Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today 3030868443, 9783030868444

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Terrorist Fiction, Terrorism Studies, and Postcritique
Who Becomes a Terrorist?
Terrorism Studies
Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS)
Postcritique
Anarchism and Terrorism
Terrorist Rhetoric
“Irreconcilable Antagonisms”
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Conrad’s Anarchist Tales
Conventions of Anarchist Fiction
Useful Information in Conrad’s Tales
“An Anarchist” and Profiling
“The Informer” and Fanaticism
Bibliography
Chapter 3: The Secret Agent: Terrorists and Counterterrorists
The Secret Agent and Terrorism Studies
Nineteenth-Century Anarchists
Conrad’s Anarchists
Anarchists and Police
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Under Western Eyes: Revolutionists and Informers
Terrorism Studies and Profiling
The Critical Consensus
Reading Under Western Eyes Today
Terrorists and Counterterrorists
Conrad’s Political Hope
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Reading Conrad Now
Index

Citation preview

Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today

Joyce Wexler

Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today “This book is important, compelling, and extremely timely—both for students of Conrad and for anyone interested in separating the facts of terrorism from the myths that surround it. Dr. Wexler, an outstanding scholar of modernism, provides impressive new readings of Conrad’s political works that incorporate new scientific studies of terrorism. Significant, revealing, essential.” —Brian Richardson, Professor of English, University of Maryland, USA “Drawing extensively on contemporary research in Terrorism Studies, Joyce Wexler sheds new light on Conrad’s understanding of the complications and contradictions of this controversial topic. She convincingly demonstrates that many of the disputes about how to read his works reflect disagreements about terrorism— and that more often than not Conrad was right, and his critics wrong. Teachers and students will find this a useful book for many reasons—for the information it provides about Terrorism Studies, for the perspectives it offers on Conrad’s relevance for issues of contemporary concern, for Wexler’s thorough, up-to-date accounts of the Conrad criticism, and for her sensible, detailed readings of often-­ taught texts.” —Paul Armstrong, Professor of English, Brown University, USA “The book utilizes the concept of postcritique to examine the representation of terrorism and counterterrorism in Conrad’s literature. Offering a rich survey of terrorist studies and the ways in which its insights find precedent in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, ‘The Informer,’ ‘The Anarchist’ and Under Western Eyes, the book will appeal to readers who wish to think social science and literature together in considering acts of terrorism and the people who commit them.” —Yael Levin, Associate Professor in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and First Vice President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America

Joyce Wexler

Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today

Joyce Wexler Department of English Loyola University Chicago Chicago, IL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-86844-4    ISBN 978-3-030-86845-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Jerome, who fills every day with love and laughter

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Joseph Conrad Society of America for providing a forum for Conrad studies. John G. Peters has been a mainstay of the organization, and he encouraged my work on Conrad early in my career when it mattered most. He is the current editor of Conradiana, which published an early version of my chapter on Under Western Eyes. Conversations with many other Conradians, notably Paul Armstrong, Peter Lancelot Mallios, Ellen Harrington Burton, Mark Larabee, and Brian Richardson, have challenged and confirmed my ideas for many years. Christopher Castiglia introduced me to postcritique, leading to my collaboration with Jay Parker on the collection of essays in Joseph Conrad and Postcritique. Loyola University Chicago provided a research leave for this book, and my colleagues in the English department set a high bar for research. I thank in particular David Chinitz, Edward Wheatley, and James Knapp for their friendship.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Terrorist Fiction, Terrorism Studies, and Postcritique  1 2 Conrad’s Anarchist Tales 33 3 The Secret Agent: Terrorists and Counterterrorists 57 4 Under Western Eyes: Revolutionists and Informers 85 5 Conclusion: Reading Conrad Now115 Index119

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Terrorist Fiction, Terrorism Studies, and Postcritique

Terrorism entails an affordable amount of violence to produce the maximum amount of fear. It is the weapon of the weak against the strong. It strikes without warning, and it depends on publicity to amplify its impact. Its targets are symbolic rather than strategic, and innocent bystanders are among its victims. Terrorists justify their violence against civilians as a necessary means to achieve a worthwhile end, but the public’s anger at such attacks often blocks the terrorists’ political message. Each act of terrorism has its own causes and aims, yet the question of individual motivation remains: What makes a person become a terrorist? Joseph Conrad tried to answer this question at the beginning of the twentieth century. Writing during the first wave of dynamite “outrages,” he explored the motives of perpetrators. At the time, attacks were blamed on anarchists, but Conrad uses the word terrorism in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, inviting comparisons to current usage.1 Anarchism and terrorism often refer to the same kind of event, an attack on a symbolic target that also injures random bystanders, and the public has turned to Conrad’s fiction to understand terrorism today.2 As the journalist Judith Shulevitz observes, “In the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent became one of the three works of literature most frequently cited in the American media.”3 Most studies on terrorism in the literature also mention this book as well as his other narratives about anarchists—“An Anarchist,” “The Informer,” and Under Western Eyes. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1_1

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critical response to these texts has changed over the years, and the current confluence of postcritique and Terrorism Studies prompts new readings.

Who Becomes a Terrorist? Since the nineteenth century, terrorists have been described as cowards, fanatics, and mad men, and their willingness to kill has been blamed on poverty, unemployment, and depression. This view persists. Walter Laqueur, who published the historical survey Terrorism in 1977, stated, “Terrorists are fanatics, and fanaticism frequently makes for cruelty and sadism.”4 In 2018 the political scientist Richard Jackson noted that this belief is also prevalent in fiction: In sum, contemporary literary ‘terrorists’ are most often narrated as caricatures and stereotypical human ‘monsters,’ rather than as understandable, rational human beings… That is, they are mostly depicted as being either ‘mad or bad,’ rather than political revolutionaries.5

But the perpetrators of violence in Joseph Conrad’s political fiction are more disturbing. His anarchists, terrorists, and revolutionists are neither fanatic nor abnormal. Apart from their use of violence, they are like most people. For Conrad, this means that they seek autonomy and solidarity; they want to control their own lives and to be part of a community. Specific factors lead them to violence, but they are driven by the same motives that Conrad portrays in other characters, whether they are anarchists, police, or victims. The normality of Conrad’s terrorists has been corroborated by social scientists. Despite the popular view that terrorists are fanatics, most experts in the field of Terrorism Studies believe that it is impossible to predict who will carry out an attack. Attempts to create profiles fail because terrorists are indistinguishable until they join an organization committed to violence. Individuals join radical groups for a variety of personal and political reasons, and very few members actually participate in attacks. Asking how an ordinary person becomes a terrorist leads to hypotheses that can be tested against empirical studies of actual terrorists. In contrast, when terrorists are labeled fanatics, they are prejudged to be pathological cases rather than political partisans. Since Conrad’s anarchists and revolutionists illustrate the findings of social scientists, his narratives add particularity and context that help the public and the police resist false stereotypes.

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There are many extraordinary characters in Conrad’s fiction, but he makes them believable by explaining how they developed. Their stories are often filtered through an incredulous narrator who makes his own process of understanding extreme behavior part of the narrative. In Heart of Darkness, for example, Marlow explains how he came to know Kurtz, perhaps the most depraved character in twentieth-century fiction. After a long account of his own journey, Marlow describes his encounter with Kurtz. Only then does he explain who Kurtz was: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”6 Kurtz is not aberrant; he is representative. Like Marlow, narrators in Conrad’s political fiction try to explain what makes ordinary people turn to violence. Conrad’s prescience is especially remarkable because he tells us more about terrorists than contemporary novelists do.7 As Peter C.  Herman observes in his introduction to Terrorism and Literature, many outside literature departments believe that fiction in all its forms has very little to contribute to the understanding of terrorism due to the inability of contemporary novelists to empathize with terrorists. Consequently, as one distinguished critic puts it, ‘the literary “terrorist” is most often personified simply as sociopathic.’8

Empirical studies support Herman’s claim. In “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001,” Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel survey terrorist fiction and report that it “is not about terrorism per se; it is about the political legitimacy and moral integrity of the society to which terrorism’s victims belong.”9 The novels in the study focus “less on politics than on sentiment and less on the perpetrators of terrorism than on its victims.”10 Appelbaum and Paknadel argue that “the most famous novels about terrorism commonly depicted terrorism as a type of philosophical and psychological derangement and hence not much to worry about.”11 The novels rarely portray terrorists themselves: “Terrorism novels have been many things in the English-speaking world, but they have shied away from the representation of terrorism and terrorists from the psychological, moral, and epistemic perspectives of terrorists.”12 The authors of the study emphasize their main finding: “the significance of the incident depends not on the meaning of the act for the terrorists, but on the injury it causes (or was intended to cause) to its targets.”13 The victims, not the perpetrators, are the core of most of these novels: “Nor is it a function of what we are able to learn about the terrorists, about their personalities, grievances, or

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tactical aims, or a function of the large-scale political conflicts of which their behavior is a symptomatic expression.”14 Focusing on the victims of violence, terrorist novels “implicitly enlist us against the perpetrators, rendering illegitimate the terrorists’ political aims often even without stopping to say what they are.”15 Appelbaum and Paknadel speculate about reasons for the lack of attention to terrorists in recent fiction. They note that “so little direct experience is possessed by the people writing the novels about [terrorism]” that authors must rely on previous narratives in the media and other texts.16 The article quotes a former terrorist’s objections to the typical characterization of IRA members: they were not “perverts and thugs” but “often quite sober, upstanding, and moralistic defenders of tradition.”17 Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber find the same characteristics in fiction written after 2001. They observe that post-9/11 literature “is mostly not concerned with the perpetrators and their agenda, but with the impact of the September 11 incidents (or other, imaginary suicide attacks) on both individual characters and American or Western society at large.”18 None of these generalizations fit Conrad. His novels about terrorism probe the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of those who commit violence. He situates terrorists’ political goals in specific social and political circumstances. He examines the “psychological, moral, and epistemic perspective of terrorists,” a perspective that his background helped him understand. An early critic observed that the sources of Conrad’s work were “observation, personal experience, hearsay, and reading.”19 The same could be said about other writers, but in Conrad’s case each of these sources was extraordinary.20 As the child of Polish nationalists, he was immersed in the ideological fervor that leads people to devote their lives to a political cause. His father was not a terrorist, but he had been imprisoned and exiled for his active resistance against the Russian occupation of Poland. Conrad became an officer in the British merchant marine, where he gained first-hand knowledge of the financial, political, and social consequences of imperial power.21 He observed the effects of global capitalism on colonizers as well as the colonized. He was acquainted with people involved in imperial trade and government, and he read travelers’ accounts of remote places. Fluent in Polish, French, and English, he was able to follow newspaper reports about revolt and rebellion throughout the world.22 Conrad’s political knowledge was formidable, yet the information in his novels is usually treated as a backdrop for the characters’ personal

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conflicts. Critics write about themes like betrayal, the loss of shared beliefs, and the absence of ethical norms. Sometimes they minimize the information in Conrad’s fiction to protect its literary value, assuming that literary qualities and political lessons are incompatible. Walter Laqueur advances these views in Terrorism. He disagrees with those who praise Conrad’s political insight, arguing that the novels are about personal betrayal and reveal little about terrorism: Betrayal is the main motive in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes and countless other novels. It is of course true that few, if any, terrorist groups escaped defectors and traitors in their ranks. However, the heavy emphasis on treason to the detriment of other motives is bound to distort the general picture. It may result in a brilliant work of fiction, but then the novelist is preoccupied with the fate of the individual, whereas the historian pays more attention to social and political movements.23

Laqueur credits novelists with insight into individuals but reserves the social domain for historians. Literary critics also question the practical value of Conrad’s political fiction. For example, in “The Terrorist in Fiction” Bili Melman claims that literature cannot portray terrorists because “fiction is not preoccupied with terrorism as a concrete, historical phenomenon” but rather deals with it as “a moral dilemma, an aesthetic experiment and an ontological problem.” Melman believes that terrorist novels have nothing to tell us about “the terrorist as he was, or might have been in reality”; the most such fiction can do is “contribute to our understanding of some aspects of the character of the terrorist, such as the appeal of political violence, individual action, and motive; the function of violence in the terrorist’s life and his relation to time.”24 Although Melman and Laqueur reach the same conclusion, her conception of fiction differs from his. She believes that society, not individual character, is literature’s domain. Since the terrorist is outside the orbit of social interaction, he is too isolated to be a good subject for fiction. Fiction can portray terrorist activities but not the character of a terrorist: “The terrorist is perceived as an individualist. He is mostly presented as an outcast, and exists in a cultural, political and social vacuum, rejecting any framework and being rejected by it.” Terrorism “does not aspire to human solidarity and fraternity.”25 She argues that since literature creates a cultural, political, and social context, it is ill-equipped to depict the abnormal isolation of terrorists. While Laqueur claims society

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for historians and Melman claims it for novelists, they agree that terrorists are too anomalous to be convincing literary characters. Neither Laqueur’s view nor Melman’s is consistent with social science research in Terrorism Studies. This research indicates that terrorists are not aberrant. Like most people, they seek autonomy as well as solidarity, and they find both when they join a terrorist organization.

Terrorism Studies While Conrad’s personal experience may account for his knowledge of terrorism, biographical authority alone cannot validate his narratives. Corroboration comes from recent social science research. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and political science, the interdisciplinary field of Terrorism Studies emerged before 9/11 and has burgeoned and branched since then. Despite contentious debates about what constitutes terrorism or “terrorism,” there is consensus on two findings: terrorists resemble everyone else until they join a terrorist cell, and infiltrating these cells is the best way to prevent attacks. These principles are clear in Conrad’s fiction. He portrays the normality and diversity of terrorists, the social and political factors that lead them to violence, the similarities between terrorists and counterterrorists, and the vulnerabilities that may help authorities prevent attacks. These themes appear in each of his narratives about anarchism—“An Anarchist,” “The Informer,” The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. Notwithstanding public opinion, the normality of terrorists is well established in Terrorism Studies. Martha Crenshaw, an expert on terrorism, discovered as early as 1981 that the “limited data we have on individual terrorists . . . suggest that the outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality.”26 In the face of public disbelief, Crenshaw reaffirmed this finding in 2000: Nevertheless, most analysts of terrorism do not think that personality factors account for terrorist behavior, nor do they see significant gender differences. One of the basic research findings of the field is that terrorism is primarily a group activity. It is typically not the result of psychopathology or a single personality type. Shared ideological commitment and group solidarity are much more important determinants of terrorist behavior than individual characteristics.27

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The same conclusions appear in a 1999 US government report on The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? by Rex A. Hudson. He reviewed extensive research to date on terrorism and counterterrorism, and subsequent studies have confirmed his findings. The report defines terrorism as the use of violence to frighten a population, often by killing innocent people as well as targeted enemies: Unable to achieve their unrealistic goals by conventional means, international terrorists attempt to send an ideological or religious message by terrorizing the general public. Through the choice of their targets, which are often symbolic or representative of the targeted nation, terrorists attempt to create a high-profile impact on the public of their targeted enemy or enemies with their act of violence, despite the limited material resources that are usually at their disposal.28

Although the report is twenty years old, one sign of its validity is that it predicted—in 1999—that al-Qaida would attack government buildings with airplanes.29 The report covers political, religious, and ideological organizations and analyzes the motives of male and female members. Hudson reviews a number of hypotheses, tests them against empirical information about known terrorists, and ends with case studies. He rejects the familiar hypotheses that the terrorist is “the lunatic, the loner, the threatener, the hater”30 and concludes that terrorists are neither insane nor fanatical. His main point is that it is impossible to predict who will become a terrorist: “One finding is that, unfortunately for profiling purposes, there does not appear to be a single terrorist personality.”31 The characteristics of known terrorists appear throughout the population.32 Therefore, attempts to create psychological and sociological profiles of likely terrorists fail. Profiles produce false positives and lead police away from truly dangerous suspects. Most experts in Terrorism Studies agree that there are constants in terrorist organizations, not in the psychology or social background of individual members. Hudson points out that it is easier to predict a group’s behavior than an individual’s: “Although it may not be possible to isolate a so-called terrorist personality, each terrorist group has its own distinctive mindset.”33 People often join a group because their friends have joined it, and the ideology of the group transforms individual members after they join. The leader imposes severe discipline on all members, discouraging or forbidding outside contact. Members are asked to prove their

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commitment to the group by performing dangerous acts of violence. The need to justify these acts binds members to the group’s ideology. Emin Daskin points out that justification is essential to maintain loyalty to the group: The justification of violent acts by terrorist groups—especially when civilians fall victim—is vital mainly because of their need to convince group members, sympathisers, potential recruits and, sometimes, the broader public of the rightfulness of their acts and to retain their commitment to the cause. Several factors such as politicisation of discontent, the (perceived) legitimacy of the political system, psychocultural aspects of political violence, ideology and doctrine, communication and utilitarian aspects play a role in the justification of political violence.34

Hudson concludes that terrorist organizations satisfy the common desire for both community and “revolutionary heroism,”35 aims that Conrad represents as well. The decision to join an organization is an autonomous act, yet individuals are subject to the group’s mindset after they join. Martha Crenshaw emphasizes that terrorist groups offer community and cultivate a sense of agency. To attract and retain members, she writes, groups appeal to both desires: “Commitment is also motivated by ego-­ involvement. Individuals seek to maintain self-respect, the support of the peer group, and the sense of belonging that is heightened by a sense of shared risk.”36 Emphasizing that people have needs as individuals and as social beings, Crenshaw speaks of ego-involvement and self-respect as well as support of the peer group and a sense of belonging. In my discussion of Conrad’s characters, I usually refer to the individual’s desire to exercise control as agency, autonomy, or freedom and the desire to be part of a group as solidarity, community, or affiliation. These terms are not synonymous, but they express forms of the fundamental desires that Conrad attributes to most of his characters. To understand any group’s mindset, Hudson advises, one must study its particular goals within “its own cultural, economic, political, and social context.”37 Instead of asking who becomes a terrorist, we should ask what terrorist groups intend to do. The best way to anticipate and prevent attacks is to study the goals and behavior of each terrorist group.38 This knowledge is acquired through surveillance and infiltration, not profiling:

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Knowing the mindset of a group enables a terrorism analyst to better determine the likely targets of the group and its likely behavior under varying circumstances. It is surprising, therefore, that the concept of the terrorist mindset has not received more attention by terrorism specialists. It may not always be possible to profile the individual leaders of a terrorist group…, but the group’s mindset can be profiled if adequate information is available on the group and there is an established record of activities and pronouncements.39

Hudson discourages a single approach: “A counterterrorist policy should be tailor-made for a particular group, taking into account its historical, cultural, political, and social context, as well as the context of what is known about the psychology of the group or its leaders.”40 Once the mindset of a group is understood, authorities can intervene: A psychologically sophisticated policy of promoting divisions between political and military leaders as well as defections within guerrilla and terrorist groups is likely to be more effective than a simple military strategy based on the assumption that all members and leaders of the group are hard-liners. A military response to terrorism unaccompanied by political countermeasures is likely to promote cohesion within the group.41

Surveillance reveals each group’s particular goals and methods and allows police to infiltrate the cell. Not everyone who joins a terrorist group is willing to commit an act of violence.42 Crenshaw highlights this fact to persuade police to redirect their efforts: “Many individuals are potential terrorists, but few actually make that commitment. To explain why terrorism happens, another question is more appropriate: Why does involvement continue? What are the psychological mechanisms of group interaction?”43 Since terrorism “is the result of a gradual growth of commitment and opposition, a group development,” group dynamics are more revealing than individual psychological profiles: “The psychological relationships within the terrorist group—the interplay of commitment, risk, solidarity, loyalty, guilt, revenge, and isolation—discourage terrorists from changing the direction they have taken.”44 Monitored by fellow members as well as the police, anarchists are under constant surveillance, as Conrad dramatizes in “An Anarchist.” Gratification of deep communal bonds and fear of punishment for leaving keep individuals in the group.

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Hudson concludes that “mindset profiling of a terrorist group is an essential mode of analysis for assessing the threat posed by the group.”45 To anticipate terrorist acts, Erik J. Dahl argues, we need “the precise intelligence” that depends on “tips from the public, informants working for local law enforcement, and long-term surveillance of suspects.”46 These findings are widely accepted by social scientists, though not by the public, and they corroborate Conrad’s narratives about terrorism. As a novelist he is free to create individualized characters, put them in specific settings, and show how they become terrorists. He demonstrates how ordinary people become terrorists and how police use surveillance and infiltration to detect them. He provides convincing examples of the interplay of individual psychology and social forces. Just as Conrad reinforces the findings of social scientists, their research validates the information in his fiction.

Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) In 2006 a group of social scientists started to question the empirical focus of what they called orthodox terrorism studies. They named their approach Critical Terrorism Studies. In a position paper, Richard Jackson and others argued that the empirical research conducted by Terrorism Studies is unduly influenced by state support, leading to a focus on “problem-­ solving.”47 CTS scholars contend that researchers funded by the government and private think tanks conceptualize terrorists as a fixed category. As a result, the dissenters incorrectly claim, orthodox researchers attempt to understand the “terrorist personality” so that police can predict and prevent violence.48 Apart from the erroneous claim that orthodox researchers posit a terrorist personality, the CTS scholars correctly differentiate their work from empirical research. The driving questions in CTS are how the concept of terrorism is constructed and whose interests it serves. These questions stem from the theoretical practice known as critique, which Jackson defines as follows: “Such analysis can be achieved using deconstructive, narrative, genealogical, ethnographic and historical analyses, as well as Gramscian and constructivist approaches.”49 Critique questions the epistemological and ontological foundation of terms and concepts. Instead of regarding texts, whether by novelists, journalists, or social scientists, as reflections of reality, critique approaches all representations as motivated constructions of reality. The meaning of any representation must be interpreted, and power relations determine which interpretations prevail.

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Applying critique to Terrorism Studies, Jackson and others reframe violent events. Questions replace common assumptions: “Thus, CTS starts by asking: who is terrorism knowledge for, and what functions does it serve in supporting their interests?”50 CTS scholars challenge the very concept of terrorism: “In this sense, just as ‘races’ do not exist but classifications of humankind do, so too ‘terrorism’ does not exist but classifications of different forms of political violence do.”51 CTS recognizes terrorism as a form of political violence that targets civilians but sees it in both state and non-state actions.52 Scholars ask why some forms of violence and not others are called terrorism, why some perpetrators of violence and not others are called terrorists, and how this naming determines the response of the police and the public to a particular event: “why, when, how and for what purpose do groups and individuals come to be named as ‘terrorist’ and what consequences does this have?”53 Conrad’s narratives raise these questions as well. The theoretical orientation of CTS makes it less pragmatic than orthodox approaches. Lee Jarvis objects to “an essentialist conception of terrorism as a coherent and bounded object of knowledge” and opposes the “preference for policy-relevant research.”54 Of course, CTS also seeks to stop violence, but its ambition is to do more than prevent attacks by non-­ state groups. It rejects definitions of terrorism based on the amount of materiel a group possesses. Orthodox Terrorism Studies, Jarvis argues, “legitimizes the state’s continued monopoly on violence.”55 CTS expands this observation to condemn state-sponsored violence as terrorism, disregarding the disparity between state and non-state resources and institutions. Setting aside empirical studies, CTS intends “to explore not terrorism per se, but, rather, representations of terrorism.”56 Jarvis proposes alternatives to the “ameliorative, problem-solving role characterizing the mainstream.”57 He calls attention to the forces that construct the public’s conception of terrorists and the fluidity of such constructions. He advocates skepticism and critique to introduce a more nuanced understanding of violent acts. He calls for “an exploration of terror’s constructions, representations and performances.”58 He argues that instead of accepting claims that certain events are acts of terrorism, we should recognize “that the writing of any event as terrorist is inherently contingent, and emphatically not necessary.”59 Other ways of understanding events are possible and important. Whether or not an event is regarded as terrorism renders “certain counterterrorist policies possible or desirable while militating against others.”60 This turn away from problem-solving research aimed at

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prevention is consistent with critique’s suspicion of essentialism and practical use. Jeroen Gunning, another CTS advocate, acknowledges that the orthodox approach “can offer very practical advice where ‘critical’ perspectives often struggle to go beyond critique and deconstruction.”61 Despite the differences between orthodox and critical Terrorism Studies, both groups reject the popular idea that a terrorist personality exists. They agree that terrorists cannot be profiled, and both branches urge authorities to examine the particular circumstances that spawn radical groups. A major difference between orthodox and critical approaches is that CTS includes state violence as a form of terrorism, a position that Conrad’s fiction illustrates. Gunning includes state violence in his definition of terrorism: “problems inherent in the study of clandestine violence, whether carried out by state actors or non-state actors, or to ideological predispositions and issues related to funding (the apparent lack thereof or too close an association with government bodies).”62 When terrorism is defined by the state, Gunning argues, it is “difficult to ask questions about the extent to which counter-terrorism policies perpetuate the ‘terrorist threat’ or whether political transformation may be more effective than mere coercive force aimed at eradication.”63 Conrad asks these questions in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, and he attributes “clandestine violence” to both anarchists and police. As Michael C. Frank argues in an essay on The Secret Agent: What distinguishes Conrad’s fictionalization of terrorism from such other, more spectacular scenarios is the fact that it exploits the imaginative potential of counterterrorism. While Conrad acknowledges the destabilizing effects of terrorism on British society, his novel implies that the true source of these effects is not the threat of terrorism per se; it is the way that threat undermines the status quo by eliciting new, formerly illegal measures in the name of counterterrorism.64

Terrorists and counterterrorists flout the law to achieve their goals, and Conrad regards the two groups as counterparts.

