ABSTRACT
Such are the good fortunes of a novel-serendipitously published on the eve of September 11, 1907, no less-whose plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory and “terroristic” cast of characters have offered themselves so suggestively to the post-World Trade Center global imaginary. Yet this essay argues that it is less any materiality of terror per se just than the very kind of media phenomenon just charted out-in which a “Conrad” becomes produced to explain, contain, and administer threats largely produced by the media as well-that is the true mark of the novel’s contemporaneity. Elsewhere, I have argued that
the production of Conrad as a prophet in today’s news media is significantly a simulated phenomenon-both in the conventional sense, that it is frequently unclear whether a genuine interpretive act, as opposed to the empty pretense of reading, is happening in these articles, and in Jean Baudrillard’s larger sense of the term, whereby “The Secret Agent” that emerges in these articles is largely an artificial phenomenon whose only genetic referent consists of the media procedures and political hysteria of the present moment (see Mallios, “Desert of Conrad”). At the close of that essay, I suggested that The Secret Agent forecasts its own fate in this respect; in this essay, I seek to restore the context and the field of textual issues that have their culmination in that claim. My subject is the central but underdiscussed phenomenon of newspapers in the novel,2
which I discuss first in light of the distinctive political and disciplinary emphases of the British press throughout the nineteenth century, and then in light of commercial developments at the turn of the twentieth century that consolidate a stylistics of “information” and a power of “simulation” that are still with us today. Indeed, the historical hunch that lurks behind this essay, informed by the several press histories cited within it, is that The Secret Agent’s special “contemporary” feel for us today derives from its singular responsiveness to material confluences and developments in the British press and mass media in Conrad’s time that continue to structure those institutions in our own. But this alone does not determine how the story is told, which historical factors and periods are made to count most, which theorists and critical discourses are conceived as most illuminating, and which Conrad texts are most closely read and how-the quandary of the “contemporary” that lends this essay its contrapuntal relation to other engagements with the politics of the mass-disseminated sign in this volume.
