End of Part Three

Having finally finished this tangled tale long after I commenced it I have to say I’m relieved.  It became more of a trial than I expected.  Part One, while way too busy, seemed to be establishing a world we needed to understand to grasp what would happen.  Part Two, with Decoud, began to distract me from my expectations about that tale: here was a character who might be the real hero, a conscious figure where others were not.  And the scene with Nostromo on the boat and the island brought the two key figures together, making them share a secret and perhaps a fate.  But no!  Part Three leaves Decoud to his death and eventually becomes the story of Nostromo–but not the Nostromo of the valiant ride to Cayta (which would make a ‘most exciting book’) but the Nostromo of a strangely operatic love story.  I feel that, where Nostromo as a character is concerned, JC has lived up to an intention: to show us a man who does what is demanded of him, but who veers, because of the silver, into an area he knows nothing about (becoming ‘a thief’ in his own estimation) and losing everything because of his ambition to live as the rich and duplicitous Nostromo–we are given reasons, emotive reasons, for this: his sense of betrayal, his need to avenge himself on those who made the silver a grand cause and then abandoned it and him (as with the Dr. saying he wished that Sotillo had found it), but this still doesn’t quite account for the story of the two daughters of the Garabaldino.  I feel that this story–The Lighthouse–could have been a short story with some brief backstory accounting for why Nostromo knew of the silver.  Its tone has so little to do with the novel we’ve been reading–the novel of Nostromo’s involvement with the Goulds, Decoud, the Dr., etc.–it almost comes out of nowhere.

That story (the Goulds, etc.) does find a satisfying conclusion, it seems to me.  The story in which Conrad makes his comment on “material interest,” the final phrase of Chapter 11, before the fable of Nostromo and the daughters commences in earnest.  The Dr speaks to Mrs. Gould (in lieu of Decoud, someone must have the wherewithal to state thematic points): “There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests.  They have their law, and their justice.  But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”  Here we have the attitude that explains what will become of Sulaco due to capitalist interests, and the sense that moral rectitude is more enduring gets taken up by Mrs. Gould when alone, seeing that life “to be large and full . . . must contain the care of the past and of the future.”  And yet she sees, in reference to the mine, the silver, and all it has meant: “There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.”  It’s a strong ending for the tale of the Goulds because it shows us that their success is only material, a view that JC floats as critique of the colonial venture when it searches only for providing material comforts and making material gains.  One may say it’s for “the future,” but one loses the value and the weight of the past, of what the dead actually died for.

Then the story of Nostromo, the island and the lighthouse.  He ends up killed by Viola in a case of mistaken identity, the old man trying to guard his younger daughter’s virtue from a local youth.  And yet he is not mistaken, for Nostromo has betrayed him by agreeing to marry the elder daughter while making love to the younger.  The story seems to me more like a fable or a folktale, and I assume this is what JC had decided to go for as most befitting the spirit of Nostromo, a man who has considered himself only in the terms by which he is known.  But it’s just there that I don’t quite buy it.  The incorruptible man gets corrupted by treasure.  Ok, more than plausible I suppose, but so what?  I thought a bit of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre (the John Huston film) which has a similar sense of folkloric fate.  The ironies are clear enough, but why at Nostromo’s expense?

And then a different sort of novel comes to mind: one in which the lives of the three men on the boat–Nostromo, Hirsch, Decoud–must all end badly because of their proximity to the fateful silver.  But to tell that tale do we need all this novelistic realism setting up rival political factions in a Latin American country, with Englishmen and Italians for good measure?  Which is to say that into a novel has been intruded a fable and I’m not entirely comfortable with that.  The fable is well-told, so much so that it makes much of the historical fiction seem rather creaky (as with the Captain Mitchell-led walking tour of the present Sulaco).

And it’s not Mitchell but the Dr. who is present at the end to investigate the scene at the lighthouse; the Dr. who, as with his scene with Nostromo with the body of Hirsch, and in his final scene with Mrs. Gould, becomes, somewhat surprisingly, our sensitive onlooker and the only one who might tell the tale but for the fact that he doesn’t know everything he needs to know to tell it.

What I’m left with is a sense of multiple narrators/tellers/main characters, but no single story.

I’ve meant to address the torture episode in Nostromo for some time now, and I’ll confess to hesitating on how best to address it. In a rather characteristic way of this novel, the scenes seem out of place or almost two heavy for what comes before and afterwards – let alone its consequences. (None, so far as I can see.) But there are some fine lines to walk here. Your comment on ‘the anti-semitism that seems simply to go without saying’, Donald, I think I may have given me an ‘in’ on the problem. Another confession then: I didn’t catch that at all while reading through the first time. Perhaps this is simple insensitivity on my part, but looking back lends me to think you might be making a bit of a jump. I don’t think it’s perverse sophistry to suggest that ‘typical’ or stereotypical qualities linked under a Jewish name make a caricature, per say: you have to read from one to the other or, in other words, find a connection in one direction rather than another. Does Hirsch act ‘Jewish’ because he’s a Jew? Or does he demonstrate certain behaviours while he just happens to be Jewish? JC does not, I believe, draw any sort of explicit relationship in this way nor does the narration seem to suggest otherwise. (Point of fact: Hirsch is a hide merchant, which strikes me a rather peculiar profession for a Jew.) Blithely naïve or otherwise, I read Hirsh as a supreme materialist and the fully corrupted, fully overwhelmed Occidental in JC’s philosophical schemes.

Who does explicitly indulge anti-semitism then in the rather more rigorous definition I’m attempting? Sotillo, Hirsch’s torturer. A few quick passages gather by searching an electronic text for the word ‘Jew’: “This Jew might have been very much frightened by the accident, but he knew where the silver was concealed, and had invented this story, with his Jewish cunning, to put him entirely off the track as to what had been done ….”; “Speak, thou Jewish child of the devil!”; and “There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind. Ah! he had confessed everything, this fractious Jew, this bribón [rascal, miscreant].” The irony of this last passage reverses the dynamic, I think: not Hirsch but Sotillo falls prey to “the credulity of covetousness” and “moral misery” anti-semitism traditionally imputes to the Jews. What falls then may prove little surprise once the soldiers forget to “burn the carcass of the treacherous Jew where it hung.”

What then do you make of “the gruesome enigma of the tortured and murdered Hirsch” and “the mystery of his atrocious end,” Donald? The two aren’t the same, of course, and I think I join JC in facing an incontrovertible fact or what Yeats calls “The uncontrollable mystery on bestial floor”. Even soldiers accustomed to casual violence seem taken by the sight as “the stiff body of the late Senor Hirsch, merchant, after swaying imperceptibly, made a half turn, and came to a rest in the midst of awed murmurs and uneasy shuffling”. I’m at a loss but something like a chronology might get at the essential oddness of it all. We might say JC gradually reduces Hirsch to a brute humanity” “sunk in hebetude … his eyes had a vacant, trance-like stare”. Then, what’s worse, is the spectacle of Hirsch screaming “all alone”: “He screamed with uplifted eyebrows and a wide-open mouth—incredibly wide, black, enormous, full of teeth—comical.” (Why comical or, better yet, how comical? That’s coming from JC rather than Sotillo, it seems to me.) And finally, before Sotillo shoots him, we have this

For a word, for one little word, he felt he would have knelt, cringed, grovelled on the floor before the drowsy, conscious stare of those fixed eyeballs starting out of the grimy, dishevelled head that drooped very still with its mouth closed askew …. Senor Hirsch's head was flung back on his straining throat; his chin trembled. For a moment the rattle of his chattering teeth pervaded the vast, shadowy room, where the candles made a patch of light round the two flames burning side by side. And as Sotillo, staying his raised hand, waited for him to speak, with the sudden flash of a grin and a straining forward of the wrenched shoulders, he spat violently into his face.

This sort of weight’s very nearly more than the novel can bear, I think. JC has a passage earlier stating how “[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 I’ll be damned if “growing complexity of their passions” covers this sort of ground. So if you’ll excuse the absence of positive commentary here, Donald, I’ll ask what you make of all this!

End of Part Two

With the introduction of Martin Decoud, the novel brings forward a character whose consciousness seems necessary for JC to get at the true action of the novel.  No one else could look on, and participate, to anything like the same degree.  We’re still primarily external to Nostromo himself, but via Decoud we can inhabit the Capataz’s company more readily.  But what interests me about Decoud is that he furnishes commentary that begins to get at what’s at stake, potentially, in this tale of Nostromo:

“I am not a sentimentalist, I cannot endow my personal desires with a shining robe of silk and jewels.  Life is not for me a moral romance derived from the tradition of a pretty fairy tale.”  And this judgment on Gould: “that other sentimentalist, who attached a strangely idealistic meaning to concrete facts.”  In this, of course, there is a critique of Gould’s tendency to see the mine as an object of fate, but also a sense that the very investure of symbolic meaning into facts—like silver or landscape or place of origin—that JC’s narrator indulges in comes into question by one of the characters.  This gives Decoud, a journalist, a grasp of the realities of the book, and of its themes, that we haven’t yet fully encountered.  “It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy.”

So, with Decoud we have an adventure on ship with Nostromo.  We see Nostromo's character more clearly in the handling of Hirsch, the Jewish stowaway.  Along with the anti-semitism that seems simply to go without saying, JC makes Hirsch unlikeable as a character; he’s simply a liability.  Nostromo declares: “it would have been no cruelty to take away from him his wretched life.”  No one would seem to disagree.  Hirsch is the thorn in the foot, an irritant to be removed.

And yet he is not killed, and so lives on to create more problems for Nostromo.  What’s not clear yet is if this decision to spare Hirsch—which Nostromo blames on Decoud’s compassion—will constitute a failure on Nostromo’s part.  We owe our view of the Capataz’s character to Decoud: “Here was a man . . . that seemed as though he would have preferred to die rather than deface the perfect form of his egoism.”  A sentiment supported by Nostromo’s statement that “silver is an incorruptible metal that can be trusted to keep its value for ever”—making a definite parallel between himself and the silver, and presenting himself as a sentimentalist in Decoud’s terms, endowing his “personal desires with a shining robe of silk and jewels” or silver.  Nostromo’s “perfect form of egoism” would require a “pretty fairy tale” to do him justice, to give him a fame that lives on and keeps its value forever.  This is the tension Part Two ends with: what will be the fate of the silver, what will be the fate of Nostromo’s reputation in this matter, what will the narrator (and Decoud) make of the tale?

End of Part One

So far I can't say that I'm intrigued too much by character, rather everything of interest seems subsumed by the mine, which emerges as not only the occasion for whatever will happen eventually, but as the symbolic instance of all the vested interests: it's what makes the connection between Gould and his father--the legacy that overturns the elder Gould's wishes--and it's what gives Gould and his wife some purpose other than their own relations: they unite on the need to be the "first family" of this remote locale.  Costaguana is presented in lots of anecdotes, to make us see a "surroundings" for the Goulds and the mine, but also to sketch, here at the outset, the various characters from which some type of dramatic crisis (and its recognition) will come--the "historic occasion" and "fatality" and "mistake" that Capt Mitchell alludes to at the close of this part.

Gould: "I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist."  In this faith, we see Gould and his mine as the expression, not only of colonialism as based on economics (rather than on culture, more broadly interpreted), but as the intention to "impose conditions" for the sake of "material interests."  But compare this with Mrs. Gould, as her "unmercenary hands" handle a lump of silver: "she endowed that lump of metal with a justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergence of a principle."

Never neglect abstractions in Conrad!  "the emergence of a principle"--this is not only the author's effort to invest the silver with more than material interest, but is an effort, perhaps, to see that "principle," that "expression" clearly.  In other words, if this is going to be a truly worthwhile novel, then I have to believe that JC is striving to find a tale, and to tell it in such a way, that will help to illuminate this "principle"--considered as not simply what makes people involve themselves in risky adventures in foreign countries (though that, obviously, is something still germane to our day), but as something that justifies itself to the persons themselves, as definitive of their interests and purposes.  We might say "oil" is that for certain interests today, or the minerals necessary for computer technology, or (always) gold, or even works of art to those who pursue them as "investments."

It seems to me that Conrad has spent not a little labor to construct a foreign land in which he can make these issues unfold.  South America, as opposed to Africa, seems much the better setting (and of course the Middle East wouldn't be on his map the way it is for us), because it has an indigenous Indian culture, a Europeanized local culture, from the colonial Spanish era, and a modern sensibility brought by commerce and, of course, the English.  The Italian element seems to me a bit of fun on Conrad's part--removing the republican forces of "southern Europe" to "southern America" perhaps because the former are more familiar to him than the struggles for autonomy in South American countries, but also because they are probably more familiar to his readers.  In any case, it makes for an odd double-vision in which "Spanish" and "Italian" come to share a certain status.  It reminds me (again, via cinema) of Italian film (Sergio Leone) creating a version of the Mexican West.   Several times as well I had to think of Marquez's Macondo; though JC is not interested in the "fabular" to anything like the same degree, it seemed to me that a certain storied timelessness of the land and the people that Marquez creates so well is felt by Conrad's narrator, though he never makes himself one with it.  The narrator's struggle, rather, will be to reveal to the world of Captain Mitchells and Goulds truths they can only perceive by weighing the meaning of Costaguana and, ultimately (I assume), Nostromo.

In the comment to John's post about the Nostromo scene at the end of Part One, I expressed a faith in JC's ability to deliver some dramatic truth via Nostromo as a character, though at the same time I obseved that that truth would not come "from within."  Rather, I think there will be an effort to set forth Nostromo as the "emergence of a principle" in some relation to the "principle," the "emotion," the "conditions" described by the mine.  But whose perspective will this relation take place in?

The complicated POV of this novel may well be necessary to give us JC's characteristically indirect revelations.  No "character/narrator" could provide all the views, but the implied ironies of the narrator keep us guessing about the motives of telling us what we're told, showing us what we're shown, as much as about the degree to which we are to grant everything credence. We are told the mine took to Gould's "mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders.  He also began to dream of vampires."  Our narrator is having fun at Gould's expense, so that even when we read: "Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.  Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.  For his action, the mine was obviously the only field" -- we may see that the narrator is having fun in a different register.  Whether ghoul-haunted or lucid about action, Gould, like his wife's concept of the "principle" in the silver, is in search of a sustaining illusion, and his narrator seems to go with him so far as to suggest that, without the mine, there is no story and that the consolations of the story will be found, if they are, in how one reads the meaning of real things and real actions, in the conduct of one toward the other, precipitated by the "force" of the mine, its effects on local life, and its interests in political issues such as the Montero/Ribiera struggles.

The canvas is large and many figures are in the composition; the setting isn't "everything," but the setting, which the narrator has taken such pains to expound, makes this, as with other examples of JC's best work, a "lesson" to be gleaned from what occurs to Europeans out of their element.

A dénouement to be continued ....

A return after a busy holiday sabbatical! I’ll confess to having finished Nostromo nearly a week back now, Donald, so perhaps at this point it would make most sense for me to move backwards and hopefully meet you somewhere in the middle of Sulaco. There are a few particular passages and one episode I’d like to hear you address – the torture scene of Hirsch – but for now I’d like to register my final, larger impressions. To be frank, the novel simply didn’t work for me as a sheer matter of pacing. The first four hundred or so pages of my edition laboriously sets up a physical world, character relations, and an unresolved scenario, only to rush through – however professionally via Captain Mitchell’s cinematic flashback – the final pages to a tidy dénouement with little to do, really, with the people or circumstances of before. It would be presumptuous to claim that Conrad lost control of the material; yet as a reader, I felt an overarching fear on his part towards the end. Couldn’t this project in its time-span prove interminable? How long – that is, precisely how many pages – would he need recording the corrosive effects his later career upon Nostromo, or to maintain the same psychological pitch and sensual intensity for so large a cast as before? The novel holds the prospect, I think, of running to a thousand pages or more. From what I’ve read elsewhere, as it stands Nostromo took Conrad three years of tooth-pulling. And so it feels to me there’s an understandable failure of nerve concluding the book. (On a more precise note, this may have prompted the future-tense, narrative interjections scattered about previously – i.e. Sulaco’s eventual success as a republic  itself – though I don’t think they simply pave the way for the end. I’d like to know how these effected your reading, Donald.) So to conclude myself, this was an interesting book if not a satisfying one for reasons I’ll address soon.

Verdi’s very own capitaz de los cargadores

A few brief thoughts in busy times! An odd scene near the end of the first section that may shed some light on Conrad’s puzzling tone, or at least why he chose an Italian for his titular hero. And it is precisely as a ‘scene’ and set-piece of sorts that it merits comment:

   The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went round.

   “A knife!” he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the shoulder.

   Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo’s hand and bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him.

    “Stand on my foot,” he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.

    “No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame,” he said. “You shall have your present; and so that everyone should know who is your lover to-day, you may cut all the silver buttons off my coat.”

    There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.                         (Everyman, pp. 119-20)

This is surely a scene taken from the world of Verdi’s operas as much as Giorgio Viola, the Garabaldino, sputters along in the wake of his general. But it’s a bravado performance of sprezzatura, a conscious conformation to reputation with a complicit audience. Something deeper might be said about identity here, but I’d like to discuss the odd sort of feedback loop involved here. Shades of Julien Sorel and À bout de soufflé (“Bogie”), there’s a creeping strain of impersonation of popular culture. What happens is some idealized version of reality is taken up again in the real world: that is, an aspiring gangster or lover impersonates a film noir criminal or Casanova gangster modelled upon real-life figures. (A really interesting, much larger example would be the reception of Japonisme in late nineteenth-century Japan, where the Japanese learned what ‘Japanese’ was from French aesthetes.) Fiction and truth get blended, as in the passage above from Conrad, in a way that might only be called ‘ironic’ and is pretty unsettling for all the fun of it. But this also depends on a certain literariness of the characters involved, after all: to take my contention, our capitaz de los cargadores would have to know about popular romances, operatic melodrama, and certain stereotypes either first-hand or culturally, which his background might conceivably supply. (And lest we forget, Italian opera was eminently middle-class fare in the nineteenth-century.) Anyone who’s taken a peek at Conrad’s bodice-ripper Arrow of Gold knows that the author did, anyways.

    (On a tangential note, would it make any difference that Nostromo is from Genoa? It’s a detail emphasized once or twice before. Perhaps another notion or stereotype is at play here.)

    And lastly, couldn’t the figure of Martin Decoud fit this mould himself? Maybe all young journalists do and the figure of a vaguely bohemian Parisian hardly calls for a direct model, either. But regardless, it’s almost more interesting to me that Conrad held back a major character so long as he did in the novel. A certain pacing of character introduction – unwieldy phrase but that’s what it is – carries a certain epic effect, or at least a readerly sense of an expanding world and plot if it’s accomplished gradually enough. And it’s not the same as a slow character development, say; we already have a sense that the Viola girls will become important. For a counter-example then, an author might otherwise quickly introduce six characters or so and let their wheels spin on stage. (There’s a lurking question here of precisely how quickly an author might bring the full cast into the wings, barring those introductory character lists you get with Tolstoy; quantity loops into quality, the same way a character disappearing on page 100 can reappear five hundred pages later and make you feel like years have passed.) Not sure entirely what we might make of this but nevertheless I appreciate the human space coming into focus.

"It did not resemble the carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct, born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion"

It’s been a bit difficult falling in with the rhythms of the novel – at least a hundred or so pages in – but I think I’ve begun to realize why. Of course, Conrad’s irony and the jumbled sense of chronology lend themselves to all sorts of fruitful (and sympathetic) confusion on the readers’ part. But I think there’s a larger tension between the sheer level of detail, the building up of a world brick-by brick, and what I can’t help laughing at, the farcical tone approaching Waugh’s Black Mischief with only a more levelling pessimism. For the former, my edition notes a passage from Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) that might prove useful: writing Nostromo, Conrad relates how he had

like the prophet of old, ‘wrestled with the Lord’ for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile … The whole world of Costaguana … men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands), all the history, geography, politics, finance ….

Now there’s undoubtedly a remarkable level of detail and what might be called landscaping, all belonging in part to what’s been called a fictional ‘surplus’ seeming somehow truer to life. (Curiously enough, I personally find that the more Conrad delineates the picture, the harder it is for me to visualize it but perhaps that’s a paradox of my own tastes and faults.) But it seems like an awful expenditure of talent and energy for throw-aways such as the account of the bandit Hernandez and his adversary, the Fiscal of Tonoro “kicked all over the body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and face because of the great sensitiveness of his military colleague” (Everyman edition, pg. 101). I’m enjoying the book too much to call it overwritten; yet the dark humor of the story (e.g. the hackneyed sort of Italian interlude à la James) and Conrad’s style (e.g. the repetition of “letters to Don José Avellanos, his maternal uncle”, pg. 103) nearly undercut all these grand descriptions of mountains and even his psychological hair-pin turns. How do you reconcile these two currents of reality and farce, the former of the world and the latter banana republics? As a simple matter of reading, I feel like little spurts of speed separate what amount to set-pieces of a sort, however masterful. It’s a bit disorientating, really; in part, even sententiousness would make more sense. (See “The material apparatus of perfected civilisation ….”, pg. 90).

On something of a related note, Donald, I’d ask your opinion on the purposes of elaborate, ‘geographical’ descriptions like those of the novel’s opening. This kind of landscaping always seems to reflect some symbolist significance (like I mentioned in my first post) or lay the physical stage for later events. In the Goulds’ study, for instance, all those firearms are laid about on shelves just begging to be used. (Shades of Hedda Gabler!) But if you’re keeping the description broad enough – say covering a mountain range – and the reader feels there can’t be much more at stake than invoking sheer physical beauty, is that enough? Of course it is, I believe, but still I have a niggling feeling that I’m either missing something or this book could be about a hundred pages shorter. Until it takes off for me, I’m beginning to fear Nostromo might call for even cursory rereadings chapter-by-chapter. This is certainly a difficult world to enter.