Conrad and Masculinity

24 Conrad and Masculinity
multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and
articulation of culture’s hybridity’. He suggests that
it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the
in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.
It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist
histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may
elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our
selves. 35
While my own concern in this book is primarily with the possibility
of eluding polarities of gender, issues of gender and cultural identity
are closely interwoven. Whether Conrad’s fiction has anything to
offer to a quest for hybridity such as Bhabha specifies is the question
to which I now turn. Rather than treat imperialism as a unified set of
practices and discourses, which a literary text either endorses or
subverts, I prefer to follow Lane and Bhabha in taking imperialism to
be complex, ambivalent and divided within itself. A similar sense of
complexity is implied by Bongie’s view that exoticism takes exoticizing
and imperial forms. The relationship to the Other involves desire
and fear. As well as desire for the Other, it can include a suppressed
identification with the Other, a desire to be in the place of the Other
which is then repressed and denied with a violence of disgust which
produces fear and loathing.
Reversing the order of composition and publication (though following
that of fictional chronology) I shall begin with Conrad’s second
novel, An Outcast of the Islands, in which the relationship of Willems
and Aïssa presents the imperial encounter in its most polarized terms.
The rhetoric of An Outcast of the Islands – generated by its symbolism,
its irony, its metaphors and similes – is not subtle, though it is effective
in its way. It draws heavily on the standard discourses of race and
gender in imperial Britain, in which the Other, racial or sexual, to the
white male colonizer is represented as debased and debasing, alluring,
threatening, dirty, unstable, moist, fecund. There are of course inconsistencies
within these sets of associations, but such inconsistencies
(the Other as beautiful yet repulsive, as listless yet full of life) are characteristic
of an ideology expressing itself through a set of images.
What is subtle in Conrad’s deployment of these discourses is the
reader’s uncertainty as to the moral and political stance of the implied
author, so that we are unsure how far the ironies extend.
It is in the description of the courtship of Willems and Aïssa that we