"Ghost-Haunted Transmission in The Shadow-Line"
Résumé
Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, published during World War I, and dedicated to his son Borys and to all the young men who were fighting with him to defend their country, appears as a story of maturation, the adult narrator reminiscing his trying first command as a form of rite of passage initiated by symbolic fathers. Transmission therefore appears at the heart of the novel but, considering the context, cannot but be problematic. Playing with the codes of the supernatural (both the marvellous and the Gothic), the novel explores the shadows that make transmission a ghost-haunted process, shadows which Conrad allows to surface and which he turns into a creative testimony to our fragile human condition.