- 1 This is particularly evident in the travel writing tradition of the logbook or diary (see for insta (...)
- 2 In contrast with Kenneth White’s narrower definition, I will be using the term “geopoetics” in the (...)
1Travel narratives are often thought to follow a horizontal spatio-temporal line, as travellers typically provide a chronological account of their linear progression through space.1 However, it is my contention that by the turn of the 19th century, the linearity and horizontality of travel narratives often tends to be disrupted by new kinds of obstacles, especially vertical ones such as chasms and fault lines which bring about various forms of crises in the plot, thus threatening both the character’s and the narrative’s integrity. In the field of geology, the term “fault line” broadly refers to a break in the earth’s surface, or a rift in a geological stratum. In the figurative sense, it moreover implies the idea of a gap or separation between heterogeneous elements, which may be linked to a defect in something’s or someone’s integrity, and may even lead to an encounter or a tension between antagonistic forces. The complex imagery this term conjures up thus makes it particularly adequate to approach and depict certain psychological and literary phenomena, bringing into sharper relief the intricate relationship between space and narrative in works of literature. In this paper, I thus intend to rely on what I call a geoliterary or geopoetic2 approach in order to determine how the spatial concept of “fault line” may help shed light on the way authors like H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad were shifting the lines of travel and adventure writing at the turn of the 19th century, by reshaping some of their key narrative spaces and norms.
- 3 See Viviès, Lignes d'horizon : Récits de voyage de la littérature anglaise, and Youngs, Cambridge C (...)
- 4 See Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 and Daniel Carey, “Truth, Lies and Travel (...)
- 5 My translation. “dispositif attestataire” in the original text (249).
2The two authors’ works would in fact not typically be defined as travel narratives in the strictest sense of the term, that is as “the narrative of an actual journey told by the person or persons who undertook it” (Pettinger and Youngs 4), yet both Conrad and Wells relied heavily on the codes of travel writing in their fiction and explored the relationship of this eminently hybrid genre3 with geographical adventure, shedding light on its ability to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction.4 In Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) for instance, the paratextual introduction by the protagonist’s nephew is very much modelled on travel narratives of the time, presenting the story as a “true,” first-hand account of a strange yet actual journey (Gay 125), using the trope of the “found manuscript” to reinforce the story’s verisimilitude and set up what Jean-Michel Racault defines as the “corroborative apparatus”5 (249) present in many travelogues. Similarly, in Lord Jim Conrad presents Jim’s story as told by the apparently reliable narrator Marlow, a sea captain often inclined to reminisce on his life and spin the yarn after dinner in various corners of the world, in front of an assembly of intent, silent listeners. In his Author’s Note, Conrad moreover insists on the fact that Jim
is not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was “one of us.” (319)
3In both novels, as the protagonists Jim and Prendick explore unknown islands or enclaved spaces, they are confronted with literal “chasms” (Conrad, Lord Jim 169; Wells 56) which represent hurdles in their trajectory, and subsequently give them access to a new, previously unknown world or reality. These disruptions in the journey’s horizontal line may be associated with a shift in genre or at least in narrative rhythm and style, thus leading to a deviation both from typical travel writing and adventure fiction. As the hero is put to the test, the spatial chasms sometimes reveal and even mirror the faults and fault lines in his character and psychology, but also in his narrative’s homogeneity and consistency. Both narratives are indeed often fraught with gaps and contradictions, which some critics have interpreted as symptomatic of the work’s flawed nature in the case of Lord Jim (Jameson 202). However, I would argue that these fault lines and hiatuses in fact evince these works’ transgressive hybridity, and to their utter modernity in an era when realism was still a dominant mode of writing.
