Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

THAT ONE MIGHT belong to a culture by choice rather than by nature was commonly vilified, in the early twentieth century, as a principle of cosmopolitan “adaptability.”¹ An insult with a double edge, adaptability implied a lack of positive identity, on the one hand, and a surfeit of abject identity, often Jewishness, on the other. It described, as historian Deborah Cohen has argued, a characteristic of unmarked “invaders,” whose versatility with language and manners helped them to live abroad without detection.² As a skill of individuals, adaptability meant that people could belong to more than one culture, or they could operate within cultures that were not, or not yet, their own. As a concept, adaptability meant something more: inclusion in a culture might depend not on the expression of innate attributes but on the performance of learned codes and habitual gestures. In Britain, nativist writers were disturbed to think that foreigners were passing as locals, but they were even more disturbed to imagine that foreigners might become locals, by learning to be natural or by changing the conditions of nature.

This chapter examines the naturalness of Joseph Conrad, whose choice of English as a language of composition and whose focus on global systems of trade, imperialism, and espionage have made him, among critics in his own time and throughout the twentieth century, at once the most British and the most cosmopolitan of novelists. For some, Conrad’s choice made him exceptionally foreign: writing all of his fiction in a language he had to learn, Conrad became not simply a stranger in England but one whose fiction is nowhere at home. For others, Conrad’s foreignness made him the most English of writers, as F. R. Leavis claims in his canonical account of the English novel. Only because he was foreign, Leavis argued in 1948, could Conrad choose English and thus inaugurate “the great tradition” that precedes him: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James. Allowing origin to follow imitation, Leavis’s narrative is typically Conradian: by virtue of his choice, Leavis proposes, the novelist affirmed the coherence and value of English literature.³ Aiming to describe a distinctly national tradition, Leavis emphasizes preference and patriotism, but he minimizes agency and self-consciousness, which would imply cosmopolitanism. Leavis proposes that Conrad does not belong to English culture voluntarily, as a cosmopolitan would, but rather he belongs “in the full sense,” by nature (18). Leavis describes Conrad’s choice as a compulsion that follows not the pleasures of cultural mixing or even the necessities of social circumstance but the imperatives of art. Claiming that Conrad’s “themes and interests demanded the concreteness and action—the dramatic energy—of English” (17–18), Leavis uses the international Conrad to create a natural national tradition: a literary and cultural lineage that is both coherent and continuous.

Today, in many critical accounts, Conrad is the exemplary figure of British modernism. He is exemplary, critics propose, because his foreignness was more extreme than the exile of his contemporaries: not only did he leave his native country for reasons of personal safety, the argument goes, but he left behind his native language as well.⁴ Critics often attribute the innovations of Conrad’s style to his history of literal and metaphorical displacement.⁵ In this chapter, I make a related but in some ways opposite claim: Conrad becomes legible as a foreigner in his life because he displays adaptability, or naturalness, in his work. I do not mean to deny that Conrad was a foreigner in England; nor do I mean to underestimate the difficult conditions of immigration and transience in which Conrad’s writing developed. Rather, I propose that Conrad’s reputation comes to shape his history. I suggest that Conrad’s analysis of display and perception in his novels, what is often called his “impressionism,” should be understood both as a philosophical critique of social categories and as an urbane practice of ethnographic self-fashioning.⁶ To measure the aesthetic and political implications of Conrad’s writing, we need to see the relationship between two strains of cosmopolitanism in his work: the geographic cosmopolitanism of immigration, international travel, and colonialism, which the novels describe, and the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of literary impressionism and decadence, whose values the novels reproduce and whose urban meanderings and ambiguous poses are crucial to his later texts. By disaggregating the several aspects of cosmopolitanism in this period, I will show that Conrad brought to his work diverse, sometimes conflicting strategies of national and international affiliation.

In Conrad’s novels, themes of deracination and cultural mixing meet practices of experimentation and promotion. Fredric Jameson’s account of the oscillation between realism and romance in Conrad’s writing provides one very useful way to describe this encounter.⁷ However, I would associate Conrad’s mixing of genres less with “schizophrenic writing” (219), as Jameson does, than with a kind of critical dandyism: the tactical deployment of rhetoric and social detail, which allows Conrad to reproduce and also to manipulate the norms of British culture.⁸ Conrad’s preoccupation with art, perhaps the chief characteristic of literary decadence, extends from his well-known interest in the medium of writing to his corollary interests in the media of everyday culture: if Conrad establishes an analogy between the representation of storytelling and a novel’s telling of its story, as Edward Said and others have shown, he also comes to connect the novel’s art of presentation to more quotidian, more pervasive, and less visible practices of artful presentation, such as physical gesture, sartorial and bodily display, and the design of shop windows and street signs.⁹ Like Walter Pater, Conrad is interested in the reader’s perception of perception, the recognition of habit and the process of defamiliarization; like Oscar Wilde, he is interested in the social processes that make norms seem natural.¹⁰ Conrad’s narratives may extend the terrain of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, but they also follow the path of Wilde: in international settings, colonial and metropolitan, Conrad brings everyday culture to many of Wilde’s precepts, allowing that “facts” are made rather than found, that description creates rather than reflects social categories, that art lends coherence to “nations and individuals,” that foreign styles are the effects of British fiction.¹¹ I will suggest at the end of this chapter that Wilde’s social paradoxes prefigure at the level of epigram the cultural artifice that Conrad represents at the level of narrative.¹²

