With the publication in 1895 of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad was hailed, understandably enough, as a trafficker in the exotic. Matters did not change much with his second novel. Reviewers seize upon what comes readily to hand and the title - An Outcast of the Islands (1896) - might have been chosen to direct attention towards local colour, romance, savages, half-castes, and, in the more serious reviews, questions about whether white men degenerate in the East. With his third novel, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Conrad was in danger of being classified as someone who had widened out from the Malayan Archipelago and Borneo to the high seas and joined the category of ‘marine story-tellers’.
Conrad criticism for the next half-century or so was often concerned to controvert this - often at Conrad’s own bidding. He complained on a number of occasions about the ‘sea stuff’ with which his name was associated; in the well-known letter to Henry S. Canby written in the last year of his life he is still concerned to argue that the problem which faces the crew of the Narcissus is not a problem of the sea but one which happens to arise on board a ship where it stands out with particular force.
There is now little danger that he will be discussed as a genre novelist or a romantic novelist of exotic passions, so that it may be useful to comment that it is actually time that his subject-matter, the range of feelings with which he is concerned and the circumstances under which his characters operate, are somewhat specialized. He writes little about love, marriage, and family life and, with a few notable exceptions, when he does so he is not very successful; the exceptions tend to be such unhappy or suppressed families as the Goulds and the Verlocs. Most of his stories are set outside what for most of his readers is normal life, the professions of his characters are unusual ones, and the opportunities and problems which confront them are unlike those which face most of us. We can of course note that the plights of his characters are often extreme forms of our own. The narrator of ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1909) is not unusual in having doubts about his competence in a new job and Marlow in ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) is not the first man to tell a lie to save the feelings of a survivor.1 We may go on emphasizing that he deals with moral problems against a background of shipwreck, revolution, conspiracy, and exploration and not with these unusually exciting happenings for their own sake, but we are aware that the material of his stories now occurs most often in such specialized forms as the thriller, the genres which we associate with Graham Greene’s entertainments and the books of Eric Ambler. I discuss in Chapter 6 how some of the material which we take for granted in much nineteenth-century fiction has now been hived off into special forms.
But if his work was once trivialized by labelling it exotic and maritime there may now be a danger of not paying enough attention to his primary themes. These, particularly because they are presented allusively and indirectly and with a high rhetoric, may seem so alien to many readers that they are assimilated to more general concerns. I have the impression that, more than other novelists of this century, Conrad has too often been talked about in the large phrases of generalization about twentieth-century man and his existential dilemmas. Quite often in endeavouring to establish some relationship with Conrad’s themes critics have reinterpreted them so as to bring them closer to their own situations and preoccupations and to some supposedly shared problems. This is the effect, if not the intention, for example, of J. Hillis Miller’s comment in the Casebook Series study of The Secret Agent (1973):
I would also include among examples of this tendency the line of thought which emphasizes the self-referential nature of the novels (basing this on the choice of a teacher of languages to narrate Under Western Eyes and Conrad’s frequent comments on the difficulty of conveying information in the unreliable medium of words), many of the psychoanalytical interpretations, and those which, noting that Conrad’s characters often have many names (Charles Gould, Charlie, El Rey de Sulaco, the Señor Administrador, Don Carlos) recruit him into the camp of those with identity crises.
There are, of course, elements of all these matters in his work; Nostromo is unsure of his role, Marlow does emphasize the impossibility of making his listeners see Kurtz as he saw him, Winnie Verloc certainly thinks of Stevie as both matter and spirit. But the effect of claiming that these are the central themes is to deny that Conrad is writing about betrayal and treachery and doubts about courage and the realization that your masters who have praised you have also used you and given you a special, slightly patronizing, name in the process. Conrad writes about these subjects partly because, when he came to writing, these were what he knew in a way that very few writers have known them and partly because he thought that the English needed to be told them. For Conrad certainly thought of himself as in some ways an exotic. He may have been glad in later life to play the part of the retired sea-dog, but he often made it clear that - to take a minor example - he did not really understand the English sense of humour; the English, it may be added, often did not understand his and, on occasions, found it offensive. His outlook is alien and it is rooted in politics.
Conrad is often described as having a ‘political’ phase in his career and to an extent this is true. Three novels written within a few years of one another stand out as overtly political in theme and they are generally judged to be among his best - Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). But the preoccupations of his earlier works are not different in kind. From the beginning, though not dealing with specifically political themes, he nevertheless displays interests which underlie the political novels. It has often been commented that he is preoccupied by the essential loneliness of each one of us and this is emphasized because his characters tend to be wanderers and exiles, seeking adventure or acceptance. One of the ways in which he shows this isolation is in the contrast between private experience and public appearance. This is, of course, true of all novelists - Bennett in The Old Wives’ Tale makes it clear that only the draper’s wife, Constance Povey, knows what her experience is; Forster in A Passage to India shows that only the chaperone, Mrs Moore, can reckon with what happens to her in the Marabar caves - but Conrad so designs his stories that we are made particularly aware of multiplicity of roles and of the extent to which the public ones are as real as the others and cannot be denied by their possessors. The very title of Lord Jim (1900), for example, underlines this. It names the central character in the form in which others would speak of him and in so doing directs attention to what is central in Jim’s plight. Put at its simplest we may say that, as an officer in the merchant navy, Jim’s situation is irredeemable; no later courage, no devotion to duty can ever wipe away the professional failure; nobody, knowing the facts, would ever give him the only job which could satisfy his urge to link his dreams of success with daily life. Indeed, it would be illegal for them to do so; his certificate has been cancelled. Yet as a private man he cannot accept this. All the ruminations of Marlow and the other reflectors take place within the area of this contradiction. Whether we believe that there can be no appeal against the dismissive verdict of the French lieutenant or whether we believe that the fixed code of professional duty is inhuman, we know that all Jim’s efforts are quixotic, sometimes heroic, always romantic delusions. Jim is not willing to lead a purely private life; his early romantic daydreams centre round the exercise of his profession and his career in Patusan is an attempt to expunge a failed public life by the creation of a new triumphant one. In this it is akin to Charles Gould’s desire in Nostromo to transform his father’s failure with the silver mine into his own success as a power for good in the land.
One concomitant of this concern for the public life is an awareness of power, not simply economic or institutionalized authority—though there is a good deal of this in the hierarchy of command in many of his early works—but what in his letter to Canby he called ‘the psychology of a group of men’, the way in which one man imposes his will upon another by emotional or moral suasion, the way in which groups can be moved to follow or to resist. In particular he is fascinated by those kinds of appeal which rest not upon institutions but upon psychological ascendancy. Wait in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim have often been instanced as examples, as has, of course, the most striking example, Mr Kurtz. Lord Jim’s own appeal to Marlow is similar, though complicated by their sharing of a profession and the feelings of loyalty, responsibility, and shame which this brings to the older man.
Relationships of this kind, dealing so much with unacknowledged feelings and normally unexplored recesses of the personality, could not be presented in any cut-and-dried way. They seem to demand indirect methods which hint and suggest rather than state—methods which we may loosely call impressionistic or symbolic without implying that Conrad was deliberately allying himself with any fictional doctrines. Related to this is his use of sharp contrasts of viewpoint and sudden disjunctions in time which force us to keep revaluing our judgements. No sooner do we receive an acceptable view of a character’s actions and motives than we are given a very different account from within a different framework of reference. Ford Madox Ford’s account of this in his discussion of Conrad’s work attributes it to their shared ideas of the progression deffet but, quite apart from the question of Ford’s reliability, this does not adequately explain the relationship between the technique and the outlook. My suggestion is that the strange paradox of the coexistence of sharp, often brutal contrasts produced by shift of viewpoint with an apparently vague and free-floating description of psychological states—the mingling of hints which will not become statements on the one hand and sardonic summings-up on the other—corresponds to Conrad’s basic conception of men as living in a world which imposes many judgements on them and in which no integration of the whole man is possible. It would be too simple to suggest that the floating states correspond to the more private aspects of personality and the sudden reversals of judgement to the public, professional, political aspects, because Conrad does not make the mistake of taking the public as merely external; he knows that we are made privately of what we are made publicly; but it is apparent that he often makes his sharpest political judgements by a juxtaposition of two viewpoints.
The combination of dogmatic statements, hints, and the eloquence of the prose, which has often been commented upon in terms of its orotundity, leads inevitably to the suspicion that Conrad is asserting that he is dealing with the most fundamental issues while retreating into vagueness when we most hope for a statement. This objection was most forcefully put by E. M. Forster in 1920. Though initially writing here about Notes on Life and Letters, the criticism extends beyond this volume to what Forster calls ‘half a dozen great books’: ‘These essays do suggest that he is misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel.’2 It is interesting that Forster goes on to suggest that the obscurity is due to a kind of double vision; ‘there are constant discrepancies between his nearer and his further vision, and here would seem to be the cause of his central obscurity’. This is surely the criticism which must be met, and if there is one story against which it could most reasonably be made it is that one in which we are specifically told at the outset that the meaning of the narrator’s stories lies not ‘inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze’ - ‘Heart of Darkness’.
‘Heart of Darkness’ has probably had more critical attention per word than any other modern prose work, with the possible exception of Ulysses, whose greater length may be thought to dilute the criticism a little. The obvious reason for this is that it resists simple readings and demands an effort of interpretation. Some of the critical accounts have been excellent but in many ingenuity takes over rather early from sense. The question arises: has it attracted so many divergent interpretations because Forster was right? Have critics been forced to wilder and wilder excesses of interpretation not only because the story is a favourite text in Eng. Lit. courses but because at its heart there is a hollow waiting to be filled up?
