Face Values: Optics as Ethics in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; Criticism (Winter 2014) (original) (raw)

This chapter provides a bridge between ‘the great tradition’ of Victorian realism and the new impulses in fiction of the early twentieth century. In this respect The Secret Agent is a highly paradoxical work. In form and structure it owes a debt to the traditions of narrative realism and expressive symbolism in the nineteenth century, traditions which arose in a more settled moral climate than the rather different ethical weather of modernity. Conrad’s caustically ironic vision of contemporary history is entirely a product of twentieth century uncertainty about moral absolutes. This sense of the relativity and ungroundedness of moral values raises important issues that begin to alter the realist tradition.

Silence often speaks of power's absence, whilst political power is often figured as voice. Voice speaks of identity or agency (secret or otherwise); it can even stand for subjectivity or conscious being itself. Voice is a precondition for discussion and consensus, and it is upon these notions that modern understandings of politics, of the negotiation of differences within the community through dialogue not force, depend. Hannah Arendt suggests that violence is a sign of power's absence, and if we agree, then we might wonder whether, if there is a relationship between voice and power, there exists a parallel relationship between silence and violence. ii I will argue that Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907) engages self-consciously with political philosophy to explore precisely this relationship. But it is not Arendt's understanding of violence that chimes most strongly with Conrad's, but rather that of her friend, Walter Benjamin. This essay will explore Conrad's text in relation to Benjamin's Critique of Violence (1921), arguing that its concern with silence speaks to Benjamin's notion of divine violence. Benjamin's critique contradicts Arendt by finding that violence and politics are intertwined, and unlike Arendt, Benjamin regards divine violence as essential to justice. Yet Benjamin's notion of divine violence is notoriously ambiguous and contested. This essay will show how Conrad's ironic use of narrative silence enables a modernist exploration of poetic justice that provides a literary answer to lingering questions around Benjamin's theory. If the divine in Benjamin appears at points where his thinking encounters the ineffable, Conrad's silences provide alternative means to register and explore what cannot be articulated with certainty. Conrad's novel

A s a w riter o f fiction Jo seph C on rad considered it very im p o rtan t th at his im aginary w orld should be presented in m o st accu rate and evocative term s which w ould give his readers a sense o f experiencing reality. In the preface to The Nigger o f the 'Narcissus' he says: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power o f the written word to make you hear, to m ake you feel-it is, before all, to make you see1 T h e em phasis w hich C on rad puts on m aking his readers see is in keeping w ith the fact th a t he him self and m any o f his characters a p p ear to look carefully at the reality they deal w ith in ord er to see its hidden tru th. Th e sheer accum ulation o f references m ad e in his w ritings to looking, w atching, observing, to glances, gazes, and to eyes generally, produces significant literary effects and m eanings. L o rd Jim m ay serve as a m o st telling exam ple o f this tendency; the novel seems to be full o f w atchful eyes. T he very first sentence o f the bo ok c o n ta in s a m en tio n o f J im 's " fixed fro m-u n d er sta re " 2. T he sentence con stitu tes a p a rt o f C o n ra d 's description o f Jim 's ap peara nce correspo nd in g to his inn er characteristics and a state o f m ind. T he w ay charac te rs look a t one an o th er and observe o thers looking and seeing m ay often represent a very com plex situatio n in w hich there is m uch m ore th an m eets the eye. F o r exam ple the passage in w hich Jim m istakes a rem a rk m a d e a b ou t a d o g for a sneer directed at himself, n o t only provides an inkling o f J im 's 1 J. C o n r a d , Preface [in:] id .,

In this paper, the writers try to compare two authors, the Iranian leftist, Bozorg Alavi (1904-1997) and the Polish Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), in their novels Her Eyes (1952) and The Secret Agent (1907), respectively. Although these two writers have different attitudes to Socialism and the question of revolution, both share Romantic idealism and a tragic sense of personal and social life. Moreover, they both are precursors of modernist novel in their countries, and share a humanistic attitude to life. However, both are intellectual elites and their relation to their homeland is problematic. All this make possible a comparative study of these two writers. Their political proclivities tint their views of life and politics and thus they have a dissimilar interpretation of nationalism and socialism, two political subjects they are entangled with. The very same political attitude colors their ideas of human agency and the ethics of human responsibility. Nevertheless, each writer critiques and questions the premises of his political belief in his work, which is the most characteristic modernist attitude they share. The paper will bring similarities, differences and contradictions in Conrad and Alavi's opinions to politics and individual ethics into focus and conclude that the reason for greatness and fame of these two writers is their attempts at reaching an understanding of humanity rather than reporting on the political taste of a people or time.