Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 65
determined by the desire for the Other, or in ideological terms, as
fuelled by the ideologies of rational progress and religion. However,
any account of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century imperialism
is likely to acknowledge the centrality of the exchange of
money and goods, and the activities of manufacture and trade.
Conrad’s fiction inhabits this sphere but wishes to rise above it by
discovering some existential or spiritual truth (however bleak) within
the processes of empire. Since the spiritual, for Conrad, is always
tentative and elusive, never a matter of firm religious faith, we can
reasonably identify this aspiration as an aspiration to an existential
revelation: to some condition of being, or of being human (perhaps of
being a man) which exceeds the mundane and even degrading terms
of economic exchange.
An essentialist view of masculinity becomes increasingly unsustainable
for Conrad in the light of his own scepticism about identity and
the human will. Thus in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands,
Conrad’s demolition of human delusions of power, vanity and
ambition generates, almost as a by-product, a seemingly fragile
masculinity, inhabited by the death drive rather than a heroic will.
Conrad attempts to discover a more valorized and powerful essential
masculinity within the other realm of the exotic (in ‘Karain’) or the
enclosed and retrospective shipboard world of the Narcissus. However,
this collapses on contact with the urban modernity to which the
narrative must return (and which is its repressed origin and motivation).
Faced with the collapse of existential models of masculinity,
Conrad seeks to rescue the economic model of masculinity from mere
instrumentality in the project of empire by reinventing it as a literary
and textual economy. Like Conrad’s biographical relations with male
literary friends, the textual exchange of knowledge, desire, language
and above all stories in his fictional texts serves to affirm a set of male
bonds that operate within the structures of modernity and empire
while articulating the desire for a shared meaning before or beyond
those structures. The figure of Marlow plays a crucial role in the establishment
of these bonds in Lord Jim, while the bonds receive a more
definitive delineation in the (contemporaneously written) ‘Heart of
Darkness’, where the association of male bonds with darkness and the
exclusion of women is made more explicit. 32 Chapter 5 will explore
those bonds and that exclusion as part of a consideration of the relationship
of masculinity to truth and knowledge. First, however,
Chapters 3 and 4 will address masculinity in more material terms, via
the body.