"The Shape of Credit": Imagination, Speculation, and Language in Nostromo

Joseph Conrad's Nostromo tends to elicit two kinds of responses from its critical readers: they either attempt to untangle its narrative or they privilege its rhetorical opacity. Such responses are in part an effect of the novel's distended presentation of events. The novel is littered with characters and narrated through a series of temporal loops, and this makes its historical trajectory anything but transparent. Attempts to pin down the novel's content straighten its narrative into historical timelines, map its actions across the imaginary topography of Costaguano, and turn its opacity into figures provided by the text's source material or Conrad's own political views.¹ By contrast, influential readers like Frederic Jameson, Eloise Knapp Hay, and Pamela Demory engage the novel's proto-modernist opacity as its own figuration of history, from Hay's reading of the novel as a fable of imperial politics, to Jameson's as a reification of the romance narrative, or Demory's as an allegory of the irreducible nature of the historical event. Critics, caught between these poles, often lose sight of the novel's narrative dynamic. I would argue that this dynamic is constitutively tied to the novel's fascination with the world market taking shape around it, most especially the subjective effects of credit's signifying mechanisms brought by the market's arrival. While the text's narration displays the increasingly dense set of social relations made possible by global capital, its construction of character explores the isolating subjective effects that paradoxically accompany this newly integrated world as its titular character falls into opportunism to survive and is finally undone by the machinations that he undertakes first to protect and then to steal the mine's silver.

The novel's narrative traces the Gould silver mining concession's defense of its "material interests" (Conrad 1904, 100)—a process that socially and politically reorganizes Costaguano by embedding it in the world market— and its anachronic presentation figures Marx's claim that "the true nature of capital emerges only at the end of the second cycle [of production and circulation]" (Marx 1971, 514). In Nostromo, narrative economy and political economy form a unique dynamic of repetition as material interests subsume Sulaco's economy into the credit-based economy of the world market. This intersection of political and narrative economies inflects the novel's rhetorical texture and drives its plotting and characterization. Decoud's declaration that the mine's latest load of silver should be sent to the mine's American backers ahead of an invading rebel army exemplifies this narrative dynamic of subsumption: "Let it come down so that it may go north and return to us in the shape of credit" (Conrad 1904, 204). Although my methodology in this essay combines narrative theory's attention to the production of plot and character with Marxism's critique of political economy, this is not to homologize narrative theory and political economy into a single "literary" economy but rather to explore their intersections as encounters between mechanisms of social interaction and calibration that have become blurred and intertwined. By addressing the novel's rhetorical constructions of temporality alongside its thematic descriptions of characters who put their life stories to economic ends, I will examine the novel's means of composing collective subjects within and through text. In this way, my argument combines insight into the novel's historicity and its rhetorical opacity in order to demonstrate the novel's engagement with economic crises and subjective tactics that are specific to the period of its writing and yet still relevant today. In particular, the novel's use of the imagination to create a kind of immaterial labor will demonstrate the relation of finance capital's subsumption of local economies and the creation of hegemonic identifications within the narrative.

In its account of the mine's increasing reliance on credit, Nostromo's narrative engages with global capital as a kind of collective subject. The novel's transnational perspective mirrors Conrad's own: a Polish expatriate in Britain, mining books about South American economic development to construct a conflicted critique of...