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P th l f th p r l tr p l : pr n Tr t ft r n nr d nd F rd
hr t n Br tz l
Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2005, pp.1-20 (Article)
P bl h d b nd n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/jml.2006.0001
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Queensland (4 Sep 2015 04:50 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jml/summary/v029/29.1britzolakis.html
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage inConrad and Ford
Christina BritzolakisUniversity of Warwick
The cognitive and aesthetic mapping of urban modernity has always relied
heavily on notions of shock. From the 1880s onwards, neurological dis-
courses occupied a central place in accounts of the origins of modernity,
as well as in the genealogy of the modernist artifact. Th ey serve as shorthand for
the far-reaching reorganization of spatio-temporal experience brought about by
changes in transport, energy, urban planning, communication and media, the
“taylorizing” of labor in the factory, and the mass slaughter of modern mecha-
nized warfare. Th e history of shock as a discursive formation of modernity,
culminating in Freud’s famous analysis in 1920 of the mechanisms of traumatic
neurosis, is intertwined with notions of modernization itself as pathogenic.¹
In recent years, a number of modernist scholars have embraced neuro-
logical readings of modernity, particularly in relation to the impact of visual
technologies. Modernism, with its impressionistic sampling of the moment,
is seen as decisively shaped by the advent of the cinema.² If mass urbanized
existence was conceived, from the outset, in terms of a constant assault on the
senses, the nascent cinematic technology of the 1890s, based on the sudden and
incessant displacement of images, formalized this principle as the basis of its
medium (Charney and Schwartz). Attention emerges as, in Jonathan Crary’s
words, a problem of perceptual synthesis produced by “a social, urban, psychic
and industrial fi eld increasingly saturated with sensory impact” (17).³
Crary’s work has been pivotal in the impetus to resituate impression-
ist painting, and modernism more generally, in relation to the fi eld of mass
visual culture. What arguably remains elusive, however, is the geopolitical
location of the literary “impression” as the widely acknowledged cornerstone
2 Journal of Modern Literature
of an emergent modernist rhetoric. Th e situation of the novel around the turn
of the century—in particular, the impressionist remodelling of the form by
the James-Conrad-Ford group—registers an intense anxiety concerning the
imagined boundaries of the metropolis. Critics have long recognized Conrad’s
sustained if ambivalent interrogation of European imperialism and its cultural
consequences.⁴ Less attention has been paid, however, to his collaboration ⁴
with Ford Madox Hueff er (as he then was), between 1898 and 1908, which
coincided with the appearance of many of Conrad’s most well-known works.
In his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1919), Ford claims that e
it was through their collaboration that a shared “impressionist” aesthetic was
evolved: “we saw that life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains”
(182).⁵ During the period of the Congo debates and the Boer War, Conrad and
Ford were participating in a wider conversation about imperialism, race, and
capitalist modernity that included fi gures such as H.G. Wells and the socialist
politician and writer R.B. Cunninghame Graham and whose implications for
impressionism, as a term of literary-historical analysis, have yet to be unravelled
(Delblanco).
Th e Edwardian moment was characterized by considerable interchange
between what are now seen as “modernist” and popular fi ctional forms (Trotter,
Daly). As collaborators, Conrad and Ford explored the various possibilities of
contemporary mass-market genre fi ction, such as Wellsian fantasy, travel fi c-
tion, invasion novels, political satire, espionage fi ction, and the detective novel.
I shall focus here on a few of these generic experiments: Ford’s travel book Th e
Soul of London (1905), the jointly-authored scientifi c “romance”-cum-political
novel Th e Inheritors (1901), and Conrad’s spy story s Th e Secret Agent (1907). Th ese t
texts, I shall argue, respond to a historically specifi c metropolitan experience
of cognitive dissonance in the face of violently reconfi gured relations among
urban, national, and global space. Th eir generic instability, or hybridity, is
symptomatic of their attempted “cognitive mapping,” in Fredric Jameson’s
phrase (“Modernism and Imperialism” 52), of the imperial world-order, fol-
lowing an accelerated period of European expansionism. What is at stake is
a crisis in the location of a metropolitan subject increasingly grasped as an
ensemble of particularized and disjunct sensory experiences. “Impressionism,”
the rubric which, by Ford’s account, unites his and Conrad’s literary endeav-
ors during the 1900s, names, among other things, the conversion of late 19t
century ethnographic discourses of “degeneration” and urban pathology into a
modernist rhetoric of the image, foregrounding the isolated moment of visual
perception at the expense of its overall narrative context.
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 3
UNTHINKABLE SPACES
In Th e Soul of London (1905), Ford Madox Ford describes London as unmap-
pable and “illimitable”; more of an “abstraction” than a “town,” it can, he argues,
be adequately represented only through a series of fragmentary impressions
(15, 7). Ford’s own account of the capital proceeds by a series of word-paint-
ings; like Whistler’s famous fogbound cityscapes of the period, it is dominated
by light eff ects, by recurrent images of steam, vapor, and clouds, and by an
insistence on wavering, dissolving, or “tremulous” (29) outlines. Th e central
motif of the text is nebulousness—“it is impossible, without an eff ort, to dis-
sociate in our minds the idea of London from the idea of a vast cloud beneath
a cloud as vast” (102).
Impressionism, for Ford, is a response to the neurological predicament
of modernity caused by urbanization and by the various technological and
social changes that accompany it. In Chapter 5, the narrator claims that “an
awakened sense of observation is in London bewildering and nerve-shattering,
because there are so many things to see and because these things fl icker by so
quickly” (96). Th e book’s Preface anticipates the central modernist claim that
the experience of the city is best represented by cinematic means: “A really ideal
book of the kind would not contain ‘writing about’ a town: it would throw a
personal image of the place on the paper” (3). Th e question “What is London?”
