The Secret History of Costaguana

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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. Sulaco province (suh-LAH-koh). Only maritime province of Costaguana and the only province in the country with a sound economy, thanks to its silver industry. The province has tried to gain its independence several times. After various military reversals, its independence is once again established by the end of the novel, with some degree of economic stability guaranteed by the mining of its silver resources. Though the characters are not very “deep,” and much of the hermeneutic interest of the Marlow narratives is absent, the novel also entertains a characteristically modernist interest in psychology and mental states. Nostromo even features a neat example of self-reference: in his 1917 Author’s Note, Conrad wryly cites as his major source the History of Fifty Years of Misrule, an imaginary book written by one of Nostromo’s characters. Centrally, though, this novel is at the crux of epic literature’s transition from the reasonably coherent forms of Balzac and Tolstoy to the confounding sagas of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Nostromo is path-breaking both for its representation of an entire post-colonial society engaged with global capitalism, and for its reworking of the historical novel in an age when traditional historiography, the omniscient perspective, and the idea of progress could no longer be taken seriously.

As any good novelist would do, Conrad did not refrain from transmuting people he met elsewhere and later, not necessarily in South America, into lively characters of his Costaguana story. 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]

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However, that decision ends up being his downfall. Greed is not good, Nostromo. The O.S.N. decides to build a lighthouse on the Great Isabel, which makes Nostromo pretty anxious that someone will find the silver. To solve that problem, he make sure that his friends the Violas get installed there as caretakers. He gets engaged to the eldest Viola daughter, figuring it would give him the perfect excuse to be on the island skulking around. The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo.

Gould Concession. Silver mine located about ten miles from the town, that has been run by the Gould family for three generations. Not only has the mine been a curse to Charles Gould’s father, it is the cause of much bloodshed, bribery, and political maneuvering. However “pure” its silver, and however efficiently the mine is run, Conrad uses this notion to question whether material wealth can ever be a civilizing force of itself, or only ever a corrupting, sapping one. The novel’s central dialogue over the nature of imperialism focuses on the mine. During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, [note 11] a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885, just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship Tilkhurst. These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology. However, things do not go according to plan. It is almost impossible to provide an account of the plot without giving away what are called in movie criticism ‘plot spoilers’. But the silver does not reach its intended destination, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with both the civil conflict and the attitudes of the people who know that the silver exists, and their vainglorious attempts to acquire it.Living away from one's natural environment—family, friends, social group, language—even if it results from a conscious decision, usually gives rise to... internal tensions, because it tends to make people less sure of themselves, more vulnerable, less certain of their... position and... value... The Polish szlachta and... intelligentsia were social strata in which reputation... was felt... very important... for a feeling of self-worth. Men strove... to find confirmation of their... self-regard... in the eyes of others... Such a psychological heritage forms both a spur to ambition and a source of constant stress, especially if [one has been inculcated with] the idea of [one]'s public duty... [44]

Costaguana. Imaginary South American republic vaguely located on the continent’s west coast, with the bulk of the country over the mountains, or cordillera, where is situated its capital, Santa Marta. Costaguana suffers under political corruption and instability, and its people live in great poverty. 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. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires [17] [note 6]—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. [19] Postcolonial analysis of Conrad's work has stimulated substantial debate; in 1975, author Chinua Achebe published an article denouncing Heart of Darkness as racist and dehumanising, whereas other scholars, including Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow, have rebutted Achebe's view.Conrad is relentless in his willingness to confront every unpleasant truth. He will not even admire a beautiful edifice: "The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the conquerors", he writes, "proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the tribute-labour of vanished nations." It is in the totality of his realism that the author--a Pole who knew Russian tyranny as a boy and later spent fifteen tough years in the merchant marine--achieves fairness. (In one sentence he demolishes North and South: "There is always something childish in the rapacity of the passionate, clear-minded, Southern races, wanting in the misty idealism of the Northerners, who at the slightest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth.") And it is in his sympathy for individuals, rather than for groups, that Conrad achieves humanity. For Nostromo, like any great story, is about individuals and their desperate need for love. In an August 1901 letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review, Conrad wrote: "Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism." [116] [note 25] Death [ edit ] Conrad's grave at Canterbury Cemetery, near Harbledown, Kent Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter by Conrad to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska ( née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels: