conrad's the secret agent

Chapter 1: Joseph Conrad’s TheSecret Agent

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By 1900, the novel in England was firmly established as the principal literary art form both at the popular level and at the level of ‘serious’ literature. The distinction between popular and serious literature was itself a recent arrival on thecultural landscape of the world’s first industrialized nation. It had displaced the older distinction between literatures rooted in the folk culture of a rural people and theclassical literatures of court-based aristocracies. The novel in the nineteenth century, from about 1830 to 1900, was the first literary form to cut across that older configuration and make visible new social divides based on a number of factors. For one

2 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

thing, the arrival in history of the urbanized masses put new pressures on the established social and political order. New historical actors put in circulation new themes and new styles of conduct. As a result, the delineation of social classes and of social relations in general grew moredistinct with the passage of time. Moreover,provision for widespread literacy and education finally rid learning of the last vestiges of ecclesiastical patronage. In themidst of these socioeconomic changes, the great Victorian novelists, mindful of the needto make an art that could come to grips with change, had begun to forge a new literary tradition in their practice of prose fiction.Literary history has given the name

‘realism’ to this new style and to the literary theory and procedures of composition that accompanied it. It was the most progressive cultural development in thenineteenth century. Although the literary culture of Victorian England was one of its principal high points, keep in mind that ‘realism’ was not simply an English phenomenon. It was in fact a pan-European one and it extended beyond prose fiction into drama and, to some extent, into poetry as well. But this was a tradition that attained a highly developed form in England.It was not only better able to reflect the new reality of an industrializing Britain, but to shift the ground of literary and cultural history as well. Indeed the distinction between the popular and serious novel arises from the example of the great Victorian realists and one important precursor. Jane Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Thackery, Gaskell, Trollope, the Brontës, and, later, Henry James, Gissing, and Hardy,all helped to create a prose art of

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

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sophistication and authority that was soon imitated by the minor writers of the age. ‘Realism’ as a style and‘moral realism’ as aform of cultural critique defined the aesthetic and moral standard against which most other cultural manifestations were compared.

Not surprisingly, the extraordinary achievement of these writers could not be ignored by practitioners of the form in the twentieth century. The novelists of modern times, then, were not writing in an artistic vacuum. The weight of past achievement lay heavily on their shoulders. This was a good thing –– it put before the modern writer greatexamples of the art. But it was also potentially injurious. The great accomplishments of the Victorians, as great asthey were, were relevant to a particular moment in the evolution of British society. Some thought, however, that these monuments obscured the physiognomy and temper of a new time. They were perceived by the most progressive artists at century’s end as no longer able to tell the story of a new, unprecedented modernity. So much had changed that the artistic habits of the past could no longer make sense of life and that only new methods, new approaches would do.


The example of the past was so weighty andit carried such a wide authority that many novelists found it difficult to break out of the mould of ‘realism’ set by their illustrious predecessors. Talented early twentieth century novelists like Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and many others were never able to unlearn the lessons in which they had been raised, and although immensely popular with the reading publics of Edwardian and GeorgianBritain, literary history has set them in thesecond rank, at least for now, and raised to prominence novelists who, at the time, could not compete, in terms of readership at least,with the Bennetts and the Galsworthys.

The story of the British novel at the turn of the century, then, must begin with this state of affairs. And, as a result, it must begin with the one writer from the late nineteenth century who found his way out past the settled artistic habits of his immediate contemporaries and began the work of “vivid essential record” (Leavis 204) in a new style more suited to modernity. We should remember, however, that Joseph Conrad, no matter how we cut it, was also a product of the nineteenth century and we must not exaggerate his modernism. For a good long time his work was seen as entirely embraced by the conventions of nineteenth century moral realism. Of course, Conrad was a realist, yet, at the sametime, he was more than a realist and it is that crucial difference which we must try to define if we want to align him with the great moderns.

Ever since the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis published The Great Tradition, his influential study of the British novel, Conrad has been counted as one of the major figures in the literature of the English


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language. This is particularly noteworthy as English was not Conrad’s first language, indeed it wasn’t even his second language. Hefirst set foot on English soil in 1878, hardly understanding a word of English. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 intoa family of politically active Polish nationalists, Conrad was educated in the classics and in theliterature and culture of his native Poland. As a teenager he decided, against his family’swishes, to go to sea and subsequently shipped out from Marseilles in France in 1874. Joiningthe British merchant service four years later.He sailed until 1893, when he finally settled down in England and devoted himself to writing, becoming not only an important novelist, but one of the great stylists of English prose.

Leavis considers him one of the two principal legatees of the great Victorian masters in the first half of the twentieth century; the other is D. H. Lawrence. Emphasizing Conrad’s indebtedness to the moralrealism of his predecessors, Leavis measures Conrad’s adherence to their standard. Althoughhe seems sure of Conrad’s stature in that august company, there are moments in the bookwhen


Joseph Conrad(Walter Little,1924) he is not so sure, when Conrad’s practice as

a novelist does not seem to realize the required degree of sensitivity “to the stresses of the changing spiritual climate” as they are “registered by the most conscious,” those with the finest and most mature ethical sensibilities (33).

He calls the aspect of Conrad’s art that does not fit comfortably into the moral realism of the Victorians “a disconcerting weakness or vice” (201), as if Conrad were trying his best to be George Eliot, but, in one or two particulars fails to measure up tothat high standard. In this Leavis betrays critical assumptions that locate the leaden rule of excellence in a compositional ideal that no one,except those from whose work it is abstracted,could possibly reach. He refers, for example,


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to Conrad’s “muffled”verbal style in “The Heart of Darkness” (205), but Conrad’s struggle with language isthe struggle of someone who has cometo believe that a good deal of existence, the darker, more enigmatic part, always escapes the strenuous cogencies of the dutiful realist. To be sure, there is nothing false about nineteenth century moral earnestness. Itis genuine enough. But it cannot grasp the enormities which await humanity in thetwentieth century. Dickens was able to stare full in


the face the appalling oppression of the poor in mid-Victorian England and, more importantly, he laid that face bare for all tosee and, as a result, helped bring about the political and social remedies required. But could he have maintained his trenchancy in theface of Dachau? Or, more recently, in the faceof the mountains of human skulls in Cambodia or Rwanda? Of course, we cannot know. It is perhaps safe to say that his confident morality might have been significantly shaken by the experience. Conrad, whose “Heart of Darkness” had already dared to imagine the unimaginable in Kurtz’s prescient marginal note, “Exterminate the brutes!” in 1899, or inthe torture chamber scenes of Nostromo (1904), had looked past the palliative effects of remedial social welfare programs as the solution to the question of evil. He had looked right into the darkness at the core of the human soul, and if he could not rehearse the propermoral realism in his response, nor convene the required verbal lucency, was it his own “disconcerting weakness” that was at fault, or was it the impenetrability of the dark? Isn’t it simply the casethat before certain barely imaginable realities words inevitably fail?

Who, alive to the fatal history of the twentieth century, can have an easy answer to that question? Conrad’s modernity is defined by the fact that Conrad was exceptionally aware of the destructive violence of the modern age. In the nineteenth century, the great age of social and political reform, the historical situation offered arather different aspect. Above all, it was a situation that seemed capable of reform. The ills of society and of persons were felt to be meliorable by organized political and


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social action. Society was the dynamic product of human effort. And if it took a particular form today, a little human ingenuity and thought could change it for thebetter tomorrow. All that was required was strenuous devotion tothe public and private duties of responsiblecitizens. In this acceptance of the doctrineof human power and human perfectibility, thecultural and aesthetic principles of realismgot their start. It was through the adoptionof a realistic mode of thought, as opposed to the fantastic seeming prejudices, ignorant imaginings, and superstitions of the past, that permitted humanity the full benefit of its own exertions.

In the arts, this change was heard as a call to reality, to attend to the actual formsof life. In criticism, the term refers both to aliterary method based on accuracy of observation and descriptive fidelity and to amore general attitude that rejects the allegorical traditions of romance, traditionsthat were often the product of religious belief, of fanciful idealization, and escapism. It was the tangible problems of concrete life to which the realists turned their attention. According to Henry James, the “only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (“The


Art of Fiction” 5). Whether the individual novelist was interested in bringing about reform, like Dickens, for example, or, primarily interested in supporting the statusquo, like Trollope, the sobriety and seriousness of their approach and their devotion to the ‘real’ world of concretely realized men and women indubitably united them in a common artistic standard. A particular novelist, Dickensor Gaskell, may give greater weight to a sociologically inflected‘reality’ as opposed to the psychological realism of a James, but the aesthetic principles with which all of them worked had much in common, or, putting it another way, developed from the same set of epistemological intuitions.

For some of the great critics of nineteenthcentury fiction, like Leavis or the Hungariancritic Georg Lukács, realism represented morethan a literary method or style. It went to the very heart of the civilized order, indeed, for them, was its very embodiment. Itwas what marked a matured civilization from its somewhat primitive antecedents. According to Leavis, a facile artfulness alone was not enough to make a great artist, say of the stature of Jane Austen. It was “her intense moral preoccupation,” he wrote, and without it “she wouldn’t have been a great novelist” (16). But make no mistake, Leavis is not saying that to be a great novelist one mustset art aside in order to be a kind of moralphilosopher. Far from it, the great realistswere also great artists. But they were greatartists in a particularly morally responsibleway. This is how Leavis putsit in a famous formulation from The Great Tradition. The artfulness of an Austen, or an Eliot, or a Conrad, he writes, when “brought


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to an intense focus”, consists of “an unusually developed interest in life .... [T]hey are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity” (18).

Georg Lukács, in his Studies in European Realism and The Historical Novel, is at once more philosophically sophisticated than Leavis andless of a moralist. The greatness of the realists, he writes, lies in their ability torecapture and recreate the totality of human life. As a Marxist, Lukács is alive to the conflicted nature of capitalist societies. Tohis mind, alienation is the great psychic disease of capitalism, running like a faultline through the social whole, dividing individuals from each other, from their communities, from their work, and, ultimately, from themselves. The great realist, he contends, pulls together all these divisions and fragments into a complex totality. This totality does not solve the problem of alienation, but it makes it possible to see around the alienated state towards a richly detailed, many-sided collective image of human wholeness. This is realism, a complex, comprehensive accounting of the relations between human beings, nature, and history. These relations embody what is most typical


about a particular phase of history, what is most historically significant and progressive.The careful revelation in fiction of these relations lays bare society’s inner dynamic and the conflicts that resound in individual psychologies. The task of the realist, then, isto explore in as much concrete detail as possible the significant movements of history itself.

These accounts of realism place this mode of writing at the apex of literary art. They value ‘life’ as the complex reality of recognizable human beings undertaking plausible and coherent actions in particular sociohistorical contexts. But in recent years, some critics and theorists have rejected the approaches of Leavis and Lukács as rather naive. They prefer to view realism from a radically different perspective. Rather than being a reflection of life as it is, realism is seen to be a system of discursive conventions ––conventions of character, setting, narrative causality –– that produce a lifelike illusion of some real world outside the text. But theillusion is not real. The real, such as it is,is always already absent or unknowable. ‘Reality’ in a novel is essentially an effect of these conventions, not some objective domain that the text tries its best to reflector imitate, a domain by which we can measure the genius of the artist in rendering it to the highest degree of versimilitude. Instead, the reality-effect is generated by the writerly processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. Finally, realism, in the later nineteenth

century, gave birth to a subspecies called ‘naturalism.’ It was a development that


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unwittingly fed into the cultural process thathelped undermine the authority of realism for the serious artist, although realism has remained the standard procedure in the world of the ‘best-seller’ and other types of popular literature to this day. Naturalism wasa more deliberate kind of realism that attenuated the notion of human beings as self-willed actors, seeing them instead as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. Naturalism came about as a resultof the increasing authority of the scientific attitude and thesocial sciences at the turn of the century; the now familiar view that individuals are only partially responsible for their fates. That they are the products of blind circumstance and conditioning gained wider currency at the time.

Emile Zola’s fiction, for example, aspired to scientific objectivity in its representations of contemporary life in France. He claimed a scientific status for his meticulously researched studies of


poverty, sexual obsession, the effects of heredity, and so on. Because of its focus on matters that were not usually the topics of public debate, naturalism was more often than not censured for bordering on the sordid and the obscene. It was also found to offer a despairing vision of human life; in an age that still said it believedin the heroic potential of human agency. Sucha portrait of impotent humanity was, at best,shocking, and, at worst, a deliberate betrayal of the popular nineteenth century belief in human power. In England, the vogue for naturalism was not as strong as on thecontinent, but it provided a creative resourcefor writers like GeorgeMoore and George Gissing. Even the arch-modernist James Joyce, in the collection of stories called Dubliners, found a suitable, if controversial, modus operandi in naturalism. Andto some degree so did Joseph Conrad.

When The Secret Agent (1907) was first published the initial reaction mistook it for a work in the new style. “We are shown the seamy side of a preposterous world,” A. N. Monkhouse wrote in the Manchester Guardian, “a festering society that is commonly left to thepathologist and philanthropist” (quoted in Karl 625). Although Monkhouse also saw that Conrad’s novel was “vital and surprising,” he was not overwhelmingly enthusiastic. In fact, no one was. What the commentators missed was the fact that Conrad’s novel, although drawingon naturalist effects, also represented a new departure, a change that was rather difficult to see for eyes blinkered by the conventions of orthodox realism. It may have looked likenaturalism, but it was something more, indeed something other. Frederick Karl, Conrad’s biographer, puts it this way:

What the reviewers, even the more


15favorable ones, appeared to miss was thepeculiar mosaic of characters and eventsConrad developed in his fiction in thisperiod [1900–1910]. Although neither aprophet nor a seer, he brought a vision tohis novels. This vision was not a prettyone, of course, and it offended manyreaders as being excessively pessimisticand depressing in matter and tone. ButConrad had assimilated into his very bonesthat sense of Spenglerian final things,the awareness of decline, of entropy, ofthe last gasp of civilization headingtowards destruction. (626)

It was a somber and ironic vision, and it required a somber and ironic approach. Conrad himself was very much aware that a work like The Secret Agent was not entirely understood and in 1920 when the novel was being reprinted fora uniform edition of his collected works, he tackled this blindness head on in an “Author’s Note” that is well worth taking a moment to read.

