JOSEPH CONRAD, NOSTROMO: HOW TO INVENT A LATIN AMERICAN REPUBLIC THAT RESEMBLES ALL, BUT IT IS NONE…
Paris, France, mid-August, 2000. A first-edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo was being auctioned through a well-known Internet outlet, at a reasonable price. It was the first American edition (1904)1, not the very British one. I decided to wait until the last minute of the auction, and then intervene all of a sudden, just increasing slightly on the endmost bid standing in the queue. Not quite a gentleman-like gesture, though within the “rules of the game”, so to speak. And it worked. The book was sold to me.
Minutes afterwards, an email arrived at my address, hastily written by the director of the library of a large American university in the south of the U.S., by all evidence suffering from stress and irritation. That he had turned away from the computer’s screen just for a moment, to look for a cup of tea. That he had seen my “last bid”, and tried to improve it, but to no avail, it was too late. That they had been looking for this Nostromo for quite a while, to complete their collection of first-editions of relevant English novels. Would I be so kind as to let them have that copy? They were prepared to add a “bonus” on what I had to pay, plus delivery expenses, of course, and, not to be forgotten or underestimated, the immense gratitude of that institution of knowledge and wisdom vis-à-vis this modest scribbler shall be written in golden letters.
My answer implied that, if it were to happen that the honourable institution had been unable to find a similar copy somewhere else, I would then be most blessed to consider the possibility of re-selling the (my) “American” Nostromo.
(Cover and first pages of the 1904 American edition of Nostromo)
Now, let us go back in time to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1986. Though living in Kiel, West Germany, I was on a mission to Brazil, gathering data and interviewing key people in order to concoct a large study on the “future competitiveness” of some industries of the largest Latin-American country. Hence living in São Paulo, though commuting often to Rio de Janeiro and other industrial sites nearby. On the 29th of November of that year I was assaulted (for the first-time in my life) by a gang of young, raucous thieves, flaring knives, on the Copacabana beach. My mistake, as no one should loiter at twilight in such a spot, wearing long-trousers and other attires pertaining to an affluent European. Reflecting on the incident (grievous though not catastrophic), the following day, I wrote in my diary:
“30.11.1986. Rio de Janeiro. My room, on the bed are some Brazilian newspapers. On the small bed-table are my books, among them Conrad’s „Nostromo“, whose revisitation I now begin with fruition.”
Four days later:
“04.12.1986. Río de Janeiro. A week of intensive work (…) I have come to the end of Conrad’s Nostromo. A gratifying reading. Great book. One of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. Still valid for Latin America today (…)”
Whether Conrad had in fact acted as a protector over this modest poet in those carioca days in Rio de Janeiro, sparing me severe physical injuries, remains an intriguing possibility. The incident as such did not minder my concentration on Nostromo–quite the contrary, it seemed to have provided the righteous stimulus to relish every single line.
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, *1857-†1924), remains–even in our so-called epoch of “political correctness”–one of the most influential novelists, world-wide, to have emerged between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. That Nostromo. A tale of the seaboard, 1904, (from Italian “il nuestro homo”, “our man”) ought to be considered as one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century remains a plausible assessment, rarely contested, either hither or thither. It was written by a Pole (who never actually had a Polish passport), born into a fiery nationalistic Polish family in a place that now belongs to the Ukraine, but which then was part of the Russian Empire. Thus Conrad was – until he acquired British citizenship – a subject of the Russian crown. And before becoming a “Brit” he had been sort of a “Frenchie”, albeit not a legal citizen, working for the French merchant-marine, for about four years, previous to his joining the British merchant-marine.
Hence the query which prompts itself every time: Was he in fact writing literature in his “third-language?” Let that discussion be continued by others, in possession of more suitable information and penetrating insight. We prefer to suggest the possibility that he used all “his languages” in order to create his own English, the “Conrad-English”, seldom remaining unnoticed. At times a thinness of archaism, a slight suggestion of abstruseness, transpiring perhaps the more complex grammar and syntax of Slavic languages, occasionally a not disturbing yet evident intensiveness in the mechanical construction of phrases, proper of someone who had to consult the dictionary too often. And ask others to revise the text.
