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Literary Review
CLASSICS REVISITED
Play of opposites
BY RAVI VYAS
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, Joseph Conrad, first published 1907, Penguin Classics, Special Indian Price, £2.99.
We say outright: these are madmen, yet these madmen have their own logic, their teaching, their code, their God even, and it's as deepset as could be.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Devils
IT was Dostoevsky's discovery (put most succinctly in his brief masterpiece, Notes from Underground and The Devils) that the most destructive and dangerous of all religions was the newfound faith in the power of reason, science, industry, revolution and the perfectibility of man. "If everything in life was rational," he said in The Brothers Karamazov, "nothing would happen". Joseph Conrad took it further to see anarchy as a more or less permanent ingredient in all political situations because there are "well-hidden anarchistic tendencies in everyone which can be touched off by something we don't like — in the last analysis, government."
A modern novel
It was in The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale that Conrad projects himself imaginatively into the personalities of terrorists to understand their points of view and why they are prepared to kill for the sake of an idea. In this sense, the novel is extraordinarily "modern". We have a world which is reflected precisely in its own underworld: the subverters of society supported and financed by its own pillars, or by a series of lower middle-class women, policemen who enjoy the "manhunt" but who regard the ordinary criminal as one of themselves. In all respects, The Secret Agent is a depiction of a corrupt society, shot through with grim irony, as also the story of Winnie Verloc told (as Conrad said in his Author's Note to the 1920 edition) to "its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair".
The Secret Agent is set in 1886, but its central incident is based on a botched bomb attack on Greenwich in 1894. The facts of the outrage: a young man called Martial Bourdin was found in Greenwich Park on a hill near the Royal Observatory on the evening of February 15, 1894. There had been an explosion; Bourdin had set it off, and in doing so had killed himself. Bourdin had a brother-in-law called Samuels, who edited an anarchist paper but was an undercover police agent and had accompanied him to the Park. Bourdin may have stumbled, setting off the explosive that had been supplied by Samuels, acting as an agent provocateur.
But Conrad was concerned with far more than the story of a strange and anarchist plot that had gone wrong. The Secret Agent is concerned with the idea of secrecy itself. As with Dostoevsky, to whom Conrad owes a huge debt, the characters come face to face with some double, a secret sharer, who resembles them, reminds them of the ambiguity of the world and the psychological incompleteness of the self, and initiates them into an awareness of chaos and duplicity. Likewise, the modern world has its own secret within it, in the form of inner darkness. The heart of darkness is a settled fact in all his works. The double face of things is a recurrent modernist theme; everything is touched by its ironic opposite.
Play of irony
So, despite its ironic subtitle, The Secret Agent is far from being a simple tale. From the moment Verloc steps out of the darkness of his seedy shop, selling cheap porn, rubberware and revolutionary literature in Soho and passes through upper class London of opulence and luxury with an air of "punctual and benign violence", nothing is as it seems. Verloc sees a town "without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered gold" and sees his task not to challenge but to preserve this respectability: his mission is "the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism". For all his big talk, Verloc is a man of consummate idleness, "an indolent monster, diseased with vanity, whose first and last desire was advertisement". When Verloc arrives at the Embassy that employs him, he proves to be an agent provocateur, though he has provoked very little. He is a shopkeeper, a solidly married man — a petit bourgeois to his fingertips. "And you are a professed anarchist too," cries Vladmir of the Embassy. Everything has a touch of contradiction about it, even the language. Verloc is a "rock" but "a soft kind of rock". Even simple words have lost their meanings; nothing is, as it seems.
Soon the ironic oppositions of the novel begin and they multiply. We meet Verloc's band of revolutionaries in the dim shop; Michaelis, the revolutionary-in-exile who speaks of historical inevitability and therefore doesn't want to sully his hands; Karl Yundt, the terrorist who asks men to become destroyers; Comrade Ossipon, "the scientific revolutionary" who believes that the "lobes" of the ears are a clue to human identity but basically preys on young women. Revolutionaries talk in brilliant circles of various ideas of radical reform, human suffering, social cannibalism — but where is the real feeling of compassion? Nowhere.
Inherent contradictions
Conrad's fundamental theme is that the terrorists are imperfectly aware of the contradictions in all things; they idealise the world rather than looking at it directly which leads to a faith in total destruction, death as perfection. Put it another way, political extremism involves two ingredients: an extremely simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains at the back of it all. But, as a Russian proverb put it, to live your life is not as simple as to cross a field — which is what Conrad set out to prove in The Secret Agent.
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