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325 Michela Vanon Alliata the NAKED MAN FOM the SEA Michela Vanon Alliata THE NAKED MAN FOM THE SEA: IDENTITY AND SEPARATION IN “THE SECRET SHARER” “The Secret Sharer”, Conrad’s most famous and explicit exercise in the trope of the double – the first proposed title “The Other Self” leaves no room for doubting that this is a story of a double 1 – opens with the description of a moment of crisis in a young seaman’s life as he passes from the shared life of a crew to the isolation and responsibility of authority. From the very beginning, this sea narrative published in 1912 in the volume Twixt Land and Sea along with “Freya of the Seven Isles” and “A Smile of Fortune” 2, moves in unex- pected directions, away from the formulaic model of romance and adventure to become an introspective journey into the self. In its suspended temporality, metaphors, eerie and dream- like quality, the emphasis on the psychological inherent in the double which is intimately associated with the idea of fate 3 1 Letter to J.B. Pinker, 6 January 1910. In The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davier, vol. 4, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1990, p. 317. 2 These three long stories all set in south East Asia and all focusing on a young captain under stress, were written for magazines from 1909 to 1911. See J. Conrad, Twixt Land and Sea, Kent Edition, Garden City, Doubleday, 1926. The first of these, “The Secret Sharer”, was written in less than two weeks. In a letter to John Galsworthy, Conrad wrote: “I have just finished the short story – 12000 words in 10 days”. See The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, cit., p. 296. 3 “The Romantic obsession with the arbitrary and the irrational found its most characteristic symbolization in the idea of Fate. No concept is more central to the theme of the double. Protagonists, confronted with an embod- iment of the dark forces from their own nature, attribute their possession to the inscrutable workings of a destiny which they are powerless to evade. The notion of fate attaches itself to the Calvinist theology of predestination, which carries with it, the attendant question of the status of free will and the possibility of repentance and redemption”. In J. Herdmann, The Double 325 annali di ca' foscari, xliv, 1-2, 2005 and raises issues of identity, is so pronounced as to overshad- ow other important aspects, such as the ethical issues of au- thority and power, mutinous social chaos and legality 4. Written from the depths of Conrad’s own experience – his assuming the captaincy of the Otago, his one and only com- mand as he sailed from Bangkok to Singapore early in 1888) 5 – this tale of eastern seas transcends its autobiographical refer- ence to dramatize a psychic conflict, a problematic, uncertain and divided subjectivity. Briefly, “The Secret Sharer”, marks an emotionally-charged phase: the development and resolution of the separation-individuation process which accompanies the emergence of the sense of self. The protagonist of this perfectly balanced maritime story – indeed one could call it a kammerspiel as most of the narrative is contained inside the narrator’s cabin – is an unnamed cap- tain on his maiden voyage 6. There is no introductory frame and from the very begin- ning, through the limited point of view, the reader is invited to in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990, p. 12. In his excellent study Herdman argues that “the ideas which are articulated by means of the double are essentially moral and religious, and the psycholog- ical perspective cannot not be separated from its content” (p. X). 4 In this connection, it is also noteworthy that much of the story occurs at night, the time for dreams, and the domain of the unconscious. 5 Though Conrad in The Author’s Note disowned “the autobiographical form” of both “The Secret Sharer” and “The Shadow Line” – “the above two stories are not the record of personal experience. Their quality, such as it is, depends on something larger if less precise: on the character, vision and sentiment of the first twenty independent years of my life” – both stories were steeped in the memory of some lived event. See J. Conrad, Author’s Notes, a cura di Marialuisa Bignami, Bari, Adiatica, 1988, p. 140. After resigning from the Vidar, “and while still under the sway of this recoil from inaction, Conrad was unexpectedly offered the command of a sailing vessel, the Otago, which ushered in a new and important chapter in his maritime career. Now a captain for the first time, the recent ‘deserter’ from the Vidar was psychologically in somewhat the same position as was M. George, a recent ‘deserter” from Poland, who freshly arrived in Mar- seilles, stood upon the threshold of a new career – a French sailor”: B.C. Meyer, Joseph Conrad. A Psychoanalytic Biography, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 70. 6 After acknowledging the main source of “The Secret Sharer”, Conrad wrote: “In the specially maritime part of my writings this bit of presentation may take its place as one of my two Calm-pieces. For, if there is to be any classification by subjects, I have done two Storm-pieces in ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ and in ‘Typhoon’; and two Calm-pieces: this one and ‘The Shadow Line’, a book which belongs to a later period”. In Author’s Notes, cit., p. 140. 326 identity and separation in “the secret sharer” identify himself with the young captain who tells and com- ments his own story in the first person. Uneasy in his office, sensing for the first time the peril of leaving the land for the solitary life on board a ship, in his perplexity and hesitancy in giving orders to his crew, as if he were not entitled to do so, the captain seems closer to a modern anti-hero than to a romance character projected to- wards the realm of action and adventure. Appointed to the command “only a fortnight before” and “the youngest man on board” 7, he wanders alone the deck of his ship anchored in the Gulf of Siam waiting for the wind which will allow him to set sail. He is in his sleeping suit and “barefooted” (TSS, 21), like a common passenger and not as a commander. The shipboard setting emphasizes the isolation of the captain and the crew, as does the description of the gulf, which opens the story. Divided between fear and expectation, anxiety and excite- ment on how he will face “the untempted life” of the sea (TSS, 21), the captain, “at the threshold of a long passage”(TSS, 18), finds himself in a state of limited individuation, in a condition of identitary indeterminacy, as if he had neither emancipated himself from the maternal object, symbolised by the security of the port, nor yet differentiated himself as a separate, unique individual 8. Feeling as he does “untried as yet by a position of the fullest responsibility” and “willing to take the adequacy of the others for granted” (TSS, 19), he is not only in a state of suspended awaiting, but falls prey to a paralysing sense of insecurity de- termined by his preoccupation to measure his fitness “for a long and arduous enterprise”(TSS, 18). The attendant feeling of alienation, an ontological premise for the materialization of the double, is accompanied by a sense of estrangement not only from the rest of the crew but also from himself. 7 J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, with a new intro- duction by Joyce Carol Oates, New York, Signet Classic, 1997, p. 19. Hence- forward all references to the text will be given in parenthesis in the abbre- viated form TSS. 8 See A. Aparo, “Il doppio. Dal persecutore al compagno segreto”, in E. Funari, (a cura di), Il doppio tra patologia e necessità, Milano, Cortina, 1986, p. 90. 327 annali di ca' foscari, xliv, 1-2, 2005 All these people had been together for eighteen months or so, and my position was that of the only stranger on board. I mention this because it has some bearing on what is to follow. But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself (TSS, 19). The word alienation, from the Latin alius, another, and the derivative forms alienatus “belonging to another country” and alienus, “estranged”, bears the notion of being or feeling a stranger, an outsider. Significantly, this key concept, a thematic word in the text, as well as secrecy, is defined as a feeling of inadequacy to the stance that in those very years Freud defined “Ego Ideal” 9: But I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself se- cretly (TSS, 19); Transgressing naval etiquette and to the astonishment of his crew, the captain has made the odd decision to take the night watch himself in order to get acquainted with his ship in his new role of captain 10. […] My strangeness, which had made me sleepless, had prompted that unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more” […] (TSS, 21). When he sees that the rope side ladder, a virtual medium between the ship and the land, “had not been hauled in” since he has “peremptorily dismissed [his] officers from duty” (TSS, 22), he proceeds to get it in himself.
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