It is around Mr Kurtz that uncertainties are bound to accumulate because it is in the relationship between him and Marlow that the book centres. Since Marlow narrates the story and is coming to terms as he tells it with an experience from his past, it is a part of the effect of the story that he should find some difficulty in telling it and, indeed, that at times he should seem overwhelmed by what he is remembering.
Much of this sense of being overwhelmed is given by the dynamics of narration, the hints, foreshadowings, speedings up, slowings down, and it is for this reason regrettable that we do not usually discuss ‘Heart of Darkness’ until we have forgotten what it is like to read it as distinct from what it is like to have read it: that is, when the sense of the novel as a temporal activity has been virtually entirely expunged from our minds by the sense of it as a spatial quasi-object.
A very simple example of the importance of temporal progression is the way in which Conrad often achieves vividness of description; the most obvious example in this story is the account of the stabbing of the helmsman, which is first registered as his pulling a stick out of someone’s hand and overbalancing and is then reinterpreted as his being stabbed in the side and falling over, clutching the spear. Moreover if this is true of such localized effects as the stabbing of the helmsman it is also seen in the larger sweep of the story where we are presented with a sequence of happenings, many of them bewildering and fragmentary, and only subsequently comprehend them. But the effect is not merely one of vividness; more significantly the narrative method is the form in which Marlow’s fascination with Kurtz is dramatized. Our sense of the effect of Kurtz on Marlow is not produced primarily by statements about him but rather by the dynamic way in which we see Marlow being overwhelmed.
The form of retrospective narration gives great freedom for the narrator’s mind to range backwards and forwards; for example, in the middle of explaining that he got the job because his predecessor had been killed, Marlow leaps forward to say ‘when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones’. But for a considerable stretch up to the attack on the boat, the narrative settles down to a forward chronological movement: the passage round the coast, the arrival at the station, the overland journey to the Central Station, delay, then the journey up-river and then the attack by what Marlow assumes to be Kurtz’s enemies but, by the time he is telling the story, knows to be his devotees. The helmsman is killed, the attack is beaten off and then the steady forward movement is broken and memories of Kurtz come flooding hardly comprehensibly into Marlow’s narrative—‘the deceitful flow from the heart of an inpenetrable darkness’ … ‘I have heard more than enough’ … ‘I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie’. The effect is as if, having described the defeat of the last obstacle to his encounter with Kurtz, Marlow can no longer maintain control over his memories.
But what, we must ask, is the nature of this power which Kurtz has to impose himself upon Marlow to the extent that he chooses to allow the other officials to lump him in with Kurtz as a member of the party of‘unsound method’? The answer, it seems to me, is implied in those two words. Kurtz is not a hypocrite; he is not to be moved by euphemistic labels. Nor - and this point is often blurred - is he significantly worse than the others. He has killed for his pleasure but those he kills are no more dead than those worked to death or condemned to death by the others for their economic and professional advancement. Kurtz is not so much a new figure, transcending the rapacity of colonization, as its logical culmination gifted with self-knowledge. He does not speculate about what the head office will think of his activities and he does not attempt to justify what he is doing in terms of sound trading methods. This makes him more compelling than the respectable chief accountant who makes ‘correct entries of perfectly correct transactions’ within sight of those whom these strictly legal dealings, recorded with arithmetical accuracy, have killed; but it only makes him more wicked if we judge individual evil as worse than communal evil.
Much of the puzzlement which has been felt about this story has come about as a result of dividing it into two parts - the picture of colonialism in the first half and an explanation of the second half in terms of a rather vague conception of metaphysical evil. I think that this has happened because it has often been felt that the overwhelming sense of horror and evil of the later parts in some ways transcends the sphere of politics. This may be understandable if we think of political choices as having to do with slightly theoretical matters of administration. But that was not a mistake which was likely to be made by someone with Conrad’s background and if we consider the wider hints given in the story, especially those related to what we may loosely call the framework of narration, we are less likely to make this mistake.
It has often been pointed out that the end of the story contains a precise verbal echo of a passage near the beginning:
This harks back to the paragraph which describes how
The effect is to return us at the end to the same waterway that has, at the beginning, seemed to invite admiration for the explorers and imperialists who have sailed from it and to show, with the echo of that word ‘darkness’ on which so many changes have been rung, that those voyages have led out to actions not unlike those of Mr Kurtz. More generally, the awareness of darkness which the story has generated is brought back home; not only the centre of Africa is dark.