As many scholars have shown, Conrad is critical of norms in some cases and reproduces nature in others: his novels present racism as an arbitrary science and an instrument of exploitation, but they also invoke racist stereotypes. Patrick Brantlinger contends persuasively that Conrad may be more interested in reputation, stereotype, and “propaganda” (Brantlinger’s term) than he is in actual people or in the project of replacing racist stereotypes with antiracist identities.¹³ One might say that Conrad resists, above all, the “fact” of identity, both in his own life and in the description of his characters. In the colonial context, resisting the fact of identity may seem to ignore, or even support, one of the principal strategies of European imperialism: the process of reducing individuals to abstract, dehumanized groups. However, in the European context, where the rhetoric of individuality is used to justify imperialism, resisting the fact of identity allows Conrad to show how nature is produced. Conrad does not imagine more inclusive or more flexible paradigms of belonging, but neither does he allow the old paradigm to function as it did, invisibly and timelessly. Rather, he presents belonging as a social process, introducing naturalness—the purposeful imitation of what passes for nature—as a literary tactic that later novelists, such as Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebald, will use both to reorient and to diversify British points of view.

I argue that Conrad is exemplary as a British writer in the early twentieth century not because he is the most foreign but because he is the least natural. His novels emphasize strategies of promotion: how social gestures, including the gestures of writing, become legible as necessary and defining characteristics. Conrad’s work attests to an emerging conflict between naturalness and nature, between a model of identity based on manners and a model based on instinct or race. Conrad addresses this conflict directly in his texts: he shows how social processes make details into facts, behaviors into characteristics, persons into categories. By attributing cultural distinctions to an interpretive history, Conrad links national identities to conditions of visibility, how people are perceived, rather than to conditions of existence, what people really are. Deflecting charges of adaptability in his life while depicting adaptability in his novels, Conrad develops naturalness as a characteristic of British culture and as a tactic of critical cosmopolitanism.

This chapter focuses on The Secret Agent, the novel about national reputations that helped to shape Conrad’s cosmopolitan reputation among early readers. The case of The Secret Agent is striking: reviewers attributed the novel, a tale of anarchists and foreigners in London, to Conrad’s cosmopolitan nature, even while the novel attributes such characteristics to the fiction of rhetorical display. I will begin by describing Conrad’s efforts, in prefaces and letters, to refute or manipulate the characteristics that readers assigned to him. I will then turn to The Secret Agent, in which Conrad teaches readers to distrust both apparent identities and “established reputations.”¹⁴ Scenes of display may be pervasive in Conrad’s work, but The Secret Agent is unique among the novels because it assigns these scenes to a specific cultural milieu: bohemian Soho and its cast of immigrants, foreigners, and other indeterminate residents. In The Secret Agent, Conrad presents the skillful manipulation of social details and local manners as a norm of cosmopolitan London.

Eager to differentiate naturalness from nature, early-twentieth-century reviewers emphasized Conrad’s foreign origins while they praised his fluent use of the English language. One is reminded that to call someone “a natural” is to notice how effortless his or her actions appear; it is to notice not nature but the appearance of nature. Whereas naturalness is culturally and historically specific because it depends on a projected impression, nature lays claim to timelessness, to a world apart from representation and recognition. Conrad understood this distinction. In a letter to his French translator Hugh-Durand Davray, he argues that his novels cannot function in any language other than English. The work, Conrad explains to Davray, “is written for the English—from the point of view of the effect it will have on an English reader.”¹⁵ Contrasting his interests with those of Rudyard Kipling, his most acclaimed predecessor in the English literature of empire, Conrad argues,

While the difference between nature and naturalness was central to Conrad’s literary project, his work was produced in the context of a literary culture devoted to categories of national distinctiveness and authenticity. For this reason, one observes in Conrad’s public writings a very different set of claims than those he offers in private letters, such as the one to his translator. In his public comments, Conrad claimed to write not for effect but for transparency. He made these claims in response to early critics and reviewers who described him in published reports as a foreigner playing the role of an Englishman; to his readers, the better he played this role, the more foreign and decadent he seemed. Reviews of The Secret Agent attributed the novel’s dark view of London to the fact that its author was a foreigner to England and to English culture. These reviews often claimed that Conrad’s novel was nothing more than the natural expression of his foreign self. His choice of English as a literary language was thought to confirm this fact, as it emphasized the artifice of Conrad’s endeavor. Through the rhetoric of choice, Conrad’s contemporaries registered his imposture; through the accusation of artifice, early-twentieth-century critics sought to differentiate Conrad’s impersonation of Englishness from the nature of Englishness and other national cultures.

