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In a radical shift from Hans Blumenberg's account of the classical trope, "Shipwreck with Spectator", the existence of the spectator is no longer grounded in their safe detachment from shipwreck, but from their fearless involvement in it. In this article, I will shift focus once again, from those involved, lifesaving spectators of shipwreck to the immediate actors, or rather: the actor-network of sea travel, which includes shipping companies, crews, passengers, and ships. This actor-network, with the sailing crew at its core, has been subsumed into a binding code of behavior in distress ever since the 1852 foundering of the Royal Navy steam frigate HMS Birkenhead at Danger Point, off the Western Cape of Africa. The code's two key imperatives - "women and children first" and "captain goes down with the ship," henceforth known as the Birkenhead drill - were safely embedded in Victorian morals by popular life guides. [...] Based on this shift of attention, I will look at two different articulations of this dilemma, the "Jeddah incident" of July 1880 (a shipwreck that never happened), and the sinking of the Titanic of April 1912 (a shipwreck that has been happening ever since), and unfold the translation of each case in a modern novel: Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" for the former, and Franz Kafka's "Der Verschollene" ("The Man who Disappeared") for the latter. I will pay particular attention to the role of professional ethics as drivers of the narrative in both cases, and I will highlight how the two authors, while using an almost identical plot structure, pursue different strategies of fictionalizing the Birkenhead dilemma.
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