Conrad as Progressive Political Propagandist

31:1, Book Reviews the result of wishful thinking. The second, an experiment in fiction set in A.D. 3,000 and titled "The True Report of a County Council Candidate's Dream," is a futuristic fantasy. Influenced by BeUamy's Looking Backward, and Butler 's Erewhon, the work places the boorish narrator in a distant time and an unfamiliar London populated by beings who find him as strange as he finds them. The wonders of the future prefigure others Shaw would prophesy; the absurdity of the situation and the dialogue prefigure Monty Python. Taken together, the entries in this volume clearly help us to deepen our understanding of Shaw's life and works by amplifying the contexts in which he wrote and by analysing some of his works carefully. Viewed separately, each is a well crafted piece that deserves attention in its own right. The collection surely has an appeal well beyond the circle of Shaw specialists. John J. Conlon University of Massachusetts at Boston CONRAD AS PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL PROPAGANDIST Gudrun Kauhl. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent. Text und Zeitgeschichtlicher Kontext. Bern; Frankfurt/Main; New York: Peter Lang, 1986. sFR 44.00 Kauhl's reading of TAe Secret Agent is structured on two convictions. The first is that the novel's discrepancies in tone may best be analysed by assuming that it has two opposed narrative voices; the second is that it deliberately presents contemporary political and scientific theories "in their moral failure and destructive consequences." These narrative voices may be defined as the humanitarian voice urging moral action and the skeptical voice denying the validity of every human effort. Kauhl argues that the story itself ultimately reveals, in spite of the skeptical narrative voice, which looks upon mankind as unalterable, that there is a degree of latitude for the constructive human will. The narrative itself shows that the dominant principle of free contract at the turn of the century had for its consequence "the creation of social areas within which a blind egoism must necessarily rule, within which human beings are in the end reduced to struggling blindly for survival" (113). By appealing to the reader's orthodox sense of justice it suggests the replacement of the liberal system by a more truly humanitarian one. It makes the reader aware, by its exposition of the sufferings of the "submerged third," that to accept the verdict of the skeptical narrative voice, which sees man as a biologically determined creature of egoistic drives, means to perpetuate forever and ever the social misery portrayed. We need not accept that the skeptical voice's comment on Stevie's circles is the symbolic embodiment of the author's conviction that man is imprisoned in a world of material change obeying its own laws, against which even the will to destruction is powerless, as 122 31:1, Book Reviews Stallman maintains. The novel's basic "thrust" is a humanitarian one because the story itself supports the humanitarian narrator's altruistic drive. Kauhl's book makes exciting reading because it delicately balances the utterances of the two voices, never letting on until close to its end which of them triumphs in her view. She grippingly demonstrates that the perspectival dichotomy persists throughout almost the whole of TAe Secret Agent. Over against the humanitarian voice telling us in moral irony that the novel's world is one of Verlocs and Heats, a world whose prevailing morality is one of moral perversions and whose rulers are completely out of touch with its darker realities, we have the skeptical voice, which keeps tracing all human motivation to the prompting of a self-assertive mechanism, endeavoring to show that all human beings are, and ever will be, solely actuated by a desire for power and/or the urge to seek pleasure in avoidance of pain. Even Conrad's famous Chapter Eight, Kauhl reasons, only seemingly offers a resolution of the dichotomy. It shows the London of the submerged, revealing that these, supposedly free to act on the basis of the free-contract-principle, are actually incapacitated from acting freely by the social inequality that principle enforces. The resolution which seems to be urged, that of an active humanitarianism on...