The Irish critic Robert Lynd, reviewing Conrad’s writing in a London newspaper in 1908, argued that literature should follow and invigorate national traditions: one should only want or choose what one has been given, and everyone is given, he asserts, something specific and distinct. Lynd writes,

The phrase “choice, as it were” reflects Lynd’s belief that language cannot be chosen at all. Lynd regrets not Conrad’s failure to be English but his failure to be Polish, the nationality to which “everybody knows” Conrad belongs. Lynd is concerned less about Conrad’s actions (giving up the Polish language, electing to write in English) than about the implication of these actions for the distinctiveness of national cultures; Conrad’s choice suggests that national culture is a matter of self-identification and practice rather than a matter of race or nativity. The logic of Lynd’s critique follows the logic of adaptability: only because Conrad is “cosmopolitan” and “homeless,” Lynd argues, does he choose to write in English; writing by “choice” rather than by “nature,” however, Conrad becomes cosmopolitan, the kind of person who chooses. Behind Lynd’s critique of Conrad is his conviction that all literature should express a particular national culture whose circulation and continuity it serves to maintain. For Conrad, on the contrary, literature is the medium through which culture is perceived and in some measure produced.

Many reviewers of The Secret Agent saw the novel as a turning point in Conrad’s career: with The Secret Agent, Hugh Walpole wrote in 1916, “a new attitude was most plainly visible.”¹⁷ Even those reviewers who sought to defend Conrad from the cosmopolitanism of whimsical, denationalized writing supported him much as Lynd attacked: by locating in his work the manifestation of an “alien … genius.”¹⁸ Everywhere, critics imposed the same language of inevitability: for Lynd, Conrad should not write in English because he is Polish; for others, Conrad’s choice of English was irrelevant because the writing betrays its author’s Polishness all the same. Edward Garnett, who recommended Conrad’s first novel for publication, later wrote in the Nation that the author of The Secret Agent had brought the “secrets of Slav thought” to “our [English] tongue”;¹⁹ a reviewer in the Glasgow News found it “not an irrelevant reflection upon The Secret Agent that its author, Joseph Conrad, is of Polish birth”;²⁰ and Arthur Symons, whose magazine accepted Conrad’s first published short story in 1896, celebrated the novelist as a man of “inexplicable mind” who “does not always think in English” even when he uses English words.²¹ The reviewers are eager to keep the actual apart from the observed.

Rather than dispute the logic of these comments, Conrad spent much of his career, in prefaces and in biographical essays, insisting that his art was a product of natural inclination. This may sound like a direct contradiction of Conrad’s sensibility as he described it to his translator, and in some ways it is. However, this insistence allowed Conrad to refute the personal implications of adaptability (a foreign nature) while also embracing the professional implications of naturalness (success in art). In a 1919 introduction to A Personal Record, first published in 1912, Conrad refutes “certain statements” in the press, that he had “exercised a choice” to write in English and that his work, in its sensibility and themes, reflects its author’s “Sclavonism.”²² Conrad’s refutation seems clear enough:

For Conrad, denying choice and adoption becomes the only way to deny the natural foreignness (“Sclavonism”) and insincerity (“vanity”) that intention has come to designate. The accusation of indulgence leads Conrad to claim imperatives. He proposes that English is natural to his writing because, through English, through a language and culture that he has had to learn, he has found the subject of his work. His encounter with English, he argues, inspired him to write:

It is in this context that one should read Conrad’s “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent, which he published in 1920, some thirteen years after the novel first appeared. Claiming to have begun The Secret Agent “impulsively” and without intention, Conrad explains:

It’s obvious that I need not have written that book. I was under no necessity to deal with that subject. … [Having finished Nostromo and The Mirror of the Sea], I gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of The Secret Agent—I mean the tale—came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don’t remember now.

The “Author’s Note” begins by explaining that “the origin of The Secret Agent” resides in a “reaction” to Nostromo, the novel Conrad had published three years earlier. Whereas the “far-off Latin-American atmosphere” of Nostromo required effort, Conrad explains, the London of The Secret Agent was not a matter of purpose but of chance and convenience. Conrad denies having any curiosity, a quality he values in The Secret Agent because it leads to the questioning of facts and the distrust of reputations. In the “Author’s Note,” Conrad wants to disavow interest in “gratuitous” pleasures or literary adventure (43). Instead, he claims that the anarchist story came to him: the conversation that produced the tale was so “casual,” Conrad reports, that he can no longer recall how it began. Conrad presents The Secret Agent as a narrative of uncertain origins. By claiming that his topic reflected no choice of his own, Conrad segregates the subject of the novel, the contamination of London, from his “purely artistic purpose” (41).²³