Ford suggests, can best be posed through a syntax of apparently random visual
snapshots. Th is syntax signals a crisis in the representation of the capital city,
as symbolic embodiment of national identity. For Ford, both London’s moder-
nity and its inaccessibility to conventionally realist forms of representation are
explicitly bound up with its acknowledged status, by 1900, as, in Charles G.F.
Masterman’s phrase, the “heart of the empire” (qtd. in Schneer 2):
If in its tolerance it fi nds a place for all eccentricities of physiognomy, of costume,
of cult, it does so because it crushes out and fl oods over the signifi cance of those
eccentricities. It, as it were, lifts an eyelid and turns a hair neither for the blue
silk gown of an Asiatic, the white robes of a Moor, the kilts of a Highlander, nor
the silk hat, inscribed in gold letters with a prophecy of retribution or salvation,
of a religious enthusiast. In its innumerable passages and crannies it swallows
up Mormon and Mussulman, Benedictine and Agapemonite, Jew and Malay,
Russian and Neapolitan. It assimilates and slowly digests them, converting them,
with the most potent of all juices, into the singular and inevitable product that
is the Londoner—that is, in fact, the Modern. Its spirit, extraordinary and
unfathomable—because it is given to no man to understand the spirit of his
own age—spreads, like sepia in water, a tinge of its own over all the world. Its
extraordinary and miasmic dialect—the dialect of South Essex—is tinging all
the local speeches of England. Deep in the New Forest you will fi nd red brick
houses trying to look like London villas; deep in the swamps of coastal Africa
4 Journal of Modern Literature
you will fi nd lay white men trying to remain Londoners, and religious white men
trying to turn negroes into suburban chapel worshippers.
London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its
assimilative powers, because it destroys all race characteristics, insensibly and, as
it were, anaesthetically. (Ford, Soul of London 12–13)
London’s modernity, Ford argues, lies in its power to assimilate a bewil-
dering array of cultures. Its seemingly cosmopolitan “tolerance” is actually a
cannibalistic “destruction” of “race characteristics.” Th e world town’s devouring
powers stand in for the process of territorial expansion that lies behind and fuels
it. In an image which strongly suggests photographic development, Ford depicts
the “spirit” of “the Modern” as “spread[ing], like sepia in water, a tinge of its
own all over the world” (13). Th e metropole produces, or develops, the “modern”
by blurring boundaries between the cultures it brings into contact, both in the
capital city itself and in its colonial peripheries. Metropolitan identity must
therefore, Ford claims, be an aff air of anesthesia, of defensive non-sensitivity
to an otherwise overwhelming burden of stimuli.
For Ford, then, “impressionism” emerges as a partial solution to the rep-
resentational dilemma posed by the instability of the imperial metropolis’s
imagined boundaries. Th e urban “impression” is implicated in the global dis-
semination of “the spirit of the Modern,” not least through the technologically
mediated image. It is therefore part of a wider discourse of modernity as a
global culture of shock whose most obvious manifestation, from the 1880s
onwards, is the intertwining of progress, imperial conquest, and war. Conrad’s
and Ford’s venture into “scientifi c romance,” Th e Inheritors (1901), begun in s
1899 during the month that the Boer War broke out in South Africa, satirizes
colonial schemes enabled by European investors and supported by British
politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain (Seed ix–xxvii).⁶ Arthur Granger, a
failed novelist with impressionist tendencies, becomes obsessed by a young
woman who appears to him at various points in the novel, claiming to be the
representative of a futuristic cult called the Fourth Dimension. Under the lead-
ership of the Duc de Mersch (modelled on King Leopold of Belgium), head
of the Congo-like territory of Greenland and founder of the “System for the
Regeneration of the Arctic Regions” (26), the Dimensionists seek to infi ltrate
the British Government. Granger, who describes himself at the start of the
novel as “a writer with high—with the highest ideals” (6), becomes involved in
writing “a paean to a great colonizer” (74), for Th e Hour, a newspaper fi nanced rr
by De Mersch.
Like Th e Soul of London, the text of Th e Inheritors is marked by Ford’s s
polemic against “social imperialist” discourses of national effi ciency, collectiv-
ism, and administrative expertise. It satirizes the rhetoric of enlightenment and
civilization used by fi nanciers, governments, and journalists to justify European
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 5
expansionism. Th e Dimensionist woman is described as having “the confi dence
of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occi-
dental” (14). She is linked with an evolutionary racial rhetoric; Granger, hearing
her explain the Fourth Dimension, feels like “a negro” or “Hindoo” (14). Th e
novel’s satire on imperialist rhetoric operates through visual motifs of light and
obscurity. Whereas Granger clings to twilit, shadowy, or half-lit landscapes
associated, as David Seed has pointed out (xiii–xvi), with a dying cultural
order, the Dimensionist woman’s “insolent modernity” (14) is associated with
an almost unnaturally intensifi ed visibility. At the same time, her appearances
to Granger are connected with a disruption of visual perspective. Looking at
Canterbury Cathedral under her direction, Granger comments: “One seemed
to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than
the conception of gods to whom cathedrals were raised. Th e tower reeled out
of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an
unrealised, an unrealisable infi nity of space” (8, emphasis added). In a subsequent
encounter with Granger, she is described as having “brought the whole [scene]
into composition” (46). Th ese proto-cinematic eff ects of spatial disjunction tie
in with Granger’s neurasthenia, and with his description of the Dimensionist
woman as having “the eff ect of some incredible stimulant” (11).
