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.
