The shadow line (novel)

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The shadow line. A confession ( English original title The Shadow Line. A Confession ) is a short story or a short novel by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The Shadow Line was published as a book in 1917. It tells how a young captain copes with critical situations on his first command at sea and thereby gains human maturity. The novel has autobiographical traits.

action

The first-person narrator , whose name is not mentioned in the book, dismisses from a steamer of the British merchant navy, where he was first officer , in an East Asian port (which is recognizable as Singapore ) because of an unspecified weariness . He stays at the local seaman's home and makes the acquaintance of the long-serving Captain Giles, who only occasionally takes over commands. He encourages him to apply for command of a three-masted barque, the captain of which has recently died and which is moored in the port of Bangkok . An intrigue by the chief steward of the seaman's home, with which he wanted to give command to another resident, fails. The first-person narrator gets on board a steamship and travels to Thailand , where he euphorically boarded his ship. The first officer, Mr. Burns, shows hostility at first, probably because he had made himself hopeful that he would take over the post of his old captain. While the trading deals that Mr. Burns had poorly arranged dragged on, large parts of the crew fell ill with cholera and malaria . The first-person narrator hopes the fresh sea breeze will have a healing effect on them and orders them to go to sea. But in the Gulf of Thailand the ship falls into a lull and with full rigging only turns in circles for two weeks, while almost all crew members lie in their bunks with malaria. Only the first-person narrator and Ransome, the extremely employed Smut , who is not allowed to work hard because of a heart defect , are spared. The first-person narrator discovers, to his horror, that the rich supplies of quinine on which he had relied on have been sold secretly by his criminal predecessor and replaced by a worthless powder mixture. He is now aiming for the port of Singapore to get help for his crew there. Mr. Burns spreads the horror tale that the late captain, who was buried at 8 ° 20 ′ north latitude at sea , had cursed the ship to prevent it from crossing this line. Finally the weather changes: A storm is approaching, and the sick crew including Ransomes, who spent themselves life-threateningly in the process, manage to reef at least the mainsail on a pitch- dark night in heavy rain, otherwise the finally coming breeze would have buckled the mast. As the ship picks up speed, the now apparently insane Mr. Burns triumphs over the dead captain with wild speeches and gruesome laughter before he collapses. Without being able to fall back on the severely weakened crew, the first-person narrator steers the ship in forty sleepless hours almost single-handedly to the outer roadstead of Singapore, where, with Ransome's help, he anchors and hoists the flag with the doctor's emergency signal. Doctors quickly come on board and transport the sick crew members to the hospital. The first-person narrator also goes ashore, has a conversation with his fatherly friend, Captain Giles, and hires a new crew in order to be able to continue his journey quickly. The book ends with Ransome signing up for fear for his weakened heart.

Narrative perspective

The subtitle of the English original is "A Confession ". This is the name given to the autodiegetic narrative perspective that Conrad persists throughout the book: As a young captain, the first-person narrator is the protagonist of the narrative, at the same time, as a significantly older man, he looks back on his former self, narrating and reflecting. This allows Conrad to retrospectively work out the change in the personality of the first-person narrator, who as a young man still acts spontaneously and unmotivated at the beginning of the book, then depends on the help of others and clings to irrational ideas such as healing through sea breeze, but in the crisis matures into a responsible personality with authority and thus skipped its own shadow line.

interpretation

The narrative clearly braces two narrative levels, one real and one symbolic : The eponymous "shadow line" is the line 8 ° 20 ′ north latitude, which the ship has to cross in order to escape the wicked captain sunk there or the calm and malaria, and at the same time also the step that the first-person narrator takes to mature from young man to adult, from dreamer to doer, a change that Conrad describes as a veritable " initiation process ". This is underlined by the fact that the starting point and end point of the journey described are identical, which is therefore not a spatial journey: the first-person narrator arrives where he has already been, but as a different person. Even the beginning of the book, where in a few pages about passing youth and weariness, the lust for provocation and the irascibility that are typical for this age, signals that the shadow line is not primarily about a seafarer or adventure story , but about general human issues.

background

The events described in the book are a dramatized version of what happened to the author himself in 1888: The 31-year-old Conrad had disembarked from his ship Vidar out of boredom and was waiting in the seaman's home in Singapore for an opportunity to return to England when he met himself offered the opportunity to command the Otago , which was then in Bangkok. He gladly accepted, but had considerable difficulties to contend with on his first trip, much like what he tells them in the shadow line .

