Conrad and Masculinity

view I am deriving from Irigaray is emphatically not that homosexuality is
complicit with patriarchy and empire, but that a homophobic discourse is
complicit with these structures – a homophobic discourse which prescribes
a notional absolute barrier between male homosocial bonds and male
homosexual bonds, leading men to use women in order to conduct certain
relations with other men while assuring themselves and each other than
these are not homosexual relations. This would presumably apply less to
men the more they regarded themselves as being overtly homosexual. The
terms of the argument must be subject to the contentions of what
Sedgwick terms universalizing and minoritizing definitions of homosexuality
(EC, 1).
Chapter 6 Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth
Notes 227
1 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche,
parallel text with English translation by Barbara Harlow (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 55.
2 The Cambridge edition of the novel has a comma after ‘still’, stressing
immobility rather than persistence. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A
Simple Tale, eds Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 193.
3 Stott notes that when Ossipon meets Winnie after the murder ‘the prose is
not simply describing the effects of a murderess upon the man who
confronts her – it is also itself stimulating that effect. It builds up clichés,
disrupts syntax, overloads the passage through repetition to the point of
rupture’ (Stott, The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale, p. 154).
4 Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), p. 472.
5 Cave, p. 472. Here, as elsewhere, my use of narrative terms is based on
Genette’s scheme in Narrative Discourse.
6 Cave, p. 469.
7 Cave, p. 473.
8 Cave, p. 473.
9 Cave, pp. 471–2.
10 Cave, p. 473.
11 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘A Poem is Being Written’, Representations, 17
(Winter 1987), 110–43 (pp. 129–30).
12 For a critique of Girard’s assumption of gender symmetry in the erotic
triangle, see BM, 22.
13 See, for example, the description of the African men in a canoe (HOD, 61)
and Marlow’s reflections on the noises made by Africans on the river bank
(96–7)
14 See ‘Author’s Note’, UWE, x.
15 Ruppel, p. 32.
16 See Freud’s discussion of automaton and gaze in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The
Sand-Man’, in ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVII, pp. 217–56.
17 Letter of c. 7 April 1913 to J.B. Pinker, CL, V, 208.