Uncanny Conrad: Home, Exile, Memory, and Communion with the Dead

Uncanny Conrad: Home, Exile, Memory, and Communion with the Dead LAURENCE DAVIES University of Glasgow A lthough this paper speaks of dealing justly with the dead, it will do less justice to Melville and to Poland than to Conrad. Nevertheless, I hope that charting the uncanny contiguities of exile, home, memory, judgment, and ancestral presences in Conrad may throw—as Marlow would say—“a kind of light” on Melville. Here we are at the limit of deep-water navigation on the Odra (Oder) River, in a polyglot city shaped by exile, devastation, and involuntary resettlement as well as by the wealth, cultural and financial, brought by the Baltic shipping trade.1 Neither Conrad nor Melville ever saw the Baltic, but Szczecin is a likely place to feel the poignancy of exile, the impermanence of home, and the heft of national identity (or, for Conrad, identities) in the work of two conspicuously international authors. Their affinities are not confined to experience fore or aft. It goes almost without saying that the author of Billy Budd and “The Encantadas” is a polyphonist and a mixer of modes, writing in a multitude of voices, switching from poetry to prose, to drama, from fiction to statistical account, but so, more quietly, is the author of Heart of Darkness and An Outcast of the Islands as he glides without warning from the grandly operatic to the savagely ironic, from the orotund to the colloquial.2 These are protean writers, hard to confine in any ideological cage, not least when they treat of the uncanny, the supernatural, the metaphysical. C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 In the early eighteenth century, Szczecin, then called Stettin, was a safe haven for Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France. The Jews of Stettin had the ghastly distinction of being the first German Jewish community to be deported from the “Old” Reich to the newly-conquered territory of the Generalgouvernement; 1,300 of them were sent to Lublin and beyond on 13 February 1940. After the Nazi surrender of the city in April 1945 came the eviction of the German population to make way for Poles and Ukrainians (among them minority groups such as Hutsuls and Lemko) expelled from the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1947. For the mayhem in the wake of the Second World War, see Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 154-201. 2 A disclaimer: the “quietly” here expresses a formal distinction between the two, but no implicit ranking. A disciple of the French masters and their code of aesthetic purity, Conrad did not love Melville, but as critics and scholars we are free, if we want, to love them both. 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 105 L A U R E N C E D A V I E S By way of illustration, here is a passage from “The Life-Buoy,” Chapter 126 of Moby-Dick. Uncanny tales depend for their effect on prior conviction. In no other narrative mode is the will to believe so powerful, the expectation quite so urgent. As the Pequod nears the equatorial whaling grounds: in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn [. . .] the watch [. . .] was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—like halfarticulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents— that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening [. . .] while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooners remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman— the oldest mariner of all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.3 When Ahab comes on deck, he laughs at his crew’s fears, explaining that the noise was made by lost or...