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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
I. REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AS PORNOGRAPHY IN THE SECRET AGENT
In a scathing review of Conrad's archly-ironic The Secret Agent, an anonymous reader for Country Life took the author to task for being "naughty" without being "at all nice." Deeming Adolf Verloc "a sort of spy and informer in the service of revolutionists," the reviewer went on to argue that "The sort of shop kept by Mr. Verloc is one where shady photographs, obscene literature and other articles of similar kind are sold. The people who keep such places are, generally speaking, the most unmitigated blackguards who hold on to the edges of civilisation."(1) This reviewer amusingly misreads the novel, believing that Conrad confers "respectability" on Verloc, making him "decent in his indecency, and honest in his dishonesty."(2) The Country Life reader nevertheless stumbled on a point repeatedly made in The Secret Agent that has not received due critical attention: the connection between a "criminal class of revolutionists" and the consumers of illicit pornography.(3)
It will be my thesis that The Secret Agent forges innumerable subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) bonds between revolutionary politics and pornography in order to tarnish the glamour of subversive politics with the smuttiness of tawdry sex. At the same time - and paradoxically - the novel represents and critiques late-Victorian England's pervasive twin-anxieties over uncontrolled sex and politics. "Indecent" and revolutionary "wares" are represented in The Secret Agent as "corrupt" ("perverse," "disreputable," "depraved," and "sordid,"), "secret" ("private," "obscure," and "confidential"), Continental in origin, infantile and solipsistic in nature, and "cannibalistic" or violent in execution. Both spheres are depicted as figuratively or literally masturbatory, and as attracting a morally dubious readership - a clientele that inhabits the same physical space in Verloc's shop. However, in the last analysis, it is the very connection between the pornographic and the revolutionary threat itself that is satirized. Despite Conrad's repeated caveats that he is not concerned in The Secret Agent with revolutionary politics but is instead taking his fiction in new generic and technical directions, the novel has been seen to offer "intense political engagement."(4) In its linking of "revolutionary propaganda" and "obscene literature," the novel's "wit" as a whole parallels Embassy Chief Vladimir's wit - which consists in "discovering droll connections between incongruous ideas" (SA, 20).(5) While it is certainly no secret that the "criminal class of revolutionists" (SA, 109) bears the brunt of The Secret Agent's all-encompassing irony, the means - metaphorical, symbolic, imagistic, and otherwise - by which these revolutionists are represented as pornographers remains in need of elaboration.
The Secret Agent begins by placing revolutionary and pornographic literature, all "doubtful" and "shady" "wares of disreputable rubbish," in the same "dim shop" situated in a "household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun" (SA, 34). The novel's third paragraph notes that the "shopwindow" of Verloc's house on Brett Street
contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls, nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes very flimsy . . .; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications . . .; a few books with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong - rousing titles. (SA, 9)(6)
The novel opens by juxtaposing sordid, decaying, and "secret" pornographic materials with equally secret, decaying, and morally dubious revolutionary tracts. Just as revolutionary texts are given "rousing" titles, so pornographic texts possess "arousing" ones, their "promising title[s]" "hinting at impropriety" (SA, 9-10). And on the novel's second page we read that Verloc
would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside . . . or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers. (SA, 10)
By the time we read, still later in the novel, of Verloc's "wares of disreputable rubbish" (SA, 34) or of his shop front "hung with papers, gloomy with vague piles of cardboard boxes and the shapes of books" (SA, 116), it is difficult to tell whether it is the politically rousing or sexually arousing materials that are being detailed.
