Nothing demonstrates Conrad’s extraordinary creative range more clearly than his move from the leisurely, semi-mythical sonorities of Nostromo (1904), with its epic and mock-epic conventions, to the claustrophobic intensity of The Secret Agent (1907): Conrad’s dynamite novel. Explosions, both real and imagined, are at the heart of The Secret Agent, just as they dominate and define the other novels in the subgenre, which combines melodrama, crime fiction, and, sometimes, science fiction.[1] As the name suggests, the subgenre was a response to the consequences of the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel in 1867 and its adoption by radical groups as a preferred weapon; dynamite has many times the explosive power of gunpowder. It was “relatively easy and inexpensive to manufacture, and small groups or even individuals could handle the greatest destructive force ever before known in the history of civilization” (Melchiori, 2). Dynamite provided determined groups a credible way to oppose state power; in England, that group was usually the Irish Fenians. From 1881 to 1885, the Fenians carried out a number of attacks, focusing on London: the London Times offices in 1883; the Underground in 1883, 1884, and 1885; and the House of Commons and Westminster in 1885. These attacks convinced the English that terrorism was something even a relatively open society needed to fear; the dynamite novel was an expression of that anxiety.[2] Because dynamite fiction very often reflected and was inspired by a society that feared an internal, not a foreign, enemy, an enemy created by the very structure of English society, the politics of the genre tended to be reactionary. The fiction treated the radicals as noxious misfits: cruel, monstrous, criminally insane, or sometimes, as is the case with “Zero” in Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s The Dynamiter (1885), bumbling fools. It seldom identified the social ills that might lead people to adopt radical positions: poverty, class divisions, imperial wars, or, generally, an unjust social system, though Grant Allen takes small steps in the latter direction in For Maimie’s Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite. One of the protagonists, the brilliant chemist, Sydney Chevenix (a likely model for the Professor[3] in The Secret Agent), works obsessively on the creation of a noiseless explosive. As Melchiori noted (228–232), Chevenix revels in the military superiority his creation will give the British in their wars with “a lot of uncivilized enemies . . . the unsophisticated savages [won’t] even know they’re being shot.” They will be killed in droves. “There’s an engine of civilization for you!” (24) Chevenix cries, enthusiastically. Chevenix’s assistant, the Polish Stanislas Benyowski, is a nihilist who dreams of assassinating “enemies of the people.” Allen asks his reader to condemn both Benyowski and Chevenix for their willingness to use violence and terror to advance their causes, whether in support of an idea, nihilism, or a state, Great Britain. But Allen never criticizes English society, and his nihilists spend their time and ferocity attacking each other. The Secret Agent and the two anarchist stories Conrad wrote at the same time are unusual, possibly unique, in that they blame both the radicals and the cultures, foreign and domestic, that fuel the radical outrage.[4]
“An Anarchist” (1906), “The Informer” (1906), and The Secret Agent (1907) all deal both with radical ideologies and with the class systems that provoke those ideologies. Though all three works condemn early twentieth-century socialists and anarchists, they all attack the French and British class systems more sharply and unequivocally. Indeed, they demonstrate the truth of Conrad’s own comments about The Secret Agent in his “Author’s Note”: “I have no doubt . . . that there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist, I won’t say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more concentrated purpose than any of them” (8). Most of the radicals are presented dismissively, but their causes are not. In the short stories, Conrad’s irony always works in at least two directions, with the middle-class narrators essentially unconscious of the way their stories implicitly undermine class hierarchies, hierarchies which are under explicit attack by the radicals, so both the radicals and their anarchist ideals and the narrators and their less-conscious acceptance of bourgeois conventions are under scrutiny and attack. The Secret Agent has no narrator, so the irony and the narrative’s point of view—the values of the novel—are harder to pin down than those in the stories. The irony is so generally corrosive, in fact, that it might appear to dissolve everything it touches: governmental systems, both actual and those proposed by the radicals; the British police force; international diplomacy; the English aristocracy, middle class, and working class; even the institution of marriage and family. But though The Secret Agent has no heroes, no characters or institutions left untouched by its pervasive and scathing irony, it has one central villain: the English class system, a system condemned at the moral heart of the novel. The short stories, “An Anarchist” and “The Informer,” written at the same time, with similar subjects, provide a useful window on how to read the irony in the novel. The radicals may have advocated demonic means to end England’s iniquitous class system, but the narratives’ sympathies are ultimately with them, with Conrad’s radical devils.
