‘A succession of incomprehensible images’ : decoud, boredom and history in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

Abstract

In an early scene in Nostromo, Emilia Gould declares that ‘nothing ever happened’ in Sulaco. ‘Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time’, the narrator adds, ‘respected the repose of the place’. The sense of historical impasse in Sulaco despite its tumultuous history is part of what I will call Nostromo’s rhetoric of boredom. I will suggest that Conrad’s novel embodies this rhetoric through Martin Decoud, the ‘idle boulevardier’ who commits suicide when marooned with the Goulds’ silver. Decoud’s weary conception of the universe as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’ marks him out as a familiar cultural trope: the Parisian flâneur. During the nineteenth-century, this famous figure was often depicted in the language of disengagement, despondency and fatigue that would become characteristic of modern boredom. By attributing these qualities to Decoud, Nostromo locates the sceptical and ahistorical philosophy that leads him to commit suicide within a specific historical context. Moreover, Nostromo’s narrative form often presents its content as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’, depicting its characters’ perspective through the paratactic accumulation of inconsequential details. Thus, the historically-constituted experience conveyed through the rhetoric of boredom is further expressed through the novel’s dissonant mode of historical narration.