4In the first part of Lord Jim, the eponymous character becomes an outcast after deserting his ship in a moment of weakness, as he thought that the steamer he was chief mate of was about to sink and convinced himself that there was no preventing it. As the ship’s path is checked by an unknown submarine obstacle, his own trajectory as a hero is violently derailed, leading him to wander aimlessly from place to place in order to try and escape being recognised. Marlow perceptively remarks on the distance separating Jim from his fellow men after his fateful act is brought to light during his trial, using the metaphor of the chasm to illustrate Jim’s utter solitude, and the unique trajectory of his life: “He had advanced his argument as though life had been a network of paths separated by chasms” (Conrad, Lord Jim 100). Yet in the second part of the novel, Jim is given a second chance to bridge this gap—literally and metaphorically—by adopting the more linear trajectory of a traditional explorer and adventurer when, on Marlow’s recommendation, he is sent to Patusan, an enclaved and remote insular space that appears to be altogether set apart from the rest of the world:
Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the coast overpowered the voice of fame. […] You find the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages. The seventeenth-century traders went there for pepper, because the passion for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch and English adventurers about the time of James the First. (173)
5Interestingly, the romance usually associated with voyages and adventure is immediately counteracted by the triviality of the object of the traders’ “love” and “passion,” highlighting the utilitarian nature of the quest for commodities such as pepper as well as foreshadowing the lack of glamour in Jim’s own adventure. He will in fact attempt to follow in these old adventurers’ footsteps as he is to manage Patusan’s trading station on behalf of Stein, a merchant who appears as the epitome of the classical explorer. He gives Jim a ring that is to act as a talisman or key into this locked yet penetrable enclave which Marlow metaphorically refers to as enclosed by a “wall,” the “door” of which Jim must cross and “shut […] after him” (180; 177): “a jump into the unknown [...]. Neither Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other side when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him over the wall with scant ceremony” (176). We may note again the stark contrast between the adventurous and linear nature of the metaphorical “jump into the unknown” Jim thinks he is taking and the grotesque, almost comical metaphor used to describe the very same action from Marlow’s point of view, in which Jim appears utterly passive and lifeless while his trajectory seems much bumpier.
6Yet the place is not just metaphorically surrounded by a wall with only one aperture, since its geological making literally stems from a breach in the earth’s surface: the enclave is depicted as a “crumbling islet” (173) within an “Archipelago” (167), being bordered by “a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, [which] stand out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall breached by the sea” (185). Moreover, Patusan’s very landscape seems to be built around a pivotal fault line: “There can be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep hills, very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine” (169). In both passages, Patusan’s superlative fragmentation as well as the centrality of this breach in its geological structure are underlined by the iterative use of the lexical field of the split, and mirrored in the sentences’ paratactic structure. To enter this cleaved space, Jim has to go up an estuary, which is in itself a kind of breach or door in the island’s seemingly impenetrable wall: it is indeed the only access to this enclave which is “circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains” (175), while the river is originally described as “closed” which means that Jim must “manage to find a crack to get in” (179)—the geological term is here used both literally and metaphorically.
- 6 I borrow this term from Mikhail Bakhtin, who defines the chronotope as the condensation of time and (...)
7Although the topological “crack” proves rather easy to find, Jim is confronted with several obstacles when attempting to “get in”: he and his boatmen first have to wait for the turn of the tide to paddle upstream, which checks the linearity of their spatial progression by subverting the traditionally unidirectional movement of the river—a chronotope6 that is often used as a symbol of the linear passing of time—, as though time were suspended on this transitory threshold, preventing Jim from proving his worth as a hero through adventurous action. In fact, he repeatedly underlines the uneventfulness of this journey, which appears as the antinomy of adventurous travel: “he had never in his life felt so depressed and tired as in that canoe” (187), the only short-lived “excitement” or “amusement” being provided by alligators or monkeys, to the point that he even “doze[s] off” (187). He is then stopped at the Rajah’s “gate” (187) which initially seems rather easy to cross: “I simply walked in through the gate and—and—here I am” (188). Yet this apparent straightforwardness turns out to be deceiving, as suggested by Jim’s hesitation, the repetition and dashes betraying the various halts and obstacles he omits mentioning. He is in fact imprisoned for three days in the Rajah’s stockade, resulting in another lull in the linear progression of the plot. This suspension in the timeline is symbolized by the presence of a broken clock which the Rajah’s men ask Jim to fix, as though he were the only one capable of starting the forward movement of time (and adventure) again, which is exactly what he does when he suddenly realises the danger he is in and finally decides to take action:
They did actually bring out to him a nickel clock of New England make, and out of sheer unbearable boredom he busied himself in trying to get the alarum to work. It was apparently when thus occupied in his shed that the true perception of his extreme peril dawned upon him. He dropped the thing—he says—“like a hot potato,” and walked out hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would, or indeed could, do. (194)
- 7 Jacques Rivière for instance argues: “l’aventure c’est ce qui advient, c’est-à-dire ce qui s’ajout (...)
