29.1britzolakis

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

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

Jonathan Simpson

muse

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


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


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


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


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,


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.


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.


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).


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


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


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.


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


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


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.


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.”

Works Cited

Arac, Jonathan. “Romanticism, the Self and the City: Th e Secret Agent in Literary History.”t Joseph

Conrad: Critical Assessments. Ed. Keith Carabine. Vol. 3. London: Croom Helm, 1992.

Arata, Stephen. “Th e Secret Agent.” A Joseph Conrad Companion. Ed. Leonard Orr and Ted Billy.

Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.


Armstrong, Tim. “Two Types of Shock in Modernity.” Critical Quarterly 42, 1 (Spring 2000): y

60–74.

Bender, Todd K. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte

Brontë. N.Y.: Garland, 1997.ëë

Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London:

Fontana, 1973.

Bivona, Daniel. Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature.

Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990.

Booth Howard J. and Nigel Rigby, eds. Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality

1890–1940. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell

UP, 1988.

Carabine, Keith (ed). Joseph Conrad: Critical Assessments. Vol.3. London: Croom Helm, 1992.

Charney, Leo and Vanessa Scwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: U of

California P, 1995.

Chrisman, Laura. “Imperial Space, Imperial Place: Th eories of Empire and Culture in Fredric

Jameson, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.” New Formations 34 (Summer 1998): 53–69.s

Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction: Th e Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

. “Autocracy and War.” Notes on Life and Letters. London: Heinemann, 1927.

. Th e Secret Agent. Oxford: OUP World’s Classics, 1983.

Conrad, Joseph and Ford Madox Ford. Th e Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. Ed. David Seed. Liver-

pool: Liverpool UP, 1999.

Coroneos, Con. Conrad and Space. Oxford: OUP, 2002.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 2001.

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin-de-Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–

1914. Cambridge: CUP, 1999.

Delblanco, Nicholas. Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford and H.G. Wells.

N.Y: William Morrow, 1982.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey and the Cinema.” Endless Night:

Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories. Ed. Janet Bergstrom. Berkeley: U California P,

1999.

Donald, James, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, eds. Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism.

London: Cassell, 1998.

Edmond, Rod. “Home and away: Degeneration in imperialist and modernist discourse.” Modernism

and Imperialism: Writing and british Coloniality 1890–1940. Ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel

Rigby. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.

Fincham, Gail and Myrtle Hooper, eds. Under Postcolonial Eyes. Cape Town: U of Cape Town P,

1996.


Fincham, Gail, ed. Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism. New York:

Columbia UP, 2002.

Fleishman, Avrom. “Th e Symbolic World of ‘Th e Secret Agent’ ”. In Carabine, Joseph Conrad.dd

Ford, Ford Madox. Th e Soul of London. London: J.M. Dent, 1995.

. “On Impressionism.” Poetry and Drama 2. 6 ( June 1914): 167–75.a

. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duckworth, 1924.

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Th e Pelican Freud Library. Ed. Angela Roberts and

Albert Dickson. Vol. xi.. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953–77.

Glover, David. “Th e ‘Spectrality Eff ect’ in Early Modernism.” Gothic Modernisms. Ed. Andrew Smith

and Jeff Wallace. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.

Gogwilt, Christopher. Th e Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and

Empire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

Hobson, J.A. Imperialism: A Study. London: James Nisbet, 1902.

Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Derry:

Field Day, 1988.

. ‘Th e Political Unconscious’. Joseph Conrad: Critical Assessments. Ed. Keith Carabine. Vol. 3.

London: Croom Helm, 1992.

. Th e Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP.

1981.

Jan Mohamed, Abdul R. Manichean Aesthetics: Th e Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst:

U Massachussetts P, 1983.

Lacan, Jacques. ‘Tuche and Automaton’. Th e Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 1979.

Lerner, Paul L. and Mark S. Micale, eds. Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern

Age, 1870–1930. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.

Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–22. N.Y.:

CUP, 1984.

Lindquist, Sven. Exterminate all the Brutes. London: Granta, 1997.

McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

MacLaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot.

Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000.

Marcus, Laura. “Literature and Cinema.” Th e Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Litera-

ture: the Twentieth Century. Ed. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus Cambridge: CUP, 2004.

Moore Gene M, ed. Conrad’s Cities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

Parry, Benita. “Tono-Bungay: Modernization, Modernity, Modernism and the Failed Electrifi cation

of the Empire of Light.” New Formations 34 (Summer 1998): 91–108.s

Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London: Mac-

millan, 1983.

Peters, John G. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.


Phillips, Jerry. “Cannibalism qua capitalism: the metaphorics of accumulation in Marx, Conrad, a

Shakespeare and Marlow.” Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Ed. Francis Barker and Peter dd

Hulme. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.

Pick, Daniel. War Machine: Th e Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale

Univ. Press, 1993.

Pietz, William. “Th e Problem of the Fetish I,” Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17.s

Porter Roy and Marijke Gijswijt, eds. Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War. rr

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

Ray, Martin. “Conrad, Nordau and other Degenerates: Th e Psychology of Th e Secret Agent.” Conra-

diana 16. 2 (1984): 125–40.a

Rubery, Matthew. “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Wild Story of a Journalist.” ELH 71. 3 (2004), 751–74.H

Rignall, John. Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator. London: Routledge, 1992.rr

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Th e Railway Journey: Th e Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth

Century. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1977.

Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Oxford: OUP, 1996.

Schneer, Jonathan. London 1900: Th e Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Seed, David. “Introduction.” Th e Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox

Ford. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999.

Spittles, Brian. Joseph Conrad: Text and Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

Stott, Rebecca. “Th e Woman in Black: Unravelling Race and Gender in Th e Secret Agent.” Joseph

Conrad: New Casebooks. Ed. Elaine Jordan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.

Sypher, Eileen. Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British

Novel. London: Verso, 1993.ll

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. N.Y.: Routledge, 1993.

Trotter, David. Th e English Novel in History 1895–1920. London: Routledge, 1993.

Verhaegher, Paul. “Trauma and hysteria within Freud and Lacan.” Th e Letter: Lacanian Perspectives

on Psychoanalysis 14 (Autumn 1998): 87–105.s

Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.

London: Virago, 1992.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980.

Zimring, Rishona. “Conrad’s Pornography Shop.” Modern Fiction Studies 43. 2 (Summer 1997): s

319–48.

29.1britzolakis

Documents

Transcript of 29.1britzolakis