As Marlow becomes an apologist for Jim, the reader is expected to adopt a stance of judgment toward Marlow-is expected to see that Marlow, too, is a fallible human being who is different in degree but not in kind from Jim. On three occasions Conrad undercuts Marlow's pretensions to moral authority. First, during Jim's trial, Marlow offers Jim Brierly's plan to evade the trial and escape the rituals of civilized judgment; second, Marlow goes to Stein because he wishes to «dispose» of Jim, in part to avoid his bizarre fear of having Jim-in the role of a common vagrant-confront him in London; and, finally, during his visit to Patusan, Marlow loses control in his interview with Jewel for no reason other than his own need to assure himself that he is better than Jim at a time Marlow's ability to make moral distinctions is threatened: 'I felt the sort of rage one feels during a hard tussle… 'You want to know [why the world does not want him]? I asked in a fury. 'Yes! she cried. 'Because he is not good enough, I said brutally.' Marlow's self-indulgent indiscretion-what purpose is served by telling Jewel that Jim is not good enough? — strikingly contrasts with the climax of Heart of Darkness. When an embittered and disillusioned Marlow returns to Europe, he is willing to lie to the Intended, although he hates a lie, and to let her think that Kurtz's last words were -701- her name in order that she have the sustaining illusion of Kurtz's undying devotion.
While Marlow enacts the moment of irreconcilable impasse or aporia of modernism, Conrad, I am arguing, does not. For, as we have seen, Conrad's omniscient voice stands in judgment of Jim's behavior and of Marlow's understandable efforts as one of us-lonely, doubting humans in a confusing world that Conrad thought of as a 'remorseless process'-to explain Jim's behavior. Conrad expects the reader to understand that Marlow's confidence in absolute values has been undermined by his own experience, and that readers must, like judges, sift through the data as objectively as possible, even while recognizing that, like Brierly and Marlow, we are all prone to skewed judgments based on our own needs. But while the novel tempts us to be a Jim reader of Jim, or a Brierly-reader or a Stein-reader, and, even more urgently, to be a reader of Marlow-who at times is a Jim-reader, a Brierly-reader, and a Stein-reader-it finally insists on our being an omniscient reader and as unforgiving and unyielding in our judgments as the omniscient narrator.
Poignantly, by allowing Doramin to shoot him, Jim chooses the masculine world of physical action, represented by the pistol (recall how he had entered Patusan 'with an unloaded revolver in his lap'), over the alternative, more feminine world of values represented by the talismanic friendship ring given to him by Stein-the ring that he gave to his messenger, 'Tamb Itam, to give to Dain Waris as a sign that his messenger's words should be trusted.' Just as his achievements in the native black world can never be as real to Jim as the failures in the white home world, feminine values-those of romantic love and personal ties-cannot be as real to him as the world of male heroism. Jim can love Jewel in his romance world of 'knight and maiden,' but not in the relative world of partial failures and relative successes By choosing to face the male pistol, Jim, in fact, ironically closes the eternal circle implied by the feminine ring.
Conrad's novels about politics have been viewed both as nihilistic statements and as dramatizations of a political vision. While the subject of these novels- Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) — is often politics, their values are not political. The -702- novels affirm the primacy of family, the sanctity of the individual, the value of love, and the importance of sympathy and understanding in human relations. His concern for the working class derives not from political theory but from his experience as a seaman and from his imaginative response to the miseries of others.
In the political novels Conrad is disillusioned with materialism and imagines that 'industrialism and commercialism' may foster wars between democracies. Like Dostoevsky, Conrad disavows the 'Crystal Palace,' the Victorian symbol of science and progress. In a mechanistic, amoral world, Conrad understands the necessity for political and social organization. While he dissects flaws in various systems, states, and communities, he does not propose alternative programs. But he does insist on preserving the freedom of the individual to live his own life as long as he does not pose a physical threat to others.
