puts it in more complex terms: ‘Conrad’s goal is to make us
see, or otherwise transcend the absence of everything but words, so that we
may pass into a realm of vision beyond the words ... For Conrad the
meaning produced by writing was a kind of visual outline, which written
language would approach only from the outside and from a distance that
seemed to remain constant’; ‘by using substance instead of words the
Conradian hero, like Conrad himself, aims to vindicate and articulate his
imagination. Every reader of Conrad knows how this aim too is bound to
fail’: Edward Said, The World, The Text and the Critic (1983; London: Faber,
1984), pp. 95, 110.
15 ‘The term implied author . . . comes from Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961) . . . [It] is used to refer to that picture of a creating author
behind a literary work that the reader builds up on the basis of an image
put in the work . . . by the author him or herself. The implied author may
be very different from the real-life individual responsible for writing the
work.’ ‘By extension the term “implied reader” was coined to describe the
reader which the text (or the author through the text) suggests that it
expects’; Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, (3rd