Conrad and Masculinity

60 Conrad and Masculinity
conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the sacrifice is only
forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than the way to perdition.’
In other words, you maintained that we must fight in the
ranks or our lives don’t count.
(339)
This is clearly recognizable as a version of the redemptive ‘idea’ behind
colonialism which Marlow evokes near the start of ‘Heart of Darkness’,
only to break off when his own metaphor (‘something you can set up,
and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . .’ (HOD, 51)) reminds
him of Kurtz. The more explicitly racist views of the ‘privileged man’
are not ironized in this subtle way, though neither are they endorsed,
either by Marlow or the implied author. Rather than pausing to reflect
on the moral implications of this position, the Marlow of Lord Jim seeks
to set Jim apart from such service in the ‘ranks’:
Possibly! ... The point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no
dealings but with himself, and the question is whether at the last
he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and
progress.
(339)
This view of Jim is at odds with Marlow’s sense of him as ‘one of us’,
a point to which I shall return shortly. Whatever the hesitation in
Marlow’s account between a vision of Jim as a member, albeit a straggler,
in the ‘ranks’ of imperial progress, and a vision of him as a
transcendently individual tragic hero, the bond between Marlow and
Jim is interwoven with the imperial project and with ideas of racial
identification. Furthermore, this is emphasized in the extension of
that bond, via the act of narration, to the ‘privileged man’, and hence
to the implied reader. It is this strategy, of projecting and exploring
male bonds via the processes of narration, that is central to Conrad’s
representation of masculinity in the Marlow fictions (Lord Jim, ‘Heart
of Darkness’, Youth, Chance), as well as in Under Western Eyes.
In Lord Jim, then, there are two versions of ‘home’. One is the quasiidyllic,
insular, rural world of Jim’s father the ‘good old parson’,
‘equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe’
(341), in a ‘quiet corner of the world as free of danger or strife as a
tomb’ (342). Marlow’s attitude to this world is a mixture of sentiment
and irony, but the heterodiegetic narrator of the first four chapters is
more unequivocally ironic about the parson’s social role as part of the