The essay ''Autocracy and War' (1905) helps us understand Conrad's political novels. The essay boils down to two central points. Above all, Conrad is opposed to autocracy. Secondly, he uncharacteristically affirms a belief in the evolution of both nations and mankind. In Nostromo, even when high-minded characters espouse ideals, political principles are thinly veiled disguises for the desire to control the enormous treasure of the San Tomé mine. Because of their own obsessions and moral weaknesses, the Goulds, Decoud, Antonia, Nostromo, and even the Viola family are engulfed by politics created by the insistent demands of materialism. Nostromo is the story of men who, while seeking to define their own lives in bold and heroic terms, become entrapped by the circumstances that they seek to control and the political activity in which they engage.
In Nostromo, the disrupted chronology, the rapidly shifting focus, and the ominous instability of the ending dramatize a world that has lost its moral center, a world in which, as Yeats put it in 'The Second Coming,' 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.' The form is a correlative to a narrative about a civilization that lacks a moral center. No matter what illusion or abstraction to which a character has committed himself-whether it be Viola's republicanism, Monygham's devotion, Gould's idealism, Nostromo's 'good name'-each major character returns to a position in which he is alone, stripped of his public self, and exposed to the vicissitudes of an indifferent cosmos. At first, each major character is depicted as part of the social and political order of Sulaco; only then is he examined in his -703- private facet and shown to be serving not the community but dimly understood psychic needs and unacknowledged obsessions.
Nostromo, the man garbed in silver trappings, is the offspring of the mine. Virtually anonymous, with only the vaguest claims to a personal past or national identity, he is metaphorically the spongy lump of silver metamorphosed into a fully grown adult. Nostromo is the child of materialism and imperialism; he is created by the needs of Mitchell and, later, by Gould, as a human instrument that can be depended upon to place the interests of those he serves before his own. That he belongs to the imperialists and their political interests is implied by the title that has been conferred upon him by those he serves: Nostromo, 'our man.' Such a name deprives him of a personal identity in the eyes of those he serves. When he flippantly promises the chief engineer that he will 'take care' of Sir John 'as if [he] were his father,' he acknowledges the patrimony of materialism and concomitantly neglects his own need for human relationships.
Nostromo's relation to the cargadores and natives parallels Gould's position with the aristocrats. Both are motivated by intense vanity that is related to their need to compensate for a disrupted family. Both rely on taciturnity and detachment to maintain that position, and both are treated almost like royalty by obsequious followers because of the power they are perceived to hold. When Nostromo gradually drifts into bondage to the treasure, he becomes Gould's double. The terms on which he rebels only establish the dominance of the paternity of material interests. He wants to overthrow the flourishing regime he helped to establish. He supports a socialist party that seeks to undermine the authority figures whom he allowed to become his political fathers in place of Viola; he wants to assuage his guilt for betraying the trust of the people, specifically the cargadores, even though Sulaco's prosperity has clearly brought tangible benefits to the people. His rightful name, Fidanza, is an ironic suggestion of fidanza, the Italian word for confidence, the quality for which he is recognized by others but which in its most profound sense he lacks, and of the Latin root, fidelitas, or loyalty, the value he has implicitly renounced.
Gould's libidinous energies are engaged by the mine instead of by his relationship to his wife. The first silver that the mine produces is described in terms that suggest a demonic birth. In what might now be seen as an instance of Conrad's awareness of the commodification of women, Mrs. Gould is midwife to silver rather than mother to children. -704-
Just as the uncorrupted waterfall becomes galvanized into a silver-fall, Gould's sexual substance becomes a stream of silver and his offspring a lump of silver. Mrs. Gould has sublimated her sexual needs and has tacitly permitted the production of the silver to become Gould's homage to her and to substitute for intercourse. The result is not only a childless marriage but her becoming a lonely, isolated, sexually frustrated woman. Potentially tender moments climax not with intimacy but with Gould's return to the mine at night. The spongy lump grows into a wall that divides her from her husband.
Decoud, the man who is alternately cynic and romantic, pragmatist and idealist; the man whose perceptive analysis of others often goes beyond the narrator's understanding; the man who uses the written word to rescue his identity is, like Marlow, a character from whom Conrad is at times barely able to distance himself. Decoud is Conrad's mirror, and the distance between Conrad's voice and his character dissolves when he narrates Decoud's complete inability to cope with his solitude. Decoud's final crisis approaches states of mind that Conrad experienced in the period from 1895 to 1898. Thus, in 1896 Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett:
