The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoevsky are at one in their abhorrence of anarchists and social revolutionaries. In them, they see a nihilism which ends only in the self-fulfilment of Silenus’s words of wisdom – existence itself is tainted, and the best thing is to be done with it. Thus, the conclusion of Conrad’s The Secret Agent takes place in a beer-hall called, ironically, the Silenus. The world those revolutionaries Ossipon and The Professor are seeking to transform is itself already sordid – late nineteenth century London, down among the lower orders, wallowing in the murkiness of espionage and paid agents provocateur – and therefore, it seems, whatever the outcome of their anarchistic endeavours, be they successful or otherwise, the world will be no less and no more sordid, only different.

Mr Verloc, the novel’s central character, is someone engulfed by indolence. He has the air of ‘having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.’ He is an agent provocateur, what we would nowadays call a sleeper, in the pay of a foreign power and providing information, waiting to act as required but, in fact, doing an absolute minimum to earn his pay. A change in personnel at the embassy forces his hand: he is impelled by his new boss, Mr Vladimir, to engineer a terrorist outrage, a meaningless explosion at the Greenwich Observatory – an attack on the first meridian, that potent symbol of science and progress. Mr Verloc is unhappy with his assignment, but he has no option but to obey. Tragedy ensues.

In his time in England, Mr Verloc has inveigled himself into English (lower order) society. He is married to Winnie and shares her house with Winnie’s mother, a frail and fading woman, and Winnie’s brother, the slow-witted Stevie. Ostensibly, he is the proprietor of a shop which has a reputation for dealing in unusual and illicit, probably pornographic material smuggled in from the continent. It is a comfortable living, requiring no great effort on Mr Verloc’s part, and this forms part of his irritation at being forced to act on behalf of his paymasters. Thus, the character of Mr Verloc comes under Conrad’s critical gaze twice over: as a reckless anarchist and as a laggard whose indolence results in moral apathy. His response to the tragedy he provokes is one of vexation, momentary shock, fleeting regret, but his overriding impression is that it was inconvenient, and not his fault, and something that had happened which simply had to be overcome. His inability to comprehend the emotions of his wife are symptomatic of a morally casual, reprehenisble nature. Mr Verloc is found wanting, in almost every respect. But he is not an evil man, he is merely banal. Through him, and those like him, Conrad argues, evil is allowed to flourish.

Around Verloc is a small congregation of fellow anarchists and revolutionaries – Michaelis, Yunt, Comrade Ossipon – who share his outlook and demeanour. They are not an attractive group of people. Future society would not be safe in the hands of such immoral louts, one must suppose. And what is the alternative? Conrad offers little hope in the figures of authority who are ranged against the anarchists. Mr Vladimir, Verloc’s master at the Embassy, is a calculating, manipulative man, callously indifferent to anything but the cause. The police investigation is hampered by protocol and hierarchy and suspicion. Verloc, we discover, as well as being an agent of a foreign power, is also a double agent providing information to the police, who are happy to use him and turn a blind eye to the illicit wares he peddles. These are two sides of a single coin, then, Conrad suggests.

And Mrs Verloc is little better. She is resolute in her refusal to see anything that is happening around her, to probe for questions or meanings, to wonder at any events which may unfold. She deliberately encases herself in a cocoon of ignorance, as though she can somehow remove herself from the mortal fray. As the novel proceeds, both she and we learn the futility of such an approach. She is another individual found wanting, then. Indeed one of the few moments of genuine altruism in the novel arises when Winnie’s mother decides to move out of the family home into an almshouse, in the hope that this will make life easier for Winnie and, in particular, Stevie. We are left in little doubt that this will not be a happy retirement for the old woman – their progress as they take a cab through the streets of London towards the almshouse on the day of her departure is described almost in terms of a descensus. It is a low point for the family, but one wrought by goodness. Thus, there is an almost unbearable poignancy later in the novel when the family sinks even lower, towards its nadir, this time not as a result of failed goodness, but of Verloc’s moral vacuity.

And this gets to the heart of The Secret Agent,  what makes it a great novel. Yes, it is an insightful analysis of terrorism, as has been much discussed in the years since 9/11. Yes, it offers a perspective on anarchism and revolutionary socialism which, however caricatured, does present a cogent critique of modern thought. One may or may not agree with Conrad’s analysis – for me it is overly pessimistic – but it is undoubtedly brilliantly written.

But what makes the novel great is the way he melds the political with the personal, the public with the private. Because the events which Verloc unleashes as a result of his terrorist act undoubtedly have their public repercussions, but no act can ever be played out purely in the public arena: there must always be a private dimension. In 9/11 or 7/7 there was the political reality of those terrorist acts, certainly, and they will not be forgotten in our generation, but there were also hundreds of private tragedies, families torn apart, lovers lost, families bereaved. For them, for those who survived, there was no 9/11 or 7/7 as such, only the moment that their darling died and their lives changed. Their understanding of what those events mean is inherently different from the understanding of those of us not directly affected. And this is what we see powerfully in The Secret Agent. Verloc is not only an agent provocateur, he is a husband. He not only works as a terrorist but as a shop owner, a family man. And that family life is irrevocably violated. In a harrowing episode, Mrs Verloc overhears the terrible truth of what has happened. The moment circles around her and we are taken on a dizzying swoop around her emotions:

In that shop of shady wares fitted with deal shelves painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the sheen of the light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs Verloc's left hand glittered exceedingly with the untarnished glory of a piece from some splendid treasure of jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.

From that moment, the symbol of their marriage consigned to a dustbin, there is no hope for the Verlocs. The personal has been devastated. There is, then, little cheer in The Secret Agent. Throughout, it reveals a world of grim failure, a society hurtling towards a nihilistic end. And this is symbolised most effectively by the final scene, with Ossipon and The Professor leaving the Silenus. Ossipon walks blindly, ‘feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing’, while The Professor averts his eyes from the ‘odious multitude of mankind.’ He has, we are told, ‘no future.’ The obvious question that Joseph Conrad is posing, of course, is: ‘do we?’