The story was written for Blackwood’s Magazine and the introduction of a narrator within an appropriate setting for the spinning of a yarn is a very familiar way of opening a magazine story; Blackwood’s specialized in adventurous stories and the original readers must have felt quite at home with the first page or two. But they would have received something of a shock towards the end of the paragraph of which I have been speaking when they came across mention of ‘the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests - and that never returned’. The men of Sir John Franklin’s expedition in search of the North-west Passage did not merely fail to return; they were sought for a long time and in 1854 John Rae reported to the Admiralty, on the basis of Eskimo accounts, that some of them appeared to have prolonged their lives by cannibalism. This suggestion was opposed at once in Household Words on the basis that Eskimos were unreliable and British seamen would not have done such a thing, but thereafter the scandalous story rose to the surface from time to time, often provoking denials of its possibility. In October 1880, for example, Admiral Richards wrote to The Times, blaming Eskimos for cutting up some of the bodies, in reply to the account of the American expedition to the Arctic led by Lieutenant Schwatka. At the beginning of ‘Heart of Darkness’, in short, the readers of Blackwood’s (though not, so far as I have been able to discover, modern critics) were reminded of a well-known scandal about an activity popularly supposed to be practised in the heart of the dark continent (and which is associated when we come to the middle of the tale with surprising restraint) but which may actually have been committed by their own countrymen.3
I am emphasizing these original readers because it seems clear that Conrad is taking into account certain of their likely expectations and playing ironically against them, most strikingly in his dealing with the concept of‘going native’. He arouses expectations about this supposed activity in speculations about how the Romans felt when they arrived among the British ‘savages’, but he soon checks any simple assumption not only by his descriptions of the farcical brutality of white men by contrast with the black men who ‘wanted no excuse for being there’ but also by likening the local people’s abandoning of the countryside over which the white men travel to the probable behaviour of the English if they were subjected to forced labour by a lot of men who were ‘travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend’. There are inconsistencies in the attitudes to colonization expressed, especially at the beginning of the story; Marlow, for example, sees with approval those parts of Africa coloured red on the map, he speaks of efficiency as the only quality which saves ‘us’ (presumably the English) and shows with contempt the inefficiency of the traders of the story, yet the efficient accountant is perhaps the most chilling of them all. These, and other, inconsistencies may be the result of uncertainties in Conrad’s own mind; he is not a systematic and theoretical thinker and his works gain much of their force from the sense that he is exploring his own contradictions.4 He was certainly a paradoxical man who often claimed impeccably respectable and rather conservative views while writing corrosively subversive novels. But the inconsistencies may be intentional and designed to prevent his readers from being alienated too soon and we may assume that Marlow, in telling his story, is recreating the frame of mind of that part of it which he is narrating at the time. The easy way out for the English reader of the time was presumably to disapprove of King Leopold’s notorious exploitation of the Congo without drawing any general conclusions about colonization.
It is with the account of Kurtz’s report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs that the inadequacy of the concept of ‘going native’ is made clear. This society is clearly based upon the International Association for the Suppression of Slavery and the Opening Up of Central Africa which had been formed by Leopold II in 1876 and its rhetoric is reminiscent of the common European account of relations between Europeans and Africans.5 Of this report Marlow says:
After a parody of the hollow rhetoric - the peroration gives him ‘the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence’ - he quotes the note at the foot of the last page, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ The opening paragraph is, indeed, ominous, for it makes perfectly clear that Kurtz, of whom we are told ‘all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’, took with him from Europe this conception of the superior race which alone justified colonial activity and which led to vast slaughter in the Congo. Conrad makes it quite clear that Kurtz has not ‘gone native’, except in the sense that some of his indulgences are peculiar to Africa. What he has manifested is not a succumbing to the more primitive, but oppression by the advanced European.
But Conrad is not only writing about the evils of colonization; he makes perfectly clear towards the end of the story that he regards it as an index of what men may come to do in Europe. The other ‘pilgrims’ of trade are held back by timidity or hypocrisy from following Kurtz’s logic, just as Marlow tells his listeners that they are themselves kept in order by social forces, ‘the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums’, but once someone arrives to whom you can appeal in the name of nothing but himself there will be little to stop him. Nor need he be a ‘great’ man, if by ‘great’ we mean possessed of striking originality of mind or intellectual powers. Kurtz is a hollow man, he is ‘avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearance of success and power’. The combination of burning eloquence and mean ambition must have seemed, when the story was written, puzzling, for the obvious type of the eloquent and charismatic leader must for most people have been Napoleon; we, the better part of a century later, should not be surprised at the combination of demagogic leadership with banality.
The implication that colonization is merely a special case of domination is stated without ambiguity when Marlow returns to Europe:
The journalist, who knew Kurtz before he went to Africa, defines Kurtz’s potentialities very clearly:
Even the not very successful interview with the Intended, a passage in which Conrad’s tendency to idealize young women in a manner which also diminishes their reality is seen at its worst, is more effective if we do not try to relate Kurtz to a vague metaphysical sense of evil but rather to that evil which is done under the sun and which we can see, the evil which Conrad saw as lying at the heart of colonial exploitation and potentially in other oppressions. The Intended then takes her place with the other inhabitants of the European capital and also harks back to Marlow’s aunt who, living in the middle of ‘all that humbug’, saw him as ‘Something like an emissary of light’ and who talks about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’.
The sense of confusion and at times of vagueness and muddle in the story is not, I think, at the heart of it. Indeed, the heart of the darkness is very precise and if Conrad’s only intention had been to alert us to the evils committed by others, if, that is, he had wanted to be one more denouncer of the behaviour of Leopold in the Congo, he could have performed the task very expeditiously. But the essence of the story is that Marlow, in his alternations of contempt and revulsion and fascination, should take us with him; I have suggested that in one very simple way he was meant to take with him the original Blackwood’s readers; within the story he takes not only the listener who reports his story but also the other listeners, the Accountant, the Director of Companies and the Lawyer (well may one of them interject ‘Try to be civil, Marlow’ when he seems to disparage their work). Marlow is struggling with his memories, trying to make sense of his reactions; in returning us at the end to a Thames which leads out to ‘the heart of an immense darkness’ the story may be taking a step beyond what Marlow could know.
But there is one very simple question which is not asked in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and it is, in this, like several of the early works. Why, if he is convinced near the beginning of his journey of the inherent evil of the colonizing process, does Marlow continue to work for the colonizers? Why does not Conrad raise this issue? Why, similarly, we may ask, does Conrad exclude from ‘Youth’ any question of the morality of shipping men in a coffin ship; a merchant seaman would have been well aware of everything that led up to the Plimsoll Merchant Shipping Act of 1875; but the only hint we have is a jocular one about saving as much as possible from the burning ship for the underwriters. To such questions there are a number of answers; the simplest is that Conrad himself had done what he describes and he writes of what he knows. We can add to this that there is no room in the stories for such concerns; we must have a Marlow to observe Kurtz and the colonizers and he has enough to digest without worrying about the morality of his own employment. More generally, this delimitation is a manifestation of a framework within which short-term efficiency and the doing of one’s duty are accepted virtues. Captain Beard is allowed to have certain aims untarnished and so is Marlow, though it is worth noting that he comes back down the river not as a captain but as a passenger. The questions would not even occur to one were it not that in the overtly political novels these are often the kinds of issues with which Conrad does deal; in them he seems to take nothing for granted. The policeman who is mentioned in ‘Heart of Darkness’ is a traditional figure of order; in The Secret Agent when Stevie asks what the police are for, his sister, avoiding the word ‘steal’ which upsets her feeble-minded brother, formulates her answer in terms which could hardly be improved upon by the anarchist Professor: ‘They are there so as them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from those who have’ (8).
The three novels which we call political - Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes - widen the scope of Conrad’s presentation of human dilemmas and represent the summit of his achievement before a marked decline. But they are not fundamentally different in outlook from the earlier works. Conrad does not conceive of a separate sphere of life, an optional extra, called politics. An Englishman of his generation might have thought that politics was an activity into which he was free to dip or not. The son of Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski could not and this was not merely because of any specifically familial situation, though it must have been that, too, but because anyone born into the educated classes in what had once been Poland but was now a part of the Tsarist Empire would have known that every significant detail of social life was political. The plight of Razumov in Under Western Eyes can stand as a parable of this: he does not wish to involve himself in politics and positively isolates himself from the political concerns of his fellow students; therefore he is the man to whom Haldin goes for shelter after he has assassinated the Minister of State. He cannot be neutral; he must connive at assassination and risk Siberia or he must betray Haldin and, as he discovers, work for the secret police.
The specifically political nature of the first, the largest and the best, of the three political novels, Nostromo, published in 1904, is made abundantly clear from the start. It is often found confusing and unwelcoming by readers coming to it for the first time and this is because its form throughout asserts its meaning—the subordination of individuals to the social and political situation. The apparently rebarbative presentation, the going backwards and forwards in time, the introduction of characters in asides or as if we already know about them, the effect of muddle, are part of the meaning. Much of what we see in the second, third and fourth chapters in a series of sharply presented but often incomprehensible actions is described clearly and sequentially much later in Decoud’s letter to his sister, just as the past history of Costaguana with all its oppression, civil warfare, and suffering is doubtless made easily comprehensible in Don José Avallanos’s famous Fifty Years of Misrule. Individuals experience and suffer in a confused situation which can later be seen as part of a process of which other people can make sense. People are less important and less free than they think. It is typical of this irony that the removal of the silver in the lighter by Decoud and Nostromo is intended as a desperate measure to retain the support of the financiers upon whom Gould and the Blancos depend; the silver is lost but this has no effect whatever upon those financiers and nobody even mentions this apparently surprising miscalculation.
What we acquire in the first fifty pages or so is not a feeling that we are getting to know individual characters, though a number of them are introduced to us in sharp, usually visual, detail, but a sense of the economic and political situation in which they are involved. The unifying factor of the presentation is the emphasis upon manipulation and the exercise of power. The first mention of the politics of Costa-guana is typical; Mitchell asserts his priorities, which are the priorities of all those who have invested time and money in this underdeveloped republic, when he says that ‘he accounted as most unfavourable to the orderly working of his Company the frequent changes of government brought about by revolutions of the military type’ (1. 2). It is no surprise that the chairman of the railway company knows that the acquisition of land for the line is a matter of‘the judicious influencing’ of those in power; ‘it was only a matter of price’. The rhetoric and the realities of Costaguanan politics are summed up well in the reflection about the President-Dictator: ‘After all he was their own creature - that Don Vincente. He was the embodied triumph of the best elements in the State’ (1. 5). The effect which Conrad achieves by his fragmented and allusive presentation is of a situation which is taken for granted; there is no moment at which we feel that a moral stance should be taken, no moment of shocked revelation. When, much later, in Part in, Chapter 7, we are specifically informed that ‘Every Minister of the Interior drew a salary from the San Tomé mine. It was natural’ it does not surprise us; the best elements in the State, the allies of the honourable Avellanos, the opponents of the mob, are not less greedy than Sotillo or Montero, merely more discreet and more respectable.
One of the most striking ways in which Conrad asserts the immersion of his characters in a political situation and the consequent attrition of their individual freedom is the manner in which their roles are defined by titles, sobriquets, simplifying descriptions: Gould is the Senõr Administrador, the Inglese, el Rey de Sulaco, Don Carlos as well as Charlie; often the titles are piled up in one description; Decoud is ‘The brilliant “Son Decoud”, the spoiled darling of the family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco’, Viola is ‘sailor, champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace of Mrs Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour’; Nostromo is ‘Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and faithful Nostromo’. This last example is particularly striking for it occurs at the moment when he decides to steal the treasure, but the effect of such descriptions is always mockingly diminishing.
The progress of many of the characters is towards an understanding of what roles they are forced to play and how small is the area within which they are free. This effect of determinism is announced by the introduction on the second page of the story told by the local people, ‘associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth’, of the treasure seekers who died on the desolate promontory of Azuera and haunt the treasure from which they cannot tear themselves away. Nostromo repeatedly likens himself, and Sodilo, to the legendary guardians of treasure, but the image reverberates throughout the book as appropriate to so many of them. Their fate is determined by the chosen symbol even before we meet them.
The most thoroughly developed study of a man who is devoted to the silver of the mine is that of Charles Gould, whose ancestry, courtship, marriage, and subsequent career as administrator of the mine is the first lengthy sequential section of the book after the setting out of the scene and the political assumptions in the first five chapters.
I have suggested that Conrad assumes in ‘Heart of Darkness’ that his expected reader will have certain assumptions about the colonial enterprise which it is his intention to undermine. It is equally true here that Gould is initially presented as the personage with whom the English reader may most readily be expected to feel at home and to sympathize. He has, indeed, a very good claim on our sympathies. The story of the atrocious exploitation of his father by a succession of corrupt governments is told us in Part 1, Chapter 6, in a tone of gentle but implacable irony (‘It was an ordinary Costaguana Government - the fourth in six years - but it judged of its opportunities sanely’) and we cannot but sympathize with Charles Gould’s determination to make a practical success of that which had virtually killed his father; the first suggestion of his ability to idealize, even to anthropomorphize, material things, a tendency of which he is accused so effectively later by Decoud, is attractive:
He knows that, given the nature of South American politics, he will have to bribe and he knows that he needs the backing of Holroyd and his associates who talk in terms of economic domination: On the other hand, Europe must be kept out of this continent, and for proper interference on our part the time is not yet ripe’ or ‘we will go with you as long as the thing runs straight. But we won’t be drawn into any large trouble.’ But his accounts of his aims are far removed from ignoble acquisitiveness:
For Gould politics is a dirty activity; of his uncle Harry who became President of Costaguana he says:
But politics is not, despite Gould’s wishes, a separate sphere and the man who can present his uncle as a non-political President finds that he is himself a President-maker, for ‘the Ribierist party in Costaguana took a practical shape under the eye of the administrator of the San Tomé mine’, and in time the Separationist proclamation will be written upon San Tomé paper. The government which is formed to defend that order which the mine requires and which Gould trusts will lead to a better justice makes its appeal in the expected impeccable terms. One of the most effective methods by which Conrad enforces judgements is by shifts of tone. At times the effect of a series of rapid shifts is to induce a sense of insecurity as one apparently secure response is suddenly shown by a change to be unreliable. At other times, as here, Conrad enshrines within a general texture of sub-ironic prose a series of clichés which simultaneously report with accuracy what is being recounted and imply a sardonic comment on it. The effect is of undermining farce. Even if we had not seen the debacle of the regime with poor Ribiera fleeing for his life we would find fatuous the description of the terms of the government appointment:
Few passages in Conrad’s novels convey so forcefully his sardonic contempt as such unexceptionable sentiments. Gould says of the Monterists who call themselves Liberals that the words he knows well have a nightmarish meaning in Costaguana, but do we not feel the same about the reassuring platitudes of Westminster-style political rhetoric?
Inevitably, with the failure of the Ribierist government, Gould becomes disillusioned with the cause which he has espoused; the attempts of the President of the Provincial Assembly, Don Juste Lopez, to ‘save the last shred of parliamentary institutions (on the English model)’ (m. 7) by leading a deputation to hand over power to Montero fill him with a mixture of contempt, compassion, and despair. The parliamentarians themselves feel that, in not using the mine as a bargaining card on their behalf, he is abandoning them. But Gould is now committed to nothing but the continuance of the mine under his own direction or its destruction. Bearing in mind the frequent sincere praise of Gould by the likes of honest men such as Hernandez the bandit (later to be created a general in the last flurries of the Blancoist cause) and the small-scale welfare state created by Mrs Gould among the mineworkers, we may well feel that his trust in the civilizing effects of material interests is not totally misplaced, but Conrad’s comments on his manipulation of the politics of the country and his ultimate lack of commitment to the regime he has created are harsh. ‘To him, as to all of us,’ Conrad says pitilessly, ‘the compromises with his conscience appeared uglier than ever in the light of failure’ (m. 4), and he is likened to an adventurer and a buccaneer ‘throwing a lighted match into the magazine rather than surrender his ship’. And he is described as finding himself unable to speak to the Blancos in defeat because he ‘suffered from his fellowship in evil with them too much’ (ra. 7).
We may better understand this harshness if we pay attention to many underplayed moments in the story which elucidate the society with which he has allied himself and for which, like any investor who manipulates the local politicos, he must share responsibility. The Blancos, once known as the Oligarchy, are not so very different in their effect upon the people of the country from the vulgar revolution-ists. One of the first signs that Montero is disloyal to the Blancos, for example, is that
Loyalty to Gould’s nominee for the Presidency would presumably have entailed a continuation of those leg irons and floggings. The apparent superiority of the Blancos rests to a large extent upon their more elegant style of life and much play is made with the vulgarity of the revolutionaries and the mob whom they use. One of the more entertaining examples of this is that the railway engineer points out that Fuentes is ‘a man of birth and education’ (m. 2) who appears miserable at being linked with the vulgar Gamacho and fears him; seventy pages later we discover that birth will tell as Fuentes ingratiates himself with Montero and with a few well-chosen words sees to it that Gamacho will be ousted.
Conrad frequently gives to the revolutionists crude outbursts which ask for denial and then obliges us to recognize the amount of truth in them. Montero’s toast ‘I drink to the health of the man who brings us a million and a half of pounds’ (1. 8) is not to the taste of Sir John to whom it is addressed but it is a true account of the function of the ‘financier of railways’. The Monterist press attacks the ‘sinister land-grabbing designs of the European powers’ and Ribiera who ‘plotted to deliver his country, bound hand and foot, for a prey to foreign speculators’ (11. 2). We already know that the railway has bribed the Commissioners to let them have the land and the point has been driven home when Gould, after the reception for Sir John, looks at the populace enjoying themselves eating and drinking and dancing and says: ‘All this piece of land belongs now to the Railway Company. There will be no more popular feasts held here’ (1. 8).
Nowhere is the tactless expression of the aims of foreign investment and commerce more strikingly expressed than in the scene in which Barrios and his troops are seen off at the port. This section - the fourth chapter of Part II - brings together most of the central characters of the novel and brings to mind most of the main themes; it ends with the often quoted image of the triumph of material forces; as the crowd disperses a train passes and ‘a series of hard, battering shocks, mingled with the clanking of chain-couplings, made a tumult of blows and shaken fetters under the vault of the gate’. Earlier the telegraph wire has been likened to ‘a slender’ vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a moment of peace to enter and twine itself about the weary heart of the land’. Barrios, upon whose mission the fate of the Europeans and the Blancos seems to rest, is a man of acknowledged honesty and courage, though it is believed that he has obtained the ‘reputedly lucrative Oriental command’ through the efforts of his creditors. His reassurance to those seeing him off is expressed in terms which are not too dissimilar from the Monterist rhetoric:
He is thought to have had too much to drink and most of the listeners do not respond to what is described as ‘his interpretation of Senor Avellanos’s ideals’, but one of them, Young Scarfe, caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment, puts matters in his own words:
Mrs Gould defends him on the grounds of his youth against Decoud’s ironic praise of him as ‘an enlightened well-wisher’ but when the party has returned to the Casa Gould Decoud leaves no doubt that he does not believe deeply in the cause that he has espoused; to Avellanos’s insistence that they must reassure their financial backers in Europe and the United States he replies, ‘Oh, yes, we must comfort our friends, the speculators.’
