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Anarchist, Detective, and Saint: The Possibilities of Action in The Secret Agent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph I. Fradin
Joseph I. Fradin*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
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Abstract

In four characters, Conrad undermines all possibility of unambiguous moral action. The Professor, whose anarchism begins in existential emptiness and contains a violent totalitarian impulse, dramatizes the potential for death in the human will when its energies are directed toward power, toward political ends; the capacity for destruction, both private and public, of the Professor's devotion to the “idea” is grotesquely symbolized by the bomb he carries, his hand always on the detonator. The Assistant Commissioner has no “idea,” but his apparent efficiency is thoroughly undermined by the way Conrad exposes the ambiguity both of his motives and of the sources of the energy which enables him to succeed in his hunt for Verloc. Like Winnie, the Commissioner has chosen “respectability”—an inauthentic life. Winnie's own destruction begins in her feeling for Stevie and is hastened by Stevie's angry compassion, since even compassion is dangerous as a motive for action. This is a lesson Michaelis' youthful political experience has taught him, and his withdrawal presents the novel's final paradox: that in an anarchic world, self-preoccupied inertia may become the posture of a saint.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1414 - 1422
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. In his Preface Conrad of course talks of The Secret Agent as the story of Winnie Verloc and her “tragic suspicion that ‘life doesn't stand much looking into’. ” For a brief discussion of Winnie, see below, pp. 1419–20.

2. If, on the one hand, the Professor belongs among those who like Gould in Nostromo are possessed by an idea which brings death, he is, on the other, a death figure like the skeletal Jones of Victory, who gathers into one violent image what is destructive of life in Heyst's existential freedom.

3. The Secret Agent, Doubleday edition (New York, 1924), p. 67. Hereafter references to the novel will be made in the text.

4. I wish to thank the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, Philadelphia, for permission to quote from the manuscript of The Secret Agent. What Conrad crossed out in this sentence remains quite clear in the manuscript, except for two illegible scrawls which I have indicated by broken lines. I am also somewhat uncertain about the “s” at the end of “symbols.”

5. For discussions of The Secret Agent as a political novel, see Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago, 1963); and Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957).

6. For a more affirmative view of the Assistant Commissioner, see Avrom Fleishman, “The Symbolic World of The Secret Agent,” ELH, xxxii (June 1965), 196–219. See also Claire Rosenfield, Paradise of Snakes (Chicago, 1967), which appeared after the acceptance of this article. Miss Rosen-field's analysis of The Secret Agent supports my reading of both Winnie and the Assistant Commissioner.

7. The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1948), p. 109.