The Shadow Line
The Shadow-Line is a short novel based at sea by Joseph Conrad; it is one of his later works, being written from February to December 1915. It was first published in 1916 as a serial in New York's Metropolitan Magazine (September—October) in the English Review (September 1916-March 1917) and published in book form in 1917 in the UK (March) and America (April). The novella depicts the development of a young man upon taking a captaincy in the Orient, with the shadow line of the title representing the threshold of this development.
The novella is notable for its dual narrative structure. The full, subtitled title of the novel is The Shadow-Line, A Confession, which immediately alerts the reader to the retrospective nature of the novella. The ironic constructions following from the conflict between the 'young' protagonist (who is never named) and the 'old' drive much of the underlying points of the novella, namely the nature of wisdom, experience and maturity. Conrad also extensively uses irony by comparison in the work, with characters such as Captain Giles and the ship's 'factotum' Ransome used to emphasise strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist.
The novella has often been cited as a metaphor of the First World War, given its timing and references to a long struggle, the importance of camaraderie, etc. This viewpoint may also be reinforced by the knowledge that Conrad's elder son, Borys, was wounded in the First World War. Others however see the novel as having a strong supernatural influence, referring to various plot-lines in the novella such as the 'ghost' of the previous captain potentially cursing the ship, and the madness of first mate Mr Burns. Conrad himself, however, denied this link in his 'Author's Note' (1920), claiming that although critics had attempted to show this link, "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is."
Andrzej Wajda has made a 1976 film adaptation of the novel under its Polish title - Smuga cienia.
A Confession. (1917)
"Worthy of my undying regard"
To Borys And All Others Who,
Like Himself,
Have Crossed In Early Youth
The Shadow Line Of
Their Generation
With Love
Plot summary
A young, inexperienced, but competent seaman suddenly gives up his successful position as mate on a steamship. Whilst he is on shore in Singapore an older and experienced sea captain recommends him to the harbour master, as a result of which he is given command of a sailing ship whose captain has died at sea. He travels to Bangkok to take charge of the ship and feels that he is joining an illustrious brotherhood of distinguished former commanders. However, he learns from the chief mate that the previous captain was dissolute and neglected his duties, The chief mate was forced to take charge of the ship, and the captain cursed the ship and all its crew before dying.
The new young captain is delayed in Bangkok by a combination of official procedures and the chief mate’s illness. He seeks medical advice, but impatient to be underway with his new commission, he disregards the warnings and sets sail in unfavourable conditions.
The journey progresses very slowly because of a lack of wind, and the ship becomes becalmed in the Gulf of Siam. Meanwhile all the crew are infected with malaria, and the chief mate appears to be dying. The mate believes that an evil influence from the previous captain is casting a jinx on the ship.
The young captain then suddenly discovers that the supplies of quinine he has been using to treat his crew have been stolen and sold by the previous captain, who has re-filled the bottles with useless stuff. The captain is supported in all his attempts to keep going by the ship’s cook, who has a bad heart
The chief mate recovers slightly, but the ship makes no progress. The captain in despair decides to abandon the voyage and return to Singapore. En route the ship encounters a tropical thunderstorm, and the captain has to maintain the safety of the ship with the help of only two or three sick crew members. The chief mate goes through a phase of near madness in which he believes that they are battling against evil forces of the former captain, who he personally buried at sea in the same part of the Gulf.
Finally, the ship reaches Singapore, the crew are taken off to hospital, and the cook requests to be discharged from his duties. The captain recruits a replacement crew and is planning to resume his voyage the very next day, feeling older and wiser.
Commentary and themes
Narrative structure
The main elements of the narrative are arranged in a very simple pattern. The story begins in Singapore as the young captain secures his first command. He travels to Bangkok to join his ship, and sails back to where he came from, in Singapore. This structure echoes the main thematic development of the novella – his change from a state of youth and immaturity to that of an older and wiser man who has been hardened by the grim experiences of his journey.
Conrad is renowned for the complexity of his novels and stories – particularly the radically fractured time schemes of his narratives. But the structure and the sequence of events in The Shadow-Line are relatively straightforward. Events are related by a single first-person narrator, the young sea captain, and he delivers them in the same sequence that they occur, with no flashes forward or backward.
The only element of ‘back story’ is provided by the chief mate’s account of his conflict with the previous captain, and the only part of the text which is not either dialogue or first person narrative is two brief extracts from the young captain’s diary. In fact it’s difficult to understand why Conrad bothered including these two short passages, because they continue to recount events in the same sequence and in a similar manner.
