From Verloc to the Unabomber: modernist and post-modern versions of the underground

Michael Titlestad*

Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, better known (fortunately perhaps) as Joseph Conrad, wrote The Secret Agent in the winter and spring of 1905–6. Contrary to the author’s claims that the plot derived entirely from his imagination, that he was (according to the Author’s Note in the first edition), ignorant of such matters in the real world, Norman Sherry elegantly demonstrates that aspects of the novel rework the macabre reportage concerning an explosion near Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Martial Bourdin, a supposed anarchist, destroyed himself when a bomb he was carrying detonated prematurely. Readers of The Times on the morning of 16 February 1894 were invited to picture “a respectably-dressed man, in a kneeling posture, terribly mutilated. One hand was blown off and the body was open. The injured man was only able to say, ‘Take me home’, and was unable to reply to a question as to where is home was.” But even apart from its dependence on accounts of the Greenwich Bomb Outrage, as it came to be known, The Secret Agent bears all the marks of a writer richly informed about anarchist politics in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is this informed, but rigorously ironic, vision of the political underground in London in the 1890s with which I will begin.

The story of The Secret Agent is simple enough. The morally and physically flabby Verloc lives with his young wife, Winnie, and her mentally afflicted brother, Stevie, above their store, which trades in French postcards, various “gentlemen’s delights” and anarchist pamphlets. Seemingly a member of a left émigré underground circle, the Central Red Committee, Verloc hosts secret meetings at which the prospective dictatorship of the proletariat is discussed. The lines of argument at these gatherings are proleptic in that they represent the standard debates within the left over the next decades: the Marxist optimist (who believes that the inherent contradictions in capitalism will lead to its inevitable downfall) faces the activist dedicated to mobilising labour and the anarchist, for whom the simple destruction of the hegemonic order is his sole objective. In fact, Verloc is an agent in the hire of an undisclosed foreign embassy (quite evidently the Russian Embassy), who is commissioned by Vladimir, the shady and megalomaniac diplomat, to instigate an act of violence that will lead the British Government to enforce more stringent policing of political dissidents. Verloc is hardly successful as an agent provocateur: having obtained explosives from a nihilist anarchist, the Professor, he forces Stevie to carry the paint-tin bomb to the Observatory. Stevie trips and is reduced to the semblance of a “cannibal feast” by the explosion, which leads the grieving Winnie to murder her husband and, after her plan to leave England with Ossipon is thwarted, to commit suicide.

The Secret Agent represents perhaps the most sustained ironic treatment of the political underground in all literature. At an obvious level, this treatment is typically modernist in the general sense and, more specifically, typically Conradian in its elaboration of a narrative voice that assumes an unwaveringly critical distance from that which it observes. The underground figures who meet above Verloc’s shop are shown, despite their anti-establishment posturing, to be quite pathetically dependent on the system they pretend to oppose. Yundt, the old, bald “terrorist” who styles himself as the great threat to society, has to be nursed by a “blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter”. Michaelis is a bloated glutton who emerged from prison looking like a monument to consumption, and Ossipon is a narrow-minded and ineffectual ideologue. While the Verlocs are misguided and lazy (Winnie mentally and Verloc physically), we nevertheless sympathise with them when events overtake them and they are reduced to such wretchedness by a combination of blindness and weakness. We have no sympathy with the other members of the Central Red Committee. Fashioned in Conrad’s ironic voice they are it seems, along with Vladimir, the embassy bureaucrat, reduced to elements in his ongoing jeremiad against the Russian state.

Perhaps the most memorable character, other than Verloc, is the Professor. Too arrogant to associate with the members of the Red Committee, he is, as Conrad suggested to his friend and editor Cunningham-Graham, his version of the “perfect anarchist”. The Professor wanders the streets of London with a bomb strapped to his chest and the India rubber ball of the detonator grasped in his hand. His life’s work is the pursuit of the “perfect detonator”; his quasi-Nietzschean philosophy the unambiguous and unwavering destruction of the social order (in the words of the great Johnny Cash: “I don’t care if I do die do die do”). The Professor’s nihilism is marked by his refusal to consider what a better society might entail: his is the stuff of destruction alone. Guimond and Maynard point out, though, that despite the evident purity of the Professor’s motives, Conrad contrives his nihilism as nothing other than a secular perversion of the sectarian fanaticism of his father and shows that it translates into rampant ambition and arrogance. In other words, the nihilist arises through a psychological and biographical foible that amounts to pathology.

What might Conrad’s conservative vision tell us about one highly influential way in which the underground is imagined?

First, he sees the underground as unavoidably complicit in the system it opposes. While it styles itself as a different order, as a detached alternative to hegemony, it in fact bears out the system. We see that, although its self-styling depends on typically modernist metaphors of depth – it is concealed, but also has a deeper or more fundamental understanding of the world it opposes – the Central Red Committee is in fact constitutively superficial. The interests of its members are, first and foremost, their own petty egos; and their relation to the bourgeois order, rather than being subversive, is parasitic. Even the Professor, who seems at first to embody at least an alternative to the hypocrisy of Verloc’s immediate political circle, is revealed to be nothing other than a victim of his psychology and its provenance. He is, in other words, egomaniacal and delusional, displaced from the real rather than its engaged saboteur. The underground, for the Professor, is a carefully contrived way of avoiding the real world from which he is alienated through his narcissism.

