MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONKAND NOSTROMO.

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of ry < San Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

^3^ thC Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Sudarshan Ramani

San Francisco, California

May 2018

Copyright by Sudarshan Ramani

2018

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Mimesis, Romance, Novel: Representation of Milieu in The Monk

and Nostromo by Sudarshan Ramani, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria

for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONKAND NOSTROMO

Sudarshan Ramani San Francisco, California

2018

ABSTRACT: The century that separates M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) is a century of historical and aesthetic revolution. Paired together, both novels reveal the continuity of the problem of representing reality. Both of these novels are original products of an international outlook that mixes high and low culture, the experimental and the popular, the folkloric and the avant-garde. When viewed in this context, it becomes possible to see the historical and the contemporary in a gothic novel like The Monk, and the gothic and the fantastic in a historical novel like Nostromo. Following the example of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, this thesis focuses on the presence of contingent and dynamic elements in the narrative style of these two novels so as to better explain their originality, and the ways in which both authors continue to challenge the static pillars of tradition and cultural inheritance.

PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the advice, guidance,

and support of my professors, my fellow students, and my family and friends who have

given me great advice on how to proceed with the project. I would like to thank my thesis

committee, Professors William Christmas and Geoffrey Green for their invaluable

guidance and support throughout the project. 1 also greatly depended on the advice,

support, and inspiration of all my teachers: Professor Julie Paulson, Professor Wai-Leung

Kwok, Professor Summer Star, Professor Gitanjali Shahani. My family and friends have

been a constant source of support for me throughout this grand adventure, my mother

Suchitra Ramani and my father T.V. Ramani; my brother Vikram, his wife Anjana, my

nephew Avyan; my relatives - V. S. Kaushik, Chandreka Kaushik, and Arvind Kaushik,

and Dr. Mala Pandurang. I especially wish to acknowledge the support given by Suresh

and Patricia Chandrashekhar and their children Siddharth and Shantanu, as well as Laxmi

Parmeswar and her family; and in addition to this, Anuj Malhotra, Suraj Prasad Mahato,

Abdul Nurullah, Zoha Mahdi, Devdutt Trivedi, Suyash Barve, and Arjun Chauhan.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: From Representation of Reality to Representation of Milieu.........................1

Chapter One: The Monk: Escaping the Castle......................................................................31

Chapter Two: Nostromo: History and Legend..................................................................... 59

Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 87

Works Cited 89

1

INTRODUCTION:

From Representation o f Reality to Representation o f Milieu

Edward Said remarked that “a beginning” immediately establishes “relationships

with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some

mixture of both” (Said Beginnings 3). It is the point from which “the writer departs from

all other works,” going on to identify it as, “the first step in the intentional production of

meaning” (Said Beginnings 3-5). Knowing when and where to start is a crucial part to

any extended critical inquiry especially when the title of the thesis is “Mimesis,

Romance, Novel: The Representation of Milieu in The Monk and Nostromo’’''', this

selected trinity groups together broad literary concepts that evoke something totalizing

and global, while the subtitle narrows the focus on two specific texts. Much of this thesis

is dedicated to maintaining that balance while establishing relationships between the two

halves; and through a newly formulated synthesis, it hopes to provide a framework by

which both novels can be regarded in a new light, one which emphasizes and respects

their unique nature even as they are attached to a global perspective. One should regard

this thesis as an extended beginning, a considered first step in critical production that

seeks to extend already existing traditions, continuities, and antagonisms, rather than

resolve them entirely. The reasons for doing so is because the respective texts, products

of different authors, genres, and centuries, are not connected to each other in any linear

fashion, nor are they typical examples of their periods. Rather, both works should be

identified as ruptures in existing traditions. Both novels are singular and original

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responses to previously established genres and styles of writing, shaped and determined

by the tensions of a shifting present. Understood and engaged with as original ruptures in

existing traditions, and analyzed in tandem, they complicate many of our assumptions

about the novel and the romance; about the categories of genre such as the gothic or

historical novel, as well as conventional notions about realism. The original nature of

these works necessitates a larger discussion about categorization, if only to put existing

debates in a broader context.

This introduction will provide a broad outline for the central argument of this

thesis, to better explain what can be understood by studying these two books in tandem,

what critical questions can be raised in doing so, and the overall value of both posing the

questions and the attempt to respond to them in this thesis. The introductory chapter will

begin by explaining the importance and value of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. It will

summarize many of its selected arguments from its overall thesis while carefully

qualifying the original meaning in his text. This is done to explain how I intend to apply

Auerbach’s concepts as tools. It will then proceed by explaining how Auerbach’s ideas

connect with existing debates on theories of the novel and the development of realism.

Works by Ian Watt, Lennard Davis, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Leslie Fiedler among others on

this subject are specifically consulted. At stake here is the linear model of development

from the prose romance to the realistic novel, and from the realistic novel to the genre of

the gothic and historical novel, the genres to which The Monk and Nostromo can be said

to belong. By synthesizing the multiple arguments made there on the formal

3

developments of prose, and linking them alongside Auerbach’s viewpoints, a provisional

formulation can be developed for application to the texts at hand. The choice of the texts,

the value of the application of this formulation, the historical context that provides a

warrant for doing so will then be explained in detail, while providing brief summaries for

the chapters that follow and how they extend this argument with regards to specific texts.

This thesis engages with The Monk and Nostromo in tandem rather than direct text-to-text

author-to-author comparison. The intent is not to compare both works but to examine

how they both confronted certain problems, and how their attempt to resolve those

problems, whether successful or unsuccessful, sheds light on the issue of representing a

dynamic reality against a static backdrop in the novel form. The method of doing so, the

use of explication, how it is understood in Auerbach and Watt, and how it is useful for

this thesis and valid on both a theoretical and practical level will be mentioned in the

concluding part of this thesis.

Since its publication in German in 1946 and its translation in English in 1953,

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has become a seminal work of literary criticism. Writing in

2013, Arthur Krystal notes that the book represents “the apex of European humanist

criticism,” and across the decades, it became “the book that students of comparative

literature had to contend with” (Krystal “The Book of Books” 1). Edward Said in his

“Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition” identifies it as “by far the largest in

scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works” of the second-half of the

twentieth century (Said “Introduction to Mimesis'’’’ ix). Yet the achievement of this book,

4

the lucidity of its prose, and the wealth of its ideas are at odds with Said’s qualification

that it is “not principally a book providing readers with usable ideas” committed as it is to

a rigorous exploration of a text in all its details and individual particulars (Said

“Introduction to Mimesis” xvi). Mimesis is a book of twenty chapters, each one exploring

in detail a selected excerpt from a chosen text, arranged chronologically from the ancient

world (Homer, Old Testament) to the early twentieth century (Virginia W oolfs To the

Lighthouse). The choice of texts includes poetry, religious texts, historical accounts,

dramatic works, romance, satire, and the novel. Each chapter in the book focuses on a

text isolated in context but explored in the light of Auerbach’s distinct method, which

gives Mimesis its overall unity. It is not a theoretical work with any grand totalizing idea

or concept. In Literary Criticism & the Structures o f History, Geoffrey Green

acknowledges the “difficulty in assessing Auerbach according to a functional context” by

noting that Auerbach grounds his choice of method by highlighting the impossibility of a

linear view of historical progress (12). Auerbach states that it is, “no longer possible to

represent the history of our life style, that is the history of the last three thousand years, as

a process governed by laws” (qtd. in Green 12). A whole picture, Auerbach avers, “can

never be expressed in abstract or extra-historical terms, but only as a dialectic dramatic

process” (qtd. in Green 12). Auerbach’s eschewal of theory was grounded in his

acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of the present, of the fact that authors and critics

are writing in a present with active historical forces, and as such the insight derived from

“the explication of specific texts must to be evaluated and appreciated in a relative

5

manner” a process designated as “radical historical relativism” (Green 12). The

consistency with which Auerbach maintains his method continues to pose challenges and

difficulties to literary critics and historians owing to his focus on intuition and “interior

soul-searching” as a qualification to avoid making ahistorical and absolute statements

(Green 13). But seen from another angle, it suggests “an extreme reticence to propose

analytical and descriptive truths” about humanity (Green 13). Hence the considerable

difficulty in attempting to paraphrase Mimesis, in whole and in part, even if Auerbach

repeatedly insists that his work should be accepted as “full-scale all-encompassing

sociological depictions of the historical societies that provided the contexts for the

specific literary texts that he was examining” (Green 13-14).

From this careful overview of Auerbach’s methodology and the difficulties in

engaging with his work on a critical level, one can gather that his work allows significant

scope for entry to other readers and critics of his own arguments. He insists on the

reader’s role to privilege their own inner self and intuition and he opposes a view of

history that is linear. Auerbach believes that in order “to be able to understand a

humanistic text, one must try to do so as if one is the author of the text, living the

author’s reality...by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of

philological hermeneutics” (Said “Introduction to Mimesis” xiii). This leads to a blurring

of lines between “actual events and the modifications of one’s own reflective mind”

which is what is signified, according to Said, by the subtitle of the book, “the

representation of reality” (Said “Introduction to Mimesis” xiii). For Auerbach, “the

6

representation of reality” connotes an “active dramatic presentation of how each author

realizes, brings characters to life,” and by this presentation clarifies the true meaning of

the world that he brings to life with language (Said “Introduction to Mimesis ” xx). For

Auerbach, the theory and practice of hermeneutics are interlinked. His method of

explication allows him to interpret and imagine the historical reality behind the

production of the text. By this process of interpretation, and by his choice of texts,

Auerbach can conjure a world-historical perspective spread across Mimesis, visible when

read from end to end.

The effect of this approach is that Mimesis makes us appreciate and experience

the development of realism, as we have come to understand it, as a process that takes

place across centuries, determined by historical and social developments. Auerbach’s

definition of realism is asserted in Chapter 18 of Mimesis, “In the Hotel de la Mole,”

where he examines the development of the realist novel in France and goes on to define

its features:

The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and

socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for

problematic-existential representation, on the one hand; on the other, the

embedding of random persons and events in the general course of

contemporary history, the fluid historical background - these, we believe,

are the foundations of modern realism, and it is natural that the broad and

7

elastic form of the novel should increasingly impose itself for a rendering

comprising so many elements. (491)

Auerbach’s views on the development of the novel and specifically in the way the novel

allows for the mixture of styles is more clearly expressed in the second chapter of

“Fortunata” where after examining the scene of Trimalchio’s Banquet in Petronius’

Satyricon, he remarks that,

In modem literature the technique of imitation can evolve a serious,

problematic, and tragic conception of any character regardless of type and

social standing, of any occurrence regardless of whether it be legendary,

broadly political, or narrowly domestic; and in most cases it actually does

so .(31)

Auerbach’s observations on the development of realism were quite influential on Ian

Watt’s study The Rise o f the Novel. In a 1978 speech at the University of Alabama, Watt,

describing the biographical and academic context leading to the writing of the book,

notes that Gyorgy Lukacs, and Erich Auerbach “actually contributed much more to The

Rise o f the Novel than the few references in the text suggest” (The Literal Imagination

73). In Watt’s theoretical outline for the development of the modem novel, Auerbach is

cited for his demonstration of “the connection between the Christian view of man and the

serious literary portrayal of ordinary people and of common life” (The Rise o f the Novel

79). Auerbach’s view is cited in an antinomian fashion as a justification for Watt’s

argument that the development of the English novel is connected to the Protestant

8

Reformation and the Puritan temperament (The Rise o f the Novel 79-80). It is antinomian

because the major lacuna of Mimesis, as noted by Said, is the way he “scants the

substantial English contribution” in outlining the influence of Romance literatures in

Europe, and likewise barely mentions the English contribution to the development of

realism in the nineteenth century (Said “Introduction to Mimesis” xv-xxi).

Watt’s argument specifically identifies England’s religious divides from

Continental Europe as the historical conditions that led to its vaccination from the

“classicizing tendencies of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation,” which led to

neo-classicism, a more rigid establishment of the Homeric separation of styles, “to an

extent that would certainly have surprised Aristotle” (The Rise o f the Novel 79). In France

especially, “a fully established style noble,” was prescribed to an extent that, “the objects

and events of everyday life were banished from the stage” (Watt The Rise o f the Novel

79). In England, the Protestant Reformation, especially in the works of Puritan writers led

to a break from the separation of styles, as typified in the works of John Milton, Paul

Bunyan, and especially Daniel Defoe whose works represent, “the supreme illustration in

the novel of the connection between the democratic individualism of Puritanism and the

objective representation of the world of everyday reality and all those who inhabit it”

(Watt The Rise o f the Novel 80). The novel, he continues, is “the form of literature which

most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation” which allowed it to

become the narrative form that came closer to the texture of daily experience than any

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before (Watt The Rise o f the Novel 80). For Watt, realism in the novel is very much an

achievement of the mixture of the two styles identified by Erich Auerbach:

If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side,

it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to

portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited

to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in

the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it (The Rise o f the

Novel 11).

The notion of “inverted romance,” which Watt seizes on, highlights one of the main

features of the novel as it evolved over the course of the eighteenth century. Watt insists

that the realist novel is not an inverted romance and that it diverged greatly from all its

predecessors. However, Lennard Davis points out that, “the romance seems a logical

place to start if one is intent on finding liminal or originating moments” (Davis 25).

In Factual Fictions, Davis argues that the development of realism marks “a

profound rupture” between the prose romance and the modem novel (25). One of the

characteristics of this dichotomy is the quality of the early novel, as seen in the works of

Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, which was an extension of the flourishing print

culture of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writers, critics, and observers of

this period share a common belief, “a nearly universal perception that a literary

revolution was taking place” (Hunter 10). This perception is reflected in Samuel

Johnson’s claim for England being “a nation of readers” in 1781 (qtd. in The Rise o f the

10

Novel 37). The consciousness of a growing literary readership never quite matched the

historical reality, which measured only a gradual improvement in male literacy from 10

per cent of the population in 1500 to 46 percent in 1714, plateauing at 60 percent in the

mid-eighteenth century (Brewer 167). But nonetheless the great flourishing of print led to

the birth of not only new readers, but new kinds of readers, and the readership of the

early novel had a relationship to texts that was different from what came before and what

followed. Readers of print in this time develop a new kind of relationship, borne of an

emerging sense of time cultivated by “the regularly occurring serial newspaper” that

allow for a narrative to provide a sense of recording events as and when they occurred

(Davis 73). One of the elements that differentiates the modern novel from the romance is

the belief among its chief practitioners that they were writing “factual accounts rather

than fictional ones” (Davis 8).

