Monuments of Words and Wood in Craft Ashore and Crafts at Sea, in Bronze and Stone

Chapter 7 ’s sightings, a departure from Conrad’s literary influence, are memorial in nature—material lieux de memoire which endure, locating Conrad and his oeuvre, not in his time and place in the history of the canon, as do literary sightings of him, but in the wider living culture of communities. In “Between Memory and History: (The) Problematics of Sites” (Fr. Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux) (1998) which enriches the last chapter of Intimations of Conrad Pierre Nora observes that there is no spontaneous memory, that we deliberately create “archives.” They are “fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.” These “archives,” whatever they may be—rituals, celebrations, museums—are a “defense” of a “privileged memory that has retreated to jealously protected enclaves”; for without performative and material commemoration, history would “sweep away” the collective memory: “We buttress our identities upon such bastions, but if what they defended were not threatened, there would be no need to build them” (Nora 9). No lieu de mémoire can be more poignant than funerals and cemeteries, the processions, headstones, and monuments like “boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity.” A cemetery is a “moment torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death,” like a “shell on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (10). By the very act of “seeing,” observing, sensing, a lieu de mémoire an author’s memories are incorporated in our own present identities. “Multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 3), are not static, fixed in time and competitive with new memory, but incorporative. There are no “winners and losers”—blockage of the new by the old, erasure of the old by the new. Rather, we as Conrad’s readers experience an “intercultural” incorporation of our own, another’s past and present woven into the fabric of our individual present lives and collective folk memory. “Borders of memory are jagged”, Rothberg writes; “borrowing(s) and adaptation(s) from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant” (3). As Conrad observed, however, “[I]t is very difficult to display a dogged devotion to a mere spirit, however great [. . .]. [O]rdinary men require something much more material, effective, definite, and symbolic on which to concentrate their love and devotion” (Notes on Life and Letters 191). Often some—let us call it simply a Thing—an artifact, anthem, monument, building, town square, ritual, book or poem—concrete or abstract—embodies a community’s cultural heritage. Historian Pierre Nora (1931–) has called this thing, this entity, whatever it may be, a “lieu de mémoire” or “locus memoriae,” a place of memory which, for better or worse, evokes as in a mirror a shared past (Nora, xvii). Having the power of a symbol, as a reification of the community’s collective soul, the lieu de mémoire evokes strong bonds of fellow feeling—all the more poignantly for a people, folk. Such is the nature of the lieu de mémoire, a physical symbol encoding and evoking its referent. It is a realm of memory—not the least, Conrad’s oeuvre, which incorporates imaginings of other places and times. Often some Thing—an artifact, anthem, site, monument, building, town square, ritual, book or poem—has the power of a symbol, concrete or abstract, embodying a community’s historical heritage. Memory, then, is plastic, malleable, communicable to “The Generation of Postmemory,” the phenomenon’s name gracing the title of Marianne Hirsch’s Holocaust study. Images, objects—a photograph, a sketch, a reminiscence, as “sites of memory,” mark another generation so that its artists and writers may “reanimate” the past (Hirsch 36, 162, 208, 229). Memory thus has potential as “the source of [. . .] powerful creativity,” the “ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones” (Rothberg 5). It is in the spirit of these incorporative and creative elements of memory that this chapter documents lieux de mémoire of Conrad. We, the postmemory generations, incorporate in our own cultural identities Conrad’s life experience of his time through the lieu de mémoire of our own. Rodin-contemporary sculptor Jacob Epstein’s bronze bust of Conrad; a metal plaque at Singapore’s Fullerton Hotel; a sculpted stone monument at Gdynia’s waterfront; a three-masted square-rigged former training ship named Joseph Conrad; also a pub at Lowestoft in Suffolk named The Joseph Conrad, a renowned school of fine cabinetry founded by Dimitrievich Krenov was inspired by Conrad; and a boat of the likely design of Conrad’s arguably fictional Tremolino, was built by Lance Lee, shipwright of traditional wooden vessels for the enhancement at sea of life skills for youth.