Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel (review)

Although "the phenomenon of conspiracy" may be "as old as (if not older than) recorded history" (1), conspiracy as a subject of reputable academic inquiry can be dated more recently and precisely to the publication of J. M. Roberts's The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972). "For about a century and a half," writes Roberts, "large numbers of intelligent Europeans believed that much of what was happening in the world around them only happened because secret societies planned it so…. More believed such nonsense, probably, between 1815 and 1914 than at any other time" ([Scribners, 1972], 102). In England, popular belief in the power of conspiratorial groups to determine public life had as much to do with governmental policies adopted during the Napoleonic wars—for instance, the Combination Acts of 1799 to 1800 and the Committees of Secrecy of the House of 1801, 1812, and 1817—as it did with the presence of domestic disturbances caused by Luddism and Captain Swing or with actual continental societies like the Carbonari or the Illuminati. Buttressed by occasional factual confirmation, conspiracy was a useful political and legal category that offered tremendous imaginative appeal, prompting a popular mythology articulated through more or less credible conspiracy narratives. Adrian S. Wisnicki's Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel argues that a subset of these narratives developed into "a distinct but related phenomenon—the conspiracy theory narrative" (2), exemplified by such late-twentieth-century novels as Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) and characterized by its "half-ironic response" to its own obsession with conspiracy (6).

In order to trace "the conspiracy-conspiracy theory narrative tradition" back to what he identifies as its source (8)—nineteenth-century detective fiction in general and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842–43) in particular—Wisnicki develops a highly original structuralist approach to its central narrative components. Modeling his reading strategy primarily on Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916), Wisnicki identifies "the essential conspiracemes (cf. phoneme, morpheme, etc.) or units of conspiracy theory narrative" (9, emphasis original), among which he includes the "Subject Who Tries to Know," "the Hidden Hand," "the Conspiracy to Defraud," "the Paranoid Subject," "the Inaccessible Authorities," and "the Vanishing Subject." Succinctly describing his own interpretive process, Wisnicki writes, "Each chapter centers on one or two conspiracemes and explores these conspiracemes in terms of a few twentieth-century examples and (the primary focus of the chapter) nineteenth-century precedents. Each chapter also situates the nineteenth-century works in relation to their historical moment" (16).

Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism achieves its most successful fusion of structuralist analysis and detailed close reading in chapter 5, "From Conspiracy to Conspiracy Theory," which is exceptional in its synthesis of conspiracemes, its exclusive concentration on late-Victorian and Edwardian conspiracy fiction, the quantity of texts to which it gives substantive attention, and its revisionist typology of "formulaic conspiracy genres." This chapter argues that, in the transitional period leading up to the First World War, "another kind of conspiracy narrative finally coalesces, one in which the various types of conspiracies (and conspiracemes) appear side by side or become entangled, and one which stresses irony and foregrounds the indeterminacy of its claims regarding the conspiracy elements" (144). Building upon prior work by Barbara Melchiori, I. F. Clark, Bernard Porter, and Stephen Arata, Wisnicki convincingly shows how the pervasive irony, alienation, and sense of imperial disintegration that characterizes the modernist period also inflected the conspiracy narrative tradition. The Fenians appropriately assume pride of place in his pithy reconstruction of the turn-of-the-century historical context, which serves as the backdrop for interconnected close readings of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands (1903), Joseph Conrad's...