Between English and Multilingualism: The Rhetoric of Revolutions in Conrad’s Nostromo

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to analyse how the English language was adjusted and mixed with other languages so as to represent the multilingual reality of a Spanish-speaking country in Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) and, at the same time, lay bare the «discrepancies between [...] stated principles and actual deeds» (Berthoud and Kalnins 2007a: xvi) without ever mentioning them explicitly. The novel is set at the end of the XIX century in Costaguana, a fictitious South American country with a long history of revolutions and bloody dictatorships. The third-person narrator tells the story in such a way so as to expose the futility of these rebellions that never really change the status quo, and the bombastic lack of substance of the discourses which promote and justify them. One of the narrative and linguistic devices used to achieve this goal is the recourse to multilingualism: Nostromo―written in English―contains a great number of small parts totally or partially in other languages such as Spanish, Italian, German, French, Latin and Quechua. Throughout the novel it is possible to find a vast array of instances in which multilingualism is fashioned in such a way so as to draw attention to the above mentioned «discrepancies between [...] stated principles and actual deeds». Thus, the narrator exploits other people’s multilingual discourses in a Bakhtinian way (Bakhtin 1981) to silently denounce their hypocrisy and futility.