Conrad may be criticized as a “cosmopolitan” or commended as a “foreigner,” but either way these nominations assumed that qualities of belonging reflect attributes that cannot be chosen: they cannot be adopted, nor can they be relinquished. Moreover, critics suggest, the novelist’s attributes are expressed in his writing, where—as Garnett puts it—Conrad has translated foreign thoughts into English and into “London.” Garnett suggests that Conrad has made English and England cosmopolitan, but it may be rather that The Secret Agent projects, more than the novels before it, the syncretic and artificial conditions of English culture. Whereas Walpole finds in The Secret Agent a “new attitude,” I would suggest that the novel’s subject (cosmopolitan London) brings to light an attitude (naturalness) that persists throughout Conrad’s work. The Secret Agent, a novel set in London without a single character who is English or English only, may seem all the more “foreign” because it finds the deliberate effects of Englishness in the heart of domestic space. The novel’s title character, we are told, is “thoroughly domesticated,” as if comfort or familiarity must be created from the start (47). Conrad’s novel includes a range of experiences that one expects to find familiar: marriage, habits of perception, government institutions, and landmarks of local color, such as restaurants, shops, and city streets. Yet Conrad suggests that domestic culture is full of foreign activities, such as colonialism and European politics, as well as foreign people, those immigrants and cosmopolitans who make their home in the city. In The Secret Agent, Conrad attributes the characteristics of British culture to artful display and tactical promotion. His novel seeks to consider how inherent attributes are strategically produced and how national identities are shaped by conditions of collective expectation.

Conrad’s characters often proclaim, “things do not stand being looked into.”²⁴ This phrase constitutes a warning, but it is a warning that Conrad generally disregards: he knows that looking will disrupt social organization, and he is willing, even eager to take the risk. Marlow famously explains, in Heart of Darkness, that imperialism thrives on the activities and expressions that go without seeing: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”²⁵ Looking closely at “the conquest of the earth,” one sees not only the manifest ugliness of European imperialism but also the practiced indifference that allows hypocrisy to function; indifference is disrupted, Conrad suggests, by the critical pressure of excessive examination. Marlow is pointing not simply to racial discrimination and appropriations of land but to the heroic rhetoric (“the conquest of the earth”) that transforms ignoble acts into noble gestures. Conrad suggests that only by looking “too much,” only by looking more avidly than is necessary or required, can one assess or even discern the conditions of political complacence. In Marlow’s example, the excessive act of looking at rhetoric makes the more usual act of looking at bodies less normal and more arbitrary.

In general, excessive looking allows readers to notice the acts of merely sufficient perception in which they can no longer simply participate. Looking “too much” creates alternatives to socialized vision, as it does for the imagined worker in Conrad’s well-known credo, from the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim.”²⁶ Conrad hopes to make distracted observers out of “entranced” workers. In his novels, those who engage in excessive or unproductive looking are able to see, unlike those who are absorbed by habit, that perception is a social process rather than an automatic or natural response. The knowledge of social process allows characters to manipulate perception by making use of display and by recognizing the strategies of promotion employed by others.

In some ways, The Secret Agent shares with Conrad’s other novels a concern with verbal propaganda—one thinks of phrases such as “the conquest of the earth” in Heart of Darkness, the “one of us” refrain in Lord Jim, or the belief in “material interests” in Nostromo.²⁷ Yet The Secret Agent expands the repertoire of social persuasion, adding, to the verbal propaganda introduced by characters and by the narrator, the visual propaganda of the city: shop windows, fashioned bodies, and even a literal signpost. Conrad establishes an analogy between the self-conscious displays of secret agents, pornography shops, and Soho street signs and the novel’s display of facts, such as racial and social characteristics or the nature of family relations. Because Conrad equates his own strategies with the strategies of assimilation deployed by London criminals and detectives of indeterminate origin, The Secret Agent seems to express decadent values as well as to describe them. The novel suggests that some foreigners can pass as natives because, like Conrad, they know how to manipulate perception. Conrad’s foreigners assimilate not by becoming homogeneously English but by fitting their own mixed characteristics into the cosmopolitanism of London. The Secret Agent makes readers see national belonging as a performance of requisite effects, and it presents characters as everyday artists, whose skills of political manipulation rely on their knowledge of spectators rather than of life.²⁸

At the center of the novel is a plot to alter the perception of facts: an official of an unnamed foreign embassy plans an attack on the Greenwich Observatory because he wants to stimulate a crackdown on English liberty; the bombing will stimulate police action, the provocateur expects, by creating something to be policed. The aim of the bombing is simply the impression it will produce: the fear of crime and the sense that “science” is at risk (67). The bombing is a ruse, whose structure of pretense Conrad introduces in the first paragraph of the novel. The Secret Agent opens with a description of the Soho pornography shop owned by Adolf Verloc, a spy to the foreign embassy and the “secret agent” assigned to carry out the bombing:

The words “nominally” and “ostensible” convey the duplicity of the narrative’s world: Mr. Verloc has deputized his brother-in-law only in name; his shop is a business only in appearance. The opening paragraph yields several conditional statements, some of which seem to contradict the others: the shop is not really left in charge of the brother-in-law; the shop can be left in charge of the brother-in-law because there are very few customers; even when there are customers, practically none come when the brother-in-law is in charge; even if customers come when the brother-in-law is in charge, it does not matter because Mr. Verloc does not care about the shop, which is not his real business; and even if the shop were his real business and he did care about it and he did have customers and the customers did come during the day, it is not the brother-in-law but Mrs. Verloc who is in charge.

One learns at the beginning of the novel that pretense governs the arrangements of Verloc’s family and business. One learns later that the pretense of family is inseparable from the pretense of foreign crime: Mrs. Verloc, known as Winnie, marries to provide security for her “half-idiot” brother, Stevie; she encourages Verloc to involve Stevie in his business so that Verloc will want to keep him in the household; Verloc does not perceive the real cause of Winnie’s interest, just as Winnie does not perceive Verloc’s real business; finding Stevie at hand, Verloc uses him to transport the Greenwich bomb; however, Stevie drops the bomb accidentally, destroying not “science” but himself. One kind of domestic catastrophe replaces another, and the private affair leads to the discovery of the political debacle.

The novel begins with an account of verbal propaganda: Verloc may say that his brother-in-law is in charge of his business, but the family arrangement as well as the business are social fictions whose veneer of normalcy serves to keep less conventional arrangements from view. Unlike most of the characters, the reader can see the fictions because Conrad invokes the language of presentation, gesturing to less ostensible, less nominal details that he has not yet described. Elsewhere, in the voice of the Assistant Commissioner, Conrad offers an explicit analogy between the novel’s art and everyday social artifice. Like Conrad, the Assistant Commissioner knows that what counts as a meaningful fact depends one’s manner of speaking. Conversing with his supervisor, who wants information “only no details,” the Assistant Commissioner decides to adopt a “parenthetical manner” (143). In this way, he explains, “every little fact—that is, every detail—fitted with delightful ease.” Instead of subtracting details, as he was asked, or making details more important, the Assistant Commissioner speaks trivially, so that no detail seems trivial (less significant) in the least. For the novel, any designation of importance or irrelevance is not to be trusted because significance is a matter of presentation.

This is an insight that Conrad extends to the constituents of metropolitan London, where not only narratives but also places, people, and objects achieve social meaning through strategic display. Indeed, the narrative ruse in the opening paragraph seems, retrospectively, to echo the visual tricks that pervade the English scene. In the third paragraph of the novel, Conrad describes Verloc’s shop window, where strategic display is natural both to the genre of the window and to the genre of pornography:

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two and six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like the Torch, the Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.

The pornography shop provides camouflage for Verloc’s anarchist activities by making the appearance of strange, disheveled men seem normal. The shop is convenient for Verloc in many ways: it allows him to pretend to his colleagues that he is a fellow anarchist (in fact, he is a spy of a foreign embassy); it allows him to pretend to the foreign embassy that he is a spy (in fact, he is a police informer); it allows him to pretend to his wife and mother-in-law that he has a business (in fact, he is lazy and does very little). Like cosmopolitan London, as Conrad will come to describe it, the pornography shop is made of diverse, contradictory parts, such as the assorted paraphernalia that it sells: “photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls,” “a few numbers of ancient French comic publications,” and “a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title” as well as “bottles of marking ink” and “rubber stamps” (45–46). We might say that these are similar objects: the exotic origins of the first three items can be equated to the imperial origins of the “marking ink” (known also as “Indian ink,” made in China or Japan) and the “rubber stamps,” whose primary material is a natural product of empire. For most, however, the last two items are legible only as English conveniences—those everyday objects that aid and obscure the sale of eccentric goods. Indian ink and colonial rubber, central to global trade, are the products that make up England.

The marking ink and the stamps are useful because they allow customers to pretend, at any given moment, that they have come to purchase common objects rather than foreign magazines. However, since Verloc is not in fact trying to sell pornography, the ink and the stamps are useful in another way: they make the shop look authentic by projecting a pretense of respectability; that pretense is crucial to the genre of the shop. The low light in the window and the nondescript packages lend the shop a coyness that makes its other ruse—it is a meeting place for anarchists—less visible. Roland Barthes would call the ink and the stamps “useless details” because they serve to affirm Verloc’s reputation as a shopkeeper: they have no denotative content; rather, they convey the reality of the shop.²⁹ But Verloc understands the usefulness of so-called useless details.³⁰ Pretending to run a pornography shop requires the knowledge of pornography (what the shop sells) as well as the knowledge of how pornography is concealed (what the shop must claim to sell). To look naturally foreign, Conrad suggests, the pornography shop must display a deliberate Englishness.