A romance, in Davis’ formulation, announces its fictiveness whereas a novel like

Robinson Crusoe presents itself as factual while being fictive (21). A novel focuses on

contemporary life and mimics as close as possible the living reality and, at times, mimics

the form of journals, letters, and newspapers (Davis 39-40). A romance is “set in the

distant, idealized past” modelling itself on the epic in its episodic structure and choice of

neoclassical figures as protagonists, excluding the domain of everyday life prized by

Auerbach as a pre-condition of reality (Davis 40). This sense of a break between the

romance and the novel is shared by many eighteenth-century authors including Clara

Reeve, who avers that “no writings are more different than the ancient romances and the

11

modern novel” (qtd. in Davis 41). Yet if the emergence of the novel constitutes such a

sharp break from the prose romance, how does one explain the development of the gothic

novel by the end of the eighteenth-century and the historical novel in the nineteenth-

century, both of which share with the romance an eschewal of contemporary reality for

exotic settings, works which for the most part insist on their Active nature rather than

aspiring to factualness. These gothic and historical novels bear little resemblance to the

novel as per Davis’ nine-point taxonomy on the differences between the novel and the

romance in that their narrative patterns do not amount to the epic form in either length or

episodic nature, nor are they restricted to depicting exclusively the world of the

aristocrats (Davis 40).

The manner in which novels are an extension of the revolution in print led to a

paradox where “the most powerful vicarious identification of readers with the feelings of

fictional characters that literature had seen should have been produced by exploiting the

qualities of print, the most impersonal, objective and public of the media of

communication” (Watt The Rise o f the Novel 206). The development of the novel form

over the course of the eighteenth century and the growth of its readership created a shift

in society where “the private reading of novels in a sense displaced the taste for public

discussion” (Hunter 175-176). Novels provide readers with the “most powerful vicarious

identification... with the feelings of fictional characters,” which eventually “led to a way

of life that was more secluded and less social than ever before, and, at the same time,

helped to bring about a literary form which was less concerned with the public and more

12

with the private side of life than any previous one” (Watt 206). This process and change

documented by Hunter, Davis, and Watt, bears the truth about Auerbach’s observation on

the process of rigidification that occurs when a dynamic process and movement slowly

becomes static, commodified, and institutionalized (Auerbach 119-120). The “process of

rigidification” is identified by Auerbach as a symptom of the continuity of the aristocratic

center-focus from antiquity to the medieval era (120). In “the clash of the very young and

the age old,” the former was paralyzed, “until it managed to come to terms with the

vestiges of tradition, until it had filled them with its own life,” thus allowing the old to

preserve itself in the new order (Auerbach 120). The novel emerged in a dynamic

historical epoch and its beginnings expressed that reality it derived from and it drew

strength and vitality from its capacity to mimic that real world. Yet the success of the

novel among its readership led to the book taking the place of that reality it reflected. So,

in a concrete way, the existence of the novel and its success and impact exchanged that

dynamic reality for a static reality, and since it was committed to mimesis and realism, it

continued to reflect the more suburban and static world it created. Mimetic realism in the

mode outlined by Watt and Davis - a factual world set in a real location, with language

that is realistic and perceptible to its reader - led to a rigidification dealing with the truth

that the author was no longer mimicking pre-existing reality. Instead authors were now

imitating what novel readers came to understand as pre-existing reality, largely from their

experience of reading other books of the same kind. This eventually led to authors such

as Henry Fielding seeking to revive the novel by merging the prose form of the realistic

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novel, as it came to be developed, with the epic and dramatic styles of earlier prose

styles, leading to Tom Jones, a self-described “comic epic in prose” (Watt The Rise o f the

Novel 246-248). Fielding’s innovation is credited by Gyorgy Lukacs and Leslie Fiedler

for paving the way for the historical novel, or historical romance as Fiedler describes it,

and likewise Tom Jones led to the development of “the first Gothic mansion in the history

of the novel” (Watt The Rise o f the Novel 27).

Auerbach opposes a rigid development of history and he provides us a method for

understanding the place of the novel in the eighteenth century and its development in a

non-linear fashion. We can see the way in which a radical innovation, upon solidifying its

achievements, creates a situation that leads to a rupture, marking to a new break that

opposes the current trends by reviving connections to the past. One of the problems of

interpretation that comes from understanding the development of the novel after this

period is the difficulty of sorting out categories, genres, and styles. For Gyorgy Lukacs,

the development of the historical novel, formed after the French Revolution, marks a

revival of the Enlightenment and its progressive mission in the reactionary Post-

Napoleonic period (Lukacs 27-30). For Fiedler they are emblems of a reactionary

tendency that naturalized a static backdrop of history - for example the safe world of

“lost-causes” championed by Sir Walter Scott - from the comfort of a present that has no

active fear or interest in the chosen period (Fiedler 164-165). However, both Lukacs and

Fiedler do agree on a single major point, the element of continuity and similarity between

the gothic and the historical romance.

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Horace Walpole’s The Castle o f Otranto is the first gothic novel, paving the way

for “a whole new fictional mode [that] has been characteristic of the last two centuries,”

subsequently influencing writers like Dickens, Ibsen, Emily Bronte, and William

Faulkner among others (The Literary Imagination 143-151). Fiedler identifies the gothic

as the most influential, transformative, and dominant style in American literature (29-31).

Lukacs likewise identifies The Castle o f Otranto as the most famous historical novel of

the eighteenth century, albeit regarding its depiction of the past as “mere costumery”

bereft of the more individualized and detailed view of the past found in the works of Sir

Walter Scott, the founder of historical fiction (19). Scott himself was open about his

fondness for the gothic genre and in his pre-literary career as a bookseller and critic, often

tried to promote the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Reeve, “by placing [gothic novels]

in the belles lettres of British prose fiction” (Gamer 524). The gothic novel, as per Watt,

is an “oxymoron” since as Walpole states in the preface of the second edition of his book,

gothic meant “very old,” whereas novel meant “new” and the latter was associated with

contemporary subjects, and the gothic novel is, in literal terms, the “Old New” (Watt The

Literal Imagination 144). For Walpole, The Castle o f Otranto is an attempt “to blend the

two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modem” (qtd. in Watt The Literal Imagination

144).

The past in Walpole’s book, and in other Gothic fiction, has far more depth and

meaning as compared to “the psychological present in which the characters live,” which

only comes alive when the lives of the characters are deeply affected by “the power of a

15

long anterior past” (Watt The Literal Imagination 144). The importance attached to the

past, signified by the word gothic, is both a literal expression of Walpole’s real-world

antiquarian enthusiasm for medieval revival architecture, and an expression of the

cultural nostalgia in Augustan England (Watt The Literal Imagination 145). Gothic

fiction abounded in depicting, “a sublime and picturesque landscape” and in its focus on

decaying castles, family secrets, and the importance of relics, it embodied a “cult of ruin”

that came to signal in later times as “counter-enlightenment” (Hart 86). The element of

nostalgia is complicated however considering the distinct theory of history identified by

Fiedler as central to the gothic tale (Fiedler 136). Samuel Richardson’s novel of

contemporaneity chose the present for its subject, theme, and style, eschewing any

judgment on the past and any historical worldview (Fiedler 136-137). The gothic novel,

on the other hand, is an expression of “the pastness of the past” and in doing so it

suggested in a more intuitive, poetical, and ahistorical method, a sense not of reliving the

past, but on the contrary, “the sense of something lapsed or outlived or irremediably

changed” (Fiedler 137). Authors of gothic fiction presented the past as “corrupt and

detestable” albeit with a fascination bordering on the exploitative fascination with the

grotesque (Fiedler 137). In this way, gothic fiction is a manifestation of the

Enlightenment, and Walpole was indeed a skeptic who described the Italianate Catholic

milieu of the novel as taking place in “the darkest ages of Christianity” and as such his

vision is secular, with his supernatural characters presented as, “essentially historical

beings with rational human aims” (Watt The Literal Imagination 150). This was the

16

original manifestation of the gothic in late Augustan England where it expressed “the

pastness of the past.” It was fundamentally an expression of eighteenth-century

modernity no less than Defoe and Richardson. The gothic novel’s focus on love and

terror allows it to become an “anti-bourgeois novel” transgressive in its heightened

displacement of the domesticity of the suburban milieu of its readers to a dark gothic

castle (Fiedler 127).

As such the emergence of the gothic and its derivations, of which the historical

novel can be understood as one among many, shifts the modes of mimesis away from

direct representation of reality, to representation itself. The representation of a milieu in

the gothic style is not restricted to mimesis of the past since, as established above, the

original gothic established a sense of the past without any direct historical research and

verisimilitude. What matters in the milieu is an expression of the writer’s attitude to the

setting, what defines the gothic is the attitude towards reality more than the nature of that

reality, the attitude of the author towards its characters, their station, the supernatural, and

history. Auerbach’s view of the development of the mixed style in history observes that

patterns of realism develop intermittently in different periods before undergoing

rigidification, noting that, “the profound and significant Henry Fielding, who touches

upon so many moral, aesthetic, and social problems, keeps his presentation always within

the satiric moralistic key,” leading him to eschew the tragic and existential seriousness

that would return strongly in the nineteenth century before rigidifying in Flaubert’s

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“objective seriousness” and the absence of fluidity in the political and historical

background in the novels of Charles Dickens (481-492).

The gothic by contrast has proven to be the style that has remained consistently

dynamic from its first arrival. The persistence of the gothic mode is perhaps a result of its

unmistakable internationalism, and its ability to move across multiple cultures. Watt

describes the novel as “the most translatable of the genres” allowing it to provide instant

access to great writers across the world, some of whom, as in the case of Dostoevsky in

Russia, were bereft of a vast classical literary tradition in their chosen language, since

“the novel has less need of historical and literary commentary than other genres - its

formal convention forces it to supply its own footnotes” (The Rise o f the Novel 30). The

gothic novel proves to be the most translatable of all styles in the novel, originating as

English projections of characters in a Continental milieu, and gradually extending to

become a style exported to American and Continental fiction, while open to endless

mixture with other styles and genres in the novel and romance. In its original form, it

inhabited and maintained continuity with the same milieu of Augustan England expressed

in the works of Defoe and Richardson. By the end of the eighteenth century, it would

reinvigorate itself by becoming the first international expression of Romanticism, which

emerged in Germany, exemplified by Mathew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, which I will

go into more detail in Chapter Two. In the nineteenth century the mode of the Gothic and

the influence of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, would inspire Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein and in Wuthering Heights, would achieve the “fuller psychological

18

characterization and the denser presentations of the environment of the Victorian novel,”

inspiring the likes of Ibsen, Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and authors

of the early and middle twentieth-century, including Thomas Pynchon and Kurt

Vonnegut (Watt The Literal Imagination 154-158). Watt, who planned a sequel to The

Rise o f the Novel dealing with the gothic and comic styles of the later novel tradition,

admits that the persistence of the gothic is an indication of the ambivalence of modernity

and is unlikely to wither, “as long as our political sky gets blacker daily with chickens

coming home to roost...as long as we continue to experience boredom, night, sleep and

fear.. .the past, alas will continue to haunt us, and see to it that we spend much of our

lives on Gothic time” (Watt The Literal Imagination 158-159).

Fiedler notes that the development of the novel came about because of the mix of

the two modes of “analytic and projective” with the analytic belonging to the realist

tradition and the projective belonging, roughly to the gothic tradition (141). In the

analytic tradition, interior psychological states are concealed beneath the exterior actions

of the characters presented in a realistic milieu, whereas in the projective, symbolic, and

gothic style, the exteriority of actions because of the abstract and artificial milieu, matter

little in verisimilitude compared to its capacity to “symbolize in outward terms an inward

reality” (Fiedler 141). The fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the

works of Melville, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, and Faulkner, contains a mixture and

mingling of the analytical and projective styles (Fiedler 141).

19

Frances Russel Hart, in analyzing the mixture of the symbolic with the realist

highlights, on the other hand, the existence not of “two ambiguous traditions but an

ambiguous one, oscillating between sociological mimesis on the one hand and

psychological exploration on the other” (84). The focus on the background and milieu of

gothic fiction has often come at the expense of the analysis of the experience of the

characters. Watt avers that the gothic genre’s focus on milieu often results in “thin

characterization” with the exception of the villain figures who often invite identification

and attention from the readers (Watt The Literal Imagination 152-153). Hart argues that

“the dreadful, sublime shock to one’s complacently enlightened idea of human character

and the reality to which it belongs...is the experience dramatized in Gothic fiction” (88).

The experience of the characters to the existence of the demonical element either in

nature or themselves invites the readers to challenge their own sense of reality, and in the

enlightened-romantic-historical context, of which the gothic is the meeting point, “the

full and terrifying truth...is that he demonic is no myth, no superstition...but a reality in

human character or relationship, a novelistic reality” and, as Hart concludes, “rather than

representing a flight from novel to romance, the Gothic represents a naturalizing of myth

and romance into the novel” (Hart 99-103).

This process of naturalization which begins in the gothic genre undoubtedly led to

the creation of the historical novel, which shares with the gothic a focus on the past and a

desire to revive the reader’s interest in it but differs in its eschewal of the psychological

and subjective forces in favor of mimetic realization of the external features of the period

20

(Fiedler 162-163). In the historical novel, “hero and heroine flee not projections of their

feared inner selves but real enemies, genuine conspiracies, external dangers. Action itself

becomes the end, the evasion of ennui sought through a constant change of tempo and

place” (Fiedler 163). For Fiedler, the historical novel is a retarding of the gothic tradition,

offering “a myth of the past” that is “nostalgically conservative” as opposed to the gothic

tale of terror which is “sentimentally radical” (Fiedler 164). In its origins, the historical

novel under Scott amounted to a form of nostalgia for a safely distant past, that of the

Jacobite rebellions which had withered away by the time of the writing of the books into

obsolete dead ends of no political consequence (Fiedler 164-165). Scott’s works, and the

work of other historical writers, manifests no fear of the past, which the gothic writers

nonetheless evoke as palpable and ever-present; in the former, history becomes mere

pageantry, a resurgence of classicism after the challenge of the two great prototypes of

tragedy in English prose - Clarissa and The Monk (Fiedler 165). Gyorgy Lukacs offers a

contrary view by highlighting Scott’s unique synthesis of the epic and the romance in the

historical genre. The epic tradition is evident in Scott’s identification of “those periods

and those strata of society which embody the old epic self-activity of man, the old epic

directness of social life, its public spontaneity... This truly epic character of Scott’s

subject-matter and manner of portrayal is... intimately linked with the popular character

of his art” (Lukacs 35). The major innovation over the old epic is the presence of

“mediocre heroes” rather than larger-than-life figures like Achilles and Odysseus (Lukacs

35-36). Rather than being central figures, they are average characters whose function

21

within the narrative is to bring into contact figures on the extremes and the margins into

contact with each other (Lukacs 36). The “compositional importance of the mediocre

hero” allows Scott to express the popular and historical nature of English social

evolution, “the age-old steadfastness of English development amidst the most terrible

crises” manifests in the trajectory of the mediocre hero’s shift between one faction and

another (Lukacs 36-37). In this light we can see an evolution from Fielding’s “comic-epic

in prose” and a fulfillment of the naturalism that the gothic style imbues any process of

translation and adaptation. Scott’s influence on the development of the historical novel

was immediate on Continental writers like Pushkin, Goethe Stendhal, Balzac, and

Tolstoy, typifying the international orientation of the gothic style in its derivative form

(Lukacs 31). The historical novel benefitted in addition from two separate parallel trends,

the development of German Romanticism, and the French Revolution.