Conrad begins by admitting that “even an artless person” ought to have foreseen, as hedid not, “that some criticism [of the novel] would be based on the ground of sordid surroundings and the moral


squalor of the tale” (7/37). Of course, we ought to be immediately wary when an artist of the stature of Conrad, otherwise so very artful, puts himself before us as an artless naif, even less than artless. Indeed he puts himself throughout the “Author’s Note” in a peculiar position as an author. We are perhaps accustomed now, at the end of the twentieth century, to the spectacle of authorial reticence. Modernist authors often feel they need to deflect readerly notice from themselves and their so-called creative powers and refocus attention on the work of art itself. They say that the work is not theproduct of a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” as Wordsworth had written in the famous prefaces to Lyrical Ballads.It is more unassuming and incidental, though no less intense or creative. It is an artifactthat comes in tiny increments rather than by arobust act of creative will power. For the “artless” Conrad, the novel came, he writes, in dribs and drabs.

He is at pains to “justify” (not “defend” he says) his choice of subject and treatment.He explains “that there was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses” (7/38). The word impulse is important because he tells us that the novel was begun “impulsively” as a result of a casual conversation with a friend about the bizarre underworld of the anarchists, recalling a time in the 1880s and1890s when they had been particularly active in London.

He says that he vaguely remembered an old story of an

anarchist who had attempted to blow up theGreenwich Observatory in southeast London, buthad only succeeded in blowing up himself. The


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whole thing is described as “a blood-stainedinanity of so

The Greenwich Observatory,c. 1890s


fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverseunreason has its own logical processes” (9/39). The fate of the mad bomber (“half an idiot”) and his sister, who committed suicideafterwards, form one set of tributaries feeding into the river of creation. Another, he hazily recalls, is the chance reading of the memoirs of an Assistant Commissioner of Police who had been active in the police service during that same period of terrorist outrages in London.

These were the documentary fragments from which The Secret Agent was compounded. They were then subjected to a creative process of the most unassuming character. He felt himself “stimulated” by these half–remembered details.

And then ensued in my mind what a studentof chemistry would best understand fromthe analogy of the addition of the tiniestlittle drop of the right kind,precipitating the process ofcrystallization in a test tube containingsome colourless solution. (10/40)

Test tube? Tiniest little drop? Colourlesssolution? Is this art or science? As an account of the working of the imagination in 1920, this was entirely new. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s influential description ofimaginative power in the Biographia Literaria, almost a hundred years before, that was stillthe most authoritativeaccount in English literature. For Coleridge, the imagination was the supreme faculty in themakeup of the human mind; there wasnothing more powerful, not even reason, and itwas this faculty which connected a fragile andlimited humanity to Nature and to the infinite. Conrad’s rather prosaic test tube


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analogy ran dead in the face of the Coleridgean tradition.

This small moment in the “Author’s Note” tells us a great deal about Conrad’s aesthetic commitments. This account of the creative process resembles an equally attenuated account of the workings of the imagination in one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” published in the same year as Conrad’s “Note.” There Eliot also offers a chemical analogy for the transformative action of the imagination. He invites the reader to consider the moment of creative inspiration, not in terms ofvolcanic exertions of willpower or transcendence, but as “the action which takesplace when a bit of finely filiated platinum isintroduced into a chamber containing oxygenand sulphur dioxide” (Selected Essays 7). Eliot,like Conrad, is speaking of the action of acatalyst. The artist’s mind is like the waferof platinum; it bringsabout a chemical reaction in the gases, but remains itself unaffected. Conrad’s tiniest drop that precipitates the process of crystallizationis suggestive in the same way. Indeed later inthe “Note” Conrad is


at pains to say that his own role in the making of the novel was very much that of an objective or detached observer, yet, paradoxically, still very much engaged and curious nonetheless. It was important not to let the personal element interfere in the telling of the story. In this he also recalls Eliot, who wrote, in “Tradition and theIndividual Talent,” that the artist must surrender himself completely at the moment ofcomposition “to something which is more valuable” than merely his own personality (Selected Essays 6 –7). Similarly, Conrad says that he had to “fight hard . . . to keep at arm’s length” his own prejudices, “lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of thestory” (11/41). He goes on a little later to speak of his “complete self-surrender” to thetask at hand,including a necessary artistic identification with his characters when necessary, even if that meant identification with criminals, victims, and lunatics: there were moments, he writes, “when I was an extreme revolutionist” (11/42). In these respects Conrad’s artistic allegiances can be seen to be leaning towards the modernismdefined for literary history by T. S. Eliot and his generation.

IIThe first step towards this new modernism

lies in Conrad’s adoption of what he calls in his “Author’s Note” an “ironic method.” He mentions irony in a passage where he is speaking ofhis effort to keep at arm’s length the personal element in order to let the story develop its own truth. The irony in the novel is the product of “deliberation,” he writes,


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and it “alone” can provide the proper sort of detachment (11/41). Again it is important to emphasizethat this modernist inclination to distance oneself does not imply indifferenceor lack of intensity. Modernist writers argue that it allows them to engage their material more intensively and even with great passion, but with a colder eye,rather than with the warmth of personal sentiment. “It is one of the minor satisfactions of my writing life,” Conrad comments, “that havingtaken that resolve Idid manage, it seems to me, to carry it right through to the end” (11/41– 42).


But what do we mean by irony? As a straightforward rhetorical device, it is defined as an occasion in discourse when a discrepancy arises between what is said and what is really meant. This is normally referred to as verbal irony, and it has many shades and nuances that are usually conveyed by situation and tone of voice. In its most crude and loudest form it becomes sarcasm. A more complex form is dramatic irony in which an audience knows more about a character’s situation than the character does. The audience can see consequences that are contrary to a character’s expectations, thus ascribing to a character’s statements sharply differentmeanings, meanings that provide a silent, even mocking, commentary on the character’s words and actions. In tragedy, this is calledtragic irony. Conrad’s ironic method draws ondramatic irony as a structural element and brings it to bear on his narrative materials in a different way. Conrad’s cold-eyed narrator is not concerned to illuminate the destiny of a dramatic hero. The ironic visionis, to adapt a term from the science of organizations, systemic. Perhaps an apt shift of focus in the age of mass society. The narrator seems to make an ironic contract with the knowing reader; they become co-conspirators in viewing the world in a certain way. Every aspect of the text is immersed in irony, the action, the characters, the setting, the language, the tone of voice, even the author’s comments about what he is doing, as Conrad does in hisprefatory “Note.”

This, of course, is not new with Conrad orthe modernists. Jane Austen novels can be seen to be informed by a similar ‘systemic’ irony, that is to say, the narratorial voice


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exploits in a continuous way a structural discrepancy of world views, not just of particular statements or situations. Jane Austen’s narrator in Pride and Prejudice, for example, defines a way of seeing the world which encompasses and surpasses the implied world view of her characters, a Mrs. Bennet, say, or, even, her husband, Mr. Bennet, whoseown comically ironic approach to his wife is shown to be merely a clever form of verbal irony, ultimately deficient in ethical terms.Irony of this form is an important constituent element of realism and it is the source of the moral tension and the marking instance of “ethical sensibility” that F. R. Leavis admired so much in “the great tradition.” Jane Austen was able to deploy anironicmethod in her fiction because of the certainty of her own values and ethical beliefs. Moreover, she could be sure her more thoughtful contemporaries shared these values,understood her irony; it actedas a spur to ethical re-appraisal and self-knowledge. To this extent the great realistswere all strenuous believers in the redemptive influence of the ironic mode. Andas result, we can infer that they believed in the corrigibility of individual men and women.


