Conrad's cinematic vision is encompassed by his pithy dictum- potent power of the written word lies in making us hear, feel and above all see".8. Conrad's epistemology , in his book 'Nostromo', can be found at the meeting point of the senses(primarily visual), emotions , imagination, will and the external world. Joining external matter and subjective vision , the image and the eye, in metaphoric constructions is the process by which he enacts his aesthetics, his characters enact their lives and readers enact their involvement in aesthetic creation.. The protean movement of the visualized structure- image into icon, framed images, disrupted images, relation between images- together with the more concrete cinematic techniques bring Conrad incredibly closer to the cinematic vision. Conrad in 'Nostromo' has not totally shrugged free of the pre-Victorian mores where the novelist effected a god-like stance and leaped about in time and space offering all kinds of insights and hindsights. And so we have a bird's eye-view of the 'town of Sulaco', situated in the Republic of Costaguana. : Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean , with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of clouds...On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala...On the other side what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines...(p.39) However, from time to time, Conrad erases the presence of the omnipresent God and substitutes it with the perspective of a character : All morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom House. " If I see smoke rising over there", he thought to himself, " they are lost"...He shouted, set after them one shot from his revolver and galloped upto the cafe window. He had an idea that old Giorgio would choose that part of the house for a refuge...( p ) Although ,throughout the novel, Corad moves between the eye of the God that imagines itself as both physically present in the scene and at the same time out of and above it, holding all visual perspective simultaneously, he replaces wherever possible, the voice and presence of a god-like novelist with the 'seeing' eye of man
Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010