The most striking example of this point comes in Conrad’s display of people. Over the course of the novel, the Assistant Commissioner poses as an anarchist and a “stranger” by speaking English all too well (187). Conrad suggests, as his reviewers do, that the deliberate choice of English is a defining characteristic of foreigners, yet, unlike his reviewers, Conrad suggests also that foreignness is a manner that anyone can adopt. The Assistant Commissioner transforms himself into a foreigner by stepping into a caricature that the narrative has generated. Assuming attributes he and we have learned to call “foreign,” the Assistant Commissioner investigates the source of the Greenwich bombing by fitting into its milieu. This investigation takes him to Verloc’s shop.

Conrad’s text provides an account of the “customers” who typically call at the shop and whose appearance and gestures the novel configures as the manner the Assistant Commissioner will appropriate. The customers are of two main types: “either very young men” or “men of a more mature age.” Of the latter group, it is said, they “had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments” (45). The reader encounters the physical description two chapters before being told who these older men are, before being told that, in fact, they are not customers at all. The physical description quickly becomes an apposition, a defining characteristic: “the evening visitors—the men with collars turned up and soft hats rammed down”—nod “familiarly” when they enter the shop (46). Once the “visitors” are named as “anarchists,” the apposition becomes the evidence for an identity that it has helped to create. The Secret Agent produces the conditions that make identities recognizable, imagining social roles by creating their characteristics.

The Assistant Commissioner becomes “foreign” because unremarkable aspects of his person become newly meaningful as specific attributes. He alters his appearance just as he altered his speech, changing not the details but the style; he refuses to call this strategy “a disguise” (148). With a “short jacket” and “low, round hat,” the Assistant Commissioner emphasizes “the length of his grave, brown face”; he gives himself “the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a very deliberate manner” (150). While the jacket and hat give new emphasis to the Assistant Commissioner’s features, his face and eyes in fact remain the same. Conrad suggests that there is pleasure in this process: the necessary physical traits are said to be “brought out wonderfully” by the strategic choice of clothing. The Assistant Commissioner’s “deliberate manner,” better than a “disguise,” suits him to his task: he is transformed into one of many “queer foreign fish”; he fits in among strangeness by looking as conspicuous as possible (150–51). The Assistant Commissioner becomes noticeable by taking notice, for the more closely he considers his activities, the more “unplaced” he feels (152). Checking his image in a sheet of glass, the police supervisor is “struck by his foreign appearance” (151) and then adopts the details the novel has attributed to anarchists and strangers. Deliberateness makes the Assistant Commissioner feel foreign, so much so that the characteristics of foreigners, invented as “characteristics” by the novel, become natural to him.

In the language of chance and opportunism—the very language that he uses to describe his own writing process in the later “Author’s Note”—Conrad renders the Assistant Commissioner’s “inspiration”:

He contemplated his own image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration raised the collar of his jacket. This arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward twist to the ends of his black moustache. He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his personal aspect caused by these small changes. “That’ll do very well,” he thought. “I’ll get a little wet, a little splashed—”

The “subtle modification,” intentional but inspired, affirms the recognition (the “foreign appearance”) that had provoked it. Some thirty pages later, at the shop, the Assistant Commissioner is taken for the foreigner he has become. Winnie Verloc, tending the front counter, notices that “he … wore his moustaches twisted up. In fact, he gave the sharp points a twist just then. His long, bony face rose out of a turned-up collar. He was a little splashed, a little wet. A dark man, with the ridge of the cheek-bone well defined under the slightly hollow temple. A complete stranger” (187). To Winnie, the Assistant Commissioner not only looks foreign but sounds foreign as well: “There was nothing foreign in his accent, except that he seemed in his slow enunciation to be taking pains with it. And Mrs Verloc, in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that some foreigners could speak better English than the natives” (187). A deliberate and precise English, combined with a “turned-up collar” and purposefully sharpened moustache, allows Winnie Verloc to recognize, as it were, that the stranger has come “from the Continent” (187). The Assistant Commissioner has performed foreignness by sounding as “English” as possible. Speaking deliberately is not a sign that the Assistant Commissioner knows his English well so much as a sign that he knows his signs: he knows that conveying foreignness has more to do with reputed truths than with actual ones.

The Assistant Commissioner has acquired this knowledge, the novel suggests, not by wandering through London but by working in the colonies: living as a foreigner abroad has made him something of a foreigner, and an anarchist, in England. His subordinates fear that he will “disorganize the whole system of supervision” (197). Like the Assistant Commissioner, Verloc, too, is not quite a local: he is “a foreign political spy” (208) and also “a natural-born British subject” (59). He is, Conrad tells us, “cosmopolitan enough,” which means he knows his way around London. Verloc’s experience of the world has taught him not to be fooled by apparent nominations: seeing that “No. 1 Chesham Square” is marked on a wall at least sixty yards away from the area it designates, Verloc is without “surprise or indignation” (53), for London’s “topographical mysteries,” the novel suggests, match his own. Both Verloc and the Assistant Commissioner possess a “mistrust of established reputations” (129).

