I’ve just finished Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a magnificent and great novel if ever there was one. It chronicles several years in the history of the invented Republic of Costaguana in South America, focusing on the seaboard town known as Sulaco as it grows rich and influential thanks to a huge silver mine located there. This mine is the central image of the story, consuming the hearts and minds of every character by offering power and wealth in equal measure and giving the novel many elements taken from traditional myths. What Nostromo does so well is use this mine to become at turns a political novel, a philosophical one, and – most importantly – an adventure one. Using formal inventiveness Conrad is able to create a fictional world every bit as alluring as the silver at its heart.
Here, though, I’d like to gush simply about the formal tricks and turns Conrad uses to introduce and give life to his imagined republic, and to the characters who inhabit it, especially the mysterious and fascinating Nostromo himself. The novel is good enough that I could go on for days, and so I think it’s wise I limit myself to these two connected ideas.
An Introduction to Sulaco: The First Chapter of Nostromo
The first chapter of Nostromo is not, dare I say, particularly punchy. It begins in the matter of fact manner more typical of a history book than of a novel. But therein lies its purpose. It is designed to bring us into the Republic of Costaguana and Sulaco as if they had existed for many years. And this requires a great deal of skill. When we think of a country, we rarely stop there in our minds. We think of the capital, we think of the location, we think of its history and its people. Conrad, in creating a new world, has to do all this in a way that doesn’t come across as being boring; but he also cannot skimp on the descriptions, because then the world will hardly feel real and lived-in then. That is the central challenge for the first chapter and its four or five pages.
“In the time of Spanish rule” – the novel’s opening words – already establish Nostromo as part of history, and a familiar one. We laypeople may not know the specifics of Spanish rule, but we know its approximate time and its approximate extent. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to add another country to those we know Spain once ruled.
Once the country has been fixed in history it needs to be fixed geographically through a description of the main features around Sulaco itself. But naming a mere rock, such like the peninsula of Azuera, is once again not enough. Conrad must invest objects with history too, and show their relationship to the people. And thus, the barren peninsula, we are told, is associated by the poor of the town with “an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth” and therefore they “will tell you that it is deadly because of its hidden treasures”. Now we have not merely a rock, but a people revealed through their attitude towards it.
Conrad goes on, very briefly, to tell the story of this peninsula – which is never visited during the events of Nostromo. That is, how two foreigners went out with the goal of finding the treasure apparently lurking there but disappeared without a trace. Again, we have the people’s view of things – “the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success”. Magic and mystery live within the language of this part of the novel, and these stories-within-the-story of Nostromo add to the fairy-tale like quality of the novel. Ideas and events seem doomed to repeat. Perhaps, indeed, they are fated to.
The rest of the first chapter continues to add to this mythic representation of Sulaco and its history. A rogue cloud is described as “burst[ing] suddenly into flame and crash[ing] like a sinister pirate-ship of the air” – an ominous description if ever there was one. Meanwhile, using phrases like “as the saying is”, Conrad is able to create even the idiomatic language itself of the local populace. There is no weak point, it seems to me, in all of this – the world feels real and lived-in. The attitude of the locals is built up piecemeal through each new geographical location and its associations, so that by the end of the chapter, without a single man or woman being named, the reader has the sense of a them as pious folk, superstitious and hostile towards foreigners and their wealth. We already know their speech; we even know their myths.
And as Nostromo progresses we return to these places in thought or in action, and even the figures of speech find themselves being used. The novel itself is the vindication of its first chapter, proving the reality of all that Conrad initially describes. The two parts buttress and justify each other.
An Invaluable Fellow – The Creation of Nostromo the Man
The best of Conrad’s characters embody the fragility of our understanding that came with modernism and the modern sensibility – people like Lord Jim and Kurtz, characters seen through Marlow’s eyes in glimpses, as though they are walking deep in fog. Nostromo creates its titular character in a way that takes its cue from Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim while moving beyond them. Nostromo himself, oddly enough, scarcely appears in the novel’s first two hundred pages, but we feel his presence throughout. While other characters, such as the stoic Charles Gould, owner of Sulaco’s San Tomé mine, are all focused on the creation of wealth, Nostromo himself stands out by his focus, instead, on his reputation. And in light of this, the lack of his appearance until the middle of the novel makes perfect sense – his reputation precedes him. We come to “know” him before we meet him.
But at the same time, we feel a sense of uncertainty in our knowledge of Nostromo. We come to know the facts – he is an Italian, raised in Genoa, who now is the captain of the longshoremen in Sulaco’s harbour – long before we meet the man, but we are keenly aware that they are inadequate for getting a true measure of him. When we do see Nostromo he appears in the epic mode, rather than as a normal character – his language is curt and full of an almost inhuman confidence. When he talks with one character who is mourning the fact that his son never lived past childhood Nostromo simply says “If he had been like me he would have been a man.”
His figure is also highly symbolic. For example, there is the silver-grey mare that he rides, which connects him with the mine while also making him preternaturally fast. He appears like a vengeful spirit without clear goals of his own – he lacks any kind of internality, at least in the novel’s first hundred pages or so, where his confidence and pride overcome any hint of reflexivity. At the closing moments of Part First he is present at a night-time celebration among the locals which even has more than a hint of the Dionysian about it, with “the barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum” that draws him in. There, he is confronted by a lover who demands a gift, and Nostromo, carelessly powerful, cuts off the silver buttons of his very own coat to give to her. His self-mastery is frightening and alluring.
The use of names is another area where Nostromo casts an epic shadow. By giving him countless names and epithets Conrad shows the multifaceted nature of his character. Even the very name “Nostromo” is not his own, but the name by which the English residents of Sulaco call him. We don’t even hear his actual name, Giovanni Fidenza, until near the book’s end. As a result, we receive the impression, yet again, that we are only scratching the surface of who he is. A great many people trust him as “a perfectly incorruptible fellow”, but others know him as “the generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores”. Who is he really?
This situation is further muddied when certain epithets, such as “incorruptible” are used not without a hint of irony – but only at times, so that we never know how much the irony reflects truth, or distracts from it. Early on in the book we are told of a character that “so far, she too was under the spell” of Nostromo’s reputation. Is the “so far” a warning, or a red herring? Does “spell” refer to something that is backed up by the rest of the story, or is it the mark of an evil man and sorcerer? I certainly shan’t reveal the truth here – I just want to indicate the range of methods by which Conrad fashions the character of Nostromo while leaving him nonetheless a mystery for us to piece together.
We see Nostromo as gestures, and we hear him more through reported speech than through his own mouth. Conrad gives us masses of information but never enough of the man to make sense of them. To my mind at least, it is a fascinating way of showing how modernism disrupted our notions of certainty and character. Conrad can’t tell us who Nostromo is, but his characters all get the chance to have a go. Yet each explanation seems to contradict the next one, leaving us even more confused than when we started out. And yet we know that under all of these explanations there must be a man. The challenge in reading Nostromo partially becomes trying to locate this man and understand who he is and what it is that drives him.
Conclusion
The depths given to Nostromo are great, but there are many other characters in the novel who are fascinating in their own way, from taciturn Englishman Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, to the indignant General Montero whose decision to start a revolution forms the key conflict of the book. It isn’t just the characters of Nostromo that make the novel great, but also its exciting plot, filled with tricks and turns including even buried treasure. Conrad lures us in with the promise of adventure, and then reveals something far more complex lying under the novel’s surface – a modern myth, yes, but also a highly political novel, and a brutally sad story of our common exploitation of the South American nations, long after formal colonialism had ended. It’s a really cool book, and thoroughly recommended. Even though I only managed to finish it the third time through…
An interesting comparison to Nostromo would probably be Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement, which I talk about here. Both novels explore the changes in sleepy rural society around the beginning of the twentieth century, and how far we should consider our notion of “progress” to be a positive thing.
Did you enjoy Nostromo as much as I did? Did Conrad’s style derange you rather than dazzle? Why not leave a comment below