Modernism’s Secret Agent

It might be claimed that modernist works of art have a negative aspect in common, namely their attempt to break with realism. Modernism can be seen as a creative disfiguration of realism, a fact which for Georg Lukács’s stiff-necked study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism counts heavily against it. For Lukács, modernism is really a bungled version of realism, one which has gone sour and shapeless. This overlooks the fact that modernist art can disfigure realism in illuminating ways as well as in objectionable ones. It can do so, however, only if it retains a trace of the realism it bends out of shape. To have force, a deviation has to call to mind the norm from which it departs. In this sense, modernism, despite its sometimes clamorous claims to originality, is unavoidably parasitic on realism, so that we would arguably be truly post-modernist only when we had become genuinely post-realist as well. Perhaps modernism bears something of the same relation to realism as dreams do to our waking life, at once divergent from and dependent on it, full of improbable fantasies yet drawing abundantly on everyday materials.

Modernism’s reliance on realism is more than a formal affair. It goes to the very root of the modernist worldview. Classical realism, by and large, believes in a world with firm foundations and a meaningful structure—one in which truth and reality, though sometimes problematic, may be brought to light by patient investigation. The typical modernist work has had its faith in all of this badly shaken, but unlike its post-modern progeny it is old enough to recall (or to imagine that it recalls) a time when there were still truth, reality, foundations, transcendence, and coherent identity, and to feel their loss sorely. Something is lacking for modernism, so that many of its literary works seem to revolve around an absent center. In Joseph Conrad’s fiction, there is the unseen bomb explosion of The Secret Agent, the silver of Nostromo, the supposedly dark heart of Africa in Heart of Darkness, and Jim’s unrepresented jump from his ship in Lord Jim. All these are absences which, rather like the presence of some invisible planet, can be known by the way they wrench their surroundings out of shape. Reality has not exactly fallen to pieces, but there is an unsettling void at its center.

At the same time, a perpetual Now, or succession of absolutely original moments, dismantles all continuity, and along with it all enduring identity. If the self is reborn every second, then there is nothing that persists, and thus nothing for perpetual renewal or innovation to happen to. True difference depends on a degree of consistency, and pure difference capsizes into pure identity. As with the paradoxes of the ancient philosopher Zeno of Elea, time becomes a series of disconnected moments, and thus ceases to flow at all. There is an image of such frozen temporality in The Secret Agent:

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediaeval device for the punishment of crime, or some very new-fangled invention for the cure of a sluggish liver.

This sense of getting nowhere fast is the ultimate riposte to the ideology of progress, of which the conservative Conrad is deeply skeptical. How can there be progress when the very idea of motion is a metaphysical mystery? How can you be in one place at a particular moment yet at the same time en route to another? Conrad’s cab passenger lives in an eternal present—a view of time, ironically, which can also be found in the classicism on which so much modernist art turns its back. The classical work may be less marooned in the past than perpetually up to date, contemporaneous with every historical situation. If it seems immune from decay, this might be because it can renew itself at every moment. Its so-called timelessness may spring not from being sealed from temporality but from being constantly abreast of it.

If you are feeling really reckless, you can try to put a bomb under time itself in order to blow a black hole in the stuff, as with the demented Professor of The Secret Agent. This, however, is not a simple matter, since history is gross, material stuff, which has an unnerving habit of creeping back into place once one has tried to dislodge it. Such, at least, is the London of Conrad’s novel, a dank, fog-bound city whose streets have “the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies.” A police constable seems to surge out of a lamppost, as though he, too, were part of inorganic nature. The novel’s vision, deeply influenced by literary naturalism, is of an oozy, viscous city populated by grotesque, object-like figures, which it would take more than a bomb to blow apart. This is one reason why the work cannot decide whether its anarchist characters are ludicrous or alarming. When the book’s chief protagonist, Mr. Verloc, ventures out of his house,

His descent into the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off. A murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him.

The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the road way glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross station the genius of the locality assimilated him. He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.

The anarchists in the novel may dream of a new humanity, but the book presents human beings as mere outcroppings of nature, interchangeable with the lower animals. The corpulent Verloc is built of such solid stuff (like “a soft kind of rock”) that it is a mystery how he moves. His intellectually disabled brother-in-law, Stevie, is blown to bits by a bomb, but telltale pieces of his body and clothing survive like “a heap of rags, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast.” Reality is too dense to be destroyed, and human existence is just an endless recycling of meaningless matter in slightly variable forms. It is precisely because it is so brute, so void of meaning and value, that the world persists—a fact which, were they to be aware of it, would be no source of consolation to its inhabitants. Fortunately, however, they are not. For Conrad, as for a number of his fellow modernist artists, everyday consciousness is false consciousness.