The eponymous hero of “An Anarchist” (which first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, August, 1906) is a young Parisian workman, Paul, who loudly embraces anarchism in a drunken rage during his twenty-fifth birthday party. Jailed and released, he is annexed by criminals who justify their robberies by pretending anarchist principles. They force him to participate in a bank robbery; he’s easily caught and jailed again, this time on a penal island off the coast of South America. He escapes with two of his anarchist “comrades,” whom he kills once they’ve rowed him to safety. A ship strands him on another island, where he’s enslaved by the manager of a huge cattle ranch owned by B.O.S. Ltd., a company famous throughout the world for its processed beef products. The manager, Harry Gee, needs someone to maintain the company steam launch, and when he finds Paul wandering the island, he guesses he is an escaped prisoner and forces him to work for the company. He becomes a literal slave. The narrator offers to help Paul escape, but he has nowhere to go, and a life of repeated betrayals has left him in absolute, hopeless despair.
The long, sardonic attack on advertising that opens “An Anarchist” runs precisely counter to the attitudes and tones of Harper’s, the popular, advertisement-rich American magazine where the story first appeared:
B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The “art” illustrating that “literature” represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease, weakness—perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen—even as the love of the father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings. (406)
The contempt for the advertisements representing this meat extract could hardly be more plain, but the dim-witted, bourgeois narrator exempts the company that produces it from that blame: “Of course the capital of a country must be productively employed. I have nothing to say against the company” (406). Conrad’s irony works first against the fatuous claims of advertisements, then against the fatuous narrator, who creates a false distinction between advertisements and the companies that commission them. The actual product, the material extracted from slaughtered cattle celebrated by pamphlets distributed in many languages throughout the world, is as bogus as its ads; the narrator’s claim that B.O.S. Ltd. makes “productive” use of capital reflects the point of view of someone wearing ideological blinders, unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to grasp the predatory nature of international corporations. In this way, the narrator adopts the point of view of Harper’s Magazine itself. During the early years of the twentieth century, business was always good in Harper’s, for it created the wealth that underpins the pleasant, upper middle-class lives of the characters in its domestic comedies and dramas. In Harper’s world, business is stern and demanding, but also glamorous; the university is only a lighthearted way station for young men “going into business.”
But in this story, as in Nostromo, the world is increasingly ruled by ruthless, international corporations, and business is the ultimate villain. Stephen Donovan articulates this well in his essay, “Magic Letters and Mental Degradation: Advertising in ‘An Anarchist’ and ‘The Partner.’” “Conrad wrote ‘An Anarchist’ in a climate of growing cynicism about modern business and, in particular, the unchecked might of a new industrial entity: the vertically-integrated corporation, supported by vast capital reserves and exercising direct control over every stage in the production process” (76). As Donovan demonstrates, Conrad regarded the true anarchists as the wealthy capitalists, whose laws are purely impersonal and economic.[5] Its attack on advertising, Donovan adds, proves that the story “signally fails to follow the requirements of fiction magazines, then under pressure from advertisers to publish upbeat tales . . . that would put readers in the mood to buy” (85). When the lepidopterist-narrator protests “Of course the capital of a country must be productively employed” and that he has “nothing to say against the company,” the irony is obvious. B.O.S. Ltd. produces and aggressively markets a noxious pseudo-food, and in the name of that company, one of its managers keeps one of its employees miserable and enslaved.
