Chapter Three
"Should Be Out of It"
Starving the Feminine in Joseph Conrad

Conrad can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think. So his books always look bigger than they are. He's as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling is of the objective
T. E. Lawrence

As a feminist critic, I've often been asked why I read Joseph Conrad. What could a writer infamous for his characterizations of women (or lack of them), a writer praised for concentrating on a "masculine world where . . . little is left of the distracting, enigmatic world of women," have to offer a feminist reader?^[1] If that feminist is also someone who has internalized the anorexic logic, is male identified and more comfortable in a "masculine world," Conrad's early work offers an escape from gender through its reification of anorexic beliefs. For an anorexic, Conrad is a comforting friend, a soul mate. If an anorexic logic informs the subtext of theories of literary production and gender configuration in Kafka, Eliot, Pound, and Williams, in Conrad this logic verges on the obsessive. While an anorexic style does not characterize his finished products, in his letters and in his method of composition Conrad shows similar preoccupations with the body and literary genesis. In his early work the anorexic logic functions to determine relations between textual subjects and their experiences of their bodies. Characters, such as Marlow in Heart of Darkness , create themselves at least partially from the pressure of the anorexic logic. They are made and remade by it—it is part of the "life of their own" that

Conrad attributes to those characters. When Conrad speaks of Marlow as a separate person, "[T]he man Marlow and I came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships," he alludes to the way in which Marlow's subjectivity is constituted before us through his own agency.^[2] Conrad's work is concerned with the process of self-constitution through the internalization of cultural codes about the body, the anorexic logic of policing oneself, and how that policing is given narrative authority. In their self-creation through the anorexic logic, Conrad's early subjects present an aestheticized version of the anorexic's self-creation. Conrad's characters are aesthetic projections of an anorexic subjectivity that helps to shape the narrative authority that demarcates and creates the boundaries that form the text.

The most significant difference between Conrad and the writers examined in the second chapter is that instead of eliminating the personal as an ideal for the production of art, Conrad incorporates it. As Ian Watt writes of The Nigger of the "Narcissus ," "[T]he creative method . . . is characteristically personal without being directly autobiographical. . . . since T. E. Hulme and the Imagists we have demanded . . . hardness of outline, exactness of diction. . . . Conrad uses every device of sound and sense for the very opposite purpose."^[3] Indeed, instead of the characteristic "hardness," Conrad often uses a method of narration most readily exemplified in the famous passage from Heart of Darkness where the first narrator explains to Marlow that "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze."^[4] J. Hillis Miller calls this method "parabolic narration," a form in which Conrad's expressed goal to "make [the reader] see" is actually predicated upon its impossibility or failure.^[5] That Conrad is sensitive to this failure marks him as a different kind of "anorexic" from those in the second chapter. Using sometimes overwritten, repetitive, or obscure language, he seems one of those modern writers whose method is characterized by too much language and the failure of clear definition. A contemporary review of Conrad's second novel, An Outcast of the Islands , sounds a good deal like the frame narrator's description of Marlow: "Mr. Conrad is wordy: his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences. His style is

like a river-mist."^[6] None of Conrad's narrators can ever quite get it right, a failure that generates the necessity for more language and more stories, not less.

If Conrad's writing is not structurally anorexic, then how is anorexia important to a discussion of it? In his work the anorexic logic explicitly designates narrative authority. It manifests itself on one level in the description of characters, whose fatness or thinness seems to brand them as either despicable or heroic, obtuse or enlightened. Winnie, Verloc, and Michaelis—indeed, nearly every character in The Secret Agent —are described with a narrative horror of their corpulence, while characters in albeit precarious positions of enlightenment like Kurtz and Marlow are characteristically thin. As in Kafka, along with thinness comes a detachment from the ordinary world of human affairs, an abstention from the usual modes of human intercourse, particularly sexual modes. Fatness and lack of imagination verging on stupidity are repeatedly equated, as with Captain MacWhirr's "thick figure" that belays the fact that "it was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whipsaw in the way of tools."^[7]

In Conrad, thickness of body equals thickness of mind. The narrator, a doctor, in "Amy Foster" describes Yankoo Goorall in a way that makes the equation explicit: "One would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight like a pine, with something striving upwards in his appearance as though the heart within him had been buoyant "("Typhoon" and Other Tales , 326). In a logic that seems distinctly Platonic, in this passage to "cling" to the earth is to have no imagination, physically figured in the "uncouth" bodies of the "heavy men" with "leaden" gaits. Lack of imagination is signaled by material bulk, spreading flesh, fatness. In beings who are "lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight like a pine," there is no corporeality to weigh down the heart and mind but "something striving upwards" that indicates a buoyant heart, a greater soul. Fatness indicates dullness and limitation; thinness, a

sharpening of the senses and a desire to strive beyond the merely corporeal.

In Conrad, unlike the writers treated earlier, fat is not necessarily equated with the feminine on the level of character. Rather, the feminine is philosophically constituted as that which should be "kept out." Males and females are fat in Conrad, and those characterizations are his most ambivalent and sometimes very negative, like the "flabby stupidity" of the "robust anarchist" Ossipon in The Secret Agent.^{[ 8]} Fatness is the sign of some fatal flaw, or lack, or form of corruption and inefficiency, as with the metaphor of the "flabby devil" to describe the imperialist project in Heart of Darkness. On this symbolical level fat becomes gendered. Although there may be men who are fat, and who possess the moral qualities associated with fatness, the early Conrad explicitly opposes fatness and its attendant qualities to his ideal masculine universe.

This ideal, like those of many of his contemporaries, is linked with a rejection and mistrust of materiality, a prevalent attitude that reflected the changing economic circumstance of the period. Materiality, in the form of goods and bodies, had become opposed to intellectual and spiritual values and thereby degraded. As Conrad writes to his friend R.B. Cunningham Grahame, with whom he exchanged many deeply distressed letters, "You with your ideals of sincerity, courage and truth are strangely out of place in this epoch of material preoccupations."^[9] Conrad voices a preoccupation characteristic of his historical period, in which industrialization, mass production, and the advent of the department store had permanently changed the cultural horizon. Materiality was seen as expanding dangerously, as voraciously devouring the hearts, wills, and ambitions of those who had "sincerity, courage and truth." Expansion of the body reflected "material preoccupations," and women—who were conventionally associated with the material, rather than the spiritual—therefore became in this period even more threatening. When the women's movement of the twentieth century's second decade publicly advocated birth control and discussed female sexuality for the first time, the Victorian "angel in the house" took on frightening bodily dimensions.^[10]

Historians like Roberta Pollack Seid explain the development responsible for attitudes such as Conrad's: "between 1880 and 1920 life

in America and western Europe was revolutionized, propelling society into the modern age. Industrialization, mechanization, and mass production produced the systems, the perceptions, the mentality, and the artifacts of the present: the bicycle, the streetcar, the automobile, the airplane, and the phonograph, moving pictures, and the telephone."^[11] These innovations produced what seemed like an overwhelming availability of material goods, a reduction in the need for physical labor, and an increase in leisure. But along with these new conveniences came an anxiety about the deterioration of intellectual and spiritual values that were forgotten in the seemingly vast onslaught of material progress. Suddenly, there were goods to acquire, and time that might have formerly been spent in intellectual improvement was devoted to their acquisition. Furthermore, technological innovations that eliminated the need for physical labor contributed to an anxiety that the body would become useless, turned from a productive machine into an inert, spreading blob without form or function.^[12] All these factors led to an anxiety about the flesh and materiality in general that appeared in modernist texts like Conrad's early work. This anxiety further exacerbated the opposition between masculine and feminine that had, with the possible exception of the Victorian period, gendered materiality as feminine. Materiality, progress, and all the values associated with them were nearly the opposite of the intense skepticism that Conrad espoused as "the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth—the way of art and salvation."^[13] In this view, a skepticism toward the body would refine, cut, and purify it in the same way that intellectual skepticism cuts through its objects.

