Joseph Conrad's Nostromo
Dios mio, this novel's a masterpiece...
For a long time, because the space freighter in the 1979 movie Alien is called the Nostromo and I knew that it was an allusion to Conrad, I’d assumed the name in the author’s text indicated a ship, and not a man. Rookie mistake!
Conrad began work on Nostromo in 1902, and it was apparently a huge struggle, with illness and financial pressures getting in the way. One can sense in the structure of this huge novel the origins of the narrative in a short story that grew into a political epic of Latin America at the turn of the century with a massive cast of soldiers, adventurers, politicians, and young women who hang around; all this from the seed of an old Italian innkeeper in a South American country — a veteran of the Italian unification struggles (as seen in the letter on The Gadfly) — and his two fetching daughters who claim the attention of another veteran, a boatswain called Nostromo.
From the perspective of reading through the Kent Edition of Conrad’s oeuvre for this mini-series of letters, the reasoning behind the ordering of the volumes starts to take shape. The first nine books of lesser material have been building up to Nostromo, almost like a pedestal.
A key clue is a reference in Conrad’s Author’s Note to our old friend Dominic of the Tremolino, of the author’s reminiscences and The Arrow of Gold.
Those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what I mean when I say that Dominic, the padrone of the Tremolino might under given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly — if scornfully. He and I were engaged together in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice.
Perhaps now is the time to introduce a famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s correspondence, from 1923:
I'd rather have written Conrad's "Nostromo" than any other novel. First because I think it is the greatest novel since "Vanity Fair" (possibly excluding "Madame Bovary") but chiefly because "Nostromo," the man intrigues me so much.
Truly this badass figure has impacted the literary imagination. “He is one of the most important types in our civilization. In particular that always made a haunting and irresistible appeal to me.”
Fitzgerald goes on to locate this Nostromo-figure continuously through the early literature of the imperialist epoch. “Kipling realized that this figure with his almost autocratic disdain of weakness, is one of the most powerful props of the capitalistic system, and under various names he occurs in many of Kipling's stories of Indian life — but always as a sort of glorified servant.”
Both Fitzgerald and Conrad hit on the ultimate isolation of the fighter as a pawn of the rich and powerful.
Nostromo has a key part to play in this drama, which takes place in the fictional nation of Costaguana. Like so many colonies after the Napoleonic wars, Costaguana has been subject to many military coups and general instability. During the latest one of these episodes, in which a general from the peasantry is leading the masses against the liberal government based on the landed gentry, a certain Charles Gould wants to sneak the treasure from his San Tomé silver mine out of the country before the government coming into power can nationalize it.
Nostromo’s dangerous task is to load the silver onto a lighter barge and slip out of the port of Sulaco in the middle of the night. The thing about Sulaco is that it’s a prosperous coastal town far away from the capital of Santa Marta and separated by a mountain range — there is an economic and territorial basis to separate from the greater country. This situation is analogous to Panama’s separation from Colombia in 1903.
The narrative is long, convoluted, delivered by an anonymous narrator as well as letters and extended monologues. And after hundreds of rip-roaring pages of fighting, drama, romance, espionage, and escape: the whole thing ends with a long, meditative passage about the construction of a lighthouse.
In a word — masterpiece.
Conrad let loose the full powers of his prose style for the opening chapters, describing the natural beauty of Costaguana before zooming into the political strife.
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank always strives for, but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The sun — as the sailors say — is eating it up. Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away from the main body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes like a sinister pirate-ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon, engaging the sea.
These phrases not only put the activity into the sun and clouds and mountain peaks, but open up more and more hypothetical worlds, those of sailors who read the weather.
And from there it’s fifty pages or so of table setting: we learn about the mining concession of San Tomé, a history written in backbreaking, virtual slave labor.
Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten. It was rediscovered after the War of Independence. An English company obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that neither the exactions of successive governments, nor the periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of paid miners they had created, could discourage their perseverance.
The new government is convinced of the mine’s worthlessness, but try to make use of it by selling the concessionary rights to the English capitalist Charles Gould. “It was no longer an abandoned mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground.”
The mine is a huge burden to Gould senior, but not his son, who takes up residence in Costaguana with his wife. “His part, his inclination, and his policy were united in one endeavour to keep unchecked the flow of treasure he had started single-handed from the re-opened scar in the flank of the mountain.”
