Conrad and Masculinity

56 Conrad and Masculinity
the most simple and crude colonialist view (one which merely
valorizes the ‘civilized’ over the ‘primitive’), but does so only by
employing the imagined exotic Other as mirror for the complications
of Western masculinity.
In The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, the gender binary is largely excluded
by the shipboard setting (though it appears in the form of supposedly
feminine or masculine qualities within men). At the same time binaries
of race and of class are exaggerated, the former in the interests of
a symbolic deployment of Wait’s ‘blackness’ as part of an incoherent
existential and psychological parable, the latter in the service of a
reactionary depiction of the future labour organizer, Donkin, as motivated
by base ressentiment. As Jim Reilly observes, Donkin is treated
with an ‘absurd, spluttering invective’ which Conrad reserves for characters
with socialist ideas. 22 These manoeuvres produce a text which,
for all its fineness of description and evocation, is marred at times by
a sense of the author’s ideological thumb pressing on the scales. As
Fredric Jameson puts it, ‘these two strategies – ressentiment and existentializing
metaphysics – allow Conrad to recontain his narrative and
to rework it in melodramatic terms, in a subsystem of good and evil
which now once again has villains and heroes’ (PU, 216). Elements of
the treatment of masculinity are of interest, such as the curious
passion of Belfast. Belfast’s devotion to the dying black sailor Jimmy
renders the former ‘as gentle as a woman, as tenderly gay as an old
philanthropist, as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slaveowner’
(140), a series of comparisons which begins with what might
be admiration but ends in what must surely be irony. This devotion
also includes obsessive aggression towards others, ‘a blow for any one
who did not seem to take a scrupulously orthodox view of Jimmy’s
case’ (140). Conrad’s depiction of Belfast’s behaviour seems a satire on
that form of sentimental male protectiveness (usually directed
towards women) which serves to justify violence and aggression. This
is all too familiar from postwar cinema, where the vulnerability of
women or children routinely provides a moral screen for the celebration
of ‘heroic’ violence. One might gloss it by the psychoanalytical
observation that sentimentality is a denial or repression of aggression
and therefore complementary to it.
By and large, however, the commitment of The Nigger of the
‘Narcissus’ to a parable of the value of a hierarchical society contains
and limits the interest of its treatment of masculinity. Geoffrey Galt
Harpham reads the story, along with many other Conrad texts, in
terms of homoerotic suggestion, finding it full of words with slang