What differentiates Conrad, and the modernists who came after him, is their ratherunsettling acknowledgement of the depths of human perversity and of the disturbing possibility that all human beings, hard as they may try to do the right thing, are fundamentally incorrigible. For them, the moodof modern times was defined by the possibilitythat no ethical system could be confidently secured in the absolute, that the “top of the [moral] structure,” as Iris Murdoch has one ofher characters say with emphasis, “is completely empty.” Their irony was one without guarantees. Their detachment was not avantage from which a wandering or errant humanity could be recalled to certain home truths. Wandering, error, confusion, clutter, and that favorite Conradian word, perversity, made of existence a ferocious muddle, both comic and tragic, sluggish and electric, all at the same time. Detachment was a way of rising above the muddle, and an unremitting irony was the language it spoke. One might keep in mind that the language of irony was the dialect spoken by the serious novel for the whole of the twentieth century. So in our discussion of all the novels in the book we must keep our ears tuned to the ironic as we will meet it in many forms from beginning to end.

Let’s begin, then, with the title page of Conrad’s novel. The Secret Agent is subtitled, ironically, A Simple Tale. By the time we take inthe final paragraph and find there the terrorist bomber, “the incorruptible Professor,” walking alone among the faceless city crowds, embracing “the simplicity of hisidea,” the word ‘simple’ and all its variations of form and meaning have been laidout before us in a complex web. The tale is simple for a number of reasons. The plot is


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relatively straightforward. Stevie is simple in the old sense of ‘simple–minded’. And so on. There are numerous subtle twists and turns in the fate of ‘simple’ as we go along.We mightadd that the word “secret” and its various forms, like “secrecy,” also undergo rigorous inquiry. But it is “simple” that catches ourattention fromthe start.The effect of reading the novel, however,

is far from simple and that is perhaps the primary irony. The life-world evoked in the novel is both simple and complex at the same time. The action is simple; the primary feelings –– Verloc’s apathy, Winnie’s maternalattachment to her brother, her volcanic desirefor revenge after his death, Chief Inspector Heat’s persistence, Sir Ethelred’s distractedness –– are all simple matters. At one point the Assistant Commissioner even refers in Chapter Ten to Verloc’s difficultiesas simply “a domestic drama” (181/204). But they are complicated by the web of personal relations, emotional entanglements, the all-too- human alloy of blithe thoughtlessness andmisguided cunning which complicates so many simple lives, the grim politics of loyalty, betrayal, and fear in which simple actions andfeelings are often


caught and twisted into perverse shapes. By the end of the novel the “domestic drama,” like the newspaper account of Mrs. Verloc’s death, seems “an impenetrable mystery …”. And it remains thatway right down to the last word (248– 49/269).

In his planning for the novel, Conrad needed something, some image or fictional contrivance by which he could convey the underlying complexity that drags down his, and possibly every,‘simple tale’. His choice was brilliant and itcame to him, he tells us in his “Note” in a vision of “an enormous town,” a vision that is none other than the great Imperial city ofLondon itself:

… a monstrous town more populous thansome continents and in its man-made mightas if indifferent to heaven’s frowns andsmiles; a cruel devourer of the world’slight. There was room enough there toplace any story, depth enough there forany passion, variety enough there for anysetting, darkness enough to bury fivemillions of lives. (10/40 – 41)

Against this multitudinous background,Conrad chose to set his

‘simple tale’. Against this background, the story of Winnie Verloc is etched with clarityand decision. Conrad himself has pointed to her story as the novel’s centre of gravity inhis “Note.” Her story is one of desolation, madness and despair and the image of the city–– dismal, dirty, full of grime, waste paper,the smoky gas lighting, weariness, and hunger–– is the symbol by which her simple story acquires all its complexity. The city becomesthe symbol of all that complicates life. In one sense, it is not a traditional symbol; itdoes not exactly stand for something in particular, like Darcy’s great house at


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Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, for example, which‘stands for’ the nobility and excellence of his character.

Conrad’s city ‘stands for’, if that is the right way of putting it, a general human condition. It is conveyed first by a mood that is evoked not only by specific images, like the city’s reliance for light on smoky and dirty gas–jets, but by the way each of the images is presented by the narrator. The narrator’s way of seeing gives to things a kind of tone, a certain potential for meaning, in the way a wink and a nudge in a conversation can speak volumes without the necessity of making all that’s meant explicit. Indeed, it is part of the meaningfulness of that sort of communication not to be uttered, not to be put down in black and white. Similarly, Conrad’s images sometimes do not convey anything as definite as an explicit meaning, yet they remain highly meaningful nonetheless. This is perhapsa difficult point to understand, but it is a capital one for coming to grips with the supposed ‘obscurity’ of modernist (or even modernist-tending) literature.

Take the following example. At the beginning of Chapter Two, Mr. Verloc emerges from his shop and, walking westward,


eventually enters Hyde Park where he is described by the narratoras sending out “glances of comparativealertness.” The complicated irony of thephrase “comparative alertness” need notdetain us now, but it is worth some thought.

Through the park railings these glancesbeheld men and women riding in the Row,couples cantering past harmoniously,others advancing sedately at a walk,loitering groups of three or four,solitary horsemen looking unsociable, andsolitary women followed at a long distanceby a groom with a cockade in his hat and aleather belt over his tight-fitting coat.Carriages went bowling by, mostly two–horse broughams, with here and there avictoria with the skin of some wild beastinside and a woman’s face and hat emergingabove the folded hood. And apeculiarly London sun –– against whichnothing could be said except that itlooked bloodshot –– glorified all this byits stare. (19/51)

That the “Row” referred to is popularly known in London as Rotten Row, where the gentry exercise their horses, makes a rather good point silently, the unspoken ‘rotten’ insinuating an editorial opinion on the edgesof a reader’s consciousness. It’s the “peculiarly London sun,” however, that needs some more careful thought. The narrator’s wayof putting it, as if the sun has no independent existence but belongs to London, resonates with the “Author’s Note,” where Conrad’s final epithet for the city is “crueldevourer of the world’s light” (10/41). It seems that even the sun cannot avoid London’smonstrous appetite.

The next bit of information, about the colour of the sun, brings an image to the eye. The sun is “bloodshot” like a drunkard’seye possibly, or a diseased eye. This is


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clear enough, but look at the sentence in which this visual information is given to us:“— against which nothing could be said exceptthat it looked bloodshot.” Against which nothing could be said? Here is a seriouscomplication. What is the implication of this way of putting it? That it is somehow necessary to search for something negative to say, to say something against the sun, before wegive up and settle on a mildly repulsive epithet? How would one describe the mood which this way of putting it evokes? A generalsourness towards life? A sullen resentfulness?Whatever this mood is and it is not such an easy thing to ascertain, look how it is intensified and complicatedby the way the sentence concludes: the sun, weare told, “glorified all this by its stare.” Glorified? Clearly this is verbal irony. Glory, in a sensible universe, cannot be what the bloodshot eye of an infirm sun bestows on Rotten Row. Nor an eye that stares. Exactly what kind of stare is this? Blank? Resentful? Envious? More of a glare than a stare? You will probably agree that this is very difficult to pin down precisely. Yet a definite mood has been created. But who or


what is the source of the mood? Verloc has been “refreshed by a night of peaceful slumber” and is only comparatively alert this morning; there are resonances here that elude a consciousness rendered by “peaceful slumber.”