To express a national-historical perspective acceptable to Scott’s readers, there

needs to be a new sense of history and it was “the French Revolution, the revolutionary

wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass

experience, and moreover on a European scale” since between the Fall of the Bastille in

1789 and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, “each nation of Europe underwent more

upheavals than they had previously experienced in centuries” (Lukacs 23). An effect of

this rapid period of change is a new historical consciousness which brought to light the

actual historical character of their nation, community, and society, which inculcate to

people across multiple nations experiencing upheaval that, “there is such a thing as

22

history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect

upon the life of every individual” (Lukacs 23). Before the Revolution, new approaches

and attitudes towards history were expressed by the intellectuals of Germany, where the

lack of national unity, and the multiple petty kingdoms that comprised German society

created a situation where “art becomes historical earlier and more radically than in the

economically and politically advanced nations,” of Western Europe, chiefly England, and

France (Lukacs 22-23). As Lukacs notes, England experienced its revolutions in the

seventeenth century during the Civil War and the Cromwellian Protectorate, subsequently

consolidated in the 1688 Glorious Revolution (Lukacs 20-21). This led to the beginning

of a unique cultural and historical development recognized by “many foreign

commentators and visitors to England,” a nation where “the rise of the arts in England

was the triumph of a commercial and urban society, not the achievement of a royal court”

creating unique conditions where “literature and performing arts that aimed for a public

and were organized commercially rather than being confined to a few” (Brewer xxiv).

This also led many of its authors and intellectuals to focus exclusively on the

present rather than on history, whereas in Germany the absence of political and social

independence, led to a great inward turn that was especially interested in the

representation of history, which led it to challenge French neo-classicism, the reigning

style of the Continent, allowing them to highlight “the general contradictions underlying

the whole ideology of the Enlightenment” (Lukacs 21-22). This results in Goethe’s

historical dramas which focus not on classical and antique material, as in previous eras,

23

but on figures such as the mercenary Gotz von Berlichingen, which directly influenced

Scott’s attitude to history (Lukacs 22). This new approach to history, which originated in

Germany, is identified by Auerbach as historicism, or “Historism” (Auerbach Mimesis

xxviii-xxix). “Mixing of styles,” writes Auerbach, “appears almost exclusively in

subjects from history or the realm of poetic fantasy; when applied to the present, it

remains within the narrowest, unpolitical sphere or, as idyll or irony, aims exclusively at

the personal” (Auerbach Mimesis 443). Auerbach defined “Historism” in detail offering a

thesis on his conception of historical representation:

Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same

whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present.

A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be

transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people

realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern

concept...not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the

intellectual and historical factors...they come to develop a sense of

historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of

their constant inner mobility.. .so that each epoch appears as a whole

whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally,

they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in

abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to

understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society

24

and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and

intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and

women ... then it is to be expected that those insights will also be

transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be

seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a

constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose

everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in

their origins and in the direction taken by their development (Auerbach

443.444).

A close outline of the development of the novel from the romance, and the development

of literary genre in the context of its origins reveals how little they conform to any linear

outline of development of style. At every step, contingent factors shape the style of

writing, the nature of its reception, and the reach of its influence. Nothing is more

representative of this then the fact that the historical novel was an expression of nascent

romantic nationalism despite being fundamentally shaped by multiple completing

international and multicultural influences (Lukacs 22-23). When we regard literature

from the standpoint of the present, it is an inescapable fact that the realist novel of the

eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, tied as it is to histories and vanished

ephemeral epochs, seems highly remote from our present. The great act of imagination

needed to enter the consciousness of writers in this time is a greater burden for the

contemporary reader than it was for its early audience, and the burden will increase on

25

succeeding generations of readers as time passes. What is at stake is a challenge of

hermeneutics, and one which thesis argues can be articulated when it engages with the

stylistic representations that emerge from comparing two novels across a historical

divide.

The two novels discussed in this thesis have weighty historical reputations.

Lewis’ The Monk: A Romance (1796) is widely recognized as the one of the best gothic

novels, and one of the strangest and most transgressive popular works of the late

eighteenth century. Chapter Two will discuss in detail its importance and the way it

represents the crucial historical meeting point of the gothic, the historic, and the novel, as

well as the range of social and historical interpretations formed around the text. Joseph

Conrad’s Nostromo; A Tale o f the Seaboard (1904) is regarded not only as a masterpiece

of twentieth-century Modernism, but also as a “Thucydidean drama” that from a

privileged vantage point looks back on the development of the historical novel from the

time of Walter Scott to Flaubert and Tolstoy, putting a capstone on a period of literary

history by means of an invented South American nation that is in fact “a little Europe

with its history intact but its memories gone” (Smith 189-190).

The lack of direct ties in terms of genre, influence, and literary style between both

books and both authors paradoxically highlights the potential of both works to provide,

when placed in tandem, shifts and changes in the representation of milieu as a result of

social and historical changes. Both works typify the non-linear development of the prose

narrative and both signal the circular loop between the gothic and the historical styles.

26

The Monk is a gothic romance that is in fact a contemporary and personal reflection on

the impact of the French Revolution while Nostromo, inspired by the historical novels

that came in the wake of the French Revolution, and indeed taking political and social

revolution as its major subject, revives the connection between the historical, the gothic,

and the romance in its representation of the Western hegemony in a New World setting of

its own invention. The very categories used to identify both works - “the gothic” and “the

modernist” - are examples of the way history determines the production of both texts and

shapes their reception. The “gothic” was a term, as understood and expressed in the

eighteenth century, thus designated a forgotten, fading, and remote past. Keeping in mind

Auerbach’s sense of “historism” we would do well to remember that the concept of

Modernity in the arts would find its earliest definition by the poet Charles Baudelaire,

who described it as representative of “that which is ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon

the occasion; it is half of art, whose other half is the eternal and unchangeable” and

representative of the modem, urban, and consumerist culture of the Paris after the

Revolution of 1848 (Baudelaire 37). The meaning attached to these labels and conveyed

by them present us with a range of critical options. Both “the gothic” and “the modernist”

are aesthetic conceptions of the representation of reality. The Monk is gothic because it

seems to be haunted and shaped by the past, Nostromo is modernist because it is focused

and driven by the present, or so we say as far as we understand those terms. But of

course, Watt as mentioned earlier, pointed out that the gothic novel was an oxymoron, an

expression of the “Old New,” and indeed Leslie Fiedler traces the earliest use of the

27

phrase “modem novel” to author and revolutionary Marquise de Sade, who used it to

designate the gothic novel that came into being in the wake of The Castle o f Otranto

(Fiedler 126). In that light, we might understand that the modernist is merely another

conception of the gothic. The latter originated as an expression of “the pastness of the

past” in the late eighteenth century, a judgment on history in the changing present. The

former differs from the latter in that rather than being a judgment on the past, it is a

judgment on the present, one that is informed by disillusionment of a better world rather

than the fear of returning to the past. Chronologically, The Monk and Nostromo are

divided by a span of 108 years, and the latter is divided from the present by 114 years,

and if Nostromo is a work of modernism then it is one that is more remote to us now than

it was to The Monk when it was composed. As time passes, the modern and the gothic, as

categories and labels, as well as many of their representative works, come to seem more

remote and less distinguishable from each other.

Owing to the personal, idiosyncratic, and highly synthesized nature of this

introduction - conducted in the style of argument by juxtaposition - the approach used in

the following chapters will follow the example of the “essayistic style of criticism” that

begins with a quotation of a given text followed by an explication of the relationship

between the rhetorical style of the passage and the larger historical context (Said

“Introduction to Mimesis ix-x). In other words, it will attempt to mimic Auerbach’s

critical method of inquiry. Since the focus of this thesis is narrower and shorter however,

the method outlined is considerably more focused in its scope. The intent is to isolate key

28

scenes and moments within the text, to treat the part as a microcosm of the whole. This

approach is useful in explicating dense novels like The Monk and Nostromo since the

large number of characters, multiple layers of narrative, and their diverse and diffuse

styles make them dauting works to explore in total detail. Narrowing it down to parts

allows for a more focused, considered, and scrupulous approach. In his essay, “The First

Paragraph of The Ambassadors'. An Explication” Ian Watt notes that the method of

“explication de texte” originating in French criticism reflects, “the rationalism of

nineteenth-century Positive scholarship” which implies “a progressive unfolding of a

series of literary implications, and thus partakes of our modern preference for multiplicity

in method and meaning: explanation assumes an ultimate simplicity, explication assumes

complexity” (Watt The Literal Imagination 194). This method of explication is very well

suited towards analyzing prose albeit unsuited for the summative synthesis one expects

from such a critical work (Watt The Literal Imagination 195-196).

In the case of the present work, the summative synthesis is presented here at the

start, in this introduction. The theoretical-historical-critical synthesis that traces the

transformation from “the representation of reality” to “the representation of milieu” the

intricate links between the realist and the gothic style and the number of philosophical

and historical influences that overlap between them have been outlined in this

introduction. Yet, the contention of this thesis is that this is merely a method to analyze

critical texts. The historical outline described so far constitutes a pre-history for the

following chapters. The detailed outline of the development of the gothic and the range of

29

critical opinions it carries serves to establish how The Monk, as shown in Chapter Two, is

largely a departure from the conventions of the gothic novel that came before, especially

the way it matches the quotidian and the exotic to create a more modem and frightening

sense of terror than its precursors. By contrast, Chapter Three, which explores Nostromo,

will examine the way the novel engages with the historical novel, as identified in its

classic form, and yet diverges sharply, namely in how the protagonist Nostromo

resembles outwardly the mediocre hero found in Scott and deployed in the narrative as a

mediating agent between competing factions, a process that Conrad portrays with irony,

wit, and sarcasm. Nostromo, a novel written by a Polish exile who learnt English as his

third language, represents the milieu of a continent and culture that he had no first-hand

experience of; but created through secondary material. It deals with Watt’s notion of the

novel as the “most translatable” of genres, and the internationalizing tendencies of the

gothic and historical fiction.

At stake here in the thesis is the universality of literary culture and experience,

exemplified in the mix of high and low styles, and local and global contexts. Not all

attempts at creating a mixed style are successful, but the very attempt to do so is valuable

in analyzing from a critical yet empathetic point of view. Daniel Defoe remarked that,

"Preaching of sermons is speaking to a few of mankind: printing of books is talking to the

whole world" (qtd. in Watt 103). Regardless of whether a printed book indeed talked to a

whole world in practical terms in the small limited frame of the early to middle Augustan

period, it is a sentiment that grows truer over a longer period of history. Mary Beard, the

30

historian of Ancient Rome, points out that as limited as the contemporary audience for

classical literature is, “Virgil’s great epic poem on the foundation of Rome, [The Aeneid],

almost certainly found more readers in the twentieth century CE than it did in the first

century CE” (Beard 1-4). Likewise, the audience of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson,

Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Scott, Conrad, and of course, Erich Auerbach, in terms of the

greater literacy, availability of information, and international spread, is empirically

greater than the ones each of them knew in their lifetime. The non-linear view of the

development of literary culture, as expressed by Auerbach, and as averred in this thesis,

provides a perspective that illuminates the present to better preserve the future.

31

Chapter One:

The Monk: Escaping the Castle

While I sat upon a broken ridge of the hill, the stillness of the scene

inspired me with melancholy ideas not altogether unpleasant. The castle,

which stood full in my sight, formed an object equally awful and

picturesque. Its ponderous walls, tinged by the moon with solemn

brightness; its old and partly ruined tower lifting themselves into the

clouds, and seeming to frown on the plains around them; its lofty

battlements, overgrown with ivy; and folding gates, expanding in honor of

the visionary inhabitant, made me sensible of a sad and reverential horror.

Yet did not these sentiments occupy me so fully as to prevent me from

witnessing with impatience the slow progress of time.

(Lewis pp. 151-152)

This paragraph comes from the nested story-within-a-story related by Raymond,

Marquis de las Cisternas, to Lorenzo de Medina. The location that is being described is

the Castle of Lindenberg in Germany, where Raymond will meet his beloved Agnes who

is passing her adolescence under the care of the domineering Donna Rodolpha, the sister

of Lorenzo. The scene leading to this moment concerns a plot hatched by the young

lovers to elope from the castle at night. As Raymond is waiting outside the castle for the

exact signal, he takes a moment to reflect on the landscape he wishes to rescue Agnes

32

from. What is evident in this scene is Raymond’s paradoxical attitude to his situation, the

fact that at the very moment he is plotting to escape the Castle of Lindenberg with his

beloved who is trapped there, the grotesque splendor of the overgrown, poorly

maintained, and decaying castle captivates him. The castle is described in the manner of a

painting, and indeed the brief description is cliched in the most rudimentary gothic

conventions, and Lewis snaps abruptly by having Raymond, the narrator of this incident,

return to his present circumstance rather than continue on with the picturesque

description of the ruin. Raymond presents the beautiful decay of the Castle of Lindenberg

to Lorenzo de Medina as an aside to indicate the period in which he waited and how he

passed his time. On both a narrative and formal level, the description of the castle is of no

real importance in and of itself; it is entirely subordinate to the character’s interior state.

The most emblematic and recurring trope of gothic fiction is the castle that is at

the center, and indeed the very titles, of Horace Walpole’s The Castle o f Otranto and Ann

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries ofUdolpho (Railo 2-6). The Monk does not feature a castle in

its title nor do castles figure prominently in either the settings or action of the plot. The

action of the novel features a variety of locations but within the narrative there are only

two castles of real significance mentioned - the Castle of Murcia and the Castle of

Lindenberg. Of the two castles, only Lindenberg is described to the reader as a location

containing significant events of narrative. The other castle, Murcia, is the childhood

home of Donna Elvira Dalfa and her sister Leonella, while Lindenberg is of course the

castle from which Raymond and Agnes seek to escape.

33

When one considers the overall plot of The Monk, the trajectory of its characters,

and its relation to its influences, one can consider it a novel about escaping the castle and

a novel about an attempt to escape the gothic genre itself. The Monk is a book that differs

from the pre-established codes of the gothic novel. It achieves this originality by taking

influences from the emerging movement of German Romanticism, which allowed Lewis

to breathe new life into the familiar milieu of the gothic romance by opening up the static

backdrop of the genre - an imagined British projection of Continental Europe steeped in

medievalist nostalgia-to dynamic elements relating to sexual desire, to paranoid

fixations, voyeurism, criminal psychology, and the supernatural.

Within The Monk these disparate dynamic elements form a cohesive unity,

representing different methods by which Lewis sought to animate the gothic backdrop to

concerns that were contemporary to his audience. To properly assess Lewis’ originality

and his attempt to escape the gothic castle, this chapter will focus only on special scenes

and incidents within the general narrative rather than take a broad perspective on the total

plot of the novel or follow the progression of specific characters. This approach closely

mirrors the narrative outline of the where, despite the title, a great number of scenes and

events do not concern Ambrosio the Monk. Lewis incorporates multiple tales-within-tales

and interspersed poems, and in broad terms charts out two parallel narratives with two

separate protagonists (Ambrosio, Lorenzo de Medina) which come together by the

closure of the book, but which still feel separate rather than properly connected. This

chapter seeks to consider the implications of this parallel construction and what it

34

suggests about the limits Lewis confronted in writing The Monk and ultimately failed to

overcome.

