Abstract
This chapter situates Conrad’s ironic treatment of the physiognomic surface/depth dichotomy within the context of urban flânerie. In The Secret Agent, the prime navigators of the London streets are two strolling characters from opposite ends of the social stratum, a bomb-throwing terrorist, physiognomically presented as the Lombrosean type of the “born criminal,” and a police official, arguably the “born detective.” As true flâneurs, they both are in but not of the crowd, trying to probe the (sur)faces of their fellow Londoners by physiognomic means. Yet the modernist writer Conrad renders the surface signs of Victorian London and its inhabitants generally impenetrable and its depths, therefore, inscrutable. Physiognomic flânerie ultimately fails.
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Notes
- 1.
Conrad’s use of generic frameworks follows a similar pattern. At first glance, The Secret Agent appears to belong to the then-popular genre of espionage fiction. Yet, within that framework, the novel tells a story of Victorian London that does not simply serve as the playground for the male, upper-class, British hero of the typical spy story. Jil Larson (2004, 14) has convincingly demonstrated that genre subversion is a central narrative strategy of Conrad’s fiction. Similarly, William W.E. Slights claims that “appropriating traditional Victorian genres (the adventure novel, the spy story)” is part of Conrad’s “ethics of irony” (2013, 28), that is, saying one thing while meaning its exact opposite.
- 2.
My semantic analysis follows Algirdas Julien Greimas’ formal analysis of storytelling, which, in a récit-presentation, establishes a first and central isotopy through the repetition of particular semes (“un plan de signification homogène, un première isotopie”), which is contrasted in the ensuing dialogue with a second isotopy (“Le dialogue […] dramatise l’histoire et fait éclater son unité, en opposant brusquement à la première une deuxième isotopie” [Greimas 1966, 70]).
- 3.
Avoiding the term “soul” in his English translation of Lavater’s Essays, Thomas Holcroft translates it with “mind.” In his translation, the quoted passage reads: “Contemplate his exterior; erect, towering and beauteous—This, though but the shell, is the image of his mind [Seele]” (1853, 2).
- 4.
I do not want to suggest that the relationship between body and soul is exclusively considered by the physiognomists mentioned in these categories. There are, for instance, numerous passages in which Lavater proposes a metonymical relationship and Ps.-Aristotle a metaphorical one. It is likely that the categories are so undecided because physiognomics has always been a science in the making and as such never developed an authoritative terminology.
- 5.
Conrad ironizes the Christian parlance of physiognomic (i.e. allegedly scientific) treatises, when his narrator points out that the stout believer in Lombroso’s physiognomics, the revolutionary, Comrade Ossipon, “did not recommend his terrified soul to Lombroso, […] because on scientific grounds he could not believe that he carried about him such a thing as a soul” (Conrad 1990 [1907], 222; my italics).
- 6.
- 7.
Census data according to http://www.londononline.co.uk/factfile/historical/ (accessed 30 October 2019).
- 8.
Shields proposes to consider flânerie “as much mythic as it was actual,” and, mostly, as a “bizarre urban myth” (2014, 62).
- 9.
Anna Despotopoulou correctly describes how, “[i]n his delineation of these wanderers, Conrad uses some of the typical character features of earlier flaneurs: the idleness of the characters, aimless strolling, freedom, random observation, episodic presentation, detachment, and even a commanding presence. However, each one of these characteristics is used in an ironic way.” She concludes that “[i]n the characters of Verloc, the Assistant Commissioner, and the Professor, Conrad tracks the deterioration of the concept of the flaneur” (2005, 142).
- 10.
