LOCKE AND OXFORD

John Locke lived from 1632 to 1704, from the seventh year of the reign of Charles I to the third year of the reign of Queen Anne: 1632 was the year of the birth of Sir Christopher Wren in England, of Pufendorf and Spinoza on the continent. In the course of his seventy-two years Locke saw the worlds in which he spent his life, the intellectual and scientific world, the political and economic world, change farther and faster than any of his forefathers had done, and in England more markedly than anywhere else. He was as much of a mere Englishman as a universal genius could be, though he spent two critical periods of his life abroad, in France from 1675 to 1679 and in Holland from 1683 to 1689. He was as private and ordinary a man as could be expected of an individual who was to help to change the philosophical and political assumptions of Europe, but for two other periods he was a directive political influence in his own right and something of a public personality. This was between about 1667 and 1675 and again in 1679–82 when he was associated with that overpowering political leader, the first earl of Shaftesbury, and between 1694 and 1700 as the confidant of Lord Somers, the chief figure of the government. He died a famous man and he has remained one of the great English names ever since.

When men think of themselves as organized with each other they must remember who they are. They do not make themselves, they do not own themselves, they do not dispose of themselves, they are the workmanship of God. They are his servants, sent into the world on his business, they are even his property (ii, § 6). To John Locke this was a proposition of common sense, the initial proposition of a work which appeals to common sense throughout. It is an existentialist proposition, which men have not thought it worth while to question seriously until our own day, and it relies not so much on the proved existence of a Deity as upon the possibility of taking what might be called a synoptic view of the world, more vulgarly a God's-eye view of what happens among men here on earth. If you admit that it is possible to look down on men from above, then you may be said to grant to Locke this initial position.

From this common-sense starting-point he proceeds to two inferences, that we are all free and we are all equal; free of each other, that is to say, and equal to each other, for we are not free of God's superiority and not equal to him. If God could be shown to have given any man, or any order of men, superiority over other men, then these inferences could not be drawn.

‘So foul a sky clears not without a storm’ is the uninviting epigraph of Nostromo. In Shakespeare's King John the line is addressed by the king to a messenger who bears bad news; the French have raised a vast army for an attack on England, which King John will not survive. The epigraph has no real analogy to Nostromo, except that both works deal with politics, internal civil wars and foreign intervention. What meaning did Conrad intend? Only one seems plausible. That the present overcast sky will not clear up without another storm. In any case, the epigraph is surely not primarily meteorological; it suggests a political or historical interpretation for the novel; and this has, in fact, been found by many critics. Most commonly they raise the issue of whether the coming storm in the novel does, or does not, support our lingering belief in historical progress.

Some three decades ago this question was raised by at least four of Nostromo's early significant critics: Albert Guerard, Robert Penn Warren, Arnold Kettle and Irving Howe. Guerard, in his brief monograph, Joseph Conrad, of 1947, writes that the mine ‘corrupts Sulaco, bringing civil war rather than progress’ (71). In his much-read introduction to the Modern Library edition of Nostromo in 1951 Warren disagreed: ‘That strikes me as far too simple. There has been a civil war, but the forces of “progress” - i.e. the San Tome mine and the capitalistic order - have won. And we must admit that the society at the end of the book is preferable to that at the beginning.’ When Guerard came to write his second and longer book, Conrad the Novelist, in 1958, he agreed; but only on condition that we take ‘as beginning the savage old days of Guzman Bento's tyranny and as end the quiet moment when Dr. Monygham makes his prediction’ (GU, 198). But what if we take as the ‘end’ that which the narrator discusses, the one with a Sulaco of ‘cable cars’ and ‘serious, organized labour troubles’? Is that preferable? More generally, how do we face - over eighty years later than Nostromo - the contrast between the old ways of life and the new?

Many people have found Nostromo difficult to read. This is probably not because there is any particular difficulty in seeing the meaning of the writing itself, since there are very few passages where one has any idea that the writer was a foreigner who only began to learn English in his late teens. It probably means, rather, that Conrad changes our expectations of what kind of continuity we should expect in the writing; most obviously, we should look, not for the usual forward chronological development of the story and its characters from sentence to sentence, but instead for other patterns of meaning and other significant continuities that Conrad does establish.

The prose

Let us begin by looking at the prose style and, to start with, at the functions of one sentence in the first chapter.

That chapter in general is an ambitious, and very successful, description of the general scene of Nostromo - Sulaco, the Cordillera, the Golfo Placido, and its three uninhabited little islands called the Isabels. Of the middle island, Conrad writes:

The vocabulary is ordinary; educated, no doubt, but without any long or rare words. The syntax is equally ordinary - it is a simple sentence, with only the one finite verb - ‘rustles’. Admittedly there are a good many qualifiers - there is only one noun without an adjective, ‘spines’; and spines is itself a qualifier iir the adjectival phrase, ‘rough with spines’. Conrad keeps his relatively long - thirty-three-word - sentence grammatically simple by using two long phrases each qualifying ‘palm’; and one could object that the second phrase, ‘a very witch amongst palm trees’, is actually syntactically dependent not on the immediately preceding phrase about the ‘trunk’, but on the ‘old ragged palm’.

There are three fairly obvious reasons for Conrad's position as a major landmark figure in the world literature of yesterday and today: the nature of his subjects, the unique quality of his own personal experience, and his technical originality. The three are obviously related to each other, and to his individual achievement.