Steam and Sail
At the start of the tale, the young sailor’s position as mate on the steam ship is comfortable and he is successful in it – carrying the approval of his captain (Kent). Yet he leaves the ship, for reasons he cannot explain. The experienced seamen with whom he discusses the issue put it down to his youthful impetuosity.
Yet when he takes up his command of the sailing ship he is in raptures with the ship itself which he thinks of as ‘she’ and himself as a lover. He also conceives of himself as the latest in a long honourable tradition of previous captains. (This is powerfully ironic in the light of the previous captain and his actions.)
But there are immediate problems connected with the type of vessel. The sailing ship requires a great number of men on deck, co-operating with each other to manage the sails and navigation. These are exactly what the captain does not have, because the crew are down with malaria. He is therefore forced to manage the ship himself, assisted by two crew who are both ill.
In the end he succeeds – so in one sense it is the older traditions of the sea and the earlier form of maritime technology which provide him with the gruelling experience that forms his character. He learns the co-operative
Youth and experience
At the start of the narrative, the young seaman is competent, but he displays the impetuosity and naivety of youth. He gives up his job without any good reason, and has no alternative career prospects. He fails to recognise that Captain Giles has recommended him to the Harbour Master, and his mood switches rapidly from despair to elation on learning of his new appointment. He also disregards the medical advice he is given, and sets sail without the services of a chief mate.
In his favour is the fact that his essential soundness is recognised by Captain Kent, his previous commander, the experienced Captain Giles, and the Harbour Master who gives him his position. He survives under the pressure of the ship’s misfortunes, and he has the good luck not to contract malaria like the rest of his crew.
Once back in Singapore, he realises that he has learned a severe lesson, he feels older (though only two or three weeks have passed) and at the end of the story he is intending to start out to complete his journey the very next day
Novel, novella, story?
The narrative is one hundred pages – approximately 30,000 words – which means it could be considered a short novel or a long short story. But it has the classic characteristics of the novella. It is concerned essentially with a single experience in the life of one character, but the event it deals with is of a magnitude that makes it more than a passing episode. That is, it deals with a universal issue, not a particular event (no matter how revealing).
The captain’s experiences test his courage to the limit; he learns a very severe lesson; and he ultimately triumphs against adversity in a way which takes him from youth to manhood. These are large-scale issues, much bigger than the smaller (though revealing) incidents which would characterize the short story.
All the drama is concentrated into one topic and one location – the captain’s command and his problems on board the ship. Even his interactions with others are reduced essentially to just the saintly cook and the deranged chief mate. This sharpness of dramatic focus reinforces the especially compacted nature of the novella as a literary genre.
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The Shadow-Line
From Modernism Lab Essays
by Anthony Domestico
In a 1924TLS (Times Literary Supplement) tribute upon the death of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf wrote, “He must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage…”[1] Woolf believed that it was Conrad’s celebration of these sailorly virtues – stoical pride in one’s work, a connection to a deep and lasting tradition, action rather than cogitation – that would ensure the writer’s legacy. Beyond his techniques of narrative mediation, beyond his modernist probing of epistemological uncertainty, we are left, Woolf claims, with maritime yarns that celebrate “fidelity, compassion, honour, service,” what Conrad himself describes in Some Reminiscences as “a few very simple ideas.”[2] Conrad the moralist and seaman trumps Conrad the modernist and explorer of the dark chasms of psychology.
If Woolf is correct in identifying Conrad’s importance in his dramas of simple but heroic virtues and vices, his crystalline rather than his labyrinthine narratives, then his 1917The Shadow-Line would seem a key late addition to his corpus. In as bald a statement of Woolf’s thesis as possible, the narrator of The Shadow-Line at one point describes “the sea [as] the only world that counted, and the ships the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity – and of love.”[3] Conrad returns to the sea after diverging into other, landlocked spheres in The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and he frames his thematic return in stark, powerful terms.The Shadow-Line opens with a description of the universal transition from callow boyhood to hardened adulthood: “One knows well enough that all mankind has streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation – a bit of one’s own…One goes on. And the time, too, goes on – till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind” (3).
This is symptomatic of a generalizing impulse that runs throughout the narrative. The young captain sees his voyage and his world in archetypal fashion, describing in his journal the “stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden” (80), seeing in his journey “that special intensity of existence which is the quintessence of youthful aspirations” (69). The work’s clear echoes of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” – a ship stalls in the ocean due to some vague sin, prompting feelings of “guilt” (99) and “shame” (97) on the captain’s part – also seem to hint towards a universal sense of guilt, an original, unnamed and unnamable sin that must be atoned for. Like Coleridge’s great poem, like Conrad’s earlier work, The Shadow-Line has the feel of a nightmarish parable that cannot quite be deciphered. The “few very simple ideas” of the novel – youth and experience, sin and expiation – occasionally seem to lock into a coherent, universal pattern, only to slide back into indeterminacy.