Postcritique Just when political scientists began to apply critique to Terrorism Studies, literary critics started to challenge the hegemony of critique. Whereas Critical Terrorism Studies favors theoretical questions, the literary

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movement known as postcritique emphasizes practical concerns.65 In “Postcritical Reading” Rita Felski claims that it is time to appreciate the ‘“uses of literature’—what literature does in the world.”66 Felski calls on critics “to engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading—such as the desire for knowledge or the longing for escape—that are either overlooked or undervalued in literary scholarship.”67 Although critique also asks what literature does in the world, postcritique is more interested in practical effects than ideological foundations. Felski contrasts critique’s “de” approaches that deconstruct, demystify, defamiliarize, and destabilize with postcritique’s “re” approaches that “replenish, reconfigure, recreate, reimagine, reinvent.”68 Both critique and postcritique recognize the power of representation, but whereas critique warns us to resist it, postcritique promotes its ability to elicit emotional responses, offer ethical lessons, and provide useful information. Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker develop this argument in Critique and Postcritique, directing attention to “Art’s work in the world.”69 While revealing implicit meanings is important, they explain, critique’s hermeneutics of suspicion prevents literature from affirming anything. They regard literature’s ability to create aesthetic and imaginative meaning as one of its public functions: “Rethinking critique can thus forge stronger links between intellectual life and the nonacademic world. Such links are not simply a matter of capitulation or collusion, but can offer a vital means of influencing larger conversations and intervening in institutional policies and structures.”70 Similarly, Jennifer L.  Fleissner discerns “a new scientism” in postcritique. This disposition accepts “the idea of something concrete, something that is simply what it appears to be,” and so “to move beyond critique then means nothing more or less than confronting the thing in itself.”71 This focus on concrete things rehabilitates the information in texts. Postcritique argues that literary qualities enhance the information about particular times and places in fiction. Since “texts draw us into imagined yet referentially salient worlds,” Felski asks, “What might literary texts teach us about the social resonance of stuff?”72 The possibility that literature might “teach” anything and that it might refer to real things is a change: “In the not too distant past, objects held captive in poetry or prose were routinely vaporized and dematerialized by critics, stripped of their seeming solidity and put firmly in their proper place as signifiers referring to other signifiers.”73 These tenets of postcritique create a role

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for literature as a source of information and a role for social science in literary criticism as a way to assess a text’s realism and accuracy. As Felski emphasizes, literature represents feelings and facts. It describes how individual choices and decisions are shaped by circumstances and psychology. Characters are unique, yet we draw generalizations from their behavior. Our own experience can determine whether we find a story convincing or not. Postcritique adds another dimension to this process by affirming the importance of the information in the story. Conrad’s narrators describe their own progression from incomprehension to understanding, illustrating the process of acquiring information as they tell their stories. They learn how ordinary people can become terrorists and how terrorists and counterterrorists can be counterparts. The narrators’ accounts of their experience can prepare us to accept the same lessons from social science research. In addition to valuing the information in texts, postcritique encourages critics to consider multiple meanings. This disposition is especially important for Conrad’s fiction. His use of contraries is hard to miss, though critics have named them variously. Keith Carabine lists several: “These famously include: egoism and altruism, emotion and reason, solidarity and isolation, moral corruption and redemption, heroism and contingency, loyalty and betrayal, idealism and scepticism, piety and scorn, and fidelity to a code composed of ‘a few very simple ideas’ and ‘truth to one’s own sensations.’”74 John G. Peters’s comprehensive survey of Conrad criticism notes other oppositions: romance and realism, the artist and the moralist, “inward psychological complexity and outward moral symbolism,” imagination and experience.75 Avrom Fleishman’s classic study of Conrad’s political novels focuses on the tension between individualism and community,76 a binary close to my focus on autonomy and solidarity. This variety suggests a dialectic that does not limit meaning to any two alternatives; Conrad creates structures that accommodate multiple oppositions. In a 1901 letter to the New York Times “Saturday Review,” he wrote, “The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous—so full of hope.”77 Understood as competing ideas rather than dualisms, as constellations rather than polarities, these “irreconcilable antagonisms” resist the either/or choices of binary thinking. Conrad’s commitment to “all the irreconcilable antagonisms” recognizes that contraries are not only irreconcilable but are also inescapable. It is noteworthy that Conrad included

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hope in this array of possibilities. Similarly, postcritique fosters hope by taking irreconcilable antagonisms seriously as well as ironically. Postcritique provides a rationale for declining to read positive statements of fact and feeling suspiciously, or only suspiciously. Postcritical readings reshape controversies about the impact of Conrad’s political views on his fiction. For example, a number of critics argue that Conrad’s conservative and even reactionary convictions caused him to caricature anarchists.78 Since some of his anarchists and revolutionists are inept, foolish, or venal, such critics assume that Conrad opposed reform. In an influential essay, Irving Howe claimed that Conrad satirized activists to ridicule their cause. Howe thought that the heroic aspirations of revolutionists deserved more respect.79 He speculated that Conrad opposed revolutionary action because he felt abandoned when his parents were exiled to Siberia for their advocacy of Polish nationalism.80 But if we take postcritique as a warrant to admit the findings of social scientists, the less than heroic qualities of Conrad’s activists simply indicate that they are a varied sample of normal people. In Under Western Eyes a terrorist is an admirable idealist, and in “The Informer” a prominent anarchist is a bourgeois bon vivant. Neither character is a caricature. Although Conrad’s skeptical comments about democracy have been cited as evidence of conservative political sympathies,81 his fiction tells another story. If we shift our attention from Conrad’s political affiliation to his knowledge of political behavior, we can appreciate his anarchists as realistic characters. Postcritique expands the significance of Conrad’s political fiction beyond the literary themes that so many critics have examined. Notwithstanding the ambiguity and irony in his work, postcritique accepts the possibility that some passages are factual, accurate, and sincere. From this perspective, we can respond to individual characters’ feelings and social conditions emotionally, and we can acquire knowledge of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Anarchism and Terrorism Anarchists developed a new kind of political resistance in the years between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. The invention of dynamite in 1867 gave individuals and small groups the power to inflict damage beyond their numbers, and the invention of the linotype machine in 1886 led to cheap newspapers and sensational journalism that publicized attacks. In the past, assassins targeted specific enemies. Now anyone could be a

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victim. The public was terrified, and it called the perpetrators terrorists. Despite different historical situations and political goals, recent terrorists resemble anarchists in Conrad’s time, and much of the research in Terrorism Studies applies to both periods. Alex Houen summarizes the historical origins of this kind of political violence: “In terms of the covert terrorism of modern times, most commentators have placed its beginnings in the mid- to late nineteenth century, associating it with the subversive militant tactics of the Russian Nihilists and Irish ‘Fenians’ in the 1860s and 1870s, along with developments in explosives and the advent of a mass media.”82 The common justification for such violence was that a clean sweep would prepare society for a new order, whether it was to be nihilist, nationalist, or socialist. At the turn of the century, radical opponents of the status quo were lumped together as anarchists, and every dynamite outrage was blamed on them. Whether bombings were carried out by Russian revolutionists, Irish Fenians, French individualists, or American labor organizers, all these radicals were referred to as anarchists because they threatened the social order. Their willingness to endanger innocent bystanders to advance their cause antagonized the public. Bombings were condemned for inflicting violence on random citizens, and the perpetrators’ political objectives were discredited. The same is true of terrorists today. Since anarchism derives from a utopian desire to be free from social coercion and constraints, the term implies extreme individualism. It became associated with collective action, however, in nineteenth-century social movements. In Russia, anarchism was theorized as a political movement fighting an autocratic regime. As the political scientist Marie Fleming explains in “Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe,” anarchism became a term that encompassed individual and collective action: “While most socialists in this period expected that there would be collective violence in the revolution, anarchists were compelled, through their insistence upon a strict interpretation of the principle of individual autonomy, to admit the legitimacy of individual acts of violence as well.”83 This duality is evident in criticism of The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes; some critics regard the terrorists in these novels as egotistical individualists, others as altruistic communalists. Fleming notes that by 1882 “propaganda by the deed was becoming identified by anarchist theoreticians, such as Reclus, with any act of revolt, even when the act was not performed consciously to elicit support for the anarchist cause.”84 The “anarchist principles of opposition to organization

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and authority” sanctioned individual acts of violence.85 Fleming concludes, “It might be argued that anarchist theory and political terrorism not only were not opposed, but that in fact they were coming to complement and sustain each other. At the very least it must be admitted that the theoreticians came to provide acts of social revolt with a sense of legitimacy.”86 Anarchism, like terrorism, became an umbrella term for attacks, no matter who the perpetrators were. The theoretical link between anarchism and terrorism acquired institutional support in 1864 when the International Anarchist Congress “formally adopted a strategy of ‘propaganda by deed.’”87 The phrase became a euphemism that justified and minimized violence by presenting it as a means of communication. Mikhail Bakunin, known as an anarchist and a revolutionist, wrote: “We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds…for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.”88 Peter Kropotkin declared that “a single assassination or bomb could ‘make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.’”89 Although he later disavowed violence,90 Kropotkin had justified it as a moral necessity: “I have said that when a party is put in the position of having to use dynamite, it ought to use it, as, for example, in Russia where the people [as a force] would have disappeared, if they had not used the means put at their disposal by science.”91 In addition to murdering hated representatives of the tsarist regime, dynamite attacks were aimed at symbolic targets and injured innocent bystanders. By the end of the nineteenth century, the killing of random victims was accepted as a permissible political tool. Once anarchism was theorized as “propaganda by deed,” it was possible to think of propaganda by words as a form of anarchism. By the turn of the century, some writers and artists called themselves anarchists to declare their opposition to social conditions. Anthony Fothergill compares anarchism and aestheticism as ways of resisting bourgeois life: “Both defiantly renounced the dominant order, with outsiderly independence and individualism the paradoxically unifying vision.”92 Art and anarchism were both seen as expressions of individual freedom. Autonomy overshadowed solidarity in artists’ anarchist proclamations: ‘Autonomy,’ ‘l’Autonomie’—the political cry of the anarchists as well as the generic name of their political clubs—was echoed in the aesthetic espoused by many among the late nineteenth-century artistic avant-garde, particularly

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in what Walter Benjamin called ‘the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ Paris, from which center it spread to other European capitals.93

Fothergill finds a source for this analogy “in the links between the modernist avant-garde and anarchist thinking.” He points out that “many artists saw an expressive link between bombs and books.”94 One of his examples is the French anarchist writer Laurent Tailhade. After the 1893 bombing of the Chamber of Deputies, Tailhade declared: “What do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful? What does the death of some unidentified persons matter, if, by it, the individual is affirmed.” Fothergill observes, “Intended to outrage, the remark is itself an outraged gesture against the bourgeois status quo.”95 If anarchism is the political expression of autonomy, aestheticism is its artistic form. As violence began to seem an end in itself, it was possible to compare violence for its own sake to art for art’s sake. Fothergill explains: ‘Anarchism is the crime of crimes.’ That is, it is crime for crime’s sake. The phrase evokes that other ‘decadent’ form of autonomy and self-centeredness contemporary with the height of the active terrorist phase, ‘Art for art’s sake.’96

Violence of the word was the reciprocal of propaganda by deed. Some writers thought that books were more powerful than bombs, and the artistic avant-garde appropriated the language of terrorism to describe its own work. Fothergill quotes Stéphane Mallarmé’s comment, “I know of no other bomb but a book.” Praising Felix Fénéon, Mallarmé added, “And I do not think that one can use a more effective weapon than literature.”97 This conflation was possible because anarchist targets themselves were symbolic. If bombs could be propaganda, words could be bombs. Fothergill argues that for Conrad too, ‘“books are deeds,’ symbolic actions as potent as political ones.”98 Fothergill notes that Conrad portrays a range of views about anarchism. While Conrad avoids taking a particular political position, he shows “what’s at stake in imposing the borders” between positions: Conrad’s aesthetic engages the liminal, the trouble at the boundaries between these concepts, by inviting us into fictional worlds that confound assumed order. This aesthetic task’s political and moral responsibilities lie

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not in endorsing a particular position but in comprehending, with compassion, what’s at stake in imposing the borders.99

Conrad’s embrace of antagonisms provides many borders to patrol, and in his anarchist narratives these include the border between autonomy and solidarity, agency and affiliation, independence and community. Like terrorism today, anarchism satisfies the desire for autonomy as well as solidarity, but anarchism is associated with individual agency to a much greater degree than terrorism is. The title of The Secret Agent reinforces numerous references to the desire for agency in most of the characters. Under Western Eyes shows how Haldin’s exercise of his agency deprives Razumov of his. Conrad, however, also shows that the anarchist principle of propaganda by deed entailed collective action. In “Conrad and Anarchism: Irony, Solidarity and Betrayal” John Rignall proposes a possible source for Conrad’s awareness of anarchism’s commitment to solidarity in The Torch, an anarchist journal. An article titled “Why We are Anarchists” states: “Because we see that the principle of solidarity of each for all and all for each, of what is good for all being good for the individual and vice versa, is the great law of nature.”100 Conrad did not share this optimism or the enthusiasm of avant-garde anarchists, but he saw that terrorists sought solidarity as well as autonomy.

Terrorist Rhetoric Literary critics disagree about the impact of terrorist rhetoric. Propaganda by deed amplifies words with acts, but are words alone also a form of terrorism? Alex Houen confronts the questions raised when books are compared to bombs: “Is terrorism primarily a matter of discursive and figurative practices?”101 He examines the implications of this comparison: “is the figurative as volatile in what it can signify and do as the violence itself? If so, does the history of terrorism show that violence and the figurative have interacted differently according to historical context?”102 While Houen is interested in the rhetorical dimension of terrorism, he does not minimize the difference between speech and bombs, propaganda and deeds: “Clearly, turning terrorism into a matter of narrative, theory, and ‘symbolic capital’ makes it easier to theorize. But what about the violence itself?”103 He knows that “such a view becomes problematic if the focus on the fictional and the figurative obscures the physical effects of terrorist

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violence.”104 Still, as a literary critic, his focus is on what literature about terrorism tells us about terrorism and about literature: Indeed, in attempting to trace the complex dynamics of terrorism, there is much to be learned from the examinations of it from within literature itself. By analyzing how different literary writers have responded to specific instances of terrorism in the twentieth century, I shall thus be aiming to offer a more adequate account of terrorism’s figurative aspects, at the same time as asking to what degree these literary responses have meant trying to refashion the force of literature itself.105

Houen recognizes how much we can learn about terrorism from literature. Writers can tell us what they know, and they can change the way we read. This aim is consistent with postcritical approaches that encourage us to appreciate literature’s work in the world. In contrast, Margaret Scanlan denies that terrorist literature has any impact other than its rhetorical effect. She argues that terrorist literature provides metaphors, not useful information. Terrorism is an appealing subject for novelists because it “provides metaphors for our mortality.”106 Terrorists’ use of symbols and plots causes readers to reflect more generally on the “relations between fiction and political activity.”107 Novels like The Secret Agent, in her view, are a poor source of information because they owe more to popular fiction than historical facts.108 The issue for her is the “problematic relationship between novelists and terrorists, a relationship grounded in a shared anxiety about the efficacy, the power and clarity, of language.”109 Scanlan claims that “the terrorist’s refusal to be satisfied with mere words corresponds to anxieties about language that have marked the novel at least since Flaubert.”110 Comparing writers and terrorists on the basis of “a shared anxiety” about language, however, minimizes the difference between the terrorist’s use of violence to enforce the meaning of words and the writer’s struggle to extract meaning from words. The analogy prompts Scanlan to analyze language rather than terrorism. Scanlan reads Conrad’s “The Informer,” a story about anarchists, as a parable for writers. Noting the similarities between terrorists and writers, she observes that in the story, “the capacity of writers to become terrorists, and of story-tellers to inflict cruelty, are pressing issues.”111 Yet Scanlan’s main point undercuts the analogy between books and bombs. She argues that since its language has been “reduced to a series of conventional

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linguistic ‘gestures,’[the bourgeoisie] is no longer able to believe that other people’s words might mean what they say.”112 One of the characters chastises upper-class supporters of terrorism for their hypocrisy. Since their lives are “all a matter of pose and gesture,” they fail to recognize “the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning.”113 Referring to this passage, Scanlan maintains that true language belongs to terrorists because their words “have no sham meaning.” Their language, she claims, is transparent and sincere: ‘“I’m going to shoot,’ when it has been followed often enough by the sound of a firing gun, compels belief.”114 Scanlan warns, “When straightforward language falls into disuse, as in a conversation consisting entirely of meaningless verbal ‘gestures,’…a debased language, that of propaganda and the sensational press, survives. Such language is meant to manipulate emotion rather than to promote a free exchange of ideas and feelings.”115 Scanlan implies that language itself has agency. Instead of seeking the speaker’s intention, she assumes that meaning is immanent in language. But words can be used sincerely or ironically, honestly or deceptively. These are qualities attached to the speaker’s thoughts, not to the words themselves. “I’m going to shoot” has a clear meaning whether uttered by terrorists or police. In both cases, the speaker has the capacity to carry out the threat. In “The Informer” characters fail to understand one another, but language is not to blame for a disparity between words and thoughts or between words and acts. What Scanlan calls the verbal “gestures” in the story are not instances of debased language but examples of dishonesty, duplicity, and rigid preconceptions.

“Irreconcilable Antagonisms” Experts in Terrorism Studies advise investigators to abandon psychological and demographic profiling and to focus instead on identifying groups that cultivate a mindset committed to violence. Despite these findings, the public continues to regard terrorists as fanatics. In 2016 Lisa Stampnitzky noted how often terrorists are considered “necessarily evil, pathological, irrational individuals and organizations that were fundamentally different from normal actors.”116 This conception reduces political objectives to psychological disorders. When terrorists are treated as aberrant individuals, fanatics, or lone wolves, their intentions are interpreted as symptoms. My reading of Conrad’s anarchist narratives emphasizes their usefulness as convincing enactments of some of the major findings of Terrorism

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Studies: terrorists are not fanatics; perpetrators and police are counterparts; prevention requires surveillance and informers. In Conrad’s fiction, terrorists resemble everyone else, including the police, until they join radical organizations. Both police and political radicals are willing to break the law in pursuit of their goals. Correcting the public’s misconceptions about terrorists and police, Conrad eludes political labels. Postcritique sanctions readings that stress the information and sincerity in his work. The following chapters show how Terrorism Studies and postcritique underwrite new interpretations of Conrad’s political fiction. Chapter 2 focuses on Conrad’s subversive use of the conventions of dynamite fiction in “An Anarchist” and “The Informer.” He embeds conventional stories in ironic narratives that erode the premises of the genre, particularly the assumption that anarchists are fanatics. Chapter 3 discusses the parallels between anarchists and police and between domestic and political agency in The Secret Agent. The main characters desire autonomy and community in varying degrees, whether they are members of a family, an anarchist cell, or a government institution. Chapter 4 examines Under Western Eyes in relation to justifications for revolutionary violence in Russia. Conrad looks beyond the alternatives of autocracy and revolution to envision peaceful change. Although the novel’s expressions of hope have been considered reactionary, postcritique recasts hope as the emotion of activism rather than quietism. Conrad conveys the cynicism as well as the hope of people who endure autocratic government, and postcritique preserves both responses. The Conclusion summarizes how the information in Conrad’s anarchist fiction helps us understand terrorism today.

Notes 1. Sarah Cole observes: “Though ‘terrorism’ and ‘anarchism’ were not synonymous in this period, they were closely allied,” and “politics all but disappears” from dynamite fiction. Sarah Cole, “Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture,” Modernism/modernity 16, no.2 (2009): 304. 2. Alex Houen’s discussion of “Definitions and Discourses of Terrorism” notes, “There is still no internationally accepted definition of terrorism” and summarizes the many and inconsistent uses of the term. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–17. Peter C. Herman restates the problem and resolves to address it anyway: “And yet, despite these unresolved questions [of definition], there is general agreement that

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something called terrorism (however variously defined) has long been a major shaping force in the world, and that terrorism today constitutes a major shaping force in both politics and culture.” Herman correctly notes, “Because ‘terrorism’ is so historically situated, it is essential to understand the historical contexts for the literary treatment of terrorism.” Peter C. Herman, “Introduction: Terrorism and Literature,” in Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3 and 6. 3. Judith Shulevitz, “Chasing After Conrad’s Secret Agent,” Slate Culturebox, September 27, 2001. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2001/09/chasing_after_conrads_secret_agent.html 4. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 125. By 1997, however, Laqueur believed that “the search for a ‘terrorist personality’ is a fruitless one.” Rex A. Hudson, The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, 1999, 44. 5. Richard Jackson, “Sympathy for the Devil: Evil, Taboo, and the Terrorist Figure in Literature,” in Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 382. Jackson adds that “terrorist motives are most frequently described in terms of greed, revenge, rage, will to power, authoritarianism, fanaticism, bigotry, sadism, blood-­lust, sexual dysfunction, and other reductive psychological explanations—rather than freedom, justice, idealism, nationalism, revolution, and the like.” 6. Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1903), 133. 7. Peter Lancelot Mallios points out “a paradox of intermittent prophecy” in Conrad criticism: “On the one hand, every generation of Conrad’s readers had had occasion to remark his works’ hauntingly prescient anticipation of so many baseline aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century psychological and political experience,” yet “Conrad has also proved unusually vulnerable to receding from view and being forgotten for significant stretches of time during the course of the ‘long’ twentieth century.” Peter Lancelot Mallios, “Conrad’s Reception,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.  H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 117–118. 8. Herman, “Introduction,” 5. 9. Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel, “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001,” Poetics Today 29, no.3 (2008): 397. 10. Ibid., 387. 11. Ibid., 401.

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12. Ibid., 409. 13. Ibid., 420. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 423. 16. Ibid., 400. 17. Ibid., 426. 18. Michael C.  Frank and Eva Gruber, “Literature and Terrorism: Introduction,” in Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 12. 19. Helen Chambers, Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, Networks, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3. 20. Peter Lancelot Mallios notes, “A central line of British reception follows this lead, emphasizing Conrad’s ‘unusual fund of first-hand knowledge of the out-of-the-way places of the earth’ and his ‘special power of conjuring up for the reader an alien environment.’” Mallios, “Conrad’s Reception,” 121. 21. Maya Jasanoff notes that Conrad’s background introduced him to global trends that have shaped our world. Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 7. 22. Norman Sherry notes that Conrad became increasingly interested in “public concerns” and read widely to write about more than personal experience. Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 3–4. 23. Laqueur, Terrorism, 151. 24. Bili Melman, “The Terrorist in Fiction,” Journal of Contemporary History 15, no.3 (1980): 560. 25. Ibid., 564. 26. Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no.4 (1981): 390. 27. Martha Crenshaw, “The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century.” Political Psychology 21, no.2 (2000): 409. 28. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 11. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 44. 31. Ibid., 60. 32. Ibid., 31. 33. Ibid., 64. 34. Emin Daskin, “Justification of violence by terrorist organisations: Comparing ISIS and PKK,” Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies, August 8, 2016, p. 3. 35. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 37.

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36. Crenshaw, “Psychology of Terrorism,” 409. 37. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 64. 38. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 64. Hudson compares the Secret Service to counterterrorists: “the Secret Service learned an important lesson—to discard stereotypes. Killers are not necessarily mentally ill, socially isolated, or even male. Now the Secret Service looks for patterns of motive and behavior in potential presidential assassins. The same research methodology applies to potential terrorists.” Ibid., 44. 39. Ibid., 65. 40. Ibid., 67. 41. Ibid. 42. An FBI statement in 2018 concurs: “Even if the F.B.I. wanted to monitor this hate speech, they wouldn’t have the resources, or any way to distinguish between those who talk and those who act.” Janet Reitman, “State of Denial,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 11, 2018, p. 44. 43. Crenshaw, “Causes of Terrorism,” 396. 44. Ibid., 396–97. Knowing a group’s mindset, however, is only the beginning of prevention. As Erik J. Dahl points out, “The problem is that most intelligence available before surprise attacks is general and nonspecific, producing what is often termed strategic warning.” Dahl explains: “Two key factors are required for intelligence to become actionable and useful in preventing attacks. The first is that it must provide very precise warning about the threat, at a level of specificity that many experts might reflexively dismiss as ‘tactical-level’ intelligence and consider not useful in dealing with the most important threats. But…the specificity of tactical-level intelligence—as opposed to broad, strategic-level intelligence—is much more likely to convince policymakers that there is an imminent threat and that action is thus imperative. This leads to the second critical factor: that the policymakers must be receptive to the intelligence with which they are provided. Erik J.  Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 2–3. 45. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 66. 46. Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack, 183. 47. Richard Jackson, Jeroen Gunning, and Marie Breen Smyth, “The Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, IL, August 30, 2007, https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/media/departmental/interpol/ csrv/case-­for-­a-­critical-­terrorism-­studies-­richard-­7.pdf, 7. 48. Ibid.

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49. Richard Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies,” European Political Science 6, no.3 (2007): 246. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 247. 52. Ibid., 248. 53. Ibid. 54. Lee Jarvis, “The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies,” Security Dialogue 40, no.1 (2009): 14. 55. Ibid., 15. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 18. 59. Ibid., 19. 60. Ibid. 61. Jeroen Gunning, “A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?” Government and Opposition 42, no.3 (2007): 375–76. 62. Ibid., 369. 63. Ibid., 368. 64. Michael C.  Frank, “Terrorism for the Sake of Counterterrorism: Undercover Policing and the Specter of the Agent Provocateur in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 46, no.3 (2014): 152. 65. Another argument for the practical uses of literature comes from Caroline Levine. She advocates “expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience… Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere.” Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 2. 66. Rita Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” American Book Review 38, no.5 (July/August 2017): 4. 67. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 14. 68. Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” 4. 69. Elizabeth S.  Anker and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 20. 70. Ibid., 19. 71. Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Romancing the Real: Bruno Latour, Ian McEwan, and Postcritical Monism,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 101. 72. Felski, Uses of Literature, 104 and 98. 73. Ibid., 98.

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74. Keith Carabine, “Under Western Eyes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 122. 75. John G.  Peters, Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11; 30; 42; 43. 76. Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 69. 77. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 348–49. 78. David Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 17. 79. Irving Howe, “Order and Anarchy: The Political Novels,” The Kenyon Review 15, no. 4 (1953): 519. 80. Ibid., 507. 81. Richard Niland, “The Political Novels,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.  H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29–30. 82. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 20. 83. Marie Fleming, “Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe,” TERRORISM: An International Journal 4 (1980): 14. 84. Ibid., 11. 85. Ibid., 6. 86. Ibid., 12. 87. Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 73. 88. Ibid., 72. 89. Ibid., 73. 90. Ibid., 79. 91. Fleming, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 12. 92. Anthony Fothergill, “Connoisseurs of Terror and the Political Aesthetics of Anarchism: Nostromo and A Set of Six,” in Conrad in the Twenty-first Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M.  Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York: Routledge, 2005), 140. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 150. 95. Ibid., 138. 96. Ibid., 139. 97. Ibid., 150. 98. Ibid.

