Conrad outlined his artistic intention in an early essay. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” He certainly succeeds in that aim in his short 1916 novel The Shadow Line.
I wrote in an earlier post how I had been re-visiting Conrad’s works, and that he seemed to be the perfect writer for current circumstances and my present mood. Strangely enough, I had forgotten the illness theme in The Shadow Line.
The unnamed narrator leaves a secure berth, almost on a whim. He is then approached to take command of a ship whose captain has died suddenly. The prize of command has fallen to him as if by accident. It appears, though, that there was something strange about the late captain.
The crew start to fall ill, and our narrator assumes that the sickness will stop once the ship puts out to sea, yet more and more of the crew succumb to the fever. Different crew members are affected in different ways.
The weather does not follow any previously known pattern and the wind refuses to blow. The only sailor apart from the captain not to fall ill has a heart problem, restricting his capacity for physical exertion. These two must save the situation.
They are becalmed; time seems to slow down and then stop altogether: “. . .my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble.” Has the previous captain exerted some kind of supernatural influence, so that they will all die, leaving a ghost ship? There are echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner here. This first voyage as captain has turned into a nightmare.
There are descriptive passages of such vividness that I had to read them again: “Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king’s palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable…”
There is an astonishing scene when the night turns to an inky blackness just before the rain comes, and the sailors have to feel their way around the ship: “The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance.”
There is also a good deal here about the hidden motives of human behaviour. The odd reasons that some of the characters have for behaving as they do are gradually revealed. The shadow line itself is the line between youth and experience, we are told, but is it something more as well?
I feel that I cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Conrad’s writing in a short piece like this. That’s not to say it’s a difficult read, though. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting, despite having read it at least once before.
I think it’s a pity that so many people encounter Conrad’s writing first through Heart of Darkness, perhaps on an academic course. It’s not his easiest or most accessible work.
Knowing something of Conrad’s biography and the fact that English was actually his third language, you might think that the plainer style of the later works was a consequence of his becoming more familiar with the language.
Yet the short story An Outpost of Progress, the other fiction that came out of Conrad’s time in the Belgian Congo, was published in 1898, before Heart of Darkness and is written in a much more direct style. It’s certainly a good place to start with this extraordinary writer.
The Good Reader 