The Secret History of Costaguana

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John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention." [125] As any good novelist would do, Conrad did not refrain from transmuting people he met elsewhere and later, not necessarily in South America, into lively characters of his Costaguana story. Literature, alas, may be the only salvation for the policy elite, because in the guise of fiction a writer can more easily tell the truth. And in literature's vast canon there is no book of which I am aware that both defines and dissects the problems with the world just beyond our own as well as Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, a 1904 novel about Westerners and indigenous inhabitants of an imaginary South American country, Costaguana. Nostromo is neither overly descriptive and moodily vague like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, nor is its ending entirely unhappy. For a civil society-in-the-making does emerge in Costaguana, but it is midwived by a ruined cynic of a doctor who has given up on humanity, a deeply skeptical journalist, and two bandit gangs, not by the idealist whose actions had helped lead to the country's earlier destruction. Conrad never denies the possibility of progress in any society, but he is ironic enough to know that "The ways of human progress are inscrutable", and that is why "action is consolatory" and "the friend of flattering illusions." Charles Gould, the failed idealist of the novel, who believes absolutely in economic development, "had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that prevail in this world." Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer" inadvertently. [128] The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. [129] Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr [note 27] ( Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon (" Youth"), Captain Lingard ( Almayer's Folly and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis ( The Shadow Line). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." [131] Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." [132] Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of Lord Jim. [133] Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884. [134]

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The character’s real name is Gian’ Battista Fidanza. “Nostromo,” the name given him by the other Europeans, is Italian “boatswain” (he was originally a Genoese sailor), but there is an apparently inadvertent pun on “nostro-uomo”—“our man.”

Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, [note 4] though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. [10] His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, [11] have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. [note 5] Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: " Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral." [118] The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism. Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Conrad is relentless in his willingness to confront every unpleasant truth. He will not even admire a beautiful edifice: "The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the conquerors", he writes, "proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the tribute-labour of vanished nations." It is in the totality of his realism that the author--a Pole who knew Russian tyranny as a boy and later spent fifteen tough years in the merchant marine--achieves fairness. (In one sentence he demolishes North and South: "There is always something childish in the rapacity of the passionate, clear-minded, Southern races, wanting in the misty idealism of the Northerners, who at the slightest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth.") And it is in his sympathy for individuals, rather than for groups, that Conrad achieves humanity. For Nostromo, like any great story, is about individuals and their desperate need for love. Conrad was born 150 years ago and his birth is being commemorated throughout the region by a growing number of Latin American intellectuals with essays, articles and even with a bestselling novel ( Historia Secreta de Costaguana: A Secret History of Costaguana by Colombian young writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez). They all concur in declaring Nostromo, a novel set in the second half of the 1th century, as a key bequeathed to us by a British writer of Polish aristocratic origins, to a best understanding of Latin America’s present. In 1996 his grave was designated a Grade II listed structure. [120] Writing style [ edit ] Themes and style [ edit ] Joseph Conrad, 1919 or after You might be wondering where our title character has been in all this. We were wondering, too. Not to worry, though—Nostromo definitely plays an important role in the novel's events. An Italian sailor who became the foreman of the Oceanic Steam and Navigation (O.S.N. for short) group of lightermen and caretaker of the Sulaco jetty, Nostromo is basically everyone's go-to guy. It is the story of a silver mine in the Occidental Province of “the imaginary (but true)” [7] Latin American country of Costaguana, and the crisis by which the province passes from the chaos of post-colonial misrule to the unquiet prosperity of Anglo-American imperial capitalism. Though the time-frame stretches from colonization and a Bolívarian War of Independence to a future of cosmopolitan modernization and possible Marxist revolution, the major action occurs over the space of less than a month, during which the Europeans’ puppet dictator is overthrown by a popular military leader and the province braces for invasion.

In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream." [182] Conrad's friend Cunninghame Graham In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine: Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes. As we know from the historical record, Panama gained its independence from Colombia in 1903 and José was there but he was not happy about it. He left immediately for London where he met Conrad, told him his story and the story of Colombia and was devastated that Conrad did use the story he had told him but created his own novel. Does it all work? The answer is more or less but we are left unsure as to whether Vásquez wants to tell the Conrad-Altamirano story or the history of Colombia/Panama. While not, of course, mutually exclusive, we do sometimes get the sense that Vásquez is not always sure where his focus is. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating account of one man’s perspective of Latin American turmoil. Publishing history Consider the following assertion: “Joseph Conrad is the author of the most penetrating imaginative effort to understand a Latin American ambiance ever produced in contemporary English literature.”Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979 It is, in my view, the masterwork of that ‘puissant rêveur,’ as Gustav[e] Kahn once called Conrad….one of the few mastering visions of our historical moment and our human lot.”—Robert Penn Warren [4] For the next fifteen years, he served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków, in October 1874, until he signed off the Adowa, in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. [48] His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque Otago from Sydney to Mauritius. [49] In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. [34] Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis. [35] Tadeusz Bobrowski, Conrad's maternal uncle, mentor, and benefactor