8He then finds the “crack” as he sees the “broken stakes of the palisade” (194) and decides to jump over it, which leads to an acceleration of events that seems to start the clock of adventure again as Jim displays a quickness and impulsiveness that are typical of the genre:7
He started off “from under his very nose,” went over “like a bird,” and landed on the other side with a fall that jarred all his bones and seemed to split his head. He picked himself up instantly. He never thought of anything at the time; all he could remember—he said—was a great yell; the first houses of Patusan were before him four hundred yards away; he saw the creek, and as it were mechanically put on more pace. The earth seemed fairly to fly backwards under his feet. (194)
9The accumulation of active verbs, added to the lexicon denoting rapidity (“instantly”; “put on pace”; “fly”) and the comparison with a “bird” offer a stark contrast with the previous slowness of movement and action, leading to a shift in style and rhythm as the clauses and sentences become shorter and livelier.
10Jim thus finally seems to be able to follow the linear and horizontal trajectory of a real hero, which no vertical obstacle may thwart. Yet when he gets to the riverbank, instead of having to swim or paddle across the stream as a typical adventurer would, the tide is so low that he must jump across a muddy creek which is, actually, almost devoid of water. He then gets stuck in this vertical “fault line,” in a rather grotesque or mock-epic scene:
He made efforts, tremendous sobbing gasping efforts, efforts that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to crack the earth asunder to throw it off his limbs—and he felt himself creeping feebly up the bank. (195)
- 8 We may think for instance of the Robinsonade genre, and the rebirth of the Robinson when swimming t (...)
11The epic amplification displayed in the almost godly act of “cracking the earth asunder” with the repetition of the term “effort” and the use of several adverbs denoting strength is immediately counteracted by the various qualifiers that question the hero’s strength and valour, such as “sobbing” or “feebly.” This shift turns said amplification into a rather comical form of exaggeration suggesting the hero’s lack of stamina, which is reinforced by the passive phrasing in the last clause, “he felt himself creeping.” The negative connotation of the verb “creep” brings the hero down to the level of a crawling reptile or insect, while the dash preceding the clause seems to illustrate in the very textual space the gap between the epic mode and its more realistic or mock-heroic counterpart. The fact that he then briefly falls asleep on the bank, much as he dozed off during his dull journey upstream, reinforces the bathetic aspect of this new type of adventure in which the typically fast adventurous jump turns into a slow and painful process of creeping out of a crack. Moreover, as opposed to classical adventurers who had to cross dangerous waters to be symbolically born again following this ritualistic ablution,8 Jim is here “reborn” from a baser, less “pure” element surging from the earth’s depths, mud, suggesting the subsequent degradation of his heroism. Instead of proving the protagonist’s value as a hero, the spatial fault line in Patusan’s landscape thus reveals the new kind of faulty heroism displayed by Conrad’s protagonists, which has an impact on the very structure of the tale as it alternates between moments of stasis or suspension, and brief moments of action.
12Indeed, this passage into what is depicted as an “other world” (241) or “another sort of reality” (176), a passage enacted both by the ambivalent jump and by the transitory state of sleep, leads to an acceleration of the narrative rhythm, and to a shift to the adventure genre as the character penetrates into a world of romance where he may finally become the hero he imagined he would be at the onset of the novel. As Nathalie Martinière notes,
La fracture de l’espace dans la fiction peut donc être considérée comme un reflet de la fracture entre la vie et la littérature, Patusan possédant le même degré de réalité que la fiction. Cette similitude révèle ainsi la valeur stratégique de la notion de seuil qui nous ramène à la problématique de la continuité entre réalité et fiction, matérialisée dans la diégèse par l’opposition entre Patusan et le reste du monde. (“Saut” 84)
- 9 In her seminal work Joseph Conrad and The Modern Temper, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan demonstrates how Ji (...)