The peculiar foreignness of Verloc, the Assistant Commissioner, and the pornography shop is echoed in the novel by two other artifacts: the Foreign Embassy, which sponsors the novel’s bombing incident, and “the little Italian restaurant round the corner,” where the Assistant Commissioner goes to polish his “strange” appearance. The Embassy is defined by a foreignness it cannot occupy: it must reside within the geographic boundaries of one country even as it remains the representative, by metonymy, of the other country it serves. Similarly, the Italian restaurant is a “peculiarly British institution” (152), whose “fraudulent cookery” could exist, would exist, nowhere in Italy. This fraudulence causes the patrons to lose “all their national and private characteristics,” the Assistant Commissioner observes. The people before him “seemed created for the Italian restaurant,” as if the place, in its artifice, attracts a fitting clientele or as if it makes its patrons fit by compromising the social categories that usually define them. The local authenticities of London—the turned-up collar, the twisted moustache, the Embassy, the Italian restaurant—are the products of cosmopolitan artifice. What is most foreign in Conrad’s novel is a strangeness invented at home, which is strange above all to those for whom things English are most familiar.

Conrad suggests in his novel that interpretation is limited by the meanings that characters and readers are able to recognize. For this reason, the novel presents “curiosity” as a crucial attribute both of spies and of detectives. For Conrad, the way people look—in what manner and with what preconceptions looking takes place—tells us most about them. It is thus, for example, that Verloc will attribute his wife’s “unreadable face” at the end of the novel not to his failed vision (and insensitivity) but to hers: “Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious” (216). Conrad describes Winnie’s “air of unfathomable indifference” (46), which he later attributes to her “philosophical, almost disdainful incuriosity” (216). Unlike the Assistant Commissioner, Winnie Verloc holds to an “uninquiring acceptance of facts” (155). Her sense that “things do not stand much looking into” repeats throughout the novel (172). Without looking into “facts,” Winnie accepts things as they seem and is unable to see the prejudices, stereotypes, and ruses that direct her vision. Curiosity, for Conrad, requires the deliberate perception both of objects and of history: one must notice that reputations are established in the space and time of narrative.

By alternating between omniscient narrative and free indirect discourse, often several times in a single paragraph, Conrad conflates the practice of the novel with practices of social perception, such that the reader’s knowledge is shaped by the way that characters read. Conrad’s characters assign the individuals they meet to cultural types they have observed or imagined in the past; they make these assignments by naming incidental details as significant characteristics and by conforming these characteristics to the types they have already imagined. Like Winnie, who thinks that the Assistant Commissioner sounds strange after she has already decided that he is a stranger, Mr. Vladimir of the Foreign Embassy fits Verloc’s appearance to the behavior he has diagnosed:

Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging remarks concerning Mr Verloc’s face and figure. The fellow was unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill. The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.

Vladimir, who thinks from the start that Verloc is lazy, incompetent, and fraudulent, confirms his judgment by finding in Verloc physical and mental characteristics that imply these behaviors. Although the passage begins with these characteristics, it is clear that Vladimir has noticed only those that will correspond to the stereotype he names in conclusion. The stereotype is the perspective that directs Vladimir’s judgment; it is what Barthes calls a “view,” a habit of description that organizes details into well-established frames.³¹ In Conrad’s work, the stereotype precedes the characteristics that seem to justify its invocation. Vladimir’s observation is ultimately both fixed and unmoored by its definitive origin: Verloc is said to be “fraudulent,” but the caricature that justifies this assessment is also something of a fiction, derived from the “American humour” Vladimir has taken seriously. Verloc embodies a falseness that is as false as the stereotype that confirms it.

Vladimir’s strategies of observation are comparable to those used by Verloc’s anarchist colleague, Comrade Ossipon, who relies on a theory of criminality devised by Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso’s theory, which was fashionable in the 1880s (when the novel is set), argued that criminals could be identified by visible marks on their bodies, such as large ears or poor eyesight. Ossipon, it is said, “was free from the trammels of conventional morality—but he submitted to the rule of science” (The Secret Agent, 259). After Winnie has killed Verloc, Ossipon looks at her with new eyes: “He gazed at her, and invoked Lombroso, as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite saint. He gazed scientifically. He gazed at her cheeks, at her nose, at her eyes, at her ears … Bad! … Fatal! […] Not a doubt remained … a murdering type” (259). Ossipon had planned to seduce and marry Winnie for her inheritance, but his assessment of her as a “murdering type” leads him to steal the money and abandon her on a boat bound for the Continent. Ossipon’s judgment is instrumental in his actions: transforming Winnie’s body into a type, he transforms his act into an imperative. As Vladimir looks at Verloc, so Ossipon looks at Winnie: in each case, the perception imposed reflects not curiosity but conformity; Vladimir and Ossipon see what they expect or want to find.

