Nostromo

Most of the book is required by its argument. The broken chronology is not ornament: the reader learns that the Occidental Republic exists before learning what it cost, so its causes arrive as a reckoning. Decoud’s isolation on the Great Isabel, Hirsch’s death under Sotillo, Monygham’s history under Guzman Bento’s priest-inquisitor, Teresa Viola dying unshriven because Nostromo will not fetch the priest: each is load-bearing, a case of a man or woman bound to an idea or a thing. The subtractive test bites in two places, and they hold the axis lowest of the twelve. Captain Mitchell’s tour serves the irony of official history but runs long and repeats what the reader has seen. And the last chapters, Nostromo’s secret courtship of Giselle while he is engaged to Linda, and Giorgio Viola’s shot in the dark, are compelled by the treasure plot but carried by a melodrama the book elsewhere avoids; much of that triangle could be cut without loss to what the novel knows.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it has held for a century: that “material interests”, foreign capital organised as a mine, become a power with their own law, stronger than the state and the revolutions that pass over it, and that the men who serve them believing they serve justice are taken over by them. Charles Gould brings the San Tomé mine to life to redeem his father and give the province order; the mine gives order, and empties his marriage. Monygham states the law to Mrs Gould, “There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests”, and goes on to say that their justice rests on expediency, without the force of a moral principle. Beside it stands the companion truth in each life: Nostromo’s incorruptibility is vanity, a self that exists only in being seen; Decoud’s scepticism cannot survive solitude. Held at this figure and not above, because the disclosures are stated by persons as much as shown, and the Costaguaneros at large are seen from above.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold. The Golfo Placido at night, a darkness so complete that the lighter carrying the silver moves through it blind, with Hirsch hidden in the bottom; the collision with Sotillo’s steamer in that dark. Decoud alone on the Great Isabel, losing faith in his own individuality over ten days, rowing out, shooting himself and sinking weighted with four ingots, “swallowed up in the immense indifference of things”. Nostromo waking on the shore after his swim and his sleep like a great beast, a man with his whole public self gone. The snows of Higuerota over the campo. Monygham walking back into Sulaco to deceive Sotillo, choosing to be thought a traitor. Held below the top because the long middle stretches of political exposition are flat, the elevation is sometimes reached by an accumulation of abstract nouns rather than earned, and the close strains for grandeur with its cry over the dark gulf.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The book opens on a legend: two gringos who went onto Azuera after treasure and are held there, alive and dead, by riches they cannot leave. That legend is the structure of the book. The silver binds Gould, who gives his life to the mine, and binds Nostromo, who hides it on the Isabel and becomes in his own person the bewitched keeper of a treasure, growing rich slowly and stealing by night. The archetype bears the weight and stays particular: a Genoese sailor with a reputation among the cargadores, known by a name the foreigners who use him have given him. Silver as the incorruptible metal that corrupts; a lighthouse raised over the hoard; the old Garibaldino’s republican faith beside the new idol. Held below the summit because the archetype is single, the book’s other figures (the fallen idealist, the sceptic, the guilty doctor) are types more than myths, and the close spells the legend out where it might have stood.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the English novel of empire, which had told the far place through a traveller or a single consciousness, as Conrad’s own Marlow books did. Nostromo has no centre. It invents a whole republic, with its history, factions, port, mine, railway and press, and tells it with the chronology broken, so that history is seen as a field of forces rather than a story with a hero. The book named for its title figure keeps him offstage for long stretches. The stake was in the form itself: a novel of this size with no guide and no hero risks the reader’s hold on it, and the book takes that risk throughout. Held below the top on two counts: the method of the time-shift and of irony toward official history extends what Lord Jim had begun, and the late adventure plot returns to the paths of the sea story.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge changes. Told in order, the book would be the story of a revolution and a rescue, with Nostromo’s ride to Cayta and Barrios’s return as its climax and the Occidental Republic as its happy end. Told as it is, the secession is known before its making, then given through Captain Mitchell’s complacent narration as a tale for visitors, and the reader sees the progress as the mine’s law repeating itself; the coda foresees the next revolution, this time against the material interests themselves. The absence of a governing consciousness is the instrument of the book’s view that no one in it understands what he is part of. Charged: the third part, after Decoud’s death, narrows toward a single plot told more nearly in sequence, and there the form is less the knowledge than the container of an ending.