10. In this context we can see that the shadow of "The Shadow-Line" does not so much indicate a clear line of transition from youth into maturity; rather it is the penumbra Conrad continuously occupied, shades of identity, a divided self.
4. Like some other artists in the period after 1910, Conrad seems to have had intimations of the terror that was to come. The descriptions in "The Shadow Line" of emaciated and frightened sailors below deck seems anticipatory of images of soldiers cowered in their trenches.
5. These intimations are traced in other artists around this time in the wonderful book by Thomas Harrison, "1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance". He writes about Schiele, Trakl, Kandinsky, Lukàcs, Simmel, Campana and Schoenberg (but not Conrad).
www.ucpress.edu/books/1910/h...
11. The narrator's adoption of his "command" on the ship thus represents the call on the self to "become what you are not - what you are not ready to be". Just as had been the case with the young Conrad, displaced from his Polish identity and sent into the world by his Uncle.
6. The text Conrad eventually wrote, however, also disavows pure autobiographical readings, distancing itself from these by use of techniques such as symbolism and inter-textuality (Coleridge, Shakespeare, Dante).
3. The book could not be produced at that time. Instead, "The Shadow-Line" was eventually written as a late text, 1915, in the context of WWI. In fact, Conrad’s son, Borys, had enlisted and became a second lieutenant while the author worked on the text.
9. Conrad was at core a displaced Pole, a "secret agent" in a world that was not his own and in which he was destined to be alien. His very chosen name referenced a book by national poet Adam Mickiewicz about Polish identity misunderstood in a foreign land.
7. Crucial here (as always in his texts) is Conrad's careful choice of epigram: the “great mirror of my despair” (taken from the French poet Charles Baudelaire). We are to ask: has this narrator truly passed through and beyond a "shadow-line" into clear waters?
8. From the protagonist in "The Shadow-Line" we have the confession of a divided self. Just as was the case for Conrad himself, whose self-description was always: “Pole, Catholic, gentleman”. In that order. This is crucial to understanding his novelistic vision and his philosophical metaphysics.
12. In fact "The Shadow-Line" can be considered a sister text to "The Secret-Sharer" (my other favourite Conrad work), since both describe a metaphysics of identity in a modern world that can no longer understand what it means to "belong" to a particular place.
