Conrad and Masculinity

28 Conrad and Masculinity
character’s thoughts but partakes of the authority of the narrator), and
narratorial comment (carrying the full authority of the narrator). 42
Presumably it is Willems who thinks that he had ‘a sudden moment
of lucidity’, a moment which, as the narrator makes clear to us by
ironic means, is in fact one of yet more profound self-deception. It
seems unlikely, even in this moment of crisis, that Willems thinks of
himself as one of ‘the most benighted [of men]’; this view seems to
belong to the narrator. If Willems (but not the narrator) thinks it is a
‘sudden moment of lucidity’, while the narrator (but not Willems)
thinks that Willems is ‘benighted’, the questions then are whether the
remainder of the passage represents Willems’s deluded thoughts or
the narrator’s observations, and how clearly and consistently Conrad
distinguishes between these two. Ruth Nadelhaft cites this passage,
and argues that the negative and stereotypical views of Aïssa, for
which many critics have attacked Conrad, are wholly attributable to
Willems. While I would agree with her statement that ‘the opposition
of civilisation and savagery, so important to this book, is always
subject to the irony of attribution’, I feel she understates the
complicity of the narrative voice with the some of the attitudes which
it ironizes: 43
That woman was a complete savage, and . . . He tried to tell himself
that the thing was of no consequence. It was vain effort. The
novelty of the sensations he had never experienced before in the
slightest degree, yet had despised on hearsay from his safe position
of a civilized man, destroyed his courage. He was disappointed with
himself. He seemed to be surrendering to a wild creature the
unstained purity of his life, of his race, of his civilization. He had a
notion of being lost amongst shapeless things that were dangerous
and ghastly. He struggled with the sense of certain defeat—lost his
footing—fell back into the darkness. With a faint cry and an
upward throw of his arms he gave up as a tired swimmer gives up:
because the swamped craft is gone from under his feet; because the
night is dark and the shore is far—because death is better than
strife.
(OI, 80–1)
Masculinity and racial identity both seemed threatened here. The
rhetoric of the Other (female and racial) as shapeless, dark and threatening
(like Haggard’s Gagool), and of miscegenation as death is in full
flow. At first this rhetoric is implicitly ironized as the deluded