The Flâneur/Flâneuse and the Benjaminian Law of “Dialectic at a Standstill” in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

INTRODUCTION

Most of the critical studies of the theme of the city in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent are focused on the despair and the squalor of the urban scenario symbolic of the moral darkness of its inhabitants, which is phrased by critics as the myth of the “monstrous town.” In this essay I aim to shed new light on the relationship between the cityscape and the human life inhabiting it as represented in The Secret Agent. My analysis works from the framework of Walter Benjamin’s study in The Arcades Project of the nineteenth-century metropolitan type of the “flâneur,” which illuminates the Benjaminian conception of an anti-linear and anti-bourgeois temporality of “dialectic at a standstill.”

Given the context of a specifically male definition of the flânerie by Benjamin and the feminist critique of his male-dominated definition, I attach equal weight to the lifestyles of the flâneur and the flâneuse in The Secret Agent. From a feminist perspective, I shall demonstrate that in this novel it is ironically the un-Benjaminian flâneuse rather than the typical flâneur who fulfills the Benjaminian “backward-looking” vision of resistance and revolt against the bourgeois temporality based on established institutions; it is the female figure of the flâneuse from whom we might identify the possibility of messianic redemption in the making of history. Winnie Verloc plays an important role as the flâneuse who defies the bourgeois patriarchal ideology of the separate spheres in her crossing from the domestic sphere—as a heroic, maternal protector of her innocent brother Stevie—to the public sphere—as an avenger killing her husband, engaged in streetwalking, and finally committing suicide. Winnie’s acts of violence and streetwalking transgress the boundary of the private/public spheres of femininity/masculinity. We can best discern the Benjaminian law of “dialectic at a standstill” at work in Winnie’s straddling the two spheres. Her actions represent the people of the private sphere in their protest and rebellion against the hegemony, exploitation, and oppression of the public sphere, which can be deemed as a backward-looking gesture towards the prehistory and towards the oppressed in the lower social stratum that prefigures the messianic rupture of the progressive movement of time in a manner of anti-bourgeois revolution.

The topic of this paper is centered on the metropolitan figure of the flâneur emerging in the nineteenth-century Paris as studied by Benjamin; therefore, the theme of the city is a major concern here. Conrad in his “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent connects the theme of the “monstrous town” to the moral atrocity of its inhabitants, who are depicted as “indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles” like “a cruel devourer of the world’s light” (vii). Contemporary critics studying Conrad’s unreal cityscape of London often follow the writer’s formulation of The Secret Agent as a tale of “utter desolation, madness and despair” (xv) so that they tend to fixate on the pessimistic sense of the story as an expression of moral failure. Cedric Watts establishes the paradigm of reading Conrad’s tale of the myth of the monstrous town, associating the physically “murky and oppressive” cityspace with the theme of a “morally murky” universe (29). Similarly, Robert Hampson argues that the “topographical exactitude” of Conrad’s text only produces an “alienated experience” of London as an urban landscape that is “anonymous and unknown” (174, 169), and Hugh Epstein suggests Conrad’s metaphorical conception of London is founded on an “inert terrain of hopelessness” (195), while Martin Ray attempts to compare Conrad’s constitution of a “threatened and apocalyptic city” to the writings of other nineteenth-century authors like Dickens and Wells (199). In J. Hillis Miller’s nihilistic reading of The Secret Agent, the motifs of “walking and insomnia” connote the value of walking as an act that “does not express the freedom of spirit” but only “signifies man’s inability to escape from himself” in the...