Yet none of those peculiarities affect the pleasure of reading: The lava exhaled by the author is of such a thickness, that, on its way down the mountain, it erases every single obstacle.
As we shall see, there is not only a Conradian English, but also a Conradian character and the Conradian density.
A perennial outsider, no doubt, from the moment he was born to the moment he died‒perhaps the most illustrious, perceptive, prolific and prodigal outsider in the history of European literature. Yet an outsider with two mental aerials, one “in”, the other “out”. The former provides the “sense of detail”, a “touch of domesticity, homeliness”, the latter the “vast panorama”, the necessary recul (recoil) to sculpture the figures as an impartial surgeon. “Outsiderness” can thus be a “blessing in disguise” too, as it provides a writer with a high-carat uniqueness, an unmistakable way of being in litterae and making litterae. It would be hazardous for those who want to imitate it, if any one should happen to be inebriated by such foolishness.
And Joseph Conrad was indeed a unique writer—one of the most influential ever. It suffices to mention Graham Greene and John le Carré in the English language, Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Augusto Roa Bastos in the Spanish language.
What do we have in Nostromo? Let us start with a paragraph that shows all the mastery of an author who did not forget that, in order to be a good writer, one must also be, at times at least, a good painter:
„A fringed Indian hammock from Aroa, gay with coloured featherwork, had been swung judiciously in a corner that caught the early sun; for the mornings are cold in Sulaco. The cluster of flor de noche buena blazed in great masses before the open glass doors of the reception-rooms. A big green parrot, brilliant like an emerald in a cage that flashed like gold, screamed out ferociously “Viva Costaguana!” then called twice mellifluously “Leonarda! Leonarda!” in imitation of Mrs. Gould’s voice, and suddenly took refuge in immobility and silence.”2
We are thus in the residence of Mrs. Elena Gould (Doña Elena), wife of the “Costaguanero” though very much English Charles Gould, the awesome, admired, envied and respected “man-in-charge” and owner of the “San Tomé” mine, whispered around as as the factual “King of Sulaco”, a harbour-town in the „Occidental” province of the República de Costaguana.
When does it all happen? Somewhere between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, albeit no precise chronological flow is established. Buoys are scattered across the textual ocean, flashing us names and events that allow us to get a grasp of the “epoch”, no doubt after Simon Bolivar, Garibaldi and Benito Juárez – till 1904. We would soon find out that we happen not need a capricious framework imposed by Kronos. That already alerts us as to the quality of the narration.
In his “Author’s Note”, a formidable example of Conrad’s narrative skills, as it can be considered the “first chapter” of the novel, but also the “last chapter", Conrad constructs a pre-Borgesian3 artifice: The possession of a unique source. Thus unveiling himself at the same time as the man who was there, and saw everything, thereby making the authorial’s voice in the novel as such almost invisible, inaudible:
“My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, the late Don José Avellanos, Minister in the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent History of Fifty Years of Misrule. That work was never published – the reader will discover why – and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents.”4
We would soon meet “Nostromo”, the “incorruptible Capataz de cargadores”, the Italian Giovanni Battista Fidanza (to be noted the phonetic resemblance with “fiducia”, fidelity, trust, “fidanza” meaning the same in archaic Italian), called “Gian’ Battista” by the Italian family of Viola, led by an old-Garibaldino, an exiled revolutionary who fought with Garibaldi. His daughters are appalled that people in Sulaco, and elsewhere, call him “Nostromo”:
“You mean Nostromo?” said Decoud.
“The English call him so, but that is no name either for a man or a beast”, said the girl, passing her hand gently over her sister’s hair.
“But he let people call him so”, remarked Decoud.
“Not in this house!”, retorted the child.
