The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Conrad · a novel in thirteen chapters, subtitled A Simple Tale · first a shorter serial in Ridgway’s, a New York weekly, 1906 to 1907 · scored on the book text published by Methuen in September 1907, in Conrad’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The anarchist and spy novel turned into domestic tragedy and black farce, under one irony that never breaks
Mythos
The sacrifice of the innocent, an Isaac with no ram; the holy fool; the city as monster; death walking in the street; each built and then undercut
Phase
Some weeks in London, scrambled in the telling: the commission, a leap past the explosion to its aftermath, a return to the weeks before it, then forward to the murder, the flight and a coda some days later
Presentation
Prose fiction in thirteen chapters, dedicated to H. G. Wells; a shorter serial in Ridgway’s (1906 to 1907), enlarged for the book published by Methuen in September 1907
Register
An even, mocking, exact irony, held without a change of voice from the comedy of the Home Office to the knife on the sofa
Scale
One family, one shop and one bomb, joined to an embassy, the police, the Home Office and the revolutionaries of a city
Governing Proposition
A secret agent who keeps a shop in London is set by a foreign embassy to stage an outrage against science, and the bomb kills his wife’s simple brother, whom he led to it. The wager of the novel is that the matter of the anarchist thriller, told with one cold irony that spares no one and with its central event withheld, can disclose two truths at once: that terror is a performance staged against what a society holds sacred, and that a household can live for years sealed in an incomprehension that ends at a knife.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The subtitle is A Simple Tale, and the irony begins there. Mr Verloc keeps a small shop in London. He is married to Winnie, and the household holds her mother and her brother Stevie, a simple boy in her care. Verloc is also a secret agent, in the pay of a foreign embassy, and the revolutionaries of the city meet in his parlour. He is fat and idle, and the narrator records his indolence with the same even exactness it will give to everything else in the book, the ministers and the police included.
In the second chapter he is called to the embassy, and Mr Vladimir gives him a commission. An outrage is wanted, and Mr Vladimir has a theory of it: the blow should fall not on persons but on science, the fetish of the age, and the target is to be the observatory at Greenwich, the meridian, time itself. Terror, on this theory, is a performance staged for an audience and aimed at what a society holds sacred. The theory names the logic of the modern attack on symbols a century before it became the subject of the newspapers, and it is spoken by the representative of a state. The embassy that provokes the outrage is the book’s first disclosure, and the interview is one of its set pieces, Vladimir’s wit against Verloc’s bulk.
The source was a real event. On 15 February 1894 Martial Bourdin, a young French anarchist, was killed by his own bomb in Greenwich Park, near the Royal Observatory. Conrad set his tale in London in the last decades of the century. A shorter version ran as a serial in Ridgway’s, a New York weekly, in 1906 to 1907; Conrad enlarged the book substantially for volume publication, chiefly in the chapters that belong to Winnie, and Methuen published it in September 1907, in thirteen chapters, dedicated to H. G. Wells. That book text is the work scored here. The Author’s Note that Conrad added for the collected edition of 1920 is context. The English is Conrad’s own, his third language.
Movement II
The revolutionaries meet in Verloc’s parlour in the third chapter: Michaelis, Karl Yundt and Comrade Ossipon. They are lazy, vain and kept. Yundt’s rage is toothless, and Ossipon is a seducer. The narrator gives them the same cold attention it gives the embassy. The novel has inherited the anarchist plot of the popular fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, and its conspirators are a comedy: the first sign of the turn it is making on that inheritance.
Stevie, meanwhile, is drawing: “circles, circles, circles”, a rendering of cosmic chaos. It is the book’s one image of the cosmos, and it is drawn by the one person in the house whom nobody hears. Stevie is the holy fool of the book: his compassion is its only goodness. The drawing is set down and left; the book does not explain it, and the irony that deflates every other figure leaves this one standing.
Then the book leaps. The fourth chapter opens after the explosion, with the Professor and Ossipon at the Silenus. The Professor carries a bomb in his pocket and keeps his hand on the india-rubber ball that would set it off; he is alone uncorrupted, a nihilist of pure will, and death walks the streets with him. Ossipon has the newspaper: a man has been blown to pieces in Greenwich Park. The explosion itself is never narrated. It is a hole at the centre of the book, and from this chapter on the reader knows what the household in the shop does not.
Movement III
Chief Inspector Heat looks at what was gathered up in the park, laid out on a table at the hospital. Among the remains is a scrap of cloth with an address on it: a label sewn into a coat. The label is the hinge of the plot. It will take Heat to the shop, and the reader, who knows only that a man was killed, has been given a clue whose meaning the household will learn last. The scene is one of the book’s set pieces, and the narrator holds it in the same even voice as the comedy before it.
