“An Alternative Frame of Reference”: The Secret Agent as Sequel to Heart of Darkness

Secrets and Lies in Conrad, SAMLA 92

Jana M. Giles, PhD

This paper explores the continuity of lying in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent to argue that the latter novel establishes the “alternative frame of reference” that Chinua Achebe criticized the former for lacking. The absence of such a frame charged that Conrad demonstrated “bad faith” in promoting stereotypes of black Africans as savages. However, I argue, first, that both novels explore the concept of restraint in relation to cannibalism for the purpose of establishing that it is the imperial Self, rather than the abject Other, who cannibalizes. The black crew on the Roi de Belges mysteriously refuse to eat Marlow and his white companions despite their gnawing hunger, while Stevie’s fragmented body lies like a “cannibal feast.” Both are victimized by imperial agents—Marlow, Kurtz, Verloc—who serve a rapacious global capitalism. Winnie also is “consumed” by the patriarchal domestic order in being exploited by Verloc and then by Ossipon, suggesting that women, too, are fodder for empire. Finally, both Marlow and Ossipon aid and abet the existing order by lying to conceal the genocidal ambitions of Kurtz and the truth of Winnie’s demise. Yet at the end of The Secret Agent, Ossipon, with his “degenerate” and “negroid” features, unlike Marlow, experiences a change of heart when he is shocked by learning of Winnie’s suicide. The Secret Agent rejects nineteenth-century racialized discourse, providing the frame that puts Marlow’s racism into its larger imperial context, and offers hope for a politics of justice.