As the mission to smuggle the silver goes underway, we meet Martin Decoud, a native Costaguanan and journalist who has been to Paris. He’s in love in Antonia, the daughter of the notable Avellanos. “Even Decoud himself seemed to feel that this was as much as he could expect of having her to himself till—till the revolution was over and he could carry her off to Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy.”
This section of the novel comes to us through passages of a long, long letter from Decoud to his sister; he shares a lot, almost as if he views this epistle as a last testament…
Don Carlos’ mission is to preserve unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould’s mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it were an infatuation for another woman. Nostromo’s mission is to save the silver. The plan is to load it into the largest of the Company’s lighters, and send it across the gulf to a small port out of Costaguana territory just on the other side the Azuera, where the first northbound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness of the gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and by the time the day breaks over the ocean we shall be out of sight, invisible, hidden by Azuera, which itself looks from the Sulaco shore like a faint blue cloud on the horizon.
The whole caper on the barge with Decoud and Nostromo is pure electricity. Not just the brief dynamic between these characters, but the danger and the darkness. They must avoid an enemy ship going purely by sounds in the water.
To make matters worse, there’s a stowaway on board, a merchant trying to escape the struggle. “The mere presence of a coward, however passive, brings an element of treachery into a dangerous situation.”
I won’t spoil the fates of these two men and their treasure. The third phase of the novel switches to the ongoing coup, in which some characters we know get captured and tortured, which we read through the eyes of a priest. Here are some striking lines from his own stream of thoughts:
At no time of the world’s history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice. The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod; a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture.
Conrad’s book is such an astute and detailed political novel — especially considering how early in the 20th century it was written. Its influence is obvious not only on mid-century American literature, but even, with its allegories and intricate structure and info dumps, on the “metahistorical” corner of postmodern novels, such as those by Pynchon or Vollmann, I daresay.
At the same time, the author’s sympathies don’t lie with the working masses, who are nothing more than a rowdy rabble in this story. Conrad’s classical liberalism in practice was quite anti-democratic. The people with their infinite follies and foibles can’t be trusted to control their own destiny. Conrad didn’t vote in British elections on this basis, I recently learned.
And as Fitzgerald said, the petty-bourgeois “heroes” like Nostromo end up feeling like tools of the bourgeoisie, to be utilized when needed by the imperialist monopolists, and discarded when hostilities are over. “What did he care about their politics? Nothing at all. And at the end of it all — Nostromo here and Nostromo there — where is Nostromo? Nostromo can do this and that — work all day and ride all night — behold!”
One last note on the text, literally the editing. The old Kent Edition is rather non-conventional in its type by our standards. Spanish and Italian words are not italicized, all accents are missing, there are odd abbreviations like Sta. for Santa, and many words are consistently misspelled, like Gefe instead of Jefe.
The Oxford UP edition fixes all of these things, but there’s something to be said about how the original edition refuses to distinguish between native and foreign language. It’s all one beautiful patina, reflecting the sense of a living multinational place. For being a product of the haphazard nature of serial publishing back in the day and Conrad’s tortured writing process, this aspect seems to stand out as an admirable experiment.
Below is Fitzgerald’s letter in its entirety. He was writing for Miss Butcher’s column for the Chicago Tribune, who queried famous writers on what book they most wish they had written.
Dear Miss Butcher:
I'd rather have written Conrad's “Nostromo” than any other novel. First because I think it is the greatest novel since “Vanity Fair” (possibly excluding “Madame Bovary”) but chiefly because “Nostromo,” the man intrigues me so much. Now the Nostromo who exists in life and always has existed, whether as a Roman centurion or a modern top sergeant, has often crept into fiction, but until Conrad was there to ponder over him, he was dismissed superficially and abruptly by those who most admired his efficient handling of the proletariat either in crowds or as individuals. Kipling realized that this figure with his almost autocratic disdain of weakness, is one of the most powerful props of the capitalistic system, and under various names he occurs in many of Kipling's stories of Indian life — but always as a sort of glorified servant. The literary attitude to ward him has been that of an officer sitting in his club during drill.
“Well, I've got nothing to worry about. Sergt. O'hare has the troop and” ——— this with a patronizing condescension ——— “I believe he knows just about as much about handling them as I do.”
Now Conrad didn't stop there. He took this man of the people and imagined him with such completeness that there is no use of any one else pondering over him for some time. He is one of the most important types in our civilization. In particular that always made a haunting and irresistible appeal to me. So I would rather have dragged his soul from behind his astounding and inarticulate presence than written any other novel in the world.
Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald