Conrad and Masculinity

58 Conrad and Masculinity
and in the final four pages of the work the narrator becomes, for
the first time, ‘I’.
(NT, 104–5)
The technique in which the act of narrating itself figures and problematizes
male bonds has not yet clearly emerged.
In Lord Jim the principal male bond evoked is explicitly a professional
code in an idealized form, identified by Marlow when he claims Jim as
‘one of us’ (78). This bond implicates gender and race in that the code is
associated exclusively with European males (officers in the merchant
marine), an ‘insignificant multitude’ in the ‘ranks’ of which Marlow is
‘keeping [his] place’ while Jim is a ‘straggler’ (334). This bond is sanctified
by moments of male intimacy which transcend professionalism and
reach uneasily for the metaphysical: ‘There was a moment of real and
profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some
everlasting, of some saving truth’ (241). In Lord Jim racial otherness is
less foregrounded than in the early Malay fiction because of the intensity
of the focus on Marlow and Jim, though Jim’s relationship with
Jewel brings it to the fore in the later part of the novel. Implicitly, it is
important throughout, as in the exoticizing and aestheticizing description
of the pilgrims on the Patna: ‘in the blurred circles of light thrown
down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration of the ship
appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand with silver
rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering’ (18). Most crucially there
is an emphasis on Jim’s literal and symbolic ‘whiteness’. This reaches
greatest intensity in Marlow’s two partings with him, each of which sets
his whiteness against a contrasting racial other, creating overtones of
imagined racial purity. When Jim first sets off for Patusan, Jim’s whiteness
is set off against a routinely derogatory portrait of a ‘half-caste’:
My eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to
see him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can assure
you no man could have appeared less ‘in the similitude of a corpse,’
as that half-caste croaker had put it. I could see the little wretch’s
face, the shape and colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere
under Jim’s elbow.
(241)
Later, Marlow’s last sight of him on leaving Patusan, as ‘only a speck,
a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened
world’, is similarly provided with a foil in the form of ‘two half-naked