The Professor is the perfect anarchist because he wants to annihilate not just this or that institution, but civilization, even reality itself. Only then could one make a genuinely fresh start. If matter is as intractable as it is, the only effective transfiguration would have to be an absolute one. This malevolent figure, then, is not only the perfect anarchist but the archetypal avant-gardist. Whatever exists must be wiped away, in an ecstatic act of destruction which is also a perverse form of creation. It is the only way one can get on equal terms with God, as a dark parody of His bringing the world into being in the first place. There are few more erotic forms of fulfillment than the death drive, and to destroy, as every toddler knows, can be quite as gratifying as to create. “I depend on death,” the Professor declares, “which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.” His desire is to see “death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity,” sweeping people out of the way like so much rotten garbage so that a utopian future may replace them. It is a classic avant-gardist fantasy. Other revolutionaries, he scoffs, seek to derive the future from the present, whereas he himself wants “a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life.” There will be no laborious process of reform, which is bound to involve complicity with what one wishes to overturn. Instead, this crazed nihilist, who lives in some liminal state between life and death, stalks around permanently wired up with explosives. Impossible to “outleft,” he is in search of the perfect detonator, which will despatch himself and his surroundings to eternity in a split second should he be threatened with arrest.

Unfortunately for Conrad’s anarchists, however, time can no more be eclipsed than matter can be obliterated. Verloc arranges for a bomb to be placed at Greenwich Observatory, the prime meridian or still point of the turning world, as though he wants to tear through the very fabric of time itself, but the attempt is bungled and history refuses to come to a halt. You cannot leap in one bound from the finite to the infinite, as some modernist art likes to dream. To trigger his bomb, the Professor needs to press a small rubber ball he carries in his pocket, but the device involves a twenty-second lag before the explosion occurs. Instant eternity is impossible to come by. Time can be made to stand still for a moment, as when the long-suffering Mrs. Verloc buries a knife in her brute of a husband’s chest, but she is soon to hear the sound of a steady dripping of blood, “like the pulse of an insane clock,” which signifies that process, temporality, and organic dissolution are once again underway. One can somersault for a precious moment out of history, but history will then reclaim you, rather as one who jumps from a height experiences a momentary freedom before falling victim to the forces of gravity. Mrs. Verloc spends the rest of her time in the novel as a terrified victim of her sole authentic act, while the Professor’s freedom consists in being prepared to exterminate himself. In the act of suicide, as a Dostoevsky character comments, one becomes godlike, supremely sovereign over one’s own existence. To live permanently with one’s death is to disarm it. Yet the consequence of the Professor’s freedom will be literally nothing.

The perfect anarchist is also the perfect Dadaist. What is one to say, asks one character in the novel, of “an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying.” The attack “must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy.” There could be few more accurate descriptions of that sector of the avant-garde which is out to emancipate itself not only from bourgeois respectability but from the manacles of meaning itself. To be intelligible is to be in collusion with the bankers and bureaucrats. Perhaps it is senselessness that the ruling powers find hardest to stomach. Maybe absurdity is more subversive than storming Capitol Hill. At their nightclub in Zürich during the First World War, a city which was also home at the time to James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin, the Dadaists declaimed poems in different languages simultaneously and thumped on outsized drums while the artist Hugo Ball delivered so-called phonetic poetry based on sound rather than sense while dressed in a magician’s costume made of cardboard. Strident, outrageous, insulting, and buffoonish, Dada later launched a nightclub in Berlin in which various surreal events were staged, including a race between a typewriter and a sewing machine.

The Secret Agent is among other things an allegory of the modernist artist. In the anti-modernist spirit, all attempts at absolute originality come to grief, but the main reason why they do so—the dull persistence of a seedy, degenerate world—involves the kind of disdainful view of everyday life which many a modernist adopted. The novel is thus modernist and anti-modernist at the same time: Social existence is worthless, but those who seek to destroy and reconstruct it are freaks and madmen. The Professor finally walks off, detonator in pocket, “like a pest in the street full of men,” but elsewhere the work would seem to take a view of these urban crowds very close to the Professor’s own:

He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.

The Professor’s elitist disdain for the masses, typical of certain strains of modernism, would seem here to merge with the author’s own. In one sense, it is salutary in Conrad’s view that everyday existence is so sluggish and recalcitrant, since this means that madcap revolutionary schemes to reconstruct it must inevitably founder, yet at the same time this torpor is scarcely a reason for rejoicing. We are offered a choice between a dingy but reassuring English normality and a fascinating but repellent Continental fanaticism. The reader is allowed nowhere else to stand. Either you refuse to look too deeply into things (the workaday philosophy of Mrs. Verloc) or like the Professor you glare through a paper-thin human existence to the seductive abyss that underlies it.

If the Professor is a modernist artist, so also is Stevie. Because of his intellectual disability, he has trouble with language, rather like some modernist writers, but though he is almost wordless, he is able through his obsessively scribbled drawings to catch a glimpse of the infinite. We see him sitting at a table “drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.” Blown to pieces at the prime meridian, Stevie seeks in his scribblings to break with linearity and annihilate time. He is compassionate and deeply distressed by the world’s inhumanity, and it may be that his whorls and cycles hint at an eternity that would provide some utopian recompense for the cruelties of the present. These compulsive scrawlings represent the mystical, which can be shown but not said. In the end, however, history in Conrad’s view will wreak its revenge on all such noble aspirations.

This essay is adapted from Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2025). It appears in the Assumption 2025 issue of The Lamp under the headline “Joseph Conrad.”