Introduction: Untimely Nostromo

In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes [. . . . ] [Martin Decoud] had the strangest sensation of his soul having returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been.

—Nostromo (1904)

We are discussing a problem of abstraction whereby, among many other things, a supreme abstract form slowly appears which is called that of Time itself, and which then holds out the mirage of some pure and immediate experience of itself [. . . . ] [But Nostromo] is rather the situation which suddenly allows the veil to be ripped away from this intolerable ontological bedrock, and it imposes it on consciousness as the ultimate lucidity.

—Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1982)

It is a normal if unconscious ambition of the reader to live vicariously through an imagined experience; to live through scenes. But [in Nostromo] every promised scene is here broken off, at most after a few pages. The reader is never allowed to settle down and enjoy. And so too, if only to combat that vertigo, the reader incorrigibly longs to locate himself in time and space, and incorrigibly wants to apprehend experience in its order and degree of importance. But this longing is frustrated from beginning to end [. . . . ] The common reader's notorious general aim—to enter into the book and become one of its characters—is carefully and austerely baffled. The novelist (shifting scene, time, focus, post of observation) maliciously chops at his hands.

—Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (1958)

This special issue of essays on Nostromo has its origins in two centennial events of 2004: one, a panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia entitled "Nostromo at 100"; the other, the day-long conference "One Hundred Years of Nostromo" hosted by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City. "Contemporaneity"—Conrad's timelines—was an important note at both events, as it has been in many recent "twenty-first century" discussions of Conrad's work. But the fact that the essays gathered here appear in the displaced and belated year 2008 , each heavily revised from its original format, each also significantly dislocated from its original scenes of discussion and discussants, all now appearing in a year of no totemic significance or mystic numerical symmetry with respect to either Conrad or Nostromo—all these raise the question of Conrad's untimeliness: i.e., how we might read him, and how we might need to read him, as not a figure of "our man," "our text," "our time," "one of us," but rather as a textual locus irreducibly out of phase with and disruptive of any attempt among its various audiences to construct themselves as "contemporary."

Nostromo is the exemplary Conrad text to raise this kind of question because, its ample claims to contemporary "resonance" notwithstanding, there is no other Conrad work, and on so many different levels of composition, construction, and reception, that flaunts problems of temporal displacement and deferral, and challenges assimilation to any specific moment "in" time, the way this one does. "Untimely" from the very beginning, Nostromo was originally inspired by a "story" Conrad heard while in "the Gulf of Mexico" during a shipping run in "1875 or '6"—(Conrad's only visit to Latin America and one in which his "contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting," if any)—which could not be told in that moment (Nosotromo xl-xli). Rather, it had to wait until "twenty-six or seven years afterwards," when Conrad encountered a different (printed) version of the story, in a different location (England), amid a very different spatio-temporal field of available¹ European historiography on Latin America and informing political events like the secession of Panama from Columbia in 1903 (Nostromo xl-xli). Actually composed between (roughly) October 1902 and August 1904, Nostromo very nearly was not indigenous to this "moment" either. Though by no means Conrad's most deferred or prolonged text in the making, it may...