In Th e Inheritors, the Fourth Dimension, a plane of reality that cannot be
apprehended within existing registers of sensory perception, represents the
increasingly organized, controlled, and administered global connectedness
of the new imperialism. Th e emergent turn-of-the-century imperial world
system seems to confound both liberal notions of progress and realist notions
of narrative perspective; hence the attraction of “scientifi c romance,” a genre
already popularly associated with the concept of multiple dimensions.⁷ In ⁷ Th e
Soul of London, Ford, discussing the rise of corporations, writes: “Th at, too, is
the Modern Spirit: great organizations run by men as impersonal as the atoms
of our own frames, noiseless, and to all appearances infallible” (30). Granger’s
aristocratic fastidiousness for the worlds of commerce, politics, and journalism
in which he becomes embroiled and his sentimental attachment to English tra-
ditions make him a marginalized and impotent protagonist. He is a transitional
fi gure, caught in a hiatus between older, nostalgic accounts of national identity
and a newer, as yet uncomprehended, geopolitical order.
Fredric Jameson’s essay, “Modernism and Imperialism,” one of the earliest
attempts to point out the occluded structural connections between daily life and
empire in modernist texts, strikingly echoes the central trope of Th e Inheritors.⁸
Jameson sees the representational dilemma of early modernism as “the problem
of a global space that like the fourth dimension constitutively escapes you” (51).
Th is new global space, which corresponds to the emergent imperial world order
announced by the Berlin Conference of 1884, is, he argues, an “unrepresentable
totality.” It is this “unrepresentable” or “unthinkable” global space that allegedly
6 Journal of Modern Literature
motivates modernism’s well-documented fascination with the impersonal, dis-
junctive, and mobile gaze of the camera, what the essay calls “cinematographic
perception.” One of Jameson’s key assumptions—the imperial subject’s inability
to imagine the colonial life-world—sits uneasily with the wide dissemination
of popularized images of empire during the early modernist era (Chrisman).
Indeed, a central theme of the Ford-Conrad collaboration, I shall argue, is the
increasingly powerful role of the new mass media (especially print journalism)
in shaping the cultural and political meanings of empire for metropolitan audi-
ences. Impressionism’s emphasis on spatial disjunction, and on what Jameson
calls, in “Modernism and Imperialism,” “cinematographic perception,” can be
seen as a strategic response to new spaces of representation brought about by
the emergent mediated public sphere of the 1900s.
Although Jameson’s account of early modernism as a neurological pre-
dicament does not mention Freud, the latter’s analysis of the mechanisms of
traumatic neurosis arguably provides the key terms of his argument. Th e phrase
“unrepresentable totality” leads back to the Freudian analysis of shock via the
Lacanian category of the Real, used by Jameson in Th e Political Unconscious
(80–81) as a synonym for “History” as “absent cause.” Discussing Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan writes (55) that “the real [. . .] present[s]
itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it—in the form of the trauma
[. . .]”. For Lacan, trauma is internal to the symbolic order at its points of rup-
ture. In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trauma constitutes an economic
disturbance of the psychic apparatus, since it is the result of a failure to dispose
of excess stimuli. A “protective shield” (Reizschutz), in origin a crust “burnt z
onto” the surface of the mental apparatus, acts as a buff er allowing these stimuli
to be mentally assimilated. Once the stimulus shield has been breached, how-
ever, Freud writes, “there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental
apparatus from being fl ooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another
problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulation
which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they
can then be disposed of “(301).⁹
For Freud, shock experience engenders a dynamic of repetition, which
confounds received linear understandings of temporality. He points out that
the dreams of patients suff ering from traumatic neuroses repeat the situation
in which the trauma occurred. Th ese dreams, he writes, “are endeavouring to
master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omis-
sion was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” (304). Th e impact of traumatic
events on consciousness is marked by deferred action [Nachträglichkeit[[ ] and t
delay [Verspatung], which, as it were, incubate the trauma. Despite the often gg
viscerally somatic eff ects of traumatic neurosis, the originating traumatic event
remains notoriously elusive, being constituted retroactively. For Walter Ben-
jamin, famously, the disrupted and compulsive temporality of shock—what
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 7
he called Chockerfahrung—provided not only the keynote of modern urban
experience, but also a template for the experimental forms of modernism. In
the prewar texts with which I am concerned here, it is the micro-structure of
the literary “impression” itself, which registers this perverse temporal dynamic
in terms of a dialectic of visibility / invisibility, turning metropolitan perception
per se into a symptom.e
SUDDEN HOLES IN SPACE AND TIME
In Conrad’s Th e Secret Agent (1907), the time-space imaginary of global moder-t
nity, anchored in the imperial capital itself, appears intensely vulnerable to
actual and symbolic destabilization. Th e novel, inspired, according to the ret-
rospective “Author’s Note” (1920), by a chance conversation with Ford about
anarchist activities, relates an abortive attempt to blow up the Greenwich
Observatory (Conrad, Secret Agent xxxiii). Conrad writes that the book’s “wholet
course is suggested and centred around the absurd cruelty of the Greenwich
Park explosion” (xxxvi), an event that “could not be laid hold of mentally in any
way” (xxxiv). In 1884, the Prime Meridian Conference, held in Washington
D.C., adopted the Greenwich Meridian as the zero meridian, announcing the
global standardization of time. Th e Greenwich Observatory at once signals
the space-time compression of modernity and guarantees London’s pivotal
status as imperial “world city.” Th e novel is therefore paradoxically “centered”
on an event—the anarchistic attack on geopolitical space and time—that sig-
nals epistemological as well as ideological rupture. Its plot is organized non-
chronologically around the events of the day of the Greenwich explosion,
which do not themselves occur within narrative time but emerge retroactively.
Th is disturbed narrative temporality also informs the novel’s representation
of the object world through patterns of fragmentation, uncanny animation,
and reifi cation.
Many critics have seen the city as the true protagonist of Th e Secret Agent.¹⁰
In his “Author’s Note,” Conrad relates the novel’s presentation of the city to his
early experience of London, as a newly-arrived immigrant. “I had to fi ght hard
to keep at arms-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over
London in my early days,” he writes, “lest they should rush in and overwhelm
each page of the story as these emerged one after the other [. . .]” (xxxvii). Th e
memory of this fi rst encounter with the metropolis is presented as disturb-
ing, perhaps even traumatic, material that resists narrative plotting. Th ere are
echoes, too, of the cannibalistic tropes of Th e Soul of London: “the vision of
an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than
some continents and in its man-made might as if indiff erent to heaven’s frowns
and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light” (xxxvi). One of the city’s pre-
dominant symbolic markers, along with threatening formlessness, is darkness,
8 Journal of Modern Literature
expanding Marlow’s claim, at the opening of Heart of Darkness (1902), that s
London too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (29).
Th e dilemma presented by the city as “cruel devourer of the world’s light”
is coded in terms of visibility, or rather legibility: of reading and controlling
the centrifugal (and politically explosive) urban text. Urban space in the novel
is intimately tied up with the control of social disorder. Verloc, passing Hyde
Park on his way to the Russian Embassy, “survey[s] through the park railings
the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury” (12) and refl ects on the need
to protect the “hygienic idleness” of the upper classes against the “shallow
enviousness of unhygienic labour.” Th e “bloodshot” London sun, which “hung
[. . .] over Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance,”
signals the centrality to the novel of surveillance or the use of various kinds of
institutional “vigilance” to control the disruptive elements (both foreign and
domestic) harbored by the modern metropolis.¹¹ Th e mid-1880s, during which
the novel is set, saw a succession of terrorist attacks (by Irish Fenians), the irrup-
tion of working class unrest into the wealthy West End, and anxieties about
the infl ux of immigrants to the metropolis. Th e Martial Bourdin case of 1894,
upon which the plot of Th e Secret Agent is based, had exacerbated fears about t
the infi ltration of London by political refugees from the Continent; these fears
were revived in the Aliens Bills debates of 1904–05, coinciding with the novel’s
composition. During this period of unprecedented imperial expansionism, after
the Berlin Conference, Britain’s capital city appeared paradoxically vulnerable
to both external and internal subversion.
Conrad’s depiction of the city as devouring abyss recycles some aspects of
the “Darkest London” / urban jungle discourses that dominated journalistic
representations of the East End during the 1880s and 1890s (Greenslade 28,
Walkowitz 15–40). London is a “slimy aquarium,” menaced by primeval dis-
solution, and navigated by the bourgeois social investigator who “penetrates”
the city’s darkest reaches. However, its central location, Soho, in the heart of
London confounds the geographical and ideological polarities—West End /
East End, civilization / savagery—on which those discourses depended. Soho,
a locality associated with immigration, political anarchism, and the vice trade,
signals a nexus of concerns linking cosmopolitanism, national identity, and
sexual impurity (McLaughlin 139). Moreover, by 1907, the year of the book’s
publication, it was the suff ragette movement that posed the major threat of
urban unrest, a phenomenon some critics see prefi gured in the murderous
insurgency of Winnie Verloc (Sypher 27–48, Stott, Zimring). “Continental”
and domestic threats of “anarchy” form interrelated aspects of a single, global
dilemma. Th e fate of Verloc, the secret agent, murdered in his own home by his
wife, suggests the impossibility of keeping the apparently discrete space of the
family home immune from the interconnected, widening circles of the capital
city, nation, and empire.
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 9
Th e principle of panoptical visibility, which seeks to render space trans-
parent, is enshrined in the Greenwich Observatory and its creation of a newly
abstract geographical and geopolitical space. Yet Conrad’s modernist disloca-
tions of narrative temporality stress the fallibility of surveillance; the novel’s
central absence—the death of Stevie, which occurs outside the narration—sug-
gests its inability to prevent those “unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden
holes in space and time” which, the narrator remarks, occur in “the close-woven
stuff of relations between conspirator and police” (85). Urban maps, too, can
be subverted by the magical or phantasmagoric aspect of the city. When Ver-
loc crosses London to visit the Russian Embassy, the narrator comments on
the capital’s “topographical mysteries,” i.e. its numerically misplaced “strayed
houses” and streets. Th e panoptical and phantasmagoric principles are seem-
ingly opposed yet interdependent, a duality embodied in the fi gure of the
detective, whose knowledge of the city’s secret codes makes him an urban
anthropologist.
Modernist texts tend to shatter the boundaries between local and global
spaces by exoticizing or defamiliarizing the everyday life of the city. Th e urban
labyrinth of Th e Secret Agent is based, as Rod Edmond has argued, on a seriest
of analogies and correspondences between metropole and colony as pathogenic
environments. When Chief Inspector Heat is admitted to the Assistant Com-
missioner’s offi ce, he fi nds him “pen in hand, bent over a great table bestrewn
with papers, as if worshipping an enormous double inkstand of bronze and crys-
tal. Speaking tubes resembling snakes were tied by the heads to the back of the
Assistant Commissioner’s wooden armchair, and their gaping mouths seemed
ready to bite his elbows” (97). Metropolitan reliance on technology is satirized
as a fetishistic practice of the kind identifi ed with colonized cultures. Th e
appeal to the fetish as a signifi er of the “primitive” is itself radically unstable,
being a product, as William Pietz has argued, of the superposition of diff erent
local spaces and temporalities eff ected by imperialist activity abroad.
