ABSTRACT
This excerpt is an example of how gay criticism can re-read a canonical author, in this case combining biographical information with close attention to double meanings within the text. Koestenbaum focuses on Romance, a collaborative exercise in romantic fiction by Conrad and his fellow novelist Ford Madox Ford. This novel is rarely judged worthy of much critical attention, but interest in issues of gender and sexuality has tended to widen the range of Conrad texts (see Introduction, p. 3). Gay criticism has increasingly been concerned, not only to rediscover and revalue the work of avowedly or evidently homosexual writers, and texts about gay experience, but also to examine the construction of masculinity in other texts. Koestenbaum's aim is not to claim that Conrad was, in any decisive sense, homosexual, but to position Conrad's collaboration with Ford on the homosocial spectrum of bonds between men. Nevertheless, it is part of his argument that homoerotic energies and fantasies were involved in many male friendships which, at the time, disavowed them. Ford and Conrad, like other literary collaborators such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 'collaborated in order to separate homoeroticism from the sanctioned male bonding that upholds patriarchy' (Koestenbaum, p. 3). Nevertheless, according to Koestenbaum, 'men who collaborate engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse' (Koestenbaum, p. 3), with the text alternately given the role of child and of shared woman.
