Conrad's Latin America.

Falcoff, Mark

Last year marked the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Although not among his best-known works, it is in many ways his most remarkable. Indeed, it could be said to be the most significant, the most fully fleshed-out of his three "political" novels, which also include The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Nostromo is "about" imperialism and its impact upon a small, fictitious, but vividly rendered South American republic called Costaguana. In spite of the left-wing vaporings of the late Martin Seymour-Smith, which disfigure the introduction to my Penguin edition, it is by no means an anti-imperialist tract. If it has a point of view at all on the interaction between foreign capital and backward Third World countries, it is that in the end the latter are undeserving of the former and that the forces of modernization outside of the orbit of European civilization are ultimately bound to fail. Nostromo is therefore a deeply pessimistic--which is to say a thoroughly conservative--book.

But it is something more than that. Although Latin American literature itself is understandably rich in novels dealing with political disorder, militarism, dictatorship, revolution, and civil war, I know of no work in Spanish or Portuguese that provides so complete a sociology of these unfortunate, ill-starred societies. Nostromo is the best--the most enduring--political novel ever written about Latin America. It was the peculiar genius of Joseph Conrad to understand the enormous weight of history on the Latin American republics--the heritage of conquest, the inchoate nature of society, the primitive forms often assumed by the quest for political power ("a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played with terrible earnestness by depraved children"), the failure to reproduce the template of the Iberian metropolis--itself a rather out-of-date version of European civilization. Above all, Conrad understood the qualitative differences between Latin America and the Anglo-Saxon world, a gap which could not be bridged by mines, railroads, telegraphs, loans, and the repeating rifle alone--a point which a century, later foreign bankers, diplomats, journalists, and self-styled humanitarians apparently have yet to grasp.

In some ways the principal character of the novel is the San Tome silver mine, located in the province of Sulaco, where most of the action of the novel takes place. During the Spanish colonial period, we are told, the mine was a source of prosperity and a magnet for settlement, but by the time of the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century its most immediately accessible veins had been exhausted. For decades it has languished in deterioration and neglect, until a Costaguana Englishman by the name of Charles Gould takes it upon himself to revive it by the injection of fresh capital and the application of the latest technology. A descendant of an English adventurer who had received the San Tome concession in exchange for assistance during the struggle against Spain a half-century before, Gould is a kind of practical idealist. He seeks to leverage advantage from the early globalization afoot at the time, as European and American capital searches for new and profitable opportunities in the periphery. To this end, he sets about visiting London and San Francisco in search of backers to revive the enterprise. Along the way he takes an English wife who emigrates to "his" country and is a major figure of the story.

The Goulds are ambitious people, but not in the sense of a left-wing cartoon; rather, they have a vision of civilization, of ordered progress, of the spreading of universal norms of justice and decency characteristic of the late Victorians. And for a time, at least, they make their vision come alive. Equally interesting are their foreign partners. A British railroad magnate who comes out to Sulaco is edified to discover that the local elite, at least, includes "cultured mere men to whom the conditions of civilized business were not unknown." The other is an American by the name of Holroyd, an iron and steel magnate whose main interest is actually less the making of money (at which he seems to be very good indeed) as to the spreading of "the purer forms of Christianity" among the heathen. For him the San Tome mine is less an opportunity for profit than a hobby, "a great man's caprice." As Charles Gould explains to his wife, "a man of that sort can take up a thing or drop it when he likes. He will suffer from no sense of defeat. He may have to give in, or he may have to die tomorrow, but the great silver and iron interests shall survive, and some day shall get ahold of Costaguana along with the rest of the world."

The revival of the mine, which occurs early in the book, produces salutary effects all along the line. The first and most obvious is a change in the quality of Costaguana's political leadership. Somewhat before the story begins we are told that the country has only recently emerged from decades of a savage dictatorship under a primitive, bloodthirsty tyrant by the name of Guzman Bento; now, with a new, predictable source of income and the capacity to contract European loans, it has a different sort of chief of state: Don Vicente Ribera is the first civilian to occupy the presidency in the republic's history. This improvement is understandably reassuring to foreign investors; for his part, the British railroad magnate regards Don Vicente as embodying "the triumph of the best elements in the State." Here Conrad subtly underscores an unfortunate but historically indisputable fact--that in Latin American countries, the least broadly representative leaders have often turned out to be the best, with the most representative turning out to be even more often quite the opposite.

The foreign influence in Sulaco, though evidently crucial to the development of the mine, is by no means limited to it. Indeed, the entire society can "work" only because its key figures are not Costaguanan at all, but rather Europeans (assisted, to be sure, by a handful of locals with intimate European connections). Apart from the Goulds, the principal actors in the story are Martin Decoud, a cynical boulevardier of French descent and mentality, Captain Joseph Mitchell, the British chief of the Ocean Steam Navigation Company, Dr. Monygham, an expatriate Scottish physician, and Giorgio Viola, a former Garabaldino who after years of fighting monarchs mad bishops in his native Italy has come to roost in Sulaco.

