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The World is Flat
- Leviathan
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 10, Issue 1, March 2008
- pp. 81-84
- Article
- Additional Information
The World is Flat MILTON REIGELMAN, Conference Co-Chair Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, USA J oseph Conrad flattened our imaginative world in the late nineteenth century by transporting us through his prose to South America, into the heart of Africa, and to obscure ports and cultures of the Far East. Fifty years earlier Herman Melville, almost as familiar as Conrad with the intercultural oceanic highway, likened the multicultural Pequod crew to “an Anarcharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth.” C 2008 The Authors Journal compilation C 2008 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 81 M I L T O N R E I G E L M A N Tracking the registrants during the fifteen months prior to the “Hearts of Darkness: Melville and Conrad in the Space of World Culture” conference, I kept being reminded of Anarcharsis Clootz, that wacky Prussian idealist and self-styled orator who appeared before the French National Assembly in 1790 with a ragtag group of people of different colors and nationalities; they were, he said, representatives of the human race, on whose behalf he was arguing. (Robespierre had him guillotined during the Terror—alas!) Melville and Conrad scholars from twenty-seven countries and every continent (except Antarctica) registered. Because of cancellations, we missed getting to meet Melvillians and Conradians who had planned to come from India, South Africa, and Uruguay, for example. But we did get to meet new colleagues from Algeria, Turkey, and Montenegro, along with several each from Japan and Italy, the two countries with the largest contingent after the U.S. and Poland. If we give proper due to the Scottish nationalists, twenty countries were represented in Szczecin. The keel of the conference was federated with academics at all stages of their careers, from two extraordinary undergraduates to five revered, nowretired scholars. And not only academics: there was an actress and a person who provides services for people with developmental disabilities; a philosopher from Germany, an economist from Poland, and an archaeologist from Australia; an American theatre director, a Polish radio producer, and a Dutch psychotherapist. Although we can today be instantly connected to people around the globe through email and video conferencing, the conference reminded us how much more wonderfully satisfying actual flesh-and-blood connections really are. On the first night a random group of conference “Isolatoes” sat talking with one another around a cozy table in the Novotel restaurant: a colleague from an adjoining state I’d never before had more than ten words with, a graduate student from Cambridge University, a community college teacher from Seattle, and a scholar from Barcelona. On the last, celebratory night of the conference, the two tables pushed together at the Karczma Polska included folks from four continents. Anarcharsis Clootz, indeed! E. M. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel counsels “only connect.” The most important connections at the conference were between the vast creations of Conrad and Melville, two worlds that had previously existed as isolated and separate universes. To be sure, one participant, James W. Long, had written his Masters thesis on both authors, and contemplates doing the same for his Ph.D. But for virtually everyone else, the juxtaposition was a new one that resulted in new and surprising insights about both writers. Of the seventy 82 L E V I A T H A N T H E W O R L D I S F L A T papers presented, two-thirds mentioned both authors, and many of these dealt with the “other” author in some significant way. About twenty-five papers were submitted that we wanted everyone to be able to hear. The selection of only two keynote addresses and six papers for the two morning plenary sessions was therefore difficult and fairly arbitrary. The brilliant—and witty—opening keynote addresses by John Bryant and Laurence Davies set the tone for the entire conference. Five of the six plenary presenters were people who had...