Is this the narrator’s mood then?Possibly. The author’s? Again maybe, althoughConrad has told us that he feels he hassucceeded in keeping his personality out ofthe way. Perhaps it is not a moodin the usual sense, namely a private state ofmind of some particular individual that is projected outwards towards the world, immersing the world in its sympathetic magic. Perhaps this is the world’smood. Or more specifically the mood of the city itself, expressed in a particular look of things, a particular existential tone which thecity sounds. It is almost as if the act of perception has been severed, against all our usual habits of thought, from the presence of a perceiver. Indeed if we go back a few lines,we find that it is not Verloc who “beheld men and women riding …”, but “these glances” whichbeheld them. It is as if a glance has floated free of the one who glances.

Through the world a serious faultline seems to run. The agents of action have been disentangled from their actions. Actions are not the result of decision by particular wills; actions simply act. Predicates have lost touch with their subjects. We find ourselves ina strange kind of fractured space. And the relationships of grammatical elements or of people or of things that, in the past, we simply took for granted, now assume changingand fantastic shapes. By the time we reach the end of Chapter Eight we have


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become so accustomed to the fractured logic ofthis disjointed world that when the narrator tells us that “Mrs. Verloc, full of deeppurpose, spoke in the tone of the shallowest indifference”(150/175), we pass over the contradictionwithout a second thought. If we need aliterary analogue for this, we need look nofurther than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,one of the great ur–texts ofthe modernist movement. In the city of London, Conrad’s Wonderland, we find a most expressive symbol of this rupture. If you examine the language of just about any passage in the novel you will find intricacies of a similar order.

So, Conrad’s city is symbolic. But what is it a symbol of ? What does it stand for? It is not any particular thing. I believe it stands for a general condition that inheres inthe very structure and texture, the very feel of the represented life-world. It is like an incurable infection that day by day weakens and debilitates the overall health of the organism but cannot be located in any particular organ. We cannot deny that Conrad’scity, then, is a symbol in a literary sense; it owes, for example, a good deal to Dickens’sOur Mutual Friend. But it is also, and this is another step towards modernism, a


London street at the turn of the century

philosophical symbol, a kind of philosophicalhieroglyph which infers not only a whole way of looking at politics or people or society, but a whole way of looking at existence. In this respect Conrad’s London also resembles the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Paris, in Paris Spleen. Like Baudelaire’s Paris, Conrad’s London is, as I said before, a fractured space. But perhaps‘exploded’ might be the better word. For a simple tale that revolves around the empty space left by the detonation of a bomb, then‘exploded’ is, no doubt, exactly the right word.

III

The explosion which kills Stevie reverberates throughout the whole novel. It is the simplest part of a simple plot. But the effects of this plot device are complicated and diverse. It is as if Conrad


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organized the novel in content and form around the blank space left by the detonation. The fractures that run through the language and imagery, the setting and theplot all seem to spread out, in a fine ravel,from the blasted centre. In fact, one might argue that the bomb is the most appropriate plot twist in a novel which suggests that an explosion is the best metaphor for modern times. The importance of the urban setting lies in just this wider application of the bomb device, namely, that the city is also the product of explosions, explosions of population, industrialism, revolution, urban sprawl, and so on.

The modern metropolis is a place in which the centre no longer seems to hold. Even its topography is fractured. This is deftly conveyed by Conrad’s use of London’s famous topographical vagaries. For example, as Verloc walks towards the embassy early in thenovel, we are told that “No. 1 Chesham Square” is nowhere near Chesham Square proper, and No. 37 in the Square actually belongs to Porthill Street. The narrator comically invokes Parliament to pass an Act to compel these wandering “edifices to returnwhere they belong” (21–22/53).

The mention of Parliament reminds us thatthe city does indeed

have a centre, in this case a political centre in Westminster, but it is a centre without substance, or at least a centre whichis strangely vacuous. We recognize the powerful in this seat of power by their titles and costumes rather than by any discernible traits of vigorous character. Forexample, take Conrad’s description of Sir Ethelred, the novel’s most imposing politicalpersonage, at the beginning of Chapter Seven.It conveys precisely a stuffed shirt sense of

34 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent‘substance’, a puffed out man coming apart atthe seams. The Assistant Commissioner finds him “at the very centre of the Empire on which ‘the sun never sets’” (174/198).

Vast in bulk and stature, with a longwhite face, which, broadened at thebase by a big double chin,appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thingreyish whisker, the great personageseemed an expanding man. Unfortunate froma tailoring point of view, the crossfoldsin the middle of a buttoned black coatadded to the impression, as if thefastenings of the garment were tried tothe utmost. From the head, set upward on athick neck, the eyes, with puffy lowerlids, stared with a haughty droop on eachside of a hooked, aggressive nose, noblysalient in the vast pale circumference ofthe face. A shiny silk hat and a pair ofwoven gloves lying ready on the end of along table looked expanded too, enormous.(115/142)

When we add to this portrait the fact that he is attended by a Private Secretary named “Toodles,” a “youthful-looking” man, owing his position to nepotism rather than merit, we soon get the


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picture. The phrase ‘man of substance’, as a conventional epithet for the powerful person or a person of character can only come into a reader’s consciousness ironically, as does thecomic description of the nobleman’s nose as “nobly salient” (the inflation of the phrase capturing exactly the “expanded” man). If Sir Ethelred (“Spare me the details”) and Toodles are the quality of person at the centre of power, then this is certainly an exploded jurisdiction. Every individual and institutionseems to be moving around a feeble,never-setting, “bloodshot” sun that can no longer hold its satellites in their regular orbits.

Adolf Verloc perfectly embodies this pattern. He is a person

without a centre. His shop in Brett Street isvirtually empty and it functions merely as a front. Among the agents of the Embassy, he does not even have a name, simply a geometrical symbol, the triangle. His marriage, for all its bogus respectability, is devoid both of the love bond and of the deeper domestic responsibilities. His activities as an agent for a foreign country are completelyineffectual. His use of Stevie to carry thebomb into Greenwich Park is as much a productof laziness, as it is of cowardice or cunning.He is not just inwardly corrupt, but simply ablank weight. We first meet him emerging fromthe back of his store with “eyes naturallyheavy”


Herbert Henry Asquith,1st Earl of Oxford andAsquith (British Prime

Minister, 1908 –16).(André Cluysenaar, 1919)


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and “an air of having wallowed, fully dressed,all day in an unmade bed;” to some extent he resembles the shabby wares he sells, like the occasional “small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside” (14/46).

In some ways Verloc is a very simple man. He is attuned only to his own needs, and, like all egoists, is blind to others. For example, he is constitutionally incapable of comprehending the force of Winnie’s devotion to Stevie. He falls back on conventional explanations: a sisterly solicitude for the vulnerable, or, like all women faced with grief, he feels Winnie only needs a good cry to get over the loss, and so forth. It would be wrong to say that Verloccompletely miscalculates the violence of herfeelings after the boy’s death, for that wouldimply calculation or thought of some sort. No,Verloc’s mind moves down the well worn pathsof the cliché andthe mental habit. And this is not suprising.

We learn early in the novel that he is lazyand given to idleness, indeed “constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion.”He is a man who has “embraced indolence … with a sort of inert fanaticism.” All formsof exertion are “too much trouble.”

He required a more perfect form of ease;or it might have been that he was thevictim of a philosophical unbelief in theeffectiveness of every human effort. Sucha form of indolence requires a certainamount of intelligence. Mr. Verloc was notdevoid of intelligence –– and at thenotion of a menaced social order he wouldhave perhaps winked to himself if therehad not been an effort to make in thatsign of scepticism. His big prominent eyeswere not well adapted to winking. Theywere rather of the sort that closessolemnly in slumber with majestic effect.


