Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 75
theorizing is precisely endless, an eternal reading of the ‘body’ as
authorless text, full of tempting, persuasive significance, but
lacking a final guarantee of intended meaning. 34
It is hard to imagine anyone less like Roland Barthes than Captain
MacWhirr, yet MacWhirr’s body too seems ‘full of tempting, persuasive
significance, but lacking a final guarantee of intended meaning’.
My starting point in considering ‘Typhoon’ is a brief discussion of
the story by Francis Mulhern, in an article about the criticism of F.R.
Leavis. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, reads ‘Typhoon’ in accord with
his own normalizing ideology of ‘Englishness’. Leavis’s account celebrates
the triumph of the rational white male officer class over the
chaotic bodily confusion of the Chinese:
And the qualities which, in a triumph of discipline – a triumph of
the spirit – have enabled a handful of ordinary men to impose
sanity on a frantic mob are seen unquestionably to be those which
took Captain MacWhirr ... into the centre of the typhoon. Without
any symbolic portentousness the Captain stands there the embodiment
of a tradition. The crowning triumph of the spirit, in the
guise of a matter-of-fact and practical sense of decency, is the redistribution
... of the gathered-up and counted dollars among the
assembled Chinese. 35
Mulhern opposes to this a very different interpretation of ‘Typhoon’:
The ship’s captain, MacWhirr, is an obsessional. Locks and charts
are the emblems of his life ... The ship has been transferred from
the British to the Siamese flag ... Sailing under ‘queer’ colours, its
crew outnumbered by their freight of alien bodies, the Nan-Shan
heads into ‘dirty’ weather. The storm attacks every established
social relationship of the vessel. Masculinity is abandoned for
hysteria; linguistic order fails, as speech turns figural or obscene, is
blocked by superstition or swept away by the gale ... Homo
Britannicus is abandoned to a chaos of effeminacy, homoeroticism,
and gibberish – the terrifying counter-order of the Chinese labourers
below. The ship survives. But the restoration of order is
understood as a furtive improvisation ... The chief officers of the
Nan-Shan, ultimate guarantors of imperial order, bear the typhoon
within themselves. 36