Viola, who runs a local inn frequented by the port workers, is an old-style revolutionary of the 1848 type who has been defeated after a selfless struggle for his ideals. His role in the story is apparently to provide a proper contrast to the bogus "revolutionaries" solely motivated by the quest for booty that Conrad has rushing across the stage at a crucial point in the story. Another Italian in the story who acts as a kind of deus ex machina is Giann'Batista, the chief of the stevedores, known by his employers as Nostromo, literally "our man." He embodies the intelligent application of European-style organization and discipline at the lowest level of technology; without him and his skilled laborers, mostly Italian, the port of Sulaco cannot function. Here Conrad seems to be saying that to accomplish even the most ordinal; everyday tasks, Costaguanans must import foreigners.

In fact, apart from Don Antonio Avellanos, "former minister to the courts of England, Spain, etc., etc." and his beautiful daughter Antonia, the only Costaguanan in the book who has a major speaking role is Padre Corbelan, a former missionary to the Indians who has a Jesuitical appetite for intrigue and who maintains useful contacts on both sides of the law. His twin obsessions are the restitution of church property confiscated after the wars of independence and the granting of a pardon to a certain Hernandez, a rural bandit whom he regards as an innocent victim of social injustice.

Thanks to the regeneration of the San Tome mine, peace and prosperity have returned to Sulaco and the republic of which it forms a crucial part. But not for long. The serpent in the garden is General Montero, the minister of war, a backwoods fighter who has lately been catapulted to flag rank and cabinet status by the simple expedient of throwing his lot in with the victorious party at a crucial moment in a civil war. The sudden transformation of Sulaco's fortunes whets the general's appetite for a greater share of power and wealth, and impels him to a pronunciamiento against the government of which he form a part. In this he is goaded on by his brother Pedrito, a former guerrilla fighter whose curriculum also includes extensive service as a domestic in the Costaguanan Legation in Paris, where his own delusions of grandeur have been fed by the spectacle of late Napoleonic France. It is Pedrito who acts as the chief strategist and theoretician of the Monterist revolution, draping an expedition for plunder in the language of class and racial war, with a dollop of "anti-imperialism" thrown in for good measure. A succulent sample of Monterist rhetoric is stowed up when one of Montero's partisans--a provincial deputy who until recently was a partisan of the Gould concession mid the government in Santa Marta--declares to a howling mob that war should be declared against France, England, Germany, and the United States, who by introducing railways, mining enterprises, colonization, and other such shallow pretenses, aimed at robbing the poor people of their lands, and with the help of these Goths and paralytics, the aristocrats would convert them into toiling and miserable slaves.

In fact, the deputy's comments represent precisely the opposite of the truth. There is nothing particularly oppressive about the established order. It is, indeed, a vast improvement over what has preceded it. As for the workers of the mine, they are better housed, fed, and cared for under the Gould regime than day laborers anywhere else in the republic. More than that: the "harassed, half-wild Indians" who labor at San Tome have come to cherish a sense of belonging to a major enterprise. "They were proud of; and attached to, the mine," Conrad writes. "It had secured their confidence and belief." For them, politics was nothing but an abstraction, something for townspeople to squabble over; the mine was something real that affected the quality of their lives. Thus while other country people heed the Monterist call for revolt, the mine workers themselves remain loyal to their employers.

The Montero brothers' revolutionary horde is a jerry-built confection of malcontents, but for all that reasonably effective. At one point, indeed, it appears that the Monterists have captured the capital and are malting their way across the mountains to Sulaco. Their main objective is to take control of the mine, but their more proximate goal is to lay their hands on the silver ingots stored in the Customs House destined for shipment to Europe on the next packet boat. The sudden shift of fortunes on the battlefield renders Gould's position in Sulaco increasingly tenuous, but desperate times call for desperate measures. It is decided to hide the ingots on one of the deserted islands just outside the entry to the port. Nostromo and Decoud convey the silver across the water in a flimsy lighter under the cover of darkness, accidentally crashing into a larger ship full of rebel troops but eventually reaching their destination. (The riveting narrative of their journey through the Golfo Placido is one that only an experienced sailor like Conrad could render so convincingly.)

Leaving Decoud in charge of the treasure, Nostromo swims back to land. When the vanguard of the Monterist forces reaches Sulaco and discovers the silver missing from the Customs House, they take it into their head that it has been buried on the continental shelf. An entire contingent of rebel troops is set to trawling the limitless deep--to no effect, except to keep them out of the military engagement which decides the outcome of the war.

Meanwhile, Pedrito Montero has arrived in Sulaco at the head of a marauding band. He grandly receives Charles Gould in what was once the grand salon of the gentleman's club of Sulaco, now a smoldering ruin thanks to a sacking by the Monterist mob. He imagines that he has the Englishman in his power. But the two men are motivated by entirely different considerations, and, because of this very fact, the tables are turned in what should have been a wholly unequal confrontation. Montero is driven entirely by the quest for unearned wealth. He imagines that the first installment in his portfolio will be the San Tome mine. What he fails to see is that for Charles Gould the enterprise is far more than a cherished piece of property--it represents his ideals, his vision for the country, his very identity. And rather than turn it over to a scalawag like Montero, he is prepared to blow the entire business sky-high. (He has ordered his employees to mine the tunnels with dynamite and wait upon his word to ignite it.) To be sure, Gould expects to be killed. But what of it?, he jeeringly asks Montero. [O]nce dead, where was the power capable of resuscitating such an enterprise in all its vigor and wealth out of the ashes and ruin of destruction? There was no such power in the country. And where was the skill and capital abroad that would condescend to touch such an ill-omened corpse?

