Moral Disintegration: Moral Imagination II

       Existentialism Revisited:  Beneath the Cross

       The Secret Agent records the disintegration, with all the manifold consequences, of both the human community and the human soul.  The “personages” who live and move, darkly and sinisterly, in this “monstrous town,” variously typify the “revolutionary spirit” that possesses and transforms them into “the devils” of F. M. Dostoevsky’s 1873 novel by that name.  No less than the Russian novelist, Conrad has no sympathy for anarchists…”all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity,”…In relating the story “to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair,…”

       …A novel of rigorous moral exploration, it forces one to see the things of the world that one has hitherto not seen, or has refused to see, or has feared to see. As such…to gain some semblance of “moral discovery” and in the process to discern more sharply the deeper meanings of life viewed in the context of assertions that have a confluent and recurrent motif in The Secret Agent: “This ain’t no easy world”; “life doesn’t stand much looking into”; it may be good for one not to know too much.”  Conrad’s “ironic method” is a dominant and even a personal aspect of this novel…”They refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives.”  …his special aim to dislodge the illusions of those who, avoiding or disregarding the data of human existence, embrace false or safe conceptions, and remain transfixed in the gulf between appearance and reality.  The moral momentum and gravity of this novel are to be observed in the stripping away of cherished illusions.  Moral discovery triumphs in this process.

          The world we encounter in this novel, set in London in the winter and spring of 1886, is draped in shadows and grime, which Conrad likens to a “descent into a slimy aquarium.”  The first chapter of The Secret Agent puts us in contact immediately with a sordid world and people.  What we see here and those we meet embody what is morally slothful, evidenced early on the appearance of Adolf Verloc, shop-owner in Soho and agent provocateur…