Conrad and Masculinity

50 Conrad and Masculinity
fighting prototypes of these men; press-gangs; mutinous cries; the
wailing of women by the riverside, and the shouts of men welcoming
victories. The sunshine of heaven fell like a gift of grace on the
mud of the earth, on the remembering and mute stones, on greed,
selfishness; on the anxious faces of forgetful men. And to the right
of the dark group the stained front of the Mint, cleansed by the
flood of light, stood out for a moment dazzling and white like a
marble palace in a fairy tale. The crew of the Narcissus drifted out
of sight.
(NN, 172)
His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance
could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were
looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse. The slopes of the roofs
glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each other without end
like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of the town
under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The
spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like
beacons on a maze of shoals without a channel.
(LJ, 337)
The precise significance of these passages is different in each case, but
each has certain features in common. London streets are associated
with the noise and chaos of modernity, and are metaphorically
compared with a natural world of sea or river with which they are also
implicitly contrasted. London is the point from which an imperial
narrative is recalled, or to which it returns. In ‘Karain’ this passage
occurs near the end, when two of the European characters, meeting by
chance in London some years after the events in the Malay archipelago
which the story describes, recall their friend Karain and one of them
(Jackson) asks the other (the narrator) whether he believes that the
Malay chief’s story of ghostly haunting ‘really happened’ (54). The
narrator appeals to the sight of the London streets as evidence against
any belief in such supernatural stories, to which Jackson responds, ‘Yes;
I see it ... It is there; it pants, it runs, it rolls; it is strong and alive; it
would smash you if you didn’t look out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as
real to me as ... as the other thing ... say, Karain’s story’ (55). This is
followed by an ironic comment from the narrator – ‘I think that, decidedly,
he had been too long away from home’ (55) – with which the
story ends. The passage from The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is again near
the end, and presents the dispersal of the crew, whose bonds, forged in