Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent – coincidentally published on the eve of September 11 1907 – became one of the three literary works most cited in American media following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Joseph Conrad’s novel deals with another historical event: the detonation of a bomb close to the Greenwich Observatory in 1894, attributed to anarchists, but never fully explained.

Anarchism in England was associated with the campaign for Irish independence, but it was largely a Russian movement, fostered by the belief that social and political revolution could be brought about only by illegal means. From the 1880s onwards a series of terrorist attacks, some successful, targeted prominent statesmen and royalty throughout Europe. The movement attracted a wide spectrum of supporters, from high-minded sympathisers to marginal criminals and psychotics. In his fiction, Conrad portrays various aspects of this range, although he admits in one of his letters that he has missed out ‘the millionaire’, a specimen of humanity he claimed to be ‘the true anarchist’. In real life, the ideas of anarchism attracted a wide range of eminent intellectuals, such as William Morris, G.B. Shaw and some of the founders of the Independent Labour Party.

Despite the urgency of its contemporary context, Conrad’s novel remains a work of imagination. He allows us to explore our understanding of terrorist movements in his time, and in our own, as well as general issues about human isolation and connectedness, and about stability and anarchy within the social and political order. He offers an interestingly conflicted vision of the English, as well as a typically damning view of ‘Russian despotism’ which he saw – along with Prussian militarism – as one of the two great threats to Europe.

Conrad called this story ‘a simple tale’. It has been described as his first ‘easy’ novel and is seen as a forerunner of the hugely popular ‘spy’ story genre that followed, but the world he portrays is not glamorous. We watch people whose belief in order is rudely shattered in a way which undermines the conspiracy of blindness in which they have acquiesced, and the version of London they inhabit is in many ways a terrible place. They have no need to go on a journey to a remote, shamefully exploited African country to discover the heart of darkness, it is already there in themselves and in their very ordinary lives.

STUDY DETAILS:

• Virtual study (via Zoom) led by Keith Fosbrook
• Five meetings, Tuesday, 6.00-8.00 pm, starting 4 October
• £125 including opening notes and resources
• Recommended edition: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Norton Critical Edition ISBN 9780393937442