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The evidence is a century of argument that has not exhausted it. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (1948), set it at the height of Conrad’s work. Later readers have taken it as the founding novel of capital and the nation in Latin America, read it for its prophecy of American power, read it against Conrad’s own Polish history of failed revolt, and read its form as a theory of history. The questions stay open: whether Gould is a tragic hero or a possessed man; whether Monygham’s self-contempt is the book’s moral centre; whether Mrs Gould’s sense of waste is the book’s verdict; whether Nostromo’s fall is a tragedy or a judgment on vanity. The forms yield on return too: the dates, the doublings, two treasure stories and two lighthouses, one of stone and one of reputation. Held below the summit because the late plot is read less on return, and the yield is concentrated in the first two parts.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the novel in English of the century’s first decade, and the political novel in Europe. The intrinsic force is high: the book made the invented state, held whole with its history and its economy, a form of the novel, and it set foreign capital at the centre of a novel with a reach no earlier book had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and named, and narrower than that of Heart of Darkness. Graham Greene’s and V. S. Naipaul’s novels of the post-colonial republic, A Bend in the River among them, work in its line; Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) answers it by name; the Latin American novel of the dictator and the company has been read beside it, though direct debt there is argued rather than shown, and it is credited here only as kinship. Its reach has run through novelists and critics more than through readers at large, and the axis stands exactly at the bar of the Epochal Gate.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed on form first. The text has survived whole and in print since 1904, in paperback series and in critical editions, and it is taught in universities; nothing that carried meaning is lost. It has outlived its conditions: the silver concession and the gunboat republic are history, and the book is read for what they disclose. For a survival of about a hundred and twenty years the usual figure sits here. Its presence is charged a little because it is read chiefly in the academy and among novelists, far less widely than Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim, and because its difficulty keeps it from the common reader.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Conrad’s English, his third language. The construction is a feat: dozens of named persons, three generations of history and a geography held exactly (the gulf, the Isabels, the harbour, the campo, the mountain, the mine, the railway), with a time-scheme that moves backward and forward without losing the reader who attends. Scenes are built with great authority: the riot and Ribiera’s flight, the lighter in the dark, Hirsch’s interrogation, Monygham’s deception of Sotillo, Teresa’s death. Charged on the sentence: the English here is often heavy with abstraction and with the triadic adjective; the dialogue, especially Antonia’s and that of the Avellanos circle, can be stiff; the narrative voice sometimes says what the scene has shown. The last part’s handling of the Giselle plot is hasty beside the care elsewhere. The making is load-bearing in the structure, less so in the prose line.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the widest range: each person attaches himself to something incorruptible outside himself, silver, reputation, love, an idea of order, the republic, scepticism, and is undone by the attachment or by its failure. Take the most distant elements. Captain Mitchell’s comic tour of “historical events” and Decoud’s death on the island obey it alike, the one as the public story that conceals the law, the other as the private truth beneath it. Gould’s marriage and the Garibaldino’s lighthouse, the Azuera legend and the coda’s prophecy of the next revolt: one physics. The range runs from farce (Sotillo’s fury) through the satire of politicians to tragedy and intimate grief. Charged once: the tone of the final love plot, operatic and sentimental, is the one place where the law seems applied from outside rather than lived.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Held, not listed. The state: the dictatorship of Guzman Bento, the Ribierist reform, the Monterist coup, the Separation, parliaments and generals. Capital: the concession, the mine, the railway, the financier in San Francisco and the investors in Europe. Labour: the cargadores, the Indian miners and their families, the porters of the harbour. History: three generations, from the veterans of the war of independence and of Garibaldi’s wars to the new republic. The family: the Goulds’ childless marriage, the Violas, Decoud and Antonia, Don José and his daughter. Consciousness: Decoud’s unravelling, Monygham’s shame, Mrs Gould’s sense of waste. The sacred: Father Corbelán and the Church’s claims, the unshriven death. The natural order: the gulf with its calms and its darkness, the snow peak, the sea. All of it turns on one mine. The highest of the twelve, charged a little for the thin rendering of the Costaguanero populace from inside.

Score: 9.3 / 10