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99. Ibid., 141. 100. John Rignall, “Conrad and Anarchism: Irony, Solidarity and Betrayal,” in “To Hell with Culture”: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, ed. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005). 16. 101. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 4. 102. Ibid., 6–7. 103. Ibid., 10. 104. Ibid., 9. 105. Ibid., 18. 106. Margaret Scanlan, “Language and the Politics of Despair in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 23, no. 2 (1990): 182. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 183. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 182. 111. Margaret Scanlan, “Language and Terrorism in Conrad’s ‘The Informer,’” Conradiana 27, no. 2 (1995): 115. 112. Ibid., 117. 113. Joseph Conrad, “The Informer,” In A Set of Six (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), 78. 114. Scanlan, “Language and Terrorism,” 117. 115. Ibid., 118. 116. Lisa Stampnitzky, “The Emergence of Terrorism Studies as a Field,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies, ed. Richard Jackson (Oxford: Routledge, 2016), 21.

Bibliography Anker, Elizabeth S. July/August 2017. Postcritique and Social Justice. American Book Review 38 (5): 9–10. Anker, Elizabeth S., and Rita Felski. 2017. Introduction. In Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, 1–28. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Appelbaum, Robert, and Alexis Paknadel. 2008. Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001. Poetics Today 29 (3): 387–436. Carabine, Keith. 1996. Under Western Eyes. In The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.H. Stape, 122–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Helen. 2018. Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, Networks. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cole, Sarah. 2009. Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture. Modernism/modernity 16 (2): 301–328. Conrad, Joseph. 1903. Heart of Darkness. In Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 49–182. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. ———. 1924. The Informer. In A Set of Six, 73–102. Garden City, New  York: Doubleday, Page & Company. ———. 1986. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crenshaw, Martha. 1981. The Causes of Terrorism. Comparative Politics 13 (4): 379–399. ———. 2000. The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century. Political Psychology 21 (2): 405–420. Dahl, Erik J. 2013. Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Daskin, Emin. August 8, 2016. Justification of violence by terrorist organisations: Comparing ISIS and PKK. Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies 1: 1–14. Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. July/August 2017. Postcritical Reading. American Book Review 38 (5): 4–5. Fleishman, Avrom. 1967. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2017. Romancing the Real: Bruno Latour, Ian McEwan, and Postcritical Monism. In Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, 99–126. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Fleming, Marie. 1980. Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe. TERRORISM: An International Journal 4: 1–23. Fothergill, Anthony. 2005. Connoisseurs of Terror and the Political Aesthetics of Anarchism: Nostromo and A Set of Six. In Conrad in the Twenty-first Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White, 137–154. New York: Routledge. Frank, Michael C. 2014. Terrorism for the Sake of Counterterrorism: Undercover Policing and the Specter of the Agent Provocateur in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Conradiana 46 (3): 151–177. Frank, Michael C., and Eva Gruber. 2012. Literature and Terrorism: Introduction. In Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael C.  Frank and Eva Gruber, 1–23. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Gunning, Jeroen. 2007. A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies? Government and Opposition 42 (3): 363–393. Herman, Peter C. 2018. Introduction: Terrorism and Literature. In Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C. Herman, 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Houen, Alex. 2002. Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howe, Irving. 1953. Order and Anarchy: The Political Novels. The Kenyon Review 15 (4): 505–521. Hudson, Rex A. 1999. The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? Washington, D.C: Federal Research Division. Jackson, Richard. 2007. The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies. European Political Science 6 (3): 244–251. ———. 2018. Sympathy for the Devil: Evil, Taboo, and the Terrorist Figure in Literature. In Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C.  Herman, 377–394. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Richard, Jeroen Gunning, and Marie Breen Smyth. 2007. The Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, IL, August 30. https://www. aber.ac.uk/en/media/departmental/interpol/csr v/case-­f or-­a -­c ritical-­ terrorism-­studies-­richard-­7.pdf. Jarvis, Lee. 2009. The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies. Security Dialogue 40 (1): 5–27. Jasanoff, Maya. 2017. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. New York: Penguin Press. Laqueur, Walter. 1977. Terrorism. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Mallios, Peter Lancelot. 2014. Conrad’s Reception. In The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.H. Stape, 116–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melman, Bili. 1980. The Terrorist in Fiction. Journal of Contemporary History 15 (3): 559–576. Mulry, David. 2016. Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Niland, Richard. 2014. The Political Novels. In The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.H. Stape, 29–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, John G. 2013. Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reitman, Janet. 2018. State of Denial. New York Times Magazine, November 11, pp. 38–49, 66–68. Rignall, John. 2005. Conrad and Anarchism: Irony, Solidarity and Betrayal. In “To Hell with Culture”: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, ed. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, 11–20. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Scanlan, Margaret. 1990. Language and the Politics of Despair in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 23 (2): 182–198.

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———. 1995. Language and Terrorism in Conrad’s ‘The Informer’. Conradiana 27 (2): 115–122. Sherry, Norman. 1971. Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shulevitz, Judith. 2001. Chasing After Conrad’s Secret Agent. Slate Culturebox, September 27, 3:00 AM. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/09/chasing_after_conrads_secret_agent.html. Stampnitzky, Lisa. 2016. The Emergence of Terrorism Studies as a Field. In Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies, ed. Richard Jackson, 17–27. Oxford: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Conrad’s Anarchist Tales

In the late nineteenth century, anarchism became a general term of abuse for political violence. Even Irish Fenians, who were actually responsible for most of the bombings in England, were called anarchists. When bombs were thrown, anarchists were blamed. Whatever the bomber’s purpose may have been, the message was lost in the public’s abhorrence of terrorism. Some activists claimed that only violence could produce the radical changes needed to redress social injustice. They called for “a clean sweep.” The public, however, reacted to bombings as “outrages,” not as political protests. As Shane McCorristine notes, “The anarchist in late-nineteenth-­ century culture was as much a symbol and mythological entity as a proponent of a particular ideology. ‘Anarchy’ denoted a variety of meanings: mercurial creativity, revolutionary disorder, social chaos, communitarian utopia, unstructured activity…”1 In 1897 Joseph Conrad had also observed the diffuse effects of anarchist attacks: “An explosion is the most lasting thing in the universe. It leaves disorder, remembrance, room to move, a clear space.”2 In this disorder, stereotypes of anarchists captured the public’s attention, and the “dynamite novels” of the period acquired a set of conventions based on popular conceptions rather than perpetrators’ political aims. After publishing Nostromo in 1904 and “Autocracy and War” in 1905, Conrad turned his political acumen to anarchism. Telling a correspondent about his plans, he reported: “Subject: Anarchists. One longish tale and two short ones will make a special volume by and bye.”3 Although he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1_2

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planned all three for a single volume,4 “An Anarchist” and “The Informer” were published separately in Harper’s Magazine in 1906. The long tale became The Secret Agent and appeared in serial form later that year. By the time The Secret Agent was expanded for book publication in 1907, Conrad had begun writing Under Western Eyes. In all these narratives his persistent interest in the countervailing desires for autonomy and solidarity concentrates on anarchism. Conrad rejected the popular conception of the anarchist as a fanatic. He uses this epithet in his tales, but not to explain terrorism. He consistently normalizes characters who take extreme action. While he uses the conventions of dynamite fiction, he transforms them by adding frame narrators whose commentary provides an ironic perspective. Conventional elements express popular conceptions of terrorists, and ironic narrators undermine them. His tales, like his novels, demonstrate that terrorists cannot be profiled and that terrorists and police are counterparts. People who commit violence are not abnormal—at least, not until they are radicalized—and police depend on infiltration and surveillance to prevent attacks. Current research in Terrorism Studies corroborates these points, and postcritique encourages readers to weigh the information Conrad provides.

Conventions of Anarchist Fiction In her 1985 book Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel Barbara Arnett Melchiori links the conventions of dynamite fiction to terrorism in her own period. She states: “I discovered the same patterns of violence, the same massacre of innocent victims, the same channelling of panic to create widespread support for existing governments.”5 Melchiori credits Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) as the source of themes and characters that became conventional.6 One of the more surprising conventions is that people in privileged classes are attracted to terrorism: Terrorists are rarely enlisted among the dispossessed: rather they spring up (now as in the nineteenth century) among the young in the educated classes, goaded into disgust by the cynicism, exploitation and corruption of the powers they desire to overthrow, or lashed by religious fervor. The movements created by such idealists also attract the psychologically fragile and megalomaniacs, but it is a common error to see these as prime movers.7

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Since authors were more likely to be acquainted with privileged classes, dynamite fiction often portrays bourgeois and upper-class anarchists. These characters, usually women, profess a moral commitment to redress social injustice, but they are also attracted to the thrill of defiance and danger. They arouse the suspicion of working-class comrades, who wonder why anyone would want to give up the advantages wealth provides. Another common feature of dynamite fiction is the questionable behavior of the police. They are counterparts to terrorists insofar as they are willing to break laws to achieve their goals. Conducting undercover surveillance, the police disguise themselves, infiltrate terrorist cells, pay informers, and occasionally instigate violence. G. K. Chesterton satirizes this convention in his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday. The plot pivots on police posing as anarchists. They eventually discover that all the anarchists they encounter are other policemen posing as anarchists. Conrad reverses this convention in “The Informer” by having anarchists pose as police to detect the informer in their midst. It was also common to portray anarchists enforcing obedience. After individuals joined a movement, their commitment was irrevocable because they feared reprisal from their comrades: This aspect of terrorism, the watch the terrorists had to keep on each other, the impossibility of a change of heart once a man had become involved in an illegal organisation, was one of the characteristics which most attracted the novelists who were to work in the genre; in both fact and fiction it proved to be extremely dangerous to become possessed even inadvertently of information.8

Conrad’s “An Anarchist” illustrates this pattern. Melchiori points out that since novelists rarely had direct knowledge of terrorists, they had to depend on the press for information, which came “not only from the day-to-day reports of dynamite outrages and of the panic which they caused, but from articles in the weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, which analysed this new phenomenon. Interviews with leading terrorist theoreticians themselves were interspersed with statements by authorities in the State and even in the Church to provide the novelist with his background.”9 Nevertheless, novelists often disregarded this information and conflated the motives of different groups:

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The writers did not all succeed in keeping the various historical strands of subversion disentangled. A bomb is a bomb, it explodes or it does not, and either way it can often make a good story… Yet the dynamite novelists of the 1880s and 1890s for the most part were inclined to attribute their fictional attempts to rather vaguely defined anarchists or, occasionally, Nihilists and socialists.10

Dynamite fiction perpetuated the “familiar equation that social protest and terrorism were synonymous.”11 By linking all kinds of social protest to terrorism, this equation discredited non-violent reform movements. Such indifference to terrorists’ goals diminished the political significance of dynamite fiction. The drama of conspiracy and detection overshadowed the bomber’s political aims. The composite identity of Hyacinth Robinson, James’s protagonist in The Princess Casamassima, became a model for later terrorist characters. Hyacinth is the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and a French prostitute who is hanged for murdering him. In addition to this mix of nationalities and social classes, the gender ambiguity of his name destabilizes Hyacinth’s identity. He seeks the fellowship of other workers and joins an anarchist group, but his loyalty wavers when he meets the beautiful and wealthy Princess Casamassima. She awakens in him a longing for art, culture, and refinement that is inseparable from his erotic attraction to her. The Princess Casamassima is one of many upper-class anarchist sympathizers in dynamite fiction. Just as Hyacinth finds glamor and excitement in the Princess’s wealth, she finds these qualities in his revolutionary activities. She voices a compassionate concern for social injustice, but her driving motives are personal; she loathes her husband, the Prince: The position made for her among these people [the Prince’s family], and what she had had to suffer from their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might be remained vague to her listener), had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and heretical à outrance—lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer as well as by the revolutionary spirit.12

Hyacinth distrusts her stated motives for abandoning her class: “he could already surmise that personal passion had counted for so much in the formation of her views.”13 The narrator comments: “It would have been easy for Hyacinth to smile at the Princess’s impression that she was ‘in it,’ and

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to conclude that even the cleverest women do not know when they are superficial,”14 an observation that fits the heroines of other dynamite novels as well as Conrad’s “The Informer.” The behavior of the “young Lady Amateur” in Conrad’s story resembles the recreational anarchism of the Princess Casamassima. To prove her sincerity, the Princess insists that she is willing to “go very far.” She believes that the other members of the anarchist cell accept her as a comrade, until she learns that they humor her because she gives them money. Hyacinth also has to prove his sincerity because his comrades suspect that his new appreciation of art and culture has weakened his revolutionary fervor. To demonstrate his allegiance, Hyacinth volunteers to carry out any action they may ask him to perform. When they order him to assassinate a duke, the enormity of the deed overwhelms him. He is afraid of reprisal if he refuses to obey the order, and he is ashamed to go back on his word. Like Paul in “An Anarchist,” Hyacinth is unable to renounce his commitment. As Melchiori observes: A great deal is made in The Princess Casamassima of Hyacinth’s pledge or vow, which, as I have pointed out, is taken at the turning point of the novel. James had not far to seek for examples of such pledges: the novels of the 1840s were full of them, and reports of cases where such illegal oaths were taken were rife.15

These elements of James’s novel became conventions of dynamite fiction and shaped the public’s conception of anarchists as terrorists. Like Melchiori, Francis Blessington regards The Princess Casamassima as “the prototype and archetype of the modern terrorist novel.”16 While writing his own anarchist fiction, Conrad published “Henry James: An Appreciation” (1905), and Blessington argues that Conrad was “no doubt influenced by The Princess Casamassima.”17 Blessington distinguishes terrorist novels like those of James and Conrad from political novels. Whereas the political novel is abstract and ideological, the terrorist novel portrays the protagonist’s inner conflicts.18 Like the bildungsroman, the terrorist novel shows how the protagonist faces difficult choices. A person who is outraged by social injustice, Blessington explains, has a “tripartite choice: to inflict disaster on the world and perhaps on oneself for real or imagined humiliations; to accept a flawed and unjust world; or to escape the dilemma, usually through suicide, without destroying others.”19 External forces and his own psychology affect his decisions, and this interplay is the

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basis of the terrorist novel’s literary value. James dramatizes this process in The Princess Casamassima, where he “created the terrorist convention of the tragically fated naïf crushed between two opposite and corrupt political forces.”20 Hyacinth is an orphan who idealizes an anarchist mentor, and his French and English parentage makes him a “hyphenated person.”21 He is trapped between personal feelings and anarchist discipline. Unable to perform the assassination he has agreed to carry out, he commits suicide. Portraying the terrorist as a victim rather than a perpetrator, Blessington argues, James preserves the novelist’s commitment to conflict. Attempting to derive practical information from novels about “the terrorist dilemma,”22 Blessington offers a profile. He compares Hyacinth’s character—an orphan with a hyphenated identity facing the choices of martyrdom, suicide, or life in an unjust world—to psychoanalytic profiles of terrorists that appeared soon after 9/11.23 Despite the literary value of Hyacinth’s psychological conflict, however, it does not help the police. Blessington’s observations about the dynamic of terrorist organizations are more useful. Conrad’s “two terror novels also show terrorists as victims and denigrate the two sides crushing the hero or heroine.”24 Verloc is caught between the police and the anarchists,25 and Razumov is “the classic terrorist as counterterrorist”; he “identifies himself with Haldin” yet turns him in and spies for the police.26 Although research in Terrorism Studies has discredited psychological profiles, it validates Blessington’s analysis of the mindsets of terrorists and police. He calls attention to Conrad’s interest in how a person decides to become a terrorist and how the police are implicated in terrorism.

Useful Information in Conrad’s Tales Conrad embeds conventional dynamite stories in ironic narratives that undermine the premises of the genre. In “An Anarchist” and “The Informer” the experiences and comments of the frame narrators debunk the conventions. Calling attention to the significance of Conrad’s narrative frames, William W.E. Slights argues that the narrator in “An Anarchist” is responsible for the ethical significance of the tale. Slights proposes “that by attending to the layers of narration, we can see [Conrad] shaping a readership that will be drawn into the kinds of ethical uncertainty inherent in his political tales.”27 The narrator, Slights says, offers a moral alternative to the hegemony of “formalist theory and practice” in the “first two-thirds of the twentieth century.”28

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In his eagerness to weaken the reign of formalism, however, Slights needlessly minimizes the value of the information about anarchists in the story. Noting that “An Anarchist” is introduced in A Set of Six as “A Desperate Tale,” he cites the OED definition of a tale as a “mere story, as opposed to a narrative of fact.”29 He finds support for this view in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Benjamin’s essay is an important document in narrative theory, and its implications for Conrad’s tales are worth pursuing. Benjamin defines the “true storyteller” as a moralist for his community. Slights claims: “What the true storyteller communicates, Benjamin insists, is neither psychological analysis nor verifiable information but rather ‘counsel for his readers’ or hearers.”30 This is the basis of Slights’s antithesis between ethics and information, but Benjamin does not exclude useful information (or psychological analysis) from tales. His essay claims that the storyteller communicates moral lessons as well as factual knowledge. It turns out that Benjamin’s ideal storyteller fulfills the functions of literature that postcritique values. Benjamin distrusts the kind of information that appears in newspapers because it lacks the authenticity of oral storytelling. He praises the “living speech” of the storyteller that brings “intelligence coming from afar.”31 The storyteller allows the listener “to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”32 In contrast, newspapers explain everything, and the information they provide is subject to verification.33 Benjamin asserts that “it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation.”34 He wants readers to interpret information, not attempt to verify it. It is not information as such but the reader’s response to it that matters to him. Unlike the journalist and the novelist, Benjamin writes, “Storytellers tend to begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they themselves have learned what is to follow, unless they simply pass it off as their own experience.”35 Similarly, Conrad’s narrators explain how they heard the stories they tell. Benjamin adds that instead of providing disembodied facts, the storyteller grounds information in the lives of characters: “The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller.”36 Like Benjamin’s storytellers, Conrad’s narrators imbue information about “the milieu of work” with their own experience.

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Despite his objections to the information “transmitted by newspapers,” Benjamin points out the value of the information in Leskov’s stories: Leskov “traveled through Russia, and these trips advanced his worldly wisdom as much as they did his knowledge of conditions in Russia.”37 Benjamin extrapolates from this example: “An orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many born storytellers… All this points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim.”38 Stories offer all these benefits. Benjamin anticipates postcritique in his embrace of the emotional and ethical lessons as well as the information that texts might contain. Conrad does not present information directly as verifiable data. His narrators, like Benjamin’s storytellers, present “the circumstances in which they have learned what is to follow” or “pass it off as their own experience.” These frame elements are usually interpreted epistemologically as indications of Conrad’s skepticism about the possibility of knowing more than one has witnessed. Benjamin, however, proposes another way of reading texts that pretend to be related orally. Whereas the reader of a novel is isolated, a person listening to a story is “in the company of the storyteller.”39 Reproducing this situation in the text, Conrad posits a storyteller and an audience in many of his novels and stories. Instead of using Benjamin’s defense of the useful information in literature as another way to bolster his argument against formalism, Slights denies that “An Anarchist” has any factual value. He believes that the story is essentially a moral tale, not a moral lesson but an “ethics of irony.”40 Like Melchiori, Slights extends his conclusions to recent terrorism, asking, “So what does Conrad have to tell us about political terrorism and the state mechanisms intended to control it?”41 His answer reinforces the popular conception of the terrorist: in “An Anarchist,” as in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Slights claims, “terrorism emerges as an aberration among civilized societies. The honest confrontation with the aberrant Other in these works provides a place for the ethical storyteller and his reader to stand apart from the all-consuming ego of Conrad’s terrorists.”42 Like so many others, Slights regards the terrorist as the “aberrant Other,” the fanatic, despite textual evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, Slights speculates that readers today are more tolerant of terrorists than Conrad’s audience was: “It is possible that in the twenty-first century we have lost that distance and that contempt for the terrorist. Perhaps we respect terror

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too much, letting it do its insidious work on our minds.”43 Slights proposes that Conrad can help us “to resist the currently rampant impulse to moralize such violent acts in simple and vengeful ways.”44 For Slights, the value of Conrad’s stories is in their representation of ethical conflicts and the difficulty of reaching judgments, not in the information the stories may also contain. Benjamin and postcritique, in contrast, welcome such information.

“An Anarchist” and Profiling “An Anarchist” is a cautionary tale showing how an ordinary man becomes an anarchist. The frame narrator, like Benjamin’s storyteller, explains how he heard the tale. He painstakingly establishes himself as a credible witness. He has the scientific habits of a lepidopterist, and he assures us, “I am not gullible.”45 He states: “I believe the story to be in the main true” both factually—“I have checked the facts as far as possible”—and psychologically—“It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify a perverted vanity” (136). He has verified the events that Paul, the anarchist, recounted: “From personal inquiry I can vouch that the story of the convict mutiny was in every particular as stated by him” (161). While the narrator’s statements are not necessarily reliable, they indicate that he values accurate information. The narrator reveals his temperament as he explains how he learned about Paul’s ordeal. Arriving on a remote island in search of rare butterflies, the narrator meets Harry Gee, the manager of the corporate ranch on the island. They dislike each other immediately. Gee’s derision colors the narrator’s account of himself: “As a matter of fact, I am—‘Ha, ha, ha!—a desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, ha, ha!’” (137). The narrator repeats Gee’s epithet and mocking laughter with chagrin: “This was the tone in which Mr. Harry Gee, the manager of the cattle station, alluded to my pursuits” (137). As a result, the narrator is not disposed to accept Gee’s account of Paul: Gee “related to me the coming of the supposed anarchist. He meant to keep him—out of a sense of duty to the company—and the name he had given him would prevent the fellow from obtaining employment anywhere in Horta [a city on the mainland]” (143). Gee knows that Paul is a fugitive but not that he has been imprisoned for being an anarchist. Gee cunningly brands Paul an anarchist to trap him. He tells the narrator: ‘“I don’t care a hang what he is,’ answered the humorous official of the

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B. O. S. Co. ‘I gave him the name because it suited me to label him in that way. It’s good for the company’” (139–40). As Gee says, ‘“I hold him by that name better than if I had him chained up by the leg to the deck of the steam-launch’” (143). Gee uses popular assumptions about anarchists for his own advantage. He regards Paul as an abject being: “To my great surprise,” the narrator reports, “Harry Gee addressed him as ‘Crocodile,’ in that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of self-satisfaction in his delectable kind” (138). Gee’s epithet for Paul imposes a false and fragmented identity: ‘“I call him Crocodile because he lives half in, half out of the creek. Amphibious—see?… But in reality he’s nothing less than un citoyen anarchiste de Barcelone’” (139). Although Paul speaks French and doesn’t “even know Spanish,” he does not protest: ‘“I deny nothing, nothing, nothing!’” (139). The hodgepodge of epithets that Gee flings at Paul harks back to the hyphenated identity of Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima. Thanks to the powerful capital of B. O. S. Ltd, Gee has more agency than any other character. Even though he is merely a manager, he invokes the authority of the company to do as he pleases. The narrator feels Gee’s grip in a trivial way when Gee overcharges him for lodging, claiming that the money is due to the Company. The narrator knows that Gee will keep it: “he charged me two dollars per diem for the hospitality of the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., (capital £1,500,000, fully paid up), in whose balance-­ sheet for that year those monies are no doubt included” (138). Gee’s dishonesty has more serious consequences for Paul. By the time Gee captures him, Paul is too shattered to resist, and he submits to his fate. Gee recounts their exchange: “Says I, ‘You’re a runaway convict.’… ‘I deny nothing,’ says he…” (141). Asked what he had been transported for, Paul replies, “Make it what you like. I deny nothing. It is no good denying anything” (142). Paul has learned that facts do not matter, and there is no point in defending himself. The meaning of his acts has been defined by the police, the courts, and then by Gee. Knowing that Gee is dishonest, the narrator questions Paul directly. Asked if he is an anarchist, Paul reiterates the answer he gave Gee: “I deny nothing whatever, monsieur” (142). Unlike Gee, the narrator interprets Paul’s words as evidence that he is not an anarchist. Eager to demonstrate that he is not gullible, the narrator reflects, “This answer made me think that perhaps he was not an anarchist. I believe those dammed lunatics are rather proud of

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themselves. If he had been one, he would have probably confessed straight out” (142). Like Gee, the narrator is wrong. Paul is and is not an anarchist. Paul’s refusal to defend himself allows Gee’s plan to work: ‘“And mark,’ he added, after a pause, ‘he does not deny it. I am not wronging him in any way. He is a convict of some sort, anyhow’” (143). Unwilling to pay Paul regular wages, Gee justifies his exploitation as punishment that Paul deserves for being an anarchist: “But that subversive sanguinary rot of doing away with all law and order in the world makes my blood boil. It’s simply cutting the ground from under the feet of every decent, respectable, hard-working person” (144). Gee vehemently defends virtues he egregiously lacks. He is exploitative and sanctimonious, yet these traits serve the corporation he works for. He demonstrates how maintaining false beliefs about terrorists serves entrenched interests. Distrusting Gee, the narrator seeks Paul’s version of events. Paul explains that he was an ordinary worker who became an anarchist because he was mistaken for one. He was a mechanic planning to open his own repair shop and get married, but he lost control of his life in a moment of inebriated fellowship. He reflects, ‘“It seems I did not know enough about myself’” (145). He was celebrating his birthday with friends in a café until two strangers joined the party. They chastised him for being happy when many others were suffering: “The pity of mankind’s cruel lot wrung his heart” (146–47). According to his new companions, “There was only one way of dealing with the rotten state of society… Blow up the whole iniquitous show” (147). Carried away by feelings of solidarity, while drunk, he shouted, “Vive l’anarchie! Death to the capitalists!” (147). At that moment, the police arrived and arrested him and his new companions for being anarchists. The price for Paul’s moment of solidarity in the café is the loss of his autonomy. The police brand him an anarchist as indelibly as Gee marks his cattle. Socialists are no better. They provide a lawyer to defend Paul, but the lawyer ignores Paul’s account of events: “In vain he assured him that he was no anarchist; that he was a quiet, respectable mechanic, only too anxious to work ten hours per day at his trade. He was represented at the trial as the victim of society and his drunken shoutings as the expression of infinite suffering” (147). The lawyer sacrifices his client to advance his own career. After the trial, Paul is unable to find work because he is thought to be an anarchist. Only his co-defendants offer him help in exchange for joining them in criminal activities: “They assured him that he would not be allowed to starve, work or no work… ‘That is, monsieur,

