Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 73
through the externalizing displacement onto the female subject of
what Kristeva would call the ‘abject’ ... whereas the mother’s voice
initially functions as the acoustic mirror in which the child discovers
its identity and voice, it later functions as the acoustic mirror in
which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his
infantile babble. 27
One might detect elements of such infantile babble in the hesitating,
excited speech of Stevie (whose relationship to masculinity is problematic).
Babble is also suggestive of hysteria, a concept with a highly
gendered history, having a special place in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century conceptions of femininity. 28 While some feminists
have criticized the use of the concept, others have sought to revalue it
in terms of resistance to social constraint. 29 Pamela Banting seeks to
account for the seeming paradox that the body is both highly
subjected to discourse and seemingly resistant to it:
Although the body is discursively and socially constructed, its
materiality allows it also to elude in some measure the totalizing
effects of such meaning ... As material substance, that is, as nonname
and nonsense, the body resists and displaces the official order
which it acquires along with its native tongue ... As flesh, the body
is both vulnerable and resistant to languages, discourses and social
constructions. And in both its vulnerability and its resistance, the
body writes back ... it is not only in its resistance but in its very
susceptibility to inscription that the body preserves some measure
of agency or signifying capabilities ... the body protests. The body
goes on strike. The body has other agendas. This is perhaps most
strikingly evident in hysteria. 30
Banting here equates the body’s resistance to social meaning, not with
a resistance to signification as such, but rather with the preservation
of ‘some measure of agency or signifying capabilities’: that is, with the
body’s ability to mean what it wants to mean, rather than to mean
what society takes it to mean.
The idea of the grotesque body is drawn from Bakhtin and elaborated
by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression. They argue that there exists a ‘cultural process whereby
the human body, psychic forms, geographical space and the social
formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies
of high and low’ (PPT, 2). They draw on Bakhtin for the