13The fault line could therefore be understood as a kind of threshold between reality and fiction, and as a chronotope whose crossing allows to shift generic lines through the constant oscillation between realism and romance, whilst simultaneously shifting temporal lines as we move back and forth from historical to mythical time.9 The passage into the fictional world of Patusan indeed temporarily allows Jim to rise to the stature of a mythical hero:
He appeared like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended upon them from the clouds. (Conrad, Lord Jim 175)
He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old mankind. He was like a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom. (202)
- 10 What Erdinast-Vulcan calls his “identi-fiction”, which she defines as “a literary text or genre on (...)
14Jim is depicted here as nearly god-like, with a stress on his atemporality and on his both literal and symbolical superiority, as he seems to rise vertically above the people surrounding him. This phenomenon is again reflected in the place’s very landscape, as can be seen with Marlow’s depiction of the moon rising between Patusan’s twin hills: “[T]he nearly perfect disc, glowing ruddily, appeared, gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till it floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a yawning grave in gentle triumph” (169). The repeated image of the “chasm” separating the two sides of “one irregularly conical hill split in two” (169) may be understood as a reflection or a mapping out of the split in Jim’s self (Van Ghent 292), as he is torn between his heroic ideal10 and the reality of his fallibility. Marlow highlights this duality earlier in the novel when he notes: “He was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence—another possessor of his soul” (73).
- 11 Stein chooses the place in order to “bury him in some sort,” using it as a “grave for some sin, tra (...)
15We may even go as far as reading the personified moon “escaping from a yawning grave in gentle triumph” as a symbolical representation of Jim’s attempt at rebirth and reunification of his identity in Patusan. Dorothy Van Ghent in fact analyses Jim’s voyage into Patusan as a rewriting of mythical heroes’ “journey underground” to Hades, eventually leading up to a form of resurrection (294). The qualifier “nearly perfect,” however, serves as a reminder of Jim’s inability to become a perfect romance hero and foreshadows the ambivalence of his final triumph. He will indeed fail to escape from the “grave” which Patusan symbolises11 but achieve a certain tragic victory by sacrificing himself in an attempt to uphold his honour, so that the reader is eventually left in this in-between state of oscillation and hesitation as the narrative closes on a series of question marks: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder? […] Was I so very wrong after all? […] Who knows?” (318). The end of the storyline thus remains as suspended and shifting as Stein’s hand waving “sadly at his butterflies” (318), performatively bringing the novel to an—albeit inconclusive—close.
16In H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau the island where the protagonist, Prendick, is cast away is described as “volcanic in origin” (81), and is similarly built around a sort of “chasm”, “a narrow ravine between two tumbled and knotty masses of blackish scoriae” (56) or “a narrow passage between high walls of lava, a crack in its knotted flow” (57). We may note again the repeated use of the geological lexicon to refer to this fault line, leading into the island’s volcanic depths which appear as various caves: as in Lord Jim, the passage is referred to as a “crack” in a “wall” leading into another world, which will turn out to be peopled with strange creatures. Even before reaching it, Prendick has to cross various thresholds, including a “ridge” that leads him down to a river which checks his linear trajectory as he suspends his course by its side: “I hesitated, and sat down in the edge of the shade” (39). Just like Jim, he then falls into a transitory state “midway between dozing and waking” (39), which brings about a shift in genre when he wakes up: he first comes face to face with a strange creature, but still remains inactive (“staring one another out of countenance, we remained for perhaps the space of a minute. Long after he had disappeared, I remained sitting up staring in the direction of his retreat” (39)), then another encounter prompts him to “jump to his feet,” although his trajectory is still not quite linear as he starts walking and then “turns about” in the opposite direction when hearing a cry (39). This is when he finally decides to move in a more straightforward line and cross the river, leading to a shift towards a more adventurous genre:
I began to realize the hardihood of my expedition among these unknown people. The thicket about me became altered to my imagination. Every shadow became something more than a shadow, became an ambush, every rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed watching me. (41)
- 12 Tzvetan Todorov identifies this hesitation as a defining feature of the fantastic, when a character (...)
- 13 See Linda Dryden for a thorough analysis of this literary friendship (4) and Nicolas Delbanco who d (...)
