Conrad and Masculinity

74 Conrad and Masculinity
distinction between the ‘classical’ and ‘grotesque’ bodies. The classical
body, like classical statuary, is elevated, static, monumental and
singular, ‘the radiant centre of a transcendent individualism’. It ‘structured
... the characteristically “high” discourses of philosophy,
statecraft, theology and law, as well as literature, as they emerged from
the Renaissance’ (PPT, 21). The grotesque body, on the other hand, is
multiple, teeming, mobile and split, part of a throng, manifests its
bodily orifices, and represents ‘a subject of pleasure in processes of
exchange’ (PPT, 22). As with hysteria, the grotesque body can be seen
in terms of resistance to social norms. In the work of Mikhail Bakhtin
the grotesque body is associated with carnival, and is seen as a site of
popular resistance to official culture. However, many have suggested
that ‘the “licensed release” of carnival’ may be ‘simply a form of social
control of the low by the high’ which ‘serves the interests of that very
official culture which it apparently opposes’ (PPT, 13). This ‘subversion/containment
debate’, as Jonathan Dollimore terms it, is of
considerable relevance to the representation of ‘aberrant’ bodies in
Conrad. 31
If we return, then, to the description of Captain MacWhirr with
which I began this chapter, we can see that it postulates a one-to-one
mapping of psychic forms onto the human body (two of the symbolic
domains identified by Stallybrass and White). Conrad’s first sentence
– MacWhirr’s face as the transparent window through which we see
his character – would seem squarely within the tradition which Gallop
describes and critiques, one which has ‘tried to render [the body]
transparent and get beyond it, to dominate it by reducing it to the
mind’s idealizing categories’. 32 Yet the implications of Conrad’s
description accord better with Gallop’s own view of the body as enigmatic.
She quotes Roland Barthes’s listing of his own likes and
dislikes, and his comment that ‘thus out of this anarchic foam of
tastes and distastes, gradually emerges the outline of a bodily
enigma’. 33 Gallop asserts that, as ‘bedrock given, a priori to any
subjectivity, the body calls out for interpretation’, but that
Outside the theological model there is no possibility of verifying an
interpretation ... if that word [‘body’] means all that in the organism
which exceeds and antedates consciousness or reason or
interpretation ... perceivable givens that the human being knows as
‘hers’ without knowing their significance to her ... a taste for a
certain food or a certain color, a distaste for another ... We can, a
posteriori, form an esthetic, consistent series of values ... But the