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Conrad and Masculinity

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Imperialism <strong>and</strong> Male Bonds 55<br />

Victoria <strong>and</strong> it is suggested that he associated her with his own<br />

mother, a powerful Malay ruler. Victoria is specifically described by<br />

Hollis as comm<strong>and</strong>ing the spirit of British imperialism.<br />

Karain, like Dain in Almayer’s Folly, appears as a figure of heightened<br />

or ‘pure’ masculinity, a masculinity to which he has access by reason<br />

of his ‘primitive’ or ‘half-savage’ freedom from the trammels of<br />

modernity. Yet the hollowness of this exoticist fantasy, which,<br />

according to Chris Bongie, <strong>Conrad</strong> comes to recognize (EM, 20), is<br />

foreshadowed in the ominous sense of vacancy, lack, void <strong>and</strong><br />

masquerade haunting such figures of ideal masculinity. Like the<br />

ending which returns to the London streets, the beginning of ‘Karain’,<br />

which presents the whole story as a memory, suggests that modernity<br />

haunts even this fantasy of the exotic. The opening paragraph<br />

contains a filmic ‘dissolve’ from the physical eye to the eye of the<br />

mind (of memory): 20<br />

I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to<br />

miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence<br />

of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago. Sunshine<br />

gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs—sunshine <strong>and</strong><br />

the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the<br />

printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of today faintly, with<br />

the subtle <strong>and</strong> penetrating perfume as of l<strong>and</strong> breezes breathing<br />

through the starlight of bygone nights.<br />

(3)<br />

This retrospective aspect of ‘Karain’, identified in its subtitle (‘A<br />

Memory’), indicates that it is written <strong>and</strong> narrated from the position<br />

of a modern, urban, ‘civilized’ masculinity, which no longer has<br />

access to such a heroic destiny as that of Karain. Furthermore, the<br />

mention of the lines of print introduces an element of self-conscious<br />

(<strong>and</strong> self-referential) textuality. The dual nature of the symbolic representation<br />

of Karain (as pure untrammelled masculinity <strong>and</strong> void<br />

masquerade) is no more than a projection back <strong>and</strong> away into an<br />

imagined past <strong>and</strong> an imagined exotic scene, of the dilemmas <strong>and</strong><br />

uncertainties of the imperial subject. For this reason I would want to<br />

add a caution to Cedric Watts’s claim (in an essay which usefully<br />

explores the mythic role of London in <strong>Conrad</strong>’s work) that at the end<br />

of ‘Karain’, ‘the predominantly pejorative notion of the “monstrous<br />

town” can be deployed in a way that usefully complicates a familiar<br />

Victorian colonialist view of exotic races’. 21 It does indeed complicate

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