Conrad, Wells and the Art of the Novel

Abstract

On 19 November 1904, H. G. Wells wrote to the novelist Morley Roberts: ‘What do you think of Conrad? I began the chorus of praise ten years ago, but I’m cooling off considerable. Short stories is his game. Nostromo is desiccated conglomerate’ (Correspondence 2: 58). Wells could not have been more wrong in his judgement. As Cedric Watts says, ‘Nostromo incorporated the most intelligent fictional analysis of international capitalism and of economic imperialism ever written’, and it is, as Watts avers, ‘Conrad’s masterpiece’ (‘Nostromo in T. P.’s Weekly’ 102). Wells’s assessment of the novel implies that it is dry, powdered goods, deprived of all life-giving moisture, texture and sustenance, an amalgam of unrelated narratives: his full implication is that Nostromo has nothing of importance to offer. In fact, ironically, Nostromo is a conglomerate, but not in the way that Wells implies. Watts pinpoints the importance of the novel exactly when he says that ‘the textual multiplicity of Nostromo amplifies its modernistic multivocality and magnifies its postmodernistic indeterminacy’ (‘Nostromo in T. P.’s Weekly’ 112). Conrad himself called the novel ‘my biggest creative effort’, and as Watts points out, Arnold Bennett, a contributor to T. P.’s Weekly where Nostromo was first serialized, ‘would later assure Conrad privately that Nostromo was “the Higuerota among novels”: “the finest novel of this