Conrad and Masculinity

72 Conrad and Masculinity
idea that ‘the repressed of masculine consciousness might be the sense
of the “flowing out and away” of ejaculated bodily substances’, so that
‘the boundaries of normal male selves are secured against flowing
out’. 24 Sussman’s account of the dominance of metaphors of fluidity
and flow would modify but on the whole support such a view, since
the fear of pollution and need for control which he identifies might
be seen as indicative of the work of repression. Such accounts of the
male body imply that in the discourses and practices of modern
Western culture, masculinity has been produced, reproduced and
modified through the foregrounding of certain aspects of the male
body and the repression of other aspects, and that the repressed
aspects have often been those most stressed in relation to women’s
bodies, in a process of projective denial. I want to suggest that these
repressed aspects – specifically abjection, hysteria and the grotesque –
return to haunt and unsettle masculinity in ‘Typhoon’ and The Secret
Agent. Each represents a model of the relationship of the body to
meaning and the meaningless.
The fear of pollution and ejaculated substances suggested by
Battersby would imply a special relationship to the Kristevan abject.
The abject – literally that which is cast off, cast down, thrown away,
rejected – is for Kristeva a product of the process of infantile selfformation,
and is distinguished from the object, although both are
opposed to ‘I’, to the emergent sense of identity. The object opposes
the self, but as a correlative of the self, allowing the self to feel
detached and autonomous by providing it with someone or something
else to relate to. The object, through its opposition to the self
‘settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning’. The
abject, on the other hand, provokes desire mixed with repulsion; it is
‘radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning
collapses’. 25 The abject is associated with defilement and death;
Kristeva describes it as a ‘border’ and comments that ‘refuse and
corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.
These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands.’
26 Kaja Silverman offers an account of the role of the abject in
the construction of such a masculinity:
Through a symmetrical gesture to that whereby the child ‘finds’ its
‘own’ voice by introjecting the mother’s voice, the male subject
subsequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the
mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position ...
the boundaries of male subjectivity must be constantly redrawn