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5 “Show[ing] Himself as a Man” Constructions of Manhood in Conrad’s Imperial Theater Before Patusan, Jim generally fails the complex tests evoked by the phrase “looking at another man’s work.” Jim “skulked down below as though he had been a stowaway” on board Marlow’s ship, silent testimony to numerous failures of self-dramatization in the public arena.1 Patusan restores Jim’s ability to have his work scrutinized. Crossing Tunku Allang’s courtyard, for instance, Jim thinks back to his first appearance there as a vagabond when he “Looked like a fool walking about with an empty shooting-iron in my hand” (150). Now, as this capacity to interpret earlier exploits as inadequate clowning subtly suggests , Jim seems to have laid claim to a new and authentic maturity. Marlow, describing the ensuing scene with Tunku Allang, certainly seems to agree: “At that moment we came into the presence [of Allang], and [Jim] became unflinchingly grave and complimentary with his late captor. Oh! magnificent! I want to laugh when I think of it. But I was impressed too. . . . [Jim] was improving the occasion by the delivery of a lecture. . . . [Allang] writhed weirdly on his mat, gesticulating with his hands and feet, tossing the tangled strings of his mop—an impotent incarnation of rage. There were staring eyes and dropping jaws all around us. Jim began to speak. Resolutely, coolly, and for some time he enlarged upon [his] text” (150). In many ways, this passage is the reciprocal of earlier scenes where Marlow could not determine whether Jim was playing a part. This time there is no doubt: Jim clearly is playing a “magnificent” part. Yet Marlow, impressed, seems just as clearly to accept the performance as a sign of true maturity and thus not a ‘performance’ at all. The difference lies in the staging of it at this court of histrionic acting, where Tunku Allang’s mopping and mowing appears convincing to the gullible onlookers (“There were . . . dropping jaws all around us”). Jim’s performance can therefore be read as rhetorical, but this time, as Marlow can see, it is arrived at quite deliberately through an incisive analysis of the theatrical situation—characterized here by an audience liable to take even the most egregious acting as real—and justified by its successful outcome. In this scene, Jim demonstrates a multifaceted mastery over the dramatic context. He has clearly studied how “Show[ing] Himself as a Man”: Constructions of Manhood in Conrad’s Imperial Theater 1 this culture reads public displays: he sees through Allang’s melodrama and the credulous crowd; he crafts a role to fit the scene, maintaining it to its successful end. And he reads his various audiences perfectly: the gullible onlookers; Allang, who must be watching Jim’s performance through his own in order to make his final decree in Jim’s favor; and Marlow himself, who is now positioned to look at another man’s work (Jim’s) and profess himself “impressed.” Importantly , Jim never needs recourse to the kind of obtuse display that afflicted the “hero of the lower deck” in Chapter I. In the spirit of the French lieutenant’s mysterious “power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection ,” the simple act of stepping into an “unflinchingly grave” pose in Allang’s presence maneuvers Marlow into doing the work of appraising and celebrating Jim’s authority. Jim’s masculine capital soars on the strength of what need not be overtly displayed of his subtle command over the public arena. This somewhat paradoxical conclusion—that Marlow accepts an obvious pose of looking resolute and cool as a sign that Jim is resolute and cool—comes into clearer focus when we figure in the imperial politics of the scene. The entire scene turns on Marlow’s discrimination of different dramatic modes as cultural signifiers. Marlow portrays the ‘natives’ as melodramatists, powerfully swayed by Allang’s egregious overacting and thus suffering from a naïve confusion between drama and reality. Jim and Marlow are by contrast intelligent realists who see through the posturing (to Marlow, Allang “could not help showing his fear” [150]) and decide which performances might be most effective. The consequence is that all audiences present in Tunku Allang’s court agree that Jim is resolute and cool—but, crucially, for completely different reasons . Jim plays to two audiences simultaneously: the one simply able to accept his performances at face value and the other (Marlow) able to appreciate the entire...

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