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how I became a compagnon,’ he said” (149). Paul tells the narrator: “It was an impossible existence! Watched by the police, watched by the comrades. I did not belong to myself any more!” (149). Like Hyacinth and actual terrorists, he fears reprisal if he deserts: “And when I was sober I was afraid to break away. They would have stuck me like a pig” (149). Threatened by anarchists as well as police, Paul is trapped. Once he is accused of being an anarchist, he gradually becomes one. The incident is an ironic reversal of conventional dynamite fiction in which social conscience motivates upper-class characters to become anarchists; here the working-class mechanic is embroiled in anarchist schemes against his will. Desire for solidarity pulls Paul into anarchist circles, and desire for autonomy drives him out. Paul and his anarchist companions Simon and Mafile are sent to a penal colony. In the mayhem of a prisoners’ uprising, Paul finds a gun and a small boat. This unlikely chain of events reveals the contradictions in anarchism. Simon and Mafile appeal to “comradeship” to persuade Paul to let them escape with him. He agrees because he wants their labor. Disillusioned with the anarchist promise of fellowship, he tells them: “There are no comrades here. I am your patron” (157). Armed with a gun, he forces them to row: ‘“I had their lives in my power. I let them live. I meant them to pull that boat’” (156). Having discovered that the anarchist promise of solidarity conflicts with its promise of autonomy, Paul reaches the apex of autonomy and the nadir of solidarity. Paul’s enthusiasm for solidarity has waned: Comrade! Monsieur! Ah, what a good word! And they, such men as these two, had made it accursed. I looked at them. I remembered their lies, their promises, their menaces, and all my days of misery… I looked at them and thought that while they lived I could never be free. Never. Neither I nor others like me with warm hearts and weak heads. (158)

When a rescue ship approaches, Paul takes autonomy to the limit: he shoots his companions. His justification is that he had no other way to escape their control: “while they lived I could never be free. Never.” His logic carries the anarchist desire for autonomy to an extreme. He exclaims, ‘“I must be free!’ I cried, furiously” (159). He forces Mafile to cry for mercy in the words that led to his own imprisonment: ‘“Well, then, shout Vive l’anarchie’” (159). He shoots Mafile and Simon and throws their bodies overboard, exulting, “I was free at last! At last” (160). The narrator’s reaction is that Paul was a victim of the contradictions in anarchism:

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On the whole, my idea is that he was much more of an anarchist than he confessed to me or to himself; and…he was very much like many other anarchists. Warm heart and weak head—that is the word of the riddle; and it is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. (160–61)

Paul embraces the anarchist cause in sympathy with its social aims, and he feels betrayed when the comrades use his commitment to force him into crime. He renounces comradeship to reassert autonomy, driven to murder to reclaim his freedom. This triumph of autonomy does not last. Paul’s rescuers abandon him on the island occupied by the B. O. S. cattle ranch. The narrator compares the island to “a sort of penal settlement for condemned cattle,” where the cattle sound like “a monstrous protest of prisoners condemned to death” (137), and Gee imprisons Paul by labeling him an anarchist. Society’s fear of anyone called an anarchist allows Gee to control Paul. Although Paul never committed himself to anarchism as a philosophy or a political goal, he is nevertheless branded, and the label deprives him of agency. Anarchism promises freedom from external forces, but both anarchists and police block Paul’s agency. The story exposes the conflict between anarchism’s promise of autonomy and its pact of solidarity. A postcritical reading can preserve these competing commitments. To illustrate the advantages of such a reading, we can compare Daniel R. Schwarz’s psychological interpretation with Jennifer Shaddock’s political analysis. Writing in the critical climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Schwarz sees the tale as a case of autonomy run amok in Paul and the narrator. Schwarz argues that the narrator needs “to vent his frustrated and repressed antipathy by recalling Paul’s method of dealing with his enemies.”46 Just as Paul kills the anarchists to regain his freedom, the narrator seeks revenge to assert his autonomy. Schwarz claims that the narrator fails to see Paul’s moral and psychological deficiencies because he is “working out his repressed urge for revenge” against Harry Gee.47 For Schwarz, “An Anarchist” is about “one man’s pathological instinct for self-destruction.”48 Like those who regard terrorists as fanatics, Schwarz believes that the mechanic is aberrant: “While Paul may deserve some sympathy as a psychotic personality, surely the recital of Paul’s own excuses is not sufficient to preclude adverse judgments of his

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behavior.”49 The failure to condemn Paul causes Schwarz to question the narrator’s competence. Evidence for Schwarz’s psychological interpretation is limited. Paul’s mental state is unstable only twice. He tells the narrator that one of the anarchist criminals said, “Devil take me if I don’t think he’s gone mad!” (157). The other occasion is when the narrator reports that Paul became agitated after telling his story: “his ejaculations became very much like raving. The burden of them was that he ‘denied nothing, nothing!’” (160). These instances indicate distress but not psychosis or pathology. Attributing Paul’s experiences to a “pathological instinct,” Schwarz reduces the story to a case study. If Paul is psychotic, the story is about one crazy person, not a political philosophy. Paul joins the anarchists because his “warm heart” inspires sympathy for less fortunate people. This moment of commitment allows others to exploit him until he regains his agency through violence. Interpreting the story as an account of the narrator’s repressed antipathy and Paul’s pathological instinct cancels its wider social and political significance. In contrast, Jennifer Shaddock disputes the “critical tradition that has read Conrad’s texts about anarchism as, at best, dramas of Conrad’s own psychological ambivalence toward radical politics and, more often, as Conrad’s overt denunciations of the movement.”50 Dissenting from this tradition, she calls attention to the ways the story complicates the meaning of anarchism. Showing how the term functions as an epithet rather than a system of belief, she points out that Paul became an anarchist because others say he is one: “Paul becomes, indeed, the desperate anarchist that others profess him to be.”51 Moreover, Shaddock observes that “there is little difference here between the anarchists and the police (or between the anarchists and Gee).”52 Shaddock’s comments on the story are consistent with social science research on terrorists, demonstrating again the accuracy of the information in the story. Facts are irrelevant to Harry Gee, the police, the lawyer, and, as Shaddock argues, many critics. Neither Gee nor the police care whether Paul really is an anarchist (139–40). Paul repeatedly says, “I deny nothing,” implying that everything—or nothing—is true. The narrator, however, seeks facts. He withholds judgment about “the supposed anarchist” (143) until his investigation is complete. After recounting the self-serving behavior of the anarchists, the police, the courts, and Gee, the narrator confirms Paul’s veracity. In the end, facts matter.

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“The Informer” and Fanaticism Like “An Anarchist,” “The Informer” satirizes popular conceptions of anarchists and projects a more accurate image. As the title announces, the tale is about information, who has it and how it is used, and a postcritical reading can retrieve some of this information. There are many informers in the story. The title specifically refers to a police spy who infiltrates an anarchist cell. It also applies to the frame narrator, to Mr X, and to the mutual friend who introduces them. These three characters are all collectors, connoisseurs, “knowers.” Their specialized knowledge qualifies them to act as various kinds of informers. The narrator and Mr X collect Chinese bronzes and porcelains, rare and valuable objects that display the wealth of their owners. Their mutual friend is a collector of acquaintances who introduces the narrator to Mr. X.53 Since Mr. X is a famous anarchist author and organizer, he also possesses political knowledge that the narrator is eager to acquire. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues that Mr X, not the narrator, is the “authorial figure” in the story: he is “the real informer both in a very literal sense (the character who imparts the information) and in the borrowed sense as it is he who betrays the real for the aesthetic.”54 If the “authorial figure” is the one who imparts information, Conrad can also be considered an informer. He provides the reader with an account of anarchism that overturns popular assumptions. He shows that a wealthy connoisseur can be an anarchist and a police informer can be a fanatic. There are so many layers of framing that one critic considers the narrative point of view “more than intricate; it is almost indecipherable.”55 James Walton, however, argues that the narrative frame permits the anarchist story to depart from generic conventions while seeming to conform to them. In his view, the meaning of the melodrama in the embedded tale depends “entirely upon the intricate narrative frame in which [Conrad] places it.”56 Like Benjamin’s storyteller, the narrator explains how he heard the story and what he learned from it. The narrator knows that Mr X is a famous anarchist but is unable to reconcile his impressions of a fellow collector with his view of anarchists as destitute fanatics: Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the chambardement général, as the French slang has it, of the general blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can

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he? I am sure that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or perform any of the routine acts of daily life. I would want no wife, no children; I could have no friends, it seems to me; and as to collecting bronzes or china, that, I should say, would be quite out of the question. But I don’t know. All I know is that Mr. X took his meals in a very good restaurant which I frequented also. (75)

The narrator’s initial assumptions about anarchists are that such a commitment stems from a faith or a fanaticism. The possibility that an anarchist could resemble himself is unthinkable, yet he cannot help seeing the similarities between Mr X and himself: “He was alive and European; he had the manner of good society, wore a coat and hat like mine, and had pretty near the same taste in cooking. It was too frightful to think of” (76). The narrator is not too frightened to continue dining with Mr X, yet he is startled when the façade of respectability falls: “One evening he remarked, casually, in the course of conversation, ‘There’s no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and violence’” (77). Mr X’s comment revives the narrator’s original image of the terrorist: “I seemed suddenly to hear above the festive bustle and clatter of the brilliant restaurant the mutter of a hungry and seditious multitude” (77). The narrator’s views oscillate between his preconceptions and his confrontation with a real anarchist. Mr X increases the narrator’s discomfort by informing him that many perfectly sane, upper-class people support anarchists: ‘Don’t you know yet,’ he said, ‘that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning.’ (78)

The narrator is incredulous: ‘“Is this a joke?’ I asked, smiling” (79). Mr X insists that he is serious: ‘“If it is, I am not aware of it,’ he said, woodenly” (79), and he begins his account of the “young Lady Amateur of anarchism” (84) to illustrate this point. The embedded tale closely resembles the plot of A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903), which is a probable source. The novel purports to be the autobiography of “Isabel Meredith.” The name was a pseudonym for the real authors, Helen and Olivia Rossetti, nieces of Dante Gabriel

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Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. The family was related to Ford Madox Hueffer, Conrad’s friend and collaborator. Even if Conrad had not read the novel, he would have heard about the Rossetti sisters’ anarchist activities from Hueffer.57 When they were still adolescents, the Rossetti sisters became publishers of an anarchist newspaper named The Torch. The heroine in their novel produces a similar publication named Tocsin (or “Alarm”). The authors convey the sincerity of their initial commitment to anarchism as well as their later disillusionment. Like the “Lady Amateur” in Conrad’s tale, Isabel Meredith, the first-­ person narrator, sympathizes with the poverty of “the people” and joins an anarchist group to ameliorate social injustice. She subsidizes the group’s newspaper and gives money to needy comrades. Her idealism is tested by the less energetic members of the group who refuse to do any work for the cause. She realizes that they take advantage of her largesse but excuses their indolence because she believes that anarchist doctrine forbids compulsion of any kind. If people do not want to work, no one should force them. The characters who fit the anarchist stereotype of malcontent, dispossessed outcasts are not the ones who act. The comrade who actually commits an act of violence does so to prove his commitment to the others. Isabel falls in love with a member of the group, but he rebuffs her because, he says, anarchists cannot indulge personal emotions. She accepts this explanation and continues to edit the anarchist newspaper until the police raid their office and destroy the press and type. These elements of the novel are consistent with the generic conventions that Melchiori describes. The embedded story that Mr X recounts employs so many of these elements that it can be read as a satire of dynamite fiction. His story includes upper class radicals, a printing press, betrayal, and covert police surveillance. As in The Princess Casamassima and A Girl Among the Anarchists, anarchism is glamorous—especially to women. Mr X explains this paradox to the narrator: “But let me observe that most women, if not always ready to play with fire, are generally eager to play with a loose spark or so” (79). He hammers this point: “For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures” (92). Mr X’s distrust of upper-class enthusiasts echoes Hyacinth’s. Like Isabel Meredith in A Girl Among the Anarchists, the young “Lady Amateur of anarchism” in “The Informer” funds an anarchist press and takes an active role in writing and distributing propaganda:

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To more personal charm than mere youth could account for, she added the seductive appearance of enthusiasm, of independence, of courageous thought. I suppose she put on these appearances as she put on her picturesque dresses and for the same reason: to assert her individuality at any cost. You know, women would go to any length almost for such a purpose. (80–81)

Mr X suggests that the Lady Amateur is seeking romance among the anarchists: I suppose she felt it necessary to round and complete her assumption of advanced ideas, of revolutionary lawlessness, by making believe to be in love with an anarchist. (85)

Mr X regards her as a poseur: “She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions—the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social class to which she belonged herself” (81). Like the heroine of The Princess Casamassima, like Isabel Meredith and the Rossetti sisters, the Lady Amateur enjoys the excitement of political conspiracy. Although Mr X’s story contains conventional elements of dynamite fiction, he does not fit the popular image of the anarchist as fanatic. The fanatics in the story are a police informer and an artist. The anarchists know that a police spy has infiltrated their cell, and Mr X stages a fake police raid to uncover the informer. Mr X repeatedly describes Sevrin, the police spy, as a fanatic: ‘“By and by a tall young man came in. He was clean-shaved with a strong bluish jaw and something of the air of a taciturn actor or of a fanatical priest: the type with thick black eyebrows—you know’” (85). Mr X reiterates, “And this one, I repeat, was extremely presentable, notwithstanding his fanatical black-browed aspect” (85). Mr X regards Sevrin as a fanatic because of his fervent dedication to his convictions: He was. The most persistent, the most dangerous, the craftiest, the most systematic of informers. A genius amongst betrayers. Fortunately for us, he was unique. The man was a fanatic, I have told you. (93)

Mr X maintains that fanaticism is unbending belief, whatever the specific belief might be. He explains Sevrin’s motives to the narrator:

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‘From conviction.’ Yes. A vague but ardent humanitarianism had urged him in his first youth into the bitterest extremity of negation and revolt. Afterwards his optimism flinched. He doubted and became lost. You have heard of converted atheists. These turn often into dangerous fanatics, but the soul remains the same. After he had got acquainted with the girl, there are to be met in that diary of his very queer politico-amorous rhapsodies. He took her sovereign grimaces with deadly seriousness. He longed to convert her. (100)

The object of Sevrin’s devotion changes, but the depth of his passion is constant. Fearing that one of the anarchists might detonate a bomb, he sacrifices himself to protect the Lady Amateur from the possibility of an explosion: It was only with the discovery of her being in the house that everything— the forced calm, the restraint of his fanaticism, the mask—all came off together in a kind of panic. Why panic, do you ask? The answer is very simple. He remembered—or, I dare say, he had never forgotten—the Professor alone at the top of the house, pursuing his researches, surrounded by tins upon tins of Stone’s Dried Soup. (94)

Believing the raid is conducted by fellow policemen, he drops his disguise. The anarchists and the Lady Amateur instantly see that he is the traitor. She turns away from the man who loves her to prove her loyalty to the anarchists. Only when he takes poison does she feel grief and guilt. Mr X considers the poison a sign of Sevrin’s fanaticism: For if his fanatical anti-anarchism went even as far as carrying poison in his pocket, only to rob his adversaries of legitimate vengeance, I knew he would take care to provide something that would not fail him when required. (99)

Undermining conventions, the fanatic is not the anarchist but the anti-­ anarchist police informer. Mr X also calls Horne, an impoverished artist in the anarchist cell, a fanatic. Horne’s fanaticism is motivated by personal loss rather than political conviction: “The guiding spirit of that group was a fanatic of social revolution. He is dead now. He was an engraver and etcher of genius” (83). Horne is a caricature of artists who call themselves anarchists because they defy aesthetic conventions: “He began by being revolutionary in his art, and ended by becoming a revolutionist, after his wife and child had

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died in want and misery. He used to say that the bourgeoisie, the smug, overfed lot, had killed them” (83). Mr X notes that Horne is extreme even for a fanatic: “This was another kind of a fanatic altogether” (86). Horne and Sevrin, anarchist and anti-anarchist alike, are fanatic in the intensity of their adherence to their convictions, and Mr X wants the narrator to see that artist and spy are similar. Sevrin’s death by poison and Horne’s denunciation of Sevrin reveal their common fanaticism: He hung his head, biting his lower lip. A change had come over him, a sort of thoughtful, absorbed calmness. Nevertheless, he panted. His sides worked visibly, and his nostrils expanded and collapsed in weird contrast with his sombre aspect of a fanatical monk in a meditative attitude, but with something, too, in his face of an actor intent upon the terrible exigencies of his part. Before him Horne declaimed, haggard and bearded, like an inspired denunciatory prophet from a wilderness. Two fanatics. They were made to understand each other. Does this surprise you? I suppose you think that such people would be foaming at the mouth and snarling at each other? (96–97)

In their fanaticism Sevrin and Horne, the fake anarchist and the cliché anarchist, “understand each other.” Mr X’s tale shows the narrator that respectable people can be anarchists and that anarchists as well as police informers can be fanatics. But Conrad makes the point of Mr X’s story ambiguous by suggesting that it may be a joke. Although Mr X has assured the narrator that his tale is not a joke, the friend who collects acquaintances raises this possibility after hearing the narrator’s account of his meetings with Mr X: ‘“And then, you know, he likes to have his little joke sometimes,’ he added in a confidential tone” (102). The narrator, however, does not see the joke, and he ends the story in uncertainty: “I have been utterly unable to discover where in all this the joke comes in” (102). It is up to the reader to figure out the joke. The anarchist tale itself is not funny—a man kills himself and a woman retreats from the world in guilt and grief—yet there are obvious jokes along the way. The anarchists meet near the “Variety Artists’ Agency [run by a] fellow called Bomm” (82). Mr X orders a bombe glacée for dessert (82). Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggests that since the narrator does not see any humor in the story, he is the butt of the joke.58 Other readers might see a joke in anarchists pretending to be police as the police pretend to be anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday. The Lady Amateur’s resemblance to the Rossetti sisters and the heroine of A Girl

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Among the Anarchists may be Conrad’s inside joke for Hueffer. Diana Culbertson argues that Conrad is not examining social themes at all but “playing a joke on his readers.”59 Conrad composes “his own private joke” and is “performing a sly parody of himself, mocking the readers of Harper’s and perhaps enjoying the gesture immensely.”60 Or perhaps the joke is that the only fanatics in the story are the police informer and an impoverished artist. The meaning of Mr X’s tale hinges on his intention, and the story makes his intention undecidable. Is he joking, as the mutual friend suggests, or sincere, as the narrator believes? A postcritical perspective preserves both possibilities. Conrad’s two anarchist tales use and undermine many conventions of dynamite fiction, especially the assumption that terrorists are fanatics. An ordinary worker can become an anarchist, and an anarchist can behave like a wealthy bourgeois. The stories depict anarchists and police as counterparts, similar in their disregard for the law. Fanatics can be found in both groups. Fanaticism is an unyielding commitment to one’s convictions, whatever they may be. The tales demonstrate the danger of profiling and the importance of accurate information, lessons that are consistent with current research in Terrorism Studies.

Notes 1. Shane McCorristine, “Ludic Terrorism: The Game of Anarchism in Some Edwardian Fiction,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 45, no. 2 (2012): 27. 2. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 1, ed. Frederick R.  Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 344. 3. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 3, ed. Frederick R.  Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 338. 4. Ibid., 346. 5. Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985), vii. 6. Ibid., 206. Sarah Cole offers a different list of the conventions of dynamite fiction in her discussion of Conrad’s knowledge of anarchism. See Sarah Cole, “Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture,” Modernism/modernity 16, no. 2 (2009): 312. 7. Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, vii. 8. Ibid., 20.

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9. Ibid., viii. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Ibid., 248. 12. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (London and New  York: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 220. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 480. 15. Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, 209. 16. Francis Blessington, “Politics and the Terrorist Novel,” Sewanee Review 116, no.1 (2008): 119. 17. Ibid., 120. 18. Ibid., 117. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 119–20. 21. Ibid., 119. 22. Ibid., 123. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 120. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 121. 27. William W.  E. Slights, “The Ethics of Readership and ‘The Anarchist,’” The Conradian 38, no. 1 (2013): 22. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 23. 30. Ibid., 24. 31. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 87 and 89. 32. Ibid., 89. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 92. 36. Ibid., 91. 37. Ibid., 85. 38. Ibid., 86. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Slights, “Ethics of Readership,” 28. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

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45. Joseph Conrad, “An Anarchist,” in A Set of Six (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), 136. Subsequent references to the story are in parentheses. 46. Daniel Schwarz, “The Lepidopterist’s Revenge: Theme and Structure in Conrad’s ‘An Anarchist,’” Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1971): 330. 47. Ibid., 333. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Jennifer Shaddock, “Hanging a Dog: The Politics of Naming in ‘An Anarchist,’” Conradiana 26, no. 1 (1994): 56. 51. Ibid., 63. 52. Ibid. 53. Joseph Conrad, “The Informer,” in A Set of Six (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), 73. Subsequent references to the story are in parentheses. 54. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Where does the Joke Come in?: Ethics and Aesthetics in Conrad’s ‘The Informer,’” Epoque Conradienne 19 (1993): 46. 55. Diana Culbertson, ‘“The Informer’ as Conrad’s Little Joke,” Studies in Short Fiction 11 (1974): 430. 56. James Walton, “Mr. X’s ‘Little Joke’: The Design of Conrad’s ‘The Informer,’” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 322–23. 57. Robert Hampson, “Conrad and the Rossettis: ‘A Casual Conversation about Anarchists,’” The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures: Second Series, ed. Mario Curreli (Pisa, Italy: Edizioni ETS, 2005), 290. 58. Erdinast-Vulcan, “Ethics and Aesthetics,” 45. 59. Culbertson, ‘“The Informer’ as Conrad’s Little Joke,” 432. 60. Ibid., 431.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 83–109. New York: Shocken Books. Blessington, Francis. 2008. Politics and the Terrorist Novel. Sewanee Review 116 (1): 116–124. Chesterton, G.K. 1908. The Man Who Was Thursday. London: J. W. Arrowsmith. Cole, Sarah. 2009. Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture. Modernism/modernity 16 (2): 301–328. Conrad, Joseph. 1924a. An Anarchist. In A Set of Six, 133–161. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.

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———. 1924b. The Informer. In A Set of Six, 73–102. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. ———. 1983. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 1. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 3. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culbertson, Diana. 1974. ‘The Informer’ as Conrad’s Little Joke. Studies in Short Fiction 11: 430–433. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. 1993. Where does the Joke Come in?: Ethics and Aesthetics in Conrad’s ‘The Informer’. Epoque Conradienne 19: 37–46. Hampson, Robert. 2005. Conrad and the Rossettis: ‘A Casual Conversation about Anarchists’. In The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures: Second Series, ed. Mario Curreli, 289–304. Pisa, Italy: Edizioni ETS. James, Henry. 1886. The Princess Casamassima. London and New  York: Macmillan and Co. McCorristine, Shane. 2012. Ludic Terrorism: The Game of Anarchism in Some Edwardian Fiction. Studies in the Literary Imagination 45 (2): 27–46. Melchiori, Barbara Arnett. 1985. Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel. London: Croom Helm. Meredith, Isabel. 1992. A Girl Among the Anarchists. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Schwarz, Daniel. 1971. The Lepidopterist’s Revenge: Theme and Structure in Conrad’s ‘An Anarchist’. Studies in Short Fiction 8: 330–334. Shaddock, Jennifer. 1994. Hanging a Dog: The Politics of Naming in ‘An Anarchist’. Conradiana 26 (1): 56–69. Sherry, Norman. 1971. Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slights, William W.E. 2013. The Ethics of Readership and ‘The Anarchist’. The Conradian 38 (1): 22–38. Walton, James. 1967. Mr. X’s ‘Little Joke’: The Design of Conrad’s ‘The Informer’. Studies in Short Fiction 4: 322–333.

