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!