Conrad and Masculinity

30 Conrad and Masculinity
War. Nevertheless, the concept may help us to explore ideas and
fantasies of regression and self-destruction in the discourse of late
nineteenth-century imperialism. Particularly appropriate is Freud’s
linking of regression and self-destructiveness to mastery, sadism and
aggression in a fantasy structure where one set of terms can be
converted into the other. So, for example, a certain repressed desire to
be in the place of the Other (to ‘regress’, according to the racist
construction of the Other) is not a subversive corrective to imperial
mastery and control but its hidden complement. Furthermore, Freud’s
highly gendered theory illuminates the gendered nature of imperial
fantasy, as conquest of the (mother) earth and return to the ‘primitive’
mother, a fantasy in which self-assertion and self-destruction shadow
each other in a specifically masculine configuration.
In a striking if portentous peroration by the narrative voice, An
Outcast of the Islands anticipates, over twenty years earlier, Freud’s
claim that ‘the aim of all life is death’. 48 Chapter 4 begins,
‘Consciously or unconsciously, men are proud of their firmness, steadfastness
of purpose, directness of aim’. The paragraph evokes with
heavy irony the resolute path through life of the ‘man of purpose’, to
conclude:
Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and
battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps
the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism:
an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.
(OI, 197)
It is Lingard’s deluded optimism and approaching decline that is foreshadowed
here, but the trope of the path is likely to remind the reader
of the first sentence of the novel, referring ironically to Willems’s
‘straight and narrow path of ... peculiar honesty’ (3). The descriptions
of Willems with Aïssa are highly suggestive of the death drive in their
symbolic overtones and representation of his conscious and unconscious
processes. Regaining the mother, excitation leading to
extinction of the self and orgasm as the ‘little death’ are all aspects of
the fantasy of the death drive, and all are suggested by the scenes of
love and conflict between Willems and Aïssa. Willems’s repeated
fantasy of the disappearance or dissolution of his self has already been
discussed. Aïssa’s gaze induces in him an almost literal ecstasy (or
standing outside of the self), in which reason gives way to an extreme
excitement which is nevertheless passive and infantile: