Mining Conrad

I once met a girl who was writing a thesis on Conrad. Her opinion of Nostromo was nothing if not passionate. ‘It’s like Conrad means to bore you to death,’ she recommended. ‘You must read it!’

So I did. I set out into the novel one morning and then kept on going for a couple of days, crouching by the coal fire of a scruffy student kitchen, staving off hunger with big basins of porridge. I can remember every now and then looking out of the window and being almost astonished to see the Edinburgh streets. As far as I was concerned, I was living not in Scotland but in an exotic Latin American republic. My world had long ago ceased to be that of the old biddies and grey buildings, and buses that rumbled over wet cobbles. It was the world of Conrad instead: of the trading port of Sulaco and its steamers, of silver mines set in tangled green gorges, of a smooth depthless gulf and towering snow-capped mountain peaks. It was a land of ambitious colonialists and washed-up idealists, of drunk, swaggering dockers and black-eyed Indian workers, of mule trains and moustaches and revolutions and red dust. In Nostromo Conrad creates an entire country. The book is an astonishingly ambitious feat. And yet, in the hundred years that have passed since it was first published, it has come to be treated as a sort of love/hate thing. For every person who admires it not only as Conrad’s supreme imaginative achievement but also as a pioneering masterpiece of early Modernism, there are two more who will swear that the only great thing about it is the great effort that must be gone through to get to the end. Even Conrad appears to have been a bit wary. Nostromo was the most anxiously meditated of his longer novels, he explained in the author’s note that accompanied its first publication exactly a century ago. ‘I hesitated as if worried by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions.’ And perhaps in this observation lies a key to the novel. Nostromo is not a piece of literature to be casually dipped into when you find you have a few spare moments. It demands time in long stretches and the entirety of the reader’s intellectual and emotional attention. This is a novel to be discovered in the same way as you might discover a new country. You watch its scenery, its people, its social and political systems all gradually unfurling around you until suddenly you realize that you no longer feel like an outsider. You are totally surrounded, immersed in the world of Conrad’s imagination. Nostromo is a book to be inhabited. Each sentence is a step on the journey. ‘A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line,’ Conrad famously declared. The long (and often distinctly foreign) constructions of his sentences are mesmerizing. He lets them unreel like a yo-yo, clause by clause to the end of their strings, until, just when you think they have lost touch entirely, just when you fear that the point has been lost, he draws them back to the subject with an effortless grace. Conrad’s elaborate prose can infuse even the most sordid details with beauty. The pages of my broken-spined paperback are littered with pencil strokes (among the splashes of spilt porridge) marking the passages that I wanted to remember. I would love to bore you to death by citing the whole lot of them. Instead I will content myself with one tiny vignette of a ‘small, staid urchin met wandering, naked and grave, along the road with a cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his mother’s rosary purloined for the purposes of ornamentation, hanging in a loop of beads low down on his rotund little stomach’. It’s one small incidental detail; but, line by line, such images slowly accrete until the reader is acquainted with the entire physical and political composition of a country and with the growing (and admittedly sometimes confusing) cast of characters who inhabit it, from the eponymous Nostromo, the ‘man of the people’ who struts through the heart of the action, to the elegant boulevardier Martin Decoud with whom his fate gets tied up. Conrad slips inside the labyrinths of their minds, luring the reader ever deeper along ever darker corridors, as he probes desires and passions and obsessions, searching for the motives that lend meaning to life, examining the fates that determine individual destiny. At the heart of the novel lies the image of the silver mine – the symbolic treasure which tests the metal of all those who touch it. What is true and incorruptible? Conrad asks. What is precious? What are the things that should really be valued? What holds us in its power? When Conrad embarked upon Nostromo he intended it to be short, but slowly, as he wrote, the idea grew into ‘an intense creative effort made on what I suppose will remain my largest canvas’. Conrad was struggling to set out nothing less than what he saw to be the truth about humanity. In this study of corruption, both internal and external, he sought to render his total vision of the world, to explore with his sly, undeceived, impeccable intelligence his sense of man’s place in nature, in history, in society. The world into which the reader first seemed to venture as an exploratory outsider is all around him. And what is its truth? The truth is that there is no truth. There are no answers. There’s nothing. This nothingness is everything to the novel. When the Ph.D student described Nostromo as a deliberate exercise in boredom, I don’t believe that by boredom she meant that fidgeting, restless dissatisfaction that can quickly be remedied by finding a new occupation. Nostromo is not the sort of book that the reader picks up lightly because it is not the sort of book that can easily be put down. Its boredom is a bottomless morass that swallows all impulses, all inclinations. It’s the sense of nothingness that hollows out our lives, that speaks of the numbness, the bleakness, the listless, spiritual emptiness that undercuts every struggle, every passion and hope. This was a novel that arose, Conrad said, at a time ‘when it seemed somehow there was nothing more in the world to write about’. It arose from a profound sense of futility, of philosophical pessimism. And though, of course, this may not appeal to those of a resolutely cheery temperament, its force cannot be simply denied. Nostromo is a novel about despair. You feel its emptiness all the time around you, a vast, irresistible, suffocating force. You breathe it in with the book’s atmosphere. You breathe it out with each yawn. To capture so visceral a sense of this blankness remains the book’s greatest achievement. And yet to confront it, to go on in the face of it, to try to engage with and understand it remains – both for the reader and the writer – the only way out. In my Penguin Classic edition of Nostromo, Conrad takes nearly 500 densely printed pages to make me feel nothing. And that’s really saying something. Because to feel nothing is one of the most powerful feelings you can have.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Rachel Campbell-Johnston 2004