Like its attitude toward business and advertising, the narrative structure and tone of “An Anarchist” was foreign to Harper’s. The cynicism of the narrator, a butterfly collector, casts a shadow over his story. He first claims that he is not gullible enough to swallow the extravagant advertising of B.O.S. Ltd. This should demonstrate, he says, the truth of the unfortunate Paul’s story; we should believe the butterfly collector because he is a skeptic. He next mocks the unrealistic romances and dramas that appeared in Harper’s. “The story,” he tells us,
contains all the elements of pathos and fun, of tragedy and comedy, of sensation and surprise—whereas from rational conduct there is nothing to be expected of a touching, instructive, and amusing nature. I am sure to be misunderstood, but I disdain to labor a point which to me seems absolutely self-evident. I will only remark that the whole body of fiction bears me out. Its main theme, I believe, is love. But it has never entered any writer’s head to take rational love for a subject. We should yawn. Only the complicated absurdities of that psycho-physiological state can rouse our interest and sympathy. (406–407)
With this aside, the narrator and, by association, Conrad himself attacks Harper’s and its readers. Conrad presents himself (very indirectly, of course, through the faintly absurd lepidopterist-narrator) as writing something that (the narrator claims) is strictly true but will therefore have only a limited readership. By Harper’s standards, it is a disagreeable story that ends unsatisfactorily; there is no virtue to be rewarded, and evil remains unpunished. Harper’s Magazine paid well, and Conrad needed the money, but “An Anarchist” reveals an angry contempt for Harper’s advertising, for conventional, bourgeois fiction, and for its audience.
Like “An Anarchist,” “The Informer” (which also first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, in December 1906), was written deliberately against the grain—a magazine story that mocks magazine stories and their readers. “The Informer” also has a flawed, eponymous hero, an unreliable narrator, and a sardonic tone: all uncharacteristic of Harper’s fiction.[6] An anticipation of The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), the story is set in London and concerns a society of anarchists infiltrated by Sevrin, the informer, who prefigures Razumov in the later novel. He falls in love with the wealthy “lady revolutionist” of the group—the predecessor of Natalia Halden and the likely successor of Vera Trotsky, another sympathetic “lady revolutionist” in Allen’s For Maimie’s Sake. The mysterious Mr. X, an internationally-known anarchist and pamphleteer, travels to London to discover who has been leaking the anarchist cell’s intentions to the police. Because of Mr. X’s elaborate ruse, Sevrin reveals himself to the anarchists in his effort to save the woman he loves from arrest, then commits suicide.
The narrative form of this story is striking. Conrad invented an oddly elaborate frame; a friend in Paris, a collector of striking personalities, puts the primary narrator in touch with Mr. X, “the greatest destructive publicist that ever lived” (131). The primary narrator is a comfortable, easily shocked collector of Chinese bronzes and porcelain. The dangerous Mr. X is also a collector and shares an intelligent interest in the narrator’s precious collection, protected from the rest of his house by a fire-proof door. The densely middle-class narrator and the incendiary pamphleteer strike up an odd acquaintance and meet regularly to share meals at a fashionable restaurant, where Mr. X tells the tale of Sevrin and the woman he calls “the Lady Amateur,” using a title that mocks her interest in radical politics—she has no real understanding of the cruel and dangerous world of anarchists. She joins the group because she finds its transgressiveness exciting.
Unlike the primary narrator, Mr. X is actually a writer with a cynical understanding of what sells to the reading public. At this stage in his career, Conrad himself had not managed to make a satisfactory living with his pen, but Mr. X has made a fortune selling his pamphlets to the bourgeoisie:
What I have acquired has come to me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed gratis to the hungry and oppressed, but from the hundreds of thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeois. You know that my writings were at one time the rage, the fashion—the thing to read with wonder and horror, to turn your eyes up at my pathos . . . . or else to laugh in ecstasies at my wit. (133)
Mr. X has made his fortune, in other words, from selling his writing to the middle-class readers of Harper’s Magazine. “Don’t you know yet,” he adds,
that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of vestment and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and danger of real ache and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. (133)
In “An Anarchist,” the narrator explains that the reading public is amused by the “imbecility” of their fellow human beings. The pathetic story of the betrayed working man, Paul, “contains all the elements of pathos and fun, of tragedy and comedy, of sensation and surprise” (406). The unhappy life of this working class Parisian is merely an entertainment. In “The Informer,” the second narrator, the radical pamphleteer Mr. X, maintains that bourgeois readers love sensation for its own sake because their lives are empty, “all a matter of vestment and gesture.” The primary narrator himself, who protects his expensive collection so zealously, evinces elaborate disdain for anarchists, calling Mr. X “a kind of rare monster.” He responds in horror to Mr. X’s claim that “There’s no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and violence” (132). Yet he is fascinated by Mr. X’s story and admits “there was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of a least one monarchy” (132).[7] This first narrator is therefore very much like prosperous, middle-class magazine readers, shuddering delightedly at the dinner table as they listen to stories out of a bourgeois nightmare, “full of lean jaws and wild eyes” (132).[8] No wonder Conrad created such an elaborate cordon sanitaire to separate himself from the teller of this tale. The smug, self-satisfied collector of bronzes and porcelain, much like the typical Harper’s reader, enjoys hearing “stories” of the poor and of the futile anarchists who have little chance of changing a social order that keeps middle-class readers and their possessions safe, like the narrator’s collection, behind fire-proof doors.