Origin and edition history

The Shadow Line (1917)

The creation time of the shadow line is not entirely clear. Conrad himself states in a letter that he wrote the story during the First World War from December 1914 to March 1915. In the foreword to the first edition , however, it says that it was written down in the autumn and winter of 1916. Conrad's translator Heinz Piontek assumes that it was written from February / March 1915 to early autumn 1916. The novel is dedicated to Conrad's son Borys (1898–1978), who served as a soldier in World War I from 1915, and also to all of his comrades, “the ones like him, early on have passed the shadow line of their generation ”, that is, who had to grow up prematurely due to the war.

The Shadow Line first appeared in sequels from September 1916 to March 1917 in the English Review , in March 1917 the book edition was published by the London publisher JM Dent. A first German translation by Elsie MacCalman was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1926 with an introduction by Jakob Wassermann . In 1999 Heinz Piontek submitted a new translation to Insel Verlag , followed by another translation by Daniel Göske from Carl Hanser Verlag in 2017 .

Movie

Andrzej Wajda filmed the subject in 1976 under the title Smuga cienia . The film was shown in GDR cinemas in December 1977 .

Expenses (selection)

  • Joseph Conrad: The Shadow Line. A confession . JM Dent, London 1917. ( Author's note for the Doubleday edition, 1920)
  • Joseph Conrad: The shadow line. A confession . German by E. McCalman. Fischer, Berlin 1926.
  • Joseph Conrad: shadow line. Novel. German by Heinz Piontek . Insel, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1999
  • Joseph Conrad: The shadow line. Novel. German by Daniel Göske. Carl Hanser, Munich 2017.

literature

  • Peter Hühn : Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917). In: same: Eventfulness in British Fiction. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-021365-2 , pp. 133–144 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  • Michael Köhler : The Shadow Line: A Confession. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . dtv, Munich 1986, Vol. 10, p. 8667.
  • Barbara Handke: First command: a psychological reading of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and "The Shadow Line" . Berlin: Galda, 2010 ISBN 978-3-941267-35-0
  • Wieland Schmied : The shadow line: About Joseph Conrad . In: German Poland Institute: Views . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, Vol. 12 (2001), ISSN 0938-3794, pp. 88-101
  • Hanjo Kesting : The shadow line of life - Joseph Conrad or the beginnings of a writer . In: The Secret of the Sirens: Books and Other Adventures . Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2014, pp. 199–223

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Hühn : Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917). In: same: Eventfulness in British Fiction. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-021365-2 , p. 133 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  2. ↑ Lothar Müller : Poseidon puts down the trident. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from June 20, 2017.
  3. ^ Michael Köhler : The Shadow Line: A Confession. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . dtv, Munich 1986, Vol. 10, p. 8667.
  4. ^ Peter Hühn: Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917). In: same: Eventfulness in British Fiction. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-021365-2 , p. 136 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  5. ^ Heinz Piontek : Notes and remarks by the translator. In: Joseph Conrad: shadow line. Novel. German by Heinz Piontek. Insel, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1999, p. 192 f.
  6. ^ Heinz Piontek: Notes and remarks by the translator. In: Joseph Conrad: shadow line. Novel. German by Heinz Piontek. Insel, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1999, pp. 189-19.
  7. ↑ Joseph Conrad: shadow line. Novel. German by Heinz Piontek. Insel, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1999, p. 7 and Heinz Piontek: Notes and comments by the translator. Ibid, p. 192.
  8. ↑ Joseph Conrad: The shadow line at perlentaucher.de