Conrad in France (review)

Volume 13 (2005) of this series of monographs, which I reviewed in Conradiana 39.1 (2007), focused on "Eastern and Western Perspectives," particularly those of Polish scholars. Volume 15 of the series, comprising articles from French scholars, has already been reviewed for The Conradian;¹ since Hugh Epstein gives an excellent account of the nature and content of this volume, I wish to do no more than draw attention to three of the papers, while endorsing the view that this volume is a worthy addition to the corpus of Joseph Conrad criticism. Every Conrad student and scholar would learn much from it.

The French education system aims to winnow its students to the point that the brightest and best are left on the threshing floor and constitute the academic elite. Its members are then expected to demonstrate their brilliance at the drop of a chapeau. British and American scholars, too, must perform at a high level, but there is often a difference between the two critical traditions. While those across the Sleeve or the Atlantic tend to derive cautious generalities from carefully sifted particularities, the French risk all in bold generalizations which may, or may not, be substantiated by textual explication. The three papers in this volume that I specially value manage, and brilliantly, the generalizations and the textual explication to support them.

Yannick Le Boulicaut's "To Cross or not to Cross the Shadow-Line" offers to establish the shadow-line as an underlying Conradian theme:

From the first novel Almayer's Folly (1895) to the novella The Shadow-Line [sic] (1917) itself, Joseph Conrad's fiction offers a great variety of real and symbolical shadow-lines. His characters have to cross frontiers and borders, to disembark on unknown shores, to grope among dark shades or stay becalmed in the deadliest mists, for the only purpose of discovering the heart of their own limits.

(107)

The Shakespearian echo in the title and the Conradian title echo here add to the pleasurable anticipation of watching a demonstration of how the novella sets up an interpretative system for approaching other, even all, Conrad works:

Conrad at his best, shows man's wandering or wavering during a decisive moment in his life and tries to understand what happens during that crucial moment when a line (a border, a frontier, a gap) is unexpectedly crossed. As a narrative motif it covers many situations: how does a man cross his inner shadow-line between youth and manhood (in Lord Jim, "Youth," "The Secret Sharer") when deprived of a father-figure or on the contrary burdened by the strong image of an absent father (Victory)? How does man survive the test of maturity or old age (in "The End of the Tether," The Rover)? How does an imaginative romantic figure overcome the unexpected discovery of betrayal (Jim, Nostromo, Razumov)? How does a mature man accept or submit to a dark stifling reality that negates powerful dreams (Almayer, Willems, Renouard)? How can one react to sudden paralysing emotions (Lingard in The Rescue, Martin Decoud in Nostromo)?

The offer of a generalizing system is typically French and at once stimulates the reader to start applying it. Marlow is always narrating his own crossings of the line. Or does he fail to make the crossing while presenting Jim, and that constitutes the struggle he has to understand the story that he is telling—hence the Ancient Mariner repetitions we are told he engages in?

The article seems to focus on men's experience, but what of Flora's shadow-lines, or Emilia Gould's, or Winnie Verloc's? The crossing of some lines is so terrible the traveller is nearly or totally obliterated (Dr. Moynygham, Decoud). Having established his interpretative apparatus, Le Boulicaut refines it by drawing in another philosophical strand: "The ongoing humanity staged by Conrad is humanity chased from Eden and roaming in a Godless world, but it is not necessarily a condemned humanity since man can be redeemed...