“Ah! Well, I shall call him the Capataz then”5
Hence that literary entity (the reader might notice that we avoided the use of an “imagined entity or country”), that place that resembles all Latin American republics but it is none, soon to inspire others, be either the Comala of Juan Rulfo, or the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. Yet the latter two are imagined towns in an unmistakable country, whilst the República de Costaguana could be placed anywhere south of the Rio Grande border, up to Patagonia.
Conrad used extensively a bibliography centred on Paraguay and Venezuela, but also Colombia, Chile and Mexico, a secessionist movement at the end of the novel recalling the “secession” of Panama from Colombia in 1903. This was a culmination of the Thousand Days War (1899-1902), one of the many civil wars between “Liberals” and “Conservatives” that caused havoc in Colombia and Panama during the 19th century. A most germane influence upon Conrad’s vision of a self-constructed Latin American republic came from Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (*1852-†1936), who lived some years in Argentina and also visited Paraguay trice. As far as we have been able to assert it, Conrad himself sailed to some Caribbean islands, and may have touched port on the East Coast of Central America.
Is it also possible to say that this novel is, to some extent, an “Italian” one? Not only because of its title, the key role of Giovanni Battista and the Viola family. Elena Gould is “una dona inglesa italianizzata”, having stayed many years in Italy with an aunt “who, years before, had married a middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis”.6 And it is in Lucca where Elena would meet her future husband, Charles Could. It transpires constantly the fate of Italian migrants, forced or unforced, who are trying to “fare l’America”, be the “Garibaldino, Giorgio Viola, the Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions”7, or Nostromo, a figure sculptured out of Conrad’s voyages and sojourns in the Mediterranean, particularly in Corsica, who leaves ship to stay in Sulaco, lured by the old Viola, “this is the place to make money”.
Why should such an outsider decide to devise a country, instead of just placing the story in this or that nation? Peradventure, he might have been transferring his own fragmented, multinational, polyglottic, adventurous life into the field of literature, constructing a fictitious topos with “bits and pieces” from different part of the mapamundi. The Republic of Costaguana, as an amalgamated construct, recalls Joseph Conrad’s amalgamated life itself. Re-phrasing it: Only an outsider would be capable of inventing such a country. At the same time, such a devise offers the author a much greater “manoeuvring-space”, it erases potential inhibitions, it grants a wider plateau where one can unleash imagination, let it go rampant.
The counterpart of Nostromo, his “associate” at the other end of the social ladder, is Charles Gould, “the Idealist-Creator of Material Interests”8 “Idealist” and “materialist” do appear quite often in the novel, to categorise the characters, yet sometimes those two adjectives seem to operate puzzlingly. In principle they are the “opposites”, but Conrad does imply a more subtle use of the words, suggesting, like in the case of the characterisation of Charles Gould, that he is an “idealist” because he believes that the “material interests” would per se create a better world. That the “material interests” in fact pursue “ideal”‒perhaps even “quasi-religious”‒goals. It is not by “good will”, “good intentions”, by “restraint” and attachment to “Arcadia", that mankind would be saved. Salvation would come by letting “material interests” impose its own intrinsic virtues. That is, sort of, a “reversed romanticism”. And perhaps more dangerous than the untainted “romanticism”.