Espionage fi ction could be said to rewrite the imperial adventure story
within the closed space of the metropolis, as the scramble for imperial territory
mutates into Great Power confrontation (Coroneos 62). Th e interdependence
between the seemingly distinct spaces of metropole and colony is embodied in
the fi gure of the Assistant Commissioner, a senior policeman whose “career
had begun in a tropical colony” (99) where he had suppressed “secret societies
amongst the natives” (99). Rejecting deskbound offi cialdom for illicit hands-on
detective activity in the Greenwich case, he plays out a fantasy of “exploration”
or reversion to the colonial frontier. Th e novel’s reading, and writing, of urban
space is suspended between that of the displaced imperial administrator and
its inverse: the traumatic response of the mentally retarded Stevie, unwitting
perpetrator and victim of the Greenwich explosion.
10 Journal of Modern Literature
DISTURBING THE NATIONAL SPECTACLE
Stevie’s “peculiar” nature manifests itself as an extreme sensitivity to stimuli;
he seems to lack the “protective shield” that Freud proposes in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. In particular, he is insuffi ciently anesthetized to the shocks
of the urban, “easily diverted [. . .] by the comedies of the streets, which he
contemplated open-mouthed [. . .] or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose
pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek piercingly in a crowd,
which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of
the national spectacle” (9). Stevie’s role as shock-receptor is illustrated in the
cab ride episode, in which Winnie and Stevie accompany their mother to the
charity lodgings which she has previously secured. In the course of the cab ride,
Stevie causes a public commotion when, having begged the cabdriver in vain to
stop whipping the ailing horse, he dismounts from the cab. Th e episode models
the novel’s disturbed temporality; narrated in the interstices of the repeated
jolts of the cab journey, it depicts a state of suspended animation in which “time
itself seemed to stand still” (156).
Stevie’s backwardness, and his role as shock-receptor, situates him as a
metaphorical “primitive” in relation to metropolitan culture. He suff ers from
a gap between visual perception and language; yet he is, as many critics have
noted, a parodic artist, as well as anarchist, fi gure. His role in the novel cor-
responds to one account of impressionism as positing a “primitive eye” that
“represents an initial sense impression before the observer organizes it into
a meaning that accords with past experience” (Peters 37). Stevie’s response
to stimuli is mimetic; his traumatic response to the urban environment is
manifested in bodily agitation, jerks, and stuttering. Th e cab ride episode stages
his identifi cation with pain and suff ering, or “convulsive sympathy” (167).
Th is mimetic behaviour symbolically disrupts the homogenizing rationality of
capitalism, as embodied in the “national spectacle” of the capital city.¹²
Stevie metaphorically unites the attributes of the child and the “native,”
an association commonplace in turn-of-the-century evolutionary anthropol-
ogy (Bivona 78). One of the anarchists, Comrade Ossipon, classifi es the boy
as a degenerate “type,” citing the taxonomic “science” of Cesare Lombroso.¹³
Coded as at once racially backward and childishly innocent, he becomes the
pseudo-sacrifi cial victim of the botched Greenwich bombing. Th e explosion
plot signals the problem of the “binding” (in Freud’s sense) and disposal of
destructive energies at work in the international body politic, which are repa-
triated to London, as the acknowledged nerve-centre of an expanding empire.
Far from being purged by Stevie’s death, however, these energies continue to
reverberate, both psychically and materially, in the text, producing murder
(Verloc), suicide (Winnie), and madness (Ossipon).
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 11
Th e Secret Agent’s interest in trauma as a possible mode of reading and
writing the imperial city manifests itself in the phenomenology of everyday
life, through patterns of uncanny animation and automatization. Apparently
meaningless or random details are frequently invested with a quasi-magical
signifi cance through repetition; for example, the Professor’s spectacles, with
their sinister “glitter” (67), Verloc’s hat, which in the aftermath of the murder
scene, becomes an “ominous object” (285), or the pianola in the Silenus Res-
taurant, which punctuates the conversation of Ossipon and the Professor in
Chapter IV with random outbursts of music. Uncanny animation of objects
goes hand-in-hand with an automatization of the human; Verloc, Winnie,
Ossipon, and other characters increasingly exhibit mechanical, trancelike, or
somnambulistic behaviour. Th ese eff ects are proto-cinematic; as Keith Cohen
remarks of the cinematic medium itself, “both subject and object simply occupy
diff erent (and variable) positions along a continuum of artifi cially produced
representation” (109).
Conrad’s impressionist privileging of the visual detail has itself been seen
as a form of autonomization. As Fredric Jameson points out with reference to
Lord Jim, the Conradian text seeks to generate its own “sensorium,” leading
to a fragmentation of the objects of perception (rpt. in Carabine 596–635).
