Conrad and Masculinity

18 Conrad and Masculinity
What is the ‘Other’? If it is truly the ‘other’, there is nothing to say;
it cannot be theorized. The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere,
outside: absolutely other. It doesn’t settle down. But in History, of
course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity that does settle down,
that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically
organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names,
defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. 11
Homi Bhabha writes of ‘that “otherness” which is at once an object of
desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the
fantasy of origin and identity’. 12 The supposedly ‘primitive’ Other is
used by the imperial subject to define both what he is not, and what
he once was, what he desires and what he fears, what he seeks and
what he denies. Such a discourse of the Other implies that progress
can only be towards sameness on his terms, or a discovery of (his idea
of) universal human nature. Such tendencies are obvious enough in
the practices of imperialism, from early missionary endeavour (the
attempt to impose the same culture) to contemporary pressure to
globalization and standardization of economic and cultural practices.
This is not to imply that the differences White identifies between
Conrad and the adventure tradition are insignificant, nor to claim
that the act of imagined identity with the Other has no moral or political
value. However, the concept of ‘subversion’ (with its assumption
of a monolithic imperialism which is being undermined) seems inadequate.
Bongie makes a significant historical distinction between the
‘initial optimism of the exoticist project’ and ‘a pessimistic vision in
which the exotic comes to seem less a space of possibility than one of
impossibility’. The latter emerges in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, along with ‘the New Imperialism’, a ‘phase of acute geopolitical
expansion initiated by the European nation-states’. As modernity
becomes a global phenomenon it ‘inevitably, and irreparably, puts
into question the Other’s autonomy, absorbing this Other into the
body of the Same and thereby effacing the very ground of exoticism’
(EM, 17–18). Thus the change which White describes in terms of a
progressive subversion by novelists (starting with Haggard and developing
in Conrad’s work), a change from the Other as other
(contrasting them and us) to the Other as same (them as like us),
might rather be described in terms of the historical development of
imperialism. The question remains what space (if any) opens up
within the fiction for a structure resistant to imperialism. Such a structure
might be named in various ways: in terms of ‘the Other of the