As in the writing examined in the second chapter, Conrad's early work sacrifices materiality and femininity (as figured in the body) for the discipline of artistic form. Through self-discipline conceived as the sacrifice of those qualities, artistic form is realized. For Conrad, in accordance with the Nietzschean tradition, art is purchased at the cost of personal agony: "Suffering is an attribute, almost a condition of greatness, of devotion, of an altogether self-forgetful sacrifice to that remorseless fidelity to the truth of his own sensations, at whatever cost of pain and contumely, which for me is the whole Credo of the artist."^[14] Self-forgetfulness means to Conrad subordinating personal emotion to the "truth of . . . sensations." Comfort in personal life

is sacrificed for art. In his biography Joseph Conrad , Jeffrey Meyers reports, before finishing The Nigger of the "Narcissus ," "[Conrad] said that he could not eat, suffered from nightmares and terrified his wife" (171). Often complaining about the "torment" of writing and therefore not eating or sleeping, as well as suffering from a variety of illnesses mostly nervous in nature, like Kafka, Conrad sees himself as exchanging bodily comfort for art. ^[15] In his letters he constantly complains about "my wretched health" and describes how art brings this on: "I am haunted, mercilessly haunted, by the necessity of style. And that story I can't write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think. . . . I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape." ^[16] Writing, the need to produce form, was for Conrad an ongoing physical torment, something he "wrenched out" of the "fluid" and chaos of his mind. His health was a necessary sacrifice. Since fluidity is conventionally associated with femininity, predictably Conrad envisions his unformed stories as "evading shape[s]" flowing through his brain.^[17] Like the trope of the elusive, enigmatic woman, the material of his stories, initially fluid and chaotic, produces in Conrad a sense of "the necessity of style" to give them solid form. The privilege given to style and form as a higher necessity than the physical has obvious gender connotations. Aristotle wrote about semen as the tool that shapes the fetus, "in the male of those animals which emits semen, Nature uses the semen as a tool just as tools are used in the products of any art. . . . such is the way in which these males contribute to generation." ^[18] At least since then, style and form, gendered masculine, have been seen to shape and create art from base matter, gendered feminine. Conrad was no exception.

If Conrad's relationship to the feminine was problematic in his work, his relationship to actual women was even worse. In the estimation of most critics Conrad's literary and actual affiliations with women were notorious. In his own life he had little interaction with them. With the exceptions of his wife, Jessie, the journalist Jane Anderson, and the writer Marguerite Poradowski, who probably served as the model for Marlow's aunt in Heart of Darkness , Conrad appears to have had few women acquaintances or friends. ^[19] There is a theory

that Conrad was hostile to women because his mother had died when he was seven, creating intense feelings of abandonment; and his relationship to his wife seems to have been an extremely conventional one.^[20] Soon after his marriage, Conrad writes in a letter to Edward Garnett that "I have ordered her to get everything ready for work there in a week's time. Her efforts are superhuman. I sit still and grumble." Jessie herself describes what happened: "He had written the most minute instructions. I was to be ready dressed for the evening and taking my ease in the drawing-room three days after the arrival of the furniture; the new maid was to be instructed to answer his ring and show him into the room; the meal was to appear; he was to be shown to his study." When Jessie, excited by his arrival, answers the door herself, she is criticized for not following instructions to the letter: "Unable to restrain myself, I dashed to the door to receive him. . . . He received me coldly, and began to reproach me with concentrated bitterness. . . . There followed some really painful criticisms, sweeping condemnations, indeed, of all or nearly all I had done."^[21] Clearly, Conrad had an English gentleman's conception of household decorum. In the book Jessie published after his death, she fully accepts her role as a conventional homemaker and mother figure, and seems to sense that this is the only way in which Conrad needs her: "I remember him once telling me that . . . he perceived very soon [after the wedding] that the young girl, now his wife, could not only take care of herself but also knew how to take care of him; and then he understood the blessedness of the married state."^[22] If indeed Conrad relied on his wife as much as he seemed to, this reliance shows his dependence upon what he marginalized. Although their relationship as it is articulated in the letters does seem to have been based on a genuine affection, it seems that this affection was dependent upon Jessie's unquestioning acceptance of a role as caretaker and unpaid domestic servant. In the Conrad household the unquestioned ideology of separate spheres structured their daily relations. Watt writes, a little wistfully, in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century that "the marital record of the great modern writers falls sadly short of any ringing endorsement of the new models of sexual fulfillment and human freedom which they and their century pro-

posed" (71). The best that can be said for Conrad is that, unlike some of the others, at least he didn't "get up any pretty fictions about it."^[23]

Jessie Conrad was often attacked by her husband's friends, and a good deal of their ammunition seems to derive from the fact that she was fat. At five feet two inches she weighed more than two hundred pounds toward the end of her life. Although she looks slim in pictures taken during the period when Conrad was courting her, the birth of two children and an accident that damaged her knees seriously restricted her mobility and led to considerable weight gain. The period's prejudice against fat, comparable to our own, is reflected in the comments of Conrad's friends. Lady Ottoline Morrell reported that "[Jessie] seemed a nice and good-looking fat creature, an excellent cook . . . and was indeed a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wrecked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, only an assuagement of life's vibrations." Although the picture of Conrad offered here is not complimentary either, it is clear that Jessie as a "fat creature" is linked to the idea of Jessie as a "good and reposeful mattress." The implicit suggestion in Morrell's comment is that fat women can only be mattresses, and that they are not intelligent but only good to cushion and assuage. Virginia Woolfs assessment of Jessie as Conrad's "lump of a wife" is more explicit: fat women have no form or shape, and are therefore decidedly unaesthetic. H. G. Wells's description of Jessie as "a Flemish thing from the mud flats" makes a connection between obesity and the lower classes, which was emerging at the time, as well as the connection between the fat body and the formlessness of mud.^[24] Conrad never mentions an aversion to his wife's weight, but the recurrence of fat as a negative motif in his texts suggests that he could not have felt positively about it. As he seems to have felt affectionately toward her as a capable but not very intelligent domestic caretaker, it is quite possible that in such a capacity her weight would not have been a cause for complaint. It perhaps served as a pretext for the distance and lack of intimacy shown in their rigid role playing.