The most influential critics of the politics in The Secret Agent in the 1960s, J. Hillis Miller, Eloise Knapp Hay, and Avrom Fleishman, represented the novel’s politics as something of a side-show. In Poets of Reality, Hillis Miller argues that Conrad’s fiction demonstrates that “[a]ll human ideals, even the ideal of fidelity, are lies. They are lies in the sense that they are human fabrications. They derive from man himself and are supported by nothing outside him” (17). The Secret Agent represents the clearest and greatest example of this existential nihilism. All men in the monstrous world of London, Hillis Miller contends, “agree that life is a game with rules everyone must obey, that many of these conventions cannot be talked about openly, and that nothing must be done to upset the delicate balance between thief and policeman, anarchist and reactionary ambassador. All of these classes of men deny their cooperation with the others. All are more-or-less consciously living a lie. They are alike in their refusal to look for the truth behind the surface of things, and in their determination to maintain the status quo.” Society, he adds, is a machine, a “manmade machine” that “has ended by making men, and by determining their existence within a framework of which many of them are not aware and which they do not wish to question” (41–42). This brilliantly acerbic analysis is compelling, but if we accept it, not only do all of the political positions taken by the characters become absurd, but the novel itself becomes depoliticized. All of the characters are posturing over the abyss, and this is the novel’s central message: human beings “are more-or-less consciously living a lie.”
Though neither identifies Conrad as an existential nihilist, both Eloise Knapp Hay and Avrom Fleishman also fail to take seriously the various political positions represented in The Secret Agent. “The revolutionists of Conrad’s novel,” Hay writes, “neither set the world on fire nor rise to sterile heroisms. Their conspiracies are worse than vain; they achieve disaster inadvertently: the gory destruction of a feeble-minded boy, the suicide by drowning of a conscientious cockney woman” (219). And Fleishman agrees that the novel reflects Conrad’s organicism—a “politics” that rejects political systems. The narrative point of view in The Secret Agent provides “an ironic vision because Conrad’s fundamental social value was the organic community, while the present status of men is that of isolation from each other, alienation from the social whole, and, in consequence, loneliness and self-destruction” (188). So Fleishman’s position is that the novel is purely satirical; Conrad’s “true” politics are consistent—he was a champion of “the organic community” in all his works. In Fleishman’s reading, The Secret Agent is an unremitting, critical satire of the individuals in the novel, none of whom act to strengthen community.
The position that The Secret Agent is a study in nihilism, that all systems represented in the novel are held up to the same caustic scrutiny and all are found deficient—indeed, that all humanly-devised systems are meretricious lies that hide what are actually webs of self-interest—is easy to support. Most of the revolutionaries are frauds, beginning with the self-consciously fraudulent Adolph Verloc. Karl Yundt is merely a vicious man with a vicious ideology that mirrors his personality. Comrade Alexander Ossipon, pseudo-scientist/author of a (likely pornographic) pamphlet entitled “The Corroding Vices of the Middle Classes” and lecturer on socialism and “hygiene” (probably a reference to the use of condoms), uses his political position to justify his conquests of the young women who support him. We might include the Professor and even Stevie on this list: their radical political positions appear to derive from their physical, mental, and psychological deficiencies. And the contempt extends beyond the revolutionaries. Through much of the novel the tone is coldly dismissive of their opponents as well, of those upholding Britain’s social values: whether the novel deprecates Inspector Heat for focusing primarily on advancing and maintaining his career; the assistant commissioner, more concerned with his own, often unhappy domestic situation than maintaining the public order; the home secretary, a nearly fossilized bureaucrat, or the man on the street who relishes the spectacle of fallen horses.[9] If the tone of The Secret Agent were consistently ironic, distanced, and semi-comic, then it would be reasonable to assert that the dismissal of the political positions of its characters as merely a superficial expression of their personalities, and it would be equally reasonable to claim that the narrative itself floats above all politics, endorsing only existential nihilism or an essentially apolitical organicism.[10]
Yet, as in Nostromo, certain key passages express a moral outrage that forces the reader to confront social ills embedded in England’s social and political system, ills that cry out for reform—perhaps for radical reform. After Stevie is killed, Winnie remembers their life together, including scenes from their terrible childhood, when she tried to protect him from their father’s abuse:
She remembered brushing the boy’s hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite so badly scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s rage (not for very long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a thunder-clap. (183)
Here, as in The Secret Agent’s great predecessor, Bleak House,[11] the suffering of children is a moral touchstone: an evil that demands not ironic distance but emotional engagement and a search for remedies. Other touches of genuine pathos are sprinkled (admittedly, sparingly) throughout the narrative. We might recall the scene in the Verloc bedroom after Verloc has heard the sneering ultimatum from Vladimir that he must instigate a bombing outrage or lose his job. The narrative provides numerous reasons to despise Verloc, who is grotesquely fat and lazy, a professional hypocrite who lives in the middle of a concentric circle of lies. Yet in a handful of passages, he is treated as just another flawed and struggling human being; in the bedroom scene we witness his lonely isolation, highlighted by his desire to protect Winnie from the ugly details of his secret life and by their isolation from each other, each with concerns that the other cannot share or understand. The assistant commissioner is a far more attractive figure, but we see his professional and personal struggles, briefly, from the same perspective. He requires solace in his club from the stresses of his professional and personal life; he spends two hours each day playing whist with other men needing the same refuge:
He entered his club to play from five to seven, before going home to dinner, forgetting for those two hours whatever was distasteful in his life, as though the game were a beneficent drug for allaying the pangs of moral discontent. . . . [T]hey all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers, as if it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence. (82)
The moral heart of the novel, the place where the novel’s pathos is most sharply focused, occurs in one of the greatest artistic representations of moral outrage in twentieth-century English literature: during the funeral procession to Winnie’s mother’s final home. Winnie’s mother fears Verloc will tire of supporting her as well as Stevie, so she lies her way into an alms house for publican widows—separating herself from her children, the only connection to human community she appears to have. The journey to her new home, which will also be her grave,[12] is accomplished by a cab driver who is a stand-in for Charon, the ferryman of the dead. The cabman beats his wretched horse, and this upsets Stevie so badly he climbs down from the cab to walk until his sister scolds him back to his seat beside the driver. The cabbie tells him of his poverty, his hard life, and his wife and four hungry children. After they’ve left their mother in her shabby, final home, Stevie walks to the bus with Winnie and works hard to articulate this profound injustice:
“Poor brute, poor people!” was all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a stop with an angry splutter: “Shame!” Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity. That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other—at the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!
He sums up his feelings succinctly: “Bad world for poor people” (131–132).
I find these passages heartbreaking; there is nothing coolly ironic about the treatment of human suffering in The Secret Agent. Winnie’s circumstances force her to choose between her beau, the young, attractive butcher’s son, and the grotesque but far richer Verloc; her love for her mother and, especially, Stevie require her to choose Verloc, so she effectively prostitutes herself. No one is to blame for this. In another work (Joyce’s story, “The Boarding House,” is just one of many examples), Winnie’s mother would have connived to ensure Winnie chose the more financially secure suitor, but here Winnie’s mother knows nothing of Winnie’s lonely sacrifice, just as Winnie later knows nothing of her mother’s equally lonely sacrifice, for which there is also no one to blame. Over and over in The Secret Agent, we are shown social evils, the “Shame!” as Stevie puts it, “his sense of indignation and horror at one sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other—at the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor kids at home” (132). As Winnie points out to Stevie at the end of this scene, cogently enough, the system itself is to blame for these injustices, a system kept in place by men like Verloc, the assistant commissioner, Sir Ethelred, and the police: “Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have” (133). In the economy of The Secret Agent, Winnie is absolutely right, and Conrad’s analysis of this systemic villainy has a great deal in common with The Communist Manifesto.
Though too steeped in irony to be suitable for the radical newspapers with the rousing titles (The Torch, The Gong) sold in Verloc’s shop, the opening pages of The Secret Agent might have appeared in a description of London written by a bona fide Marxist:
Through the park railings [Verloc’s] glances beheld 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, and solitary women followed at a long distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a leather belt over his tight-fitting coat. Carriages went bowling by, mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the folded hood. And a peculiarly London sun—against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot—glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow. Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold. There were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of walls, on the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and on the broad back of Mr Verloc’s overcoat, where they produced a dull effect of rustiness. . . . He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye. All these people had to be protected. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury. They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected; and the source of their wealth had to be protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country; the whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour. (15–16)
Once we have read the earlier short stories, we know how to read the irony in this passage. Conrad describes a social order that produces an idle, privileged class needing vigilant protection from the “unhygienic,” laboring masses. Verloc, one very peculiar arm of the London police force, along with the more conventional constabulary, help maintain this unjust homeostasis.
The nightmarish scene of the cab ride crossing London is precipitated by Winnie’s mother’s intuitive recognition of the financial basis of her family’s relationship with Adolph Verloc. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously claims that, in a bourgeois society, the cash nexus stands at the heart of every relationship, even the most personal and intimate: “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (58). The Verloc marriage stands at the center of The Secret Agent, and the foundation of that marriage is financial. Winnie married Verloc because he had the financial resources to support Winnie, Winnie’s mother, and, especially, Stevie. Conrad emphasizes the sordid nature of that financial transaction by making their home a porn shop on a seedy side of town. Winnie cannot be blamed for her decision to prostitute herself; her sacrifice is a grim one. At the same time, her deception of Verloc, who believed Winnie loved him for himself, is equally grim: calculated and cold. But the rigid British class system offers her no reasonable alternative. If she marries her own true love, the butcher’s son, she must leave Stevie to his own inadequate devices.
“An Anarchist,” “The Informer,” and The Secret Agent all provide what is essentially a Marxist analysis of bourgeois society. The poor are victims of a rigid class system held in place by the police and a complex system of economic, legal, and social injustice. This seems to me to be nearly indisputable. The only other question to ask is this: Does Conrad provide a solution? As both Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Lenin ask (the latter only five years before The Secret Agent): What is to be done?
Most of the radicals devoted to overthrowing the system in Conrad’s three works are frauds or secret agents working for the police. Anarchists are simply thieves in “An Anarchist,” and Paul’s socialist lawyer is a careless careerist with no real interest in social justice. In The Secret Agent, Karl Yundt is a dried-up, vicious charlatan, and Ossipon an intellectually empty sensualist. But in “The Informer,” the second narrator, the radical pamphleteer, contrasts favorably with the comfortably dense, complacently bourgeois narrator; Mr. X is given all the most cogent lines, and his disdain for the middle class is validated by the text and goes unchallenged. In The Secret Agent, the moral spokesman is Stevie, and he acts (ineffectually, of course) against the evils of the world. Michaelis and his naïve Marxism are treated with real sympathy. His story, quite similar to Paul’s in “An Anarchist,” is pathetic; he was a harmless young man swept up in a movement he was too limited to understand or control. He is easily dismissed because he is pathetic, grotesquely obese, and his long imprisonment has made him incapable of answering any challenge to his simple ideas. But he and his Marxist position are supported by the wealthy, aristocratic Lady Patroness, one of the few, relatively admirable figures in the novel. Michaelis is treated quite gently; he has a sweet, almost angelic nature, and for him, the establishment of a workers’ paradise does not require a violent revolution. His Marxism is rather naïve, but it is presented fairly and accurately. Here is how he characterizes his political creed to the other radicals in Verloc’s parlor:
All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists . . . . History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists. (37)
This is not only a pretty good synopsis of some of the key elements of Marxism, an essential part of it is proven accurate in the economy of the novel. When Michaelis claims that “ideas that are born in [men’s] consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events,” when he articulates a materialist historiography, in other words, that stresses the importance of people’s material circumstances over their ideas, he echoes Conrad’s representations of men’s consciousness and their ideas in the novel. The Professor’s ideas, for example, stem in large part from his circumstances; as someone who grew up in a poor background, and as a disappointed, embittered academic, his social and economic circumstances lead to his embrace of anarchism—his ideas, and the ideas of the other characters in the novel, have material origins.
