Nostromo’s Uncanny Light

Nostromo’s Uncanny Light Susan E. Cook (bio) At the end of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), a lighthouse suddenly appears on the Great Isabel Island where the title character has hidden his stash of stolen silver treasure. Seeing the new building, Nostromo is filled with “amazed dread” and thinks himself “lost irretrievably,” for “What could save him from detection now? Nothing!” (525). Nostromo’s concern is metaphoric and literal at once: he imagines that the lighthouse will figuratively shine upon the “disgrace, poverty, contempt” of his life; more practically, he worries that the workers constructing the building will discover the treasure (525). A technology of illumination, the lighthouse symbolically threatens to reveal Nostromo’s crime. Yet the lighthouse does not shed light on the silver and Nostromo; rather than light, an obfuscating “shade” on the island brings about Nostromo’s downfall. Instead of illuminating Nostromo’s crime and bringing the novel to a more conventional resolution, the lighthouse gives us an unsettling conclusion—an irony that is at once a hallmark of Conrad’s style and an echo of contemporary theories of light. Beginning in the nineteenth and extending throughout the early twentieth centuries, light—long equated with spiritual, religious, and philosophical Truth—was deemed, by science and culture alike, a physical problem of sorts, a fact that finds rich articulation in Conrad’s novel. Nostromo’s lighthouse evokes both romance and technology—and displaces both representations. Instead of merely symbolizing a bygone era of romance and adventure, the lighthouse also occupies the uneasy space between the modern and the past. In this paper, I read Nostromo’s lighthouse and the refraction of the romance plot alongside wave theory, as well as the very early stages of quantum theory and what was in its infancy seen as the “paradox” of wave-particle duality (Hendry 59). The dominant theory of light in the nineteenth century, wave theory could not account for all phenomena, such as black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect. The solutions to these problems—black-body [End Page 127] radiation in 1900 and the photoelectric effect in 1905—inaugurated quantum theory. The term “quanta” originated with Max Planck’s work in 1900 on thermal radiation; as physics historian John Hendry writes, “In the compromise between the wave law of Rayleigh and that of Wien, associated with particles, Planck’s law contained the essence of the wave-particle duality” (62). This early suggestion of a wave-particle duality, however, was not initially embraced by the scientific community, the general public, or Planck himself. I argue that a growing dissatisfaction with waves as the only answer, and an uneasiness with nascent quantum theory as a solution, is echoed in Nostromo’s treatment of refraction and a light that fails to enlighten. Nostromo’s light evokes contemporary scientific conversations and in doing so disrupts a centuries-old metaphoric association of light with truth and illumination. Conrad uses the lighthouse’s refracting mechanism to highlight this disruption, and to disorient the narrative of adventure and romance the novel seems to promise. We are left with an incomplete romance narrative—a familiar story gone awry. Set in a world where light no longer connotes a constant or knowable Truth and becomes at times confused with dark, this novel shows us an illumination that is no less than uncanny: the lighthouse casts a light, but this light has been defamiliarized. Here I re-focus the critical issue of Conrad’s stylistic break from more traditional modes of realism, reading his “impressionism” as an unsettled philosophical stance borne out of discoveries in the field of optics in particular.1 When Conrad was writing Nostromo, light was proving to be a scientific problem. The history of light before the twentieth century is one of either particles or waves—not both simultaneously. From 6th-century BC Hindu theorizations to Aristotelian philosophy to Western science in the seventeenth century, light was understood to contain physical properties—the foundation for a particle theory of light. With his 1637 Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, René Descartes effectively began modern optical physics with his idea that instead of being comprised of particles, light instead functions as a wave...