The eighteenth century, within England, saw a turning away from Neoclassicism

and Neoplatonism which, as noted by Ian Watt, “had always been strong in the romance”

(Watt The Rise o f the Novel 16). In the frontispiece for The Monk, Lewis subtitles his

work “A Romance,” and as Lennard Davis notes in his Factual Fictions, the novel and

the romance are both extended narratives in prose but differ in many essential respects

(40). The romance with its remote and exotic settings, its aristocratic milieu, its episodic

structure, and its evocation of history without any historical fidelity sharply differed from

the novel which is set in a contemporary milieu, located in the non-aristocratic world of

the middle and lower classes and has a shorter and more focused plot and setting (Davis

40). Erich Auerbach identified two styles, the Homeric and the Biblical, as typifying two

forms for “the literary representation of reality in European culture” (Auerbach 23). The

debate between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, in Auerbach’s conception of the

development of realism in Western literature, falls in line with the conflict between the

Homeric style which contains “fully externalized description, uniform illumination,

uninterrupted connections...few elements of historical development and of psychological

perspective” while the Biblical style was more specific in its illumination, featuring

“abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed...universal-historical claims...and

preoccupation with the problematic” (Auerbach 23). The 1790s was the decade when

“the sun of classicism has definitely set” giving way to Romanticism which commenced

35

in Germany and would soon spread to England (Railo, 82). This was the decade of the

French Revolution which so affected British opinions that every conversation, from

Parliament to the provinces was, “soaked in this one event” (Parreaux, 20).

The fury of the Revolution was at its height in the years 1791-1795 when Lewis

was travelling back and forth between England and the Continent (Peck 9-18). His career

was arranged by his wealthy father, a former Deputy Secretary of War who entreated his

son to learn German to better prepare for a diplomatic career in England’s foreign office.

Lewis mastered the language while residing at the Court of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,

where he undertook the translation of Oberon (1780) by Christoph Martin Wieland and

familiarized himself with many works by German Romantic masters. In addition to this,

as he remarked in a letter to his mother, he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself,

who he identified as “the celebrated author of Werther'"’ (Peck 12). Between May-

December 1794, Lewis was stationed at the British Embassy at The Hague. During this

time, he socialized with a circle of aristocratic exiles fleeing Revolutionary France and

Lewis even visited areas near the war zone where the French Revolutionary Army was

engaged in battle against the great powers of Europe (Peck 16). At the age of nineteen, in

September 1794, Lewis wrote to his mother, that he had written “in the space of ten

weeks” a romance, titled The Monk, of “three and four hundred pages octavo” (Peck 19).

Walter Scott noted that Lewis is the first to “introduce something like the German

taste into English fictitious dramatic and poetical composition” (Parreaux 26). Within his

lifetime, it was already commonplace to consider Lewis in a broader European tradition

36

rather than the local context of the English gothic (Conger 3-5). Lewis’ borrowings and

influences from German Romanticism include Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment, a version

of the First Part that was circulating in the court of Weimar where Lewis was stationed in

1792, and indeed The Monk can be understood as the “marriage of the gothic novel to the

Faust legend” (Conger 15). Other influences, including Friedrich Schiller’s Der

Geisterseher, Johann K. A. Musaus’ Die Entfiihrung, confirms that the author shared an

affinity with the German Romanticists in their fascination with social outcasts, with

misfits, and with criminal behavior (Conger 113-115). German writers and their tales

shared this common interest despite their works being original, unique, and separate in

terms of style and genre, and they provided Lewis a model “to incorporate ideas and

images from one genre into another” to infuse the traditional English gothic novel with

tendencies of outlaw romances, supernatural horror, and demonic morality tales (Conger

47-48). On the formal level, The Monk is shaped by two opposing literary approaches by

English authors towards continental Europe. The gothic genre in England proliferates

with narratives written in English but set in imagined and constructed settings in Europe,

usually revolving around castles with a historical lineage, haunted by a past crimes, and

ultimately reducing the history of the Continent to “mere pretensions of historical

coloring” (Railo 14). Unlike other gothic writers, Lewis, relying on first-hand knowledge

and experience of the continent, borrowed from the emerging romantic movement to

infuse a new playfulness whereby the order and hierarchy of society is parodied, inverted,

mocked, but still left in place, albeit with cynical self-awareness.

37

We can see this reflected when we return to the scene of Raymond and Agnes’

attempt to escape Lindenberg. As part of their escape, Agnes proposed to dress as the

figure of the castle ghost known as “the Bleeding Nun” whose story she had related to

Raymond in “a tone of burlesqued gravity” (Lewis 140). When Raymond finally gets the

signal he expects, and sees Agnes dressed as the Bleeding Nun, he spirits away with her

unthinkingly, only to realize in short order, that this is the real Bleeding Nun, an actual

ghost who substitutes for her counterfeit. The Bleeding Nun escapes the castle with

Raymond until the coach they are riding on crashes bringing them to the village of

Ratisbon where Raymond convalesces only to find himself haunted by the ghost, until the

appearance of another supernatural being, the Wandering Jew who rescues him from his

predicament. By the end of Raymond’s narrative, he returns to Lindenberg with the ghost

banished, Agnes gone, finding only the Baron who “was not a little pleased to find that

his mansion would be no longer troubled with the phantom’s quinquennial visits” (Lewis

169). In the course of Raymond’s narrative, Lindenberg becomes the castle to escape

from, but the castle’s ghost in turn abandons it during the confusion of the lovers’ plot.

By the end of the section, the ghost is laid to rest, but the castle remains standing, still in

the possession of the baron, while Raymond remains troubled and unresolved.

The Monk is a novel that contrasts the gothic with the quotidian. In attempting to

escape the gothic, the gothic travels alongside the characters in the form of the figure of

the Bleeding Nun; the ghost moves from the castle, an ancient building steeped in

tradition, rides alongside a modem coach, and haunts an emerging village. This mix of

38

styles ends up making the gothic elements, such as the supernatural, into ordinary and

easily controlled problems, while it makes the quotidian, such as the anxiety of the

present moment, the yearning for contact for another person, and the idea of escape,

gothic. The gothic castle without a ghost becomes a property easier to manage for the

Baron, with the established order and hierarchy continuing undisturbed. The supernatural

becomes somebody else’s problem but the castle remains its master’s domain. In this

moment we can see Lewis anticipating the parody of the gothic style in Jane Austen’s

Northanger Abbey whose protagonist, Catherine Morland, is rather disappointed that the

titular Abbey turns out to be mere property decorated to adhere to many of the newest

fads. We can also perceive the presence of the counter-revolutionary tendency within The

Monk which coexists, not uneasily, with the author’s unmistakable fascination for the

subversive, the hidden, the uncanny, and what Syndy Conger considers as Lewis’ interest

in raising “unanswerable questions” about “impenetrable but ubiquitous evil in the world

and in the human heart” (Conger 113-114).

Lewis’ style can be seen as striving towards the mix of styles favored by

Auerbach, an attempt to move from an elevated style catering and concerning characters

of high birth, as seen in the narrative that begins with castle intrigues, towards a style

focused on characters of low bearing allowing the character of the Marquis Raymond de

las Cistemas to come into contact with village life, with highwaymen in the forests, the

village of Ratisbon, and a world of sorcery that would not have impinged on him had his

love story not been disrupted. The character of Theodore, the Marquis’s French servant,

39

is especially important in this section, and yet the relationship between him and his

master directly expresses the cynicism of the book. Raymond de las Cisternas is a strange

character in The Monk chiefly because one can easily mistake him to be a central

character going by the fact that the first five chapters of the book, two of which are

narrated by him, significantly digress away from the opening moments which revolve

around the titular monk, Ambrosio. Ambrosio, Lorenzo, and Antonia are introduced in

the same opening scene and while the fates of these three characters never entirely forms

a complete triangle - there are scenes between Lorenzo and Antonia, and Antonia and

Ambrosio, but no confrontation or interaction between Lorenzo and Ambrosio - they

comprise a single unified strand of narrative. Raymond and Theodore, on the other hand,

comprise a parallel strand and their greatest connection to the central plot is a

redundancy. Raymond’s plot concerns the rescue of Agnes who has become a captive of

the Convent of St. Clare and becomes subject to horrific torture because of Ambrosio’s

perfidy. But Agnes is also Lorenzo’s sister and it is Lorenzo who ultimately investigates

her fate, seeks to unearth the crimes of the Church, and in doing so accidentally sparks

the riot that ultimately brings him to his sister. In other words, Raymond never actually

enacts his self-anointed role as Agnes’ savior and rescuer.

Raymond first encounters his servant when he stays at the cottage of his mother,

is besieged by highway robbers, and hires him as an expression of gratitude to his hostess

who aids him in escaping unharmed. Theodore ends up becoming a servant of significant

utility to Raymond, who, praising his “fidelity, intelligence, and good temper,” notes that

40

it pleases him to consider himself Theodore’s “guardian genius” (Lewis 145). Yet this

relationship becomes more complicated and far more one-sided when they interact face-

to-face in Chapter Five where he comes upon his servant writing in a book completely

engrossed to the extent that “he perceived not his lord’s approach” (Lewis 181).

Theodore is established before this scene as a boy of good sense and observation, and

someone who on entering Raymond’s service, started to learn Spanish (Lewis 145). In

this scene, we see Theodore as seen by his master and what is clear is the sense of

voyeurism involved in the Marquis’ gaze about his servant inhabiting, thinking, and

writing for himself. The theme of voyeurism recurs later in the narrative when Matilda, as

a display of her magical power, provides Ambrosio a magic mirror that allows him to see

Antonia bathing privately (Lewis 239-240). A similar sense of violation is suggested

when Raymond finally makes his presence felt to Theodore and asks him to show him his

verse:

“Where are they, Theodore? I shall like to see your composition.”

Theodore’s cheeks glowed with still deeper crimson: he longed to shew

his poetry, but first chose to be pressed for it.

“Indeed, my lord, they are not worthy of your attention.”

“Not these verses, which you just now declared to be so charming? Come,

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come, let me see whether our opinions are the same. I promise that you

shall find in me an indulgent critic” (Lewis 181).

When we encounter Raymond de las Cisternas, we face him from the perspective of

Lorenzo de Medina, and we learn of his adventures by means of extensive exposition

over two long chapters at the end of which we have a sense of his character only as Lewis

has allowed him to reveal to us. But it is only in this scene, after a hundred pages of

Raymond narrating his history to his aristocratic equal Lorenzo, that we truly see his

character on the page for the reader to judge. Where Raymond described his bond with

Theodore in terms that were familiar, friendly, and even paternal, this encounter reveals

their relationship to be purely of master and servant. Raymond is introduced as a voyeur

perceiving Theodore at work, and when Theodore protests about showing him his work

for approbation, his embarrassment at being exposed certainly conveys a lack of agency

about his control of his work, and his lack of privacy. And yet, there is a surprising lack

of empathy by the author for Theodore. The dialogue and context between master and

servant suggests someone intrusive, voyeuristic, and exploitative, but the narration, after

noting Theodore’s blush of embarrassment, to note that Theodore secretly wishes to show

his verses. The narration of the novel usually separates Raymond’s personal observations

from third-person description. In this scene, Theodore’s reaction is described externally

in all its dimensions with very little room to interpret the scene as anything other than

partial irony, which privileges the reader to bask in Raymond’s diabolical control where

42

at the end of the interview, the Marquis dismisses his servant while the narration relates

to us:

The youth’s countenance immediately cleared up. He perceived not the

smile, half approving, half ironical, which accompanied the request, and

he promised the copy with great readiness. The marquis withdrew to his

chamber, much amused by the instantaneous effect produced upon

Theodore’s vanity by the conclusion of his criticism (Lewis 187).

The implications of such a moment, domestic and realistic in milieu, and certainly

highlighting a social change - a servant finding time and inspiration to devote himself to

verse - merely highlights the continuing presence of the gothic hierarchy. The ghosts

depart from the Castle of Lindenberg much to the owner’s benefit, and the servant learns

the master’s language only for the master to more insidiously control and manipulate

him.

This sequence is strikingly similar to Auerbach’s explication of The Odyssey in

his famous chapter of “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis, where he notes that the description

of Odysseus’ interactions with the serving lady who recognizes the scar from his youth is

given to the reader in complete detail leaving no room to the reader to interpret an

alternative point of view from the perspective of another character. This scene

exemplifies Auerbach’s observation about the classical style where the elevated style

ensures that aristocratic characters have complete access to the lower orders (Auerbach

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3). The digressive adventures of Raymond which brings him into contact with individuals

of low social orders ends with him entirely returned to the comforts of his rank without

any self-awareness on his part, and without any recognition of this irony on either part or

that of his servant Theodore, who is a far more impressive figure when we see him

narrated second-hand by Raymond, then he is when we see him on-screen. We see here

that the mix of a gothic romance with the genres of German Romanticism with its

supernatural agents, with its acknowledgement of the greater function the literate lower

social orders must play in contemporary society, does not entirely succeed in a

completely mixed style as suggested by Auerbach. The servant who studies the master’s

language, and learns to compose verse, and advances himself by means of hard work and

diligence, ends up becoming a caricature and a tool for his master, with less sign of any

individual existence apart from his master.

The introduction of contemporary elements within the gothic is most apparent in

The Monk's many allusions to the events of the French Revolution, albeit many of these

allusions are indirect. Consider the scene where Raymond describes his French

adventures:

“Paris was my first station. For some time I was enchanted with it, as

indeed must be every man who is young, rich, and fond of pleasure. Yet,

among all its gaieties, I felt that something was wanting to my heart: I

grew sick of dissipation: 1 discovered that the people among whom I lived,

and whose exterior was so polished and seducing, were at bottom

44

frivolous, unfeeling and insincere. I turned from the inhabitants of Paris

with disgust, and quitted that theatre of luxury without heaving one sigh of

regret” (Lewis 88).

This moment brings us to one of the major problems of The Monk: the year in which the

novel takes place which is not mentioned directly in the book, yet the reader of 1796

could not help but place this incident as taking place before the outbreak of the French

Revolution. When we consider Lewis’ own life at the time in which this book was written

and when we consider the series of events that had taken place by 1796, the year of

publication, chiefly that England was at war with Revolutionary France, a mere sentence

like the one above, a description of Paris redolent of the worst cliches of the Ancien

Regime - “a theater of luxury” - can no longer appear as anything other than a deliberate

anachronism.

In this scene we find evidence of Leslie Fiedler’s claim that “the gothic felt for

the first time the pastness of the past” (Fiedler 137). The gothic is a genre that

pronounced judgment on history; its writers saw the past and its legacy as “corrupt and

detestable” and their evocations of an antiquarian Catholic Europe evinced no nostalgia

or sentiment for the good old days (Fiedler 137). In having a character describe what is

identifiably a bygone France, Lewis’ judgment is most assuredly shaped by revolutionary

upheaval. The Monk however goes further in extending its judgment not only on the past

but on the present, especially when we consider the clear allusions to revolutionary

45

violence in the riot scene of Chapter Ten, with its images of the mob attacking the clergy

and ransacking the Church, images from the Reign of Terror that had shocked the world.