Cormac McCarthy and Friedrich Nietzsche's Backworldsmen

The connection between the work of Cormac McCarthy and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is frequently made, most often in connection with Blood Meridian. The Road, too, could be read in a Nietzschean light, and it has been suggested that its opening, when the man wakes in ‘the dark and cold’ is emblematic of the eternal return. Maybe so, but if it is, it is not Nietzsche’s eternal return that McCarthy is describing. The first thing to note about Nietzsche’s eternal return is that it isn’t necessarily meant literally. Nietzsche was much more playful than he is given credit for. The second thing to note is that, as regards the soul, Nietzsche doesn’t necessarily agree that it is a separate entity. And he doesn’t go along with the notion that – as a separate entity – it is reborn. Zarathustra tells us: ‘Only where there are tombs are there resurrections’. The first mention of soul in Thus Spake Zarathustra, linking it to God and the ‘poisoners’ who ‘speak of superearthly hope’, describes it pejoratively:

Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.

This is not to say that Nietzsche does not accept the idea of the soul – he plainly does, as it reappears throughout Zarathustra, but he does not seek to place it on a pedestal. On the contrary:

Oh, that soul was itself meagre, ghastly, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!

But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What doth your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?

Of what is this soul comprised? In Nietzschean terms it is only part of the body. Zarathustra tells us:

“Body am I, and soul” - so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”

The soul, then, is a part of the individual, and could be construed as the state of overgoing wisdom. In this, there may be some connection with the idea of eternal return, in as much as this concept is key to understanding Nietzsche’s idea of the progress of man from herd to overman. For Nietzsche, eternal return is a way of reconciling oneself with the past. The overman can only be attained if one learns to love life completely, such that the idea of eternally returning to each moment bcomes acceptable. This is a troublesome concept, of course, in moral terms, because it entails final acceptance (though not approval) of events such as, say, 9/11 or a murder of a close relative and so on. People therefore tend to get stuck on the concept of eternal return here, but again I stress that I don’t think Nietzsche is being literal: it is not the event, but one’s connection with it and understanding of it that matters. It is rooted in the love of the present, the here and now. Through understanding the past, accommodating it, reconciling onself to it, removing all anger and resentment and negative emotion from our understanding of it, we allow ourselves to live more fruitfully in the present. We find redemption, in other words, because redemption comes from ourselves and our connection with the world, not from a god who, at the end of a life, graciously bestows it on the worthy. By accepting the past we affirm the present. We feel no need to prepare ourselves for the great redemption of the end. John Updike, in one of his last poems, Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth, nails this beautifully, when he writes:

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life.

Now, it may be that I am falling prey to my usual kindly, naïve humanist perspective here. Nietzsche was more definite. He said: ‘To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I willed it thus!’ – that alone do I call redemption!’ Again, taking the 9/11 or murder examples, it is possible to reach the point I suggest – understanding, reconciliation –  without too much difficulty, but to reach the Nietzschean moment of ‘I willed it’ is more of a struggle. But he goes on: ‘The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire – that is the will’s most lonely affliction.’

It may be that I’m misunderstanding Cormac McCarthy (very likely) or that I’m misunderstanding Nietzsche (even more likely). But it may also be, it seems to me, that McCarthy, too, is misunderstanding Nietzsche. The result of the Nietzschean universe created in Blood Meridian appears to be an indifference to suffering or pain or injustice. This is a simplification of Nietzsche’s views. It is, to go back to the 9/11 example, to say that one doesn’t care that it happened, which is not at all the same thing as saying one accepts that it happened.

For Nietzsche, eternal return is a life-affirming belief. Thus, to transplant it into the context of McCarthy’s The Road, say, where life is in the process of being annihilated, is surely to go against his thinking. In The Road we have a ‘long shear of light’, and in Blood Meridian, ‘the evening redness in the west’. In All The Pretty Horses we have ‘reefs of bloodred cloud’ beneath a ‘red and elliptic sun’. Further, we are told of the ‘coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.’ In other words, these are the views of backworldsmen, those ‘sick and perishing’ who, in Nietzsche’s terms:

despised the body and the earth and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming bloodrops… From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them. Then they sighed: “O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!” Then they contrived for themselves their bypaths and bloody draughts!

And so we have our bypaths. The Road begins in a cave before the time of man. In Blood Meridian we hear ‘cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.’ The Orchard Keeper’s forest ‘has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep’. Outer Dark’s triune ‘could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time’. In Suttree, we are ‘come to a world within the world’ and, in The Crossing, the ancient wolves know that ‘there is no order in the world save that which death has put there’, and ‘if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do.’

All of these, it seems to me, could be part of ‘that “other world” ... concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial naught’. In other words, we are indeed in the company of Nietzsche’s backworldsmen, those doomsayers constantly casting portents in our way, warning, always warning, of the death to come. Zarathustra describes them thus:

Backward they always gaze toward dark ages: then, indeed, were delusion and faith something different. Raving of the reason was likeness to God, and doubt was sin.

Too well do I know those godlike ones: they insist on being believed in, and that doubt is sin. Too well, also, do I know what they themselves most believe in.

Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood-drops: but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing-in-itself.

But it is a sickly thing to them, and gladly would they get out of their skin. Therefore harken they to the preachers of death, and themselves preach backworlds.

And so, in The Road, far from experiencing an eternal return of the soul, we find ourselves placed at the very edge of destruction, preaching the death of everything. It is hard to know where the soul could reside in such a landscape. Or why it would wish to do so.