Both of these examples complicate Ian Watt’s famous account of “delayed decoding,” a method of description he ascribes to Conrad’s work. The method functions, Watt explains, by combining “the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their meaning” (175). The Secret Agent does offer many examples that correspond to Watt’s account, but I want to suggest a different lesson. Take, for example, Verloc’s perception of Privy Councillor Wurmt, who becomes a “person” over the course of several sentences. For Verloc, everything at the embassy initially seems strange:

Another door opened noiselessly, and Mr Verloc immobilizing his glance in that direction saw at first only black clothes. The bald top of a head, and a drooping dark grey whisker on each side of a pair of wrinkled hands. The person who had entered was holding a batch of papers before his eyes and walked up to the table with a rather mincing step, turning the papers over the while. Privy Councillor Wurmt, Chancelier d’Ambassade, was rather short-sighted.

The effect of the unfolding is to delay recognition for the reader, much as it is delayed for Verloc, and also to force the reader to participate in the assembly of an identity produced in the collection of details. The reader is given time—and literal space on the page—to notice and join in this process. While the delay between the “black clothes” and the “person” can be attributed in part to Verloc’s “decoding,” it is also caused by a more physical impediment: the Privy Councillor has covered his face with papers. There are really two “delays” here, and the second makes a joke of the first. While it appears at first that Verloc’s recognition is delayed by his perception, the reader sees at the end of the passage that it is not Verloc’s sight but the Privy Councillor’s vision that is most to blame. In this passage, perception is a way of seeing and also a characteristic that informs and differentiates persons who are seen. Conrad will take this idea further in the later examples involving Vladimir and Ossipon, whose perception is constituted by details they have already learned to look for. “Decoding” in these cases follows a different progression: the “meaning” that characters seek to “make out” generates the “messages” that they interpret. The messages are thus never entirely “outside” perspective. Cultural types are affirmed, even constituted, in the process of recognition.³²

At the end of The Secret Agent, one sees that characters, like Conrad’s readers, are reluctant to embrace their role in the novel’s fictions. For this reason, they transform individual acts into passive constructions. Verloc calls Stevie’s death a “pure accident” because Stevie did not mean to trip and because Verloc did not mean for him to die (230); a detective describes “the casual manner” in which Stevie’s address “had come into his possession,” even though he has surreptitiously ripped it from the clothes among Stevie’s remains (109). Even Winnie’s mother makes inevitable those facts whose intentions might bring discomfort, telling herself that Winnie married Verloc as a matter of “providence” rather than sacrifice (72). Finally, when Winnie commits suicide, her death is reported in a newspaper as “an impenetrable mystery” because neither she nor the cause of her distress can be identified (266). The last lines of the newspaper article repeat throughout the last chapter of the novel. They are lines that the anarchist Comrade Ossipon has memorized: “An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair” (original emphasis). Ossipon, who had imagined a world governed by inevitable truths, is haunted by the “destiny” for which he is responsible. He sees that he is the (secret) agent of the “impenetrable mystery.”

In Conrad’s vision of English life, domestic ease exists only through the efforts of cultivated naturalness. Winnie Verloc is noted for “the masterly achievement of instinctive tact” (172) and her husband for “calculated indiscretions” (183). Winnie’s “tact” is like the other deliberate characteristics produced throughout the novel, but it condenses in a phrase the structure of description that Conrad elsewhere illustrates in a paragraph or in several chapters: Winnie’s tact is a characteristic that is formative as soon as it is formulated. It is best achieved without achievement because it is, like other local truths, a mastery that depends on the invisibility of effort. These kinds of artifacts are beneath notice because they lack noticeable history. To make this history visible, Conrad represents English culture as a social process.

One can hear in the wit of Conrad’s descriptions the echo of Lady Bracknell, who famously proposes that to have a fashionable address one need only change the fashion.³³ Like Conrad, Wilde was an unnatural Englishmen: he had to learn how naturalness looks.³⁴ Invoking habitual phrases while also displaying them, Wilde’s epigrams allowed readers to see their own expectations. Conrad extends Wilde’s analysis of art to the analysis of everyday culture. As Wilde famously puts it, with only some irony,

Wilde’s blurred “gas-lamps” and “monstrous shadows” could have set the scene for Conrad’s novel, which is full of similar, and similarly conventional, opacity. A few paragraphs after his discussion of the Impressionist fog, Wilde remarks that “nations and individuals” like to imagine that art refers to them, but rather it is art, Wilde contends, to which “human consciousness” refers (“Decay of Lying,” 1087). Conrad takes this argument further: he presents adaptability, the projection of naturalness, as the source of English nature.

Conrad aims to make readers see the perceptual norms that keep people and cultures in place. If Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s “most profound meditation on the difficult process of giving himself to England and to English,” as James Clifford has argued, The Secret Agent asks what England and English are, displaying acts of “giving” as strategies of making (96). The Secret Agent suggests that fastidious editing and infamous lies originate, not over-there in the colonies, but over-here in Soho: the metropolitan culture that Marlow lies to protect, it turns out, has many origins and many lies within it. By imitating spectators, Conrad aims to change the way they see. By creating distrust for established reputations, Conrad creates a less natural conception of Englishness and a more cosmopolitan tradition of British writing.