Conrad is peculiarly harsh to Decoud. He is far and away the most clear-sighted of the characters and his analysis of Gould’s self-deception, in particular, is unanswerable. Yet he is placed in a situation of total solitude, cracks under the strain, and is summed up as the ‘victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity’ (in. 10). It could be held against him that he takes part in political action, the separation of Sulaco from Costa-guana, not because he believes in it but because it gives him some hope of marriage with Antonia. But this is not mentioned in the chapter which describes his last days and in which a number of specific statements, amounting to a judgement, are given as reasons for his suicide. All tend towards the conclusion that, in solitude, his death is inevitable because he shares his view of life with his creator.
A scepticism equal to Decoud’s has certainly been established in the most unexpected and inventive section of the book: Chapter 10 of Part III We have been prepared for a grand climax: Sotillo, Montero, Gamacho, and Fuentes occupy the town; the Blancos have fled; Monygham is planning to buy time by deceiving Sotillo about the whereabouts of the silver; Gould is fencing with Montero while Don Pépé and Father Roman are preparing to blow up the mine if Gould so orders; Nostromo, back from disposing of the silver, is about to leave on the railway engine to fetch Barrios’s men back. Chapter 10 begins, promising further action and a resolution of the suspense:
The second sentence, slipping into the pluperfect, announces that the suspense is over and that the climax lies in the past: ‘Captain Mitchell had listened to it from his balcony anxiously.’ For the next sixteen pages we are given the disjointed retrospective account which Mitchell was in the habit of inflicting on uncomprehending and often bored visitors. All the actions and all the participants in them are reduced to stock phrases while his listeners wonder who these people can be. Each description of the fighting resembles a stock adventure story; each cliché diminishes the individuality of the person it describes and assimilates him or her to the retrospective praise of the status quo.
The effect is initially one of disappointment, of total narrative anticlimax, but this reaction is transformed as we go on reading about the improved streets, the Sulaco National Bank, the monument to Avellanos (‘worn out with his life-long struggle for Right and Justice at the dawn of the New Era’) the Parliamentary party with Don Juste Lopez at its head, the recognition of the Occidental Republic by the United States and the repeated quotation from the The Times’s description of Sulaco as ‘The Treasure House of the World’. The anticlimax of narration is replaced by a climax of realization as the basic theme of the novel comes uncompromisingly to the fore - the realization that all these individuals with whom we have been concerned are, in the development of Sulaco as ‘The Treasure House of the World’, dispensable. Their functions have mattered but not their individuality. For the ‘distinguished bird of passage’ who is listening they are figures in history who have served their turn in bringing about the present situation. Monygham is given the specific statement - the often quoted:
But all that he says is more brilliantly implied in Joe Mitchell’s retrospect and its brusque rejection of our expectations.
Apart from a little tidying up, all that remains after this is in effect a coda. I have suggested that the verdict of Monygham and the consequent despair of Mrs Gould have already been established. But they must be seen to be worked out. Similarly, Nostromo’s fate must be shown. The ending is, in terms of the legend of the treasure seekers of Azuera and Nostromo’s own frequent mention of it, allegorically right, but it leads Conrad into the somewhat over-picturesque or operatic mode into which the person of Nostromo tempts him. Nostromo has, indeed, often been criticized as a creation and Conrad himself felt that he was in need of some defence. The silver of the mine was, he said, the true hero of the book and the eponymous hero is described by him in a letter to Cunninghame Graham as a ‘romantic mouthpiece of the people’.6 But, though he may be conceived in romantic terms, there is surely something more than this to be said about him. Perhaps he can be seen as a central figure in the novel because he does represent so clearly the fate of the enterprising and reliable man who, in most societies, can fill an honourable place and enjoy the respect of his own people. His fate in this society is described, albeit with the anger of irritated love, by Teresa Viola:
Another clear-sighted observer, Monygham, wonders at his fidelity - ‘I don’t know why the devil he should be faithful to you, Gould, Mitchell, or anybody else’ (m. 1) and expresses most brutally the degree to which Nostromo is used when he answers his suspicion that he might be betrayed by saying: ‘You are safe because you are needed. I would not give you away for any conceivable reason, because I want you.’ (in. 9) There is no wonder, then, that at the time when, seeing the mine ‘lording it by its vast wealth over the valour, the toil, the fidelity of the poor’, he resolves to grow rich slowly by stealing the treasure, he is named ironically with his titles - ‘There was no-one in the world but Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and faithful Nostromo, to pay such a price’, (m. 10)