Nostromo is Italian for “mate” or “boatswain,” a contraction of nostro uomo — “our man.” To sci-fi film geeks, it’s the name of the mining craft in Ridley Scott’s Alien.
But it’s also the name of a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, which, Robert Kaplan says defines and dissects the problems with the world just beyond our own, by examining 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.”
Nostromo is Conrad’s best and most difficult work, Kaplan says:
In this media-obsessed age — when “intellectuals” spend their evenings watching C-SPAN and CNN — people may be better acquainted with Heart of Darkness than with Nostromo only because the former is exceedingly short, as well as amenable to skimming, on account of a thin plot and lengthy landscape descriptions. In Nostromo, however, landscape ambiance is a tightly controlled, strategic accompaniment to political realism.
It matters today, because so little has changed in the “developing” world:
It is a tribute to Conrad’s insight that his description of Costaguana and its port, Sulaco, captures so many of the crucial tidbits and subtleties about troubled Third World states (particularly small and isolated ones) that foreign correspondents of today experience but do not always inform their readers about, because such details do not fit within the confines of “news” or “objective” analysis.There are, for example, the handful of foreign merchants in Sulaco, without whom there would be no local economy; the small, sovereign parcels of foreign territory (company headquarters and embassies) to which people flee at times of unrest; and the obscure army captain who has spent time abroad hanging about cafés in European capitals, and who later finds himself back home, nursing resentments, and at the head of a rebellion provoked by soldiers who drink heavily.
There is, too, the “stupendous magnificence” of the local scenery — what Conrad calls a “Paradise of snakes”; the conspiracy theories begot by deep isolation and the general feeling of powerlessness and “futility”; and a wealthier, more developed part of the country that wants to secede because its inhabitants are even more cynical about the political future over “the mountains” than any foreigner. Conrad shows us, too, how bad forms of urbanization deform cultures: “the town children of the Sulaco Campo”, for instance, “sullen, thievish, vindictive, and bloodthirsty, whatever great qualities their brothers of the plain might have had.”
He describes oscillations between chaos and tyranny, and political movements named after their leaders — Monterists and Ribierists — because in Costaguana, despite the talk of “democracy” and “liberation”, there are no ideas, only personalities. He describes “the dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security.” He describes a port, an ocean port no less, that because of Costaguana’s lawlessness is “so isolated” from the world.
His conclusion is of a sort that a novelist can make with less damage to his reputation than a journalist: “The fundamental causes [of the Monterist terror] were the same as ever, rooted in the political immaturity of the people, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental darkness of the lower.” Giorgio Viola, an Italian who fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi and now lives in Costaguana with his dying wife and two daughters, believes, moments after several bullets strike his house and a mob tries to set fire to his roof, that “These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves.”
Back to Alien:
In James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, the Marine transport vessel is named Sulaco. (Also in Alien, the escape vessel is named Narcissus, an allusion to another of Conrad’s works, The Nigger of the Narcissus.)