Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 63
‘saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane
... confront[ing] savages on tropical shores’ (6). On the training ship,
he acquires an internal mediator and rival, in the form of the boy who
rescues two men from the sea. Jim denies this rivalry and his desire to
emulate the boy, deluding himself that he feels contempt for the very
quality of vanity which he is strengthening in himself:
Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered
to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry
with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares
and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes.
Otherwise he was rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since
a lower achievement had served the turn. He had enlarged his
knowledge more than those who had done the work ... He could
detect no trace of emotion in himself ... he exulted with fresh certitude
in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided
courage.
(9)
Following the devastating blow to his self-image dealt by Jim’s jump
from the Patna, Marlow and Stein become crucial figures for Jim; they
become the mediators of his desire insofar as they offer role models.
Yet the more dominant aspect of the bond between these men is
rather the vicariousness identification which Marlow and Stein feel in
respect of Jim’s heroic ambitions. 31 Jim is at once the straggler and the
leader, the failure in need of redemption and the ultimate embodiment
of the adventure hero. The suppressed mediator of Jim’s newly
formed desires in Patusan is the racially other male leader, the (imagined)
tribal chief with his prestige and almost magic power, whose
role Jim seeks to fill, both politically as leader and sexually with Jewel.
The other, marked or imagined as racial Other, provides a
model/mediator of desire who is particularly exciting because of the
transgression of boundaries which such imitation involves, and
particularly denied and deniable as model because the ideology of
racial difference offers a barrier, a way of disclaiming identification.
For Jim, and via him for Marlow and Stein, the wish to be the Other
can be indulged under the sign of racial difference, precisely because
that sign disallows the identification as beyond the pale. This process
is more obviously operative in ‘Heart of Darkness’, where the identification
comes closer to being acknowledged, and as it does so generates
a rhetoric of the unspeakable, the imperial sublime of horror. There is