CHAPTER 3

The Secret Agent: Terrorists and Counterterrorists

Since 9/11 The Secret Agent has been in the news because it is about an “outrage” that resembles terrorism as we know it today. In the late nineteenth century, the threat of anarchist violence reached England. Even though more attacks were launched by American-Irish Fenians than by foreign anarchists,1 Conrad based his plot on a bombing in 1894 by a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin. His target was Greenwich Observatory, but the bomb exploded too soon, and Bourdin died from his injuries. Using some of these facts, Conrad created a network of social and domestic conflicts around a hapless figure whose death resembles Bourdin’s. Conrad’s version of the event is so convincing that journalists frequently refer to the novel when writing about present-day violence, yet Judith Shulevitz, writing in Slate, warns, “Ah, the perils of relevance!” She claims that in The Secret Agent Conrad forestalls all attempts to draw political lessons: “He neither advocated one kind of state over another nor prophesied the ongoing war against terrorism, except insofar as he saw industrialized society as forever at odds with the anarchic human heart.”2 She regards the novel’s political content as background for Conrad’s real subject—human nature under pressure. This view is not uncommon among literary critics. With the advent of postcritique, however, there is a new interest in literature’s practical uses. Before we can accept the novel as a source of information, we must ask whether its information about terrorism and counterterrorism is accurate.3 Without minimizing the novel’s other © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1_3

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themes, we can test Conrad’s narrative against social science research in Terrorism Studies. Although Conrad’s representation of terrorists and police has been considered biased and unrealistic, the characters and events in the novel are consistent with this research. If we consider the information in the text, as postcritique encourages, the novel can correct misconceptions that distract the public and the police from actual threats. And because this information is in a novel rather than a report, readers absorb it more readily and more deeply. Knowing the thoughts and feelings of imagined characters, we can build a framework for understanding real events. Critics have needlessly dismissed the political information in the novel. The prevalent position is enshrined in the 1990 Cambridge University Press edition of The Secret Agent edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. In the “Introduction” the editors emphatically and authoritatively deny that the novel has any political significance, and they rest the novel’s claim to greatness on its avoidance of politics. They praise Conrad’s modernist irony—“For sustained irony nothing can touch the novel’s magnitude and achievement”—and his indeterminacy—“He became the apostle…of the Eternal Why?”4 The editors draw support from the critical record: Most studies, by now voluminous, have been analyses of the novel’s technique and meaning, its sardonic comic and philosophical effect, and its symbolism. Now virtually all critics—save a few, like Irving Howe, who fault the novel on grounds Conrad never laid claim to (exact portraiture of the anarchists)—follow The Great Tradition in viewing Conrad’s ‘Simple Tale’ as ‘one of the two unquestionable classics of the first order that he added to the English novel’.5

The editors sideline Howe’s objection to the faulty “portraiture of the anarchists” because it is political rather than aesthetic. Even if the anarchists are as unrealistic as Howe claims, this deficiency is irrelevant to literary judgments of the novel. The editors argue that the excellence of the novel is due to its form, tone, ideas, and symbolism. From a postcritical perspective, however, the information in the text is one more reason to praise the novel. Conrad himself was proud of the novel’s accuracy. He told his publisher that the novel was “based on the inside knowledge of a certain event in the history of active anarchism.”6 As Howe knew, Conrad disapproved of “anarchist activities.” In his “Author’s Note” of 1920 Conrad states: “I

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remember however remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-­ destruction.”7 Nevertheless, he boasted that “all sorts of revolutionary refugees in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot about them.”8 Although Harkness and Reid acknowledge that “actual anarchists were the originals of Conrad’s group,”9 the editors overrule his “Author’s Note”: “This comment was made from the vantage-point of 1920. From our vantage-point, the novel is not sordid, and if anything, the anarchists, far from being realistic, are ridiculously ineffective and unrealistically foolish.”10 The editors neutralize the political significance of the novel in an anodyne generalization: “And if Conrad is not making a point about anarchism or radicalism in 1890–1907, he is at least saying that the problems of the Verlocs are mirrored in, if not the cause of, the general inability of nations to understand each other.”11 The vague suggestion that the Verlocs’ problems resemble international misunderstandings reduces the political content of the novel to background for the domestic plot. Convinced that private life is literature’s proper domain, the editors disparage the characterization of anarchists and ignore the political information in the novel. Another line of attack on the political significance of The Secret Agent comes from Barbara Arnett Melchiori in Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel. Although Conrad uses many conventions of dynamite fiction, she considers his anarchist characters superficial: “Like Stevenson, Conrad refused to take his anarchists seriously.”12 She objects to elements of comedy in The Secret Agent such as the “total absence of any real activity and the inconclusiveness of [the anarchists’] tirades,” “class caricature,” “ineffectual and physically repulsive” members of the cell, and the “horrific description” of the explosion.13 This judgment implies that a serious representation of anarchists would portray them as determined zealots. According to current social science research, however, the features she dismisses—idleness, inconclusive discussions, and ineffectual planning— are common in terrorist groups. As the terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw notes, not everyone who joins a terrorist group is willing to commit an act of violence.14 A more recent study of novels about terrorism also minimizes the political content of The Secret Agent, though for different reasons. Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel argue that Conrad’s terrorists are unlike

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those in their survey of terrorist novels written from 1970 to 2001. The terrorists in their sample “have agents and agency,”15 and they are all too effective: “The rage for destruction we see in cases like this, the lust for assertion through negation, is the nearly universal hallmark of the terrorist in mainstream novels.”16 Conrad’s terrorists, in contrast, “are in fact capable of little; they suffer from indolence and aimlessness, and the police have their number.”17 Like Harkness and Reid, like Melchiori, Appelbaum and Paknadel discount Conrad’s political knowledge because his anarchists do not fit their model. These characters, however, are consistent with the findings of Terrorism Studies, which indicate that terrorists are sometimes indolent, aimless, and known to the police. Other critics have begun to reassess the political content of The Secret Agent. For example, Peter C. Herman’s list of serious novels about terrorism from the late nineteenth century to the present includes Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, John Updike’s Terrorist, as well as post 9/11 texts such as Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil.18 Herman’s criterion for seriousness is that all these authors “problematize both terrorism and the usual reactions to it by undoing any easy distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and…narrating the justifications for terror in ways that invite, if not sympathy, then understanding.”19 One of Herman’s examples of such insight is that bin Laden held the conception of terrorism expressed by Mr Vladimir in The Secret Agent: “violence should be directed against the ideological heart, or ‘sacrosanct fetish,’ of the day.”20 Herman speculates that critics neglect the information in terrorist fiction since knowledge about attacks, their causes and purposes, is taboo. He maintains that terror is unspeakable: “because the act breaks all rules of civilized behavior, we are not allowed to understand it.” 21 Herman suggests that if we are unable to confront the causes of terrorism outside fiction, we are unlikely to seek them in fiction. Such inhibitions deprive the public and the police of useful information. David Mulry also departs from the earlier consensus. Summarizing criticism of the novel in Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent, he states that “the weight of commentary on the anarchists tends to disregard them as individuals, to shy away from labeling them as anarchists, or to suggest that their treatment reveals Conrad’s contempt for anarchist ideology.”22 In contrast, he observes, “Recent commentary, like that by Anthony Fothergill (2005),

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also discusses The Secret Agent at length, pointing to the enduring political relevance of Conrad’s depiction of anarchism, although, of course, current interest in the text pivots around its treatment of terror and terrorism.”23 Similarly, in “Politics and the Terrorist Novel,” Francis Blessington builds a case for the practical uses of terrorist fiction. Taking a postcritical stance, he states, “What we want most from the terrorist novel is to know and experience why someone chooses terror. We want to be inside the mind of the terrorist.”24 He argues that novels can give us this knowledge by depicting how someone becomes a terrorist, specifically by portraying how a person makes difficult choices. The Secret Agent dramatizes this process in almost every character. Although Terrorism Studies discourages psychological profiles of individual terrorists, Blessington’s interest in the process of radicalization is consistent with social science research.

The Secret Agent and Terrorism Studies Current research in Terrorism Studies corroborates Conrad’s account of a terrorist outrage. This research shows that terrorism produces more fear than danger, that terrorists are too various to be profiled, and that the best way to prevent attacks is to infiltrate groups committed to violence. Similarly, The Secret Agent portrays terrorism as a symbolic strategy, terrorists as a diverse group of individuals, and informers as the foundation of counterterrorism. Despite differences of time, place, and ideology, Conrad’s anarchists resemble today’s terrorists, and police in the novel use the methods of counterterrorists today. Terrorism Studies provides a framework for interpreting the novel as a realistic depiction of anarchists and police as counterparts; they have similar personal desires and similar disregard for law. Martha Crenshaw explains that terrorists, like the anarchists in the novel, desire autonomy as well as community and find both in a terrorist cell. As noted in Chap. 1, she states: “Commitment is also motivated by ego-involvement. Individuals seek to maintain self-respect, the support of the peer group, and the sense of belonging that is heightened by a sense of shared risk.”25 Rex A. Hudson’s 1999 report on The Psychology and Sociology of Terrorism describes the desire for autonomy—“Joining a terrorist group gives them a sense of ‘revolutionary heroism’ and self-­ importance that they previously lacked as individuals”—and the desire for solidarity—“The need to belong to a group motivates most terrorists who are followers to join a terrorist group.”26 Regardless of the group’s

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ideology, terrorism satisfies these desires. The ego-involvement, self-­ respect, heroism, and self-importance that Crenshaw and Hudson mention describe the aims of terrorists as individuals. To describe them as social beings, the political scientists speak of the desire for the support of the peer group and the need to belong to a group. I describe these aims as a desire for agency, autonomy, and freedom on one side and solidarity, community, and affiliation on the other. Like terrorism today, nineteenth-­ century anarchism promised individual autonomy as well as revolutionary camaraderie. Conrad attributes the desire to control one’s own life and the desire to be part of a group in varying proportions to terrorists as well as most of his other characters. The findings of Crenshaw and Hudson suggest that Conrad’s anarchists are more realistic than critics have realized. Just as research in Terrorism Studies indicates that psychological profiling leads to false positives, the novel condemns an earlier method of profiling based on the ideas of Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was a physician, psychiatrist, and criminologist who claimed that physical anomalies were signs of mental degeneracy and criminal impulses.27 It is not the police but Ossipon, the “ex-medical student without a degree” (40), who accepts the scientific basis of Lombroso’s theory. Observing Stevie’s singular appearance and “queerness” (133), Ossipon labels him “that sort of degenerate” (41). Even Verloc bristles at this, and Yundt declares, “Lombroso is an ass” (41). Yundt believes that social exploitation, not physiognomy, explains crime: ‘“Teeth and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that marks him still better…”’ (41). As this exchange among the anarchists illustrates, heredity and environment were competing models for profiling likely terrorists. Although Ossipon considers Stevie an example of criminal degeneracy, Stevie’s role in the explosion has nothing to do with Lombroso’s theory. He is an unwitting human detonator manipulated by others. The narrator’s comments and judgments are also consistent with Terrorism Studies, especially the finding that terrorists are not fanatics. The narrator calls Verloc a fanatic, but not because he plans the bombing: he is a fanatic of idleness. He behaves “with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather with a fanatical inertness” (16). In contrast to the embedded narrators in Conrad’s tales, the narrator in The Secret Agent penetrates the minds of other characters. Freely expressing his opinions, he states that Verloc is neither mad nor bad: “What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic” (16). Even when the narrator’s tone is ironic, his assertions are incontrovertible. For example, he reports the

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unspoken feelings of Verloc and Winnie after she learns of Stevie’s death: “Their accord was perfect, but it was not precise. It was a tacit accord, congenial to Mrs Verloc’s incuriosity and to Mr Verloc’s habits of mind, which were indolent and secret. They refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives” (185). The course of events establishes the narrator’s reliability within the text; social science research corroborates the accuracy of his account beyond the text.

Nineteenth-Century Anarchists Although anarchist thought primarily justifies individual resistance to external constraints, in the nineteenth century it also inspired collective action. When Mikhail Bakunin, a revolutionist and anarchist theoretician, called for “propaganda by deed” in 1870, he made anarchism a general term for violent political protest. David Mulry suggests that The Secret Agent can be read as an ironic comment on Bakunin’s motto: “From a certain point of view, rather than being merely ‘a domestic tragedy,’ the whole story expressly revolves around this shift from propaganda by word to propaganda by deed because the consuming question for Verloc in the tale’s early development becomes: Who will not merely speak, but act?”28 Mulry argues that Conrad decided to write about the Greenwich Park bombing because it was a British instance of anarchist propaganda by deed: “Moreover, for Conrad, it is of course this defining moment in the history of British anarchism—the first anarchist bombing on British soil, and the European atrocities that follows—that is the heart-spring of the novel. The novel is about the consequences of this ideological shift.”29 Verloc is known for having a voice loud enough to stir crowds of protesters, but words are no longer enough. Conrad’s twist is that it is not the anarchists but Mr Vladimir, a foreign diplomat, who demands less talk and more action. Conrad shifts responsibility for the Greenwich attack from the historical anarchist to an imagined government official. Representing a repressive state, Vladimir wants to force the British government to end its toleration of political exiles. He complains that England has become a refuge that allows exiles to gather strength: “England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty” (28). He complains: “We don’t want a voice. We want facts—startling facts—damn you” (25). He demands action: “Isn’t your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in blunt type on this filthy paper—eh? Why don’t you do something?” (26).

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He is fed up with propaganda; he wants an outrage. Contrary to the public’s assumption that fanatics are responsible for bombings, Conrad makes the official representative of a foreign government order the attack. In contrast to the diplomat’s enthusiasm for violence, the anarchists in the novel are unwilling to carry out an attack. Verloc tries to persuade his confederates to act, but they realize that outrages hurt their cause. Ossipon rebukes the Professor for providing dynamite “for the asking, to the first fool that comes along” (59). He explains: “Under the present circumstances it’s nothing short of criminal,” because “this business may affect our position very adversely in this country” (59). Like Vladimir, Ossipon expects terrorist violence to instigate counterterrorist violence, but unlike the diplomat, he wants to prevent this reaction. An essay by James F. English validates Ossipon’s caution, noting that “propaganda by deed” was a “catastrophic failure”; it had “driven away potential supporters while supplying abundant material for the propaganda mills of reaction.”30 These consequences are exactly what Vladimir intends. Vladimir’s understanding of anarchism is consistent with the historian Yuval Noah Harari’s analysis of terrorism today. Harari argues that since terrorists lack real military capability, their power is “theatrical.” They achieve a symbolic impact far beyond the harm they inflict, yet they provoke the state to over-react: To achieve their aim, they present the state with an impossible challenge of its own: to prove that it can protect all of its citizens from political violence, anywhere, anytime. The terrorists hope that when the state tries to fulfil this impossible mission, it will reshuffle the political cards, and hand them some unforeseen ace.31

This is Vladimir’s aim as well. He demands a violent act to force a change in British policy. He wants to frighten the British so that they will suspend their policy of offering asylum to refugees from more repressive countries. His reasons for ordering Verloc to carry out an attack articulate the logic of terrorism: I am about to give you the philosophy of bomb throwing from my point of view…A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of

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any other object. You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation. (30)

Like terrorists today, Vladimir chooses a symbolic target that has no military value. He instructs Verloc to set off a bomb at Greenwich Observatory because science has become society’s sacred truth: “The sacro-sanct fetish of to-day is science” (29). Whereas anarchists use violence to weaken government, however, Vladimir calls for violence to force the government to become more repressive. Verloc plans the bombing to stay on the embassy’s payroll. Neither Vladimir nor Verloc is motivated by anarchist convictions.

Conrad’s Anarchists In addition to depicting a diplomat ordering the attack, Conrad undermines the conception of the terrorist as fanatic by portraying the anarchists as ordinary people. The novel challenges assumptions about the “typical” terrorist, showing how many different aims anarchists might have. Each character has a different reason for calling himself an anarchist, and no psychological profile captures all of them, least of all Verloc, who actually plans the bombing. David Mulry calls attention to the ways that The Secret Agent departs from the conventions of dynamite fiction. He notes that most novels about anarchist outrages were as sensational as newspaper accounts. The popular press portrayed Bourdin as a fanatic: “From the very beginning of the reporting on this affair Bourdin was not a political figure, but a sociopath.”32 Mulry adds, “Much the same effect is seen in modern media coverage of atrocities by Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, or Islamic State terror groups. The political dimension disappears in the visceral horror of individual spectacle.”33 In contrast, Conrad’s bomber is neither an anarchist nor a fanatic: “Conrad’s treatment is singular in the sense that his primary anarchist bomber is no anarchist at all, but a lazy and listless double agent whose dearest wish is to preserve the status quo and maintain the protection of the wealth of society for the wealthy.”34 Mulry notes that many dynamite novels “feature recurrent archetypes, though the political identity anarchist/socialist/nihilist is often confused and confusing.”35 Verloc’s circle dramatizes this confusion. However distinct these factions were to their members, novelists and the public lumped them together:

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(socialists blending into anarchists, and nihilists, and red flags perfectly interchangeable with black flags in the narrative economy of these novels). As a result, in tone the narratives [unlike Conrad’s] tend to be fantastic rather than realistic, hyperbolic, and melodramatic, and very rarely ironic.36

As Mulry shows, Conrad’s anarchists are more realistic than those in popular fiction. Conrad’s anarchists are neither fanatic nor unified. Their distinct beliefs reflect the diversity of radical objectives at the turn of the century. The radicals who meet in Verloc’s pornography shop call themselves “The Future of the Proletariat,” which is “not anarchist in principle, but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion” (26). Mulry contests the consensus that “Michaelis, Yundt, and Ossipon, and to a degree even The Professor serve little purpose except as fearful grotesques—broad evidence of conservative reaction perhaps, but hardly legitimate insights into the world of revolt and terror.”37 Mulry argues that Conrad has “a keen awareness of the subtleties of the anarchist movement” and that his characters express beliefs that were held by historical anarchists.38 Mulry notes, “The ideas canvassed by Michaelis, Karl Yundt, and Ossipon are clearly derived from the concerns of anarchist theorists; these three types (suggesting Conrad’s intention perhaps) also encompass different stages in the progression or development of anarchist positions in their ideologies.”39 Mulry identifies sources for each member of Verloc’s cell. Michaelis’s vision of the end of private property corresponds to the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.40 Karl Yundt echoes Sergei Nechaev’s demand for total commitment: “Day and night he must have one thought, one aim—merciless destruction.”41 Ossipon’s interest in science resembles Kropotkin’s, and the Professor evokes “zealots of the anarchist movement like Ravachol, Vaillant, and Henry—notorious propagandists by deed.”42 Mulry shows that as Conrad revised the text, he accentuated the differences among the anarchists. They are individualized and normalized: “They are by turns, cadaverous, corpulent, and prurient, and universally self-serving (who in the novel is not?).”43 The one commonality in this motley group, according to the narrator, is that they dislike work. Verloc knows that none of them will help him carry out the bombing. Most of the characters—except Stevie—seek agency and—except the Professor—want relationships as well. Each figure occupies a distinct position on a spectrum from extreme autonomy to extreme community.44 The bomb-making Professor is called the “perfect anarchist” (67). He is the

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one character who has no interest in personal relationships (67). Isolated even from the other anarchists, he is an “individualist by temperament” (66), not political conviction. He believes he has complete control over his life, but his control consists of his readiness to blow himself up along with anyone who attempts to arrest him. He claims that his willingness to die achieves a “sinister freedom” (67). Michael C. Frank regards the Professor as “the only truly threatening anarchist in the book,” noting that he may be “the earliest instance of a potential suicide bomber in literature.”45 Frank’s characterization of the Professor associates terrorism with fanaticism, suicide, and individualism: “Individual fanaticism and scrupulousness (embodied by the bomb-making Professor)” are among the factors that contribute to political violence.46 Frank’s analysis of the Professor is based on the popular conception of the typical terrorist. Unlike suicide bombers and fanatics, however, the Professor has no ideology or political agenda. He provides the means but not the motive for attacks. The other self-proclaimed anarchists envision a better society, but the Professor’s only goal is “the destruction of what is” (228). Like Vladimir, he calls on the anarchists to perform a “clean sweep” (61). He seeks only destruction, pure destruction. Alluding to Bakunin’s call for deeds, the Professor calls himself “the true propagandist” (58), though his only message is destruction. He opposes established institutions without advocating new ones. He believes that “the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence” (66). In his mind, destruction brings him social status: “He was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige” (66–67). For the Professor, destruction is a form of self-assertion and expresses individual agency. The Professor is the extreme embodiment of anarchism, autonomy, and agency with no admixture of communal feeling. Like the Professor, Karl Yundt advocates violence, but he stands for a collective rather than individual form of anarchism. He is a fervent socialist and refers to himself as “the terrorist” (38). While Frank regards the Professor as the novel’s true terrorist, he names Yundt “the first literary character to bear that explicit designation.”47 Nevertheless, Yundt does not act on his principles. He is more committed to violence than Ossipon or Michaelis, yet he too is known for talk rather than deeds. He is a “veteran of dynamite wars” who had been “a great actor in his time—actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews. The famous terrorist

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had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action…” (42). In private life he depends on a devoted woman for care and sustenance. In contrast to the Professor’s individualism, Yundt advocates violence for the sake of community: ‘“I have always dreamed,’ he mouthed fiercely, ‘of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves—and death—enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity—that’s what I would have liked to see’” (38). This pitiless desire for an ideal community is characteristic of present-day terrorists as well. Some political scientists believe it supersedes political reasons for terrorism. For example, in “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy” Max Abrahms observes that there is “strong theoretical and empirical evidence that people become terrorists not to achieve their organization’s declared political agenda, but to develop strong affective ties with other terrorist members.” This finding is evident among “a wide variety of terrorist groups—including ETA, the IRA, the Italian Communist Party, the RAF, the Red Brigades, Turkish terrorist organizations, and the Weather Underground.”48 Yundt’s dream of solidarity resembles their aim, as his embrace of destruction resembles their method. None of the other anarchists in Verloc’s circle follows Bakunin’s call for collective action, but they find various ways to achieve a degree of agency. Although Michaelis is imprisoned for fifteen years, he eats and writes to his heart’s content. Fat and verbose, Michaelis expresses a Marxist belief in the inevitable collapse of capitalism, a conviction that requires neither action nor persuasion: “He talked to himself, indifferent to the sympathy or hostility of his hearers” (39). Neither “revolutionary propaganda” nor deeds matter because “everything is changed by economic conditions” (43). Michaelis preaches the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. He explains, “Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism” (37). As the “ticket-of-leave apostle of humanitarian hopes,” he attracts a wealthy patroness (83). She protects him because “she liked to watch what the world was coming to” (84). As in other dynamite narratives, anarchists have social cachet. Ossipon is as passive as Michaelis, though he counts on emotion rather than economic laws to reform society. He trusts “the emotional state of

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the masses. Without emotion there is no action” (44). As an ex-medical student, he claims scientific authority for his opinion (44). Like Kropotkin, he believes that a “clandestine pamphlet was worth more than the terrorist’s bomb or the assassin’s dagger.”49 This belief requires no action, and he opposes the Professor’s willingness to dispense explosives indiscriminately. Like Yundt and Michaelis, he depends on women for money. While Michaelis attracts an upper-class benefactress, Ossipon charms a series of “silly girls with savings bank books” who support him (45), and he absconds with Winnie’s money at the end of the novel. Verloc is the only member of the group who undertakes a violent deed, yet he has no anarchist convictions at all. He identifies not with anarchists but with property-owners in the wealthy neighborhood of the embassy: “He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye. All these people had to be protected” (15). He complies with Vladimir’s demand for an outrage because he fears losing his embassy pay: “the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognized labour—a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state” (45). Verloc’s bourgeois aspirations differentiate him from the other anarchists in the novel, but his unwillingness to accept the discipline of work is typical, according to the narrator: The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries. (45–46)

Verloc’s comrades are not fanatics, and he knows that none of them will carry out the bombing that Vladimir demands. Verloc plans the attack himself because he wants to keep his job. Verloc’s marriage is an act of autonomy and affiliation. It marks his progress toward respectability. He has freely chosen a wife whom he desires: “The sight of his wife was agreeable to Mr Verloc. It was his idiosyncrasy” (134). Unlike the other men in his circle, he reflects, he has to support a family: “Loafing was all very well for these fellows, who knew

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not Mr Vladimir, and had women to fall back upon; whereas he had a woman to provide for—” (46). He also accepts responsibility for her dependent mother and brother. He works as a police informer and as an agitator for a foreign government because he needs the income. Until Vladimir demands action, Verloc is content, enjoying his autonomy and his family. Vladimir is contemptuous of Verloc’s bourgeois qualities and berates him: “You haven’t got even the physique of your profession. You—a member of a starving proletariat—never! You—a desperate socialist or anarchist—which is it?” (22). It is neither. Verloc has no political convictions. He needs money to support his wife and her family, a motive that astonishes Vladimir: ‘“Married! And you a professed anarchist, too!’” (32). Too fat and too bourgeois to fit Vladimir’s idea of an anarchist, Verloc fails to win Vladimir’s confidence. Nevertheless, Verloc carries out Vladimir’s plan. This is more than an ironic twist on conventional anarchist fiction: it shows how economic motives drive terrorism.50 Winnie Verloc has much less agency than her husband. Her choices are constrained by her duty to her mother and her brother. She has shielded Stevie from their father’s violence and continues to protect him. She sacrifices her romantic feelings for a suitor because he cannot support Stevie and her mother. Verloc, however, is willing and able to provide a home for all three, and she agrees to marry him. She manages her resentment by repressing her feelings: “She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into” (136). The narrator reiterates this insight: “Winnie’s philosophy consisted in not taking notice of the inside of facts” (120). Ignoring what she cannot change, she lives with severe constraints on her agency. Since Winnie married for Stevie’s sake, she feels that his death cancels her tacit contract with Verloc: “At that precise moment Mrs Verloc began to look upon herself as released from all earthly ties. She had her freedom” (189). But her new autonomy has no purpose: “For she did not exactly know what use to make of her freedom” (191). Gradually she begins to assert a degree of agency: “her wits, no longer disconnected, were working under the control of her will” (196). The first sign of her new freedom is that she refuses to satisfy Verloc’s erotic desire. When he utters his usual summons, “Come here” (196), she picks up the carving knife on the table and stabs him. Released from duty, from obligation, from responsibility, she is free: “She had become a free woman with a perfection of freedom which left her nothing to desire and absolutely nothing to do, since

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Stevie’s urgent claim on her devotion no longer existed” (198). Her first and last autonomous act is murder. Like some anarchists, she finds total freedom in an act of destruction. Her act is a crime rather than a political protest, yet it expresses the freedom from external constraint enshrined in anarchist theory. Conrad makes a similar point in “An Anarchist.” In the story, Paul declares himself free at the moment he kills the manipulative comrades who have ruined his life. Murder is the ultimate expression of autonomy in its total disregard for anyone else. It is a personal version of the terrorist’s willingness to kill random victims. This moment of freedom is short-lived for Winnie, as it is for Paul. She hears the “tick” of blood dripping from Verloc’s body before she sees it: “It was a trickle, dark, swift, thin…Blood!” (199). The delayed decoding marks her transition from exhilaration to fear, from feeling free to recognizing the consequences of what she has done. Her thoughts repeatedly turn to the punishment for murder that she remembers reading in a newspaper: “The drop given was fourteen feet” (201). Overcome by guilt and fear, she relinquishes her autonomy immediately. She puts herself under Ossipon’s control, leaning on him more abjectly than she had depended on Verloc. Giving up even the respectability she had as Verloc’s wife, she tells Ossipon: ‘“I’ll work for you. I’ll slave for you. I’ll love you…I won’t ask you to marry me,’ she breathed out in shame-faced accents” (216). She hands over her money and her agency: ‘“Where are we going to, Tom?’ she asked timidly. Mrs Verloc was no longer a free woman” (218). Ossipon takes the money and abandons her. Dreading the gallows, with the newspaper account of hanging reverberating in her mind, she kills herself. The plot highlights her oscillation between absolute freedom and abject dependence. The parallel between political and domestic events is explicit. The Assistant Commissioner informs Sir Ethelred that Verloc planned the bombing, explaining: “Yes, a genuine wife. And the victim was a genuine brother-in-law. From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama” (167–68). Ossipon reinforces this view, wondering “whether the hidden causes of that Greenwich Park affair did not lie deep in the unhappy circumstances of the Verlocs’ married life” (208).51 This parallel supports David Mulry’s claim that Winnie, not the Professor, is the novel’s “true anarchist…, since one might describe the classical anarchist as a person who discovers himself or herself free from all restraints with the courage to wipe everything away and begin anew with a clean

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slate.” He explains that “the act of revolt is modeled for us (again the original sense of propaganda by deed) by Winnie.”52 In addition, Conrad draws parallels between Winnie and the anarchists in the “Author’s Note” he added in 1920. While he calls Winnie’s death anarchistic, he denies that his narrative is an outrage: But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc’s story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind. (8)

