Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 51
struggle at sea, acquire an almost mystical value here, transcending, yet
about to be dissolved by, the harsh mercantile world of urban modernity.
And in Lord Jim, the scene is viewed from the room of the
‘privileged man’ among Marlow’s original Eastern narratees (that is, his
after-dinner listeners), who alone learns the end of Jim’s story, when
Marlow sends him a ‘thick packet’ (337) with documents and narrative.
The inner story of ‘Karain: A Memory’ (narrated by the warlike
Malay chief to the three European men who come to his kingdom to
sell him arms) is a story of male bonds betrayed because of a woman,
and more specifically because of the erotic power of her appearance.
But the act of narration becomes an affirmation of male bonds which
partially transcend the (visually emphasized) differences of race. The
story Karain tells his European friends begins with a vision of a
woman as object of shared male obsession, as Karain and his friend
Pata Matara pursue the latter’s sister (who has eloped with a
Dutchman). Karain recalls that
He [Matara] spoke of her with fury in the daytime, with sorrow in
the dark; he remembered her in health, in sickness. I said nothing;
but I saw her every day—always! ... I saw her! I looked at her! She
had tender eyes and a ravishing face.
(K, 34)
Karain is baffled by his own feelings, though certain of their strength
and their close connection to his male friend:
Thrice Matara, standing by my side, called aloud her name with
grief and imprecations. He stirred my heart. It leaped three times;
and three times with the eye of the mind I saw in the gloom within
the enclosed space of the prau a woman with streaming hair going
away from her land and her people. I was angry—and sorry. Why?
(30)
Karain’s evidently sexual obsession is provoked by the desire of other
men: although he has himself seen her face, he stresses that he has
heard ‘all men say’ that her beauty is ‘extreme’ (29). His anger and
sorrow are initiated by Matara’s cry, while his obsessional ‘seeing’ of
visions of her beauty is provoked by Matara’s obsessional speaking of
her. A homosocial structure seems to determine the story of Karain,
Matara and his sister. The idea of honour which leads Matara to try to
kill his sister is evidently an assertion of the commodity status of a