Indeed, Nostromo is a remarkable achievement. It has been long recognized that it is, by far, a vivid and, above all, a most credible literary re-creation of a newly-formed South American nation—the Republic of Costaguana. Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns the silver-mining concession in Sulaco. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and puts his weight behind the Ribierist project, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, the silver mine and the wealth it has generated become a bone for the local warlords to fight over, plunging Costaguana into a new round of chaos. Among others, the revolutionary Montero invades Sulaco; Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to Nostromo, the trusted ‘capataz de los cargadores’ (head longshoreman). Despite all Conrad’s stylistic peculiarities (and even some lapses in grammar) this is a magnificent novel which amply repays the undoubtedly demanding efforts required to read it. But that is true of many modern classics – from Mrs Dalloway to Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story " Youth" as " Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; [175] and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the SS Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant". [176] Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. [177] Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz [note 23] show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—"surprising", Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state." [110]

What [Conrad] really learned as a sailor was not something empirical—an assembly of "places and events"—but the vindication of a perspective he had developed in childhood, an impartial, unillusioned view of the w During the war that ensues, Nostromo is asked to help the Goulds get one of their silver shipments out of Sulaco before rebel forces arrive in town, so they can't get their grubby rebel paws on it. As part of the same mission, he is supposed to get Martin Decoud out of town. Martin, a journalist who is really critical of Montero and his people, would have been in mortal danger once Montero got to town. The plan is to meet up with a passing boat and put Martin and the silver on there. I always remember what you said when I was leaving [Kraków]: "Remember"—you said—"wherever you may sail, you are sailing towards Poland!" Jean-Aubrey, G. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Vol. 2 of 2. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1927. 226.Poland had been divided among Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795. The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising of Poland-Lithuania against the Russian Empire. [25] Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the "Red" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland and which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad. [26] [note 8] Nowy Świat 47, Warsaw, where three-year-old Conrad lived with his parents in 1861. Warren, Robert Penn. Introduction. Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. New York: Random House, 1951. x, xxxix.

In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:It was written by professor Malcolm Deas in an essay originally written in Spanish and titled “Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.” 1 There are plenty of cultural elements drawn from republics located on the River Plate banks, such as Argentina and Uruguay. But Costaguana’s geography is unmistakably Venezuelan, Colombian and Panamanian. Yet, speaking in hindsight, long after Nostromo was published, Conrad adamantly insisted that Costaguana meant any South American nation. Hence the outlandish mixture of costumes and Spanish idioms that so fascinatingly baffle Latin American readers to whom Costaguana brings to their minds a world at once familiar and alien.

Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Józef Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain. [101] [note 22] Perhaps this portrayal of an epoch of American imperial power in the making has led many modern and post-modern critics astray when they came to ponder the true motives Conrad could have had to write a novel so at variance with the mass of his work. I use several narratological terms drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. “Metadiegetic narrative” refers to a story within a story, in this particular case the retelling of events by one of the characters of Nostromo.

Reviews

Dr. Monygham, an expatriate English doctor in Costaguana, understands all of this and is determined to help Gould--not because he likes Gould, but because he admires Gould's wife, Emily, who, he realizes, intuits the reality of the country to which her husband appears deaf and dumb. Dr. Monygham is the dark cynic of Nostromo, whose very morality is thought to be in question. Dr. Monygham has met "the impossible face to face", through the eyes of dying patients whom he cannot save. He sees through the seductive lie that all situations are clean slates open to broad possibilities. He is wise because he has had experience: the experience of undergoing torture under a previous Costaguanan regime. Torture, Conrad explains, was like a "naturalization" procedure, since it allowed Dr. Monygham to understand life like a true Costaguanan. Indeed, he has become the psychological "slave of a ghost": the ghost of the inquisitorial priest who abused him. (The author alludes to a bright future for torture in the twenty-first century, because as man's passions grow more complex, helped by technological development, his ability to inflict pain on his fellow man will grow infinitely more refined--just look at the twentieth century! Torture may be but an offshoot of progress.) Though Dr. Monygham himself might be beyond redemption, as another character in the story concludes, "He saved us all from the deadly incubus of [the war-lord] Sotillo, where a more particular man might have failed."