Conrad considers Winnie’s end “anarchistic” because of its “desolation, madness and despair.” These are also the terms used in the newspaper account of her death: “An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair” (228). Ossipon thinks of Winnie’s death in these terms, and the Professor seizes on them as the key to revolutionary action: “Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I’ll move the world” (230). The final paragraph of the novel reiterates the Professor’s belief: “He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world” (231). The popular idea of the terrorist as fanatic encompasses madness and despair, and Winnie embodies these qualities at the end of the novel, when she knows that Ossipon will not return. But at the moment she murders Verloc, she is neither mad nor despondent. She is free for the first time in her life. She descends into madness and despair as she faces the social consequences of her protest. While the Professor stands at the extreme of absolute autonomy, Stevie occupies the opposite extreme. He neither has nor wants autonomy. He is unusually sensitive to the pain of others, both human and animal. The anarchists’ rhetoric about the cruelty of the powerful disturbs him because he takes it literally. As Winnie says, “He isn’t fit to hear what’s said here. He believes it’s all true. He knows no better” (50). He is “a moral creature,” who is “at the mercy of his righteous passions” (132). Stevie feels the pain of the dispossessed and pronounces the judgment, “Bad world for poor people” (132). Some critics claim that Conrad mocks this conviction by putting it into Stevie’s words,53 but Winnie endorses his perception of injustice: “Guiltless of all irony, she answered… ‘Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have’” (133). Her view

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is cynical but explicitly not ironic. Although The Secret Agent has been called “one of modernism’s great novels of political reaction,”54 Stevie’s sincere protest of unjust social conditions is strong evidence to the contrary. The novel’s examination of agency and autonomy has not gone unnoticed. In “The Poverty of Agency in Conrad’s The Secret Agent” Benjamin Lewis Robinson reads the novel as an expression of “a profound anxiety about the locus and scope of agency” in London in the early 1900s, “where action seems to have lost both its power and potential.”55 The possibility of significant action shifted from individual agents to institutional agencies.56 In Russia Mikhail Bakunin expected the “desperate poor” to be “agents of the revolutionary cause” because of their “negative passion.”57 Conrad, in contrast, dispels both “anarchist hopes and establishment anxieties” by showing that “lethargy and lack of passion” predominate among the poor.58 Robinson emphasizes the anarchists’ inertia, though they regard their opposition to the status quo as an expression of their agency. They feel more autonomous as dissidents and agitators than they would as compliant workers. While it is clear that agency and anarchism are central themes, their meaning is debated. In “Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Ruth Kolani works out a relationship between agency and anarchy based on Kant’s claim that responsibility is essential to freedom. She observes that some “critics have maintained that the author’s portrayal of the anarchists does not do historical justice to the anarchist movement,” yet others “have insisted that The Secret Agent is not about anarchism per se and that its anarchists are indeed not to be taken too seriously.”59 Disagreeing with both views, she argues that Conrad expresses the contemporary consensus: “To be sure, Conrad, like most of his critics, adopts the view accepted in popular usage that anarchy—whether political, philosophical, moral or social—is synonymous with disorder, chaos, violence, and nihilism…”60 Since such chaos obviates individual responsibility, she claims that anarchists lack agency. Agency, she contends, requires accountability: “As a moral-philosophical concept, agency—the capacity to act and to exert power and control— implies accountability on the part of the human agent.”61 She finds this conception of agency in most of Conrad’s fiction but not here: “Moral agency and personal responsibility are central to all of Conrad’s major novels. But The Secret Agent focuses particularly on the evasion of agency.”62 Citing Conrad’s comment on Winnie’s “anarchistic end of

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utter desolation, madness and despair” in his “Author’s Note,”63 Kolani names Winnie the true anarchist in the novel: “The murder committed by Mrs. Verloc constitutes a focal link in the chain of ‘anarchic’ occurrences in the novel, marked rhetorically by a dissociation of the doer from the deed.”64 Kolani claims that Winnie is an anarchist rather than a truly free agent because she does not accept responsibility for murdering Verloc: “The sense of autonomous freedom from all external constraints which characterizes Winnie’s deranged state violates Kant’s notion that freedom implies that the individual must take responsibility for his actions. In this sense Winnie Verloc is not free until she recognizes herself as murderer.”65 Kolani distinguishes Winnie’s anarchic freedom from Kantian freedom; Winnie’s sense of freedom is a delusion because she does not accept responsibility for murdering Verloc. Kolani combines the popular view of anarchists as mad and desperate with Kant’s idea that responsibility is essential to freedom. As a result, she concludes that Winnie is an anarchist but is not free. My view of anarchism as an expression of agency rather than an evasion of it leads to a different interpretation of Winnie. The narrator emphasizes that Winnie’s autonomy begins when her responsibility to Stevie and Verloc ends. She feels free the moment she discovers that Verloc has caused Stevie’s death. Murdering her husband, the narrator tells us, she becomes “a free woman with a perfection of freedom” (198). Her agency is complete, but her freedom is short-lived. The murder drags her into the social world of crime and punishment. Although Kolani argues that Winnie will not be free until “she recognizes herself as murderer,” as soon as she recognizes herself as a murderer she succumbs to Ossipon’s control. Alone and penniless on the boat to France, she imagines herself being hanged and descends into “desolation, madness and despair.” These feelings are not present when she exults in anarchic freedom.

Anarchists and Police If profiling can’t prevent terrorism, what can? In addition to correcting misconceptions about anarchists, what can The Secret Agent teach us about the police? Some critics might say nothing, but the novel has a lot to say about counterterrorism. The Professor tells Ossipon, “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality— counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical” (58). The Professor may not be a reliable source, but events in the novel

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support his claim. Terrorists and the police are entangled politically and psychologically, and both groups break laws to achieve their aims. Experts in Terrorism Studies recommend surveillance and infiltration to stop terrorism, and the novel illustrates both strategies. As Rex A. Hudson reports, social science research indicates that it is easier to predict a group’s behavior than an individual’s: “Although it may not be possible to isolate a so-called terrorist personality, each terrorist group has its own distinctive mindset.”66 Chief Inspector Heat would agree. He does not attempt to understand anarchists: “The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow creature by Chief Inspector Heat. He was impossible— a mad dog to be left alone” (96). In Heat’s estimation, the Professor is simply a “Lunatic” (78). Nevertheless, Heat keeps track of the anarchists’ movements. He knows that surveillance is imperfect, because terrorists are unpredictable and uncontrollable: “A given anarchist may be watched inch by inch and minute by minute, but a moment always comes when somehow all sight and touch of him are lost for a few hours, during which something (generally an explosion) more or less deplorable does happen” (69). Although Heat has developed good contacts, he does not have enough information to take action against anyone. He knows that the Professor supplies explosives but cannot anticipate his actions, discover his clients, or understand his motives. Surveillance and infiltration do not prevent the Greenwich attack, but they help the police discover the perpetrators. Chief Inspector Heat and his superior, the Assistant Commissioner, quickly discover that Verloc planned the bombing, but they conceal their investigations from each other. They have distinct personal agendas and incompatible views of terrorism. Heat is lucky enough to recover a fragment of Stevie’s coat after the explosion, causing him to reflect on chance and agency: “And after the manner of the average man, whose ambition is to command events, he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and accidental success—just because it seemed forced upon him” (73). The label on the coat leads him to Verloc. Since Verloc is one of his agents, Heat tries to steer the investigation elsewhere: “He hoped Mr Verloc’s talk would be of a nature to incriminate Michaelis. It was a conscientiously professional hope in the main, but not without its moral value” (153). He tells Verloc to flee because he fears that Verloc’s confession would reveal too much about his own methods: The turn this affair was taking meant the disclosure of many things—the laying waste of fields of knowledge, which, cultivated by a capable man, had

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a distinct value for the individual and for the society…It would leave Michaelis unscathed; it would drag to light the Professor’s home industry; disorganise the whole system of supervision; make no end of a row in the papers…(159)

When Heat discovers that the Assistant Commissioner has already interviewed Verloc, he is indignant: “The case is not followed properly, it’s being tampered with, he thought bitterly” (154). He appeals to the department’s rules of investigation, though he violates them for his own purposes. Like the anarchists, Heat finds justifications for his transgressive methods. He is eager to arrest someone for the bombing, but not at the cost of his career. In contrast to Chief Inspector Heat, the Assistant Commissioner wants to know who ordered the bombing rather than who carried it out. The Assistant Commissioner rejects the common assumption that the bombing is an “individual freak of fanaticism”; he sees that it must be a “planned thing” (109). He is aware that Heat receives information from Verloc (108), but he detects something worse than the Greenwich explosion. The Assistant Commissioner looks beyond the particular incident to its source, and he suspects a foreign instigator. The danger of an agent like Verloc in the pay of foreign governments is that he is not guided by principles: “He’s without as much faith as is necessary for complete negation, and without that much law as is implied in lawlessness” (109). The Assistant Commissioner contrasts his own search for the instigator with Heat’s focus on the perpetrators: For him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some slight indications he has picked up in the course of his investigation on the spot; whereas I, he would say, am bent upon vindicating their innocence. (110)

Just as Heat has reasons to protect Verloc, the Assistant Commissioner has a personal stake in the outcome of the investigation. He wants to shield Michaelis because his wife is a friend of Michaelis’s patroness. The Assistant Commissioner eagerly assures Sir Ethelred that the bomber has been found, that Vladimir is responsible for the attack, and that Michaelis is not involved (165). As the Assistant Commissioner tells Toodles, Sir Ethelred’s private secretary, “But a sprat is also thrown away sometimes in order to catch a whale” (163). Verloc is his sprat.

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The Assistant Commissioner demonstrates successful methods of counterterrorism. He rejects common assumptions about anarchists. He realizes that they are blamed for attacks they do not commit: “any given act of violence—damaging property or destroying life—is not the work of anarchism at all, but of something else altogether—some species of authorised scoundrelism” (109). He knows that foreign governments pay informers to infiltrate anarchist groups. Since money rather than conviction motivates spies, they cannot be trusted: they do “‘away with all certitude’” (109). Meeting Vladimir at the patroness’s party, the Assistant Commissioner gloats in triumph as he recites the ways Vladimir’s plans failed: “the foreign governments cannot complain of the inefficiency of our police. Look at this outrage; a case specially difficult to trace inasmuch as it was a sham. In less than twelve hours we have established the identity of a man literally blown to shreds, have found the organiser of the attempt, and have had a glimpse of the inciter behind him” (172). He ominously adds, “All that’s wanted now is to do away with the agent provocateur to make everything safe” (172). Knowing his plan has been discovered, Vladimir abruptly departs (172). Paying informers and ignoring stereotypes, the police discover who was responsible for the bombing. The similarities between the anarchists and the police in the novel have caused at least one critic to argue that Conrad considered governments more dangerous than anarchists. Michael C. Frank builds his argument on a comment in Conrad’s “Author’s Note” about the memoir of Sir Robert Anderson, who was Assistant Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard at the time of the Greenwich bombing.67 Anderson compared “the secrecy of terrorist plots on the one hand and the secrecy of police practices designed to detect and thwart these plots on the other.”68 Convinced that ‘“ordinary law’ and ‘ordinary methods’ are ineffective against terrorist conspiracies,”69 Anderson thought that the police should be allowed to use extraordinary methods. Frank distrusts this policy: “When the alleged protectors of the social order begin to operate clandestinely, deliberately pushing the limits of legality, then their actions have more damaging consequences than any dynamite explosion.”70 Frank points out that the explosion in the novel would not have occurred without “state-sponsored espionage and incitement to violence in the name of counterterrorism as well as a system of secret policing in which an endemic lack of transparency first allows the bombing to happen and then hampers the investigation.”71 In Frank’s view, the novel speaks to the post-9/11 war on terror primarily because of its “critique of

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counterterrorist practices.”72 He urges readers to pay attention to Conrad’s indictment of covert policing: As I will demonstrate, The Secret Agent is a response to the emergence of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch as much as it is a response to the Greenwich Bomb Outrage and its surrounding media discourse.73

The Professor’s dynamite and Verloc’s duplicity are not the only causes of the explosion. Frank endorses the Assistant Commissioner’s opinion that Scotland Yard should make the “suppression of the secret agent” part of its “departmental duties,”74 but he does not go so far as to blame the police for the bombing. He merely argues that Vladimir’s plan could not have worked “without the endemic secrecy within…the Special Crimes division.”75 Frank observes: “The Assistant Commissioner’s diatribe against political spies is one of the few passages in Conrad’s novel in which the author suspends his otherwise pervasive irony.”76 Frank hears no irony in this passage, perhaps because he agrees with it, and he assumes that Conrad also agrees with the Assistant Commissioner. If Conrad is not always ironic, he is consistently dialectical. He pits the Assistant Commissioner’s opposition to secret agents against Chief Inspector Heat’s success in developing a network of informers. Frank, however, aligns himself with the Assistant Commissioner: “Within the fictional universe of The Secret Agent, there is no question that the Assistant Commissioner is right in his opinion. Secret agents pretending to be anarchists are indeed more dangerous than actual anarchists,”77 a position taken by many in Critical Terrorism Studies. Research in orthodox Terrorism Studies, however, would not support the Assistant Commissioner’s view that informers are useless. Thanks to Inspector Heat’s network of informers, the police know about the Professor and Verloc’s circle. Heat is confident that the anarchists are not planning an outrage, but he does not know that Verloc is also working for Vladimir. Heat’s relationship with Verloc fails to prevent the bombing but helps him trace the label on Stevie’s coat to Verloc. In addition to similar methods, the police and anarchists in the novel have similar motives. Although the police are expected to act on behalf of the community, they use their institutional authority to enhance their personal autonomy. The Professor claims that only he has ‘“the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone’” (58), but both Chief Inspector Heat

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and the Assistant Commissioner also work alone. They are supposed to cooperate, but each prefers to operate independently and secretly. They relish “that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves” (96). Although the police try to preserve the status quo that anarchists try to destroy and their aims and justifications differ, terrorists and police alike ignore laws that limit individual agency. The novel corrects the public’s misconceptions by dramatizing the findings of social science research. Conrad reminds us that terrorists come from all backgrounds, warning us against profiling and stereotyping. He shows that anarchists have personal and political reasons for joining terrorist cells and that not all are willing to commit violent acts. Each character occupies a position on a continuum from autonomy to affiliation, the desires Conrad considers fundamental in human nature. The novel describes how ordinary people motivated by common desires can do terrible things. The narrative takes us through the small decisions that lead Verloc to bomb Greenwich Observatory and Winnie to kill her husband. Each step toward the catastrophe is understandable, the result of common desires rather than fanaticism.

Notes 1. Michael C. Frank, “Plots on London: Terrorism in Turn-of-the-Century British Fiction,” in Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael C.  Frank and Eva Gruber (Amsterdam and New  York: Rodopi, 2012), 50. 2. Judith Shulevitz, “Chasing After Conrad’s Secret Agent,” Slate Culturebox, September 27, 2001, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/09/chasing_after_conrads_secret_agent.html 3. FBI agents pursuing the Unabomber believed that he had been influenced by Conrad’s novel. They found that Theodore J.  Kaczynski “loved Conrad’s works well enough to read them about a dozen times” and “may have drawn upon the 1907 novel.” See Serge F. Kovaleski, “1907 Conrad Novel May Have Inspired Unabomb Suspect,” The Washington Post, July 9, 1996 (accessed May 13, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/ archive/politics/1996/07/09/1907-­conrad-­novel-­may-­have-­inspired-­ unabomb-­suspect/6593b4cc-­7d6e-­4c27-­9181-­2fc0315f989b/.

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4. Bruce Harkness and S.W. Reid, eds., “Introduction,” The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xxiii and xxxii. 5. Ibid., xl–xli. 6. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 3, ed. Frederick R.  Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 371. 7. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. Subsequent references to the edited text are in parentheses. 8. Ibid., 8. 9. Harkness and Reid, “Introduction,” xxviii. 10. Harkness and Reid, “Introduction,” xxxviii. 11. Ibid., xl. 12. Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 74. 13. Ibid., 75. 14. Martha Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 77. 15. Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel, “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001,” Poetics Today 29, no. 3 (2008): 418. 16. Ibid., 405. 17. Ibid., 401. 18. Peter C. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist,” Modern Philology 112, no. 4 (2015): 693. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 695. 21. Ibid., 698. 22. David Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 105. 23. Ibid., 104. 24. Francis Blessington, “Politics and the Terrorist Novel,” Sewanee Review 116, no. 1 (2008):117. 25. Martha Crenshaw, “The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century,” Political Psychology 21, no. 2 (2000): 409. The work of Crenshaw and Hudson presented in this paragraph is also discussed in Chap. 1. 26. Rex. A. Hudson, The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, 1999), 37. 27. Harkness and Reid, The Secret Agent, 418 n. 41.11. 28. David Mulry, Among the Anarchists, 107. 29. Ibid.

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30. James F. English, “Anarchy in the Flesh: Conrad’s ‘Counterrevolutionary’ Modernism and the Witz of the Political Unconscious,” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (1992): 626. 31. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018), 165. 32. David Mulry. Among the Anarchists, 48. 33. Ibid., 69 n. 34. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Ibid., 87. 36. Ibid., 88. 37. Ibid., 105. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 108. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. Ibid., 110. 42. Ibid., 111. 43. Ibid., 106. 44. Harkness and Reid suggest that Verloc’s shop resembles London’s Autonomie Club as a place where anarchists debated and plotted. The oxymoron embedded in the name of this organization also joins individual agency and communal endeavor. “Introduction,” xxix. 45. Michael C.  Frank, “Terrorism for the Sake of Counterterrorism: Undercover Policing and the Specter of the Agent Provocateur in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 46, no. 3 (2014): 171 and 170. 46. Ibid., 154. 47. Ibid., 170. 48. Max Abrahms, “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy,” International Security 32, no. 4 (2008): 94 and 97. 49. David Mulry. Among the Anarchists, 111. 50. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 86–69. 51. Harkness and Reid dilute this point when they suggest that “the problems of the Verlocs are mirrored in, if not the cause of, the general inability of nations to understand each other.” “Introduction,” xl. 52. Mulry, Among the Anarchists, 116. 53. Benjamin Lewis Robinson, “The Poverty of Agency in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 46, no. 3 (2014): 207. Robinson claims that “this sentence can be no more than a sentimental phrase in the pejorative sense: a truism demeaning to the truth it expresses.” 54. James F. English, “Anarchy in the Flesh,” 628. 55. Robinson, “The Poverty of Agency,” 197–98.

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56. Ibid., 195. 57. Ibid., 202. 58. Ibid. 59. Ruth Kolani, “Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” in The Ethics in Literature, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), 86. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 87. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 93. 64. Ibid., 92. 65. Ibid., 96. 66. Hudson, Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, 64. 67. Frank, “Counterterrorism,” 167. 68. Ibid., 168. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 152. 71. Ibid., 154. 72. Ibid., 174. 73. Ibid., 154. 74. Ibid., 169. 75. Ibid., 173. 76. Ibid., 170. 77. Ibid.

Bibliography Abrahms, Max. 2008. What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy. International Security 32 (4): 78–105. Appelbaum, Robert, and Alexis Paknadel. 2008. Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001. Poetics Today 29 (3): 387–436. Blessington, Francis. 2008. Politics and the Terrorist Novel. Sewanee Review 116 (1): 116–124. Conrad, Joseph. 1988. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 3. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. Edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crenshaw, Martha. 2000. The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century. Political Psychology 21 (2): 405–420. ———. 2011. Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences. Oxford: Routledge.

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English, James F. 1992. Anarchy in the Flesh: Conrad’s ‘Counterrevolutionary’ Modernism and the Witz of the Political Unconscious. Modern Fiction Studies 38 (3): 615–630. Frank, Michael C. 2012. Plots on London: Terrorism in Turn-of-the-Century British Fiction. In Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber, 41–65. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. ———. 2014. Terrorism for the Sake of Counterterrorism: Undercover Policing and the Specter of the Agent Provocateur in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Conradiana 46 (3): 151–177. Harkness, Bruce, and S. W. Reid, Eds. 1990. Introduction. The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, xxiii–xli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, Peter C. 2015. Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist. Modern Philology 112 (4): 691–712. Hudson, Rex A. 1999. The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division. Kolani, Ruth. 1999. Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. In The Ethics in Literature, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods, 86–100. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Kovaleski, Serge F. 1996. 1907 Conrad Novel May Have Inspired Unabomb Suspect. The Washington Post, July 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ archive/politics/1996/07/09/1907-­c onrad-­n ovel-­m ay-­h ave-­i nspired-­ unabomb-­suspect/6593b4cc-­7d6e-­4c27-­9181-­2fc0315f989b/. Laqueur, Walter. 1977. Terrorism. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Melchiori, Barbara Arnett. 1985. Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel. London: Croom Helm. Mulry, David. 2016. Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, Benjamin Lewis. 2014. The Poverty of Agency in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Conradiana 46 (3): 195–216. Shulevitz, Judith. 2001. Chasing After Conrad’s Secret Agent. Slate Culturebox, September 27, 3:00 AM. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/09/chasing_after_conrads_secret_agent.html.

CHAPTER 4

Under Western Eyes: Revolutionists and Informers

Like The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes seems so prescient that journalists have turned to it to understand terrorists today. For example, in the New York Times Book Review of September 11, 2005, Tom Reiss called Under Western Eyes “the true classic of terrorism.” It was written “during the first great terrorist wave of modern times,” and “it puts us into the psychic world of the terrorists, a place where violent action is the ultimate proof of sincerity, it is dazzling, unique. We see the cult of the suicide bomber in the mystic terrorists of 100 years ago.”1 Nevertheless, literary critics and historians usually deny that there is any useful information about terrorism in the novel. Although they search for Conrad’s political beliefs, they discount Conrad’s political knowledge. This tendency to separate literary meaning from practical information needlessly reduces the novel’s current significance. In Terrorism the historian Walter Laqueur illustrates how Under Western Eyes has been relegated to strictly literary importance. He reads the novel as a story of betrayal rather than terrorism, claiming that Conrad has nothing to tell us about political violence because he is interested in characters’ personal motives.2 Laqueur argues: “The behavior of the terrorists reflects the moral and emotional reactions of the Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness.”3 Yet Conrad connects individuals’ moral and emotional reactions to the social and political factors that lead them to terrorism. As he explains in his 1905 essay “Autocracy and War,” “the psychology of individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1_4

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the general effect of the fears and hopes of the time.”4 In fact, Laqueur makes the same point in a discussion of The Secret Agent: Everyone is impelled by considerations transcending the self as well as by motives of a personal character. Fiction cannot offer a master key to the soul of the terrorist; the most one can hope for is to detect certain common patterns in the character and mental make-up of the dramatis personae who acted as a group at a certain time and place.5

The “most one can hope for” is not insignificant, and the “common patterns” in the novel are not only situated in a specific time and place, but they are consistent with social science research in Terrorism Studies. Critics’ responses to the novel also reflect a specific time and place— their own. When tsarist Russia was the arch enemy of Western liberalism, Haldin seemed heroic. If we read the novel with recent terrorist attacks in mind, however, we may be less sympathetic to the revolutionists than earlier critics were. Haldin, who kills a government minister as well as innocent bystanders, was praised because he fights an autocratic regime, but Razumov, who leads the police to the terrorist, was condemned because he betrays a fellow student. Razumov knows that he will be implicated in the assassination merely because Haldin, a casual acquaintance, hides in his rooms. Today Haldin would be condemned as a terrorist, and Razumov would be honored as a responsible citizen. Both readings are possible because the novel portrays the similarities as well as the differences between Haldin and Razumov and between revolutionists and police. As Andrzei Busza points out, Razumov is caught between “the lawless state and its obverse: the lawless revolution.”6 The methods of both are brutal, and both abrogate the individual’s autonomy in the name of a greater cause.

Terrorism Studies and Profiling In light of research in Terrorism Studies, Under Western Eyes merits Reiss’s accolade. Like contemporary experts, Conrad shows that it is impossible to construct a psychological profile of terrorists because they are different from each other and—until they decide to use violence—no different from everyone else.7 Conrad depicts terrorists and government agents as counterparts, similar in their ruthless quest for power despite their antithetical ideologies. The Russian police try to prevent terrorism by using surveillance and informers, methods that recent research in Terrorism Studies

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endorses. The consensus among social scientists is that the best way to prevent terrorism is to study the specific mindset of each terrorist group and learn its immediate plans. Under Western Eyes reinforces these findings by examining revolutionary violence in nineteenth-century Russia, where terrorism as we know it was theorized. Conrad describes the social forces and ideologies that motivate each character, calling attention to the similarities between the bomber and the informer. Both Haldin and Razumov are students who oppose the autocratic regime, though Haldin works for revolution while Razumov advocates gradual reform. Haldin risks his life for his cause, but his decision to throw a bomb at a government minister’s carriage is also the act of an autonomous individual who expects to be remembered for his courage. Razumov protects his prospects for a career, but he is also a patriot. As Alex Houen notes, “Just as Razumov wishes to become, above all, a representative of the nation, so Haldin talks of his soul as working on behalf of Russia itself.”8 These similarities make it hard to wholly condemn or defend either character. The revolutionists are too diverse to profile. Each character has distinct reasons for his or her decision to join or oppose a particular faction. Their political “mindset” brings them together but does not eliminate their differences, nor do their individual personalities predict their behavior. Haldin is adored by his mother and sister and admired by fellow students. Razumov is the illegitimate son of an aristocratic father and depends on his academic ability to win a place in society. He hopes that writing a prize essay will lead to “an administrative appointment of the better sort.”9 Since Razumov is friendless whereas Haldin is secure, we might expect Razumov to be the terrorist. Nevertheless, it is the more fortunate man who decides to assassinate a government minister. The novel deserves to be considered a “classic of terrorism” because it replaces popular stereotypes with individualized characters in the specific historical conditions that led to violence in Russia.