17Crossing the perpendicular lines of the ridge and river hence triggers a consistent narrative oscillation between adventurous yet realistic travel narrative, encapsulated by the terms “hardihood” and “expedition,” and the suggestion of the marvelous (“altered to my imagination”; “invisible things”), leading the protagonist and the reader to experience a fantastic hesitation between the rational, realistic explanation and its supernatural counterpart:12 “I half-persuaded myself that my pursuer had abandoned the chase, or was a mere creation of my disordered imagination. [...] I thought my nerves were unstrung and that my imagination was tricking me [...]” (45). The hesitation is clearly expressed in the first sentence through the exclusive coordinator “or,” and will only be solved when Moreau finally explains his experiments to Prendick, although the question of Prendick’s potential madness will remain forever open. In the last chapter, he in fact explains that even though he has come back to England, he still lives in terror of the Beast Folk, and writes of a “cloud” or “shadow” that often comes “over his mind,” “obscur[ing]” his reason so that he oscillates between periods of sanity and “delusion” during which he has to confine himself to the edges of society (130-131). This constant fantastic, psychological and generic oscillation illustrates the text’s eminently liminal position as the author seems to revel in crossing and shifting generic lines, moving from travel narrative to romance all the way to the fantastic and even prefiguring science fiction. Conrad, who developed a friendship with Wells as they started a literary correspondence and found they lived in the same area in Kent,13 indeed praised Wells’s works for this liminality and called him “Realist of the Fantastic, whether you like it or not” (quoted in Kleiner 161), while Wells in turn commended Conrad’s ability to combine realism and romance in An Outcast ofthe Islands: “Surely this is real romance—the romance that is real!” (quoted in Parrinder et Philmus 92). Simon James moreover argues that Wells’s “scientific romances,” which The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to, similarly combined romance and realism, though a more scientific form of realism: “Wells’s romances are still made to engage with the real material conditions of existence by their adherence to not a naturalist, but a scientific realism, hence, ‘scientific romances’” (12).
18Much as Jim’s in Conrad’s novel, Prendick’s courage is indeed put to the test when crossing this rift and accessing the island’s telluric depths, as the first-person narrator underlines:
I hesitated—had half a mind to bolt the way I had come—and then, determined to go through with the adventure, gripped my nailed stick about the middle, and crawled into the little evil-smelling lean-to after my conductor. It was a semicircular space, shaped like the half of a beehive […]. (Wells, Island of Doctor Moreau 57)
- 14 Note again the shift in posture, which as in Jim’s act of “creeping” up the riverbank, reduces Pren (...)
19The use of the dash again reflects in the textual space and syntax this oscillation of a character torn between heroism and cowardice at the threshold of a new kind of adventure, his eventual jumping (or rather crawling)14 into the unknown signaling a potential shift to the romance mode. This breach in the earth’s surface is in fact the door into the Beast Folk’s realm, the other half of the “beehive,” a strange liminal space. As in Lord Jim, crossing the line of the chasm is associated with some form of sleep and the passage into another world, as Prendick writes: “I could have fancied I was in a dream” (Wells, Island of Doctor Moreau 59) and “I could have imagined I was already dead and in another world” (58-59). Such liminal spaces, according to anthropologist Victor Turner, are in-between spaces often associated with “darkness” or “wilderness” (95), leading to rites of passage wherein individuals may be put to the test and prove their worth, thus redefining their identity (Eliade 12). This phenomenon is especially pregnant in travel and adventure narratives, which consistently rely on patterns of initiation or Bildung often linked to the passage through a defamiliarising space, allowing protagonists to round off their identity and complete their evolution into adventure heroes (Letourneux 40). Yet like Jim again, when stepping into fault-line the “hero” is led to behave in a somehow grotesque way as he witnesses and participates in a mad kind of ritual with the beast folk:
A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing law. Superficially the contagion of these brute men was upon me, but deep down within me laughter and disgust struggled together. (58)
- 15 See the “cloud” or “shadow” that comes over his mind intermittently when he goes back to England, a (...)
