Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 59
fishermen ... pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable, oppressed
lives into the ears of the white lord’:
Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long
before I had lost sight of their protector. He was white from head
to foot, and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of
the night at his back.
(336)
These partings are both moments of emotional intensity for Marlow,
moments when the bond between him and Jim is intensified by the
poignancy of separation, giving rise to the sense of ‘profound intimacy’
cited above.
Jim’s life is the product of the imperial export of masculinity.
Inspired by the popular literature of imperial exoticism, it is made
possible by the existence of imperial trade and commerce. The relationship
to ‘home’, an England to which he will never return, is
central to Jim’s ego-ideal. This becomes apparent to Marlow when Jim
invokes the need to ‘keep in touch with ... those whom, perhaps, I
shall never see any more’ (including, as he says, Marlow himself, but
also implicitly his family at home) (334). Marlow imagines the importance
of this link as he reads a letter from Jim’s father (342), and he
also enacts it through his narration by letter to the ‘privileged man’ ‘at
home’ (337). As in ‘Karain’ the story is framed from London, the heart
of empire, except that here London figures not as the end of the text
itself, but as the location of the intra-textual reading of its end. Only
one man among Marlow’s listeners in the East ‘was ever to hear the
last word of the story’ (337), and he hears it (or rather, reads it) back
home in London. This privileged narratee is also explicitly an advocate
of white supremacy, and Marlow associates this belief with the
‘ranks’ which consecrate his bond with Jim. In the following passage
Marlow addresses the unnamed reader of his letter:
You said also—I call to mind—that ‘giving your life up to them’
(them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in
colour) ‘was like selling your soul to a brute.’ You contended that
‘that kind of thing’ was only endurable and enduring when based
on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in
whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical
progress. ‘We want its strength at our backs,’ you had said. ‘We
want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to make a worthy and