In his description of Parisian cityscapes and the physiognomy of the masses, Benjamin uses the same word, “Schleier,” that Lavater uses to describe the physiognomic relationship of body and soul: “Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria” (Benjamin 1999, 10; my italics). Lavater writes: “Körper! die aufgerichtete, schöne, erhabne Gestalt—Nur Hülle und Bild der Seele! Schleyer und Werkzeug der abgebildeten Gottheit! wie spricht sie von diesem menschlichen Antlitz in tausend Sprachen herunter!” (1775–1778, I:4). In Conrad’s novel, the veiled face is that of Mrs Verloc, grieving her brother’s death. Behind her black veil she appears “like a masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable intentions” (Conrad 1990 [1907], 193; my italics). Yet, in Conrad, the veil is nothing that can simply be lifted to reveal whatever lies beneath it; it becomes, in The Secret Agent, a mise-en-abyme, a veil covering another veil: “He […] dragged the veil off, unmasking a still, unreadable face” (193; my italics).
- 11.
In many respects, the Professor’s behaviour can be regarded as an idealized self-image (ISI) avant la lettre. Dorothy J. Susskind famously developed ISI as a technique to reinforce the patient’s self-confidence (Susskind 1970).
- 12.
From Ossipon to Michaelis (chapter 3), Michaelis to the Professor (chapter 4), the Professor to Chief Inspector Heat (chapter 5), Heat to the Assistant Commissioner (chapter 6), and, finally, from the Assistant Commissioner to Sir Ethelred (chapter 7).
- 13.
The conflict between the two characters is connected with the fact that the Assistant Commissioner dealing with the affair compels the Chief Inspector to take actions that might lead to the dreaded confrontation with the Professor: “And deep down in his blameless bosom of an average married citizen, almost unconscious but potent nevertheless, the dislike of being compelled by events to meddle with the desperate ferocity of the Professor had its say. This dislike had been strengthened by the chance meeting in the lane” (Conrad 1990 [1907], 96). Later, after both policemen have confronted Verloc individually, the Chief Inspector, upon learning of his superior’s actions, instantly and specifically regrets that “it would drag to light the Professor’s home industry” (159). Although, on the novel’s surface, the Professor makes an appearance in only 3 of the 13 chapters (chapters 4, 5, and 13), the mark he makes on the development of the plot is tangible beneath that surface, in the depths of chapters 6 and 9.
- 14.
Lombroso’s notion of the delinquente nato is attacked in the novel by Karl Yundt, who declares that criminals are not born but rather made, primarily by allegedly scientific systems of surface reading. Yundt rages: “Teeth and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that marks him still better […]? That’s how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about.” The conclusion of his reasoning is that “Lombroso is an ass” (Conrad 1990 [1907], 41). In Sibylle Baumbach’s analysis of the Lombroso passages in the novel, she therefore concludes that “The Secret Agent also adopts a critical attitude toward physiognomics, which raises the reader’s awareness for the occasional difference between surface and depth in a character’s disposition—which is the result not only of his or her physique, but also of the psycho-social environment of that character” (2007, 77; my translation). While I agree with Baumbach’s interpretation, I consider Conrad’s critique of physiognomics to be more radical than her mitigating terms like “occasional” and “not only” suggest (Kronshage 2018, 170–171).
- 15.
John H. Smith proposes to consider Schopenhauer’s paradoxical “view of the body as the ‘immediate’ objectification of the will and the gap that exists between the ‘moral character’ (namely, the will) and its external expression in the face” as “an infinitesimal difference, like a line tangent to a curve, touching it at just one infinitely small point” (2017, 477). Productively comparing Schopenhauer’s position to twentieth-century techniques of face-reading, example Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Smith concludes that “we can read faces all we want, and they can capture what we will, but a kernel remains unknown in the infinitesimal interstices between character and expression” (477). Smith’s concept of the “infinitesimal gap between the shown and the known” (467) is a felicitous turn of phrase that excellently captures the way in which Schopenhauer curtails physiognomics’ power without fully dismissing its face-reading potential.
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Kronshage, E. (2021). Physiognomic Flânerie in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. In: Baumbach, S., Ratheiser, U. (eds) Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75397-9_9
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