(20/52)

So far, so simple. But Verloc is also a more complicated character than that which isconveyed by this marvellous portrait of indolence. For one thing he is a fractured man. He is marked by the double life which hehas led for years, by the company he has keptand the deceptions he has practised as a profession. In this respect, he exudes an “air common to men who live on the vices, thefollies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common tokeepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses,” or sellers of patent medicines, “private detectives and inquiry agents” (21/52). Here is the complicating dimension ofVerloc’s character. He was not born this way. His “moral nihilism” has been acquired throughlong years of practice, so that now it has become an intrinsic part of his being, indeed the essential element. Emptied of any ethical imagination and of moral feelings, Verloc is the quintessential ‘hollow man’. Perhaps, it is also not suprising that when T. S. Eliot wrote “The HollowMen” (1921–25), which at one time was part ofThe Waste Land, he had recently become familiar with Conrad’s fiction.


39

If Verloc was the conventionally evil character of melodrama (the “devil” [223/244] that Winnie refers to when she meets Ossipon after the murder), it would beeasy to find a place for him in the gallery of the damned. But he is not alone in his moralnihilism. Nor is he particularly unique. Whencompared to others in the novel, he seems rather the rule, than the exception. Here again the city landscape provides more than abackground, more than a conventional realist setting. It stands for a kind of ethical vacuity that permeates every street and square. Conrad’s monstrous town remains to the bitter end a place, “in which all sounds of lifeseemed lost as if in a triangular well of asphalt and bricks, of blind houses and unfeeling stones” (223/244). This is made clear enough throughout the novel, but nowhere more plainly than in Comrade Ossipon’s walk home to sleep after he has betrayed the helpless Winnie Verloc at the train station.

His robust form was seen that night indistant parts of the enormous townslumbering monstrously on a carpet of mudunder a veil of raw mist. It was seencrossing the streets without life andsound, or diminishing in the interminablestraight perspectives of shadowy housesbordering empty roadways lined by stringsof gas-lamps. He walked through Squares,Places, Ovals, Commons, though monotonousstreets with unknown names where the dustof humanity settles inert and hopeless outof the stream of life. (241/261– 62)

Winnie can exact a proper revenge for Stevie’s death by killing her husband; the Assistant Commissioner can solve the mystery of the bombing and rid Her Majesty’s

40 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret AgentGovernment of the odious diplomat, Mr. Vladimir; but we are left with the view that no positive action can rehabilitate the spirit of negation which chains together the city and its inhabitants.

If one episode epitomizes the complete desolation of the urban setting both in its physical and human dimensions, it is the cab ride that Winnie, Stevie, and their mother take to the charity cottages in Chapter Eight. Although the cab itself, the driver, and the horse are painted in the colours of death and despair all through the passage, wealso have our most sustained presentation of a more positive theme in the form of Stevie. And what impresses us most about the “idiot” boy is the fineness and depth of his ethical sensibilities, from his plea to the cabman not to whip the horse, to his incontrovertible summary of life in a brutal world. In this respect, he bears some literary ancestry from Russian literature andthe tradition of the ‘holy fool’, as in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

Again and again Stevie’s reactions to events in the episode are contrasted to the more conventional reactions of his sister, and each time he is revealed to be the deeperthinker, the better moral philosopher. For example, Stevie is stimulated by remorse and


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The cabs, trams, and wagons of London, c. 1900sympathy both for the horse and the cabman.He understands that life is a tight web ofco-dependencies. Both horse and cabman arecaught in a brutal system neither canescape; the misery of onefeeds on the misery of the other in the name of the misery of a third party, the cabman’s children. Only the word “Shame!” fits the case in Stevie’s mind.

Stevie was no master of phrases, andperhaps for that very reason his thoughtslacked clearness and precision. But hefelt with greater completeness and someprofundity. That little word contained allhis sense of indignation and horror at onesort of wretchedness having to feed uponthe anguish of the other –– at the poorcabman beating the poor horse in the name,


as it were, of his poor kids at home.(142/168)

Although we cannot call these thoughts a series of sophisticated moral reflections, they stand up very well to comparison with the moral alertness of the other characters. Conrad tells us immediately that Winnie, herecalled “Mrs. Verloc,” no doubt to press home the point that continuous contact with Mr. Verloc has caused the


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evacuation of her own ethical sensibilities, “could not pretend to such depths of insight.”

Moreover she had not experienced the magicof the cabman’s eloquence. She was in thedark as to the inwardness of the word‘Shame’. And she said placidly:

‘Come along, Stevie. You can’t help that.’

Her lack of depth of moral feeling is symptomatic; it is shared by all the characters. Only Stevie, in all his ‘simple–mindedness’, wants to get to “the bottom” ofthings (144/169). His sister, on the other hand, a woman who puts “her trust in face values” and who believes that things “do notstand much looking into” personifies the moral superficiality of the adults. This is deeply ironic writing and the irony is not limited to the fact that we know by Chapter Eight that Stevie will be obliterated by Verloc’s bomb.

Stevie’s plight, his helplessness, makes him an immediate object of sympathy for the reader. But for all his guileless devotion to his sister, to Verloc, and to the suffering of others, he is a remarkably successful humanbeing. While all the rational adults in the novel mouth banalities, their minds running along well-worn ruts, only Stevie seems capable of genuine moral struggle and Conrad is at pains to let us know that a vital morallife is not simply a matter of possessing theproper feelings, but a problem of language as well. It is a problem of finding, after long inward labour, the right words for moral truths, not for sentimentalities, or shabby commonplaces, or clichés:

The docile Stevie went along; but now hewent along without pride, shamblingly, andmuttering half words, even words thatwould have been whole if they had not been


made up of halves that did not belong toeach other. It was as though he had beentrying to fit all the words he couldremember to his sentiments in order to getsome sort of corresponding idea. And, as amatter of fact, he got it at last. He hungback to utter it at once.

‘Bad world for poor people.’ (143/168)

In an exploded world this is where all new philosophy must start, stumbling through the wreckage of language to get to the truth of things. As readers we must not allow ourselvesto sentimentalize the ‘simplicity’ of the ‘idiot’ boy. Conrad is making a radical point here and he is neither trying to separate Stevie from the mainstream of humanity by virtue of his “ ‘queerness’ ,” nor by appealing to the tradition of the ‘holy fool’.Conrad insists explicitly on Stevie’s positionalongside the “rest of mankind” (143/169); Stevie, indeed, is one of us.

One can argue that Stevie provides The SecretAgent with a moral centre and it is no doubt deeply and radically ironic that it is this centre of moral coherence that is reduced in the course of a “simple tale” to “blood and dirt,” to a bit of fabric from a coat with


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Greenwich Park an address handprinted in ink. That this

reduction of a human being to a shovelful of tissue and twigs occurs by virtue of a casualact of thoughtless opportunism and not by deliberate cunning, takes us out past dramatic irony and into a kind of philosophical irony which is new in modern literature. It has been anticipated in the fiction of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James in the nineteenth century.Conrad provides one more turn of the screw inthis tradition. As a result, he ought to be seen as a philosophical contemporary of writers like Kafka, Beckett, and Camus, rather than of the latter-day realists like Bennett and Wells. Conrad’s irony is at the core of both his moral vision and his aesthetic sense. In this he differs from the realists for whom irony was a device of primarily satiric purpose; it was a way of exposing the discrepancies between the professed ideals of society and its actual practices. Conrad’s irony is not simply a tool for getting at established truths that are hidden from view for the time being,


i.e., until we can all see better. Conrad’s fiction, like all great modern art, questionsthe confidentnineteenth centurybelief inprogress as the master code of the historical process, namely, that things will improve because we will know moreand we will learn howto see better. His work questionsthis simple faith in

history as the great narrative of human freedom and progress. For Conrad, history is an arena of confusion, error, and,for want of a better term, black comedy, and the detached observer can only communicate hisresignation from the general optimism by recourse to irony. His, then, is an irony of vision, not merely of literary effect. It inheres in his point of view as the primary constituent of how the world is, and it is the place in his workwhere the ethical and the aesthetic meet.