The two kinds of "sordid" literature are depicted as physically alike. While the "obscure [political] newspapers" in Verloc's shop are described as "badly printed" (SA, 9) - the "Future of the Proletariat" pamphlets at one point are said to contain "prophetic bosh in blunt type on . . . filthy paper" (SA, 26) - the pornographic pamphlets on sale are portrayed as cheaply printed, "flimsy," "faded," and "soiled" (SA, 9-10). That both types of literature provide Verloc with income - the first type associated with his "ostensible business" (SA, 9), the second with his "other business," which "is in a way political" (SA, 12) - is another means by which the novel exploits the connection between revolutionary politics and pornography. This point is emphasized when we learn that Verloc's home is "kept up on the wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret wares" (SA, 194), and when we learn that Verloc "had been guided in the selection of this peculiar line of business by an instinctive leaning towards shady transactions, where money is picked up easily" (SA, 46).
But the novel's association of revolutionary politics with pornography extends beyond physical and commercial similarities to include the ironic name Verloc chooses for himself, "agent provocateur" (SA, 25), "provocative" being a time-honored word for erotic as well as political enticements. Verloc's failure on all counts is manifest when Mr. Vladimir of the (presumably) Czarist Russian embassy chastises him for failing to "provoke" outrages against the English social order (in order to compel the police to clamp down on revolutionary activity); when Verloc's bomb attack against the Greenwich Observatory fails to provoke much of anything at all (except the slaughter of his brother-in-law Stevie); and when we learn that Verloc has failed sexually to "provoke" his wife Winnie for years. Indeed, his final abortive attempt to arouse her sexual interest (SA, 196-97) proves to be one of his last acts of all, in effect provoking her to kill him. Moreover, since few buy either the pornographic or political "wares" (SA, 50), none but the already-converted are "provoked" to any action by Verloc's subversions. Only Stevie is actually observed perusing the political papers, and his reaction to them is what it might be if he were reading the pornographic ones: "He gets a red face poring over them" (SA, 50).
The scant traffic through Verloc's shop reveals a further link between the two types of reading material on sale. The customers in the shop, we read, "were either very young men [pornographic 'amateurs'] who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age [revolutionists], but looking generally as if they were not in funds" (SA, 9). The two groups are also united in that individuals from both enter the shop stealthily, "slipping in suddenly" (SA, 9) or appearing inside with "collars turned up and soft hats rammed down" (SA, 10).
The deepest connections between Verloc's two types of "wares" relate to both being depicted as "cannibalistic" and as deriving from the Continent. France - and particularly Paris, the European "capital of vice" in the mind of Britons - is repeatedly alluded to in The Secret Agent as the source of pornographic pamphlets and revolutionary ideas alike.(7) For example, we are apprised immediately of Verloc's "French comic publications" (SA, 9), and later learn that he renews "his stock from Paris and Brussels" (SA, 138), that the "packages he gets from Paris and Brussels" stem from "a connection - friends on the Continent - amongst people who deal in such wares" (SA, 102). Even Verloc's family name and origin provide an opportunity for the novel to satirize the insular English fear of corruption by Continental influences. The Verlocs all claim to be of French descent (SA, 11, 23); Verloc is described as generally arriving "in London (like the influenza) from the Continent" (SA, 11); and the Verloc name itself suggests "a syphilitic" in French? Characters in The Secret Agent frequently invoke the Continent (and particularly France) as a place of escape from the arms of the law (SA, 147, 209, 218), and Paris is identified as a convenient place to launder money (SA, 220).
France is also represented in The Secret Agent as the source of political vice, both explicitly (Verloc is known earlier to have affiliated with the "Revolutionary Red Committee" in France [SA, 61, 101]) and implicitly (as the major source, dating back to the Revolution of 1789, of l'esprit revolutionnaire). Conrad's own disdain for this spirit is well documented. In A Personal Record, for example, he insists that such a spirit "frees one from all scruples as regards ideas," and that its "hard, absolute optimism is repulsive" because of "the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains."(9) That this spirit finds its source for Conrad in a "corrupted" French Revolution is equally clear. As early as 1885, for example, when the Conservative party failed to carry the English Parliament, Conrad lamented in a letter that "every disreputable ragamuffin in Europe feels that...
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