If the themes of The Shadow-Line seem chiseled down, even parabolic in nature, then the structure of The Shadow-Line similarly appears simplified in relation to Conrad’s major, earlier works. The plot takes a circular route: the young captain begins in the “Eastern port” (4) of Singapore and ends in the same place. The captain’s first voyage is defined negatively by what doesn’t happen: the ship remains immobile in a calm sea through a good portion of the tale; the captain does not bring the quinine that he believes will save his men from illness.
Formally, The Shadow-Line departs from the formal devices both of Conrad’s earlier work and of modernist writing in general. Unlike in Lord Jim, for instance, there is no gap between sujet and fabula; there are no real analepses or prolepses, as the narrative plods forward (sometimes at an achingly slow pace) without digression. Marlow, that framing figure who foregrounds issues of mediation and narrative indecipherability, has no place in this directly told tale.The Shadow-Line is the presentation of the captain himself, even containing selected pages from his diary. As for the prose style, Conrad seemed constitutionally incapable of writing short, declarative sentences: his sentences accumulate clauses, trade in abstract nouns, revel in circling around their subjects. In The Shadow-Line, though, the abstrusities are at a relative minimum; by Conrad’s standards, the writing is clear and concise.
Jeremy Hawthorn suggests that The Shadow-Line betrays a “general modernist suspicion” of “neat plots (in life and art),” that, as the novella closes with the captain about to embark on other journeys, there is “a characteristically modernist deferral of unambiguous closure.”[4] Hawthorn is right to point out that the novella’s separate plots and voyages are never straightforward: “they wind around, stop before they should, continue when the reader expects them to end, intersect with other travellers heading in a different direction, and generally exhibit that untidiness that is associated with life rather than art.”[5]
The novel does end with the prospect of new journeys opening up into the future, as Hawthorn indicates, but it also ends with a final portrait of the undying, simple virtues of seamen. After asking his faithful mate Ransome to shake hands, the captain describes their parting:
He exclaimed, flushed up dusky red, gave my hand a hard wrench – and next moment, left alone in the cabin, I listened to him going up the companion stairs cautiously, step by step, in mortal fear of starting into sudden anger our common enemy [his weak heart] it was his hard fate to carry consciously within his faithful breast” (109).
Danger still lurks in the background; Ransome’s diseased heart is only a literal manifestation of the hazards that reside in all human breasts. Yet despite this abiding peril, Ransome’s virtues – his “faithful” nature, his “cautiously” plodding determination, his acceptance of his hard fate – form a bulwark, no matter how tenuous, against the annihilating forces that lie behind the everyday in Conrad’s fiction. Earlier, the narrator describes his captaincy as a part of a “dynasty, continuous not in blood, indeed, but in its experience, in its training, in its conception of duty, and in the blessed simplicity of its traditional point of view” (44). The novella’s ending, rather than exhibiting a modernist predilection for complexity, openness, and ambiguity, actually asserts the continuance of this blessed simplicity; in this way, it can be read as a conservative affirmation of tradition rather than a modernist destabilizing of any such norms.
A final and interesting stylistic departure from Conrad’s earlier, more celebrated works lies in his use of what Ian Watt famously called “delayed decoding.” Delayed decoding, Watt writes, is the process by which the reader is put “in the position of being an immediate witness of each step in the process whereby the semantic gap between the sensations aroused in the individual by an object or event, and their actual cause of meaning, was slowly closed in his consciousness.”[6] The most famous instance of delayed decoding occurs in Heart of Darkness, where Marlow describes a man’s reaction to being bombarded from the coast: “Something big appeared in the air before the shutter,” and “the man stepped back swiftly,” as “the end of what appeared a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool. It looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody ashore he had lost his balance in the effort.”[7] It is only later in this same passage that we realize that the “cane” is actually “the shaft of spear,” that the man has not wrenched something precious from somebody else but has been pierced in the “side just below the ribs.” We inhabit the same epistemological gap that Marlow does: we become estranged from the represented reality of the text, caught up in the complex transition from perception to interpretation.
The most exemplary example of delayed decoding in The Shadow-Line occurs when, after the heavens turn into a sheet of rain and wind, the captain stumbles over something on the deck: