Conrad and Masculinity

232 Notes
22 R. W. B. Lewis, ‘The Current of Conrad’s Victory’, in Joseph Conrad, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986), pp.
63–81 (p. 78).
23 Meyers, pp. 78, 83–4.
24 Meyers, p. 83.
25 Meyers, p. 85.
26 Lewis, pp. 63, 64.
27 Lewis, pp. 80, 81.
28 Lewis, p. 71.
29 For example, Cedric Watts considers Conrad in terms of the author’s own
phrase ‘homo duplex’: Joseph Conrad (Writers and Their Work) (Plymouth:
Northcote House, 1994), p. 1; see also Watts, The Deceptive Text: An
Introduction to Covert Plots (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 13–14,
21–4, on ‘Heart of Darkness’ as a ‘Janiform’ text (i.e. paradoxical or selfdivided)
and Kurtz as a divided character. Jacques Berthoud interprets
Conrad’s novels as making the tragic point that ‘man seems capable of
discovering the reality of his own values only through their defeat or
contradiction’: Berthoud, p. 189. See also Kenneth Graham, ‘Conrad and
Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, pp. 203–22 (pp.
215–19).
30 Stephen Heath, ‘Difference’, Screen, 19.3 (Autumn 1978), 51–112; rpt. in
The Sexual Subject, pp. 47–106 (pp. 49–50, 60).
31 Heath, ‘Difference’, p. 50. De Lauretis quotes Lacan as follows: ‘the interdiction
against autoerotism bearing on a particular organ, which for that
reason acquires the value of an ultimate (or first) symbol of lack (manque), has
the impact of pivotal experience’, and comments that ‘desire and signification
are defined ultimately as a process inscribed in the male body, since
they are dependent on the initial – and pivotal – experiencing of one’s
penis’ (de Lauretis, p. 23).
32 Here using ‘woman’ in de Lauretis’s sense (see Chapter 7, note 29 above).
33 Whitford, p. 19.
34 Whitford, p. 22.
35 On the first of these see the treatment of Don Juste and the Sulaco parliamentarians
in Nostromo, ‘putting all their trust into words of some sort,
while murder and rapine stalked over the land’ (N, 367–8), and of the
supposed Russian love of words in Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent.
On Conrad’s scepticism about, and commitment to, language, see Epstein,
passim and Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, pp. 90–110. For Conrad’s
view of utopian visions, see the portrayal of the utopian hopes of the revolutionaries
in Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent.
36 See Mrs Gould’s reflection: ‘There was something inherent in the necessities
of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the
idea’ (N, 521).