Introduction
“The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad is based on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894 when a man named Martial Bourdi, had, like Stevie Verloc, the main protagonist of “The Secret Agent”, killed himself setting off a bomb in Greenwich Park near the Royal Observatory. Thus, the terrorists in “The Secret Agent” seem to be right out of the daily newspaper stories on psychotic racism, plane hijackers, gunmen, and political terrorists. One of the anarchists in “The Secret Agent” says “No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and ill in the service of humanity – that’s what I would have liked to see”. However, Conrad is not a cynic or a nihilist. He believes that despite the coldness, the terrorist is also a human with his own set of values. It is this philosophy that is well brought out in his novel “the Secret Agent”. Thesis: In “The Secret Agent”, Conrad creates a narrator who willfully separates himself from the world he despises only to gradually emerge later as a character with his own humanistic values.
Analysis
Conrad’s novel illustrates how his values are universal in nature. The secret Agent records the falling apart of the human community and the human soul. It evokes the dramatic range and depth of Conrad’s moral concerns. He explores the issue of rebels, anarchism and terrorism in a moral angle and forces his readers to see these issues from a fresh perspective. “The Secret Agent” has no single real hero. Conrad concentrates on a group of characters, mostly anarchists. He is not sympathetic to these people, but empathetic. He focuses on these men and women as “shams” – with no principles and no loyalty to first principles. Verloc is a man whose life is ruled by indolence and a perversely refined notion of respectability. Ossipon is described as a weakling who lives by exploiting the vulnerability of women. Thus Conrad shows them to be possessed by the same vices and illusions that permeate the society they reject. He even portrays them to be physically unattractive, indicating that they lacked discipline inner and outer that society requires of them. Michaelsi is “the ticket-of-leave apostle”, “with an enormous stomach”. Mr. Verloc has a “fat-pig style” and “he’s fat – the animal”. The anarchists personify moral corruption and negation. In this novel, Conrad helps the readers to see through the anarchists in their repulsiveness and degeneracy (Panichas, p. 217).
Conrad’s foreign anarchists are shown to be ordinary people, lazy to work and living on dreams of power. Verloc works as a secret agent of the Russians, manipulated by Russian paymasters and pressurized by Chief Inspector Heat, the London policeman. The only really dangerous evil figure is that of the fanatical Professor who has an obsession for explosives and is suicidal in temperament. He hates others for having political goals and believing in a better way of life. “He has the means to commit violent acts and for him only death has real meaning”(Meyers, p. 10). He carries the mindset of what we can call the suicide bomber of modern times.
Verloc receives his orders for the destruction of the astronomical observatory at Greenwich from his new boss Vladimir. Vladimir intended to give the British “a jolly-good scare” and make them enact repressive laws in the interest of security. But he has no direct contact with the anarchists who will carry out his plan. He wonders if they are “a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme” or “the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge”. Verloc, unwilling to let any of his terrorists risk their lives, and unwilling to do it himself, tricks his backward stepson Stevie, into carrying the bomb. But Stevie ends up blowing himself and Verloc is in turn killed by his wife for having tricked Stevie to his death.
One of the main points made by Conrad in this novel, in the context of terrorism is that the destructive acts cannot be blamed on any one factor. They are caused by multiple factors working together. For example, Stevie’s death is caused by “Verloc’s sullen irritation, Vladimir’s megalomania, the anarchists’ laziness, Heat’s paranoia, the Professor’s cunning, Winnie’s solicitude, Stevie’s compassion and clumsiness, and much more” (Orr and Billy, p. 186). Such a chance combination of events can neither be predicted nor prevented.
Conrad sees no way to justify the violence of the revolutionaries. He found their violence vain, delusional and criminal. But he also did not believe that society was perfect and healthy. In Conrad’s radically Hobbesian view, social institutions are themselves tainted with criminality and they are grounds that nurture self interest and self deception. For example, Conrad portrays London as a wasteland, where “the dust of humanity settles inert and hopeless out of the stream of life” and his hopes are being snuffed out in his fight for survival. Adolf Verloc, during his walk across Hyde Park reflects that the people around need to be protected: “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; …the whole social order favorable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour”. This shows that from the viewpoint of Verloc, it is not about oppressing people or taking away things from them, but rather about the noble cause of protecting them. Conrad describes the true anarchist as one who seeks to create a space “outside” all existing social structures (Orr and Billy, p. 186). The Professor is wholly dedicated to “the destruction of what is” and calls for “a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life”. The Professor, through anarchy aims to remake a fallen world. He too, like Verloc, is under the illusion that he is going to do something noble.
In The Secret Agent anarchism is not analyzed politically but rather it is presented as the outcome of ignoble character traits in people and society (Orr and Billy, p. 177). The novel’s revolutionists are shams and their indulgence in anarchism is mainly due to their own self interest. As Conrad puts it, “the way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds” (SA, p. 66). Michaelis finds in anarchism a way to express is sentimentality, Yundt, his impotent rage and Ossipon his lechery. Even the Professor, is driven by “a frenzied puritanism of ambition” (SA, p. 55). Unable to achieve professional success the Professor embraces terrorist anarchism in order to procure “the appearances of power and prestige” (67). These characters are also pretentious people who think they are conventional people desiring the betterment of the world.
Conclusion
By exploring the lives and psyches of the people involved in underground activities, and by presenting the novel in a first person narrative form, Conrad successfully shows that the individuals behind the destructive acts may or may not be aware of the sinister nature of their deeds and they may or may not be propelled towards such acts by purely political intentions of anarchy. They are also humans – caught up in myriad forces that make them as much victims of society as society is a victim of their anarchistic activities.
Works Cited
- Conrad, Joseph (1907). The Secret Agent. Classic Books Company. 1907
- Gray, John (2002). A Target for Destructive Ferocity: Joseph Conrad’s World, Where Terrorists Plotted to Blow Up the Royal Observatory, Speaks to Our Own. Look No Further for a Great Contemporary Novelist. New Statesman, 2002, Volume 131, Issue 4585, p. 27+.
- Meyers, Jeffrey (2005). The Prescience of Joseph Conrad. Contributors: Jeffrey Meyers – author. Commonweal. 2005, Volume 132, Issue 18, p. 10+.
- Orr, Leonard and Billy, Ted (1999). A Joseph Conrad Companion. Greenwood Press. Westport, CT. 1999
- Panichas, Andrew George (1998). Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virtue. Mercer University Press, 1998