Joseph Drury writes in “Twilight of the Virgin Idols: Iconoclash in The M onk”

that Lewis’s novel and the gothic tradition are suspended between “credulity and

superstition on the one hand and skepticism and enlightenment on the other” (217). In

The Monk rationalism, represented by Don Lorenzo, clashes against the active presence

of the supernatural. Key to Drury’s argument is the concept of “Iconoclash” which he

borrows from the French philosopher Bruno Latour. Iconoclash refers to the

“interpretative uncertainty that so often surrounds the breaking of images and icons...Is it

merely destructive or does it serve some constructive purpose as well?...we call an action

iconoclasm...when we think we know why the image is being smashed; an iconoclash,

on the other hand, refers to a situation when, for whatever reason, we don’t know the

answers” (Drury, 219). We see this reflected most clearly in the denouement of the riot

scene, which begins with Lorenzo de Medina castigating the superstitious ceremony of

the religious festival and with the author describing his thoughts - “He blushed to see his

countrymen the dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to

free them from their monkish fetters” (Lewis 294). And yet when the riot breaks out and

is later contained, we see Lorenzo fighting alongside the Inquisition in quelling the

violence and finally collaborating with the Inquisition in restoring order over the mob.

Lewis does not provide us any propaganda in service for the Inquisition and indeed the

final moment of The Monk has them submitting Ambrosio to vicious torture that leaves

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little doubt that the reader’s sympathies should lie with the wretched, lecherous, evil, but

all too human monk rather than the inhuman Inquisition. But there is no judgment

pronounced on Lorenzo for the fact that he fights alongside the very clerical forces he

criticized and castigated throughout the novel, nor is there much room for an ironic or

sardonic parody on the part of the author on the fact that the hero ends up serving the

very order that he expressed dislike for. Lorenzo, according to Drury, experienced the

sense of Iconoclash by first mocking the belief of the nuns in the Convent of St. Clare

and the corruption of the church that has tortured his sister Agnes and killed his beloved

Antonia. In doing so, Don Lorenzo has destroyed that object. Yet the events that follow

have Don Lorenzo defending the same nuns whose superstitions he despises from an

anticlerical mob risen to burn the convent. The finale of the novel sees no displacement

of the church but rather a restitution of its authority with Lorenzo adjusting himself as an

aristocrat invested in upholding the same order that he had previously criticized. As noted

by Drury, iconoclash is an action tinged with ambiguity; and in destroying an object, the

person who performs the act of destruction either feels guilty or performs a kind of

atonement, and that “the story of the iconoclastic gesture, therefore, is necessarily also to

tell the story of how indignant modem critique always gives way to a disconcerting

ambivalence” (Drury, 221).

In that light one can judge that the ambivalence expressed within The Monk is an

expression of Lewis’s inability to entirely achieve his ambitions for originality, but we

can also judge that the same inability and ambivalence gives the book an unresolved

47

irony that in and of itself represents a mixing of styles. For in attempting to escape the

gothic castle and all that it entails, and in borrowing from the emerging European avant-

garde of German Romanticism, in representing the events of the revolution in an

exoticized genre, Lewis attacks the very ground on which he stands. It is Lewis who is

affected by “iconoclash,” by the ambivalence and chaos his own story contains, drawn to

it by his own youthful daring and yet repressed by the aristocratic circumstances that

enabled, nurtured, and ultimately pacified the same. This is most apparent when we

consider the scene where Lewis’ attempt to mix the two styles outlined by Auerbach is

achieved with the most acute clarity: his approach to the supernatural. The traditional

gothic tale generally eschewed the supernatural. Ann Radcliffe’s works such as, The

Mysteries ofUdolpho, featured the threat and fear of supernatural events that were finally

revealed to be hoaxes (Railo 57-59). In The Monk the supernatural is always shown

directly and never hidden away, which leads to several contradictory moments within the

narrative without any full explanation given.

For instance, when we return to the scene of Raymond’s history of his adventures

which he relates to Lorenzo, the latter interjects his friend’s narrative twice, and both

occasions concern Raymond describing his seduction of Lorenzo’s sister. These comical

interruptions revolves around the notion of Lorenzo’s honor as a nobleman and brother,

but when we consider Lorenzo’s rationalism, as evidenced by his dislike for the

superstitions of the church and its hypocrisy, his silence in the face of Raymond’s

narration of the incident of the Bleeding Nun is a curious lacuna. This incident is not

48

mentioned again after Raymond finishes his narrative, in either his interactions with

Lorenzo or Theodore. Another instance of the supernatural concern Ambrosio and

Matilda where, the latter playing Mephistopheles to the former’s Faust, tempts him with

the promise of the demonic forces that she seemingly controls. She offers him the means

by which he can ensnare Antonia and bring her to his clutches, noting that his hope is

“for supernatural aid, by invoking the daemons yourself, and accepting the conditions of

their service” (Lewis 245).

But the most mysterious of supernatural incidents in the narrative is the scene

concerning Antonia’s encounter with the ghost of her mother Elvira. Donna Elvira Dalfa

is killed by Ambrosio when the monk pays a visit to her house in Chapter Eight with the

intent to sexually assault Antonia. Elvira dies trying to protect her daughter, driving

Ambrosio to run and hide in panic. In Chapter Nine, Antonia is grieving for the loss of

her mother and adjusting to her grief:

In truth Antonia's situation was sufficiently embarrassing and unpleasant.

She was alone in the midst of a dissipated and expensive City; She was ill

provided with money, and worse with Friends. Her aunt Leonella was still

at Cordova, and She knew not her direction. (Lewis 268)

An important point to emphasize about this sequence is that this is perhaps the only

moment in the entire narrative where Antonia is truly alone without chaperon or suitor.

When we first see her, she is with her Aunt Leonella attending the Abbey of the

49

Capuchins to hear Ambrosio’s sermons. Then we see her from the gaze and viewpoint of

her suitor Lorenzo de Medina and as the object of Ambrosio’s perverse fixations. We

also see her depicted from the viewpoint of her mother Elvira who grieves about her

daughter’s naivete nurtured by her overprotectiveness. After this scene, Antonia will be

poisoned again by Ambrosio and taken into a tomb from which she will be discovered

and rescued far too late in the wake of the riot scene of Chapter Ten, where she will die

after meeting Lorenzo de Medina one last time. In this one scene of loneliness,

independent from the gaze of other characters, we get a true sense of Antonia’s character.

Lewis emphasizes, in rather modem language, her loneliness, her isolation, her economic

realities. Indeed this paragraph could conceivably exist in a realist novel, and indeed in

the phrase “she knew not her direction” Lewis carelessly leaves open a suggestion that

Antonia’s path is not entirely conditioned into nunnery and marriage, the only two

options available for women in the book.

The female characters of name and prominence in the narrative are defined by

their spousal rank (engaged, married, widowed, spinster) including Donna Elvira,

Marguerite, Leonella, Donna Rodolpha, Agnes, or they are nuns such as Mother St.

Ursula, the good nun of St. Clare, or the domina, the evil nun who oversees Agnes’s

torture. The phrase “knew not her direction” is an indication of possible freedom for the

most confined and secluded character in the novel. Across The Monk we have characters

constantly straining at their lack of privacy fully aware that they are being watched by

someone or other. Ambrosio is under the gaze of Matilda, Agnes is a captive of Donna

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Rodolpha and later the Convent of St. Clare. This scene is unique in the novel for its

sense of privacy, allowing the character who is the most watched, observed, and studied

by others, some measure to think for herself. Lewis dramatizes this internal moment with

keen insight:

Antonia listened anxiously to the Carriages, as they rolled along the Street.

None of them stopped, and it grew late without Leonella's appearing. Still,

Antonia resolved to sit up till her Aunt's arrival...The hours passed on

slow and tediously. Lorenzo's departure from Madrid had put a stop to the

nightly Serenades: She hoped in vain to hear the usual sound of

Guitars.. .She took up her own, and struck a few chords: But Music that

evening had lost its charms for her, and she soon replaced the Instrument

in its case. She seated herself at her embroidery frame, but nothing went

right: The silks were missing, the thread snapped every moment, and the

needles were so expert at falling that they seemed to be animated. At

length a flake of wax fell from the Taper which stood near her upon a

favorite wreath of Violets: This completely discomposed her; she threw

down her needle, and quitted the frame. It was decreed that for that night

nothing should have the power of amusing her. She was the prey of ennui,

and employed herself in making fruitless wishes for the arrival of her Aunt

(Lewis 270).

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Antonia then walks into the library to peruse a book only to find herself awakened

to her mother’s loss by the “total silence” of the library, “the few dying Plants in the

window which, since Elvira's loss, had been neglected” and “the gloom of night” which

inspires Antonia with “a melancholy awe” bringing her to grief (Lewis 270-271). To

distract herself from this grief, Antonia takes to reading one of her favorite stories from

the books, the ballad “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene,” which allows Lewis to

intervene with another one of his poems, a burlesque and grotesque medieval romance

about a knight Alonzo who returns from the dead as a skeleton to claim his former

beloved Imogene who is being married to another man (Lewis 294-299). What follows is

an extended paragraph describing the arrival of a ghost in a manner that is a perfect

pastiche of the gothic style as developed by Clara Reeve, who Eino Railo credits to be the

first writer to make “deliberate use of an empty suite of rooms supposed to be haunted”

(Railo 8).

It’s important to describe the milieu of this scene in more detail because of its

unusual nature. We have noted that gothic novels are fixated on the castle and have

discussed the novel’s attitude to the traditional gothic castle of Lindenberg. Lewis

throughout The Monk sets the action in a diverse array of locations. A good deal of the

action takes place in the Abbey of Capuchins and the Convent of St. Clare but there is

very little description of its architecture, and this lack of description leaves it without any

special determining characteristics. Ambrosio is associated with interior spaces such as

the private cell in the abbey, the grotto where Matilda reveals to him her true nature, and

52

the necropolis beneath the convent where he later kidnaps and hides Antonia. The

villainous monk’s final scenes take place in his cell as he awaits judgment from the

Inquisition. Within this litany of locations, Antonia’s home stands out for a number of

reasons. Namely that it is a location with a precise address and direction. Ambrosio

obtains it for his schemes, “Donna Elvira Dalfa, strada di San Iago, four doors from the

palace d ’Abbornos” (Lewis 217). As Lennard Davis and Ian Watt observe in their studies

of the development of the novel in the eighteenth century, the novel differed from the

romance in its more contemporary attention to milieu, place, and setting. Where gothic

fiction resembles romance in its remote and exotic settings, its aristocratic milieu, its

episodic structure, and its evocation of history, a novel is set in a locale known to the

author, in a contemporary milieu, located in the non-aristocratic world of the middle and

lower classes (Davis 40). Watt describes the novel as “the inverted romance” which took

inspiration from the “individualist” spirit of Locke and Descartes to bring a greater

realism to the setting and time of the narrative (Watt 11-14). Romances abound in strange

places filled with the foreign, the archaic and the exclusion of contemporary life (Watt

19). Throughout The Monk in a variety of episodes we see Lewis open up his narrative to

contemporary events and happenings in Europe, with the many allusions to the events of

the French Revolution and German Romanticist movement. The single most gothic scene

in the novel does not take place in a castle steeped in history, but in the relatively middle-

class dwelling of Donna Elvira Dalfa. Lewis makes the domestic and the mundane gothic

and he does so by ensuring the milieu and setting he chooses for it is a comfortable

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domain familiar to both Antonia and the readers. Watt notes that the novel creates the

impression of “life by time” in its accumulation of details, names, places, description of

objects and items to create a sense of realism (22). In the scene of the arrival of Elvira’s

ghost, we see the creation of the gothic by time, resulting in a moment of genuine horror

and dread. We see the transformation of a home by death, by time, and memory, into a

gothic space, and we see the transformation of a mother into a ghost, and the result is the

most purely uncanny and horrific moment in The Monk when the door of the library

opens, and Antonia perceives a “a tall thin Figure, wrapped in a white shroud which

covered it from head to foot” who then announces that they will meet in three days

(Lewis 275). Antonia collapses in shock at seeing the identity of the ghost, crying out,

“Almighty God! My Mother!” before collapsing (Lewis 275). This is the end of

Antonia’s brief spell of independence, freedom, self-regard, and personal solitude. And

the end of that freedom comes from the ghost of her beloved mother.

There is something deeply horrific and troubling about this scene. It differs from

Raymond’s encounter with the Bleeding Nun where the supernatural is described with

what Agnes herself suggests as “a tone of burlesqued gravity” and the occurrence of the

nun provokes no remark or reflection or later comment from the other characters aside

from the Baron who is pleased that the ghost is laid to rest. In this sequence, Antonia

confronts a ghost, recognizes it, and faints. The scene is striking because the gothic arises

from the quotidian and works as an extemalization to a very interior state of loneliness,

confusion, and ennui. The fact that the ghost arrives in the comforts of a home and

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without external prompting, e.g. the machinations of Ambrosio and Matilda, makes it

especially invasive since even the comforts of home are not to be trusted. The realism is

further heightened when we reflect that the ghost, in this instance, is an ordinary crime

victim living in a house in the city rather than a remote figure from history. But what is

truly horrific is what the scene suggests about the supernatural.

As Syndy Conger notes, Lewis borrowed the trope of the woman’s ghost from

Der Geisterbanner, or as it was known in English, The Necromancer, by Ludwig

Flammenburg, a novel that was sufficiently popular to be referred to by Jane Austen in

Northanger Abbey, alongside The Monk and other works by Horace Walpole and Ann

Radcliffe (Conger 76). In that story the ghost was located in a cavern in the Black Forest

rather than in the domestic dwelling of a single mother, and there the ghost haunted the

villains who tormented it. A ghost was also featured in Horace Walpole’s The Castle o f

Otranto but there he’s a benevolent ghost who aids the hero. Where earlier ghosts served

as agents of a moral authority, tormenting the evil and aiding the good, in The Monk, the

ghost torments the most innocent, virtuous, and naive character in the novel, and indeed

horrifies her into a shock, putting her into the clutches of Ambrosio from which she will

never escape till her death. Lewis’ introduction of the supernatural which he infuses into

a realist setting leads, as per Conger, into a scene with “an ambiguous nightmare quality”

departing from his previous sources in suggesting “a more complex moral worldview”

about the absence of a rational moral order in society (79-82). It’s very clear that Elvira

does not haunt her murderer Ambrosio. Right after Antonia’s fainting spell, when her

55

servants Jacintha and Flora run to the Abbey for help, Ambrosio, on learning of the

situation, reflects on his opportunity:

The cause of Elvira's death remaining unknown, he was convinced that

crimes were not so swiftly followed by punishment...as till then he had

himself believed. This persuasion made him resolve upon Antonia's ruin,

for the enjoyment of whose person dangers and difficulties only seemed to

have increased his passion (Lewis 276).