The Critical Consensus Much of the critical tradition, however, has ignored the ways Haldin and Razumov are similar. Since the novel appeared, most critics have regarded the two students as antithetical figures, admiring Haldin and despising Razumov. Although Haldin is the bomber, he is idealized as a self-­ sacrificing patriot. Razumov helps the police, yet he is disparaged as an

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informer. An unsigned review in the Pall Mall Gazette of October 11, 1911, titled “Betrayal” set the tone: “We are revolted by Razumoff’s betrayal of his fellow-student (though Haldin’s crime merited the swift and degrading execution that was its punishment), for Haldin had sought refuge in Razumoff’s rooms and had confessed to his crime under the conviction that his host was, like himself, a Nihilist.”10 In The English Review Ford Madox Hueffer described Haldin as the man Razumov “betrayed to death.”11 A mid-century article by Robert F.  Haugh on “Joseph Conrad and Revolution” depicted Razumov as “an archconservative young student in St. Petersburg, who betrays a fellow-student hiding in Razumov’s room after the successful assassination of a Czarist official.”12 Contrasting the two students, Frederick R. Karl declared, “Thus Razumov is even more than usually interested in self, while Haldin, on the contrary, has just committed his most selfless act for the revolutionary cause.”13 These claims reflect the political sympathies of the critics. Abhorrence of Russia is evident in the widespread opinion that Haldin’s act is warranted by the evils of autocracy, evils that Conrad himself lambastes in “Autocracy and War.” Believing the revolutionary cause is just, critics praise Haldin’s self-sacrifice and condemn Razumov’s selfishness. When terrorism is used by factions one opposes, however, it is condemned. The rise of terrorism has made Haldin’s act harder to defend. By today’s standards, Razumov is a model citizen. He complies with the mandate, “If you see something, say something.” John Hagan is a welcome voice of dissent from what he calls the “orthodox” view that the “betrayal itself was prompted by Razumov’s culpable egoism and selfishness.”14 Notwithstanding the impressive list of critics who take this position, including Thomas Moser, Albert J. Guerard, Leo Gurko, Ted E. Boyle, and Frederick R. Karl,15 Hagan argues, “Razumov loathes the situation which the betrayal has placed him in, but he never expresses any doubt about the necessity of that betrayal.”16 Razumov hesitates before leading the police to Haldin, but he sees no alternative. Citing the “Author’s Note” of 1920 in which Conrad describes Razumov as “an ordinary young man, with a healthy capacity for work and sane ambitions,” Hagan claims that Razumov’s “concern for his personal future is not to be regarded as mere vanity, selfishness, or cold egotism.”17 As Razumov knows, “To keep out of the fray—to avoid the extremism of either reaction or revolution—is the only course by which he can see his way clear to a future of any distinction, not to mention mere survival.”18 Hagan accepts Razumov’s reasons for denying that he betrayed Haldin

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and attributes Razumov’s downfall to the crime he almost committed— deceiving Haldin’s sister in revenge for Haldin’s destruction of his future career.19 Razumov’s moral dilemma is not whether or not to turn Haldin in but whether or not to let Natalia and the other expatriates in Geneva continue to believe that he helped Haldin.

Reading Under Western Eyes Today Hagan’s 1969 defense of Razumov may be more acceptable now that terrorism is so widely feared. Instead of sympathizing with Haldin, readers may hear echoes of recent terrorists’ rationales in his justification of his violent act. As the political scientist Martha Crenshaw points out, “Terrorists usually show acute concern for morality, especially for sexual purity, and believe that they act in terms of a higher good. Justifications usually focus on past suffering, on the glorious future to be created, and on the regime’s illegitimacy and violence, to which terrorism is the only available response.”20 Similarly, Haldin tells Razumov that the assassination of a government minister was a personal sacrifice for the sake of his country: “You suppose that I am a terrorist, now—a destructor of what is. But consider that the true destructors are they who destroy the spirit of progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of persecutors of human dignity. Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you” (23). In addition, Haldin affirms the purity of his intentions. He claims the virtues of “self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction, of faith—the labours of the soul” (24). He calls on a mystic patriotism to redeem him for having killed bystanders who were near the minister’s carriage: “The Russian soul that lives in all of us. It has a future. It has a mission, I tell you, or else why should I have been moved to do this—reckless—like a butcher—in the middle of all these innocent people—scattering death—I! I!… I wouldn’t hurt a fly!” (25). Haldin claims that his violence is principled, necessary, and beneficial to the Russian nation. At the same time, Haldin takes pride in his act. When he explains why it is important for him to escape, egotism replaces altruism: “Men like me are rare. And besides, an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator vanishes without a trace. They sit in their offices and palaces and quake” (23). As he demonstrates, terrorists killing and dying for their beliefs claim to act on behalf of a community and a cause, yet they are also proud of their individual agency.21 Razumov notices the same

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quality in the revolutionists in Geneva: “All revolt is the expression of strong individualism—ran his thought vaguely. One can tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings” (203). Using violence to benefit their community and risking their lives to attain fame and respect, terrorists combine altruism and egotism.22 Razumov also seeks agency and affiliation. He has absorbed the familiar ideology of meritocracy that one can achieve success through hard work. He is “a young man depending entirely upon the development of his natural abilities for his place in the world” (27). Razumov avoids political activism because “his main concern was with his work, his studies, and with his own future” (16). Assessing his opportunities, he hopes that academic distinction will lead to a career in the government bureaucracy. At the same time, individual achievement will allow him to become part of a community. Although he does not belong to a domestic or political circle, he too identifies with the Russian nation. Like Haldin, Razumov believes that he acts for the good of his country: “He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of liberalism—rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian truth. ‘That’s patriotism,’ he observed mentally…” (35). He deplores the injustice of the autocratic regime, but he favors “Evolution not Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption” (57). Haldin shatters these aspirations. As soon as Razumov discovers Haldin hiding in his rooms, he thinks: “There goes my silver medal!” (20). He realizes that he could be imprisoned on mere suspicion of being associated with the assassin: “The police would very soon find out all about him. They would set about discovering a conspiracy. Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in the greatest danger” (23). The police proceed the same way today. Razumov “saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life broken, ruined and robbed of all hope” (24). Through no choice of his own, Razumov is implicated in Haldin’s crime: “‘I am now a suspect,’ he thought again” (61). He blames Haldin for destroying his only chance at a secure life: “Am I to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a better lot be robbed of the only thing it has to go upon at the will of violent enthusiasts? You come from your province but all this land is mine—or I have nothing” (54). Haldin blocks his path to a career and a community. Hopes dashed, Razumov disintegrates: “He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away from him one by one” (65). Feeling trapped and alone, Razumov is overcome by “rage and fear” (64).

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Despite his anger, however, Razumov feels a moral obligation to Haldin as a desperate man in great need of assistance.23 Weighing Haldin’s need against his own convictions, Razumov is “in conflict with himself” (33). He knows that Haldin is guilty: “‘For it is a crime,’ he was saying to himself. ‘A murder is a murder’” (28). Yet he feels dishonorable for betraying Haldin’s personal trust. He considers his options: “I would save him if I could—but no one can do that—he is the withered member that must be cut off” (35). Imagining Haldin’s accusations, Razumov defends himself: What is a betrayal? They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction am I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him? On the contrary—every obligation of true courage is the other way. (36)

Just as Haldin feels guilty for the deaths of innocent people, Razumov wrestles with his conscience for helping the police find Haldin. To save Haldin, Razumov would not only have to endanger himself but would also have to violate his own beliefs. Torn between approval of Haldin’s cause and disapproval of Haldin’s violence, resenting Haldin’s intrusion and heeding Haldin’s plea for help, Razumov becomes erratic. Razumov fears arrest if he does not turn Haldin in, yet he dreads being responsible for someone’s death. At first, he agrees to help Haldin escape, but the plan fails.24 Razumov is so distraught that he hallucinates a vision of Haldin’s body lying in the snow. Only then does he decide to lead the police to Haldin. Knowing that he will be considered a suspect, Razumov asks his father Prince K to accompany him to the police. The nobleman gives Razumov his full approval: “Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action” (43). Voiced by an aristocrat, this judgment may seem self-­ serving, but it is consistent with the counterterrorism principles of our own time. Everyone is expected to report suspicious persons, activities, and objects. The families of terrorists are routinely interrogated.25 Despite Prince K’s efforts to protect his son from the repercussions of an involuntary encounter with the assassin, the police exploit Razumov’s vulnerability. Councillor of State Mikulin maneuvers Razumov into spying on expatriates in Geneva. Razumov is loath to cooperate. He wants to “retire,” but Mikulin poses the unanswerable question: “Where to?” (82). Both the state and its opponents seize control of Razumov’s life.

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Conrad repeatedly attributes Razumov’s frantic behavior to his loss of agency rather than feelings of guilt or remorse. As a dispossessed youth in an autocratic country, he has tried to achieve a measure of autonomy through academic achievement, and now he asks himself “if it were worthwhile to go on accomplishing the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own” (66). Events beyond his control are to blame: “Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of his hands by Haldin’s revolutionary tyranny” (69). Autocracy and revolution are both tyrannical, and Razumov feels helpless: “He lost all hope of saving his future which depended on the free use of his intelligence” (70). His efforts seem futile: “three years of good work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardised—turned from hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break through” (70). Today it may be easier to sympathize with Razumov’s dilemma than with Haldin’s martyrdom. As Razumov’s plans collapse, he falls apart: “His strung up individuality had gone to pieces within him very suddenly” (72). When his agency is thwarted, he has no self: “The true Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future—in that future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy—for autocracy knows no law—and the lawlessness of revolution” (66). Deprived of his hopes for autonomy, he spirals out of control, and the rest of the novel deals with his disintegration. Losing his identity, he assumes the persona of Haldin’s accomplice that the expatriates project onto him.26 His successful transition from being the informer to playing the terrorist illustrates how deceit makes psychological and sociological profiles useless. While most discussions of the novel’s moral issues focus on the moment when Razumov becomes an informer, the climax of the novel, as Hagan argues, is his later decision to reveal his role in Haldin’s capture to the expatriates. They lionize Razumov as Haldin’s accomplice, and Haldin’s sister Natalia falls in love with him. By the time Razumov confesses, he is no longer in danger of the revolutionists discovering that he is a government spy. It is their trust that makes his duplicity unbearable. Unwilling to continue dissembling before the state, before the revolutionists, and before Natalia, he confesses his role in Haldin’s capture first to Natalia, whom he loves, and then to the others, whom he despises.27 He tells her that he has renounced his plan to seek revenge:

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Listen—now comes the true confession. The other was nothing. To save me, your trustful eyes had to entice my thought to the very edge of the blackest treachery. I could see them constantly looking at me with the confidence of your pure heart which had not been touched by evil things. Victor Haldin had stolen the truth of my life from me who had nothing else in the world. He boasted of living on through you on this earth where I had no place to lay my head on. She will marry some day, he had said. And do you know what I said to myself? I shall steal his sister’s soul from her. (272)

With full knowledge that he will be punished by both the expatriates and the government, he refuses to occupy a false position any longer. This is a moral decision that allows Razumov to regain autonomy. His confession unexpectedly wins him a place in the community as well. Some of the expatriates whom he has deceived come to respect him. Sophia Antonovna extolls him at length: There are evil moments in every life… Well, call it what you like; but tell me how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition as he himself says in that book, rather than go on living secretly debased in their own eyes? How many? And please mark this—he was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe, and more—infinitely more— when the possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil-work of his hate and pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him. There’s character in such a discovery. (287)

If Sophia Antonovna can exonerate Razumov, can we? Irving Howe could not. He was unforgiving, accusing Conrad of portraying the revolutionists as caricatures of political commitment who are unworthy of Razumov’s confession: “if indeed [the revolutionists] are as contemptible as he supposes he can hardly believe them the proper agents of either Haldin’s heritage or revenge.”28 Certainly, Peter Ivanovitch, the great “revolutionary feminist” (106), is the object of the language teacher’s scorn. Ivanovitch is Conrad’s composite revolutionary leader, resembling Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others.29 Ivanovitch himself commits no violence, but he incites others to act. The language teacher satirizes Ivanovitch’s sensational story of his escape from Siberia (98) and mocks him for exploiting women while mouthing feminist slogans, taking money from Mme de S—and labor from Tekla. Writing at the height of Cold War fear of communism, Howe objected to this tone. He argued that there was

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“a serious failure in judgment; an equation of rulers and ruled, both of whom Conrad finds to be stained by ‘the cynicism of oppression and revolt.’ To assimilate the behavior of a Haldin to the behavior of a Czarist functionary is to indulge the middle-class smugness which afflicts Conrad whenever he decides to place his drama under western eyes.”30 Conrad, however, does not equate rulers and ruled. Although he demonstrates that members of both groups seek autonomy and community, he differentiates their political positions. Razumov explicitly acknowledges the justice of Haldin’s cause: In giving Victor Haldin up, it was myself after all whom I have betrayed most basely… After all it is they and not I who have the right on their side. Theirs is the strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don’t be deceived, Natalia Victorovna. I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave? No! I am independent—and therefore perdition is my lot. (274)

Razumov disparages and disavows the regime he spies for, but he adamantly refuses to join Haldin’s party. He sees that working for the government was wrong, but he still opposes revolution. He is alone but independent. Although Howe criticized Conrad for his inability to respect the revolutionists, the novel ends with Sophia Antonovna’s sincere praise for the previously ridiculed revolutionary feminist: “Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man” (289). Both satirized and admired, Ivanovitch exemplifies Conrad’s aesthetic of irreconcilable antagonisms. In 1901 he wrote, “The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous—so full of hope.”31 Tekla regards Ivanovitch as a colossal contradiction: “Peter Ivannovitch is the greatest genius of the century perhaps but he is the most inconsiderate man living” (117). Addison Bross suggests that some of Ivanovitch’s contradictory qualities are based on Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski. He devoted his life to Polish independence, but Bross considers him more reactionary than radical.32 Citing an untranslated portion of Korzeniowski’s article “Poland and Muscovy,” Bross argues: Given his obsession with the mystical and moral force of the peasantry, his worship of his martyred wife, his obsession with a distant destiny that supposedly would emerge from the special insights of the genius-poets of Polish

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Romanticism, his turning away from the material conditions that needed to be changed to ameliorate the lives of the peasants he idealized, Korzeniowski is not far from a figure in Under Western Eyes—the raving ‘feminist,’ the admirer of peasants, Peter Ivanovich…33

Bross points out that Korzeniowski maintained “a valued myth, one that identified the peasantry’s mystic role in Poland’s destiny. Furthermore, as regards military strategy, the myth strengthened and justified the insurrectionists’ faith that an armed rising against Russia was feasible.”34 Bross questions the value of Korzeniowski’s faith in his cause, arguing that he “possessed a mentality that has to be called fanatical.”35 Like Conrad, Bross understands fanaticism as relentless dedication to a cause, whatever it might be. If Korzeniowski achieved little despite his integrity, Ivanovitch is successful despite his faults. The story of his life is “translated into seven or more languages” (98), and he is “a ‘heroic fugitive’ of world-wide celebrity” (102). Conrad saw that character and achievement are not necessarily aligned. The novel’s epigraph attributes this knowledge to Natalia: “I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread.”

Terrorists and Counterterrorists In addition to dramatizing various reasons that individuals become revolutionists, Under Western Eyes casts light on terrorism as a tactic. As the language teacher says, Haldin’s act is “an event characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination of a prominent statesman” (14). In addition to targeting government officials, Russian revolutionists were willing to kill innocent bystanders. Walter Laqueur notes that the “terrorist campaign conducted by Narodnaya Volya was essentially different from anarchist activities elsewhere in Europe, which were carried out.…by isolated individuals inspired by obscure ideals. Russian terrorism was both one aspect of the formation of a revolutionary socialist party and a symptom of a general crisis in Russian society.”36 Laqueur reports that Russian revolutionists felt a keen moral responsibility about taking life.37 Most were close to their families, and almost a quarter were women.38 Although Russian anarchists were social revolutionists, not opponents of all forms of government, they wanted to destroy the current regime and were willing to use terrorism to accomplish their goal. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari explains, terrorists “produce a theatrical spectacle that they hope

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will provoke the enemy and cause him to overreact. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and turns it against us.”39 The historical events on which Conrad based Haldin’s act produced this kind of spectacle. Naming Haldin’s victim “Mr de P—,” Conrad alludes to the assassination of Minister of the Interior Count Vyacheslav Konstantinovich de Plehve by the Social Revolutionary Organization of Combat in July 1904. Conrad grafts onto this incident the two-bomb plan used by the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya [The People’s Will] in 1881 to assassinate Tzar Alexander II.40 Influenced by Bakunin’s writings, this group chose bombs instead of pistols because of their “dramatic effect.”41 When the bomb aimed at the Tsar’s carriage hit only the driver, another bomb was thrown. This time the attack killed the Tsar and the bystanders who had rushed to his aid. Like the second bomber, Haldin is responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Although some revolutionists scrupulously avoided endangering anyone except their target,42 Haldin throws his bomb into a crowd. Killing random victims, he becomes a terrorist. Just as Conrad refuses to portray Haldin and Razumov as opposites, he rejects the political alternatives of revolution and the status quo.43 As Rachel Hollander argues, “By reducing Razumov’s existence to the extreme choice between revolution and autocracy, Conrad emphasizes the limitations of both political ideologies, and the possibility for a wholly new alternative.”44 Scathing contempt for autocracy was not enough to make Conrad advocate revolution. We might say that as the son of Polish patriots he hated everything Russian, including Russian revolutionists. We could also take Conrad at his word in the “Author’s Note” to Under Western Eyes when he explains that he wanted to convey the “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny” (6). The novel shows how Russian autocracy fueled revolutionary anger and how the government recruited informers and punished conspirators. As the English language teacher says, “I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their submission or their revolt” (89). He warns that autocracy’s ruthlessness produces a reciprocal recklessness, giving the public reasons to fear terrorists as well as the police. The historian Richard English observes the same result in more recent cases: “It is worth remembering that state responses to terrorism almost certainly do more to shape the world and its politics than do non-state terrorist acts themselves.”45

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In Under Western Eyes the violence of revolutionists both counteracts and exacerbates the violence of the state. The language teacher warns Natalia: The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution—not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time… Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success. (108)

Although Howe and other critics regard him as Conrad’s mouthpiece,46 the language teacher is a fully developed character who expresses his own opinions. He is the spokesman for Western, specifically English values. More than an observer, he befriends Natalia and her mother and plays a role in Natalia’s relationship with Razumov. Offering impressions of the expatriate community from a Western perspective, he conveys how different the revolutionists are from one another and how far their networks extend. He sympathizes with the revolutionists’ cause but distrusts their methods. His friendship with Haldin’s mother and sister allows him to see admirable qualities in the bomber. At the same time, feeling none of the Russians’ desperation, the language teacher is appalled at the social and political costs of revolution. This stance pleases neither liberal nor conservative critics. The disparity between Conrad and the narrator can be measured by comparing the novel to “Autocracy and War.” The essay is a jeremiad against centuries of despotism that have put Russia beyond the pale of civilization. Conrad maintains that the West will never understand Russia and Russia will never adopt Western institutions: “Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought when it crosses her frontier falls under the spell of her Autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself.”47 Russia has no foundation for reform: “It is impossible to initiate any sort of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has never been anything else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back as to a parting of the ways.”48 Reform is impossible, and revolution brings its own evils: “There can be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with Russia’s future, a word

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of more vague import, a word of dread as much as of hope—‘Revolution.’”49 The essay foresees no way to ameliorate conditions in Russia. Despite this denunciation of autocracy, Conrad has been branded a reactionary conservative.50 He was open to this charge partly because he was unable to endorse liberal democracy. The essay’s accusations appear in the novel as well, but they are distributed among characters who debate them. The essay warns that nothing short of revolution can change Russia, but the narrator condemns revolutionists. The essay despairs of mere reform, but Razumov believes that Russia must go through its own process of reform and evolution (57). Haldin and Natalia both believe revolution is necessary, though he acts on his belief and she regrets its cost. The deplorable Peter Ivanovitch echoes the essay’s rejection of Western models: “Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or development is—well—dirt. Intelligence in the wrong place is that. Foreign bred doctrines are that. Dirt. Dregs” (164–65). He adds, “for us at this moment there yawns a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by foreign liberalism” (165). This dispersion of the essay’s views complicates attempts to decide if the author is radical or reactionary, liberal or conservative. The polemic of “Autocracy and War” is recast as a drama of contraries. Perhaps the most comprehensive account of Conrad’s political beliefs is Avrom Fleishman’s classic study Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Drawing support from Conrad’s essays, especially the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Fleishman regards solidarity as the underlying value in Conrad’s work: “The organicist ethic of allegiance to the concrete, popular community should be seen in contrast to the prevailing individualist ethic of self-direction, self-­ realization, and self-assertion.”51 Fleishman pits the community of Haldin’s political faction against the individualism of Razumov’s personal ambition. Writing in 1967, Fleishman alludes to Cold War attitudes when he positions his argument against readings that uphold Razumov’s individualism: To take a last case, Razumov, the hero of Under Western Eyes, has been read as a victim of the stifling effect of revolutionary politics on the free development of the individual. It is much truer to the complexity of that novel to see him attempting to find a balance among various allegiances—to persons, to state, to humanity at large—conflicting claims which pull him apart and ultimately destroy him because he has been reluctant to realize and act on

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the fundamental fact that human life is social, that there is nowhere for the individual to retire in isolation.52

Although he recognizes the conflicting claims on Razumov, Fleishman maintains that Razumov is incapable of joining a community and blames this failure on his individualism. Fleishman condemns individualism as the root of anarchy and a cause of terrorism: anarchy is “that state of social decomposition at the opposite pole from organic community. This anarchy is already latent in the individual—individuality and anarchy are implicated in each other—and in the absence of an ordering community it springs into action as terrorism.”53 Fleishman contrasts Haldin’s social engagement with Razumov’s isolation, but the alternatives of community and anarchy are less prominent in the novel than the imperatives of community and autonomy for both characters. Fleishman’s binary of community and anarchy casts Razumov, not the bomber, as the terrorist. Regarding Razumov as a self-serving informer, Fleishman indicts him for anarchy and terrorism. Regarding Haldin as the representative of a community, Fleishman praises him as an altruist and excuses his violent act as a sacrifice for his country. This conclusion is untenable today. The ubiquitous threat of terrorism has discredited justifications of violence in the name of a community.

Conrad’s Political Hope Conrad loathed autocracy and was skeptical of democracy, but he was not without hope. Despite his grim prognosis for Russia in “Autocracy and War,” Under Western Eyes depicts hope as well as cynicism. The novel represents a range of dispositions in the narrator’s inconsistent judgments and in the main characters. The narrator states that his intention is to capture the spirit of Russia for Western readers: The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a précis of a strange human document, but the rendering—I perceive it now clearly—of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story till some key word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word which if not truth itself may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale. (58)

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He ventures to propose the defining word: For the word that persists in creeping under its point is no other word than Cynicism. For that is the mark of Russian Autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. (58)

He foregrounds cynicism as the trait that characterizes the regime and its opponents. It is the trait that distinguishes Russia from the West. The West has developed differently and is incapable of comprehending Russia: for this is a Russian story for Western ears which, as I have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty of moral negation— and even of moral distress—already silenced at our end of Europe. (129)

Although the narrator pronounces this judgment with breathtaking confidence, he also discerns the opposite temperament. He marvels at Russia’s longing for spiritual unity: In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest. (33)

He tries to explain the relationship between Russia’s spirituality and its cynicism: I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. (86)

He admits that as a Westerner he cannot understand Russians, yet even this admission is a claim to understand them. It depicts Russia as a world

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beyond comprehension: neither Russia’s faith nor its cynicism is like anything in the West. Whereas Conrad appreciates the value of contraries, the narrator finds them disturbing. He is unable to articulate a relationship between cynicism and hope. He analyzes them separately, never suggesting that their co-existence is the defining quality of Russia. Thus he regards Peter Ivanovitch as a monster of contradictions: For it was as though there had been two human beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The civilised man, the enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the triumph of spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom from day to day, like a tracked wild beast. (99)

In contrast, Razumov sees that these contraries are both present in the national character. He tells Ivanovitch: “We are Russians, that is—children—that is—sincere; that is—cynical if you like. But that’s not a pose” (161). Razumov’s Eastern eyes see the moral conditions of the place more comprehensively than the narrator does. Despite the despair of “Autocracy and War,” Conrad depicts hope in his major characters. Both Haldin and Razumov are men who believe in the future of Russia. As noted earlier, Haldin justifies his actions as an expression of the Russian soul (25). He claims religious sanction for the bombing, “I thought ‘God’s will be done’” (26), and he envisions the afterlife of a martyr: They can kill my body but they cannot exile my soul from this world. I tell you what—I believe in this world so much that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life. That is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die. (51)

Razumov also has faith in the future—until Haldin appears in his rooms. Razumov challenges Haldin’s claim to represent Russia’s mystic spirit. Razumov claims the nation as his birthright: “all this land is mine—or I have nothing” (54). Haldin calls himself a martyr, “a political saint,” but Razumov asserts a more modest role: “I am content in fitting myself to be a worker” (54). Razumov hopes for a future, whatever it may bring:

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Looking forward was happiness—that’s all—nothing more. To look forward to the gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion, love, ambition, hate—hate too indubitably. Love and hate. And to escape the dangers of existence, to live without fear, was also happiness. There was nothing else. Absence of fear—looking forward. (60)

The opportunity to look forward to something—to anything—without fear is his idea of happiness. It is a secular faith in the future. Natalia is the novel’s most passionate defender of hope. Aware that the narrator minimizes this characteristic of Russia, she compares her brother’s political fervor to religious belief. When the narrator asks her if her brother “believed in the power of a people’s will to achieve anything,” she replies: ‘It was his religion,’ declared Miss Haldin… ‘The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are only arbitrary decrees.’ (107)

She agrees with her brother’s conviction that revolution is necessary, though she realizes that the English teacher resists this idea: “‘Don’t expect to understand him quite,’ she said a little maliciously. ‘He is not at all—at all—Western at bottom’” (88). She does not envision a particular form of government but a brotherhood: ‘Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?’ ‘Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I believe that the future shall be merciful to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that there can be no union and no love.’ (268)

Her Russian hope resists Russian cynicism. She supports revolutionary change, yet she abhors revolutionary violence. She causes the narrator to expand his definition of the Russian spirit once again: “There was no longer any Natalia Haldin because she had completely ceased to think of herself. It was a great victory, a characteristically Russian exploit in self suppression” (284). No longer a grieving sister, she becomes a symbol. For the sake of a better future, Natalia accepts the necessity of revolution, violence, and personal sacrifice.