20Instead of resulting in a unification of the hero’s identity, the passage through the liminal space of the fault-line reveals in fact the essential split within Prendick’s personality, as he struggles between contagion and rejection, madness and rationality. The use of the medical metaphor with the term “contagion,” which is echoed later when he writes “I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions” (130), highlights the malleability and the shiftiness of human nature which, when entering the fault-line, is no longer protected by the stronghold or vaccine of “civilization” and its supposed rationality, and seems to have been fundamentally altered by the contact with the beast folk, revealing something essentially primitive within. This may explain Prendick’s inability to redefine his identity through the adventure, and the eventual split in his self after his sojourn on the island, as he oscillates between episodes of sanity and madness or at least darkness.15 Prendick indeed concludes on the link between animality, disease and mental instability when he remarks: “I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone like a sheep stricken with the gid” (131). The term “gid” refers to “a fatal disease of sheep and goats, characterized by unsteady gait and loss of balance” (Notes to Island of Doctor Moreau, 139), suggesting a fundamental rupture in one’s physical and mental balance as a result of this passage through the fault-line and prolonged contact with the Beast Folk. This chasm within his identity had already been explicitly pointed out by Prendick earlier on in the narrative, wherein he used the imagery of tearing and splitting to refer to his state of mind:
I fell indeed into the morbid state, deep and enduring, alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. […] A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I […] [was] torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels. (96)
21This instability of the protagonist’s identity is reflected by the island’s very landscape and geology, which being volcanic in nature is sometimes shaken by tremor and looks infernal rather than Edenic: “Now and then a faint quiver of earthquake would be sensible, and sometimes the ascent of the spire of smoke would be rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam” (81). As Bertrand Westphal notes in his introduction to Geocriticism:
Comme le territoire, saisi dans un mouvement qui le fait, le défait et le refait sans trêve, l’identité est plurielle, archipélagique. […] Quant au territoire perçu sous un angle multifocal, il se met à osciller. C’est ainsi qu’il laisse transparaître toute la lymphe identitaire qu’il recèle. (Westphal, Géocritique 211)
22The shifting geology of the place thus seems to echo the character’s very modern internal oscillation, torn as he is between different worlds and plural identities. I use the term “modern” here to refer to the new outlook or “temper” brought about by the late-19th century ethical and aesthetic crises, notably following the “death of God” heralded by Nietzsche in his Gai savoir. This resulted in what Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan describes as “the collapse of the mythical anthropomorphic (i.e. Ptolemaic) view of the universe, and its succession by the Copernican vision of a vast indifferent and amoral cosmos” (2), leading some to experience an identity crisis or split between the pre-modern/Ptolemaic outlook and the modern/Copernican one (Erdinast-Vulcan 5), as is clearly evidenced in Prendick as well as in Jim, and reflected in similar ways in Wells’s and Conrad’s symbolical use of geology and landscape.
23Indeed, when Prendick goes to live in the fissure with the beast folk and gets more and more familiar with their ways, the island’s eerie landscape in the moonlight is described in terms that are very similar to those used for Patusan: “The moon was just riding up on the edge of the ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island” (Wells, Island of Doctor Moreau 119, emphasis mine). This depiction of a personified moon with a split face seems to reflect the character’s duality in a way that is oddly reminiscent of Marlow’s description when he takes up the moonlight imagery later on in Lord Jim:
For a moment it looked as though the smooth disc, falling from its place in the sky upon the earth, had rolled to the bottom of that precipice; its ascending movement was like a leisurely rebound […]; the bare contorted limb of some tree, growing on the slope, made a black crack right across its face. (Conrad, Lord Jim 246, emphasis mine)
24Here Marlow goes a little further in the way he plays with the symbolism of landscape, going from simile to metaphor, which endows the scene with an almost surrealist feel. The “black crack” across the moon’s “face” mirrors—or may even be the negative image of—Jim’s “white line on the forehead” (262), and the fall of the moon at the bottom of the ravine evidently foreshadows Jim’s eventual downfall, which Marlow seems to have sensed by that point: the fall into the depth of the ravine can only lead to the rise of an eminently shattered self.