In Th e Secret Agent, one such “impressionist” moment occurs as the narrator t
tracks the Assistant Commissioner’s movements around Soho in the course of
his detective work:
Brett Street was not very far away. It branched off , narrow, from the side of an
open, triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious houses, temples of
petty commerce emptied of traders for the night. Only a fruiterer’s stall at the
corner made a violent blaze of light and colour. Beyond all was black, and the
few people passing in that direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing
heaps of oranges and lemons. No footsteps echoed. Th ey would never be heard of
again. Th e adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these
disappearances from a distance with an interested eye. He felt light-hearted, as
though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away
from departmental desks and offi cial inkstands. (150)
Th e apparently random detail of the oranges and lemons on the fruiterer’s stall
forms the highly charged focal point of the scene. Abstracted from its material
context, and luminously projected against a background of engulfi ng darkness,
it is endowed with a magical persistence, in contrast to the pedestrians who
“vanish[] at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and lemons.” It
recurs when Winnie and Ossipon pass the stall later that evening; the narra-
tor notes that “the fruiterer at the corner had put out the blazing glory of his
oranges and lemons, and Brett Place was all darkness, [. . .]” (273). When
12 Journal of Modern Literature
Verloc’s role in the explosion is revealed, he muses on the unforeseen but cata-
strophic eff ect of the “small, tiny fact” (236) of Winnie’s labelling of Stevie’s coat
with his name and address: “It was like slipping on a bit of orange peel in the
dark and breaking your leg” (263). Th e impression “ambushes” the spectator /
reader when (s)he least expects it. It has a perversely temporalized or uncanny
structure, resembling that of the afterimage or visual trace, which prevents the
eye from being overwhelmed with blackness.
Th e Conradian impression, then, appears to be based upon a defensive
persistence of vision; concentration on the isolated visual detail averts a trau-
matic overwhelming of the spectator by the abysmal city. Th is tactic is clearly
marked by late 19t century discourses of urban “degeneration.” Indeed, for
the bourgeois urban explorer, in the person of the Assistant Commissioner
(“the adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department”), what is at issue
is, unambiguously, the control and surveillance of space, bringing about an
imaginary convergence of metropole and colony. His “interested eye” inscribes
the uncanny object world of the metropolis within what Jan Mohamed calls
the Manichean narrative of imperial adventure romance (“as though he had
been ambushed all alone in a jungle”). Th e impressionist “eye”/I, conversely,
both asserts and denies this convergence. It grasps metropolitan modernity
precisely as a technology of visual representation contingent upon certain
traumatic exclusions or modalities of non-seeing. Conrad’s concern with the
isolated visual impression as a mode of processing an otherwise threatening
and unassimilable urban space signals a wider cognitive and indeed historical
dilemma. Th e technological shattering at the centre of the novel—and its nar-
rative mediation—marks the fate of the body within the global perspective of
modernity.
A TALE OF MAIMING AND KILLING
In Imperialism: A Study (1902), a text crucial to turn-of-the-century debates y
about Britain’s role in the post-Berlin Conference world order, the Liberal
commentator J.A. Hobson argued that empire served as a safety valve for
capitalism. It did so by exporting both surplus population and surplus capital,
thereby averting domestic revolutionary upheaval. Th e colonies, that is, absorb
the home country’s otherwise destabilizing productive surplus. Daniel Bivona,
paraphrasing Hobson’s argument, refers to an “economy of the supplement”
(114) underlying empire.¹⁴ Espionage fi ction can be read as negotiating the ⁴
explosive, indeed catastrophic, potential of this destabilizing surplus, which
returns in the guise of “anarchy” to the metropolis. Made explicit by the exoti-
cist fantasies of the Assistant Commissioner, who sees urban space in terms
of imperial exploration, it fi nds its sacrifi cial representative in Stevie, who, as
I have already argued, is metaphorically aligned with the “native,” and whose
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 13
mutilated “remains,” left over from the explosion, provide the indecipherable
evidence through which Heat (and the reader) must piece together events.
What is excluded at the level of metropolitan perception returns elsewhere
in the text as the literal carnage produced by the explosion. Chapter Five, in
which Inspector Heat examines Stevie’s “mangled remains” (86) as forensic
evidence, confronts both Heat and the reader with a visceral materiality of
destruction. Th e spectacle of the dismembered body is reiterated at various
points in the novel, with, as Steven Arata puts it, “a brutal insistence” (174). It
is likened to “an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast” (Conrad,
Th e Secret Agent 86), and a “heap of mixed things that seemed to have been
collected in shambles and rag shops” (87); the Chief Inspector is compared
to “an indigent customer bending over what may be called the by-products of
a butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner” (88). Stevie’s
“mangled remains” generate a dilemma of naming; “the shattering violence
of destruction which had made that body a heap of nameless fragments” (87)
gives rise to a crisis of the relationship between whole and part, a metonymic,
dissociative energy that circulates through the text. What Rod Edmond calls
“the body-in-pieces” (49) moves along an unstable metaphoric chain from “can-
nibal feast” to the byproducts of a butcher’s shop. It shuttles between the realms
of waste and salvage, the raw and the cooked, the “exotic” and the domestic,
tracing a perverse circuit of production and consumption, which links the
metropolis with the absent space of the colony.
In Th e Secret Agent, the catastrophic destruction of the “primitive” body ist
caught up within a metropolitan dialectic of visibility and invisibility. Con-
rad’s repeated return to the scene of Stevie’s mangled remains—the “cannibal
feast”—rhetorically extends the meanings of shock beyond the Greenwich
explosion to a refl ection on modernity as a global culture of destruction. Th e
“cannibal feast” is a highly ambiguous metaphor for that process. Cannibal-
ism, as trope and topos, has lent itself, historically, to both imperialist and
anti-imperialist discourse; it haunts Western representations of capitalism (and
indeed of the modern city) as well as of colonized peoples (Phillips). It is, of
course, central to the narrative of degeneration in Heart of Darkness (1901),s
ambiguously suspended between the subversion of empire’s civilizing mission
and a racist metaphysics of African “evil.”¹⁵ Conrad uses cannibalism to signal
what Phillips calls the “primitivism of progress” (186), a theme crucial to turn-
of-the century debates about the morality of imperialism. Hobson’s Imperial-
ism, published in 1902, between the publication of Heart of Darkness ands Th e
Secret Agent, stressed imperialism’s regressive and atavistic character and saw t
it as a catalyst for war. In Th e Secret Agent, the cannibal feast—and the larger t
thematic of modernity as barbarism—is explicitly brought home to the metrop-
olis, where it deforms the nature of metropolitan perception and aesthetic
representation.
