The Shell Collector

The spiraling shape of the cone shell is a recurring and complex motif, often representing the strange path of the shell collector’s life. It is no wonder that the shell collector dwells so frequently on this image, as he spends his days using his hands to find this familiar shape. The cone spiral frequently appears as a metaphor in moments when the events of his life seem to be out of his hands, representing the latter half of the theme of Fate Versus Happenstance. The shell collector seems somewhat averse to the concept of fate. Maybe, he thinks, the disruptions of his solitude “grew outward from [] himself, the way a shell grows, spiraling upward from the inside, whorling around its inhabitant, all the while being worn down by the weathers of the sea” (12). Rather than attributing the unexpected events of his life to fate, he sees them represented by an image of organic growth influenced by external events.

Elsewhere, however, the shell evokes not chance but destiny. This is what the mwadhini sees in the snail, arguing that the snail’s presence on the beach and Nancy’s unexpected cure are “signs” of Allah’s will. A sense of divine purpose is also part of what strikes the collector the first time he encounters a cowry shell: He asks, “Who made this?” (13), implying that something so perfect must have an element of design. Although the collector grows up to become a scientist, his experience of the shells remains spiritually inflected: “Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that” (14). He appreciates the shells’ mystery—the sense that they reflect a profound reality beyond his grasp—even as he insists on control in his personal life.

Shell imagery also develops the collector’s Isolation From Humanity. The mwadhini likens the collector’s blindness to a shell that cuts him off from the outside world, but it would be more accurate to say that the collector uses his blindness to cut himself off. His isolation is self-imposed, and it is only during his near-death experience that he recognizes his loneliness and deprivation: “He was lost in every way: in this lagoon, in the shell of his private darkness, in the depths and convolutions of the venom already crippling his nervous system” (35). Shell imagery recurs just before the collector (partially) sloughs off his isolation, emerging from the snail’s venom to allow Seema into his life.