Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 17
theory have developed a network of ideas around the concept of the
Other and the Same, and it is in terms of these two concepts that I will
seek to articulate a model of masculinity and imperialism. 9
White argues that to show the imperial subject as changed by the
encounter with the Other, or as (like Kurtz) desiring to return to the
‘wilderness’, is ‘subversive’ and challenges ‘the assumptions of imperialism’
(AT, 24). In this she underestimates the complexity of
imperial desire and the paradoxical nature of ideology (its ability to
embrace, and seemingly reconcile, contradictions). Chris Bongie’s
Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle is a study
of exoticism as a literary and cultural phenomenon, with Conrad as
one of the principal examples. For Bongie exoticism represents an
impossible desire to escape from the modern world to a fantasy other
realm of authentic experience. He uses the term ‘exoticizing exoticism’
for ‘an erotic attachment to both the Other “creature” and his /
her world’ which figures them as ‘a possible refuge from an overbearing
modernity’. Such exoticizing exoticism, though it is likely to
include some criticism of the effects of imperialism, can nevertheless
be just as powerful a motor of destructive imperialism as ‘imperial
exoticism’, which overtly espouses ‘the hegemony of modern civilization’.
As Bongie points out, both forms allow the fantasy of an ‘heroic
subjectivity denied him [the imperial subject] in post-revolutionary
Europe’ (EM, 17). Thus both involve the appropriation of other
cultures for the psychic or social needs of the imperial power, and so
run readily in parallel with economic exploitation. Indeed the very
idea of the ‘wilderness’ or ‘jungle’ as constructed in imperial fictions,
including those of Conrad, represents the projection of the fears and
fantasies of the imperial subject onto an imagined Other space of
horror, or challenge, or adventure, effacing the culture of the Other by
rendering it as contained by a ‘primitive’ ‘nature’. 10
White also assumes that an ‘insistence upon distinctions between
them and us is at the heart of the imperial subject’ (AT, 80), so that for
her, Conrad was unconventional and subversive because he stressed
‘the similarities between “us” and “them” rather than those differences
that privilege “us”’ (AT, 119). This ignores the complementarity
between ‘otherness’ and ‘sameness’ as constructions. To recognize and
denigrate someone as my Other, my opposite, that which I am not
(and which therefore defines what I am) is to place him or her within
what Hélène Cixous calls ‘the Empire of the Selfsame’, that is, within
the sphere of my own construction of identity: