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Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2005, pp.

1-20 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/jml.2006.0001

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Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:

Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in
Conrad and Ford
Christina Britzolakis
University of Warwick

he cognitive and aesthetic mapping of urban modernity has always relied

heavily on notions of shock. From the 1880s onwards, neurological discourses occupied a central place in accounts of the origins of modernity,
as well as in the genealogy of the modernist artifact. They 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 mechanized warfare. The history of shock as a discursive formation of modernity,
culminating in Freuds famous analysis in 1920 of the mechanisms of traumatic
neurosis, is intertwined with notions of modernization itself as pathogenic.
In recent years, a number of modernist scholars have embraced neurological 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. 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 Crarys
words, a problem of perceptual synthesis produced by a social, urban, psychic
and industrial eld increasingly saturated with sensory impact (17).
Crarys work has been pivotal in the impetus to resituate impressionist painting, and modernism more generally, in relation to the eld of mass
visual culture. What arguably remains elusive, however, is the geopolitical
location of the literary impression as the widely acknowledged cornerstone

Journal of Modern Literature

of an emergent modernist rhetoric. The situation of the novel around the turn
of the centuryin particular, the impressionist remodelling of the form by
the James-Conrad-Ford groupregisters an intense anxiety concerning the
imagined boundaries of the metropolis. Critics have long recognized Conrads
sustained if ambivalent interrogation of European imperialism and its cultural
consequences. Less attention has been paid, however, to his collaboration
with Ford Madox Hueer (as he then was), between 1898 and 1908, which
coincided with the appearance of many of Conrads most well-known works.
In his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrancee (1919), Ford claims that
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). 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 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).
The Edwardian moment was characterized by considerable interchange
between what are now seen as modernist and popular ctional forms (Trotter,
Daly). As collaborators, Conrad and Ford explored the various possibilities of
contemporary mass-market genre ction, such as Wellsian fantasy, travel ction, invasion novels, political satire, espionage ction, and the detective novel.
I shall focus here on a few of these generic experiments: Fords travel book The
Soul of London (1905), the jointly-authored scientic romance-cum-political
novel The Inheritorss (1901), and Conrads spy story The Secret Agentt (1907). These
texts, I shall argue, respond to a historically specic metropolitan experience
of cognitive dissonance in the face of violently recongured relations among
urban, national, and global space. Their generic instability, or hybridity, is
symptomatic of their attempted cognitive mapping, in Fredric Jamesons
phrase (Modernism and Imperialism 52), of the imperial world-order, following 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 Fords account, unites his and Conrads literary endeavors 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

UNTHINKABLE SPACES
In The Soul of London (1905), Ford Madox Ford describes London as unmappable 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). Fords own account of the capital proceeds by a series of word-paintings; like Whistlers famous fogbound cityscapes of the period, it is dominated
by light eects, by recurrent images of steam, vapor, and clouds, and by an
insistence on wavering, dissolving, or tremulous (29) outlines. The central
motif of the text is nebulousnessit is impossible, without an eort, to dissociate 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 icker by so
quickly (96). The books 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). The question What is London?
Ford suggests, can best be posed through a syntax of apparently random visual
snapshots. This syntax signals a crisis in the representation of the capital city,
as symbolic embodiment of national identity. For Ford, both Londons modernity and its inaccessibility to conventionally realist forms of representation are
explicitly bound up with its acknowledged status, by 1900, as, in Charles G.F.
Mastermans phrase, the heart of the empire (qtd. in Schneer 2):
If in its tolerance it nds a place for all eccentricities of physiognomy, of costume,
of cult, it does so because it crushes out and oods over the signicance 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 Londonerthat is, in fact, the Modern. Its spirit, extraordinary and
unfathomablebecause it is given to no man to understand the spirit of his
own agespreads, like sepia in water, a tinge of its own over all the world. Its
extraordinary and miasmic dialectthe dialect of South Essexis tinging all
the local speeches of England. Deep in the New Forest you will nd red brick
houses trying to look like London villas; deep in the swamps of coastal Africa

Journal of Modern Literature

you will 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 1213)

Londons modernity, Ford argues, lies in its power to assimilate a bewildering array of cultures. Its seemingly cosmopolitan tolerance is actually a
cannibalistic destruction of race characteristics. The world towns 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). The 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 aair of anesthesia, of defensive non-sensitivity
to an otherwise overwhelming burden of stimuli.
For Ford, then, impressionism emerges as a partial solution to the representational dilemma posed by the instability of the imperial metropoliss
imagined boundaries. The urban impression is implicated in the global dissemination 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. Conrads
and Fords venture into scientic romance, The Inheritorss (1901), begun in
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 ixxxvii). 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 leadership 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 inltrate
the British Government. Granger, who describes himself at the start of the
novel as a writer with highwith the highest ideals (6), becomes involved in
r a newspaper nanced
writing a paean to a great colonizer (74), for The Hour,
by De Mersch.
Like The Soul of London, the text of The Inheritorss is marked by Fords
polemic against social imperialist discourses of national eciency, collectivism, and administrative expertise. It satirizes the rhetoric of enlightenment and
civilization used by nanciers, governments, and journalists to justify European

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

expansionism. The Dimensionist woman is described as having the condence

of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental (14). She is linked with an evolutionary racial rhetoric; Granger, hearing
her explain the Fourth Dimension, feels like a negro or Hindoo (14). The
novels 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 (xiiixvi), with a dying cultural
order, the Dimensionist womans insolent modernity (14) is associated with
an almost unnaturally intensied 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 vastervaster than cathedrals, vaster than
the conception of gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out
of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an
unrealised, an unrealisable innity of space (8, emphasis added). In a subsequent
encounter with Granger, she is described as having brought the whole [scene]
into composition (46). These proto-cinematic eects of spatial disjunction tie
in with Grangers neurasthenia, and with his description of the Dimensionist
woman as having the eect of some incredible stimulant (11).
In The 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. The 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 scientic romance, a genre
already popularly associated with the concept of multiple dimensions. In The
Soul of London, Ford, discussing the rise of corporations, writes: That, 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). Grangers
aristocratic fastidiousness for the worlds of commerce, politics, and journalism
in which he becomes embroiled and his sentimental attachment to English traditions make him a marginalized and impotent protagonist. He is a transitional
gure, caught in a hiatus between older, nostalgic accounts of national identity
and a newer, as yet uncomprehended, geopolitical order.
Fredric Jamesons 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 The Inheritors.
Jameson sees the representational dilemma of early modernism as the problem
of a global space that like the fourth dimension constitutively escapes you (51).
This 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

Journal of Modern Literature

motivates modernisms well-documented fascination with the impersonal, disjunctive, and mobile gaze of the camera, what the essay calls cinematographic
perception. One of Jamesons key assumptionsthe imperial subjects inability
to imagine the colonial life-worldsits 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 audiences. Impressionisms 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 Jamesons account of early modernism as a neurological predicament does not mention Freud, the latters analysis of the mechanisms of
traumatic neurosis arguably provides the key terms of his argument. The phrase
unrepresentable totality leads back to the Freudian analysis of shock via the
Lacanian category of the Real, used by Jameson in The Political Unconscious
(8081) as a synonym for History as absent cause. Discussing Freuds
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan writes (55) that the real [. . .] present[s]
itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in itin the form of the trauma
[. . .]. For Lacan, trauma is internal to the symbolic order at its points of rupture. In Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trauma constitutes an economic
disturbance of the psychic apparatus, since it is the result of a failure to dispose
z in origin a crust burnt
of excess stimuli. A protective shield (Reizschutz),
onto the surface of the mental apparatus, acts as a buer allowing these stimuli
to be mentally assimilated. Once the stimulus shield has been breached, however, Freud writes, there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental
apparatus from being ooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another
problem arises insteadthe 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).
For Freud, shock experience engenders a dynamic of repetition, which
confounds received linear understandings of temporality. He points out that
the dreams of patients suering from traumatic neuroses repeat the situation
in which the trauma occurred. These dreams, he writes, are endeavouring to
master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis. (304). The impact of traumatic
events on consciousness is marked by deferred action [Nachtrglichkeit
[
t] and
delay [Verspatung],
g which, as it were, incubate the trauma. Despite the often
viscerally somatic eects of traumatic neurosis, the originating traumatic event
remains notoriously elusive, being constituted retroactively. For Walter Benjamin, famously, the disrupted and compulsive temporality of shockwhat

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

he called Chockerfahrungprovided 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 see into a symptom.
SUDDEN HOLES IN SPACE AND TIME
In Conrads The Secret Agentt (1907), the time-space imaginary of global modernity, anchored in the imperial capital itself, appears intensely vulnerable to
actual and symbolic destabilization. The novel, inspired, according to the retrospective Authors Note (1920), by a chance conversation with Ford about
anarchist activities, relates an abortive attempt to blow up the Greenwich
Observatory (Conrad, Secret Agentt xxxiii). Conrad writes that the books whole
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. The Greenwich Observatory at once signals
the space-time compression of modernity and guarantees Londons pivotal
status as imperial world city. The novel is therefore paradoxically centered
on an eventthe anarchistic attack on geopolitical space and timethat signals epistemological as well as ideological rupture. Its plot is organized nonchronologically around the events of the day of the Greenwich explosion,
which do not themselves occur within narrative time but emerge retroactively.
This disturbed narrative temporality also informs the novels representation
of the object world through patterns of fragmentation, uncanny animation,
and reication.
Many critics have seen the city as the true protagonist of The Secret Agent.
In his Authors Note, Conrad relates the novels presentation of the city to his
early experience of London, as a newly-arrived immigrant. I had to 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). The
memory of this rst encounter with the metropolis is presented as disturbing, perhaps even traumatic, material that resists narrative plotting. There are
echoes, too, of the cannibalistic tropes of The 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 indierent to heavens frowns
and smiles; a cruel devourer of the worlds light (xxxvi). One of the citys predominant symbolic markers, along with threatening formlessness, is darkness,

Journal of Modern Literature

expanding Marlows claim, at the opening of Heart of Darknesss (1902), that

London too has been one of the dark places of the earth. (29).
The dilemma presented by the city as cruel devourer of the worlds 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 towns opulence and luxury (12) and reects on the need
to protect the hygienic idleness of the upper classes against the shallow
enviousness of unhygienic labour. The 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. The mid-1880s, during which
the novel is set, saw a succession of terrorist attacks (by Irish Fenians), the irruption of working class unrest into the wealthy West End, and anxieties about
the inux of immigrants to the metropolis. The Martial Bourdin case of 1894,
upon which the plot of The Secret Agentt is based, had exacerbated fears about
the inltration of London by political refugees from the Continent; these fears
were revived in the Aliens Bills debates of 190405, coinciding with the novels
composition. During this period of unprecedented imperial expansionism, after
the Berlin Conference, Britains capital city appeared paradoxically vulnerable
to both external and internal subversion.
Conrads 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 1540). London is a slimy aquarium, menaced by primeval dissolution, and navigated by the bourgeois social investigator who penetrates
the citys darkest reaches. However, its central location, Soho, in the heart of
London confounds the geographical and ideological polaritiesWest End /
East End, civilization / savageryon 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 books
publication, it was the suragette movement that posed the major threat of
urban unrest, a phenomenon some critics see pregured in the murderous
insurgency of Winnie Verloc (Sypher 2748, Stott, Zimring). Continental
and domestic threats of anarchy form interrelated aspects of a single, global
dilemma. The 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.

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

The principle of panoptical visibility, which seeks to render space transparent, is enshrined in the Greenwich Observatory and its creation of a newly
abstract geographical and geopolitical space. Yet Conrads modernist dislocations of narrative temporality stress the fallibility of surveillance; the novels
central absencethe death of Stevie, which occurs outside the narrationsuggests its inability to prevent those unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden
holes in space and time which, the narrator remarks, occur in the close-woven
stu of relations between conspirator and police (85). Urban maps, too, can
be subverted by the magical or phantasmagoric aspect of the city. When Verloc crosses London to visit the Russian Embassy, the narrator comments on
the capitals topographical mysteries, i.e. its numerically misplaced strayed
houses and streets. The panoptical and phantasmagoric principles are seemingly opposed yet interdependent, a duality embodied in the gure of the
detective, whose knowledge of the citys 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. The urban
labyrinth of The Secret Agentt is based, as Rod Edmond has argued, on a series
of analogies and correspondences between metropole and colony as pathogenic
environments. When Chief Inspector Heat is admitted to the Assistant Commissioners oce, he nds him pen in hand, bent over a great table bestrewn
with papers, as if worshipping an enormous double inkstand of bronze and crystal. Speaking tubes resembling snakes were tied by the heads to the back of the
Assistant Commissioners 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 identied with colonized cultures. The
appeal to the fetish as a signier of the primitive is itself radically unstable,
being a product, as William Pietz has argued, of the superposition of dierent
local spaces and temporalities eected by imperialist activity abroad.
Espionage 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). The interdependence
between the seemingly distinct spaces of metropole and colony is embodied in
the 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 ocialdom for illicit hands-on
detective activity in the Greenwich case, he plays out a fantasy of exploration
or reversion to the colonial frontier. The novels 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.

10

Journal of Modern Literature

DISTURBING THE NATIONAL SPECTACLE

Stevies 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 insuciently 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). Stevies 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. The episode models
the novels 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).
Stevies backwardness, and his role as shock-receptor, situates him as a
metaphorical primitive in relation to metropolitan culture. He suers from
a gap between visual perception and language; yet he is, as many critics have
noted, a parodic artist, as well as anarchist, gure. His role in the novel corresponds 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). Stevies response
to stimuli is mimetic; his traumatic response to the urban environment is
manifested in bodily agitation, jerks, and stuttering. The cab ride episode stages
his identication with pain and suering, or convulsive sympathy (167).
This mimetic behaviour symbolically disrupts the homogenizing rationality of
capitalism, as embodied in the national spectacle of the capital city.
Stevie metaphorically unites the attributes of the child and the native,
an association commonplace in turn-of-the-century evolutionary anthropology (Bivona 78). One of the anarchists, Comrade Ossipon, classies the boy
as a degenerate type, citing the taxonomic science of Cesare Lombroso.
Coded as at once racially backward and childishly innocent, he becomes the
pseudo-sacricial victim of the botched Greenwich bombing. The explosion
plot signals the problem of the binding (in Freuds sense) and disposal of
destructive energies at work in the international body politic, which are repatriated to London, as the acknowledged nerve-centre of an expanding empire.
Far from being purged by Stevies death, however, these energies continue to
reverberate, both psychically and materially, in the text, producing murder
(Verloc), suicide (Winnie), and madness (Ossipon).

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

11

The Secret Agents 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
signicance through repetition; for example, the Professors spectacles, with
their sinister glitter (67), Verlocs hat, which in the aftermath of the murder
scene, becomes an ominous object (285), or the pianola in the Silenus Restaurant, 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. These eects are proto-cinematic; as Keith Cohen
remarks of the cinematic medium itself, both subject and object simply occupy
dierent (and variable) positions along a continuum of articially produced
representation (109).
Conrads 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 596635).
In The Secret Agent,
t one such impressionist moment occurs as the narrator
tracks the Assistant Commissioners movements around Soho in the course of
his detective work:
Brett Street was not very far away. It branched o, 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 fruiterers 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. They would never be heard of
again. The 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 ocial inkstands. (150)

The apparently random detail of the oranges and lemons on the fruiterers stall
forms the highly charged focal point of the scene. Abstracted from its material
context, and luminously projected against a background of engulng 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 narrator 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

12

Journal of Modern Literature

Verlocs role in the explosion is revealed, he muses on the unforeseen but catastrophic eect of the small, tiny fact (236) of Winnies labelling of Stevies coat
with his name and address: It was like slipping on a bit of orange peel in the
dark and breaking your leg (263). The 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.
The Conradian impression, then, appears to be based upon a defensive
persistence of vision; concentration on the isolated visual detail averts a traumatic overwhelming of the spectator by the abysmal city. This 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). The 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. Conrads 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. The technological shattering at the centre of the noveland its narrative mediationmarks the fate of the body within the global perspective of
modernity.
A TALE OF MAIMING AND KILLING
In Imperialism: A Studyy (1902), a text crucial to turn-of-the-century debates
about Britains 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. The colonies, that is, absorb
the home countrys otherwise destabilizing productive surplus. Daniel Bivona,
paraphrasing Hobsons argument, refers to an economy of the supplement
(114) underlying empire. Espionage ction can be read as negotiating the
explosive, indeed catastrophic, potential of this destabilizing surplus, which
returns in the guise of anarchy to the metropolis. Made explicit by the exoticist fantasies of the Assistant Commissioner, who sees urban space in terms
of imperial exploration, it nds its sacricial representative in Stevie, who, as
I have already argued, is metaphorically aligned with the native, and whose

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

13

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 Stevies mangled remains (86) as forensic
evidence, confronts both Heat and the reader with a visceral materiality of
destruction. The 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,
The 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 butchers shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner (88). Stevies
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 cannibal feast to the byproducts of a butchers 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 The Secret Agent,
t the catastrophic destruction of the primitive body is
caught up within a metropolitan dialectic of visibility and invisibility. Conrads repeated return to the scene of Stevies mangled remainsthe cannibal
feastrhetorically extends the meanings of shock beyond the Greenwich
explosion to a reection on modernity as a global culture of destruction. The
cannibal feast is a highly ambiguous metaphor for that process. Cannibalism, 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 Darknesss (1901),
ambiguously suspended between the subversion of empires civilizing mission
and a racist metaphysics of African evil. Conrad uses cannibalism to signal
what Phillips calls the primitivism of progress (186), a theme crucial to turnof-the century debates about the morality of imperialism. Hobsons Imperialism, published in 1902, between the publication of Heart of Darknesss and The
Secret Agent,
t stressed imperialisms regressive and atavistic character and saw
it as a catalyst for war. In The Secret Agent,
t the cannibal feastand the larger
thematic of modernity as barbarismis explicitly brought home to the metropolis, where it deforms the nature of metropolitan perception and aesthetic
representation.

14

Journal of Modern Literature

In the unstable metaphoric chain of association precipitated by Stevies

remains, the cannibal feast is contiguous with the urban slaughterhouse. Daniel 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 oers his own contribution to the toposs of
inevitable war which had developed in the wake of the 1884 Berlin Conference and the intensied imperial scramble for overseas territory. His essay
starts with an eloquent denunciation of the human toll of the Russian-Japanese
conict of 190405 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
conict, he mourns the generations that ll the ditches and cover the elds
of Manchuria with their torn limbs (8687). However, Conrads panoramic
vision of a Europe about to be plunged into widespread violence nds the precipitating causes not merely in Russian autocracyhis most obvious targetor
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, lling the eld hospitals [. . .] (84)

In Conrads illustrative vignette, the detail of the overworked horse falling in

the streetwhich also forms the centrepiece of the cab ride episode in The Secret
Agentserves 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
[wars] sacrices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood (110). The Jingoist
response to the Boer War had recently revealed the extent to which this gospel undergirds the collective imaginary of both imperialism and war. Conrad

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

15

warns that the removal of the sights and sounds of battleelds 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. The Inheritorss dwells on the complicity of the
press, and of the metropolitan intelligentsia more generally, with imperialism;
newspapers in The Secret Agentt invariably give a distorted or inadequate account
of the events they relate. The repeated return to the gruesome and sensationalist
scene of Stevies mangled remains (the product of an event nowhere directly
represented in the novel) can be seen as a symptom of this technologicallydriven dialectic of closeness and distance, carnage and media representation.
The only discourse not implicated in the collective imaginary of imperialism
is Stevies convulsive, inarticulate response to cruelty, which disturbs the
enjoyment of the national spectacle. The 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 Stevies death, struggles to
make sense of it:
Greenwich Park. A park! Thats where the boy was killed. A parksmashed
branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly esh and bone, all spouting up
together in the manner of a rework. She remembered now what she had heard,
and she remembered it pictorially. They had to gather him up with the shovel.
Trembling all over with irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement 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).

The imagined recreation of the carnage of the explosion comes as the

solution to a series of gaps in Winnies 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
lacunaee are belatedly supplied by a series of pictorial, ashlike images, which
retrospectively and vicariously act out the scene of Stevies death. Winnies
shock has a literalizing force, as she catastrophically relives the dismembering, and forensic re-membering, of Stevies body: They had to gather him up
with the shovel. Yet this traumatic re-living is at second hand, based on an

16

Journal of Modern Literature

overheard conversation between her husband and Chief Inspector Heat. The
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 Winnies
enlightenment, she is depicted as abstractedly tearing in half the sporting
section of a newspaper in her hand.
Winnies vision of Stevies 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 fruiterers stall, the
passage is dominated by the idea of projection against an engulng darkness.
Here, however, cinematic sequencing works to sublimate the carnage of the
body-in-pieces into a pyrotechnic display. The hallucinatory, disembodied
head which linger[s] in Winnies consciousness is part of that metonymic
dilemma, of the relation of whole to part, which was rst violently realized
in the spectacle of Stevies 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 oer 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 signier of national
identity. Whereas The Soul of London poses this question as a dilemma of description or of setting boundaries, The Inheritorss does so in the science-ctional
terms of incompatible planes of reality. The Secret Agent,
t meanwhile, pushes
the logic of metropolitan perception to its limits in the uncanny overdetermination of the detail. This 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 supplement (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. The impression
can bind the traumatogenic energies of modernity only at the expense of the
absent, racially marked and colonized body. This 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 blindness. Traumas shattered perspective draws together the military, imperial, and
technologically mass-mediated dimensions of modernity, as aspects of a single
perverse economy.

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis

17

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 distinguished, 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 Crarys inuential 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 16775. Scholarship in this area has been dominated by the
phenomenological tradition, most inuentially in Ian Watts analysis of delayed decoding in Conrad
in the Nineteenth Century. See also Levenson, Bender, and Peters.
6. See also Saunders 11819. On the novels thematic links with Heart of Darkness, see Glover
2943.
7. For a discussion of previous examples of scientic romance, including Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland
(1884), C.H. Hintons Scientic Romancess (188496), and H.G. Wellss The Time Machinee (1895), see
Seed, Introduction, xxxxiv.
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 6982; Rignall, 13751; Moore; Fleishman.
11. The novels 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 11538. On the 1880s, see Walkowitz 1540.
12. On mimetic behaviour as a persistent theme within anthropological narratives of encounters with
non-Western or colonized cultures, see Taussig.
13. On the novels references to degeneration, see Greenslade 11419, and Ray.
14. For the impact on Heart of Darknesss of contemporary press reports of cannibalism in the Congo, during the 189194 war between Leopolds forces and the Arab slave traders, see Brantlinger 25963.
15. Conrads 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.

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