Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 55
Victoria and it is suggested that he associated her with his own
mother, a powerful Malay ruler. Victoria is specifically described by
Hollis as commanding the spirit of British imperialism.
Karain, like Dain in Almayer’s Folly, appears as a figure of heightened
or ‘pure’ masculinity, a masculinity to which he has access by reason
of his ‘primitive’ or ‘half-savage’ freedom from the trammels of
modernity. Yet the hollowness of this exoticist fantasy, which,
according to Chris Bongie, Conrad comes to recognize (EM, 20), is
foreshadowed in the ominous sense of vacancy, lack, void and
masquerade haunting such figures of ideal masculinity. Like the
ending which returns to the London streets, the beginning of ‘Karain’,
which presents the whole story as a memory, suggests that modernity
haunts even this fantasy of the exotic. The opening paragraph
contains a filmic ‘dissolve’ from the physical eye to the eye of the
mind (of memory): 20
I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to
miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence
of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine
gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs—sunshine and
the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the
printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of today faintly, with
the subtle and penetrating perfume as of land breezes breathing
through the starlight of bygone nights.
(3)
This retrospective aspect of ‘Karain’, identified in its subtitle (‘A
Memory’), indicates that it is written and narrated from the position
of a modern, urban, ‘civilized’ masculinity, which no longer has
access to such a heroic destiny as that of Karain. Furthermore, the
mention of the lines of print introduces an element of self-conscious
(and self-referential) textuality. The dual nature of the symbolic representation
of Karain (as pure untrammelled masculinity and void
masquerade) is no more than a projection back and away into an
imagined past and an imagined exotic scene, of the dilemmas and
uncertainties of the imperial subject. For this reason I would want to
add a caution to Cedric Watts’s claim (in an essay which usefully
explores the mythic role of London in Conrad’s work) that at the end
of ‘Karain’, ‘the predominantly pejorative notion of the “monstrous
town” can be deployed in a way that usefully complicates a familiar
Victorian colonialist view of exotic races’. 21 It does indeed complicate