Quite some
time ago I happened to find a Conrad novel among the discarded books. It was a
work I had never heard of, Nostromo, not nearly as famous as Heart of
Darkness. An intriguing story, set in the fictional, dysfunctional South
American republic of Costaguana.
One of the
protagonists of the story, Charles Gould, comes from a British family which has
been established in Costaguana for a while. Born in Costaguana, he has received
his education and married in Britain, as is the custom in his family. During
this period, he receives letters from his father, who is angry and desperate at
having been granted ownership of an abandoned silver mine. The government
expects revenues which Gould senior cannot deliver, so they demand the money
from Gould himself, in the form of fines and other juridical measures. All he
is capable of doing is writing frustrated epistles to his son Charles, exhorting
him never to return.
Charles meets
Emilia in Italy and the two become a couple. The narrator remarks:
Charles
Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went on
acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity.
Then death
intrudes. Charles receives the news that his father has died, and draws the
conclusion that the anxiety over the silver mine has killed him. (I am
summarizing; the scene in the book, told in a long flashback, is brooding,
foreboding, all silences and eruptions.) At once he comes to the conviction
that his vocation consists of turning the dead, lethal silver mine into a
life-giving thing – an improvement on his father’s helpless attitude.
Action is
consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the
Fates.
So Charles
Gould returns to Costaguana with his wife Emilia. And they succeed: the San
Tomé silver mine blooms beyond belief, with financial backing from the US and a
British working ethos among the employees. Several times it is referred to as
an imperium in imperio, a state within a state; its economic strength
gives it a measure of independence from the government. The narrator remarks
about the Goulds:
It
was as if they had been morally bound to make good their vigorous view of life
against the unnatural error of weariness and despair.
Charles
Gould hopes that the mine will bring prosperity to Costaguana and thus
establish the conditions necessary for law and order to arise. At one point he
explains this to his wife, and ends with the remark:
‘What
should be perfectly clear to us, is the fact that there is no going back. Where
could we begin life afresh? We are in now for all that there is in us.’
However,
because he is such a power in the land, he has to deal with all sorts of
political figures. With corruption being prevalent everywhere, from the
established government to the bandits roaming the wild, it is difficult to do
this without being implicated in the messy affairs of Costaguana. Charles
chooses to go his own way and observe a scornful silence as much as possible.
At
the beginning of Chapter II.6 we see the couple again. Charles has just started
voicing the threat of blowing up the entire mine, thus sending the country back
into certain chaos. Doña Emilia complains that there is an sense of unreality
about everything:
‘My
dear Charley, it is impossible for me to close my eyes to our position, to this
awful…’
She
raised her eyes and looked at her husband’s face, from which all sign of
sympathy or any other feeling had disappeared. ‘Why don’t you tell me
something?’ she almost wailed.
‘I
thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,’ Charles Gould said,
slowly. ‘I thought we had said all there was to say a long time ago. There is
nothing to say now. There were things to be done. We have done them, we have
gone on doing them. There is no going back now. I don’t suppose that, even from
the first, there was really any possible way back. And, what’s more, we can’t
even afford to stand still.’
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