If Conrad was not exemplary in his actual relationships with women, his literary characterizations of them have long been under attack. As Watt writes in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century ,

Conrad's works deal much less than those of most novelists with women, love, sex, and marriage; most of his critics have felt that where Conrad attempted these subjects he failed; and several have connected this with his own unresolved sexual conflicts. . . . His works tend to reflect the nautical mythology which divides women into two wholly separate categories—the idealised asexual mother figures, and the venal sexual aggressors. (69)

It is true that in the early work, women occur infrequently and are given problematic roles such as Aissa's as the agency of male destruction in An Outcast of the Islands , or as competitors in the melodramatic love triangle between Nostromo, Giselle, and Linda. On certain levels it is clear in the early work that anything with a feminine connotation must be "kept out," as in Marlow's infamous injunction that women "should be out of it," or as in Conrad's critical advice on his friend Norman Douglas's manuscript: "What is that woman doing in here? Take her out!"^[25] Ruth L. Nadelhaft has recently argued that "through ... women characters . . . Conrad chose to express some of his most penetrating scepticism and criticism about the social and political order of Western Europe ... from the beginning of his career," but she is alone in this estimation. Most feminist critics see Conrad, through his representations of women, as affirming imperialist ideologies he otherwise critiques.^[26] Furthermore, a long critical tradition that has privileged Conrad's early work and praised it for its purgation of femininity has led us to mostly read the early writing and ignore the later work that does not participate in this purge. Thomas Moser's reading, which largely established the "achievement and decline" theory of Conrad's work, speculates about "why Conrad, rather than subordinating women and love in the full-length novels, did not cut them out altogether and produce only perfect works [emphasis added] like The Nigger of the 'Narcissus ' and 'The Secret Sharer'"^[27] Moser's idea of perfection, then, seems characteristically anorexic: perfection in artistic terms is achieved through "cut[ting women] out altogether."

I. Text over Flesh: Heart of Darkness and the Fat Man

Go, . . . and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
George Bernard Shaw,
Heartbreak House

The definitive structural characteristic of anorexic thinking seems its protest against or criticism of a social structure that participates in and reinforces the very construction it resists. The anorexic takes a complicated network of social meanings and codes about her body as female and internalizes them, believes them, misrecognizes them as truth. As we have seen, because those codes are, as Noelle Caskey writes, part of "the cultural and biological interrelationship of fat and femininity,"^[28] the body that is rejected as fat is also rejected as female. Women biologically have a higher percentage of body fat than men, which is necessary to maintain secondary sex characteristics. Due to this seemingly inevitable biological fact, fat becomes coded as one of the primary definitions of femaleness.^[29] In itself, the biology of a higher fat percentage has no significance. But as it is represented, encoded, and understood in sources that range from health magazines to advertisements for diet soda, weight loss programs, or Coors beer, fat is an utterly repellant substance responsible for everything from lowered self-esteem to loss of love and sexual attractiveness to physical well-being.^[30] As Wolf writes, fat is portrayed as "expendable female filth, virtually cancerous matter, an inert or treacherous infiltration into the body of nauseating bulk waste."^[31] This representation helps to form the views of countless women and girls who, like some of my students, define abstemious as "being able to refrain from eating in order to lose weight." The way misrecognition is central to the narrative of Heart of Darkness is structurally very similar to the misrecognition seen in anorexics, who accept the pejorative definitions of fat and femininity as truth. These are definitions the text also seems to accept.

Of the early works, Heart of Darkness is one of the most explicit in

its use of body weight as a sign system. Even though Marlow exclaims that "it seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt" (30), showing that Heart of Darkness is concerned with the failure of signs, one system not questioned in the text is the imagery of fatness and thinness.^[32] The connection between fat and everything threatening to the masculine order marks one place in which the narratorial perspectives of Marlow and the frame narrator converge. Marlow's narrative undercuts the frame narrator's naive praise of the imperialist project as "bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" (8). Yet, his position as enlightened storyteller who "felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew" (70) corresponds to the frame narrator's description of Marlow as having "sunken cheeks . . . a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, [he] resembled an idol" (7). Marlow in effect becomes the bearer of his own torch, one that claims to illuminate and expose the hypocrisy of the first. The description of Marlow as an ascetic idol indicates that his words are authoritative. A long historical tradition equates ascetics and philosophical or religious sages, and Marlow is one of those figures whose outward thinness represents his intellectual sharpness.^[33]

Marlow's narrative is a complicated interweaving of anorexic tropes that operate on several levels. In the way his anorexic logic is articulated, fat signifies a host of negatives. First, there is an equation between inefficiency and fat, between the imperialist project as barbaric and the fat bodies of its perpetrators. This equation is set up through a series of minor characters, the first of whom is encountered in the Company offices. A contrast is made between the secretary and the "great man," which marks the start of a pattern: "A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary" (14). The secretary is the one "compassionate" person Marlow comes across in this setting, and the seemingly innocuous detail of the "skinny forefinger" foreshadows this affiliation of skinniness and compassion in characters encountered later. In contrast to the compassionate secretary, "[F]rom behind [a heavy writing desk] came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man him-

self" (14). An "impression of pale plumpness" becomes Marlow's code for everything that is inefficient, morally suspect, and even viciously corrupt. The heavy writing desk mirrors the heaviness of the man behind it and, to a greater degree, the sluggishness and inefficiency of a bureaucratic process that takes itself much too seriously, mistaking its weight for importance.

This pattern is repeated so often in the text that it is impossible not to see it as a preoccupation of Conrad's. Most often, those with whom Marlow sympathizes are thin, and those with whom he does not are fat. Early in the narrative, when he gets his first passage up the river, Marlow's concern with inefficiency and immorality is shared by the Swedish steamer captain. In his comments to Marlow he duplicates what Marlow has just said: "'Fine lot these government chaps—are they not?' he went on speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some people will do for a few francs a month'" (18). Significantly, this captain whose perspective is so close to Marlow's is described as "a young man, lean, fair, and morose" (18). The adjective "lean" comes to be nearly interchangeable with "good" through repeated association, while "fat" is associated with everything negative. Of the friend Marlow makes at the Central Station, the man he dances with on the deck of his defunct steamer, he says: "This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank bony yellow-faced man with big intense eyes" (31). For Marlow, in his dedication to efficiency, "good worker" is the highest compliment he can pay, and this approval is linked with the foreman's "lank" boniness. In contrast, the Manager's uncle, the head of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, whose purpose, Marlow reports, was "to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land . . . with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe," "resembled a butcher in a poor neighbourhood and his eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with ostentation on his short legs" (32-33). There is an implicit connection here between the "fat paunch" and the lack of "moral purpose." The "pilgrims," Marlow's derogatory name for the Company workers that accompany him  downstream, have similar physiques. Again and again, he uses descriptions like "a little fat man with sandy hair and red whiskers" (41).

Marlow's implicit condemnation of fat can be connected to a transition in historical attitudes about body weight and its cultural significance. While in the early nineteenth century, weight and fat still stood for prosperity and power, by the late nineteenth century another attitude had emerged that equated body fat with corruption and laziness. Whereas historically thinness had signified scarcity, in a time of tremendous industrial expansion and rising standards of living, a fear of abundance developed.^[34]   According to Seid in Never Too Thin , "[T]echnological innovations, economic changes, and the ideology of efficiency all conspired to reinforce the slenderized ideal. The human body—both male and female—was to be as efficient, as effective, as economical, and as beautiful as the sleek new machines, as the rationalized workplace" (83). Despite what often seems an antiprogress, antiexpansionist stance, Marlow's body aesthetics and the qualities he takes the body to symbolize conform with this historical ideal.

Indeed, the ideology of efficiency is one of Marlow's strongest preoccupations, and as the thin body was taken to be much more efficient than the fat body, this has much to do with his preference. He repeatedly breaks into diatribes about the saving graces of efficiency and hard work, as in this characteristic passage: "I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself—not for others—what no other man can ever know" (31). Marlow's most often-voiced complaint against the imperialist project is the inefficiency and laziness of its white participants, rather than its violence and cultural annihilation: "Th[eir] only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a tradingpost where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh no" (27). Throughout the novel he dwells on inefficiency, and that inefficiency is indubitably equated with fat. At one point in his journey he mentions that he has "a white companion, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the exasperating habit of fainting on the hot hillsides miles away from the least bit of shade and water. Annoying, you know . . . I couldn't help asking him once what he meant by coming there at all. . . . he weighed sixteen stone" (23). Too much flesh is inefficient, "annoying," and makes one a burden. Marlow can't understand "what

he meant by coming there at all," because efficiency demands a physical fitness that this "chap" lacks.

Inefficiency in the outposts and proceedings is immediately equated with what Marlow has named the "flabby devil": "On the fifteenth day, I . . . hobbled into the Central Station . . . a neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show" (24). The "flabby devil" becomes Marlow's controlling metaphor for the whole imperialist project. "I would become acquainted," he says, "with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be too" (20). Marlow has made flabbiness the figure for, the outward embodiment of, more inward characteristics that have moral connotations. Since ravenous and voracious are among the most common synonyms of rapacious , there is a clear connection between the devil's voracity and his flabbiness. Flabbiness is caused by morally flawed characteristics like voracity.

A necessary condition for efficiency in Marlow's narrative seems to be an anorexic attitude toward food, an ability to survive on little. He marvels that the Manager seems Manager only by virtue of his physical capacity for endurance, and he notes that "triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself" (25). The Manager declares that "men who come out here should have no entrails," and Marlow gives him a grudging admiration for this, noting that with this utterance, "[Y]ou fancied you had seen things" (25). "No entrails," nothing coming in and nothing going out, seems the desired condition, signifying invulnerability and indestructability. Anorexics subscribe to this same ideal, which is a central part of the logic of the disease. If one had "no entrails" one would not have to eat. By not eating, anorexics deny they have entrails, and, by extension, that they have bodies at all. They see their ability not to eat as a form of power over their own bodies and the world around them.^[35] It is this logic the Manager makes use of, whether he is anorexic or not. He further uses the ordering of food as a means of obtaining and maintaining power: "When annoyed at meal-times by the constant quarrels of the white men about precedence he ordered an immense round table to be made for which a special house had to be built. This was the station's mess room. Where he sat was the first place—the rest were nowhere"

(25). The Manager solves the question of precedence neatly through a hierarchical arrangement based on eating rituals, in which he occupies the head seat, reminding others of their dependence and vulnerability. Marlow articulates the traditional racist equation between blacks and embodiment, as well as his hierarchical assumptions, when he is further annoyed because, in addition to this reminder of the workers' dependence on the Manager for food, the Manager "allow[s] his 'boy'—an overfed young negro from the coast—to treat the white men, under his very eyes, with provoking insolence" (25). Fatness and the control of food operate here according to two symbolical systems: the earlier, that it signifies prosperity and power; and the later, that it signifies insolence and moral failure. Marlow's comment here is antifat as well as racist, pointing to his overwhelming prejudice toward fatness and all the things that it signifies to him. To an extreme degree, literal anorexics have internalized the sign system that Marlow uses in the text.

The antifat sign system Marlow deploys seems shared by his audience, for the frame narrator begins to emphasize what those on the ship experience as Marlow's disembodiment. Through their acceptance of his narrative authority and the symbols he makes use of, Marlow becomes "no more . . . than a voice" to his audience (30). Whereas this point marks one of Marlow's crises of narrative authority where he is certain of his inability to communicate, his audience seems to feel otherwise. Although Marlow has just exclaimed that "it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence," the frame narrator reports that "I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night air of the river" (30). Just as Marlow feels that Kurtz "presented himself as a voice" (48), the frame narrator feels the same way about Marlow and has the same faith in Marlow that Marlow has in Kurtz—that he will be able to provide a clue to the "faint uneasiness." Marlow seeks Kurtz because "I was curious to see whether this man who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there" (33). Here the frame narrator looks to Marlow to give a similar kind of answer: How would someone who

has experienced all this interpret it? What answers would he have? Despite the fact that Marlow seems disembodied, because it has grown dark, this sense of disembodiment has much further significance. In Heart of Darkness , when audiences grant narrative authority, when they have come to see speakers as bearers of truth, they experience that authority as disembodied. For the frame narrator and Marlow, authoritative voices don't have bodies.

Marlow, despite all evidence to the contrary, designates Kurtz as an anorexic ideal of bodiless existence. He equates this ideal with a higher morality, an "idea at the back of it" that can "redeem" what seems immoral (10). He explains that "I had never imagined [Kurtz] as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to myself 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him"' (48). When Kurtz dies, Marlow still persists in saying, "[T]he voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole" (69). He can only experience Kurtz's corpse as an abstract "something"; what is real to Marlow is "the voice." Kurtz, like the rest of the "flabby devils," is described as so "voracious" that it seemed as though he "had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." Yet he is "lank and with an uplifted arm . . . I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving." From this description, clearly Marlow sees him as essentially different from the rest of the "rapacious" imperialists (59). In Marlow's sign system, lack of restraint leads to the pilgrims' paucity, as well as their deficient morality; and Kurtz also has "no restraint . . . a tree swayed by the wind" (51). Still, he escapes Marlow's condemnation and becomes his "choice of nightmares" (62). If one must have a nightmare, at least it shouldn't be fat. Since Kurtz's thinness makes him sufficiently superior in Marlow's eyes, Marlow sometimes forgets that "Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him" (57). The fact that Kurtz has "no body" to a large extent dictates Marlow's "choice." He explains that all Kurtz's activity, all his acquisition of ivory that the others spoke so much about, was nothing, that "of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words" (48). Paradoxically, what conveys a sense of

"presence" to Marlow is not physical presence but words experienced as coming from a disembodied voice.