25It seems to be Marlow’s difficulty to grasp the crack at the core of the story that leads him to resort to such symbolism and “pathetic fallacy,” as he struggles to define Jim’s fleeting essence which is as slippery and paradoxical as Patusan’s:
This was, indeed, one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under its obscure surface; and I felt that when to-morrow I had left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion. I have that feeling about me now; perhaps it is that feeling which had incited me to tell you the story, to try to hand over to you, as it were, its very existence, its reality—the truth disclosed in a moment of illusion. (246-47)
26The final paradox highlights the liminal, oscillatory nature of Patusan, torn as it is between reality and fiction, and between chronological and mythical time. When Marlow eventually sails home and leaves Jim on the coast of Patusan, the latter similarly seems to slip out of existence, remaining an indecipherable mystery:
For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world…And, suddenly, I lost him… (257)
27The sand sinking under him makes it look as though Jim were slowly being engulfed into the earth’s depths, as through an invisible fault-line in its surface, merging Jim with the surrounding landscape until he is only an invisible “speck” or grain of sand. This may explain why the tale, which Marlow acknowledges was based only on “fragmentary” information that he “piece[ed] together” in the manner of an incomplete puzzle or mosaic to form what he calls an “intelligible picture” (262), ends on multiple question marks and sees its elusive centre slip through the cracks: “And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic” (318). The text’s entire structure revolves around this chasm or fault line, which some critics have interpreted as a flaw in its structure (Jameson 202), as its two very distinct parts pit two realms (the Patna and Patusan) and two genres or modes (realism and romance) against each other: however, I would argue with Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan that
both these targets of critical disapproval—the generic shift and the narrative discontinuity—reflect the basic dynamism of the novel. These two “aesthetic” ruptures should be viewed in a Bakhtinian light, as the projections of the protagonist’s frame of mind, the fault lines within his consciousness. (182)
28It is my contention that these “ruptures” or fault lines should also be understood as a way for Conrad to spatialise his dynamic oscillation between the romance and realist modes both textually and literally, by associating them with two opposite textual and topological spaces that are both separate and interconnected.
29Jean-Paul Engélibert similarly shows that The Island of Doctor Moreau revolves around what he calls a “secret centre” symbolised by the island’s fissure, and which Prendick can only access by following a rather labyrinthine path across the island: “Ce parcours montre en fait une structure en abyme de l’île dont la figuration la plus achevée serait ‘l’île dans l’île.’ Toute île est mystérieuse et recèle un centre secret où son altérité se redouble” (“Problèmes de l’insularité” 26). Yet although he manages to enter this secret centre, the key to the mystery remains elsewhere, in what Moreau describes in spatial terms as his “Bluebeard’s chamber” (Wells, Island of Doctor Moreau 36), which means that the exploration of the island’s chasm only results in further blurring the truth as Prendick now believes that the beast folk are men turned into beasts. Yet the real mystery eventually seems to lie in the gaps left throughout the text which leave the reader wondering, notably through the use of narrative ellipses:
In this manner began the longest part of my sojourn upon this Island of Doctor Moreau. But from that night until the end came there was but one thing happened to tell, save a series of innumerable small unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these half-humanized brutes. (121)
30The detailed and exhaustive “chronicle” or travelogue, typical of realistic travel writing, is here replaced by a text that disposes of superfluous details, but also potentially becomes more incomplete and arbitrary. Some ellipses are less deliberate, as they result from Prendick’s gaps and losses of consciousness which makes him appear as a rather unreliable narrator: “and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of [the ship’s] side, until I found myself in a little cabin aft” (9) or “That is all I can tell definitely. I saw the Leopard Man strike Moreau, and then everything spun about me until I was running headlong” (91). Thus when Moreau explains how he struggled to recreate human creatures in all their complexity, he may also be metatextually commenting on the author’s difficulty in offering a faithful and univocal representation of reality which cannot, contrary to what realists and naturalists believed, be fully grasped as there will always remain “unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps” (78).
31The exploration of these spatio-temporal gaps, these flawed and split characters as well as these narrative and generic fault lines lead to the shifting of a number of literary lines, and to the creation of highly innovative texts which question the realist ideals of linearity and exhaustivity, and propose instead a breach with canonical forms by revelling in incompleteness, gaps, faults and unevenness. In his seminal work on geocriticism, Bertrand Westphal very aptly sums up the intricate link between spatio-temporal discontinuity and literary transgression:
La transgression intervient dès lors que se dessine une alternative à la ligne droite du temps, aux figures trop géométriques de l’espace policé. Elle est dans le sidestep qui laisse percevoir les incalculables déclinaisons de l’espace-temps. Le code fait de l’espace-temps un bloc unique et voué à le demeurer. Or la transgression impose l’hétérogène, donc la polychronie (la conjugaison de temporalités différentes) et la polytopie (la composition de spatialités différentes). (73)
32The transgressive nature of these texts could be explained by the dynamism of the transitory period in which the two novelists wrote, as the globe became progressively mapped out, which led authors to take a “sidestep” and explore tangential routes for travel and adventure writing: “[T]he glance of the modern traveller contemplating the much-surveyed earth beholds in fact a world in a state of transition” (Conrad, “Travel” 130). This was also a time of intellectual upheaval and change which prompted all kinds of innovations, as Wells himself noted:
We live also in a period of adventurous and insurgent thought, in an intellectual spring unprecedented in the world’s history. [...] And it is inevitable that the novel, just in the measure of its sincerity and ability, should reflect and cooperate in the atmosphere and uncertainties and changing variety of this seething and creative time. (Wells, “Contemporary novel” 147)
33The shifting “variety” of this time seems to have led to the creation of eminently “adventurous” texts, which consistently crossed and explored generic borderlines, questioning the linearity of time as well as the continuity of space to create what we could call a new geopoetics of the fault line. As Linda Dryden notes, both authors were indeed part of the same fin de siècle literary scene and were both “foundational” in creating “new forms of fiction” (5), or what Ford Madox Ford and Conrad called a “new form,” which she argues anticipated modernism. I would rather contend that these authors developed a unique and innovative geopoetics that was as shifting and indeterminate as the period they wrote in, straddling the fault line between contrasting epochs and literary trends. This is evident in a passage from Ford’s Personal Remembrance in which he reminisces on his collaboration with Conrad, using a spatial metaphor to describe the way they attempted to move away from the “straight,” and find tangential lines for the novel: “It became very early evident to us that what was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straight forward” (136). To this novel that goes “straight forward,” Conrad opposes a more shifting narrative line, that follows the meanderings of human thought and perspective: “That, I suspect, has been the difficulty the critics felt in classifying it as romantic or realistic. Whereas, as a matter of fact, it is fluid, depending on grouping (sequence) which shifts, and on the changing lights giving varied effects of perspective” (Conrad, Collected Letters 8: 131, emphasis mine).
34If Wells’s novel does reflect the “changing variety of this seething and creative time,” notably through gaps in the narrative as well as the digressive and shifting quality of Prendick’s storyline—as he himself metatextually points out: “my inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of my story” (85)— Conrad perhaps took this derailing of the straight narrative line a step further. He put the chasm tearing Jim’s identity, and Marlow’s attempt at piercing it, at the core of the narrative, so that the meaning of the text no longer seems to lie in its “secret centre” but rather in the multilinear interpretative itineraries it offers, following the shifting line of Marlow’s hermeneutic quest:
Le narrateur tourne autour du sens, tentant de pénétrer le secret des choses par recoupement et superpositions. Il crée le texte autour d’un vide : puisque les profondeurs diégétiques n’ont rien à révéler, il faut bien que ce soit la narration elle-même qui comble le vide en créant le sentiment de profondeur, comme une illusion d’optique, un leurre visuel qui se révèle plus intéressant à observer que ce qu’il cache. (Martinière, Espace 349)
35The illusion of depth can be attained through the vertical superimposition of various temporal and narrative strata, as well as by letting the “centre,” that is, the truth, float up to the surface, in the course of these fluid explorations:
I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. (166)
36The narrator of Heart of Darkness indeed reflexively comments on Marlow’s narrative strategy, suggesting that he finds the meaning of stories not inside the narrative shell but outside, on the hazy surface of its words:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel; but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty haloes that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (48)
37The point is thus no longer to uncover the depths below the words, but rather to let truth slip out through the cracks, perhaps by allowing the words’ poetic substance to rise to the surface, as Conrad suggests in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus:
And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. (Prefaces 51)
38The form of the novel, and its shifting trajectory through the fault-line in search for an elusive centre, may therefore embody the very centre it searches for, which is no longer to be found in the depths of discourse but rather on the misty surface of the words shaping it, rising from its gaps and cracks as the moon rises from the rift in both novels, to shed an (albeit hazy and evanescent) light on the two authors’ innovative geopoetics of the fault line.
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