Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 57
sexual meanings. He persuasively relates this effect to Conrad’s relationship
to English: ‘Conrad makes “mistakes” by failing to perform
the kind of “screening” that is performed more or less effortlessly by
native speakers.’ 23 Thus for Harpham the absence of women in the
story enables rather than removes the representation of sexuality. He
argues that ‘in a monosexual and presumptively ascetic environment,
Conrad’s sexual imagination becomes extravagant, complex,
and rich; he becomes capable of conceiving of satisfactions unthinkable
with a women in the vicinity.’ 24 In his reading of the story
Harpham rightly corrects Tony Tanner’s naive suggestion that ‘no
women’ means ‘no desire’ in sea stories. 25 However, Harpham seems
content to accept an existential reading of Wait as ‘a universal mirror
in whom everyone sees himself’ and as ‘a human instance or form of
the sea’, echoing Conrad’s own claim that Wait ‘is nothing; he is
merely the centre of the ship’s collective psychology and the pivot
of the action’. 26 As Scott McCracken accurately observes, Conrad’s
comment
Is an example of how Conrad effectively writes out a presence
which is central to the text ... This writing an absence dehistoricizes
the relationship between black sailors and white. The text
constructs a white discourse in which being is expressed in existential
terms and not as part of a historical narrative, and that
being is the subjectivity of a white masculinity. 27
Harpham deals interestingly with sexuality but neglects the interaction
of race and gender, and especially the politics of representing a
black man as merely a ‘pivot’ or ‘mirror’. In The Nigger of the
‘Narcissus’, Conrad is feeling his way towards the use of mediating
narrators, a device which emerges fully in Lord Jim. In the former work
the narrator’s role is uncertain and inconsistent. As Jeremy Hawthorn
argues, the book exhibits ‘a narrative indecision that stems from ideological
contradictions and uncertainties’ (NT, 102):
From the earliest reviews of the novella mention has been made of
the fact that the work appears to have a single narrator who mainly
adopts the viewpoint and perspective of an ordinary crew-member
... but who sometimes sounds more like an officer and who even
becomes omniscient on a number of occasions [giving us access to
private thoughts and conversations] ... There are, too, regular shifts
between the narrative use of ‘we’ and ‘they’ to refer to the crew ...