Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 53
He snatched the sword from the old man, whizzed it out of the scabbard,
and thrust the point into the earth. Upon the thin, upright
blade the silver hilt, released, swayed before him like something alive.
(18)
Yet this excess of conventional masculinity is also presented as an act
or pose, as implied in the following passage:
It was the stage where, dressed splendidly for his part, he strutted,
incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to
awaken an absurd expectation of something heroic going to take
place—a burst of action or song—upon the vibrating tone of a
wonderful sunshine. He was ornate and disturbing, for one could
not imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front
could be worthy to hide.
(6)
This idea of the ‘horrible void’, combined with Karain’s fear of a space
behind him, would suggest castration anxiety. This anxiety is partially
relieved by the presence of his sword bearer, and also when he enters
the privileged world of homosocial exchange on the schooner. Here,
as Karain himself puts it, ‘he was only a private gentleman coming to
see other gentlemen whom he supposed as well born as himself’ (12).
It is as if Karain is aware of the phallic role which racial difference
enables the Englishmen to project onto him. Their patronizing attitude
to him as a naive, faintly ridiculous native allows them to
indulge vicariously their admiration for his egregiously phallic qualities.
In the narration by the unnamed third European who is the
first-level narrator of the story, Karain is fetishized as the embodiment
of the phallus, yet the suggestions of a masquerade concealing a void
suggest simultaneously that his body is marked as castrated. This paradoxical
combination can be understood in terms of Steve Neale’s
argument, quoted in Chapter 1, that the male body ‘specified as
racially or culturally other’ can signify castration and lack, while it can
also be fetishized ‘inasmuch as it signifies masculinity, and, hence,
possession of the phallus, the absence of lack’ (SD, 130). As the attitude
of the Europeans hesitates between the affirmation of a male
bond with Karain and the maintenance of a racial and cultural difference,
so his role in their narrative hesitates between fetishization as
the phallus and stigmatization as lack. It is in terms of the phallic that
the cross-cultural bonding takes place: