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.
This is a good passage to notice, for all the reasons you cite. And it points up what seems to me "the problem" so far: the Goulds have the weight of "full disclosure," so to speak; they are our surrogates, in the sense that bourgeois whites in this world are what we recognize immediately, so we get a lot of them in the First Part with everyone else, almost, seeming to be "local color." The question becomes how to make us believe in and accept and interpret the persons of this locality, a problem the Goulds have as well. So, to me, that justifies the lengthy, distracted "introduction" of Nostromo. He is far from the most important person here, socially, and it will take some time to see him become important.
ReplyDeleteBut what does this scene do for us? It plays on the things you mention, and your Godard ref is brilliant because my sense of our hero at this moment was filtered through film rather than Italian opera, though you're right to point out JC's familiarity with the latter. The point being: we've all seen this sort of thing--use of a recognizable stereotype for the sake of the reader's acceptance, but also, more complexly, a given sense of the character's awareness of his exploitation of "type." Behind this I'd suggest something else, devil's advocate-wise: that the stereotype does come from somewhere; that the "expressiveness" of Nostromo here is true to type, that, in other words, he's the type of person who lives his life "epically," and, given an audience, will conform to its expectations with what (to our minds) is a "filmable gesture." In other words, I'm giving JC the benefit of the doubt: his hero is sommeone who rises to "what is expected"--whether by bored locals looking for a romantic moment to talk about later, or by his superiors looking for a factotum equal to any task.
The scene, a crowd-pleaser, doesn't give me much to go on yet about Nostromo as a character; if my faith in JC isn't sustained then these sorts of scenes will be all we get.
But the question arises: will we ever see Nostromo from within? Is that possible? Note how we immediately turn to Capt Mitchell talk of "historic occasion" and "fatality" (in quotation marks!). JC is slow to show his hand in this one!
Excellent, thanks Donald! I like the notion of the Goulds as our very own entry point into the world. Even the vaguely Jamesian backstory might be a way of easing us into a different novel. (Whether that's warranted or successful, well, I'll wait to see your response!) Your thoughts on Nostromo himself might also hint at some of my own early dissatisfaction. The character might be, as you suggested, all gesture at this point. The book might progress as he grows into a character; that is, Conrad's subject in part may be the psychological movement from nothing to someone, with the former no less delineated or convincing as the expansion into a believable personality. (I won't ruin anything by saying Conrad does devote a few amazingly well-written pages to just this later on, brought on by reasons you'll see though I don't quite follow them.) But that's an awful risk to taking, asking readers to care about a 'potential' character or psychological ex voto.
ReplyDeleteSome of your comments now make more sense (about Decoud, who I've now encountered finally), but I don't have much to say about your speculations about the pacing. I find I don't have any problem with a new character being added to dominate Part II. I'm grateful for it because Decoud, "the adopted child of Western Europe," brings to the tale a consciousness that was lacking, character-wise. Much more than Gould, he can be a character/narrator (as with his letters to his sister) and so can move us much more closely to the zone of influence of Nostromo. I'll save my comments on their time together on the boat to my own post, but it seems to me that the introduction of Decoud allows JC to comment about the very operatic quality you describe (in statements about idealists and sentimentalists, etc., that reflect on the kind of Romanticism we've been encouraged to see in Nostromo and even in the Goulds' emotional investment in the mine).
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