Conrad's Quarrel with Politics: The Disrupted Family in Nostromo

DANIEL R. SCHWARZ Conrad's Quarrel with Politics: The Disrupted Familyin Nostromo Criticism that insists upon discussing Nostromo from a predominantly political perspective often seems to confuse the subject matter with the novel's values.' When Conrad created imagined worlds with a political and historical dimension, as he did most notably in the three consecutive novels generally classified as political novels - Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), he was concerned less with political theory than with the cost of politics in terms of disruption of family ties, of personal relationships and, ultimately, of personal growth. To be sure, Conrad was fascinated by political doctrines, movements , and ideals, but he despaired that political activity could make a difference in a world he regarded as a 'remorseless process.'2 He sadly realized that political activity fails because most men are selfish, while those who are not are victims of their own obsessions, and thus are incapable of sustained activity in the interest of the community's welfare . I do not deny that Conrad considers how, why, and for what values men organize themselves into nations, communities, parties, factions, and interest groups, but in this paper I shall argue that Conrad indicts political activity as both suspect in its causes and pernicious in its effects. In his view erratic lurching between revolution and autocracy, between secession and federation, has little to do with ideas about how men should best be governed. Even at the close, when Gould's vision for the mine is fulfilled and Sulaco flourishes, the conditions for the next revolutionary uprising are growing, like poisonous mushrooms, in the discontented hearts of Captain Fidanza and his comrade, the malevolent 'blood-thirsty' photographer. With deep regret, Conrad came to believe that political activity was a threat to the traditional paradigms on which civilization depends: heterosexual relationships, family relations between parents and child as well as siblings, and personal relationships - between all those who seek to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved. Thus, in the political novels Conrad posits interpersonal relationships and family ties as alternative values to political doctrines, while he demonstrates that man can be destroyed when he allows political abstractions to subsume his private self. In Nos/ramo, even when high-minded characters espouse ideals, political principles are thinly veiled disguises for the desire UTQ, VOLUME XLVll, NUMBER 1 , FALL 1977 38 DANIEL R. SCHWARZ to control the enormous treasure of the San Tome mine. Because of their own obsessions and moral weaknesses, the Goulds, Decoud, Antonia, Nostromo, and even the Viola family are engulfed by politics created by the insistent demands of materialism. Nostromo is the story of men who, while seeking to define their own lives in bold and heroic terms, become entrapped by the circumstances that they seek to control and the political activity in which they engage. The disrupted chronology, the rapidly shifting focus, and the ominous instability of the ending dramatize a world which has lost its moral centre, a world in which 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.'3 The form is a correlative to a narrative about a civilization that lacks a moral centre. Like Dubliners, Nostromo is really a series of episodes in the moral history of a nation; Costaguana and Sulaco are metaphors for a nation and a major city under siege. Despite the hectic activity - the political machinations, the riots and uprisings, the marches and retreats - the novel moves towards climactic moments when the major characters are isolated and must discover the essential self that has survived the public self. The scenes in which Mrs Gould gradually and incompletely awakens to her loneliness, Gould to his position as an adventurer, Nostromo to the awareness that he has been manipulated by those who do not care for him, are all the more effective because they are in stark contrast to the rapid and confusing external events. Decoud's excruciating discovery of his moral emptiness and his subsequent suicide are rhetOrically and structurally climactic because each of the major characters has already discovered an innerself, distinct from the position w hich society defines for him...