The police, in this book, live in a trade with those they hunt. Heat has his informers and his professional vanity. Above him the Assistant Commissioner takes up the case for reasons of his own: he means to protect Michaelis and his wife’s patroness. It is a thin thread for so much weight. Whether the Assistant Commissioner is a better man than Heat is one of the questions the book leaves open; his relative decency sits a little apart from the law of incomprehension that governs everyone else.
The Assistant Commissioner goes to the Home Office, to Sir Ethelred, the great man who wants only to be spared details, and into the comedy of Toodles. The state’s indifference is half of what the book has to disclose, and these chapters are required by it. They also run longer than the argument needs, and some of their dialogue is stiff. The farce of the minister’s room is not a holiday from the book’s law but an instance of it: the irony that measures Sir Ethelred is the irony that will measure the parlour.
Movement IV
The eighth chapter goes back across the weeks before the explosion. Winnie’s mother removes herself to an almshouse, and goes there in a cab, with Stevie. The horse is starved and the cabman maimed, and Stevie is in anguish. He finds the plain words: “Bad world for poor people”. It is the one plain truth spoken in the book, and no one listens to it. The cab ride is among the great scenes of pity in English fiction, and it is also a working part: it removes the last person between Winnie and Verloc.
Stevie goes to stay at Michaelis’s cottage, and the label that will bring Heat to the shop is sewn into his coat. Then the morning comes when Verloc takes him out, towards Greenwich. Stevie follows the man he trusts as a father; the sacrifice of the innocent is the one archetype the book builds to bear its full weight, an Isaac with no ram. Because the reader already knows what is on the table at the hospital, these chapters of Stevie alive are unbearable in a way no telling in order could make them. The form is the knowledge.
The marriage was made as a bargain, Winnie’s body for Stevie’s safety, by a woman who has made it her rule not to look too far into things. On the evening of the explosion Verloc talks. For pages he sets out his own grievance; his wife hears only that Stevie is dead. It is two monologues and no dialogue, and it is the book’s domestic disclosure in one scene: each person in the shop lives sealed in an incomprehension of the others.
Movement V
Verloc lies on the sofa and calls his wife to him. She comes with the knife. He sees it descend, slowly enough to know what it is. Afterwards, in the still room, Winnie hears a ticking and takes it for the clock; it is the blood dripping from the sofa onto the floor. The murder is the book’s summit, and it is rendered in the same even voice that gave the comedy of Toodles: the irony, without changing its register, has become the vehicle of horror. The farce and the blood obey one rule.
Winnie flees into the streets. She meets Ossipon, and Ossipon finds the body; the boat train follows, required in fact and dilated in the telling. Her death follows, and a coda some days later. The book ends with the Professor, who walks off “like a pest in the street full of men”: the one figure who never compromised, carrying his death through the crowd. The last height is black and cold, and it is the book’s last word on the city.
The book failed with readers and reviewers in 1907, when Conrad badly needed a success, and was charged with sordidness and with disrespect to its subject. Leavis raised it in The Great Tradition (1948) to the first rank of Conrad’s work, and it has been continuously present since. Conrad made a stage version in 1922; Hitchcock filmed it as Sabotage (1936), and Christopher Hampton in 1996. Greene took it as a model for his entertainments, and Ambler and le Carré inherit its premise that the secret services and their enemies are one trade. After 2001 a wide public came back to it as the novel that had already understood terror as spectacle.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds the domestic plot whole. The mother’s cab ride to the almshouse removes the last person between Winnie and Verloc and gives Stevie his scene with the cabman’s horse; Stevie’s stay with Michaelis makes the label sewn into his coat, and the label is how Chief Inspector Heat traces the body to the shop. Mr Vladimir’s commission sets the engine going, and the Professor has the last word. The test bites in the official world. The Assistant Commissioner’s visits to Sir Ethelred and the comedy of Toodles carry the state’s indifference, which is half the subject, but they run longer than the argument needs, and his motive, the protection of Michaelis and of his wife’s patroness, is a thin thread for so much weight. Winnie and Ossipon on the boat train are required, and dilated.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is double. The political half: terror is a performance staged for an audience and aimed at what a society holds sacred. Mr Vladimir’s theory, that the blow should fall on science, the fetish of the age, at the observatory at Greenwich, names the logic of the modern attack on symbols a century before the newspapers made it their subject. The revolutionaries are lazy, vain and kept, the police live in a trade with those they hunt, and the embassy that provokes the outrage is a state. The domestic half carries the force: a marriage made as a bargain, Winnie’s body for Stevie’s safety, in a house where each person is sealed from the others. Stevie’s “Bad world for poor people” is the one plain truth spoken, by the one person no one hears. Held below the top because the domestic truth is told elsewhere in the realist novel, and the political one is stated in the official chapters more than discovered by the action.