Nostromo: The Nation, Nation Formation, Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism

Where The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ carefully brackets out the economic dimension of shipping as part of Conrad’s exclusion of ‘land entanglements’, Nostromo brings ‘the code of the sea’ on shore and confronts it with the operations of contemporary capital. Captain Mitchell and Nostromo are both sailors ‘come ashore’ from the multinational world of ships to the multicultural society of Costaguana. Through their presence in the novel, Conrad foregrounds ideas of ‘service’ based on an organicist ideology. The narrative then challenges both ideas of service and the organicist ideology on which these rest through Conrad’s early depiction of globalisation. Through the long history of Costaguana that he provides, Conrad depicts the processes of colonisation and neo-colonisation; at the same time, this history of liberation struggles and revolutions immerses the reader in the violent complexities of South American politics. In creating his fictional country of Costaguana and the secession of Sulaco, Conrad also confronts nationalism, the idea of the nation and the process of nation-formation. He also engages with cosmopolitanism through the dandified Decoud and touches, at the end, on the topic of transnational activism, which was to feature in his next two novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. In Nostromo, while the principal characters are consciously engaged in what they see as the process of nation formation, the narrative demonstrates that the concept of the nation is outdated in a context in which the determining force is transnational capital.