"Fiction is history or it is nothing": forme narrative e verità della Storia in Nostromo di Joseph Conrad

In a letter to Edmund Gosse, referring to Nostromo, Conrad wrote: “it [the novel] seems to me much more true than any history I ever learned” (Conrad 2002: 231).This comment seems to suggest an interpretive perspective as it establishes an explicit hierarchy between narrative invention and historiographical account, attributing to the former the ability to capture truths that the latter is incapable of conveying. This essay takes up the author’s suggestion in order to explore how that astonishing novelistic mosaic that is Nostromo, set in the late nineteenth century in the fictional republic of Costaguana, articulates its truth. It employs impressionist strategies and discursive processes that manifest themselves in the multiplication of temporal layers and the intersection of genres and expressive registers, paralleled by a similar refraction of points of view. The result is a sumptuous and, in some ways, disorienting narrative architecture which, thanks to the subtle interplay between realistic mode and a mythical-archetypal universalization, offers a revealing interpretation of the trajectories of history. It sheds light on specific dynamics captured in their unfolding and, most importantly, anticipates scenarios that would later be confirmed in the developments of twentieth-century history.