Ambrosio finally does meet his fate and comeuppance, but that incident has no

connection to any supernatural or religious sense of order and morality, or any direct

correlation to his crimes. His exposure happens by accident, by confusion, and chaos

brought out by the riot triggered accidentally by Lorenzo de Medina, an incident that

unleashes anti-clerical violence which eventually horrifies the hero. The events leading to

Antonia’s doom, the unmotivated malevolent intervention of a demonic aspect of her

loving mother, is the main charge against the neoclassical rigidification that otherwise

handicaps The Monk and its connections to the gothic and the romantic. In this one

moment, Lewis is able to go further than both, albeit in an act of “iconoclash” as

identified by Drury, which leads him to restore order in a manner that is cynical and

nihilistic. Here we see him moving from the Homeric to the Biblical style highlighted by

Auerbach where in opposition to a style that “externalized, uniformly illuminated

phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae

in a perpetual foreground” we have the “externalization of only so much of the

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phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity” left

for interpretation to sort out the “thoughts and feelings” which “remain unexpressed” and

suggested leaving a sense of the mysterious (Auerbach 11-12).

Throughout The Monk, we see Lewis animate his characters and settings with a

mix of styles borrowed from the emerging currents of his era. This attempt to mix these

styles, to balance the elevated with the low, does not lead to an Auerbachian “mixed

style;” rather it leads to a work where the static form of the gothic matches the mobile

form of the novel leading to a series of collisions resulting in a divided work. Peter

Brooks, in his 1973 essay “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” remarks that the novel is “not

only the aberrant masterpiece of the Gothic novel” but a work of literature that

demonstrates “a remarkable understanding” of its historical conditions and “the

epistemological moment” to which it belongs (249). He locates The Monk as a novel

published at the pivot point between “revolution and reaction...at the dead end of the Age

of Reason” where “the Sacred has reasserted its claim to attention, but in the most

primitive possible manifestations as taboo and interdiction” (Brooks, 249). A

contemporary observer shared a similar view. The Marquis de Sade writes in his “An

Essay on Novels” in 1799 that the “only merit” of the gothic novel “consists of their

reliance on witchcraft and phantasmagoria,” identifying The Monk as being “the best of

them” (De Sade 13). Sade identified the gothic novel as “the necessary offspring of the

revolutionary upheaval which affected the whole of Europe” and that to the observers and

participants in the events of that epoch, “novels became as difficult to write as they were

57

tedious to read” (De Sade 14). He further notes that individuals of that generation

“experience more adversity in four or five years than the most famous novelist in all

literature could have invented in a hundred. Writers therefore had to look to hell for help

in composing their alluring novels” (De Sade, Page 14). This situation undoubtedly

created challenges in representation, and narrative resolution that “the author of The

Monk was no more successful in overcoming them than Mrs. Radcliffe” and the

unavoidable choice made by the author “to develop the supernatural and risk forfeiting

the reader’s credulity, or to explain nothing and fall into the most ludicrous

implausibility” leads to irresolution (De Sade, Page 14). In Representations o f

Revolution, Ronald Paulson notes that the gothic genre which originated in a pre­

revolutionary era attained the height of its popularity and success during the

revolutionary decade of the 1790s because, “it was precisely [the] inability to make out

events on a day-to-day basis, but with the suspicion of personal skullduggery beneath

each new changing-hands of property, that made the gothic novel a roughly equivalent

narrative form” (225). The gothic novel, especially The Monk, became the mode and

genre that gave voice to the uncertainty, confusion, and paranoia bom from “a new sense

of history” that transitioned from a structure centered around Kings to a whole multitude

of people (Paulson 225).

The Monk is a romance animated by an emerging historical consciousness that manifests

itself in the form of digressions, redundancies, and ruptures. Lewis’s attempts to mix

styles, the English gothic and the German Romantic, the static and the dynamic, the

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Homeric and the Biblical, does not entirely create a work that breaks away the rigid

categories of form, genre, and style that subdivide the novel and other prose forms.

Rather it results in a divided, ambivalent, and strange book animated with a sense of

society driven by the random, the strange, the chaotic, and the surreal in the original

sense of the word, that is, the super-real. The Monk was indeed a beloved novel of the

French surrealists leading Andre Breton to remark in The Surrealist Manifesto, that, “The

breath of the marvelous gives it life throughout” (Hoog 17). The surreal quality of the

book remains undiminished by its inability to fully resolve the balance between the two

styles, and the problem of mixing the elevated with the low. Indeed, the lack of resolution

is the source for the efficacy of the novel, aided greatly by the playfulness, self-

awareness, and pastiche which allows Lewis to complicate and confound many of the

established notions of the boundaries between the romance and the novel, both in his

time, and in the continuing present.

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Chapter Two

Nostromoj History and Legend

The story goes also that within men’s memory two wandering sailors -

Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain - talked over a

gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a donkey...Thus

accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop

their way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the

peninsula. On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only

have been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time.. .The impious

adventurers gave no other sign...the two gringos, spectral and alive, are

believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks... They are now rich

and hungry and thirsty - a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts

suffering in their starved and parched flesh of distant heretics, where a

Christian would have renounced and been released. (Conrad 6-7).

This is the legend of the hidden treasure in the Azuera islands, which is first

related by the narrator in the opening chapter of Nostromo. It recurs throughout the novel,

cited by the title character when, on his departure for the dangerous mission with Martin

Decoud aboard the cargo-lighter, he bids farewell to the Viola family but leaves behind

his effects in their custody to be given to his girlfriend after his death. Nostromo wryly

admits that they might adorn another lover should he die, noting that no rival suitor need

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worry that he would “linger on earth after I am dead, like those gringos that haunt the

Azuera” (Conrad 204). This reference to the legend of the gringos by Nostromo, the

Capataz de Cargadores (Foreman of the Stevedores), is mocking, ironic, and playful. His

citation of the same legend later in the novel is far more desperate, serious, and fevered.

There he mentions the legend to Dr. Monygham after coming across the body of Senor

Hirsch, a Jewish fur-trader tortured and murdered by Colonel Sotillo, after the failure of

the same desperate mission. Nostromo tells Monygham that, “There is something in a

treasure that fastens upon a man’s mind.. .He will never forget it till he is dead - and even

then - Doctor, did you ever hear of the miserable gringos on Azuera, that cannot die? Ha!

ha! Sailors like myself. There is no getting away from a treasure that once fastens upon a

mind” (Conrad 364).

This short excerpt from Nostromo concerning one of its many recurring motifs

illustrates the density of plot, story, action, and events that take place within the novel.

The legend itself is a parable of greed suggestive of Chaucer’s “Pardoner Tale” but what

matters is that it provides material for the character of Nostromo to interpret in light of a

changing present. When first invoked by Nostromo, he is at his most powerful, secure,

and content. He is certain of his place in the city of Sulaco as the Capataz de Cargadores;

he avers no fear or regret for early death and no yearning for an afterlife. In the second

instance, Nostromo has become desperate, lost, and disillusioned, afraid for his survival

amid the Civil War that has broken out in Sulaco. Here he believes in a universal

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obsession extending beyond death, losing any comfort in the present, any certainty of

identity, and projecting his grief and suffering to a cosmic level.

In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach notes that, “it is easy to separate the historical from

the legendary in general” (19). The structure of legend differs from history in that “the

legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous... It runs far

too smoothly” (Auerbach 19). Legends eschew the casual, secondary, unresolved,

digressive, and chaotic elements of real life that complicate the “the clear progress of the

action and the simple orientation of the actors,” in stark contrast to the “historical event

which we witness or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it” (Auerbach 19).

In Nostromo, we see the title character cling to the simplicity of the legend of the treasure

haunted by “tenacious gringo ghosts” even amid a chaotic present in which he is at

various moments - actor, agent, witness.

One can make a provisional argument that the main quality that separates

Nostromo from other characters of the novel, is that his attitude is shaped by legend,

where other characters are consciously shaped by history. From this, one can extend this

argument to claim that Nostromo is about the relationship of a man with a legendary

consciousness to a historical milieu, with its multiple voices, forces, systems, and

institutions. This is of course paradoxical since Nostromo, published in 1904, is a book

that, despite its mimesis of the historical novel in its outward action and surface texture,

relates the events of a fictional South American nation called Costaguana. Most of the

action transpires in the fictional city of Sulaco. The history related in the novel is

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fundamentally as real as the legend of the gringos of the Azuera. The intermixture of the

legendary and the historical allows Nostromo to subvert several of the common

conventions inherent in the genre of the historical novel, or to use Leslie Fiedler’s term,

the “historical romance,” allowing the book to pronounce judgment on a teleological

view of history.

This chapter will discuss selected scenes from the action of the text rather than

discuss the novel in all its parts. The focus in this chapter will be on the character of

Nostromo himself and the dichotomy between his placement in the narrative, and his

largely marginal and de-centered relation to the action of the events of the narrative. To

that end, the thesis takes an equally de-centered relation to the plot and overall situation

of the background, restricting itself to the foreground of the character of Nostromo and

the ways in which his place in the text is empathetic and modem precisely because of his

decentralization, marginalization, and limited agency. The focus is mainly on Nostromo

himself to the exclusion of many of the most widely written about characters in the book,

such as Charles Gould, Giorgio Viola, Antonia, and Emilia Gould. The intense focus on a

single character provides the best method to gauge the representation of history and

legend within the pages of the text. This thesis will examine Nostromo through the

informed critical views of many Conrad scholars chiefly Albert Guerard, Cedric Watts,

Ian Watt, Aaron Fogel, Peter Smith, and Edward Said.

Critics have long observed what Kiernan Ryan identifies as the “radically

contradictory dynamic pulsing at the core of all Conrad’s major fiction” (Ryan 43).

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Citing Arnold Kettle, Ryan identifies within the pages of Nostromo, clear social criticism

directed at the corruption and dehumanization of imperialism resting side-by-side with

the existence of, “a certain mistiness...buried deep in the language and symbolism of the

book” that expresses a cosmic judgment on the events and characters (qtd. in Ryan 43).

The intermixture of history and metaphysics has led to divergent schools of critical

thought regarding Nostromo. The straightforward realist readings of Nostromo “are

compelled to evade...the novel’s rebarbative strategies of narrative disorientation, its

sabotaging of conventional fictional expectations” while the modernist readings reduce

the text by shriveling “its mimetic range and depth to a mere reflexive writhing,

dismissing the massive, objective concretion of the social reality it deliberately

constructs” (Ryan 45). Albert Guerard also discusses this dichotomy in Conrad the

Novelist, observing that Nostromo’’s experimental style of narrative, which involves serial

disruptions of chronology and anachronic presentation of action, is suggestive of the “art

novel” yet the breadth of its canvas and the nature of its preoccupation make it resemble

“the nineteenth-century realistic novel [and] the Edwardian double-decker study of

society” (176). For Guerard, this intermixture is a weakness of the book, as he judges it to

be “one of the most uneven of the great English novels,” noting that the experimentalism

of Parts I and II gives way in Part III, “to a relaxed method and a much more popular

story” (Guerard 216). In Public and Private Value, Peter Smith identifies Nostromo as

the culmination of the development of the historical novel first developed by Walter

Scott, noting that it shares a “family resemblance” to War and Peace, Sentimental

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Education, Little Dorrit, The Princess Casamassima (1-2). He praises Conrad’s

Nostromo for looking back at the nineteenth century from the vantage point of the early

twentieth century and observes that “the only constant has been the relentless and

accelerating pace of change” (Smith 14). Others likewise argue that the distance between

the book and a work like Middlemarch “is not absolute,” and it provides a focal point for

the transformation of Victorian realism to modernism (Levine 40).

As noted in the Introduction of this thesis, the modernist resembles the gothic in

that it is an aesthetic judgment on reality. Leslie Fiedler regards the gothic as the

modernizing tendency of the late eighteenth century that evoked the historical from the

vantage point of the eighteenth century (Fiedler 163). He categorizes the historical novel

as “historical romance” in that it evokes the past without judgment, without perspective,

and offers the illusion of characters inhabiting a past like the present, as opposed to the

gothic, which expresses fear and terror for the past and its influence on the present (162-

163). Where Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper evoke the past, they do so with no

active terror or fear of the past, and this lack of fear, in Fiedler’s judgment, makes the

historical genre comfortable and safe (Fiedler 167). Whether modernist or tradition-

minded, critical perspectives on Nostromo are united in finding within it a terror and fear

of the past, a terror that does not dissipate but appears to continue until the end of the

novel, grounded as it is in the confusion, uncertainty, and obscurity of modem life. The

same legend of the gringos of the Azuera remains unaltered upon its presentation at the

beginning of the novel, but what is transformed and altered is Nostromo’s understanding

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of the meaning of that legend. Nostromo goes from a disbelief in the persistence of the

ghosts to a belief in the power of treasure and greed to extend itself eternally beyond

death. In Nostromo, “Life (as form, color, movement) repeatedly reaches us before any

coherent understanding of it. The reader must collaborate not only in the writing of a

novel, now, but also in the writing of a country’s history” (Guerard 175).

Keeping Ryan in mind, we can identify the dichotomy of the critical judgment on

Nostromo as one that divides the form and the content, leading to a picking of sides

between the modernist, the experimental, and the present-oriented, while relegating the

historical, the popular, and the backwards-gazing elements on the other side. To go

further, one can argue that one side looks at Nostromo as pointing ahead to the present

while another side looks at Nostromo as gazing back to the past. In his extended

discussion on the novel in Beginnings: Intention and Method, Edward Said identifies this

divide as existing because of “Conrad’s habit of viewing his life as an uneasy

compromise between two conflicting modes of existence” on account of his “radical

uncertainty about himself’ (106). The two modes, according to Said, are to “experience

reality as an unfolding process, an action-being made,” and, “to feel reality as a hard

quantity” (Said Beginnings 106). Said states that the former mode is “that of the actor”

and the latter mode is “that of the author” (Said Beginnings 106). To assert one’s control

over life, over one’s present, requires an understanding of both modes which can only

take place when “the retrospective view modifies, and even contradicts, the richly

complex dynamics of a specific action,” which in Nostromo takes the form of a conflict

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between “immersion in action and the retrospective definition (record) of that action”

(Said Beginnings 106).

When we return to the legend of the gringos and Nostromo’s two successive

chronological references to the action, we can state that when Nostromo first playfully

alludes in a mocking way to the legend, he is using it to relate to his present, and he exists

in the mode of the actor; in the second instance, when he is projecting a universalizing

view through that legend, he is becoming an author. The trajectory of Nostromo the

character then, his central divide both within himself and in the overall narrative, is the

period when he is an actor and participant in the drama of society, and the second period

where he attempts to become an author. The first period is in most objective senses

Nostromo’s great social success, while the second period, which we will discuss later, is

the most elusive and pessimistic period of his life. Captain Mitchell acknowledges this

divide at the end of Part I when he sets up and announces Nostromo’s great part in the

secession of Sulaco from Costaguana:

“It was history - history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you

know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir.”

But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to

another, which could not be classed either as “history” or as “a mistake” in

Captain Mitchell’s phraseology. He had another word for it.

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“Sir,” he used to say afterwards, “that was no mistake. It was a fatality. A

misfortune, pure and simple, sir” (Conrad 105).

Nostromo as an actor participates in history. Nostromo as author experiences a

fatality and misfortune but not because of any mistake, at least according to Mitchell.

This judgment highlights the divide between Nostromo’s legendary view whereby the

same event of the gringos of the Azuera is interpreted and reinterpreted as time passes,

culminating in the Capataz’s obsession with treasure while Mitchell perceives events and

actions in relative terms, distinguishing between the two periods of Nostromo’s success

and failure. Nostromo thinks in terms of legend, a clear story without contradictions,

rather than history, a chaotic process of events that demands human judgment and

participation.

For most of the novel, Nostromo is marginal to the events of Costaguana and

Sulaco and the various factions and interests that gravitate in the background, all of

which lead to the outbreak of revolution and civil war in Sulaco. Part 1, with its

celebrated fragmenting of chronology non-linearly relates multiple layers of the history

of Costaguana, introduces Nostromo on four different occasions. Each introduction is

discontinuous; we get little sense of progression of character from one scene to another.

Mitchell first mentions him when he describes his action in suppressing a riot, calling

him “Nostromo - invaluable fellow” and later “Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand” and

“This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach” (Conrad 11-12). We are

introduced to Nostromo again later on, but this time from the perspective of Giorgio and

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Teresa Viola, fellow Italian immigrants in Costaguana. Teresa, who is famously and

bitterly mocking of her adopted son, laments how the fame and verbose praise bestowed

to him by Mitchell is what Nostromo cares most about, mocking him above all for his

nickname, declaring “What a name! What is that? Nostromo? He would take a name that

is properly no word from them” (Conrad 20). After this Nostromo disappears for another

fifty-six pages before he is mentioned again, this time in his legendary aspect, “at the

height of his prestige” when, in one incident of a dock strike, “the appearance of a

phantom-like horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labor

without fail” (Conrad 76).

The fourth and final introduction is when Nostromo engages in a carnival fiesta

basking in his popularity, flirting with a Morenita who seductively cuts off his silver

buttons (100-104). This final introduction is described by Said as “the most splendidly

theatrical moment in all of Conrad’s fiction” anticipating the exotic celebration of

matadors in the work of Hemingway, one of Conrad’s many disciples (Said Beginnings

126). It is also the only truly celebratory portrayal of community in the novel. As Daphna

Erdinast-Vulcan notes, the real theme of Nostromo is the “absence of an identifiable

collective subject or community” (Erdinast-Vulcan 140). Nostromo’s stature as the hero,

a “Man of the People” is undercut because he does not belong to an identifiable

community, being an agent of “material interests” of the Gould Mining Concession, a

tool to suppress strikes and dissent, actions which he carries out without any self­

reflection. Nostromo, which we learn by the end of the novel is the nickname of the

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Genoese sailor Giovanni Batista Fidanza, is the Italian phrase for boatswain, a literal

contraction of “Nostra Uomo,” which means “our man” (Said Beginnings 126). Taken

together, the four introductions of Nostromo give us a gallery of the various ways

Nostromo is seen by the community, and highlight that his personal and social identity

are defined by how others perceive him. He is seen as loyal servant by Senor Mitchell,

wayward son by Teresa Viola, mythical legend by the striking dockworkers he is

suppressing, and by the people as a folk hero, an operatic figure who is one of them to the

extent that he can sustain that illusion. Together they add up to the composite portrait of

Nostromo the actor, in Edward Said’s formulation. This self-regard, what the narrator

repeatedly identifies as Nostromo’s vanity, is tested, and cracked by the event that the

narrator calls, “the most desperate affair of his life” (Conrad 396). This is the mission

assigned by Gould to carry a shipment of silver ingots aboard a cargo lighter to escape

the militarist junta led by General Montero and Colonel Sotillo, a mission which fails

through no real fault of Nostromo’s. Nostromo has no inkling or understanding of the

true purpose of this mission, which ultimately amounts to be of no actual significance in

the grand events of the civil war. The mission proves to be “pettily grand” in that it is

simultaneously a small sliver of action within the larger civil war yet given greater focus

and intensity than any of the big scenes and events that surround the world-historical

conflict (Fogel 104). In historical terms, Nostromo’s great heroic moment is the scene

after he discovers the corpse of Senor Hirsch, where he undertakes a daring ride to Cayta

to bring a rebel army to save the Gould Mining Concession and the oligarchs of Sulaco

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from the rebels. But this incident, titled by Senor Mitchell as Nostromo’s “famous ride to

Cayta,” is teased as promising a “most exciting book” but it is also, as Kieran Ryan notes,

“precisely the kind of book Conrad’s integrity cannot permit Nostromo to be” (Ryan 48-

49).

As an actor Nostromo is pompous, vain, naive, and lacking in self-awareness

about his place in the world. There is no community on behalf of whom Nostromo can

truly be a hero despite being most suited to the task and occasion because in Sulaco

everyone uses each other (Smith 192). This transactional existence is exemplified by “the

holy alliance,” to use a Marxist phrase of Charles Gould, the chief oligarch of Sulaco and

Nostromo’s ultimate patron, with the bandit clan led by Hernandez, who become

mercenaries and soldiers in Gould’s faction, and finally in the new regime become

ministers with portfolio. The priest Father Corbelan works as a go-between between the

capitalist and bandit factions in the service of capitalism or “material interests” (Conrad

379). The milieu of Costaguana and Sulaco which seems exotic and peopled with Anglo-

Italian-Hispanic names and characters, “are mostly empty, lacking in appropriateness, in

property” because they are not “Romantic but contractual, deliberately hollow, and often

oxymoronic” (Fogel 117). Nostromo, the absurd name taken from his Anglo masters, is

after all “our man,” the man of the Gould Mining Concession and the Sulaco oligarchs,

and his great heroic service to his employers is becoming comically under-rewarded

compared to the enrichment of the bandits because the latter cement their service in

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Sulaco’s hour of need as equal partners, a position that Nostromo only belatedly realizes

is beyond his humble reach.

In the rough outline of the movement of Nostromo from contented puppet to

discarded tool condescended by his superiors, one can glimpse the radical undercutting of

the traditional historical romance and its milieu. As noted in the Introduction, Gyorgy

Lukacs identified the great advance made by Walter Scott in the historical novel is his

placement of the “mediocre hero” at the center of his action as opposed to the epic hero

(Lukacs 34-36). The “mediocre hero” was the average person who was best positioned to

engage with multiple factions and interests, serving simultaneously as a channel for the

reader to engage with a historical worldview, and as an expression of England’s national

self-image as the moderate voice of stability amid a world of chaos (Lukacs 36-37).

Nostromo in many ways fulfills this position as Stephen K. Land observes in his essay,

“Four Views of the Hero”:

Nostromo keeps his options open by cultivating both the good opinion of

his employers and popularity among the working classes...Balanced

between two worlds he occupies a unique position, on account of which he

exercises considerable powers; his following among the people makes him

an effective leader of the harbor work force, which in turn, as long as he

steers clear of involvement in politics, makes him a valuable employee to

Mitchell. Nostromo is thus the linchpin upon which the cohesion of local

economy depends...Yet he can only function in this way only as long as

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he avoids open espousal of either popular or patrician values, and as long

as he holds aloof from both wealth and domestic obscurity (95).

Nostromo provides on the surface the archetypal role of the protagonist of a historical

romance. Yet by circumstance, milieu, and style of narrative, he can never truly perform

that function of embodying the teleological historical perspective through his own

experience as a character. As Captain Mitchell states above, this is not because of any

mistake on his part but the result of misfortune and circumstances.

For after all, despite being marginal to the events of the novel, and decentralized

from the narrative of actual world-historical agency, Nostromo as a character is in Harold

Bloom’s words, “the only persuasive instance of the natural sublime in a twentieth-

century hero of fiction” and indeed is a “Homeric throwback” like Tolstoy’s Hadji

Murad (Bloom 4-5). Nostromo as a man of action, lacking in psychological awareness,

is Adamic in his innocence and naivete but “the world he lives is not the Adamic

world...rather, a frontier world, where a sleepy pastoral Campo has been invaded by

industrialism, bringing with it all the complex energies, confusion of racial histories and

attitudes, and moral anxieties” (Van Ghent 28).

The novel’s litany of anti-climaxes soft-pedals the great historical pageants it

promises to deliver, and this undercuts Nostromo’s capacity as both actor and author. The

unfairness of this failure is even more acute because of the unique nature of the stage on

which Nostromo is presented. The invented milieu of Costaguana and Sulaco constitutes

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“Conrad’s greatest creative achievement” according to Albert Guerard in Conrad the

Novelist (178). It is an invented milieu of a continent that Conrad only briefly visited in

his years as a merchant sailor, created entirely out of historical research and imagination,

and yet it is more fully realized and developed, Guerard avers, than the Malaysian jungles

and towns in Lord Jim, based on Conrad’s years of service in the Malay Archipelago

(Guerard 178-179). Its mimesis is in a large sense independent of the characters (Guerard

178). The impressive realization of the South American milieu can however be mistaken

for the real thing. One can read Nostromo as an actual historical novel about South

American history and society. Such a reading is by no means invalid but it is problematic,

as Frederic Jameson warns us when he observes that the novel’s Anglocentrism and

restriction in scope to the perspective of white settlers, registers as “offensive and

caricatural” from a post-colonial perspective (Jameson 116). The European projection of

a South American setting is “more complex than simple racism” however in that

Conrad’s prose invests with “considerable fantasy-attraction and provides material for the

practice of the idyll...at the same time it accredits the good opinion the industrial West

has of itself’ (Jameson 116). Indeed, to see the South American milieu with its

considerable surface realism and verisimilitude as mimetic and realistic is to fall into the

trap that Auerbach aimed to escape with “Historism,” a method of radical relativism that

recognizes the “incomparability of historical phenomena and their constant inner

mobility” (Auerbach 444).

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In his chapter “Nostromo: A Tale of Europe” in Public and Private Value, Peter

Smith regards Costaguana and Sulaco as a projection of Europe, as “a place of virtually

impenetrable unity” transferred to “a sort of Lilliput” where the great inheritances of

Europe’s political and cultural legacy are extended in laboratory conditions to see how

they develop in an abstract South American tapestry without the baggage of the totalizing

legacies of cultural nationalism impinging on them (189-190). Costaguana is, then, “a

little Europe with its history intact but its memories gone” (Smith 190). In other words,

Nostromo's main subject is not a European projection of South America as it appears on

the surface, nor should it be confused with an allegory of European experience. Rather, it

is about the internationalization of Europe as a hegemonic idea, a sardonic elegy of

Europe’s conquest and subjugation of the world in its colonial projects and its

frighteningly effective social engineering (Smith 194-195). Edward Said insists that

Nostromo is “most assuredly not the product of a great established literature;” rather, it is

a singular vision of a Polish emigre educated in France and writing in English, his third-

language, which ultimately becomes a novel that resembles no tradition of European

literature, meriting comparisons with the “more insecure, individualistic, and nervous

American tradition” of Moby-Dick (Said Beginnings 110).

This deracination of tradition and culture completely renders ironic the attempts

of Nostromo to be the hero of a community, and hampers his ability to fulfill the role of

the Lukacsian “mediocre hero,” the observer-agent of history. The historical novel in the

course of the nineteenth century, as Lukacs pointed out, became a mode to express

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Romantic nationalism in the wake of the events of the French Revolution, where the need

for mass participation led to the rise of propaganda that summarized political, social, and

economical realities in a common consensus shared by multiple classes, leading to the

creation of a national tradition necessarily connected “with memories of the past”

(Lukacs 25). The historical novel, originally manifested in the gothic novel, provides a

means for articulating a grand narrative view of society and culture. Mikhail Bakhtin, as

Aaron Fogel observes, famously applied the concept of polyphony to the works of

Fielding, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, noting that it provides a pluralistic portrayal of

multiple dialects, multiple classes, nationalities, and professions (Fogel 118). Yet this

polyphonic portrayal of society is in danger of the process of rigidification, becoming

contrary to its aim of celebrating diversity in text, “an encomium on expansive

nationalism” (Fogel 118). Erich Auerbach noted this rigidification in the works of

Dickens and Thackeray when, in the former, “strong social feeling” and “suggestive

density of his milieu” coexist with a general absence of the “fluidity of the political and

historical background,” and in the latter, a carefully detailed historical setting and

carefully researched background, such as Europe pre-and-post Waterloo in Vanity Fair,

“preserves the moralistic, half-satirical, half-sentimental viewpoint...as it was handed

down by the eighteenth century” (Auerbach 492).

What is at stake in the classical historical novel is the assumption of a progressive

view of history, a linear advance of progress, with unbroken continuity with the past.

Such a view makes history abstract and impersonal, rather than human and contingent.

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The challenge for Conrad in Nostromo is not merely to refute and correct this tendency.

His aim is to undermine the illusions and self-deceptions inherent in accepting a world­

view of this sort, to remove any sense of triumph from the realization and construction of

these illusions. He achieves this primarily in what Fogel identifies as “an oxymoron of

scale” noting that Nostromo is neither “a great national novel or even a great ironic

provincial novel” (Fogel 103-104). Conrad eschews the polyphonic national rhythm of

Tolstoy and Dickens by insisting “on an a priori confusion about scale itself, paying

attention to a large community that is at the same time small, half inside and half outside

a ‘great world’ that is somehow trivial” (Fogel 103-104). This confusion of scale reflects

Conrad’s great international perspective as a Pole writing in English, conscious of his

origin as a citizen of a subjugated small state to a large Russian empire, influenced and

shaped in turn by the competing traditions of France and England, providing him with an

authentically Auerbachian “radical relativism.”

The great historical plot of Nostromo that encases and intersects randomly with

Nostromo himself concerns the secession of Sulaco from Costaguana to become an

independent city-state oligarchy built on national principles. This plot, with its affections

for independence, self-determination, and nineteenth-century republicanism, would be

heroic and presented uncritically in a conventional historical novel where actual historical

personages express such sentiments. But in Nostromo, they are first articulated by a

cynical Frenchmen named Martin Decoud, described sardonically as a Costaguanero who

was “Frenchified” but possessing a “most un-French - cosmopolitanism” (Conrad 120).

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Decoud is a journalist, pamphleteer, and intellectual. His plan for the independence of

Sulaco from Costaguana to better protect itself from the populist uprising of Montero and

Sotillo begins with a draft of proclamation and two-hour-long speeches of action,

conveying the impression of “a new State evolved...out of the head of a scoffing young

man fleeing for his life, with a proclamation in his pocket...It sounds like a comic fairy

tale - but behold it may come off; because it is true to the very spirit of the country”

(Conrad 248). And indeed it does come off, albeit Decoud, Nostromo’s companion on his

doomed mission, commits suicide before the consummation of his vision.