This perception of Kurtz mirrors the frame narrator's perception of Marlow, and each break in the narrative is filtered through a kind of screen that detaches words from body to produce more words. It seems necessary to obfuscate the body to generate the words. The second time Marlow experiences narrative crisis, the frame narrator's words (there are no words describing his body, so he is always a voice) replace Marlow's and return to his physicality: "Then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face appeared worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids with an aspect of concentrated attention" (48). Although Marlow's "lean face" is a sign of his learned experience and marks a difference between him and his listeners, this description makes him more than a voice. When Marlow is silent, his body appears. When he speaks, his body disappears. To speak, the text suggests, one must not eat. To tear the veil from the "surface of things," one must not eat. Marlow doubts that his words will signify, precisely because he equates the "good appetites" he attributes to his audience with a perspective that would make it impossible for them to understand what he has learned from Kurtz: "This is the worst of trying to tell . . . Here you all are each moored with two good addresses . . . excellent appetites, and temperature normal" (48). "Excellent appetites," among other things, mark the audience as firmly grounded in a world that has no proximity to truth, that is "out of it." From such a perspective, Marlow fears, it is impossible to understand what he is trying to tell, since this perspective has such a firm belief in the "events of the surface." Those who can see beyond the surface have poor appetites. While Marlow fears that these men of appetite will not understand or will reject him, they actually seem to accept his position as the "lean learned sage" who will reveal truth.

If Marlow is granted narrative authority within the text, that authority has been questioned on feminist grounds, as well as on issues of race.^[36] In these readings he is seen as ultimately upholding the very values he claims to critique. In her article "Too Beautiful Altogether," Johanna M. Smith argues that Heart of Darkness is "a story about manly adventure narrated and written by a man," and that "the collusion of imperialism and patriarchy [in] Marlow's narrative aims to 'col-

onize' and 'pacify' both savage darkness and women."^[37] This colonization and pacification is achieved through Marlow's images of women and "savages." These images tend to uphold imperialist and patriarchal stereotypes of the native cultures as "primitive" and of women as "out of it." Nina Pelikan Strauss further sees Heart of Darkness as a narrative predicated upon and made possible by the exclusion of women. The text functions, in her view, as the establishment of a kind of brotherhood between a male author, male characters, and male readers.^[38] I would add that those "brothers" are white, as the discussion of brotherhood in Falk makes clear. Both the image making that Smith objects to and the exclusion that Strauss criticizes are explicable in terms of the anorexic logic I have analyzed. I argue elsewhere that this attitude undergoes a shift in Conrad's work, and that the late work is not as easily dismissed on these grounds. Conrad's ambivalence is readable even here, in Heart of Darkness , one of his first works. Nadelhaft writes, referring to Marlow's disclaimer that "I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally"(Heart of Darkness , 11 ), that "the denigration of the 'personal' as the proper subject for great literature haunts Conrad . . . This need to disparage the personal and the specific nature of experience shapes much of the prose style of Heart of Darkness and accounts for some of its peculiar tension (Joseph Conrad , 44-45). Marlow's attempt to attain and present a subjective and personal perspective that is also transcendental, thereby claiming a privileged proximity to truth, is part of the logic I call "anorexic." This posture results in the particular images of women and natives he creates. Nadelhaft does not mention, however, that Marlow's comment is then qualified by the frame narrator, who asserts that, in his devaluation of the personal, Marlow "show[ed] in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear" (Heart of Darkness , 11 ). Clearly, Conrad was ambivalent toward the idea that great literature is by definition impersonal and, as his later work shows, toward the idea that such literature cannot include women. The views expressed in Heart of Darkness align with the anorexic tradition that Smith and Strauss call "patriarchal." But the ideal of impersonal literature, which is also a part of that logic, is questioned in Conrad's texts.

Most feminist readings that criticize Marlow focus on the four instances of discussion about or representation of women in the text.^[39]Heart of Darkness reads as a nearly perfect demonstration of Lacan's "L-schema," in which a subject watches another subject unnoticed and assumes he has authority because of it, while he is in fact watched by someone else, whose watching calls that authority into question.^[40] Marlow watches and critiques "the pilgrims" and their imperialist ideology, but as the L-schema demonstrates, we as readers watching Marlow observe that in his representations of women he replicates that same ideology. His fidelity to "the idea" that "redeems" the "conquest of the earth . . . [, which] is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (Heart of Darkness , 10 ), results in the famous lie to the Intended at the end of the novel, which keeps her "out of it" and thus maintains the order of the world as Marlow knows it. That world is ordered according to a strict separation by gender, a separation based on a theory of knowledge. In Marlow's designation of "haves" and "have nots," he ruminates that "it's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own and there had never been anything like it and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact, we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation, would start up and knock the whole thing over" (16). The attainment of truth, in Marlow's estimation, involves being "men enough to face the darkness" (10), and women are "out of it" (49), presumably because they lack the necessary "manliness." Their world is based on fantasy, not knowledge, a world created in opposition to "confounded fact[s]" and maintained only through ignorance. A further complication of Marlow's truth is that since nonwhites are themselves the essential "darkness" for Marlow, their access to truth is never a consideration.

Marlow's truth replicates the Victorian ideology of separate spheres, in which the white woman's role is to create a realm of domestic bliss to which the white man can return and recover from the brutality of the world of commerce.^[41] Nonwhites, like the "overfed . . negro from the coast" or the "native woman" whom the accountant forces to starch his shirts or Marlow's cannibal helmsman, exist only to serve. Marlow has some doubts about women but pushes so-

cial roles to the level of ontology, creating a seemingly unquestionable equation of women with nontruth and delusion that he finds in Kurtz's painting of "a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch" (27). Yet the blindfold is significant, since it implies that it has been placed there—that female blindness is not innate but created. As the narrative proceeds, what seemed an absolute ontological statement becomes an ideology that it is necessary to impose: "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own lest ours gets worse" (49). Marlow's confusion at this point stems from the fact that he is working within a paradox. This passage immediately follows his sense of narrative failure, through which he realizes that "the worst of trying to tell" is that he is attempting to communicate to persons of "excellent appetite" an alien, anorexic perspective that he has learned from Kurtz. "Excellent appetite" marks their comfortable grounding in the world of "neighbors and policemen," a perspective that he is attempting to change by educating them.

Yet Marlow concurrently espouses the continuation of the very ideas that his narrative destroys. He breaks from what he thinks is a vain attempt to communicate a different perspective to a more strident insistence upon the ideology of separate spheres. This division is part of the very perspective he wants to break apart to communicate his truth. In the process of breaking he perhaps inadvertently indicates that the idea that women are "out of it" is itself ideological, and that he must come up with a story to explain it. Storytelling and image making, as he well knows through his criticism of the pilgrims' narrative that names the natives "rebels" and "enemies," help to create and impose ideology. The story becomes an interpretation that is mistaken for truth. Although Marlow sees and reveals imperialist ideology in images like the "bundles of acute angles" (21) that is an African worked to death by imperialist conquerors, he mistakes such barbarity as a necessary condition for human "civilization." He sees brutality as a truth that many are not "man enough" to face. But this is an interpretation of events that he misrecognizes, mistakes for necessity or truth.

