Conrad and Masculinity

62 Conrad and Masculinity
When Marlow suggests to the ‘privileged man’ that Jim ‘had no dealings
but with himself’, he represses the mediated nature of Jim’s
desires. Though he correctly identifies Jim’s egotism here, he forgets
the dependence of that egotism on imagined others. These include
both the others at home and in the merchant service to whose
approval Jim ultimately looks, and the Others of Patusan whose
destiny Jim seeks to shape. Marlow’s forgetfulness of the former is all
the more surprising in that in his next paragraph he recounts Jim’s
final, abortive, verbal message, ‘Tell them! . . .’ (339) followed by ‘No.
Nothing’ (340). Jim’s desire for ‘that opportunity which, like an
Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side’ (416) is thoroughly mediated,
beginning, like that of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, with
external mediation via literature. Jim shares the goal of Flaubert’s
protagonists, to ‘see themselves as they are not’. 30 Jim would seem to
fit well the category of the ‘romantic vaniteux’, who
does not want to be anyone’s disciple. He convinces himself that he
is thoroughly original. In the nineteenth century spontaneity
becomes a universal dogma, succeeding imitation. Stendhal warns
us at every step that we must not be fooled by these individualisms
professed with fanfares, for they merely hide a new form of imitation.
Romantic revulsion, hatred of society, nostalgia for the desert,
just as gregariousness, usually conceal a morbid concern for the
Other.
(DD,15)
This comment, as applicable to Kurtz and Nostromo as to Jim,
points up the limits of Conrad’s understanding of his own protagonists.
Unrivalled perhaps in his charting of the envy, hatred,
self-hatred and sense of impotence which accompany the almost
inevitable thwarting of mediated desire, Conrad often succumbs
nevertheless to the romantic myth of originality and transcendence
(in tragic, doomed form), as the endings of Lord Jim, ‘Heart of
Darkness’ and Nostromo show. As Girard suggests, it is modernity, with
its reduction of firm hierarchical differences, that causes internal
mediation to triumph (DD, 14). That same modernity, as Bongie
shows, generates exoticism.
What is the relationship between Girard’s Other, who mediates,
stimulates and frustrates the desire of the subject, and the racialized
Other of imperialism? Jim’s initial model is the white imperial subject,
presented to him as external mediator through adventure literature,