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IVThe activities of the anarchists, like

Ossipon, the Professor, Karl Yundt, and Michaelis, are matters of comic treatment by Conrad. Some critics argue he indulged in exaggeration, caricature, and ridicule of historically significant political ideas because of his own personal abhorrence of revolution and revolutionaries. These critics also point to the fact that the police are notthe objects of Conrad’s unforgiving scrutiny. Indeed, they seem to represent in the design of the novel some minor, but persistent, principle of orderliness in a disordered world. They may not be a solution to the senseof moral despair and spiritual decay, but at least they are professionals andgo about their business in a professional manner. If the Assistant Commissioner cannot entirely keep faith with a political system that produces a Toodles, he can at least keep faith with the professional code of the policeservice. A number of critics, Irving Howe and Terry Eagleton in particular, have felt that Conrad, by indulging his own anti-revolutionary prejudices, has to some extent spoiled his tale. He has blotted, so to speak,the copybook of his own artistic intentions, intentions made clear in the “Author’s Note” of 1920. It is the one crack in the author’s “ironic method,” they argue.

There is some truth in this criticism, if one limits oneself to looking for the political reality of The Secret Agent. How realistic is the novel in depicting what really happens in the world ofanarchism and other revolutionary movements? This is possibly an important critical question if we are dealing with a documentary


text. But The Secret Agent is a work of fiction, a work of art. If it departs from the ‘reality’ ofthis or that aspect of the world as a historian or political scientist might view it, then the proper critical question to ask is not why does the novel deviate from reality, but what artistic purpose does the rendered reality serve. Conrad’s intention, difficult as this is to fix with certainty, is assuredly not to produce a political analysis of anarchismat the turn of the century.


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If we take his own comments seriously, Conrad enters his fictional world through the agony and trial of Winnie Verloc that provideshim with a narrative thread, the “simple tale”as it were, of his plot. Indeed if we read thenovel with that in mind we soon find that the documentary impulse is relatively faint, in fact more of an obstacle, than an opportunity to communicate the main themes. The pervading sense of living in a moral and spiritual vacuum, so marvelously conveyed by the emptiness, silence, and wreckage left after a bomb blast, touches everyone in the novel. AndStevie more catastrophically than anyone else.All the elements of the novel then ought to help in supporting and developing that theme and it must be said that Conrad, from that point of view, is remarkably successful.

The anarchists are treated as occupying a prominent place in the vacuum and although they pass themselves off as the victims of capitalism and authority, we find that they are rather victims of their own philosophical commitment to scientific materialism, a blind faith that dries up their human sympathies, and, in turn, rendersthem victimizers of others. Ossipon, nicknamed the ‘Doctor’ and with his reliance on the quack theories of Lombroso, is perhapsthe best illustration of this misplaced faithin science. That in the end his only thoughtsare on the theft of Winnie Verloc’s money does not vitiate political anarchism or philosophical materialism as such, but reveals how certain unreflective beliefs can blind one to one’s own perversity and to the suffering of concrete human beings. It is theold problem of revolutionary politics, of both right and left:namely, acting in the name and love of

50 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agenthumanity, but holding actual people in contempt. The bomb-mad Professor represents the zero degree of this tendency.

Lost in the crowd, miserable andundersized, he meditated confidently onhis powers, keeping his hand in his leftpocket of his trousers, grasping lightlythe indiarubber ball, the supremeguarantee of his sinister freedom: butafter a while he became disagreeablyaffected by the sight of the roadwaythronged with vehicles and of the pavementcrowded with men and women. He was in along, straight street, peopled by a merefraction of an immense multitude; but allaround him, on and on, even to the limitsof the horizon hidden by the enormouspiles of bricks, he felt the mass ofmankind mighty in its numbers. Theyswarmed numerous like locusts,industrious like ants, thoughtless like anatural force, pushing on blind andorderly and absorbed, impervious tosentiment, to logic, to terror, too,perhaps. (Chapt. 5, 73 – 4/102–3)

No one, in the end, is worthy of his respect, because, for the revolutionary theoretician, people are mere ciphers and metaphors, abstract categories of thought andaction, not women and men of flesh and blood.The image of Stevie’s body reduced to a shovelful


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of bloody flesh and dirt is Conrad’s bitter riposte to this particular perversion of politics. But the anarchists are not the onlyones about whom this point can be made.

Sir Ethelred, bulky representative of the established order, is hardly conscious of theconcrete presence of human beings. His repeated instruction to the Assistant Commissioner to spare him the details of the bombing underlines the point. What are the ‘details’he doesn’t want to know about? Merely the human beings involved. The police, too, operate inside this moral vacuum. They may have their professional code, but they are victims as well of theexplosion. Conrad’s attitude toward the police in their relation to criminal elementsin society is part of the ironic design of the book. The police, no less than the anarchists, suffer from the same moral vacancy. Each needs the other to exist. “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket,” the Professor tells Ossiponin the Silenus over glasses of beer. “Revolution, legality,” he continues, “ –– counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. [The policeman]plays his little game–– so do you propagandists” (Chap. 4, 64–5/94). Anarchy without the existence of authority is as unthinkable as the reverse formula, authority without the constant threat of disorder and chaos. The police andanarchists are slaves to the same dialectical process which the psychopathic Professor can only transcend by destruction.

The paradox into which the shabby little Professor has boxed himself resonates at the end of the novel as well, indeed in the very

52 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agentfinal paragraph, where Conrad’s concluding comment, that he was “like a pest in the street full of men,” plays on a number of senses of the word “pest.” The “incorruptible” terrorist is compared to an insect, perhaps carrying a plague (la peste is the French word for plague), who is both an annoyance and very dangerous at the same time. This identification reverses the figureof humanity as insects–– the locusts and ants of Chapter Five –– as the old terrorist is also observed walking in the streets. That the camera close–up on the “pest” at the end of the novel dilates suddenly to reveal “a street full of men” is perhaps indicative of a quiet kind of affirmation by Conrad himself. The street is full of “men,” by which Conrad means individual people, not crowds, or ‘the masses’, or ‘humanity’, or‘the people’, or “insects” for that matter, terms that evoke political discourses in which persons, lumped together in aggregates, are reduced to abstractions or things.

When reading Conrad’s fiction, especially in his most fertile period, the novels and stories from The Heart of Darkness to Victory, we cannot escape the task of understanding the significance of his “ironic method.” And this is so, not only for coming to grips


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with Conrad, but with understanding a good deal of serious modern literature, and particularly of understanding what literary history calls ‘modernism’. So what is the significance of “irony” in Conrad’s approach to fiction? This is a difficult question to answer simply, and it is well worth pausing to consider it. The difficulty lies, partly at least, in the fact that for Conrad, and inmodern literature generally, irony is a way of seeing the world, a way of interpreting itand holding it at arm’s length for dispassionate assessment. In short, it is an inevitable property of an author’s temper, not merely a literary device.