“Mr. Holroyd’s sense of religion” (Mrs. Gould) “But it seemed to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of an influential partner, who gets his share of profits in the endowment of churches. That’s a sort of idolatry. He told me he endowed churches every year, Charley.” “He is at the head of immense silver an iron interests”, Charles Gould observed. “Ah yes. The religion of silver and iron.” 9
There is indeed such a Conradian character. And its purest form is an amalgam, a sort of transfigured and camouflaged Joseph Conrad himself. Herewith the description of the American mogul Holroyd:
“He was a big limbed, deliberate man (…) and his massive profile was the profile of a Caesar head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest.”10
Holroyd and Gould would seal an alliance, the American providing the monumental financing to enhance the “...the Gould Concession” into an “Imperium in Imperio” 11, aware that they have to deal with “...the high and mighty robber gangs that run the Costaguana Government...”12, hence pulling, more or less subtly, all the necessary strings:
“...for the San Tomé mine had its own unofficial pay list, whose items and amounts, fixed in consultation by Charles Gould and Señor Avellanos, were known to a prominent businessman in the United States...”13
The “Gould Concession” would act as a catalyst to attract more capital. There is:
“...Sir John, coming from Europe to smooth the path for his railway (…) He worked always on a great scale; there was a loan to the State, and a project for systematic colonization of the Occidental Province, involved in one vast scheme with the construction of the National Central Railway...”14
All that wealth sprouting around in the “Occidental Province” soon generates the envy and the wrath of the politicians and generals not “subsided” by the “Gould Concession”, particularly in the “Eastern Province”, armed insurrection leading soon to civil-war. The clique of wealthy foreigners and enlightened natives in Sulaco mobilises, to counter militarily the threat of expropriation and death. One of the leading figures sustained by the “occidentals” is:
“Pablo Ignacio Barrios, son a village alcalde, general of division, commanding in chief the Occidental Military district (…) Wandering away as far as Mexico he had fought against the French by the side (as he said) of Juarez, and was the only military man of Costaguana who had ever encountered European troops in the field (…) an inveterate gambler (…) He was always overwhelmed with debts (…) his gold-laced uniforms were always in pawn with some tradesman (…) He had obtained the reputedly lucrative Occidental command, mainly through the exertion of his creditors (the Sta Marta shopkeepers, all great politicians) who moved heaven and earth (…) (otherwise)”...we shall all be ruined.”15
There is also Father Corbelán, a robust Catholic priest, unorthodox, who does not hesitate to negotiate with bandits in order to galvanise the “democratic” coalition, aware that some of the officers may not quite be up to the task:
“I have watched your reverence converting General Barrios by a special sermon on the Plaza”, he said (Decoud). “What miserable nonsense! (…) That man is a drunkard. Señores, the God of your general is a bottle!”16
Antonia Avellanos, one of the many wonderful female characters in the novel is also an amalgam:
“Miss Avellanos, born in Europe and educated partly in England, was a tall, grave girl, with a self-posessed manner, a wide, white forehead, a wealth of rich brown hair, and blue eyes. (…) Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. (…) He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life.”17
“Jose Avellanos”, the educated Patrician with large diplomatic experience and endless sufferings and persecutions under the previous dictatorship, a “Costaguanero” but also an amalgam, keeps clinging to the hope of finally seeing progress and peace in his native country.
Then appears Martin Decoud:
“When General Barrios stopped to address Mrs. Gould, Antonia raised negligently her hand holding an open fan, as if to shade from the sun her head, wrapped in a light lace shawl. The clear gleam of her blue eyes gliding behind the black fringe of eyelashes paused for a moment upon her father, then travelled farther to the figure of a young man of thirty at most, of medium height…”18
Here we meet the blasé Parisian domiciled (mostly) young would-be-intellectual, poet-aspiring, pamphlets-scribbler Latin American creole (a little bit à la Nietzsche), yet another amalgam, but who is not a coward. In fact, despite all his rhetorical dismissal of foes and friends alike, he would turn to be a “true romantic”, pursuing his own form of “idealism”.
Felicity would bestow its favours upon him only in the company of Antonia. As she objects, however, to move to Paris, Martin decides to “create” another country in Latin America, more auspicious and tolerable…”, suiting his personal interests and those “material interests” of others. “Secession” then, and long live the new Republic!
