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304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1907
“You give yourself for an agent provocateur The proper business of an agent provocateur is to provoke. As far as I can judge from your record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money for the last three years.”
“All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity – it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production – by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.”
‘The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree the middle-classes are stupid?’
Mr. Verloc agreed hoarsely.
‘They are’
‘They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What they want just now is a jolly good scare.’
For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages & opportunities of the state but against the price that must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint & toil. The majority of revolutionaries are the enemies of discipline & fatigue easily.Joseph Conrad apparently never felt comfortable in London and while he took on British citizenship, may have felt himself a perpetual alien from all but his native Polish homeland. For this reason, he seems particularly able to convey the spirit of so many disaffected characters in the only novel the Conrad wrote set in London, a book that much like one of the characters is "inclining toward the gutter...(having committed an act) of "madness or despair". The Secret Agent ends like this:
There are also some for whom the sense of justice & the price extracted looms up monstrously, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. These are the true fanatics. The remaining portion of the social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of noble & vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets & incendiaries.
And the incorruptible fellow walked, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin & destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable--and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness & despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected & deadly, like a pest in a street full of men.Much like Turgenev in his novel Fathers & Sons, Joseph Conrad attempted to grapple with the quandary of why some within a seemingly stable society choose its destruction, a concern that would seem a never-ending social problem but one that the author dealt with valiantly, occasionally with garbled phrasings but mostly with uplifting prose & well-drawn characters.
"الحقيقة يمكن أن تكون أكثر قسوة من رسم كاريكاتوري."
""الأدب هو التاريخ، تاريخ البشرية، ولا شيء آخر. بل هو أكثر من ذلك، الأدب يقف على أرضية صلبة، يعتمد وجوده على واقعية الظواهر، ورصد الأحداث الاجتماعية، بينما التاريخ يعتمد على الوثائق، وقراءة المطبوع والمكتوب. لهذا، الأدب أقرب إلى الحقيقة، لكن بغض النظر عن هذا. المؤرّخ فنان أيضاً، والروائي هو المؤرّخ، الحامي، الحارس، والمفسّر للتجربة الإنسانية."