Conrad and Masculinity

64 Conrad and Masculinity
a moment in Lord Jim when the identification with the Other is
glimpsed, in the very moment of the imagined return ‘home’:
Here they all are, evoked by the mild gossip of the father, all these
brothers and sisters ... gazing with clear unconscious eyes, while I
seem to see him, returned at last, no longer a mere white speck at
the heart of an immense mystery, but of full stature, standing disregarded
amongst their untroubled shapes, with a stern and romantic
aspect, but always mute, dark—under a cloud.
(342)
No longer white but dark, Jim is able at last, in Marlow’s fantasy, to
return from the imperial scene to the domestic, in a microcosm of the
process by which London becomes the heart of darkness in ‘Heart of
Darkness’, and its streets the dark imperial centre in The Secret Agent.
The return home is the return of the repressed. Revealing, as Bivona
argues, that imperialism is the unconscious of ‘domestic’ England,
Conrad simultaneously reveals the crisis of male identity at home as
the unconscious of the myth of imperial adventure. Significantly, it is
a written text (Jim’s father’s letter) which provokes Marlow’s vision of
a dark Jim returned home. Conrad finds a way of exploring the process
of male rivalry, of denied identification with the Other, by setting up
a sequence of mediating structures in the form of narrative technique.
Marlow’s desire is mediated by Jim (in ‘Heart of Darkness’ Kurtz mediates
Marlow’s desire, while in Chance both Captain Anthony and
Powell play such a role in relation to Marlow). In turn the desire of
narratees (the ‘privileged man’ in Lord Jim, and listeners on the boat
in ‘Heart of Darkness’) is mediated by Marlow. The next step in this
sequence is the implied reader. The gains of this technique in terms of
subtlety and an embodying of the structure of male desire in the structures
of narrative (and the processes of narrative desire) are
accompanied by a limitation: a tendency to specify the implied reader
as male.
Both of the theorists whose models I have employed here – Girard
and Sedgwick, whose work took Girard as a starting-point – deploy
economic models of desire, in the sense that they consider it in terms
of structures of exchange and substitution. The idea of economies
(that is, systems of exchange) is helpful in understanding some of the
conflicts and aspirations in Conrad’s fiction. Imperialism is, arguably,
driven by economic forces. One might of course describe it in psychological
terms, as driven by the will to power, in social terms, as