Conrad and Masculinity

78 Conrad and Masculinity
The story neither endorses this assumption of racial superiority nor
clearly repudiates it, though the rendering of the Chinese leader’s
perspective (‘who concealed his distrust of [Jukes’s] pantomime under
a collected demeanour’ (13)) tends towards the latter. The following
passage describes the ‘coolies’ fighting for their money below decks as
the violent storm tosses them and the ship around:
With a precipitated sound of trampling and shuffling of bare feet,
and with guttural cries, the mound of writhing bodies piled up to
port detached itself from the ship’s side and sliding, inert and struggling,
shifted to starboard, with a dull, brutal thump. The cries
ceased. The boatswain heard a long moan through the roar and
whistling of the wind; he saw an inextricable confusion of heads
and shoulders, naked soles kicking upwards, fists raised, tumbling
backs, legs, pigtails, faces.
(58)
The ‘coolies’ are alternately united into a single body – a writhing
mound of flesh – and separated out into body parts:
Jukes saw a head bang the deck violently, two thick calves waving
on high, muscular arms twined round a naked body, a yellow-face,
open-mouthed and with a set wild stare, look up and slide away ...
The hatchway ladder was loaded with coolies swarming on it like
bees on a branch ... The ship heeled over more, and they began to
drop off: first one, then two, then all the rest went away together,
falling straight off with a great cry.
(62–3)
The logic of this passage, in which Jukes observes, not persons, but ‘a
head’, ‘two thick calves’ and ‘muscular arms’, suggests that ‘a yellowface’
should read ‘a yellow face’. 37 It is characteristic of the denigrated
body that it is dispersed or fragmented on the one hand, or coalesces
into an indifferent mass on the other. The former is how pornography
habitually represents women: as a sum of body parts fetishized. The
latter is how class hatred habitually represents the working class
politicized: the mass, the threatening mob. Both fragmented and
coalesced bodies suggest a loss of individual autonomy, of a discrete,
active, willing self located within the boundaries of a separate body. 38
The description of the Chinese men closely resembles Karl Marx’s
description of the lumpenproletariat as ‘the whole indefinite,