This misrecognition leads him to assert that women "should be out

of it." If the truth is that "civilization" is based upon the savagery of conquering "those with slightly flatter noses than ourselves," then the image of the "sombre and polished sarcophagus" that Marlow uses to describe the grand piano in the Intended's drawing room is appropriate, in his view, to this self-consuming society of cannibals who prey upon each other. Since the etymology of the word sarcophagus derives from the Greek word for "flesh eater," the piano, that embodiment of refined culture whose keys are made from the ivory extracted from the jungle by savage means, is the appropriate image for Marlow's truth. He becomes "anorexic" through insisting upon this truth in which he does not want to participate. He does not want to eat the flesh, to traffic with the imperialism he disparages. He does not want to participate in what he now sees as the process of "people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams" (70). At this point food and drink, symbols of ordinary human interaction, become tainted and impure. He makes the particular instance of his experience in the Congo into an ontology, a whole for human existence, reducing and collapsing history into a moment: "[W]e live in the flicker." Nineteen hundred years becomes "the other day" (9).

Yet he also actively upholds that civilization he so disdains through his lie to the Intended. He lies despite the fact that he has declared earlier that he "hate[s], detest[s] and can't bear a lie." Lies make him feel physically nauseous, "like biting something rotten would do." Lies have "a flavour of mortality"; they are what he "want[s] to forget" (29). It is the flavor, a physical sensation, that he wants to forget. Flavor and taste, gastronomical terms, are substituted for moral ones. From that substitution it is possible to glimpse an underlying sense, more personal, less abstract and intellectualized than Marlow's usual mode of philosophizing. He reacts to the world physically but wants to forget those sensations, to cut them out. Yet he risks the lie and the sensations it brings in order to keep women out, to keep them in "that beautiful world of their own." This need to keep women separate, cordoned off, marks his participation in the ideology he criticizes. It is the idea of separate spheres, one barbaric and one civilized, that allows imperialism to operate.

The "anorexic" cannibals, "savages" under Marlow's command on the steamboat, throw the idea of separate spheres into question. The cannibals are therefore a great mystery to Marlow, who can find no reason for their restrained behavior. Restraint is a large part of the anorexic sign system that decrees moral value and is associated with self-discipline and strength of will. The twenty cannibals on board his steamer are agreeable to Marlow because they are good workers: "Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face" (36). What he doesn't see won't hurt him, is Marlow's attitude, as long as there is good work. But later he finds a much greater reason to respect the cannibals and dwells on that reason at some length. "It occurred to me," he explains, when a cannibal asks Marlow to "catch 'im," that is, one of the wailers on shore, "that he and his chaps must be very hungry, that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past" (42). As the Company had provided the cannibals with pieces of brass wire they were supposed to trade for food, and villages had been hostile, Marlow realizes that "it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live" (42). Considering this further, he becomes quite perplexed:

Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no longer hard. . . . I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest—not because it occurred to me that I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you that just then I perceived—in a new light, as it were—how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes I positively hoped, that my aspect was not so—what shall I say?—so—unappetising. (42-43)

Marlow is especially daunted by this situation because cannibals are thought deficient in moral and physical restraint due to their eating practices. Yet they show a good deal more restraint than the "pilgrims," who carelessly make targets of anything that moves on shore.

The cannibals don't eat, for no discernible reason other than Mar-

low's half-joking speculation that it might have something to do with "how unwholesome the pilgrims looked." Since the pilgrims have been repeatedly described as fat and Marlow has been repeatedly described as thin, it can be assumed that to Marlow, their unwholesomeness is due to their fatness, and that he hopes he would be more "appetising," because he would make lean-cut chops rather than heavily marbled ones. But joking aside, what he calls the "dazzling fact" (43) of their restraint, their refusal to eat what would nourish them, is something he considers in serious moral terms:

Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is, and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. . . . But there was the fact facing me . . . like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma. (43)

This passage brings together many central preoccupations of the thin/ fat motif. Hunger is presented in this passage as a force that goes beyond any system of values, that is "a sombre and brooding ferocity" stronger than any civilized ideals of restraint. Even men who are "men enough to face the darkness" (10), the passage suggests, cannot fight hunger. It takes something even more, "all a man's inborn strength." Restraint from hunger is defined here as the true test of strength and masculinity, of "true inner mettle." Femininity, then, would be defined by the opposite of restraint, by indulgence. Since it was thought that indulgence in food leads to fatness, fatness would be part of femininity, what makes the pilgrims "less men" than the cannibals. Restraint from eating is what "separates the men from the boys," and is therefore the ultimate sign of advanced civilization; for Marlow's bewilderment at the cannibals' abstention, "the fact facing [him] like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma," must arise from his assumption that cannibals have much less reason for restraint. Marlow, like the anorexic, misrecognizes renunciation as development, as refinement—as, in effect, masculinity. Marlow equates not eating with

"higher life forms." The cannibals, who are more restrained and therefore more masculine, problematize that equation or cancel it out altogether.

Nonetheless, Marlow sticks to that equation, and the equation persists throughout early Conrad. In the early work, the view of history is that the anorexic condition is civilized, the very latest historical development. Anything else belongs to an earlier, more barbaric time. It is a state achieved only with great difficulty and is very precarious, and the civilized still retain traces of their former state. One must be "man enough" to face this dichotomy between civilization and savagery, not eating and eating in Heart of Darkness. From this perspective you must recognize

your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise . . . truth stripped of its cloak of time. . . . the man knows and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. (38)

The emphasis here on the "inborn strength" of men who are men is a repetition of the "inborn strength" that it takes for men to fight hunger. As in that passage, masculinity is defined as a man's ability to face the fact that he has within him "trace[s]" of what belonged to earlier phases of development, everything that as a civilized man he defines himself against: "wildness and passion," femininity, primitivism. Only a man can meet this horrifying "truth with his own true stuff." In the face of this truth the acquisitions of civilization become veils; principles are "pretty rags that would fly off at the first good shake"—feminine. The truth is masculine; what covers it, feminine. The truth is that masculinity carries some vestige, a "remote kinship," of femininity within it. Everyone is "wild at heart," a grim recognition true men can face—and also use to justify their colonialist enterprises through a "survival of the fittest" logic. True men know they could deteriorate into fatness and rapacity, and therefore learn to exercise the capacity for violence with discretion.

Thus, in Conrad's early work, fat is equated with femininity, but in a very different way than in the writings of Kafka, Eliot, Pound, and Williams. In Conrad, the connection is between fat and femininity, a quality, and not actual women. Men as well as women can be feminine. Femininity is paradoxical. It is associated with nature, the primitive, and the savage but also with civilization, which is, in Heart of Darkness , a fiction that veils truth: in other words, Kurtz's Intended and all she represents are the safe domestic sphere that manufactures comforting ideologies of human progress. Civilization, as a feminine fiction crucial to the lives of white women, covers up a truth of human brutality and lack of restraint that only "true men" can face. This lack of restraint is also coded as feminine and dark, so that true men recognize the terrible truth of the dark, feminine savage within. Heart of Darkness participates in the colonialist projection of unrestrained sexuality onto black women, equating them with bodily excess, so that white women can become disembodied "angels," as in the Intended who comes "floating toward [Marlow] in the dusk. . . . This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo" (72-73). The feminine is thus split into light and dark, disembodiment and embodiment, fantasy and reality. The feminine as the flimsy fiction of civilization covers nature and simultaneously is nature defined as lack of restraint. Those who have no restraint are feminine and not "true men"; those who have no restraint eat, as well as plunder and kill; those who eat and plunder and kill without reason are fat. It is a complicated trajectory whose logic is an integral part of the colonialism Marlow critiques and is one of the ways he upholds its values.

