Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 83
between the low social body and infection: ‘[Verloc] generally arrived
in London (like the influenza) from the Continent’ (6). Stallybrass and
White comment that ‘in the bourgeois imagination the slums opened
(particularly at night) to let forth the thief, the murderer, the prostitute
and the germs’ (PPT, 133). The Secret Agent inhabits the discursive
world of the nineteenth-century urban ‘low’ to the point where it is
tempting to find a reflexive joke in the embarrassed young customers
of Verloc’s shop who buy marking ink and then drop it into the gutter
(5) (writing in the gutter?). Indeed, in an unusual intrusion the otherwise
anonymous narrator ironically places himself in the role of a
slightly fastidious Mayhew or other middle-class social investigator: 43
There was also about [Verloc] an indescribable air ... common to
men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of
mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling
hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry
agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating
electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines. But of
that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far
into the depths.
(13)
The grotesque is obviously one of the dominant modes of The Secret
Agent. How important is the grotesque body, in the sense defined by
Bakhtin and elaborated by Stallybrass and White? And how do
masculinity and the body bear upon each other in this ‘simple tale’? 44
The narrative voice of The Secret Agent is strongly characterized by its
tones of irony, cynicism and contempt, although it is not consistent,
nor does it belong to any identified person. This voice is obsessively
and excessively concerned with the body, in particular with the body
seen under certain aspects: as grotesque, distorted, unhealthy,
deformed; as subject to violence or fragmentation; as object of disgust
and fascination; as expressive of character and as ironically inappropriate
to character; as enigmatic text which others seek to read. As well
as the more obvious examples of descriptions of Verloc, Mrs Verloc,
Stevie, Ossipon, Michaelis and the Professor, these obsessions are
manifest in the depictions of more minor characters, such as the cab
driver, with his ‘bloated and sodden face of many colours’ (SA, 157),
the mother of Stevie and Winnie, with her ‘big cheeks [which] glowed
with an orange hue’ (159), and even the cab-driver’s horse, whose
‘little stiff tail seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke’ (166).