Marx and Engle’s The German Ideology (written in 1845–1846 but left unpublished until 1932) might be the clearest and most direct source of information about the relationship between the bourgeois subject and culture, about the ways the bourgeois individual is influenced and, ultimately, created by his or her culture. Here is one of the passages devoted to the creation of the bourgeois subject in The German Ideology:
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
So, as we’ve already heard from Michaelis, the material conditions of people’s lives determine their thinking, their very being: “As individuals express their life, so they are.”
The German Ideology describes the history of economic relations before the rise of the bourgeoisie: from families to tribes (based on families) to agricultural collectives and towns including slaves, laborers, tradesmen, overlords, and finally to an aristocracy and kings. These circumstances, including all the interactions among the members of the various classes, create the consciousness of the individuals.
The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with . . . material activity . . . , the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux [effusion, flowing out] of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.
Marx was the first great, secular philosopher to suggest that human beings are controlled and even, in a sense, created by economic and cultural forces they neither control nor entirely understand; that is a central observation and claim that undergirds Marxist theory. It is also a central observation and claim informing all of Conrad’s greatest fiction.
The two white traders in “An Outpost of Progress” represent Conrad’s most explicit examples of the bourgeois subject. They have no ideas of their own—their consciousness has been created for them by their culture. Kayerts and Carlier, he writes,
were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotions and principles, every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd—to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. (Tales of Unrest, 79)
“An Outpost of Progress” is Conrad’s most naturalistic story; he treats his characters as though they are experimental subjects. Take two mediocre creations of a bourgeois society, Conrad tells us, place them in an alien environment, and here is what must happen.
That objective distance between the narrative voice and the central figures closes in Lord Jim: the central character is treated much less objectively; the secondary narrator, Marlow, loves him, and most readers want him to succeed. So Jim’s lack of autonomy is less obvious; Jim is the hero of the novel, and we want our heroes to be self-actuated. But Jim is nearly as much a creature of his material circumstances as Kayerts and Carlier. He decides to become a sailor because of his economic circumstances; he was one of five sons, so he needed to support himself independently of the small estate, the parish living his father had inherited. He grew up reading adventure fiction, so he makes a crucial life decision to go to sea based on novels that more-or-less slavishly follow culturally-determined formulae. The ideas he imbibes from adventure novels, in other words, are not his own. And those ideas are the productions of a self-justifying, bourgeois culture. After he makes a criminal mistake—choosing to save his life by abandoning the passengers of his ship—he spends the rest of his life attempting to convince himself and anyone he encounters that he is an English gentleman, attempting to live up to what, in the novel, proves to be an arbitrary and often inhuman code of conduct that guides his actions and even his thoughts. So Jim’s actions and thoughts are determined, from beginning to end, by his material circumstances and by his culture.
The Professor shares Karl Yundt’s misanthropy, but he is treated quite differently. Born to lower-class parents, he is prevented from pursuing an academic career by his class and his unprepossessing physiognomy. His Nietzschean disdain for the middle class is also unattractive, but, like Stevie, he is a sincere moral agent. He is not merely seeking revenge on a world that refuses to recognize and reward his talents:
The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor’s indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as an agent of his [own] ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent . . . . (66)
As I hope I have shown above, “the established social order” is the ultimate villain in these three works, so the Professor is sanctioned by the text to work against that order. The Professor is the most cogent (though not the only) spokesman for the novel; he is also its unacknowledged, and unacknowledgeable, hero. Like another great work of art, like Paradise Lost, Conrad’s fiction of 1906 and 1907 evinces real sympathy for the Devil. It also conveys a radical, Marxist disdain for contemporary bourgeois English society, and it articulates a materialist approach to the creation of the bourgeois subject. Overall, though The Secret Agent honors the values of Great Britain—freedom of thought in an open society, a society protected by a long tradition of civic stability—it also registers real disgust for the complacency of the middle classes in Great Britain, a complacency that seems impervious to the plight of the poor and that takes a vicarious pleasure in the spectacle of anarchists fighting desperately and vainly for social justice.
