Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 49
Sedgwick’s work on the structure and history of nineteenth-century
homosociality provides the crucial framework for understanding here.
In her examination of ‘the structure of men’s relations with other
men’, she postulates ‘the potential unbrokenness of a continuum
between homosocial and homosexual’, without any implication that
‘genital homosexual desire is “at the root of” other forms of male
homosociality’ (BM, 1–2). In other words, sexual and non-sexual
bonds between men shared certain structural features, even while the
ideology of the time held them apart and contrasted them. This would
explain why male friendships might be both reassuring and a focus of
anxiety for Conrad in his new literary life. They offered companionship,
support and models for a new (to Conrad) way of being a man –
through writing – but at the same time drew him into the structures
of a modern, urban, British, middle-class masculinity in a condition of
crisis, or at the very least transition. In his literary works, Conrad
imagines male bonds established far from the corrupting streets of the
metropolitan centre, but these narratives obsessively return to that
metropolis as repressed origin and final destination.
Those London streets which Conrad paced with Garnett and with
Crane also provide a crucial point of reference in ‘Karain’, The Nigger
of the ‘Narcissus’ and Lord Jim, functioning in each fiction as the image
of a powerful but occluded scene to which the imperial adventure is
in some way referred back for its significance, with a sense of irony,
nostalgia or loss:
A watery gleam of sunshine flashed from the west and went out
between two long lines of walls; and then the broken confusion of
roofs ... The big wheels of hansoms turned slowly along the edge of
side-walks; a pale-faced youth strolled, overcome by weariness, by
the side of his stick ... a line of yellow boards with blue letters on
them approached us slowly, tossing on high behind one another
like some queer wreckage adrift upon a river of hats.
(K, 54–5)
The roar of the town resembled the roar of topping breakers, merciless
and strong, with a loud voice and cruel purpose; but overhead
the clouds broke; a flood of sunshine streamed down the walls of
grimy houses. The dark knot of seamen drifted in sunshine. To the
left of them the trees in Tower Gardens sighed, the stones of the
Tower gleaming, seemed to stir in the play of light, as if remembering
suddenly all the great joys and sorrows of the past, the