Conrad and Masculinity

86 Conrad and Masculinity
trace. Another sort of hole in space and time threatens Heat’s professional
detachment and his rationality when he is confronted with
Stevie’s remains:
His reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of
lightning ... Yet it seemed impossible to believe that a human body
could have reached that state of disintegration without passing
through the pangs of inconceivable agony ... Heat rose by the force
of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception
of time ... He evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain
and mental torture could be contained between two successive
winks of an eye.
(87–8)
This response to Stevie’s body also brings Heat closer to Stevie’s mind,
since fear and unsettling sympathy with the suffering of others are
characteristic of Stevie. Furthermore, this rapprochement of the representative
of social order with the destroyed body and hysterical
personality of the ‘idiot’ or ‘degenerate’ unsettles the superiority
which Heat desires to feel over the puny Professor. When the Professor
threatens him with joint destruction by the bomb which he always
carries, Heat’s recent view of Stevie’s remains gives a horrible effectiveness
to the Professor’s words: ‘you may be exposed to the
unpleasantness of being buried together with me, though I suppose
your friends would make an effort to sort us out as much as possible’
(93). The abjection of the body in becoming a mutilated corpse and
the confusion of inside and outside threaten the autonomy of the classical
male body. Furthermore, in the scene which follows these, the
Assistant Commissioner sees Heat in terms which associated him with
the grotesque, idle Verloc, and in terms which question his ‘whiteness’.
He notes that Heat’s physiognomy, though ‘determined’ is
‘marred by too much flesh’ (116) and, observing that Heat is ‘a big
man’, is reminded of ‘a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the
distant colony’ [where the Assistant Commissioner had begun his
career] (118). These effects, in which the classical male body is threatened
by irruptions of the grotesque, come about largely through
attempts by characters to read each other’s bodies: the Assistant
Commissioner trying to read Heat’s living body just as Heat tries to
read Stevie’s remains. The implication seems to be that normative
masculinity depends upon the male body not being read, or read only
in certain terms. These terms accord with the theories cited earlier,