"The [revolutionary] Government can certainly bring about the destruction of the San Tome mine if it likes," Gould warns him, "but without me it can do nothing else." He goes on to sketch out "the ruin of all other undertakings, the withdrawal of European capital, the withholding, most probably, of the last installment of the foreign loan."

The day is saved for Gould, for the mine, for the established order in Sulaco, through three expedients. The first is a perilous journey undertaken by Nostromo through enemy territory to convince a loyalist general to lift the siege of the town by bringing relief troops around by sea. The second is a blanket pardon granted to Hernandez the bandit and his outlaw hordes (brokered by Father Corbelan) in exchange for an attack on the Monterist forces from the rear. The third is a decision by the elite of the town to separate entirely from Costaguana and declare independence as the Occidental Republic, with Hernandez--now gazetted a general--as its first minister of war. What has become a conflict between two distinctive territorial entities is brought to an end by an international naval demonstration when a U.S. cruiser is the first to salute the Occidental flag ("white, with a wreath of laurel in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower").

It seems extraordinary that any work of fiction could so skillfully compress so much South American history. Students of the subject will readily recognize in Conrad's Costaguana pieces and chunks of nineteenth-century Haiti, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela, all seamlessly knit together in a coherent whole. The principality, is rendered so true to life that at times the reader is tempted to doubt that it is an imaginary creation at all. A thousand tiny details--the "luxuriant beauty of [Sulaco's] orange gardens bearing witness to its antiquity"; Padre Corbelan's refusal of an Episcopal palace for a residence, "prefer[ing] to hang his shabby hammock amongst the rubble mid spiders of the sequestered Dominican Convent"; the posada kept by a retired Mexican bullfighter where the plotters gather; the new attorney-general of the rebel republic, a &frocked notary, "whom the revolution had found languishing in the common jail on a charge of forging documents"; General Montero's "imbecile and domineering stare" his reading ability limited to "spel[ling] out the print in newspapers," "the various Parisian hotels where the Costaguanan Legation sheltered its diplomatic dignity"; the legend that the dictator Guzman Bento's corpse "had been carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the Church of the Assumption"; even Mrs. Gould's crushing political naivete--paint a more convincing picture than most novelists can reasonably be expected to achieve.

But what is more remarkable still is how little has changed in the region since the book was written. General Montero foreshadows a whole host of counterfeit social revolutionaries in uniform to come along throughout the twentieth century, from Mexico's General Plutarco Elias Calles, Bolivia's Colonel German Busch, Argentina's General Juan Peron, Colombia's General Rojas Pinilla, Peru's General Velasco Alvarado, to present-day Venezuela's irredeemably silly Colonel Hugo Chavez. Montero's brother Pedrito, too, is a type well known to the contemporary scene, a kind of proto-Sandinista, a skilled guerrilla fighter-cum-ideologue whose main objective is wealth and power but who brandishes--somewhat unconvincingly, it is true--Western liberal language to disguise his true motivations. (Another practitioner of the art, without the distinction of battle honors, might be Haiti's recently exiled ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.) Even Father Corbelan seems remarkably ahead of his time, his left-wing clericalism a sort of precursor of Liberation Theology. He might be said to represent the perennial clash between Catholic social doctrine and the imperatives of material progress.

The major point to make here, however, is not that Monterism--as we might call it--is something found only on the fringes of "normal" political life in Latin America. A mere decade and a half ago Argentina's president Raul Alfonsin--a lawyer, a civilian, democratically elected--made a speech declaring that the United States purposely lent money to his country "so that it won't develop." More recently, Bolivia's President Carlos Mesa staged a plebiscite whose apparent objective was to withdraw his country's participation in the international natural gas market, thus assuring it another four centuries of extreme poverty, at the same time encouraging the region where the gas itself is found to seriously consider secession. And every day of the week Argentina's unfortunate president Nestor Kirchner makes some statement which sounds as if he were speaking not from the presidential palace in Buenos Aires but from the armed camp of Pedrito Montero; as one of his critics pointed out, he represents those many Argentines for whom the acquisition of wealth is "a matter of waiting to win the lottery."

With stunning prescience, Conrad saw that at the very moment when European imperialism was nearing its apogee, its antithesis--what the French call tiermondisme--lurked just over the horizon, in the fullness of time to demonstrate that whatever the sins of colonialism, what was bound to follow could conceivably be worse, perhaps even far worse. Nostromo is a supreme work of art which is also a prophecy, one which more often than not has been amply fulfilled.