Conrad and Masculinity

80 Conrad and Masculinity
meaninglessness as itself a form of meaning: a construction of otherness
which bears the marks of a particular ideological project.
Desire perhaps provides, not a resolution of this paradox of the
meaningful and the meaningless, but a way of thinking through it.
Stallybrass and White maintain that
The top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized
constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual
fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of
subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those
Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the
social level.
(PPT, 5)
If we join with this a Lacanian understanding of desire as founded on
lack and therefore necessarily failing of its object, it is perhaps possible
to see how the ‘low’ body can be at once desired for what it means, and
yet exceed, or fall away from, that role as meaningful signifier. The low
body can flicker between object and abject. In the role of object, this
body ‘settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning’, as
the Chinese Other defines for Jukes his own colonial, white, masterful
identity and as the valueless personal ‘rubbish’ confirms the universal
exchange value of the dollars. 41 In the role of abject, the low body
‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’. 42
To what extent does desire figure in ‘Typhoon’? There are, of course,
those odd and striking overtones of homoeroticism between the officers:
He poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander.
His lips touched it—big, fleshy, very wet.
(44)
This somehow seems to go beyond the no-doubt desirable situation of
a chief mate having the ear of his Captain. If the ‘top’ depends upon
the low and includes the low symbolically , ‘as a primary eroticized
constituent of its own fantasy life’ (PPT, 5), then the practical,
economic dependence upon a racial Other (ideologically represented
as subordinate or inferior) is evident in the very function of the
‘coolies’ and their money, as well as in the Siamese owner of the ship
and the Siamese flag which, like the arrival of the boatswain on the
deck, so irritates Jukes. The symbolic inclusion of the ‘low’ as eroticized
fantasy appears in irruptions of the grotesque body (orifices,