Conrad's subjects are original, compared with the long tradition of prose fiction before him, because they do not centre either on the erotic life of a small set of people, or the education of a young person or persons in the ways of the world. Instead Conrad took as his topic the actions of relatively ordinary men and women in the real world. This means that it is in one sense typical of Conrad that having been a seaman he wrote a good deal about life on board ship; but in another sense his sea fiction is not essentially different from his other tales. The Nigger of the (Narcissus’, say, is not unlike Nostromo, because both, whether ship or country, attempt to reveal a whole social process in action; or, to put it a little differently, to show the fate of many individual people of varying ages facing the real world. This is not to say that Conrad was essentially a Naturalist, like Zola; Conrad does not start with a theory or a plan about the social world; he starts, rather, with his personal sense of how he, and presumably others, began by finding themselves in a world which they did not choose, but in which, whether they like it or not, they must act; for in that action they will find, or more probably fail to find, the realisation of their ideas and aims as individuals. Conrad put this basic general artistic premise fairly clearly in a letter to his publisher, William Blackwood. At a critical time in his career, events forced him to defend his view that ‘ultimate and irretrievable failure is not to be my lot’.

Part of the novel's ‘sociability of vision’ certainly comes from Nostromo's riches of characters. The novel is rich in numbers - Najder speaks of its having over twenty protagonists (NA, 289), and there are many more - perhaps seventy or so named or unnamed persons; it is also rich in variety - of ages, sexes, races, religions, educations, and moral attitudes. But we must also ask whether these characters are shown in convincing and significant ways, and whether Conrad's narrative teqhnique assists in showing this process or not.

Conrad is not generally considered to be one of the novel's supreme creators of character; and, rightly or wrongly, we must concede that he does not initially make things smooth for his reader. There is, for instance, his fairly random habit in the way the characters are introduced. Some of them get no names, such as the assistant to the chief of police, or the chief engineer. We understand that the policeman is not named, since he only appears once; but the chief engineer, as Tillyard has shown (r, 146-8), is an interesting and rather admirable person. Monygham calls him ‘the Napoleon of railways’ (N, 318), but his views of Gould and Holroyd, show an admirably free and understanding intelligence. This is also exhibited in his surprising open-mindedness about the possible success of Decoud's scheme for secession, whereas Monygham merely mocks the idea, presumably because he dislikes ‘that plump dandy, Decoud’ (N, 316). The engineer is also more understanding than Monygham in seeing what Holroyd's missionary enthusiasm means: ‘things seem to be worth nothing by what they are in themselves. I begin to believe that the only solid thing about them is the spiritual value which everyone discovers in his own form of activity’ (N, 318).

The engineer's lack of a name is not particularly important, of course; but if fits in with Conrad's other refusals to concede to the usual convention of naming characters: some important ones, like Sir John, get no surname; and others, like Monygham, get no given name. On the other hand Conrad sometimes merely does not name a character until some time after he has been introduced, as happens with Don Pepe; while others, such as Harris or Sidoni (N, 243, 548), are given proper names though they are hardly characters; here Conrad is merely throwing in a name for casual verisimilitude.

Hamblen's Nicolo and Conrad's Nostromo

‘I'd rather have written Conrad's “Nostromo” than any other novel.’ So Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1920. Many other novelists have rated Nostromo just as highly, but other than Fitzgerald I know of none that have singled out the character of Nostromo in particular as their main reason.

In his ‘Author's Note’, dated October 1917, Conrad gave what was, compared to many of his brief prefatory remarks for other novels in the collected edition, an unusually detailed account of Nostromo's origins. After finishing the tales in the Typhoon volume, published in 1902, Conrad wrote, ‘it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about’. (Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Keith Carabine (Oxford, 1984). Hereafter cited as N.) This ‘strangely negative but disturbing mood’ was finally broken by ‘a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details’.

Conrad had actually heard the substance of the anecdote before. ‘In 1875 or 6,’ he recalls, ‘when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution.’ Conrad had made two voyages to the Caribbean in his adolescent days; and on the second of them, sailing on the Saint-Antoine in 1876, he was ashore in South America for what was almost certainly the first and last time in his life (NA, 44). But, as he says in the ‘Author's Note’, ‘having no particular interest in crime qua crime’, Conrad forgot the story of the stolen silver until

Synopsis of the following six Meditations

In the First Meditation reasons are provided which give us possible grounds for doubt about all things, especially material things, so long as we have no foundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up till now. Although the usefulness of such extensive doubt is not apparent at first sight, its greatest benefit lies in freeing us from all our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses. The eventual result of this doubt is to make it impossible for us to have any further doubts about what we subsequently discover to be true.

In the Second Meditation, the mind uses its own freedom and supposes the non-existence of all the things about whose existence it can have even the slightest doubt; and in so doing the mind notices that it is impossible that it should not itself exist during this time. This exercise is also of the greatest benefit, since it enables the mind to distinguish without difficulty what belongs to itself, i.e. to an intellectual nature, from what belongs to the body. But since some people may perhaps expect arguments for the immortality of the soul in this section, I think they should be warned here and now that I have tried not to put down anything which I could not precisely demonstrate. Hence the only order which I could follow was that normally employed by geometers, namely to set out all the premisses on which a desired proposition depends, before drawing any conclusions about it. Now the first and most important prerequisite for knowledge of the immortality of the soul is for us to form a concept of the soul which is as clear as possible and is also quite distinct from every concept of body; and that is just what has been done in this section.