ABSTRACT
Conrad's and Ford's other two novels are soberer tales, rooted in England, without exotic touches; and yet, by dwelling on sensations of ambiguity or queerness, these works resume the themes of Romantic. Koestenbaum focuses on Romance, a collaborative exercise in romantic fiction by Conrad and his fellow novelist Ford Madox Ford. 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. 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'. Nevertheless, according to Koestenbaum, 'men who collaborate engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse', with the text alternately given the role of child and of shared woman. Collaboration fertilizes a work with double meanings that can never be justified and that sustain a dreamy half-life, impossible to dismiss and impossible to prove.
