The Secret History of Costaguana

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Jean-Aubrey, G. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Vol. 2 of 2. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1927. 226. 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. In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, The Problem of China, which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas: Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." [164] Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; [165] in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. [166] The first accurate transcription was published in Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness in 1995; Hampson's transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007. [167] [168]

He helps the town get rid of thieves and protects the Violas (i.e., the family he lives with), and he's instrumental in helping to get Don Vincente out of Costaguana before the rebel forces can seize him. His name sounds a tad occult, but he's a good dude with a sound head on his shoulders. 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: 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] 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

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Westbere House in Canterbury, Kent was at one time owned by Conrad. It is listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England. [84] In its engagement with politics and imperialism, Nostromo is a logical bridge between Conrad’s earlier and later work. It is set (like Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim) within the realms of overseas empire, but Costaguana is post-colonial and the key players are, by culture if not always by birth, English, French, Italian, and Spanish, so that the situation that plays out resembles in some ways the European turmoil of The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. As in earlier work, the plot is told largely from the point of view of the powerful, though Conrad’s deepening engagement with the revolutionary mindset is betokened by Nostromo himself, who is transformed from an ignorant servant of the capitalists into an Marxist: he becomes a self-aware, if not particularly intelligent, “Man of the People.”

Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel Victory appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, The History of a Sin ( Dzieje grzechu, 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of Victory a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to his unfinished Suspense. Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw." [172] Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. [43] Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes: Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985 Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X [note 9] of the Warsaw Citadel. [28] Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." [29] On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres (310mi) north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. [30] In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis. [31] 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.Despite their obtuseness towards the sentiment of the populace (they learn “with stupefaction” that their unprepossessing dictator has been deposed), the Europeans represent imperialism at its finest. Yet—in spite money, probity, and good fortune—they only save the Occidental Province by violently severing it from the rest of Costaguana and erecting a new ineffectual government. Worse, it is augured that “ Continues Najder: "[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.' [173] Conrad's acquaintance George Bernard Shaw says it well: "[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air." [174] Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Such irony, an essential trait of Conrad, runs strongly through Nostromo. Not only do the characters engage in actions whose importance and results they cannot comprehend, their very names signal a gulf between perception and reality. Most notable, of course, is the title character himself. Nostromo, as he is called by his supposed masters, is anything but “one of ours,” and his real name, Fidenza, or “Faithful,” becomes a cruel joke when he steals the silver he has been entrusted to preserve. 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 his twenties, Conrad resolved to kill himself with a gun – but miraculously he survived. Joseph Conrad – born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-occupied Poland in 1857 – was a bit of a gambler in his youth. In 1878, up to his ears in gambling debts, the young Conrad attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The bullet missed his heart, and he lived for the next 46 years, long enough to become one of the most important writers of his generation, with novels such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Victory, and The Secret Agent earning him the respect of critics and fellow writers (of which more below). Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.To brand Hanna Arendt as a “theoretician of imperialism” sounds absolutely preposterous to me, to say the least. On the other hand, while it does not seem fair to accuse Mr. Conrad with extolling nascent American imperialism in the region, it is true that he has seemingly bestowed upon a distinguished handful of modern novelists and travel-writers his own kind of approach and gaze on the Third World’s grim realities. The character’s real name is Gian’ Battista Fidanza. “Nostromo,” the name given him by the other Europeans, is Italian “boatswain” (he was originally a Genoese sailor), but there is an apparently inadvertent pun on “nostro-uomo”—“our man.” The story is set in the Occidental Province of Costaguana, a nation in Central America. Isolated behind an almost impassable mountain range and situated on a broad but windless bay, the Golfo Placido, Sulaco, the capital city of the province, has for centuries remained outside of events. Sulaco’s only importance comes from the riches of its nearby silver mine, known as the Gould Concession because it is operated by an English family of that name. The Goulds, who have lived in Costaguana for three generations, are permitted to work the mine so long as they pay sufficient bribes to whatever government happens to control Costaguana. Charles Gould, who has brought the mine to its greatest productivity, has grown tired of this endless extortion and resolves to throw his great wealth behind a revolution that will finally bring a responsible government to power in Costaguana.

A great deal of the narrative tension in this long novel turns on who knows what about whom, and many of the key scenes are drenched in dramatic irony built on coincidences which have all the improbability of the nineteenth century novel hanging about them. At one point a completely new character suddenly appears as a stowaway on a boat, and then improbably survives a collision with another ship in the dark by hanging onto the other boat’s anchor. And this is merely a plot device allowing him to transmit misleading information to his captors – and incidentally allows Conrad to indulge in a rather unpleasant bout of anti-semitism. Almayer's Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career. [note 14] In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. [81] According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. [note 18] To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression. [82] Romance and marriage [ edit ] In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. [34] Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis. [35] Tadeusz Bobrowski, Conrad's maternal uncle, mentor, and benefactor

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In Conrad’s universe, however, almost no one is incorruptible. The exploit does not bring Nostromo the fame he had hoped for, and he feels slighted and used. Feeling that he has risked his life for nothing, he is consumed by resentment, which leads to his corruption and ultimate destruction, for he had kept secret the true fate of the silver after all others believed it lost at sea, rather than hidden on an offshore island. In recovering the silver for himself, he is shot and killed, mistaken for a trespasser, by the father of his fiancée, the keeper of the lighthouse on the island of Great Isabel. John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Literature, alas, may be the only salvation for the policy elite, because in the guise of fiction a writer can more easily tell the truth. And in literature's vast canon there is no book of which I am aware that both defines and dissects the problems with the world just beyond our own as well as Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, a 1904 novel about Westerners and indigenous inhabitants of an imaginary South American country, Costaguana. Nostromo is neither overly descriptive and moodily vague like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, nor is its ending entirely unhappy. For a civil society-in-the-making does emerge in Costaguana, but it is midwived by a ruined cynic of a doctor who has given up on humanity, a deeply skeptical journalist, and two bandit gangs, not by the idealist whose actions had helped lead to the country's earlier destruction. Conrad never denies the possibility of progress in any society, but he is ironic enough to know that "The ways of human progress are inscrutable", and that is why "action is consolatory" and "the friend of flattering illusions." Charles Gould, the failed idealist of the novel, who believes absolutely in economic development, "had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that prevail in this world."