The concrete historical situations that helped produce the particular anorexic attitudes expressed through Marlow demonstrate one level on which the logic operates. I have shown some ways in which economic circumstance contributed to a cultural aversion to materiality, how this aversion led to the aesthetic production of texts, and how that materiality and aesthetics were inflected by racial codes and gendered. Now I shift to an examination of the philosophical underpinnings of anorexic renunciation and its gender. The misrecognition of renunciation for cultural development in Conrad contains a view of

history based on a particular theory of desire that is structured by the same anorexic logic as the previous discourse. Tracing that logic in an early Conrad text points to how he renegotiates it in his later work.

II. Fat Is Primitive: Anorexia as Historical Progress in Falk

Falk takes as its subject the cultural equation between civilization and restraint that appears in Heart of Darkness. While the cannibals in that text behave like anorexics, problematizing Marlow's ideas about them, Falk is an extended exploration of the idea that cannibalism and primitivism are linked. The protagonist, Falk, is explicitly described in terms of his "life instincts," which are related to cannibalism. Sexuality and cannibalism are presented in an indissociable relation, part of the "appetites of the world" that, if one is modern, should be anorexically avoided. A reading of the text shows what Conrad conceives of as a model of desire—ultimately self-destructive and deconstructive—that establishes different phases in historical human development through which desire passes. This model is analogous to, but also in important ways different from, Freud's model of desire in the "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." It makes early Conrad one of the clearest examples of the anorexic logic that equates development and progress with bodily renunciation in the modern literary tradition.

The text opens with a striking description of eating. The frame narrator reports:

Several of us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry. . . . the dinner was execrable, and all the feast was for the eyes. That flavour of salt-water which for so many of us had been the very water of life permeated our talk. He who hath known the bitterness of the Ocean shall have its taste for ever in his mouth. But one or two of us, pampered by, the life of the land, complained of hunger. It was impossible to swallow any of that stuff.^[42]

Here, already a kind of structural inversion is set up through the designation of the ocean as "the very water of life," since salt water is not

amenable to the human body. These men are nourished differently than land dwellers, and their "execrable" dinner conflates past and present:

The chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows; then, gorged and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales of experience—the tales of hunger and hunt—and of women, perhaps! But luckily the wine happened to be as old as the waiter. So, comparatively empty, but upon the whole fairly happy, we sat back and told our artless tales. (234)

The present differs from the past in that the meat of "primeval man" is now inedible, the "good fellows" cannot bring themselves to "gorge" on "lumps of flesh" and must fill themselves with the less substantial and more refined "old wine."^[43] The present speakers are "comparatively empty"; they have not gorged themselves; the meat is there, but they refuse to eat it. "The night of ages" in which one gorged on "lumps of flesh" is "brought forcibly" to mind by the chops, as if that past and its consumptive apparatus was something better forgotten. At this point I underscore the difference, in the text's time, between past gorging and present abstention. The "telling of artless tales" remains consistent, however, as does "the company of other good fellows." The act of eating or drinking, the act of incorporation, creates a fraternity in which "artless tales of experience" are told about other activities related to eating—"tales of hunger and hunt, and of women, perhaps." Women and sexual conquest belong to the same register, the same historical period, as the "hunger and hunt." Eating and hunting—food or women—and hunger constitute experience itself and are defined in this text as the basis for a community of "good fellows" formed through these acts and the kinds of exclusion these acts necessitate. Here one does not eat with the other, although one may very well eat the other, as indeed does happen.^[44]

The "lumps of flesh" the primeval "good fellows" gorged themselves upon are transmuted into a description of the woman who becomes the object of the protagonist's "hunger and hunt." Significantly, the agency of this description is Schomberg, the hotel keeper ob-

sessed with eating, who also appears in Victory : "'But for a fine lump of a girl, she's a fine lump of a girl.' He made a loud smacking noise with his thick lips. 'The finest lump of a girl that I ever . . .' he was going on with great unction," the narrator reports, "but for some reason or other broke off. I fancied myself throwing something at his head" (265). The description of a girl as a "lump," over whom one smacks one's lips as for a thick, juicy steak, is connected through repetition with the "lumps of flesh" that the "good fellows" gorge. Conrad makes explicit use of the "woman as food" metaphor here.^[45] Schomberg's dispute with the protagonist doesn't have to do with his choice of sexual lump, for in the sexual sense he does consume, but with Falk's diet, which in Schomberg's view is curiously abstentious:

Rice and a little fish he buys for a few cents from the fishing-boats outside is what he lives on. You would hardly credit it—eh? A white man, too. . . . Falk wouldn't look at [the meat]. I do it for the sake of a lot of young white fellows here that hadn't a place where they could get a decent meal and eat it decently in good company. . . . A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all! . . . .Ought to eat meat, must eat meat. I manage to get meat for my patrons all the year round. Don't I? I am not catering for a dam' lot of coolies: have another chop, captain. . . . No? (252)

Here the fraternity of "young white fellows" establishes itself again on the basis of the exclusion of racial and sexual others through eating rituals. Falk is indignantly seen as renouncing this brotherhood, because he won't eat the meat that establishes the community, and he subsists without it or the "good company" that goes with it, taking his meatless meals alone.

Falk has literally been a cannibal, forced to hunt down and consume a fellow shipmate on an inoperative ship drifting without food, and his aversion to meat is explained by this. Falk is described by the narrator as a "ruthless lover of the five senses" (293) and is connected with the "primeval men" of the opening passage. The emphasis on chronology is important, for Falk shows a tenacious "life instinct" that forms a mirror opposite to the protagonist of Victory , who exhibits an equally strong "death drive" and is described as "modern." Falk's connection with the primitive is made explicit, but his historical specificity is also insisted upon:

Self-preservation was his only concern. Not selfishness, but mere self-preservation. Selfishness presupposes consciousness, choice, the presence of other men; but his instinct acted as though he were the last of mankind nursing that law like the only spark of a sacred fire. I don't mean to say that living naked in a cavern would have satisfied him. Obviously he was the creature of the conditions to which he was born. No doubt self-preservation meant also the preservation of these conditions. But essentially it meant something much more simple, natural, and powerful. How shall I express it? It meant the preservation of the five senses of his body—let us say—taking it in its narrowest as well as in its widest meaning. (267-68)