In Nostromo, people make history independent of any pre-existing tradition, and

any quality of greatness, relying on their sense of survival and yearning for wealth. In the

case of Sulaco, its independence is achieved by the tactical alliance between the Gould

Mining Concession and the American Bank of Holroyd based in San Francisco,

California. This reality is an expression of Fogel’s view of the novel as anti-secessionist,

since the nationalistic romantic pretensions of independent Sulaco is undercut with the

irony of it trading its actual national identity, Costaguana, in favor of vassalage to a

global capitalist hegemony (Fogel 104). This depiction of history suggests a Marxist view

of history (Watts 71). Or at the very least the outward form of the process of dialectical

materialism bereft of the totalizing summation of its ideology, or indeed that of any other.

Edward Said insists that the notion of history created by men, as engaged by Conrad,

conveys a “prolonged revelation of horror” (Said Beginnings 118). This horror is

grounded in “man’s overambitious intention to author his own world because the world

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as he finds it is somehow intolerable...The horror occurs in the gradual, prolonged

discovery that the world created by one man is just as intolerable as the world he has

superseded” (Said Beginnings 118). Peter Smith observes that in Costaguana, “The worst

motive and the best become homogenized to a common, gray, mindless pragmatism” to

which no alternative is proffered or entertained by the characters, and by most critics,

who generally prefer the society of Sulaco at the end as an improvement to the chaotic

revolution-laden instability of Costaguana at the start (Smith 193-194).

To return then once again to the plot of the novel, when we last left Nostromo

after extensive introductions in Part 1, he was engaged in Part 2 to participate in a

desperate mission with Martin Decoud to transport silver ingots from the Gould Mine to a

safe place away from the clutches of the approaching occupying army. He and Decoud

transport the cargo of silver by night on a cargo-lighter sailing vessel. On their journey,

they discover a stowaway, Senor Hirsch, who seeks to escape as quickly as possible. The

commotion caused by the discovery leads to Colonel Sotillo intercepting the lighter and

its silver shipment by crashing into it, which leads to chaos, forcing Nostromo to escape

to a small island with Decoud and the shipment in tow. Nostromo then separates from

Decoud and arrives back to Sulaco after a considerable period, during which he and

Decoud are presumed dead, and the silver is declared lost. Nostromo will ultimately

discover that the mission of the silver was fruitless and inconsequential, and the risk he

made of his life and name was all for naught. At the beginning of Part 111, we witness

Nostromo’s rebirth, where he transforms from myth into history, waking from, “fourteen

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hours’ sleep...full length from his lair in the long grass. He stood knee deep amongst the

whispering undulations of the green blades with the lost air of a man just born into the

world” (Conrad 323). This is the scene of Nostromo’s rebirth; but if it is, then we must

also identify it as the death of his old self, the naive and innocent Capataz de Cargadores

(Erdinast-Vulcan 139). Nostromo’s self-mythical representation has faced a defeat it can

never recover from. The experience of misery, suffering, and wasted effort leads him to

question his former pride in his name albeit with the same vanity and legendary view of

life. Formerly proud of his reputation, Nostromo will now express bitterness at being

made use of, forcing him to finally act for himself rather than enforcing the will of others

(Conrad 326-327).

It is in this moment that a remarkable incident happens in the novel. We get a

Costaguanero trying to imagine and relive his memories of Europe. We discover that

Nostromo was a Genoese sailor who emigrated to Costaguana as a young man:

Since everything seemed lost in Sulaco (and that was the feeling of his

waking), the idea of leaving the country altogether had presented itself to

Nostromo... At that thought he had seen, like the beginning of another

dream, a vision of steep and tideless shores, with dark pines on the heights

and white houses low down near a very blue sea...He remembered those

sights not without some filial emotion, though he had been habitually

severely beaten as a boy on those feluccas by his uncle, a short-necked

shaven Genoese, with a deliberate and distrustful manner...But it is

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mercifully decreed that the evils of the past should appear but faintly in

retrospect. Under the sense of loneliness, abandonment and failure, the

idea of return to these things appeared tolerable. But, what? Return? With

bare feet and head, with one check shirt and a pair of cotton calzoneras for

all worldly possessions? (Conrad 328-329)

In this scene we get a representation of exile that is original in its conception. Nostromo,

in a moment of crisis, transforms, as Said argues, from an actor living in the present, to

an author who retrospectively reconfigures his past to better chart out his future course of

action. The mode that Conrad chooses to illustrate that is an immigrant’s longing for an

old world but only partially, imperfectly, and vainly. The past from which Nostromo fled

in Italy is something even he can’t fully believe in. Italy is merely a suite of landscapes

glimpsed from the decks of a ship, and its landscapes are inseparable from the effect of

the abusive childhood that he fled.

This attempt to gaze back at the past is paradoxically the triumphal modern

expression of the internationalism of Nostromo. Conrad wrote as a European, albeit one

marked by exile and multiple identities, yet in this scene he expresses a self-deracination

- a vision of exile thoroughly externalized from his cultural milieu. It is a projection by a

European author, of an immigrant so detached and removed from Europe that he cannot

truly imagine the Old World, except in the most artificial words of description. Europe as

remembered, or authored, by Nostromo, as Said would argue, is a series of static

landscapes, the milieu of Nostromo’s past, for whom a return would mark a final disgrace

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and defeat beyond his present circumstances. As an author, Nostromo is creating for

himself a new origin and beginning, “a new record” to use Said’s phrase, but one

grounded not in the grand struggles and politics of Costaguana and the secession of

Sulaco, and not in his avowed superstition in the legend of the silver of the Azueras, but

one rooted in his own past, his own experiences, and his own personal history (Said 100-

102). To put it succinctly, we get to see Nostromo create and form his own identity by

first pronouncing judgment on his own origins and ties to Europe. Nostromo’s ties to

Europe coincide with Smith’s views of Costaguana as a place where “the history of

Europe is intact, but the memories are gone” (Smith 190). Nostromo has thoroughly

assimilated into his new land, and for him a return to Europe would be a return to a

childhood he hates, which not even his present despair can transform into a false

nostalgic image. Within Nostromo, the bourgeoisie of Sulaco - Martin Decoud, Charles

Gould, Emilia Gould, Giorgio Viola — express themselves primarily in historical terms,

whereas Nostromo, the only character of prominence from the working-class - albeit the

white settler and immigrant class rather than the natives - conceives his reality in terms

of legend. This is the provisional thesis on which this chapter began. For Nostromo, the

legend of the gringos of the Azuera is one of the many legends that haunts him, the chief

legend being of course that of his own reputation and renown. As Erdinast-Vulcan argued

above, the Nostromo in this passage is one who has been reborn, and the Capataz de

Cargadores has died. So with a new birth and new identity, Nostromo has license to shift

his perspective from legend to history. He can now move himself away from being the

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“natural man” to becoming a Costaguanero marked, shaped, and defined by history, who

- like the Goulds and the Hernandez bandits, Senor Mitchell, and other figures - can

interpret, exploit, and develop their present by means of historical engagement.

Instead, Nostromo enters himself into a new legend with a new origin and

identity. The rear-gaze towards Europe is his final farewell to his old-self. The new

origins for the Capataz are indeed the loss of the silver shipment from the cargo-lighter,

and the belated discovery of the missing cache on the island where Decoud is stranded,

with two missing silver bars that, unknown to Nostromo, were used as weights by the

Frenchmen to drown his corpse after shooting himself on a floating dinghy. We learn of

Decoud’s suicide from a brief flashback within the events of the text. We are told his

final fate where he mutters in his thoughts, “I wonder how that Capataz died” (Conrad

396). Then we see one of the most explicit authorial interjections within the action of the

text:

A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out

to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the

bars of San Tome silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the

immense indifference of things...and for a while the spirits of good and

evil that hover near every concealed treasure of the earth might have

thought that this one had been forgotten by all mankind. Then, after a few

days, another form appeared.. .And the spirits of good and evil that hover

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about a forbidden treasure understood well that the silver of San Tome

was provided now with a faithful and lifelong slave (Conrad 396).

For most of Nostromo, Conrad maintains the dichotomy of dense realistic historical

description with a highly symbolic metaphysical subtext, interfusing both at various

moments. In this scene, however, Conrad’s authorial voice espouses a legendary tenor.

The phrase “the spirits of good and evil” replaces the earlier refrain of “material

interests” shared by Charles and Emilia Gould and their coterie. We know that this is the

moment that the Capataz de Cargadores selects to become a thief who will “grow rich

very slowly” (Conrad 397). Yet this is also the moment where he chooses to go by his

real historical name of Giovanni Batista Fidanza. The closing moment of the novel, its

epilogue which takes place after a significant passage of time, follows the activities of the

rich Captain Fidanza, a merchant sailor and political activist who participates in party

gatherings of socialists in the post-revolutionary independent state of Sulaco, while

secretly stealing small ingots of silver from the cache on which he builds his fortune

without suspicion or reproach (Conrad 403-404).

At the precise moment when Fidanza claims his historical identity, Nostromo after

maintaining a strong divide between the historical and the legendary throughout the book,

leans towards the legendary in its narrative as if it was unable to see its central figure any

other way, as if it could not accept the corruption of the Capataz to “material interests.”

The final end of Fidanza is tawdry, involving as it does the disguise of criminal activity

of embezzling and money laundering. This swindle is followed by the scandal of a love

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triangle with Viola’s daughters leading to his accidental death at the hands of Giorgio

Viola, who had mistaken him for another of his daughter’s suitors. The vanity of the old

Capataz returns in one final scene where he attempts a deathbed confession of his theft of

the silver to Emilia Gould who, on hearing of his confession, keeps his secret shame

hidden as a final mercy.

Among the most lucid thoughts voiced by Nostromo in his final moments is his

belief that, he died betrayed but he is unable to articulate who his betrayer was (Conrad

441). Harold Bloom identifies the traitor as Nostromo himself (3). Nostromo betrayed

himself in service to others, and then himself in service to his own need for a legend, a

new one to replace the old one. This new legend is nothing less than a desire to supplant

the folk tradition of Costaguana with the gringos of the Azuera, with “the genius of the

magnificent Capataz de Cargadores” which dominated “the dark gulf containing his

conquests of treasure and love” (Conrad 447). When Nostromo dies the first time, he is

reborn as Captain Fidanza, and when Captain Fidanza dies, he is reborn as the legend of

the Capataz de Cargadores, and as such the finale of the novel is nothing less than “the

sublime vindication of his life as a mythical hero” (Erdinast-Vulcan 141-142).

This reinstatement of myth at the end of Nostromo poses a major problem for

critics in its attempt to resolve the novel. If Nostromo is a historical or philosophical

novel, then the accession of Nostromo to “the role of principal hero, for instance, is very

disconcerting to strictly political interpretations...With its political course charted anew,

Sulaco ought to retain stage center instead of playing a supporting role in a semi-

85

conventional story of covert passion and mistaken death” (Said Beginnings 134). For

Guerard, the real Nostromo, “the book one remembers, and the book critics talk about,

has largely been achieved by the beginning of Part III” (Guerard 204). He regards the

character of Nostromo as the book’s “lost subject” (Guerard 204). Peter Smith considers

Nostromo a man of action whose outward actions and interior thoughts are one and the

same, and regards him, like Bloom, as a Homeric figure, with his obsession for fame and

renown as a laborer similar to the soldiers and warriors of The Iliad. This default to

classicism is seen by Smith as a way for Conrad to eschew any definite progressive view

on the development of class and race relations (Smith 212-213).

This judgment that favors the grand narrative of Sulaco over that of Nostromo

broaches the real divides and issues expressed and contained within the book. For Said,

Nostromo’s death leaves behind “a silent world of immense, empty spaces across which

floats an incoherent cry symbolizing mankind’s inarticulate sadness for itself’

(Beginnings 136). Nostromo’s death, coming as it does not in a heroic moment at the

height of revolution and adventure, but rather in the accidental and indifferent world of

peace in which the novel ends, becomes then a way for Conrad to pronounce judgment on

the new liberated Sulaco and the peace that is the consummation of decades of

revolution, corruption, and ill-gotten gains. This judgment is ironic, skeptical, and

unresolved. Conrad, as noted by Ian Watt, is perhaps not a progressive writer but he is an

“improving” writer who recognizes “the historical scene’s dedication to change, and the

86

permanent and somehow triumphant immobility of the natyral scene” (Watt Joseph

Conrad, Nostromo 79-80).

Nostromo’s true tragedy and pathos is precisely in his realization of the

alienation, exploitation, and exile that increases with his greater material success that

progresses throughout the narrative, “allowing him to be aware of his existence beyond

that of conventional society” and that “He must bear the burden of slavery to the silver

that also belongs to Sulaco, although he alone is selected to feel this burden” (Said

Beginnings 134-135).

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Conclusion

The century that separates The Monk (1796) and Nostromo (1904) is a century of

historical and aesthetic revolution. Yet one can observe the continuity of the same

problems in representing reality. This continuity becomes most apparent when one

considers it from the standpoint of two original works, products of exile and a world-

historical imagination. Both these original works are products of an international outlook

that mixes the traditions of high and low culture, the experimental and the popular, the

folkloric and the avant-garde.

Placed in tandem, it becomes possible to see the historical and the contemporary

in a gothic novel like The Monk, and the gothic and the fantastic in Nostromo. The

principle discovery of this thesis, as a result of the research undertaken in earnest to cover

both texts, is the relative nature of categories, whereby the gothic, far from the remote,

provincial, fad of the late eighteenth century, is revealed to have essential continuities

with the historical novel. The gothic then resurfaces through the historical novel, albeit

repressed within the traditions of Romantic nationalism by means of the process of

rigidification of style identified by Auerbach. After this repression of the originally

democratizing tendency identified by Auerbach, it then resurfaces within twentieth-

century modernism. Nostromo, with its legends of buried treasure which haunts the title

character even as historical events transforms the world around him, is a more serious

realization of the burlesqued supernatural of the legend of the Bleeding Nun in The

Monk.

88

Both books likewise pay tribute to the original nature of the novel form, and its

great humanist contribution to the democratization of literature across languages,

boundaries, and borders. The novel, that “most translatable of genres” in works like The

Monk and especially Nostromo, is able to articulate a dense and multicultural worldview

that engenders the development of constant originality, accommodating a number of

variations and styles, accessible to the amateur (like the young twenty-one-year-old

“Monk” Lewis) and the late-bloomer (Joseph Conrad).

This thesis likewise calls attention to the broader view of representation in prose

fiction that existed well before the development and outline of more rigid groupings of

authors, books, genres, and periods. By the method of parallel contrast, explication of

text, and close readings in dialogue with existing critical commentary, it becomes

possible to enrich the pre-existing tradition by means of dialogue with a larger

worldview. The debates of the eighteenth century and the development of the novel can

in the correct context illuminate problems of fiction of the early twentieth century, and

possibly any other era. Like Auerbach, like Conrad and Lewis, it rejects a single linear

development of history and culture and tradition, believing that the process of

development rests in the contingent, personal, and accidental dimensions of human

experience rather than the static pillars of existing tradition and cultural inheritance.

89

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