Non-coincidentally, The Shadow-Line is also one of the most aggressively godless testaments in the English language. From the introductory Author’s Note:
No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the merely supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.
And to add insult to insult, the author weaves a secularist taunt into the very structure of his tale.
Sailing south from Bangkok (for Australia), the narrator’s sleek merchantman, the Otago, is very soon utterly becalmed in the Gulf of Thailand; one by one the hands are ailing (as if suffocated by the malarial miasmas gathering in the static air), and will be reliant for their survival on the quinine supposedly stored in the ship’s medicine chest. Then the young captain makes his ‘appalling discovery’: the quinine is gone; it was sold by the old captain, his predecessor (a malign figure, now dead), to finance a pitifully gullible infatuation in the backstreets of Haiphong.
We glimpse the woman, who resembles ‘a low-class medium’, only in a photograph (characterised as ‘an amazing human document’); and it is one of those moments when Conrad reaches for his most scathing register. There is the captain (‘bald, squat, grey’), ‘and by his side towered an awful, mature white female with rapacious nostrils and a cheaply ill-omened stare in her enormous eyes’. So honest men were stripped of their health, strength, sanity, and youth to foster a sordid mystic and her theatrical stare…
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Keith ended his preamble and turned to me and Saul. ‘Would you like to weigh in?’ Saul shifted silently in his seat. ‘Martin?’
I took out the draft I’d written a week ago, and I said, ‘The Shadow-Line is in the end a thrilling piece of work, but its structure is hopelessly inept. It has the shape, according to one critic, of a tiny teacup with a ludicrously large handle. All that harbourfront politicking and clubroom one-upping ashore. Very turgid, very dull, and very opaque. This goes on for six-tenths of the whole. Once the Otago gets out of port, the book at last spreads its sails and fills its lungs. Now Conrad draws himself up to his full height and looks you searchingly in the eye. And when he writes like this he is an honour to read. So with your permission – Keith, Saul – I suggest we go through a couple of passages…’
What were these components searching for unity in my head? I can try to list them. One: the malaise that enfeebles and deranges the officers and men on that voyage; this was of course painfully resonant. Two: Conrad’s dismissal of religion – with the ‘hereafter’ treated with especial scorn – was resonant. Three: the question of auto-fiction, of ‘life-writing’, was resonant (the book is subtitled A Confession). And, four, our students themselves, or at least half of them, were roped into the argument because the book is set in their original longitudes – the Gulf of Siam (as it was then called) bounded by Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam; and the sickness smothering the crew, Conrad has his narrator suspect, is profoundly oriental in its mystery and power. All that, and also youth, war, isolation, sin, guilt, masculinity, madness, death…
‘There is something going on in the sky like a decomposition,’ I read out, ‘like a corruption of the air…A great overheated stillness enveloped the ship, and seemed to hold her motionless…The punctual and wearisome stars reappeared over the mast-heads, but the air remained stagnant…’ I turned some pages and pressed on: ‘The effect is curiously mechanical; the sun climbs and descends, the night swings over our heads as if somebody below the horizon were turning a crank. It is the pettiest, the most aimless…And Conrad breaks off the sentence, as if defeated by fatuity, by futility, as if there’s nothing worth saying, nothing worth thinking…There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but I had gone mad already.
‘This is the shadow-line, the climacteric, the inner test that our narrator seems bound to fail. The loss of grip, the loss of connection, the weakening of consecutive thought. He succumbs to mere superstition, quailing at the local hexes and voodoos. He can’t even…’ Christ, I thought, how much more of this is there? I checked and saw there were two apparently gleeful paragraphs on the horrors and humiliations of the disintegrating mind. So I said, ‘Now let’s turn to the prose, and note the second-language writer’s attraction to cliché. In the twinkling of an eye appears three times at ten-page intervals, my head swam twice in adjacent paragraphs. And how about this spare part of boilerplate: The feeling seemed to me the most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing. On page ninety-nine we’re told that you could have heard a pin drop in a silence so profound that you…’
But all occasions informed against me. As I toiled on, plausibly enough I suppose, I was thinking about the pure, the platonic Alzheimer’s death, which happens when ‘breathing’ joins all the other activities that the patient forgets to do.
‘It is the insistent Conradian crux,’ said Keith, winding up. ‘The Shadow-Line is about nature’s indifference to its most exotic
