Conrad and Masculinity

76 Conrad and Masculinity
The opposition between the classical and the grotesque body seems
very evidently in play in ‘Typhoon’, notably in the scenes on the
bridge and in the hold during the storm. These two locations within
the ‘body’ of the ship are themselves hierarchically organized in terms
of the geography of the ship, its class and power structure, and in
terms of race. The captain and chief mate, despite the storm, manage
to stand upright, clasped together for support, on the bridge which
elevates them above the mass of the crew, the materiality of the cargo
and the racial otherness of the ‘coolie’ passengers. When the
boatswain appears on the bridge, to warn of trouble below stairs, we
are given a physical description which marks out his association with
the grotesque body:
He was an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely
hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape. His
strength was immense; and in his great lumpy paws, bulging like
brown boxing-gloves on the end of furry forearms, the heaviest
objects were handled like playthings.
(T, 49)
Moreover, the boatswain announces his arrival, through the symbolism
of the body, in a form of parody of some ritual obeisance to a social
superior, though tinged with the homoeroticism noted by Mulhern:
[Jukes] felt himself pawed all over ... Jukes recognized those hands,
so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new
species of man.
The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours
against the wind, and had found the chief mate’s legs with the top
of his head. Immediately he crouched and began to explore Jukes’
person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became an
inferior.
(49)
The first reaction of Jukes, the chief mate, is to be irritated by this
irruption from below – ‘What could that fraud of a bos’n want on the
bridge?’ (49) – and the news brought by the boatswain identifies the
Chinese labourers as grotesque in Bakhtin’s terms: ‘All them
Chinamen in the fore ’tween-deck have fetched away, sir ... In a lump
... seen them myself ... Awful sight, sir’ (51). The Chinese labourers
are indeed the crucial grotesque body in the story, but before turning