Though the editors of the Cambridge Secret Agent, Bruce Harkness and Sid Reid, claim in their introduction that “Conrad does not seem to have been influenced” by earlier dynamite fiction (XXX), Sarah Cole accurately describes the generic origins of The Secret Agent in At the Violet Hour. “The novel itself, composed, it should be stressed, well after the period it depicts, is so replete with characters and plots out of that earlier period as to read like a handbook of late Victorian conventions for construing the anarchist scene. So, for instance, the idea that anarchism and violence are inescapable partners is writ into the saga as a premise; the presence of dynamite is a linchpin of the text; the anarchists in The Secret Agent fall into typologies as they so often did in the literature of the period, each portraying some aspect of the terrorist; semificitionalized events like the Rome conference to which Vladimir refers have historical counterparts; and the novel returns incessantly to a number of themes that dominated the late Victorian rendition of anarchism, such as the emphasis on bombs as the inevitable tools of anarchists, the freighted relation between words and deeds, and the international quality of the movement” (At the Violet Hour, 111).
For a clear and thorough discussion of the way police forces, government offices, the press, and the public responded to terrorist attacks in the 1880’s, see Porter, especially 21–67.
Chevenix’s obsession with the creation of a noiseless dynamite corresponds with the Professor’s obsession with the creation of the perfect detonator. Zero, the buffoonish chemist/dynamiter in the Stevensons’ The Dynamiter, is another model for the Professor. He sees himself working tirelessly to create the perfect deadly explosion, complaining that “chemicals are proverbially fickle as woman, and clockwork as capricious as the very devil” (156).
For a very fine discussion of The Secret Agent’s complex satire, see Brian W. Shaffer’s “‘The Commerce of Shady Wares’: Politics and Pornography in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Shaffer agrees that England’s disdain for radical politics is criticized at least as harshly as the radicals themselves, noting that “There is textual and contextual evidence to suggest that The Secret Agent maligns the culture’s apprehensions about revolutionary politics as much as it does the phenomenon itself” (460).
Donovan documents Conrad’s attitude, in part by quoting from a famous 1907 letter: “By Jove! If I had the necessary talent I would like to go for the true anarchist—which is the millionaire” (76). In “Hanging a Dog: The Politics of Naming in ‘An Anarchist,’” Jennifer Shaddock also shows how “An Anarchist” “demonstrates the mutual reliance of capitalism and anarchism—their hateful but, nonetheless, symbiotic embrace” (56).
Margaret Scanlan puts this well in “Language and Terrorism in Conrad’s ‘The Informer’”: “If Conrad intended ‘The Informer’ as popular entertainment, feeding the public’s appetite for stories about sinister anarchists and secret dynamite factories, his text betrays other interests” (117). For another fine treatment of the story as a bitter commentary on the morally ambiguous role of the writer, see The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, where Erdinast-Vulcan suggests the tale reveals how “a work of fiction invariably involves some ‘aestheticization’ of reality, a betrayal of its complexity and fullness for the sake of artistic containment” (118).
As Robert Hampson articulates more fully in “Storytellers and Storytelling in ‘The Partner,’ ‘The Informer,’ ‘The Lesson of the Master’ and The Sacred Font. See 137–40.
Diana Culbertson first suggested in 1974 that Conrad was “performing a sly parody of himself” in “The Informer,” and “mocking the readers of Harper’s.” “It is difficult to escape the conclusion,” she adds, “that Mr. X is, in part, the voice of Conrad telling a story that the narrator wants to hear, and that the narrator is Conrad’s magazine-reading public” (431, 432). In her essay, Scanlan also shows how “writers share an uncomfortable identity with informers and terrorists” (115) in the story.
Stevie, the novel’s moral barometer, is overwhelmingly distressed “by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek piercingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle” (13).
In a fine reading of the novel that reveals how fully Conrad incorporated Caesar Lombroso’s theories of personality, Ellen Harrington argues that Winnie’s “portrayal exemplifies Conrad’s nihilist vision of a corrupt modern society in which self-interest and degeneracy are endemic” (“The Female Offender, the New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent” 57). My only difference with Harrington is her characterization of the novel as “nihilist.” As I suggest below, the novel has too many flashes of moral indignation to be labeled in that way.
Dickens’s Bleak House echoes throughout The Secret Agent, from its characterizations (Michaelis’s obesity seems to derive from Bleak House’s Chadbland, and Inspector Heat owes something to Inspector Bucket) to its tone, identical to the tone of the third person narrative that works contrapuntally with Esther’s in Bleak House. Conrad himself noted how important the novel was to him; A Personal Record includes this tribute: Bleak House, he wrote is “a work of the master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other men’s work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and in English” (124). Hawthorn notes this influence in Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, 136–37.
“ In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave” (123–24).