Through his alliance with the "natural," the "five senses of his body," his identification with the body, Falk is identified with a previous world, as definitively nonmodern. Although it is clear that Falk is "the creature of the conditions to which he was born," that is, a creature of this later, differently formulated world, he also retains within him a drive that others, according to the text's formulation, seem to have lost. Through his "life instinct" he is seen "as though he were the last of mankind nursing that law like the only spark of a sacred fire." It is as if the cannibalistic Falk were the last cannibal. Paradoxically, through that cannibalistic nature, "the only spark of a sacred fire," he is the last of mankind with an instinct for self-preservation or a will to live. Identification with the body and the preservation of its five senses is cannibalistic and is equated with an earlier period of human development. Existence in the text's present, then, seems to indicate a nonidentification or renunciation of that body and its instincts toward self-preservation. The impossibility of maintaining this renunciation is made clear through a paradoxical structure: in the modern world the loss of the cannibalistic instinct, which is linked with self-preservation and has led to the extinction of self-preservation and thereby self-negation, is equated with the definitive condition of modernity, which is also self-negation. But these two negations cancel each other out: the negation of negation leads back into the abyssal structure of desire.

The first dimension of this paradox is further emphasized, as well as problematized, by the presentation of the object of Falk's hunger: "she was too generously alive; but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don't mean the worn-out earth of our pos-

session, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life, clamourous with the cruel battles of hunger and thought" (238). By implication the earth at an earlier state of human development was "too generously alive" and thereby somewhat horrific in that virginal excess that will eventually produce the "future teeming with monstrous forms of life." And in this "monstrous" future state, the time period of the text, hunger and thought have become opposed, the earth has become "clamourous" with the "cruel battles" between them. Through the logic of this opposition one cannot both think and eat, for each activity is at war with the other. The "virginal" phase of "young Earth" is associated with orality and cannibalism:

There was a sense of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind, and it was mingled with clear and grotesque images. Schomberg's gastronomic tittle-tattle was responsible for these; and I half hoped I should never see Falk again. . . . [Falk's face] was immovably set and hungry, dominated like the whole man by the singleness of one instinct. He wanted to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do—but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, like the pathos of a child's naive and uncontrolled desire. He wanted that girl, and the utmost that can be said for him was that he wanted that particular girl alone. I think I saw then the obscure beginning, the seed germinating in the soil of an unconscious need, the first shoot of that tree bearing now for a mature mankind the flower and the fruit, the infinite gradation in shades and in flavour of our discriminating love. He was a child. He was as frank as a child, too. He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food. Don't be shocked if I declare that in my belief it was the same need, the same pain, the same torture. We are in his case allowed to contemplate the foundation of all the emotions—that one joy which is to live, and the one sadness at the root of the innumerable torments. It was made plain by the way he talked. He had never suffered so. It was gnawing. (283-84)

There are striking similarities, as well as marked differences, between this passage, written in 1903, and Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," written two years later. Conrad offers here a model of development that corresponds to Freud's, that seems to contain all the stages of the development of infantile sexuality set out in the "Three Essays," as well as the insight that the instinct itself, rather

than its object, is the motivating force. Falk is here figured as a child but also as a man of another age, that is, from an earlier phase of human development, and his cannibalism is consistent with that age. According to the "authorities" in Freud's text, "[T]his aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires—that is, it is a contribution derived from the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the great instinctual needs."^[46] Cannibalism corresponds to the early oral phase of the libido, the stage of "cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food. . . . the object of both activities is the same; the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object" (198). The language of Conrad's narrator—which describes desire and hunger in Falk as "the same need, the same pain, the same torture"—suggests that in Falk's primitive life instinct or libido, his wanting to live as the single driving force of his being, the same conflation can be seen. In Conrad's passage, however, this is linked to human development throughout history, not the life of a single individual.^[47] "In us," Conrad's narrator says, "the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone." Falk exists in the earlier "singular" libidinal phase, a "gigantic force, like the pathos of a child's naive and uncontrolled desire." Not yet subjected to the later phases modern man experiences, Falk "wanted that girl" in the same way he had wanted to eat when starving on the ship—"he was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, a he had been terribly hungry for food." In this hunger Falk is aligned with "the obscure beginning, the seed germinating in the soil of an unconscious need . . . He was a child." Like the child in which a later man, like the narrator, can see earlier phases reflected, Falk's hunger and his cannibalism stand as the reminder or remainder of what modern man has presumably left behind. Yet that idea of development marks a typically anorexic form of "false consciousness" in its desire to deny and transcend bodily materiality by labeling it retrograde.

The one thing that differentiates Falk from the indiscriminate libido of a very young child—in Conrad's language, "the utmost that can be said for him"—is that he is at least discriminating in his choice of object: "he wanted that particular girl alone." The indiscriminate

libido is the "seed germinating in the soil of an unconscious need, the first shoot of that tree bearing now for a mature mankind the flower and the fruit, the infinite gradation in shades and in flavour of our discriminating love." "Discriminating" is used in the sense of choice or taste while holding the sense of a systematic exclusion of one group by another within its horizon of meaning. In "mature mankind" there is differentiation and discrimination in choice of object, and Falk practices that discrimination that nonetheless retains its oral component, its "flavour." This discrimination or taste is the "utmost that can be said of him." It is this particular phrase that marks a difference between Conrad and Freud, and that signals the transition to Victory , a text that deals explicitly with the problematic nature of the "discriminating love" of "mature mankind." In the conventional reading, Falk's exclusive choice of object would be the good desire for the one, not the many.^[48] In this reading, "the utmost that can be said of him" implies that at least Falk has discriminated in his childish hunger, and that the narrator is applauding him for this choice, his designation of a particular object, rather than a random consumption of all objects. But I offer an alternative reading of the line "the utmost that can be said for him was that he wanted that particular girl alone." It's not just that "discrimination" in object choice marks a superior or less primitive desire. Instead, the tone of this passage suggests that if Falk must desire or hunger at all, as he seems to, at least he is discriminating in his choice of food. The modern state, however, is to be without hunger.

Within this text, or if this text is read together with Victory , this phrase can also be interpreted as an indictment of desire in general. The implication is that on a certain level, the further evolution of "mature mankind" should be, paradoxically and impossibly, a development beyond any hunger altogether. This is, of course, a characteristically modernist position in that the philosophical skepticism posited as an alternative in Conrad is a repetition of similar attempts to renounce and transcend the flesh so prevalent in the Christian tradition of asceticism, as well as the Stoic and Cartesian philosophical traditions. Like Eliot in his call to replace the physical body with a poetic one, Conrad seems to argue for the progressive development of mankind away from the material, which is also a movement away from the

feminine, and to locate that development in the modern period. A tendency that marks most modern writers is the perhaps willful ignorance of the many historical precedents for this development, like those discussed above, and its elevation to an ontology. In Conrad specifically, the texts are aware of the impossibility of such a development even as this development seems desired—the desire not to desire, the definitive form of anorexic desire. In the next chapter I examine the consequences of anorexic desire for women in the work of Jean Rhys: among them, how cultural constructions of materiality and the feminine situate female subjectivity in the black hole.