14 Journal of Modern Literature
In the unstable metaphoric chain of association precipitated by Stevie’s
remains, the cannibal feast is contiguous with the urban slaughterhouse. Dan-
iel Pick has pointed out the links between the mechanization of death in
the slaughterhouse from the 1860s onwards and the emergence of modern
industrialized war. In the article “Autocracy and War” (1905), published in
the Fortnightly Review, Conrad off ers his own contribution to the topos of s
inevitable war which had developed in the wake of the 1884 Berlin Confer-
ence and the intensifi ed imperial scramble for overseas territory. His essay
starts with an eloquent denunciation of the human toll of the Russian-Japanese
confl ict of 1904–05 and develops into a more general attack on the violence of
capitalist and imperial modernity. It is dominated by the image of the fragile
human body at the mercy of military technology, “hurled across space, amazed,
without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim” (88), only to end in
“vast heaps of mangled corpses” (99). Anticipating an even more catastrophic
confl ict, he mourns the “generations” that “fi ll the ditches and cover the fi elds
of Manchuria with their torn limbs” (86–87). However, Conrad’s panoramic
vision of a Europe about to be plunged into widespread violence fi nds the pre-
cipitating causes not merely in Russian autocracy—his most obvious target—or
in German militarism, but also in the scramble for territorial possessions in
Africa by the Great Powers. War, the essay argues, has become an “institution”
(107), the inevitable outcome of the expansionism upon which the identity
of modern European states, autocratic and democratic alike, is increasingly
predicated.
In “Autocracy and War,” Conrad sees mass journalism as playing a crucial
role in the formation of this national and international culture of destruction.
Militarism is nurtured by the popular press, with its “weary platitudes,” and
“conventional expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing” (3):
An overworked horse falling in front of our window, a man writhing under a
cartwheel in the street, awaken more genuine emotion, more horror, pity and
indignation than the stream of reports, appalling in their monstrosity, of tens of
thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other
tens of thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen
ground, fi lling the fi eld hospitals [. . .] (84)
In Conrad’s illustrative vignette, the detail of the overworked horse falling in
the street—which also forms the centrepiece of the cab ride episode in Th e Secret
Agent—serves as both displacement and symptom of the horrors of distant war
within metropolitan consciousness. Newspapers desensitize their readers to
the horrors of war, while “preaching [. . .] the gospel of the mystic sanctity of
[war’s] sacrifi ces, and the regenerating power of spilt blood” (110). Th e Jingoist
response to the Boer War had recently revealed the extent to which this “gos-
pel” undergirds the collective imaginary of both imperialism and war. Conrad
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 15
warns that the removal of the “sights and sounds of battlefi elds away from our
doorstep someday [. . .] must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly
unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy” (110).
For Conrad and Ford, metropolitan anesthesia is a function of a culture
marked by ever more highly developed powers of mass communication and
technological destruction alike.¹⁶ Th e Inheritors dwells on the complicity of thes
press, and of the metropolitan intelligentsia more generally, with imperialism;
newspapers in Th e Secret Agent invariably give a distorted or inadequate account t
of the events they relate. Th e repeated return to the gruesome and sensationalist
scene of Stevie’s mangled remains (the product of an event nowhere directly
represented in the novel) can be seen as a symptom of this technologically-
driven dialectic of closeness and distance, carnage and media representation.
Th e only discourse not implicated in the collective imaginary of imperialism
is Stevie’s “convulsive,” inarticulate response to cruelty, which disturbs the
“enjoyment of the national spectacle.” Th e impact of temporally and spatially
removed violence on the construction of metropolitan sensory experience poses
questions of the ethics of narrative (and ultimately of historical) mediation.
Shortly before she stabs her husband, the stunned Winnie Verloc, who has just
overheard the news of her beloved younger brother Stevie’s death, struggles to
make sense of it:
Greenwich Park. A park! Th at’s where the boy was killed. A park—smashed
branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly fl esh and bone, all spouting up
together in the manner of a fi rework. She remembered now what she had heard,
and she remembered it pictorially. Th ey had to gather him up with the shovel.
Trembling all over with irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very imple-
ment with its ghastly load scraped up from the ground. Mrs. Verloc closed her
eyes desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where after a
rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended
alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display. Mrs. Verloc
opened her eyes. (260).
Th e imagined recreation of the carnage of the explosion comes as the
solution to a series of gaps in Winnie’s memory; Verloc “had taken poor Stevie
away from home to kill him somewhere. Mrs. Verloc could not remember
exactly where” (250); “the man [. . .] had taken Stevie out from under her very
eyes to murder him in a locality whose name was at the moment not present to
her memory” (256). When Verloc mentions Greenwich Park, these narrative
lacunae are belatedly supplied by a series of “pictorial,” fl ashlike images, whiche
retrospectively and vicariously act out the scene of Stevie’s death. Winnie’s
shock has a literalizing force, as she catastrophically relives the dismember-
ing, and forensic re-membering, of Stevie’s body: “Th ey had to gather him up
with the shovel.” Yet this traumatic re-living is at second hand, based on an
16 Journal of Modern Literature
overheard conversation between her husband and Chief Inspector Heat. Th e
event itself, as I have already mentioned, does not take place in narrative time,
and so remains absent; it is reported by others, and the newspapers carry
a report of the explosion before Winnie learns of it. Shortly after Winnie’s
enlightenment, she is depicted as abstractedly tearing in half the sporting
section of a newspaper in her hand.
