Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 85
some-looking’ (83) Professor and in contrast to the dispersed body of
Stevie. Heat looms up ‘stalwart and erect’ with a ‘swinging pace’ (82),
with ‘a good deal of forehead, which appeared very white in the dusk’,
and eyeballs which ‘glimmered piercingly’ (83). The allusion to his
forehead emphasizes his upper body/mind, his piercing eyes suggest
mental perspicacity and his ‘whiteness’ implies (in terms of the racist
discourses of the time) a lack of degeneracy, in contrast, for example,
to the association of Ossipon with racial otherness (‘A bush of crinkly
yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and
prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type’ (44)). An
attitude of body fascism, partially endorsed by the narrator through
the use of free indirect discourse, emerges in the observation: ‘To the
vigorous, tenacious vitality of the Chief Inspector, the physical
wretchedness of that being, so obviously not fit to live, was ominous’
(94). One might or might not sympathize with the view that the
Professor is unfit to live on the grounds of his morals and actions, but
the assertion that he is not fit to live because of his poor physique is
characteristic of the unpleasant way in which The Secret Agent treats
the body as a site for the inscription of narratorial judgement. Yet in
both these scenes, and in the interview between Heat and the
Assistant Commissioner, the separation of high and low, inside and
outside, health and degeneracy, white and black, upon which the selfimage
of the European male ‘classical’ body depends is subtly eroded.
Both the Greenwich bomb and the anarchists in general disturb Heat
because he perceives them as outside the established social order
(which includes respectable criminals such as thieves). To Heat ‘as
criminals, anarchists were distinctly no class, no class at all’ (97) –
that is they lack a place in the hierarchies of the social body, whereas
thieves and police are ‘products of the same machine’ (92). While
Heat thus regards police work and burglary as related forms of labour
(91–2), the Professor describes terrorism and police work, revolution
and legality as ‘forms of idleness at bottom identical’ (69), where idleness
seems a bizarre choice of epithet. In a different configuration of
outside and inside, Heat is annoyed at the Greenwich explosion
happening out of the blue, and assumes that it must be the work of a
‘rank outsider’ (i.e. not one of the revolutionaries known to him):
‘Outsiders are the bane of the police as of other professions’ (86). Heat
has partially fitted even anarchists into his idea of social order
through his belief that he can observe and monitor them all, which
the narrator informs us is a fallacy because of the appearance of
‘sudden holes in space and time’ (85) when the police will lose the