Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (review)

Jeremy Hawthorn's new book is based on the assumption that with a few recent exceptions, Conrad's fiction has been read too innocently, and that it is time to look at it otherwise. This innocence is largely the effect of the critical commonplace whereby Conrad was unsympathetic to, and ignorant of women,¹ that he could therefore not write well about sexuality and the erotic.

If we confine these issues to relationships between the sexes, it remains true that Conrad cannot be called a bold explorer like D. H. Lawrence or even Virginia Woolf, his modernist fellow writers. The force of this book, however, is that it widens the scope and provides ample evidence that the sexual and related modes of erotic enjoyment far exceed the realm of biological sex or of codified gender relations. The erotic being defined as "the biological sexual drive expressed in and mediated through the socially and culturally specific," it follows that the whole field of human activities is invested with libidinal energy wherever the divisions between the powered and the disempowered are concerned (9). That Conrad should nowadays be mostly read as a political writer makes this book all the more relevant: the constant interpenetration of private sexuality and public life is manifest in the works of a writer who was undoubtedly aware of the distinction between sex and gender. Hawthorn's method of historicizing our understanding of sexuality, and refusing to examine the sexual and erotic moments in isolation, therefore makes perfect sense—as well as the decision to overlook the chronology of publication.

As soon as the reader has got hold of this essential thread, the pattern unfolds itself very clearly, served as always by Hawthorn's inimitable style, which allies pedagogical talent with powerful critical insight. If it soon becomes evident that matters like passion and lust are far from marginal in Conrad's fiction, we may then legitimately wonder why it differs so much from the works of D. H. Lawrence: Hawthorn convinces us when he claims that it is a question of artistic vision, a sense of mankind's existential confinement. Conrad obviously does not try to find a solution to the deadlock of gender relations which no sexual revolution will cure. Instead, sexuality becomes "the arena in which the exercise of power is subjected to a most rigorous critique" (Hawthorn 156).

The first chapter, "Closeted Characters and Cloistered Critics in 'Il Conde,' Lord Jim, The Shadow Line, and Victory" uses a relatively neglected short work as a pretext leading to the larger works. Scrupulously tracing the critical history of "Il Conde" (1908), Hawthorn follows in the wake of the more recent trend suggesting that the Count is no innocent man of fine feeling, that the outraging experience he goes through is the effect of his sexual interest in good-looking Italian young men. A suggestive parallel is drawn with sexual subplots in Henry James, with the difference, however, that Conrad quickly takes us outside the life of the Victorian salon. As usual, Hawthorn amply relies on solid textual evidence; taking "Il Conde" as a point of departure, he draws connections with the other works through telltale motifs like "Nice young men," "Bachelors, suicides and gold watches," and "[t]he case of the effeminate captains" (34, 38, 41). The method of intertextual tracking makes it clear that the desire of an older man for an adolescent or younger man is far from being a rare feature, and that Conrad's male narrators are not innocent figures in the carpet (Hawthorn 37). On the basis of a comparison with Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Hawthorn singles out the strategy of displacement whereby an overtly homosexual character is used "to mask the homoerotic nature of a relationship between two ostensibly heterosexual characters" (44). Thus, in The Shadow-Line the homoerotic is relegated in the margins of the tale—the Sailors' Home—so that the relationship between the...