Homecoming in Nostromo

Abstract

As to this polish journey, I depart on it with mixed feelings.In 1874 I got into a train in Cracow (Vienna express) on my way to the sea, as a man might get into a dream. And here is the dream going on still.Conrad to John Galsworthy, 25 July 1914 (CTS 407)SINCE CONTEMPORARY READERSHIP is increasingly composed of voluntary nomads - citizens who want to belong to the world but are neither culturally nor emotionally integrated into the ethos of the land in which they live - it is not accidental that the most famous fictional journey remains that ancient tale of nostalgia-steeped adventure, Odyssey. In the twentieth century, the practical deconstruction of cultural, social, and psychological certainties centred in nation-states, national character, and national identity has shifted literary focus away from the centre and towards the margin, rendering cultural pluralism not only an inevitable subject matter for fiction but also a seldom acknowledged perceptual and therefore descriptive assumption. However, as up root edness, paradoxically, has become increasingly grounded in the human condition, the modern reader identifies more intensely and more confusedly with imaginative work derived from Homer's formula and yielding those essential literary pleasures associated with the chemical melding of the arduous journey homeward and its romantic denouement.Conrad's condition as an expatriate made him particularly interested in the notion of home: in his fiction, home is frequently foregrounded as a narrative referent in a body of work featuring numerous homeward journeys and homecomings. In principle, because return in Conrad's fiction is attempted by individuals of alienated imagination, the place to which they return tends to reflect their alienation and, in general, elicits an inadvertent self-consciousness that in specific works coheres in particular discursive modes. In Tord Jim, accordingly, the hero's moral dilemma, self-consciously intensified as he approaches the point of redemptive return, threatens to become a wholesale psychological paralysis only barely resisted by a discipline of critical detachment, naturally reflected in and reinforced by the novel's diegetic strategies. In Under Western Eyes, diegesis and discourse are organized by political theory and political analysis, but again the novel's dramatic centre is an alienated return to the origin-point of alienation and the exasperating attempt to discover psychological integrity in a world of mutually reflecting dislocations. Then, as Conrad perfects a literature of disjunctions where plot and presentation exist in an essentially ironic relationship - he contrives, as in Nostromo, a form of multi-layered fiction whose satirical, psychological, and romantic dimensions are arranged without integrative design, necessitating complex readings and even when sensitively read withholding an expected return on investment. In some narratives, dramatic tension stems from the impossibility of the homeward journey, as in Amy Foster, but whenever the notion of home is represented, dramatically or symbolically or even in absentia, it performs a discursive function, organizing ideology and counter-ideology as they structure the antagonisms that establish the basics of plot. Thus, Martin Decoud's homecoming in Nostromo and Peyrol's in Kover serve to intensify conflict and clarify the nature of the opposing forces. Variations on this technique include the ironic homecomings in Heart of Darkness and Under Western Eyes and the stalled momentum towards home that is central to the design of The secret Sharer.Unlike Odysseus' homecoming, however, those in Conrad's works deny the reader satisfactory closure, to say nothing of a happy ending. Indeed, homecoming in Conrad can be read as an allegory of the modern human struggle, burdened by existential angst and condemned to exile as a permanent condition. facts of Conrad's own experience, however, invite further examination of this seemingly conventional allegory. …