One way of looking at the question is to see Conrad’s irony as his method for overcoming the Professor’s paradox. The Professor represents an extremist version of amore general condition. Certainly The Secret Agent proposes a bleak picture of the human prospect. None of the characters in the novelseems to offer any answer to the historical and psychological “game” of revolution and reaction, and the truth forever eludes them. For the searcher after truth, however, the “ironic method” offers a kind of suspension of the “game.” The truth does not come from the “same basket” that produces the terroristand the policeman. Irony offers a strategy ofdisengagement from the dialectic of history as Conrad has interpreted it in the novel. Itis itself not a solution to the problem, but a condition for carrying on the search. Perhaps, it is Conrad’s position as an outsider, as a bemused exponent of the ironicpolitics of the exiled imagination, which gives him the necessarydetachment to carry on. Irony, in a word, forms the basis of his moral vision.


But not only that. Irony is also a condition for producing a new kind of art in modernity. It is the basis of his aesthetic vision as well. Here Conrad is the influential successor, not imitator, mind you, of the great realists. And one might addthe great precursor of the modernists to come. The aesthetic current of Conrad’s ironyis most vividly conducted in his prose style.“The style is elevated,” writes Albert Guerard, one of Conrad’s most perceptive critics, “but in the special sense of being elevated above the miseries andsqualors it describes; of remaining cool, scornful, calculating, aloof” (226). This cooldetachment reaches its highest intensity in Chapter Eleven (described by F. R. Leavis as “one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction”). Throughout the chapter, which ends with the murder of Verloc, the special qualities of a detached, ironic voice,help to fashion the drama of the piece. The situation is inherently dramatic, so the task is not so much to augment the dramatic action itself, but to bridle it, to bring it under the kind of control that helps to intensify its meaning in the context of the


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action of the whole novel. His detachment andelevation contribute to the formal excellenceof the chapter and avoid the excess of melodrama. This is dispassionate writing in the best sense, calm, free from sentimentality, passionately pursuing objectivity.

The increasing horror and suspense we feelas readers are consummately managed by the careful phrasing of each sentence and sequence of sentences. Selective quotation cannot do justice to a pervasive quality thattakes on its greatest resonance and force by the steady accumulation of its effect. But perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by the following brief quotation describing the murder itself. With Verloc reclined on a sofa, he suddenly notices movement as Winnie advances towards him.

He saw partly on the ceiling and partly onthe wall the moving shadow of an arm witha clenched hand holding a carving knife.It flickered up and down. Its movementswere leisurely. They were leisurelyenough for Mr. Verloc to recognize thelimb and the weapon.

They were leisurely enough for him to takein the full meaning of the portent, and totaste the flavour of death rising in hisgorge. (212/234)

The crucial and most unlikely word in thisdescription of ferocious violence is “leisurely,” and it is repeated in a witty series of parallel sentences that begin, “They were leisurely enough …” all through the passage. It is of course a precise choice of word.And it is deeply ironic. With each repetitionof the formulaic “They were leisurely enough …”, where “They” refers to the movements of the carving knife, we have the syntactic

56 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agentenactment of the drama of each repeated thrust. Isn’t it fitting that the indolent and torpid Verloc experiences his own death in this “leisurely” way? And in that simple action, so artfully described, Conrad telescopes the full moral import of the novel.

“Leisurely” also suggests, as does the pacing of the whole passage, a slowing down ofthe action, a slowing down of the consciousness of time, towards a species of slow motion. Indeed the whole chapter enacts agradual process of slowing down, of deceleration as it were, to the point where instants of time are experienced fully and slowly, in a “leisurely” way, as in certain dream-states where time seems hardly to move at all, even though they happen in a flicker of an eye. An eternity seems to pass in that instant of time between Verloc’s recognition of what is happening and his inability to react as the knife is driven into his chest. We shall see a similar attenuation of the timeelement in Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse later. This effect of deceleration is achieved in two ways, by


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directing attention to vividly realized particulars (e.g., the detail of the shadow moving on both ceiling and wall, or the comically upturned bowler hat at Verloc’s feet) and by artful periphrasis: “They were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to elaboratea plan of defence, involving a dash behind the table, and the felling of the woman to the ground with a heavy wooden chair” (212/234). The action described may be brutally simple, but the studied language used to describe it gives the effect of watching a film frame by frame. A reader’s primary sensation is of horrified fascination, notfor the sake of titillation, which would verge on the obscene, but for the sake of letting the ironic meaningfulness of each wordand action, the tone of voice, bring out the full ethical significance ofthe events. Conrad maintains this sort of immaculate control of his verbal materials throughout The Secret Agent.

The same thing can be said for his control of formal elements, the design of the novel as a whole. The plotting is almost flawless. The episodes are arranged in order to extractfrom the experience of the characters and thesituation maximum ironic significance. Conrad keeps us in the dark about certain matters insuch a way as to make possible suspense and black comedy. Stevie’s death, which occurs chronologically between the third and fourthchapters, is not explicitly revealed until Chapter Nine and, indeed, his appearance in the flashback in Chapter Eight has the effectof intensifying the drama and the ironic resonances. The use of recurring images, the carving knife for instance, which is first referred to some two hundred pages before the

58 Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agentmurder, or the references to insects discussed above, helps to create a sense of overarching cohesion in the text. ‘Putting out the light’ at the end of Chapter Three, repeated in a more sinister form in Chapter Eight becomes a vital echo, in its literal and figurative senses, in Chapter Twelve after the murder. There are many other examples of cohesive skeins of a similar kind. Some critics argue for the thematic importance of this artfulness, namely that the order of art acts as a kind of silent principle of intelligibility, a source of meaning, in what is shown to be an essentially unintelligible and disorderly world.

Although indebted to the tradition of realism, Conrad’s The Secret Agent looks ahead tothe novel of the future. Certain aspects of his achievement, its consummate art, the skepticism about progress, the ironic temper,his freer deployment of formal elements, constitute an enduring legacy for the historyof the novel in modern times. And although not all of the serious novelists to come can be said to descend artistically from him in adirect sense, his development of the novel form established, in addition to thosehe directly affected, an indirect influence that is yet to run its course even at the endof the century.


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Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (James Abbot McNeill Whistler, c. 1872–75)

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent 32

Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase.Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1978. Eagleton, Terry. “Form, Ideology and The Secret Agent.” In

Against the Grain: Selected Essays. London: Verso,1986.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. 1932. Rpt. London: Faber, 1950. Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics; Community and Anarchy

in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 1967.

Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963

Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Meridian

Books, 1957.James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” In The Future of the Novel.

Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Vintage Books, 1956: 3–27. The essay is reprinted in a number of other editions of James’ critical writings.

Karl, Frederick. Joseph Conrad, The Three Lives: A Biography.

New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979.

* Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and

Windus, 1948.* Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. by Hannah and

Stanley Mitchell. Harmondsworth: Penguin


61Books, 1976.———. Studies in European Realism. Trans. by Hannah and

Stanley Mitchell: Harmondsworth:Penguin Books,1972.


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Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Western World. CambridgeUniversity

Press, 1969.The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. John H.

Stape. Cambridge University Press, 1996.Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Second

Edition. London: Longman, 1993.Winner, Anthony. Culture and Irony: Studies in Joseph

Conrad’s Major Novels. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia,1988.

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