Summary
Joseph Conrad’s novel of 1904, set in a Central American republic dominated by outside interests because of its immense silver mine, read by Edward Said in the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism as prescient about North American influence and as embodying the paternalistic arrogance of imperialism that it mocks (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.16-18 / printed p.xvii-xix).
Details
- Conrad forecasts the unstoppable unrest and “misrule” of the Latin American republics — governing them, he says, quoting Bolívar, is like plowing the sea — and singles out North America’s particular way of influencing conditions in a decisive yet barely visible way (PDF p.16 / printed p.xvii).
- Holroyd, the San Francisco financier who backs Charles Gould, the British owner of the San Tomé mine, warns his protégé that “we won’t be drawn into any large trouble” as investors, and is quoted at length, ending: “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.” (PDF p.16 / printed p.xvii).
- Much of the rhetoric of the “New World Order” promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War might have been scripted by Holroyd; the implicit warning in Conrad’s portraits of Holroyd and Gould is that the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting (PDF p.16 / printed p.xvii).
- It would be incomplete to read the novel simply as a prediction of twentieth-century Latin America; Conrad is the precursor of the Western views of the Third World found in novelists as different as Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul and Robert Stone, in theorists of imperialism like Hannah Arendt, and in travel writers, filmmakers and polemicists (PDF p.17 / printed p.xviii).
- The newly independent state of Sulaco that emerges at the end of the novel is only a smaller, more tightly controlled and intolerant version of the larger state from which it has seceded (PDF p.18 / printed p.xix).
- In Chapter One, III, Said cites Nostromo again as the work in which Conrad records imperialism’s illusions and tremendous violence and waste (PDF p.53 / printed p.26).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Imperialism