Language, cannot normally have separate signs to cover the concept of a thing's 'becoming', or the concept of a thing's 'having become' .This is because one is a present participle and the other is a past participle. To escape this problem, Conrad divined a method in which past, present and future co-habit in the 'presentness' of the reader's or audience's experience. In handling of time flux, past and present lose their identity as discrete sections of time. The present becomes 'specious' because on second glance, it is seen as fused with the past, obliterating the line between them. And so the reader experiences the revolution in the present, the courtship which was prior to the revolution also in the present and the successful attempt to revive the San Tome mine also in the present.Infact, the author takes this'co-expressibility of past and present' much further in his description of Martin Decoud's death. In Chapter 10 , of 'The Lighthouse', is a description of how Don Martin's boat is spied by Nostromo on board the transport of General Barrios, within in an 'hour's steaming of Sulaco' Nostromo's eyes were the first to catch,broad on the bow, the tiny elusive dark speck, which alone with the forms of the Three Isabels right ahead, appeared on the flat, shimmering emptiness of the gulf...At a nod of consent from Barrios the transport swept out of her course, passing near enough to ascertain that no one manned the little cockle-shell. It was merely a common small boat gone adrift with her oars in her. But Nostromo, to whose mind Decoud had been insistently present for days, had long before recognized with excitement the dinghy of the lighter...Nostromo had leaped overboard; and his black head bobbed up far away already from the ship...(p.408) With vigorous and skillful effort, he clambered over the stern. the very boat! No doubt of it; no doubt whatever. It was the dinghy of the lighter No 3- the dinghy left with Martin Decoud on the Great Isabel so that he should have some means to help himself...The Capataz made a minute examination...All he discovered was a brown stain on the gunwale abreast of the thwart...(p.409) Later in this chapter is a description of Martin Decoud's death seemingly from his own perspective which in actual fact should have emerged prior to Nostomo's speculation about his death as delineated in p.415 and 416 of the novel. Conrad is here faced with the presentness of consciousness and also the obliteration of the discrete character of past and present.. He has worked out a methodology of creating an experience in which we are caught by a perpetual present permeated by the past as in Cinema. As Sturt in Psychology of Time states: One of the reasons for the feeling of pastness is that we are familiar with the things or events that we recognize as past.But it remains true that this feeling of familiarity is a present experience and therefore, logically should not arouse a concept of the past. On the other hand a present impression (or memory) of something which is past is different from a present imoression of something which is present but familiar from the past...11.
Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010