Martin Decoud. “the style of his clothing suggested an idea of French elegance; but otherwise he was the very type of a fair Spanish creole”, “His people had been long settled in Paris, where he had studied law, had dabbed in literature, had hoped now and then in moments of exaltation to become a poet like…” (…) As a matter of fact he was an idle boulevardier, in touch with some smart journalists….”this life induced in him Frenchified – but most un-French – cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: “Imagine an atmosphere of opéra bouffe...”19 “He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers, but far from being that he was in danger of remaining a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life.”20
What could save him from that seemingly inevitable destiny of decadent and useless dilettantism? One simple thing: Love.
“Antonia, I have no patriotic illusions. I have only the supreme illusion of a lover.” He paused, then muttered almost inaudibly, “That can lead one very far, though.”21
Minuets after certifying that Antonia will correspond to his partiality, he returns to the just visited residence of the Goulds in Sulaco, arguing that Antonia had lost her hat, to talk to Mrs. Gould that the only alternative is “secession”, another country. Her husband does not take long to agree:
“Charles Gould, staring at the wall, pursued his reflections subtly. “I shall write to Holroyd that the San Tome mine is big enough to take in hand the making of a new State. I’ll please him. It’ll reconcile him to the risk. “22
Ex post, things will become more complicated an unpredictable. Charles Gould had already given instructions that, were the mine about to be taken by the insurrectionists, it should be blown off, with the mountains as well. A large cargo of silver at the port has to be transported into safety, as the insurrectionists have a steamer, and may appear at any time at the harbour’s entrance. Nostromo and Martin Decoud accept to lead that dangerous enterprise. Meanwhile, the wife of the old Viola, Teresa, is dying, but before she wants to save Nostromo.
“She laughed feebly. “Get riches at least for once, you indispensable, admired Gian’ Battista, to whom the peace of a dying woman is less than the praise of people who have given you a silly name – and nothing besides – in exchange for your soul and your body.”23
Dr. Monygham, a taciturn and cynical English surgeon does diverge from the widely held opinion on Nostromo: “No. Decidely, I think that Nostromo is a fool.”24
“You gamble too much and never say “no” to a pretty face, Capataz, said Dr. Monygham, with sly simplicity. “That is not the way to make a fortune. But nobody that I know ever suspected you of being poor. I hope you have to make a good bargain in case you come back from the adventure. (…) What bargain your worship have made?”, asked Nostromo. (…) Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death upon my back, as you call it, nothing else but the whole treasure would do.”25
“Decoud, incorrigible in this scepticism, reflected, not cynically, but with general satisfaction , that this man was made incorruptible by his enormous vanity, that finest form of egoism which can take on the aspect of every virtue.”26
The silver cargo will be hidden in one of the “Isabels” islands, and soon shall be considered as “sunk” or “lost for ever”. Nostromo will return ashore, to lead yet one more dangerous mission, which will make the “secession” a fait accompli, the “new State”, “The Occidental Republic”, recognised as one as such by the United States. Afterwards Nostromo will slowly take away the silver on the island, on the sly, undertaking long sea-voyages, becoming a very wealthy man.
Nostromo is ashamed of that „theft”, fearing that, if discovered, it would ruin all his reputation. Yet is really “theft”? He is just appropriating his “share” of the effort to save the San Tome mine, which facilitates the secession and the emergence of another country. He is just appropriating his “marginal product” contribution in production (or extraction) of such a large surplus-value.
Hence the possibility of considered this novel as one about the “material interests”, about how that always mentioned though not properly defined (unnecessary in a such a literary endeavour), omnipresence “driving force”, embrace all, some believing it to be a devilish threat, others the only way to impose progress and hence reduce anarchy and gratuitous violence. To join the galaxy of “civilized” and “progressive” countries, so to speak, abandoning for ever the “Fifty years of misrule“ poignantly annotated by Don Jose Avalleanos.
The anarchy, corruption and violence permeating the Republic of Costaguana should not be considered as being peculiar only to Latin-America. Far from it, the dynamics of such a “Republic” can be found in almost any other continent on earth. Is Conrad implying in Nostromo that political power, per se, innately, uncalled for, breeds corruption, weakens every ethical principle? That “power” is in itself an “annihilator of ethics”, “foes to be destroyed, friends to be rewarded”. That whatever colour, whatever direction of the wind shall be applied upon the machinery of powerfulness, the dynamic essence itself is not altered. Perhaps the other way around: The combination of “material interests” as such always needs “corruption”, always needs a “flexible” political system, in order to exercise its own power, in order to let its “cornucopia” spill over the whole society.
The “San Tomé silver-mine” is the volcano underpinning the whole narrative structure of the novel. Initially inactive, or rather in a state of somnolence, its “being-put-into-life” by Charles Gould and the financial mogul Holroyd, is a metaphor for that “factory of money”, that “generator of wealth”, that will allow the country to “take-off”, abandon political anarchy breeding excruciating poverty (and vice-versa), and join the concert of “civilised nations”. Yet that very “back into life” of the volcano generates envy, greed, and armed confrontations aimed at seizing at least part of its “silvery lava”.
A “pessimistic” novel? It is one way of interpreting it, but not the only one. “Realistic” may the more appropriate adjective, at times:
“After one Montero there would be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolivar had said in the bitterness of his spirit, ‘America is ungovernable’. Those who worked for the independence had ploughed the sea.”27
Anyone just glancing briefly over the 50 years of Latin American history after 1904 may have no other option but to agree with the narrator.
The Conradian density, in this novel, and in most of his texts, subsumes many layers of substratum, all of them still in combustion. Even when we leave a page, or a chapter, what had just been read continues to exhume clouds of question marks, secret anguishes, cherished though perhaps too early disappointed hopes, dreams and nightmares of long forgotten countries, past loves which resist any attempt to erase them. One of the most salient Conradian features concerns the way he adorns his novelistic figures with flesh and soul. Rather than “creating” those figures as "literary characters", he simply succeeds in transplanting them from reality, where he himself gave birth to them. So much that in most cases we are subjugated to believe that “we have seen them before, somehow, somewhere…”
In fact, it seems as if Conrad had seen them all, alive, that he had been all of them, at one time. As if he had lived the lives of all his characters, male or female, he had been in every country, every town, and sailed all the seas.. And this must be ascribed to his “outsiderness”, to him being both an “outsider” and a “camouflaged insider”. Hence, he looks at the world with “four eyes”.
Should Nostromo likewise be considered as one of the “greatest”, “most relevant” Latin-American novels of all time? Yes, out of the “amalgam”, his Republic of Costaguana may be considered a “proxy” for the “Federation of Latin American Nations”, the unfulfilled Bolivar’s dream.
Not a “perfect” novel (is there any?) insist many commentators, including Martin Seymour-Smith in the introduction to the Penguin edition we used, pointing above all to the finale, with its accumulation of fortuitous, far-fetched confusions and fatal accidents. Let it be so, but there is hope:
“If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason for that – why not be frank about it? - the true reason is that I modelled her on my first love.”28
Hence this “pessimistic” novel is, in fact, a late song of a “first-love”. The only force capable of repelling the pestiferous odours coming from the almighty inevitability of the “materials interests”. Whether this is another literary masterstroke of Conrad, or whether in fact it was inspired by his intimate life, will remain a question mark. Perhaps for ever.
1Conrad, Joseph, Nostromo, Harper & Brothers, New York, November of 1904.
2Conrad, Nostromo, Penguin Books, 1983, P. 88.
3Jorge Luis Borges.
4P. 31.
5P. 211.
6P. 81.
7Author’s notes, p. 32.
8Author’s notes, p. 32.
9P. 90.
10P. 94.
11P. 140.
12P. 96.
13P. 124.
14PP. 124-25.
15PP. 159-60.
16P. 183.
17P. 143.
18P. 151.
19PP. 151-52.
20P. 152.
21P. 180.
22P. 323.
23P. 226.
24P. 278.
25P. 229.
26P. 261.
27P. 177.
28P. 34.
