You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Joseph Conrad: le premier commandement, a recent book by André Green, is a testament. But it is a very particular testament. The hurried reader will be disappointed not to find anything of the originality of an oeuvre whose immensity everyone is aware of, nor anything of the author's life, at least directly, nor anything of the wise man's last words of advice to the psychoanalytic cause for which he has fought so ardently, as is well known. In this testament, he makes us a gift of another work and, more particularly, of a short novel which, as I will show, is also a testament. This story is The Shadow-Line, probably the last of Conrad's masterpieces, written in 1915, 30 years after the events he relates concerning his first command in the English Merchant Navy. So it is the testament, then, of another writer who was a contemporary of the birth of psychoanalysis, but who certainly remained rather distant towards it and even hostile towards those who wanted to lead him to it. It is the testament of another great creator, but also of a sailor, a father, and, last but not least, of an ordinary man who was often reproached because his personal conduct fell far short of the high moral values he espoused in his work. The reader should not hope to find in André Green's book a work of applied psychoanalysis. It will be more pertinent to listen to André Green through the words of Conrad, those that he lends to his narrator. Let's listen to André Green, through the words of the hero/narrator of The Shadow-Line, the captain of the beautiful sailing ship, the Otago, on hearing a voice just as he is taking possession of the ship: “You, too!” it seemed to say, “You, too, shall taste of that peace and that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self—obscure as we were, and as supreme in the face of all the winds and all the seas, in an immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives” (Green, 2008, p. 43).1 We understand that this voi