In summary, then, the underground for Conrad, perhaps largely because of its association in the novel with the Russia he so loathed, is neither compelling nor persuasive. It is politically anodyne and its very existence indicates the inability of its members to engage the real outside of their desperate staging of an occult alternative. Given this view, it seems perverse that The Secret Agent figured in the headlines of The Washington Post and the New York Times in 1998 and was generally accepted to be an important inspiration in the actions of Theodore J Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.

Let us rehearse some of the key events in the life and trial of the Unabomber (FBI codename: University, airline, bomber). Born in 1942, Kaczynski received a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1967. He was employed in the coveted position of an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in that year, but resigned in 1969. Nine years later he planted his first bomb in the parking lot of the University of Illinois, but it was found and sent back to its return address at Northwestern University, where it exploded, injuring Terry Marker, a security guard. A year later another bomb exploded at Northwestern, injuring a student, and nine months after that a bomb exploded in the hold of an American Airlines flight, forcing it into an emergency landing at Dulles Airport. Over the next fifteen years the Unabomber’s devices killed three and maimed 23 people. In 1995 a 350 000 word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future” was published by The Washington Post and the New York Times on the basis of Kaczynski’s undertaking that he would stop planting bombs if his views were thus aired. His brother, David, noticed similarities between the manifesto and views he had heard Kaczynski express, and informed the FBI, who found him living in a small and derelict hut in rural Montana. He was found mentally fit to stand trial despite a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and a suicide attempt during the initial hearings. He eventually accepted a plea bargain and was imprisoned for life without any possibility of parole.

Various arguments have been used to support Kaczynski’s indebtedness to Conrad. He claimed to have read Conrad’s oeuvre, including The Secret Agent, “dozens of times”; like the Professor, he explained that he had dedicated himself to the invention of a “perfect detonator”; his manifesto resembles the Professor’s doctrine in its commitment to the unqualified destruction of the social order, which he calls “Industrial Society”; analogous to Vladimir’s choice of the Greenwich Observatory as a target, he chose sites he considered related to the scientific and technological hubris of the modern world; and, like the Professor, who ridicules the pretensions of the pseudo-revolutionaries on the Central Red Committee, he launched a tirade against “leftism”, which, as set out in baroque detail in his manifesto, he identifies with the anodyne and finally complicit politics of the institutionalised left in the US. But if Kaczynski did indeed model his political conduct on Conrad’s version of the underground, what does this tell us about him as a reader and about the difference between Conrad’s modernism and his evidently postmodern political views and behaviour?

It is conventional, as Guimond and Maynard do, to write Kaczynski off as a gauche reader who misses Conrad’s irony. In this view, he literalises the satirical portraits of the deluded. Conrad scholars seem, it should be added, more concerned with Kaczynski as a failed literary critic than with the victims of the explosions he engineered

I would like to conclude with three more or less unsubstantiated hypotheses in this regard.

First, “Industrial Society and its Future”, Kaczynski’s manifesto, is a pastiche of neo-Luddite, environmentalist and anarchist views without the confident distinction between depth and surface, between reality and its (mis)representation, which underpins modernist irony. The Secret Agent has a finely wrought architecture that is required to sustain the narrator’s iconoclastic and distant voice. Kaczynski’s manifesto, on the other hand, is a swamp of confused ideology and multiple voices that coheres only its jeremiad imperative to destroy the world as we know it.

Second, the underground has long trafficked across the border between irony and the real, taking as literal what is meant ironically and ironising what is accepted as fact. Kaczynski’s interpretation of Conrad is no less “literal” or crass than Al-Queda’s reading of the Koran, the Situationist International’s version of the panoptical politics of production, or the Sex Pistols’ notion of anarchy. Indeed, the underground is commonly based in a wilful act of misreading that produces an unorthodox interpretation and evaluation of the established world.

Finally, without condoning the Unabomber’s delusional politics and cruel actions, they represent an undertaking that is no less cogent and coherent than American domestic and foreign policy that, embodied by the security establishment, was arrayed against him. Kaczynski was appalling in all respects, from his personal hygiene to the terror he spread, but his delusional logic demarcates at least one way in which to become the underground, precisely to the extent that it defies our understanding. The establishment is by definition bewildered by the underground; amazed that it can take itself seriously when it is so obviously misguided. We need to remember, though, that as soon as it complies fully with the demand to be understandable, it ceases to be underground.

References

James Guimond and Katherine Maynard, “Kaczynski, Conrad and Terrorism”, Conradiana 31(1) 1999:3–25.
Norman Sherry. Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: CUP, 1971.

* Michael Titlestad is Associate Professor at the English School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits.



LitNet: 23 May 2006

Send your comments to webvoet@litnet.co.za to continue the discussion on SêNet, our interactive opinion page.

Click here and subscribe to our fantastic free newsletter - for your weekly cultural fix! Click here to see the latest edition

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.