Extract from Conrad- Politics, Subversion and Anarchy.

One of the effects of the Professor is to reflect the role of language and narrative function in the emergence of conventional wisdom. Whilst the reader is not inclined to endorse the Professor’s politics, his character speaks to the nature of conventional morality itself in that such a radical perspective can be elaborately articulated as to sound even vaguely comprehendible. He speaks of his opponents - “they depend on life, which, in this connexion is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex, organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”

The conventional order in The Secret Agent is not an organic moral constant being attacked at the periphery by rebel forces, but a social metropolis of questionable morality itself. It consists of an establishment complicit in a horrendous crime (the foreign embassy’s false-flag operation which claims Stevie’s life); Heat’s unconventional policing methods, and instinctive view of thieving as appearing as “normal as property”. This is a vague allusion to the imperfections of industrial capitalism and its innate exploitative nature. Inspector Heat himself experienced a kind of “evil freedom” which was “rather pleasant”, upon entering an anarchist enclave with its inherent enigma. All these things constitute more of an open ended engagement with conventional thinking than is posited by Leavis. Furthermore the conventional criminal classes tend to have an ambiguous status as victims of circumstance. Heat displays a liberal sympathy with thieves, “they were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of an imperfect education”, and Winnie explains the role of the police to Stevie as being one of essentially protecting the rich from the poor. The fact that these perspectives can be traced through both sides of the political divide, (an establishment figure and the wife of a provocateur with anarchist ties) is significant and the moral nature of the text is left somewhat more nebulous.

This theme of isolation from the conventional extends even to “murderers”, indeed our sympathy with Winnie’s plight after murdering her husband stems from the fact that she is not a ‘conventional’ murderer, she has no criminal network to aid her – she “was the most lonely of murderers that ever struck a mortal blow” – it is this careful extraction from the mundane and the conventional of the spectacular and the unconventional which evokes, for Aaron Fogel, the “strong confusion of detachment and empathy” amongst the reader. This is also the reason for the multiplicity of potential readings making it difficult to argue that the novel has a potent moral message. For Fogel it is the “dramatisation of art as a non-transcendental process of inquiry, itself caught up within other inquiries” that is one of the main points of the novel.

Leavis’ reading of the text as a serious moral work perhaps neglects the element of fascination which is the residual effect of characterising the Anarchists as somehow outside the dominant conventional order. The fear of the revolutionaries amongst law enforcers is illustrated by Heat’s thoughts; “The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow creature… he was impossible… to be left alone”. He is disarmed of the superiority which he would have enjoyed had he encountered any other member of the criminal classes. Here Conrad sets up a dynamic where the police officers and the criminal classes are part of an inter-dependant system whereas the revolutionaries occupy there own terrain engendering an aura of fascination and intrigue around a set of people Leavis characterises as “repugnant”. It is not clear that this is the perception Conrad intended. Irvin Howe in Politics and the Novel recounts a letter that Conrad wrote declaring that the ‘professor’ was not necessarily meant to be “despicable” but that he wanted him to possess “a note of perfect sincerity”. He goes on to say that he does not believe this came across. Nonetheless as long as this ambivalence exists it is an example of how Leavis’ approach precludes this kind of interpretation. Being opposed to literary theory he neglects the assumptions and values that the reader or critic may bring to the text.

With typical irony Conrad presents the novel’s most evocative political point through the medium of the atypical, inarticulate Stevie. Whilst in the cab Stevie sees the horse being whipped and then has to process the poor driver’s impossible situation. He says “Bad, Bad” then “Poor, Poor”, and finally “He got it at last. He hung back to utter it at once. ‘Bad world for poor people’”. It is difficult for the reader to process a response to a statement which simultaneously says so much yet so little. The sentence’s veracity cannot be denied, but as Fogel notes, it has no “verb”. Its fragmented status is suggestive of an absent ideological commitment. Stevie is yet another example of isolation from conventional society. The fact that he is evidently incapable of being in the throws of ideology and dogma, being unreceptive to normal thought processes, his innocence and sincerity is unquestioned. He is the only character untouched by the novel’s satirical tone. His outcry represents the most sincere and effectively apolitical message in the novel, which is ironically one of the novels most powerful political points. Namely whatever it is that “holds persons together, giving the political world the form it has, it is not accessible to sympathy’s verbless syntax.” This confirms the novel’s status as a “complex political” work “not reducible to political ideology”. His simplistic dialogue is also contrasted with the rich preponderance of the anarchists which despite their linguistic acumen are diluted of seriousness by the “thick fog of irony” that engulfs the novel.

