Conrad and Masculinity

26 Conrad and Masculinity
Conrad’s psychological portrait inhabits that paradoxical structure of
masculinity which involves anxiety and instability alongside power
and persistence. One is required by the ideology of masculinity both
to be a man and to become one, to be in assured possession of a
masculinity which is always at risk because it constantly needs
proving and could at any time be lost.
Conrad’s radicalism goes beyond a sceptical view of human nature
and human motives, to embrace ideas of the instability and potential
dissolution of the self. Robert Young has pointed out the connection
between the structuralist and poststructuralist decentring of the self
and the postcolonial critique of imperialism:
Structuralism’s so-called ‘decentring of the subject’ was in many
respects itself an ethical activity, derived from a suspicion that the
ontological category of ‘the human’ and ‘human nature’ had been
inextricably associated with the violence of Western history ...
[the] inscription of alterity within the self . . . can allow for a new
relation to ethics: the self has to come to terms with the fact that it
is also a second and a third person. 39
Young links this to the recognition that the First World is ‘no longer
always positioned in the first person with regard to the Second or
Third Worlds’. 40 Willems, in the face of his overwhelming desire for
the Other, experiences an existential fragmentation and undermining
of self:
He was keeping a tight hand on himself ... He had a vivid illusion
—as vivid as reality almost—of being in charge of a slippery prisoner.
He sat opposite Almayer ... with a perfectly calm face and
within him a growing terror of escape from his own self.
(OI, 78)
The image that follows, of Willems ‘slipping helplessly to inevitable
destruction’ (78) is echoed shortly afterwards by his symbolic letting
slip of his boat, a means by which he makes it inevitable that he will
go and see Aïssa (79). This conceit, of the escape from his own self, is
developed (with the unsettling reversal that now the self is doing the
escaping), when he is with Aïssa, in an extended vision which Willems
has of his self as ‘a well-known figure ... diminishing in a long perspective’
(145).
As we shall see in relation to Almayer’s Folly, Conrad’s use of