ed (Bivona 151). The mobilization of vast resources can accomplish large-scale objectives. Yet bureaucracies can begin to act independently, as self-governing entities regulated by an equally vast, if unintended internal sequencing of rules. Bureaucracies inevitably begin to act independently and even at odds with their originating intentions (Dandeker 22). Max Weber identifies large-scale bureaucratic organization with the onset of modern Western civilization and Conrad was one of the first British novelists to depict the doom embedded in organizational behavior as dictated by its tyrannical style.
In Nostromo, considered by Harold Bloom to be Conrad's greatest fictional achievement (Bloom, Nostromo, 3), the imagined space of "Costaguana" is specifically located on the North coast of South America. The silver mine of San Tomé in Sulaco symbolizes not only a dream of a Protestant empire (Martin-Smith, Nostromo, 14) but a magnet for corrosion, a testing ground for the allegedly incorruptible Gian' Battista, locally
...