Although there is this reluctance in the Secret Agent to embrace a coherent political perspective, stationed above all others, Irving Howe posits that the general impetus of both anarchism and conservatism is at bottom very similar and this is conveyed in much of Conrad’s political fiction. Both positions, from a philosophical standpoint, endorse a society where individuals are free to enter “direct relationships without the mediation of the state” . The novels political ambiguity stems from this “kinship of apparent opposites” . This is a characterisation which contests Leavis’ notion of the novel as an “organic” tapestry of “moral significances” . This is how the novel succeeds in depicting moral and political struggle in the face of alienation without a coherent resolution (the suicide of Winnie Verloc is an example of this trend).

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is Conrad’s acute ability to display the revolutionary mind. While the Professor’s ideals are nihilistic he demonstrates a logic and cynicism comparable to that of any political figure. He argues, “nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half the battle would be won then, the disintegration of the old morality would have set in its very temple, that is what you ought to aim at”. There are two things to note about this statement, first it is an example of what Leavis describes as the “obtuse assurance with which habit and self-interest assert absolute rights and wrongs”. Secondly it explicitly sets up Western morals and values as a distinct barrier to Marxist/Anarchist goals (a prescient allusion to the Frankfurt School and the cultural Marxists who recognised this problem and set about investigating it) . It leads on to the notion that moral perspectives in the novel are not just “contrasting” , as Leavis puts it, but incompatible. Conrad’s prose registers this oxymoronic aspect. He describes the city of London as representing the “majesty of inorganic nature”, and Winnie’s “disorderly formality” before she confronts her husband and meets her tragic demise. These themes of isolation and the struggle of incompatible currents (authority/anarchy, idealism/Realpolitik, revolution/order) foment a wide range of potential readings which are not easily reconciled. Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton are drawn to the text’s apparent lack of central moral or political ideology - moral “values” are “forced beyond the frontiers of the world, exiled beyond what can be articulated” – and this, for Eagleton, gives the novel its subversive aspect. Leavis on the other hand has precisely the opposite take, seeing its moral dimension expressed through its attack on self-interest and its “adequacy” in dealing with the “complexities of the real”. There is much traction in both readings and equally some difficulties, both of which have been made use of in this chapter.


Having discussed some of Conrad’s most politically infused novels and looked at a range of critical perspectives there is a sense that the general divergence of opinion still governs mainstream discourse on Conrad. Whether the critic endorses a kind of Leavisite moralism or Marxist cultural politics, it is a polarity that is difficult to transcend completely. Christopher Miller may represent a third strand of thought which incorporates disenfranchised voices by recognising a la Edward Said’s Orientalism, an Africanist discourse for example, in Heart of Darkness. Nonetheless this is an area where the “allegiance of the critic is likely to condition their argument” . I have discussed in my introduction why critics from different strands of thought are drawn to Conrad’s work. This is to do with its distrust of finalities and its political themes not constituting an overall ideology. At the same time I think I have demonstrated that this divergence of critical opinion is still useful in analysing the different aspects of Conrad’s political fiction. This speaks to its complex nature in being politically anti-political and anti-ideological while dealing powerfully with important political themes. Conrad’s most succinct and compelling statement about the interdependence of the artists’ and humanity’s concerns is highly instructive in this regard: For him, “the only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous, so full of hope”.