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ABSTRACT
This article approaches Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) as an epistemologically Janus-faced text that retrospectively parodies the material-empiricist worldview of scientific naturalism while also anticipating the absolute limits of knowledge dealt with in quantum physics. While the novel depicts the sensationalism and pervasive influence of scientific naturalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Conrad uses such characterisations to implicitly critique the movement as a systemic cultural and epistemological form of imperialism. His reaction to scientific naturalism and its position in society, however, causes him to confront the existence and influence of things that are completely beyond the human capacity to know. In rebuffing the growing cultural authority of science in The Secret Agent, Conrad establishes a narrative framework for understanding the collapse of Victorian scientific epistemologies and probes the possibility of artistically representing a revolutionary form of knowledge centred on that which cannot be known.
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Notes
1 Conrad, “Author’s Note,” 228.
2 Ibid., 229.
3 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 23. Subsequent citations from this source are given parenthetically in text.
4 For two full-length monographs on Conrad’s relationship with Darwinian evolution, see Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism; and O’Hanlon, Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin. For specific analyses of evolutionary degeneracy, including the influence of Cesare Lombroso, in The Secret Agent, see Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, 248, 260; Jacobs, “Comrade Ossipon’s Favourite Saint”; Saveson, Joseph Conrad, 117–36; Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism, 153–219; Ray, “Conrad, Nordau, and Other Degenerates”; and Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 88–119. Scholars addressing causality and determinism in the novel include Peters, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time”; Whitworth, “Things Fall Apart”; and Attridge, “Two Types of Secret Agency”.
5 See, for example, Lester, Conrad and Religion.
6 Watts, Preface to Conrad, 7.
7 Besides Darwinism and related discourses, scholars have explored Conrad’s engagement with thermodynamics and the second law of entropy. See Houen, “The Secret Agent”; Whitworth, “Things Fall Apart”; and Clark, “A Tale Told by Stevie”. For a broad analysis of Conrad’s relationship with popular culture, see Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture. Studies that focus on Conrad’s disapproval of the sensationalism of popular culture include Donovan, “Prosaic Newspaper Stunts”; and Rubery, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Wild Story of a Journalist’”. For a discussion of this topic dealing specifically with The Secret Agent, see Nohrnberg, “‘I Wish He’d Never Been to School’”. For sources on Conrad’s cynicism of absolute forms of knowledge, see Wollaeger, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism; Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision; and Schnauder, Free Will and Determinism.
8 Attridge, “Two Types of Secret Agency,” 126.
9 Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman provide an overview of the complexities surrounding the use of “scientific naturalism” and “scientific naturalists” as historical categories. While these terms are not inaccurate, “their shifting and overdetermined original meanings” should be acknowledged (Dawson and Lightman, Introduction to Victorian Scientific Naturalism, 9).
10 Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 131.
11 A solid body of research has emerged to address the popularization of scientific naturalism and Victorian science generally, especially in print. See Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context; Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical; Cantor and Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialised; and Lightman, Victorian Popularisers.
12 Webb, My Apprenticeship, 130–1.
13 Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 146.
14 Ibid., 182.
15 Ibid., 182.
16 20 Dec. 1897, CL, vol. 1: 425.
17 2 Aug. 1901, CL, vol. 2: 348.
18 Letter to Warrington Dawson, 20 June 1913, CL, vol. 5: 238.
19 Letter to Algernon Methuen, 7 Nov. 1906, CL, vol. 3: 371.
20 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 162–5; Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, 249–50; and Levine, “Paradox”.
21 Huxley, “On the Advisableness,” 25.
22 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 159, 161.
23 Lightman, Victorian Popularisers, 353–421.
24 For an overview of the importance of pure mathematics to scientific naturalism, see Turner, Between Science and Religion, 25–8.
25 Tyley, “Time and Space in The Secret Agent”; Hama, “Time as Power”; Peters, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time”; Barrows, “The Shortcomings of Timetables”; and Bernstein, “‘No Audible Tick’”. For a more general cultural study of time during the late nineteenth century, see Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 1–108.
26 Barrows, “‘The Shortcomings of Timetables’,” 263.
27 Conroy, “The Panoptical City”; and Mosely, Jr., “The Vigilant Society”.
28 Schnauder, Free Will and Determinism, 219.
29 Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 248–83.
30 Letter to Algernon Methuen, 7 Nov. 1906, CL, vol. 3: 371.
31 A few of their most prominent opponents included Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, William Gladstone, Reverend Henry Wace, and Bishop William C. Magee.
32 For a thorough account of the importance of objectivity to the scientific naturalists and their moral views, see Levine, Dying to Know.
33 Huxley, “On the Advisableness,” 31–2.
34 Dewitt, Moral Authority, 21.
35 Ibid., 34.
36 A few of the most important venues for them were the Fortnightly Review (f. 1865), the Contemporary Review (f. 1866), and the Nineteenth Century (1877).
37 1 Sept. 1923, CL, vol. 8: 165.
38 Letter to Gordon Gardiner, 8 Oct. 1923, CL, vol. 8: 191.
39 Conrad, “Author’s Note,” 228.
40 Although Michaelis may be more accurately described as a cultural materialist rather than a scientific materialist, the social and natural sciences were often linked in the late nineteenth century, and the scientific naturalists actively encouraged the public to see them as such. The materialist aspects of his character may therefore be viewed from both perspectives, especially considering Conrad’s engagement with scientific materialism in the novel.
41 Glendening, Evolutionary Imagination, 146.
42 Huxley, “Prolegomena,” 13.
43 Ibid., 35.
44 Whitworth, “Things Fall Apart,” 72.
45 As John Stuart Mill put it, “In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances.” (Mill, “Nature”, 28)
46 Tyndall, “Science and Man,” 372.
47 Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 275.
48 Letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 20 Dec. 1897, CL, vol. 1: 425.
49 Conrad is perhaps doing so in response to the textile industrialist William Morris, whom he mentions thinking about three days after he wrote the knitting-machine letter. (Letter to Edward Garnett, 23 Dec. 1897, CL, vol. 1: 428)
50 11 Oct. 1906, CL, vol. 3: 365.
51 8 May 1907, CL, vol. 3: 437.
52 Peters, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time,” 420.
53 Plotnitsky, Knowable and the Unknowable, 1.
54 Ibid., xiii.
55 Conrad, “Author’s Note”, 232.
56 Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, 267.
57 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms “particle” and “force” in 1907 were associated with science generally and physics particularly in much the same way as they are today (OED, s.vv. “particle” and “force”). Whether Conrad is consciously making this connection is unclear, but the terms nevertheless contribute to the scientific nature of the scene.
58 During the Victorian era, ether was the imagined material medium spread throughout the universe that was supposedly necessary for the propagation of light. Although it was not specific to scientific naturalism, ether was a pillar supporting this worldview because it enabled the empirical observation that produced knowledge. Huxley, for example, summarizes sight as the result of when “vibrations of the luminiferous ether of a certain character fall upon the retina.” (Huxley, “Science and Morals”, 122) In addition to believing that ether facilitated the production of knowledge, the scientific naturalist also used the concept of ether to complete their mechanistic model of the universe. Tyndall describes “an all-pervading ether” whose invisible billows “can be measured with the same ease and certainty as that which an engineer measures a base and two angles, and from these finds the distance across the Thames.” (Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” 293)
59 Barrows, “The Shortcomings of Timetables,” 267.
60 Peters, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time,” 420.