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.