Winnie’s “vision” of Stevie’s death is described in proto-cinematic terms
as both visceral and disembodied. It is sequenced in terms of the physiology of
the viewing eye: “Mrs. Verloc closed her eyes desperately, throwing upon that
vision the night of her eyelids.” Like the description of the fruiterer’s stall, the
passage is dominated by the idea of projection against an engulfi ng darkness.
Here, however, cinematic sequencing works to sublimate the carnage of the
body-in-pieces into a “pyrotechnic display.” Th e hallucinatory, disembodied
head which “linger[s]” in Winnie’s consciousness is part of that metonymic
dilemma, of the relation of whole to part, which was fi rst violently realized
in the spectacle of Stevie’s remains as they confronted the investigator. It is a
dilemma that preoccupies the novel at many levels, including that of textual
production; the spectacular or techno-medial return of the body-in-pieces
moralizes the workings of metropolitan perception.
If literary impressionism, for Conrad and Ford, seems to off er a partial
solution to the instability of the imagined boundaries of the metropolis in the
pre-1914 era, it also turns out to be part of the problem. Both writers tend to
reframe the degenerationist descent into the urban abyss as a question of the
representability, and readability, of the capital city itself as a signifi er of national
identity. Whereas Th e Soul of London poses this question as a dilemma of de-
scription or of setting boundaries, Th e Inheritors does so in the science-fi ctional s
terms of incompatible “planes” of reality. Th e Secret Agent, meanwhile, pushes t
the logic of metropolitan perception to its limits in the uncanny overdetermi-
nation of the detail. Th is narrative uncanniness is embedded in a moment of
catastrophic expenditure which forcibly brings together global and “domestic”
events, and which is itself disseminated as news.
Conrad and Ford therefore encode the “imperial economy of the supple-
ment” (Bivona) as a constitutive “blind spot” within metropolitan perception,
one bound up, ironically enough, with the increasingly fetishized status of the
visual image in impressionist and protomodernist aesthetics. Th e “impression”
can “bind” the traumatogenic energies of modernity only at the expense of the
absent, racially marked and colonized body. Th is body-in-pieces, in its brutal
facticity, is, above all, a traumatic remainder, an unassimilable excess which
shapes the modernist textual moment as an alternation of vision and blind-
ness. Trauma’s shattered perspective draws together the military, imperial, and
technologically mass-mediated dimensions of modernity, as aspects of a single
perverse economy.
Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis 17
Notes
1. See, for example, Schivelbusch, Lerner and Micale, Porter and Gijswijt. Although the terms
“shock” and “trauma” (and its cognates) are not interchangeable, I have chosen to alternate selectively
between them, not only because the history of both terms suggests that they cannot be entirely dis-
tinguished, but also because the physiological / mental ambiguity is itself crucial to shock discourse.
On the distinction between shock and trauma in the context of debates about modernism, see
Armstrong.
2. See, for example, Cohen; Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus; Marcus; McCabe.
3. See also Crary’s infl uential earlier study, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century.
4. See, for example, Parry, Brantlinger, Gogwilt, Fincham and Hooper, and Fincham.
5. See also Ford, “On Impressionism” 167–75. Scholarship in this area has been dominated by the
phenomenological tradition, most infl uentially in Ian Watt’s analysis of “delayed decoding” in Conrad
in the Nineteenth Century. See also Levenson, Bender, and Peters.
6. See also Saunders 118–19. On the novel’s thematic links with Heart of Darkness, see Glover
29–43.
7. For a discussion of previous examples of scientifi c romance, including Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland
(1884), C.H. Hinton’s Scientifi c Romances (1884–96), and H.G. Wells’ss Th e Time Machine (1895), seee
Seed, “Introduction,” xx–xxiv.
8. On modernism and imperialism, see also Booth and Rigby; Parry, “Tono-Bungay.”
9. On Lacanian trauma see also Verhaegher. On the links between Freudian trauma and cinematic
temporality, see Doane.
10. See, for example, Arac 69–82; Rignall, 137–51; Moore; Fleishman.
11. Th e novel’s events are set in 1886, the year in which rioting in Hyde Park reprised the earlier riots
of 1866, and a year before pitched battles with police in Trafalgar Square. For an excellent analysis
of this passage, see Spittles 115–38. On the 1880s, see Walkowitz 15–40.
12. On mimetic behaviour as a persistent theme within anthropological narratives of encounters with
non-Western or colonized cultures, see Taussig.
13. On the novel’s references to degeneration, see Greenslade 114–19, and Ray.
14. For the impact on Heart of Darkness of contemporary press reports of cannibalism in the Congo, dur-s
ing the 1891–94 war between Leopold’s forces and the Arab slave traders, see Brantlinger 259–63.
15. Conrad’s disillusioned view of journalism, and its collusion with the imperial enterprise, dates
back to the 1880s. On his response to the popular journalist-explorer Henry Stanley, see Rubery.
16. Compare Lindquist 77, on the role of military technology in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898:
“the men representing ‘civilization’ out in the colonies were ‘invisible’ not only in the sense that their
guns killed at a distance, but also in that no one at home really knew what they were doing.”
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