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Natalia expresses hope in her vision of an alternative to the violence of the state and its opponents. Although she keeps her distance from Ivanovitch’s circle of expatriates, her dedication to their cause is unquestionable. Her devotion to her brother and revolutionary goals gives weight to her disavowal of violence when she discourages Sophia Antonovna’s tribute to his momentous act: “I told her I hoped to see the time when all this would be forgotten, even if the name of my brother were to be forgotten too” (252). The language teacher answers, “You think of the era of concord and justice” (252), and she replies: “Yes. There is too much hate and revenge in that work. It must be done. It is a sacrifice—and so let it be all the greater. Destruction is the work of anger. Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together and only the reconstructors be remembered” (252). The veteran revolutionary Sophia Antonovna approves: “it is good for you to believe in love” (252). It is easy to dismiss Natalia’s and Sophia Antonovna’s hope as the naiveté of women, but Russian women who had risked their lives in revolutionary protests expressed similar aspirations. According to the historian Richard Stites, “In the 1870’s, the vocation of revolutionary was the only one open to women which would greet her as an equal, allow her talents fully to unfold, and permit her to rise to the top; there her energies, character, and skills were unlocked and put to use. At the very least, the revolutionaries proved that woman was capable of things undreamed of in the traditional view.”54 In Russia women helped plan and carry out terrorist acts. Over a third of the twenty-eight member Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, the group responsible for the assassination of Alexander II, were women. Most were from gentry-officer families and were well educated.55 By the 1870s about one-eighth of the known revolutionists were women,56 and “individual for individual, women were more deeply involved than the men: ‘better fewer, but better,’ as Lenin would have put it.”57 These women “set a precedent for the large numbers of women who joined the revolution in 1905 and in 1917.”58 Vera Figner was a member of Narodnaya Volya, yet later in life, she renounced terrorism. Stites quotes her reminiscence: The violence engendered by the struggle arouses ferocity, brings out the beast, awakens evil impulses, and leads to acts of disloyalty. Humanitarianism and greatness of soul are incompatible with it. And in this sense, both the government and the party, joining so to speak in hand-to-hand combat, competed with one another in the process of corrupting everything around

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them. On its side, the party proclaimed that all methods were permissible in the struggle against the enemy, and that the end justified the means. It also established a cult of the bomb and the revolver, and cannonized the terrorist. Murder and the gibbet captivated the imagination of our young people; and the weaker their nerves and the more oppressive their surroundings, the greater was their sense of exaltation at the thought of revolutionary terror.59

Like Natalia, Figner saw the need for revolutionary violence as well as its harms. Although Conrad discredits the hypocritical feminism of Peter Ivanovitch, Ivanovitch pays tribute to the importance of women in the revolutionary struggle: “But we have the Russian woman. The admirable Russian woman!… The greatest part of our hopes rests on women” (97). Even though his praise is sanctimonious, the most admirable characters in the novel are women. Conrad endows Tekla, Sophia Antonovna, and Natalia with commendable qualities. As Maureen Fries observes, “They are, in fact, largely superior in industry, mind, political commitment, and social responsibility to any man in the novel.”60 As Sophia Antonovna says, “Remember, Razumov, that women, children and revolutionists hate irony which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action” (214). Her advice to Razumov is a reminder that while many statements in the novel are ironic, some are sincere. Despite the historical foundation for characters like Natalia and Sophia Antonovna, they seem false to some critics. Phyllis Toy, for example, argues that Natalia’s hopes are like every other ideology: they reflect “a spiritual absolutism” that is “as insidious as any autocratic political rule.”61 Toy maintains, “And so even Nathalie’s ardent, idealist faith in Utopian revolutionism, her adamant rejection of the world as it is in the name of a transcendent alternative, cannot escape Conrad’s skeptical examination.”62 Similarly, after examining the changes in Natalia as Conrad revised the novel, Keith Carabine compares her to the assassinated minister de P—: her noble dream of ‘loving concord’, shares de P—’s autocratic desire for a univocal utterance, which would silence the ‘multitude of men’s counsel’. Thus, from opposing impulses, neither can accept or endure ‘the irreconcilable antagonisms’ they inherit, and which constitute for their creator the only ‘fundamental truth’ of both his fiction and of life on earth.63

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Unable to see Natalia’s hope as an alternative to reaction and revolution or her sincerity as an alternative to irony, these critics compare her disposition to oppressive absolutism. But Conrad was not always skeptical. While he subjected all ideologies to critical scrutiny, he thought that his method of presenting competing ideas fostered hope. The sentence that Carabine quotes ends with an affirmation of hope: “The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous—so full of hope!”64 Carabine recognizes this conviction when he speculates that Conrad shared Natalia’s hope for the future: Again, without Natalia’s ‘sweet’ wisdom he would have had neither an anchor for that ‘spirit of piety towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales’; nor would he, I suggest, have had the spirit to persist in his determination to ‘render the highest form of justice to the visible universe’, whose ‘soil’ as ever, is ‘soaked in blood, torn by struggles, watered with tears’.65

Avrom Fleishman also sees hope beneath Conrad’s skepticism: It is enough to be left with the ideal of love, of hope for human community, however difficult it is to imagine its development out of modern states. The vision acts as an encouragement to change, and Conrad’s is the most potent secular hope for the future to be found in modern literature.66

Fleishman conflates Natalia’s hopes for concord and justice with his view that Conrad hopes for community above all. Like Carabine, Fleishman believes that hope sustained Conrad throughout his career. Our skepticism has made us less hopeful than Conrad was, but in The Practices of Hope Christopher Castiglia challenges us to abandon the hermeneutics of suspicion. Taking a postcritical approach, he encourages us to recover the imaginative dimension of literature to sustain our own hope. Hopeful reading, he explains, is not willed optimism; it is a way to envision political possibilities that do not yet exist: Hope is the articulation of the origins of critique in imaginative idealism, self-consciously unachievable standards for living, tested and refined in the context of an as-yet-unreal world, against which real conditions inevitably

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come up short. Hope is what I would identify as the literariness of literature. It is also the thing without which social change is impossible.67

Castiglia alters the political assumptions associated with cynicism and hope. Hope is usually associated with quietism, but he argues that hope is the first step toward reform. Showing how imaginative literature advances progressive politics, Castiglia’s argument suggests that Conrad was neither conservative nor reactionary. Although he distrusted democracy as well as revolution, he hoped for radical change. While Conrad deplores the failings of autocracy, revolution, and, to a lesser extent, democracy, he also projects positive alternatives. He registers the duplicity and cynicism of political life: “Russian simplicity often marches innocently on the edge of cynicism for some lofty purpose” (102), yet he offers more than irony, suspicion, and despair. He helps readers imagine a better future. Through Natalia and Sophia Antonovna, the two most laudable characters in the novel, Conrad proposes that concord and justice could replace state and anti-state violence. Hoping that tyrants and terrorists alike will be forgotten, Natalia urges us to look beyond the destructors to the reconstructors. Under Western Eyes animates Conrad’s political knowledge through the resources of fiction, and current research on terrorism corroborates his account of political violence. A postcritical reading embraces this information as well as the novel’s expressions of hope. The novel portrays the particular conditions that formed a revolutionary mindset in Russia and the particular factors that cause one man to throw a bomb into a crowd and another to become a government agent. The number of critics who admire Haldin for assassinating a minister and condemn Razumov for leading the police to the assassin demonstrates that Conrad was able to humanize a terrorist and demonize a conscientious citizen. Showing that these men are fundamentally similar in their desire for community and autonomy, he reminds the public and the police that terrorists cannot be profiled. He shows that terrorists and counterterrorists both deprive others of freedom.

Notes 1. Tom Reiss, “The True Classic of Terrorism,” New York Times Book Review, September 11, 2005, p. 35.

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2. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 151. 3. Ibid., 152. 4. Joseph Conrad, “Autocracy and War,” The North American Review 181 (1905): 34. Conrad’s father made the same connection in “Poland and Muscovy”: “My personal fate, like that which befell hundreds of thousands of my countrymen, would not give me the right to dwell upon it. But when thoughts, actions, lives, tortures, bloodshed, deaths of all those brethren taken together form the character of a particular epoch in the history of Poland; when that epoch towers above all that is most laudable in human history, I believe that I have the right to tell it.” See Apollo Korzeniowski, “Poland and Muscovy,” in Conrad Under Familial Eyes, ed. Zdzislaw Najder, trans. Halina Carroll Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 87. 5. Laqueur, Terrorism, 174. 6. Andrzei Busza, “Under Western Eyes and ‘The Theatre of the Real,’” in “Under Western Eyes”: Centennial Essays, ed. Allan H. Simmons, J. H. Stape, and Jeremy Hawthorn (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi: 2011), 131. 7. As noted in Chap. 1, in 1981 Martha Crenshaw argued that the “limited data we have on individual terrorists . . . suggest that the outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality.” See Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (1981): 390. 8. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73. 9. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, ed. Roger Osborne and Paul Eggert (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17. Subsequent references to the novel are cited in parentheses. 10. Unsigned review, Pall Mall Gazette, October 11, 1911, 5. Rpt. in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 227. 11. Ford Madox Hueffer, English Review, December 1911–March 1912, Rpt. in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 242. 12. Robert F. Haugh, “Joseph Conrad and Revolution,” College English 10, no. 5 (1949): 274. 13. Frederick R. Karl, “The Rise and Fall of Under Western Eyes,” Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction 13, no. 4 (1959): 317. 14. John Hagan, “Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: The Question of Razumov’s ‘Guilt’ and ‘Remorse,’” Studies in the Novel 1, no. 3 (1969): 310–11. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 314. 17. Ibid., 316.

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18. Ibid., 316–17. 19. Ibid., 320. 20. Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (1981): 395. 21. Conrad’s father conveys similar feelings in his article “Poland and Muscovy.” Sentenced to exile in Siberia, Korzeniowski expresses pride in his sacrifice: “I was going to depart from my country: everything which quickens my heartbeat and everything I stand for would be torn away from me. Nevertheless I was not sad” (83). Exile “seemed as good a way to serve my country as any other. The sentence lay heavily on my breast, stifling my breath and thought; but at the same time it shone like a sign of merit, branded by the enemy but awarded by my country” (84). 22. As noted in Chap. 1, Martha Crenshaw cites a study of the countervailing reasons people join terrorist groups: “Commitment is also motivated by ego-involvement. Individuals seek to maintain self-respect, the support of the peer group, and the sense of belonging that is heightened by a sense of shared risk.” See Martha Crenshaw, “The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the Twenty-first Century,” Political Psychology 21, no. 2 (2000): 409. 23. Robert Hampson argues that even though Razumov obeys the law, he feels guilty for “betraying” Haldin because “the narrative assumes bonds of human solidarity which transcend the laws of a given society: in attempting to keep within the latter, Razumov breaks the former.” See Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 191. 24. George Goodin argues that Razumov decides to help Haldin to protect himself: “Razumov’s first decision is to preserve his neutrality, which he can best accomplish, he believes, by helping Haldin escape.” See George Goodin, “The Personal and the Political in Under Western Eyes,” Nineteenth-­Century Literature 25, no. 3 (1970): 334. 25. As Mohammed M. Hafez notes: “History, however, suggests that it is not at all surprising for terrorist recruiters to mobilize their own siblings and spouses for violent extremist causes.” See Mohammed M.  Hafez, “The Ties That Bind: How Terrorists Exploit Family Bonds,” CTC Sentinel 9, no. 2 (2016): 15. 26. Robert Hampson observes that others have noted that “Razumov presents himself as a blank surface onto which other characters project meanings…” See Robert Hampson, Conrad’s Secrets (Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 277 n. 21. 27. Keith Carabine, “Under Western Eyes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133. Although Razumov is not a revolutionist, his talk of confes-

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sion echoes Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, in “Poland and Muscovy.” Calling his diary a Confession, Korzeniowski, like Razumov, offers a confession from the depths of his suffering. Despite an eightmonth imprisonment and subsequent exile, his resolve is stronger than ever: “The greatness of those last days of entombed Poland has only one expression worthy of itself: a confession based on nothing but the lifegiving Truth.” See Apollo Korzeniowski, “Poland and Muscovy,” in Conrad Under Familial Eyes, ed. Zdzislaw Najder, trans. Halina Carroll Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 88. 28. Irving Howe, “Order and Anarchy: The Political Novels,” The Kenyon Review 15, no. 4 (1953): 520. 29. Keith Carabine sees “aspects of Leo Tolstoy and several political dissidents—Prince Peter (né Pyotr Alexeyevich) Kropotkin (1841–1921), Rufin Piotrowski (1806–72) and Bakunin (1814–76)” in Peter Ivanovitch. Like him, Bakunin “championed women’s rights (particularly in his ‘Manifesto of the Russian Revolutionary Association to the Oppressed Women of Russia on Women’s Liberation.’” See Keith Carabine, “Introduction,” in Under Western Eyes, ed. Roger Osborne and Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xl. 30. Howe, “Order and Anarchy,” 519. 31. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2, ed. Frederick R.  Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 348–49. 32. Addison Bross, “Apollo Korzeniowski’s Mythic Vision: ‘Poland and Muscovy,’ ‘Note A,’” The Conradian 20, no. 1/2 (1995): 78. 33. Ibid., 93. 34. Ibid., 87. 35. Ibid., 78. 36. Laqueur, Terrorism, 38. 37. Ibid., 124. 38. Ibid., 121. 39. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018), 164. 40. Carabine, “Introduction,” xxxvi. 41. Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin, 2017), 73. 42. Laqueur, Terrorism, 124. 43. Evelyn Cobley argues that the “parallel between hero and country” in Under Western Eyes preserves “the complexities of socio-political dilemmas. The technique creates ambiguities that do not permit the reader to side with one political system without making concessions to others, compelling him to appreciate both the strengths and the weaknesses of political

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a­ lternatives.” See Evelyn Cobley, “Political Ambiguities in Under Western Eyes and Doktor Faustus,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 10, no. 3 (1983): 377. 44. Rachel Hollander, “Thinking Otherwise: Ethics and Politics in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 8. 45. Richard English, Does Terrorism Work? A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. 46. Howe, “Order and Anarchy,” 518. 47. Conrad, “Autocracy and War,” 44. 48. Ibid., 43. 49. Ibid., 45. 50. Stephen Ross summarizes the critical consensus: “Indeed, the notion that Conrad preached the superstitions of his age has guided rather than been challenged by all but the most recent inquiries into his attitudes toward everything from imperialism to feminism, revolution to sexuality, and guilt to globalization. He has been cast variously as (at best) a conservative in thrall to the ethic of his family’s noble background; a pseudo-aristocratic reactionary; or (at worst) a jingoistic, racist social Darwinist.” See Stephen Ross, “The Ancien Régime and Fetishistic Politics in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” Conradiana 39, no.1 (2007): 3. 51. Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 69. 52. Ibid., 72, 53. Ibid., 92. 54. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 153. Rex A.  Hudson also notes more recent examples of women who appreciated the equal opportunities terrorism offered them. See Rex A. Hudson, The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? (Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1999), 57. 55. Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, 145. 56. Ibid., 148. 57. Ibid., 149. 58. Ibid., 153. 59. Ibid., 146. 60. Maureen Fries, “Feminism-Antifeminism in Under Western Eyes,” Conradiana 5, no. 2 (1973): 63. 61. Phyllis Toy, “Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language,” in Joseph Conrad: East European,

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Polish and Worldwide, ed. Wieslaw Krajka (East European Monographs, 1999), 51. 62. Ibid. 63. Keith Carabine, The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), 172. 64. Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2, ed. Frederick R.  Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 348–49. 65. Carabine, Life and Art, 173. 66. Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics, 242. 67. Christopher Castiglia, The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 4.

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Ross, Stephen. 2007. The Ancien Régime and Fetishistic Politics in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. Conradiana 39 (1): 3–16. Stites, Richard. 1978. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Toy, Phyllis. 1999. Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language. In Joseph Conrad: East European, Polish and Worldwide, ed. Wieslaw Krajka, 41–59. East European Monographs. Unsigned review. 1911. Pall Mall Gazette, October 11, p. 5. Rpt. in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry, 227–228. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Reading Conrad Now

This book began with Razumov. Although he exists in nineteenth-century Russia, I recognized him at once. Like many students today, he believes that academic success will lead to a secure career. This ambition is usually admired, yet many critics regard him as the villain of Under Western Eyes. He is condemned for betraying Haldin, a fellow student who spends more time at political meetings than in classes. Haldin is praised as a hero of the revolution for assassinating a government minister, even though bystanders are killed in the attack. Razumov is reviled for helping the police find the assassin, even though he would have been arrested if he had sheltered Haldin. Now that terrorist attacks have become a familiar part of our world, I would cast the roles of hero and villain differently. I see Haldin as a terrorist and Razumov as a serious young man whose hopes are destroyed by events beyond his control. The discrepancy between my reaction and the critics’ led me to Conrad’s other anarchist narratives and to social science research in Terrorism Studies. I noticed that while literary critics object that Conrad’s anarchists are too ordinary to be believable, the findings of experts in Terrorism Studies suggest that his characters are quite realistic. Empirical studies of terrorists show that normality is their only common trait. Conrad makes the same point by creating anarchists who are fundamentally similar to everyone else yet fully individualized. Factions with various agendas use terrorist methods, and people who belong to the same faction have different motives for joining it. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1_5

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Terrorism Studies also validates Conrad’s account of counterterrorism. Just as social science research shows that counterterrorism can instigate and exacerbate violence, Conrad’s narratives implicate the police. The police rely on surveillance and informers, tools that are both necessary and insidious. Conrad is one of the few novelists who portray terrorists and police as counterparts, equally willing to disregard the law to achieve their goals. By confirming the information in Conrad’s fiction, Terrorism Studies answers some critics’ objections and provides new reasons to appreciate it. The accuracy of Conrad’s narratives, however, is not enough to make them useful. No literary text has practical value if interpreted through the suspicious eyes of critique. Critique warns readers to distrust information in a text because representation serves unstated and possibly unconscious ideological interests. Critique scrutinizes statements of fact and feeling for bias, irony, and ideology. The hegemony of critique since the 1970s made questions about accuracy irrelevant. A few years ago postcritique challenged this way of reading, pointing out that most people turn to fiction for information, emotion, and escape. Instead of trying to detect the hidden assumptions in a text, postcritique accepts the possibility that literature can be a useful source of information about the world and that the feelings it expresses may be sincere. Thus postcritique allows the findings of Terrorism Studies to be admissible evidence in interpretations of Conrad’s political fiction. Taking a postcritical perspective, I have focused on the information about terrorists in Conrad’s fiction and tested the accuracy of this information against the findings of social scientists. Conrad’s narratives and research in Terrorism Studies often agree. Terrorism is a politically charged topic, and debates about its place in Conrad’s fiction often pivot on claims about his political beliefs. Although he is usually described as conservative and reactionary, he aims his irony at many targets. He points out the cruelty and stupidity of autocratic government as well as the dangers of revolution and the deficiencies of Western democracies. He tries to understand terrorists’ aims, and he condemns police abuses of power. He warns that terrorism causes reactionary repression more often than it accomplishes perpetrators’ goals. These positions do not fit political labels. Although Conrad’s pervasive irony justifies skeptical interpretations, readers must decide whether to take any given passage as ironic or sincere,

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tendentious or accurate. It is hard to hear irony when a statement conforms to one’s convictions, and it is hard to believe a statement is sincere when it contradicts one’s assumptions. Conrad’s hopeful statements of belief have been considered naïve or sentimental or, more often, ironic. Although critics have been reluctant to treat these statements as sincere convictions, postcritique encourages us to take them seriously. I argue that in Conrad’s political fiction, the quest for agency and community is the baseline of normality. Terrorists and counterterrorists, according to experts in Terrorism Studies, pursue these fundamental aims. Other critics, however, name the binaries in Conrad’s fiction differently. The dialectical structure of his work generates multiple perspectives, and any choice of terms is less inclusive than Conrad’s own commitment to the many “irreconcilable antagonisms” of life. One of the benefits of a postcritical stance is that it recuperates positive meanings. It welcomes information as well as emotion. It links ideas and feelings. It acknowledges sincerity as well as irony. It accepts the similarities as well as the differences between Razumov and Haldin and the hope as well as the cynicism in Under Western Eyes. If we read Conrad’s narratives as accurate and realistic accounts of terrorism, as postcritique and Terrorism Studies encourage, how does this help us understand terrorism today? Nothing in Conrad’s anarchist stories and novels will discourage anyone from joining a terrorist organization or convince terrorists that their attacks alienate the public and lead to brutal repression. His narratives will not restrain the police, or encourage governments to address citizens’ grievances. But Conrad has a lot to teach the public. We learn why profiling is futile. We learn that labeling a person a terrorist initiates an unstoppable chain of events. We learn that naming a violent event an act of terrorism gives the police free rein to find and punish the perpetrators. We learn that infiltration and surveillance are favored methods to prevent terrorism, whether or not they are legal. We learn that the cachet of terrorism captivates people from every level of society. The information in Conrad’s texts helps the public separate the rhetoric of terrorists and counterterrorists from reality. Although Conrad corrects most of the assumptions of conventional dynamite fiction, he agrees with one of them: the glamour of anarchism. From The Princess Casamassima to Under Western Eyes, wealthy people are attracted to the romance of insurgency. This fascination persists. Even

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Image 5.1  CRISISWEAR

in Woodstock, Illinois, a town so immersed in nineteenth-century Americana that Groundhog Day was filmed there, a shop called “CRISISWEAR” sells clothing that evokes terrorist disguises: items such as a Dissension Vest, an Accomplice Tank, a Battalion Gaiter, an Operator Cowl, and a Blackguard MKII (Image 5.1). These expensive costumes let people in safe places look like terrorists, a pleasure the Princess Casamassima, the young Lady Amateur of Anarchism, Michaelis’s patroness, and Mme de S, also enjoy.

Index1

A Abrahms, Max, 68 “An Anarchist,” 1, 6, 9, 22, 34, 35, 37–47, 71 Anderson, Sir Robert, 77 Anker, Elizabeth S., 13 Appelbaum, Robert, 3, 4, 59, 60 Aslam, Nadeem, 60 The Attack, 60 “Autocracy and War,” 33, 85, 88, 97–99, 101 B Bakunin, Mikhail, 17, 63, 67, 68, 73, 93, 96, 109n29 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 39–41, 47, 73 Blessington, Francis, 37, 38, 61 Boyle, Ted E., 88 Bross, Addison, 94, 95 Busza, Andrzei, 86

C Carabine, Keith, 14, 104, 105 Castiglia, Christopher, 105, 106 Chesterton, G. K., 35 Crenshaw, Martha, 6, 8, 9, 59, 61, 62, 89, 108n22 CRISISWEAR, 118 Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), 10–12, 78 Critique, 10–13, 105, 116 Culbertson, Diana, 53 D Daskin, Emin, 8 De Plehve, Count Vyacheslav Konstantinovich, 96 Dynamite fiction, 22, 22n1, 34–37, 44, 49, 50, 53, 59, 65, 117

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Wexler, Joseph Conrad and Terrorism Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86845-1

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INDEX

E English, James F., 64 English, Richard, 96 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, 47, 52

Howe, Irving, 15, 58, 93, 94, 97 Hudson, Rex A., 7–10, 25n38, 61, 62, 75, 110n54 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 49, 53, 88

F Felski, Rita, 13, 14 Fénéon, Felix, 18 Figner, Vera, 103, 104 Fleishman, Avrom, 14, 98, 99, 105 Fleissner, Jennifer L., 13 Fleming, Marie, 16, 17 Fothergill, Anthony, 17, 18, 60 Frank, Michael C., 4, 12, 67, 77, 78 Fries, Maureen, 104

I “The Informer,” 1, 6, 15, 20–22, 34, 35, 37, 38, 47–53

G A Girl Among the Anarchists, 48, 49, 52 The Good Terrorist, 60 Gruber, Eva, 4 Guerard, Albert J., 88 Gunning, Jeroen, 12 Gurko, Leo, 88 H Hagan, John, 88, 89, 92 Harari, Yuval Noah, 64, 95 Harkness, Bruce, 58–60, 81n44, 81n51 Haugh, Robert F., 88 “Heart of Darkness,” 3 Herman, Peter C., 3, 22–23n2, 23n5, 60 Hollander, Rachel, 96 Hope, 14, 15, 22, 64, 68, 73, 75, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97–106, 115, 117 Houen, Alex, 16, 19, 20, 22n2, 87

J Jackson, Richard, 2, 10, 11, 23n5 James, Henry, 34, 36–38, 47, 60 Jarvis, Lee, 11 K Karl, Frederick R., 88 Khadra, Yasmina, 60 Khalifeh, Sahar, 60 Kolani, Ruth, 73, 74 Korzeniowski, Apollo, 94, 95, 108n21, 109n27 Kropotkin, Peter, 17, 66, 69, 93, 109n29 L Laqueur, Walter, 2, 5, 6, 23n4, 85, 86, 95 Le Carré, John, 60 Lessing, Doris, 28n106, 60 The Little Drummer Girl, 60 Lombroso, Cesare, 62 M Mallarmé, Stéphane, 18 The Man Who Was Thursday, 35, 52 McCorristine, Shane, 33

 INDEX 

Melchiori, Barbara Arnett, 34, 35, 37, 40, 49, 59, 60 Melman, Bili, 5, 6 Meredith, Isabel, 48–50 Moser, Thomas, 88 Mulry, David, 60, 63, 65, 66, 71 N Narodnaya Volya, 95, 96, 103 Nechaev, Sergei, 66 Nostromo, 27n92, 33 P Paknadel, Alexis, 3, 4, 59, 60 Peters, John G., 14 The Princess Casamassima, 34, 36–38, 42, 49, 50, 60, 117 Postcritique, 1–22, 34, 39–41, 57, 58, 116, 117 Propaganda by deed, 17–19, 63, 64, 72 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 66 R Reid, S. W., 58–60, 81n44, 81n51 Reiss, Tom, 85, 86 Rignall, John, 19 Robinson, Benjamin Lewis, 73, 81n53 Rossetti, Christina, 49 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 48–49 Rossetti, Helen, 48 Rossetti, Olivia, 48

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S Scanlan, Margaret, 20, 21, 28n106 Schwarz, Daniel R., 45, 46 The Secret Agent, 1, 5, 6, 12, 16, 19, 20, 22, 26n64, 34, 40, 57–79, 81n45, 81n53, 82n59, 85, 86 Shaddock, Jennifer, 45, 46 Shulevitz, Judith, 1, 57 Slights, William W.E., 38–41 Stampnitzky, Lisa, 21 Stites, Richard, 103 T Tailhade, Laurent, 18 Terrorism Studies, 1–22, 34, 38, 53, 58, 60–63, 75, 78, 86–87, 115–117 Terrorist, 60 The Torch, 19, 49 Toy, Phyllis, 104, 110n61 U Under Western Eyes, 1, 5, 6, 12, 15, 16, 19, 22, 34, 40, 85–106, 108n24, 108n27, 109–110n43, 115, 117 Updike, John, 60 W Walton, James, 47 The Wasted Vigil, 60 Wild Thorns, 60