DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L314.24
Authors: Joel J. Janicki
Abstract: Outsiders are the bane of the police and any other profession; those outside the system are unreliable mavericks that are hard to pin down and pigeonhole. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is the consummate outsider, bringing to English Literature perspicacity, critical perspective and devastating satire.
In The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad takes for his setting turn-of-the-century London, the action of which revolves around a terrorist act. The novel presents the city’s denizens as characterized by corruptibility and grotesque features; nearly all its ‘agents’ are marked by limited vision and mediocrity; they are flabby, unsavory, possessed of a self-satisfied ignorance, and a superficial respectability; physically they embody plumpness, rotundity of form, a gross excess of human flesh. The physical flabbiness is matched by a moral one: Revolutionaries and dignitaries have lost their ideals; their spirituality has been consumed by their physicality. The single idealism presented is the destructive nihilism of the “perfect” anarchist.
The present study aims to examine Conrad’s novel from the perspective of anarchism and betrayal. Anarchy here suggests a state of disorder on various levels, political and moral as well as social and familial. The word derives from the Greek meaning “absence of a leader”; as a philosophy, it denies the authority of the government to conduct human affairs.
Conrad captures changes taking place in western society in which moral absolutes have been undermined, political leaders employ subterfuge, subversion and double agents to undermine order, integrity, and rule of law, and individuals break their bonds of loyalty and trust consciously and unconsciously, resulting in a state of anarchy at various levels. The “social anomie” or normlessness that ensues marks a breakdown in social identity, one that will be examined in the novel by making use Conrad’s political essay, “Autocracy and War” (190{6e6090cdd558c53a8bc18225ef4499fead9160abd3419ad4f137e902b483c465}) and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of betrayal and the fragmented life in as presented in Loyalty, Dissent and Betrayal (2005).
Keywords: Anarchy, Betrayal, nihilism, anomie, grotesque
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