Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 39
of reading ideological and utopian elements together, as interlocking
aspects of the same discourse.
This approach involves an element of what Said terms ‘contrapuntal
reading’, as regards both masculinity and empire. Reading wholly
with the grain of the text can produce a critical discourse which replicates
or repeats ideological aspects of the text. The following
comments, from an introduction to the novel, seem to me to exemplify
such an effect:
The Willems-Aïssa relationship also powerfully enacts late-
Victorian fears about degeneracy and atavism, the potential for
‘falling back’ into the pre-conscious and pre-historic, and vivifies
the split between ‘culture’ and ‘barbarism’ that so obsessed a colonial
power forcing its technologies and moralities on conquered
peoples.
Insistently associated with trance, dream, and sleep, she [Aïssa]
represents at the very outset what she does at the conclusion –
immobility and the loss of individuality and of consciousness – in
a word, death.
Once a man of defined social and economic status, Willems is
transformed by her [Aïssa] into a creature alone and adrift, and his
loss of consciousness signals not only a reversion to animal existence
but the reassertion of the feared Other lurking, like Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, within the post-Darwinian self. 59
The author of these comments, J.H. Stape is, of course, not endorsing
the nineteenth-century racist theories which would associate the
Malays with ‘degeneracy and atavism’, but illuminating them for the
reader. His use of scare quotes around ‘culture’ and ‘barbarism’ as well
as his comment on colonial power make this obvious. Nor, presumably,
does he share the gynophobia which connects women with
death and the unconscious. Rather, he is offering these as the text’s
own terms, and proposing that it is in these terms that we should read
it. Nevertheless, he also wishes to argue that ‘Conrad’s allegorical
gestures and symbolism in An Outcast repudiate colonialism’. The
basis on which he does so is a claim of universalism: ‘Betrayal and
greed recognize no national boundaries ... Cultural and individual
particulars dissolve (and re-form) before the varieties of desire.’ 60
Having made this claim of cultural universalism himself, Stape also