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The register is ironic and cold, held down on purpose, and elevation comes as dread and as a terrible pity, in a handful of places. The cab ride to the almshouse, with the starved horse, the maimed cabman and Stevie’s anguish, is among the great scenes of pity in English fiction. The murder is the summit: Verloc on the sofa, the knife, the slow descent he has time to see, and after it the ticking that Winnie takes for the clock and that is the blood dripping from the sofa. Her flight, Ossipon’s discovery of the body and the Professor walking off “like a pest in the street full of men” rise to a black grandeur. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between these heights the book is flat and sardonic by design, and they come less often than in the great tragic novels.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Myth is built in part and held at an ironic distance. One structure bears full weight: the sacrifice of the innocent, Stevie led to his death by the father figure he trusts, an Isaac with no ram; and Stevie is the holy fool whose compassion is the book’s only goodness. Around it stand the city as monster, a London of fog and dark that devours its light, and the Professor as death walking, the bomb in his pocket and his hand on the india-rubber ball. Stevie’s drawing of “circles, circles, circles”, a rendering of cosmic chaos, is the book’s one image of the cosmos, and the attack on the meridian, on time itself, keeps a mythic charge. But Conrad will not let his figures become figures: Verloc stays a fat, idle man, and Winnie’s revenge is not Clytemnestra’s. The irony undercuts the archetype as fast as it builds it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the sensational novel of anarchist plots and foreign agents, the popular fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, with Stevenson’s The Dynamiter and James’s The Princess Casamassima beside it; Dickens’s London; and Dostoevsky’s novel of conspiracy, which Conrad disliked. The turn is to take the matter of the shilling thriller and tell it with an irony that never breaks: bombs, spies and murder given by a narrator who regards police, ministers and anarchists with one cold detachment, who withholds the central event entirely, and who scrambles the order so that the reader learns of the death before the mother and the sister do. The stake was real: the book failed with readers and reviewers when Conrad badly needed a success, and was charged with sordidness and with disrespect to its subject. A decisive turn in the novel’s tone and matter, not a break with its form.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in order, it would be a thriller with a twist. Told as it is, the explosion is a hole at the centre, known first through Ossipon’s newspaper and Heat’s view of the remains on the hospital table, so that every domestic chapter after it is read with the knowledge Winnie lacks, and the two chapters that go back to Stevie alive are unbearable as no chronological telling could make them. The irony is the instrument, not the decoration: in a world where no one understands another, the narrator’s distance reproduces the sealed lives of its people and lets the reader see what none of them see. Verloc’s confession, a grievance talked for pages to a wife who hears only that Stevie is dead, is two monologues and no dialogue. The cost is a certain stiffness in the official chapters.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The evidence is more than a century of return, and the yield has renewed rather than exhausted. Neglected at first, the book was raised by Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) to the first rank of Conrad’s work. Since then it has been read as a political novel of anarchism and the police state, as a domestic tragedy whose true centre is Winnie, as a comic novel and a black farce, as an early modernist experiment in time and point of view, as a Marxist document of the London poor, and, after each wave of political violence and above all after 2001, as a study of terror as spectacle and of the state’s part in it. The reading of the Professor alone has moved with each decade. Questions stay open: how far Verloc understands what he has done, whether the Assistant Commissioner is a better man than Heat, what the irony spares. A wide yield from a book of modest length.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the novel in English in the first decade of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book made the political novel of conspiracy, terror and secret policing a subject for serious fiction in English, joined it to a modernist handling of time and an ironic narrator, and made the spy story a vehicle of moral and political knowledge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Graham Greene took it as a model for his entertainments and for the seedy, compromised world of his spies; Eric Ambler and, through them, John le Carré inherit its premise that the secret services and their enemies are one trade; Hitchcock filmed it as Sabotage (1936); and the literary novel of terror stands in its line. Held here because it redirected a genre more than the novel’s form, and did less to the whole field than Heart of Darkness.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over a hundred and nineteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Conrad published it and corrected it for the collected edition; the serial and the book text are both known, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: slow at first, for it sold poorly in 1907, then continuous from the 1940s, in print throughout in many editions and translations, widely taught in English and comparative literature, adapted for stage, film and television several times, and returned to by a wide public after 2001 as the novel that had already understood terror. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the Greenwich bomb, the anarchist émigrés of the 1890s, a Home Office of top hats, but it has outlived those conditions by being read for what they show. Its presence is wide, not the widest of its era, and the slow start holds it here.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Conrad’s English, his third language, mastered for art; there is no translation between. The command is of one ironic voice held across a whole book, a harder thing than it looks: the narrator gives Verloc’s indolence, Heat’s professional vanity, Mr Vladimir’s wit and Karl Yundt’s toothless rage with one even, mocking exactness, and then, without changing register, renders the cab ride and the murder with a precision that makes the irony itself the vehicle of horror. The set pieces are made with great care: the embassy interview, the hospital table, the cab ride, the shop bell, the murder and the clock, the boat train. The handling of time is masterly, and the making bears the weight. Charged on three counts: an irony at times laboured and repeated, as in Verloc’s fatness and the comic Toodles; some stiff official dialogue; and a syntax that now and then thickens into adjectival weight.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: every person in this world is sealed in a private interest and an incomprehension, and the irony that measures the minister measures the murderer and the murdered. Take the two most distant elements: Sir Ethelred’s room at the Home Office, where the great man wants only to be spared details, and the back parlour of the shop, where Winnie sits still after Verloc has told her. Both obey the law. It covers the embassy, the police, the anarchists, the almshouse, the cabman and the Professor, and it covers comedy and horror without a change of physics, so that the farce of Toodles and the blood on the floor obey one rule. The range is wide, from the diplomatic and the governmental to a mother’s sacrifice and a boy’s drawing. The one strain is the Assistant Commissioner, whose motives and relative decency sit a little apart from the law that governs everyone else.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders, held in one small structure by one family and one event. The state, in the Home Office and the Assistant Commissioner; foreign power, in the embassy; the police and its trade with informers; political ideas, in the anarchists and the Professor’s nihilism; science and time, in the target; the city, in its fog, its streets and its poor; labour and poverty, in the cabman, his horse and the almshouse; the family and the marriage, in the Verlocs and the mother’s self-sacrifice; consciousness, in Winnie’s long stillness and Verloc’s self-pity; sex, in the marriage as bargain and in Ossipon’s seductions. The sacred is present only as absence, in Stevie’s compassion and the blank of the cosmos. These are joined, not listed: the bomb joins the embassy to the parlour. The limit is the scale of a short novel and a social range that goes little above or beyond the city.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Unconcealment, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.8. A text whole and continuously present since the 1940s, returned to after 2001 as the novel that had already understood terror; a double disclosure, of terror as a spectacle aimed at the sacred and of a marriage made as a bargain; one ironic voice held from farce to murder without a seam; and one law of sealed incomprehension that measures the minister and the murderer alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.1: the heights, the cab ride, the murder and the ticking, the Professor in the street, are great and few, and the cold register between them keeps them few by design. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, where the sacrifice of Stevie bears weight and the other figures are built and then undercut by the irony, and The Encompassed at 8.3, many orders held in the scale of a short novel and a social range that goes little beyond the city.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition clear it at 8.6, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls short, its myth built in the sacrifice of Stevie and elsewhere evoked and undercut. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.1, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The aggregate, at 8.6, is short of the summit in any case.
Basis · Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, scored on the book text published by Methuen, London, in September 1907, in thirteen chapters and dedicated to H. G. Wells. The shorter serial in Ridgway’s, a New York weekly, in 1906 to 1907, is context; Conrad enlarged the book substantially for volume publication, chiefly in the chapters that belong to Winnie, and the book text is the work. The Author’s Note added for the collected edition of 1920 is context and is not scored. Conrad’s stage version (1922) and the films, Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) and Christopher Hampton’s (1996), are adaptations and bear only on The Imperishable and Pressure on Tradition. The work is in Conrad’s English, his third language; there is no translation between the desk and the work. Read from knowledge: no text of the novel was in hand and no quotation was checked against a file. The book is known closely in its plot, its chronology, its principal scenes and its persons, less closely in its sentences word for word. Quotation is confined to the subtitle and three short phrases whose words are certain, and none is cited by page. Matters that could not be verified, among them the length in words, the year in which the Author’s Note places the action, the name of the street where the shop stands, the exact wording of several passages often quoted from the book, and some lines of later influence argued by critics, are not given.