ABSTRACT
One of the first modernist texts to position an idiot figure at its symbolic centre was Joseph Conrad’s novel of political intrigue, The Secret Agent (1906), which explores tensions between the social and personal dimensions of idiocy. With the rise of public provision for idiots and the insane in late Victorian and Edwardian England and with the popular theory that ‘feeble-minded’ individuals were pathological and should be segregated in specialized institutions, it is
interesting that Conrad – a relatively new inhabitant of London after a career at sea – should choose to portray an idiot living in the midst of the Edwardian metropolis.3 In order to assess the shifting representation of idiocy in the early twentieth century, this chapter discusses the manner in which The Secret Agent linked nineteenth-century realist concerns to a modernist interest in the aesthetics of idiocy: twin issues that are developed in the next two chapters in relation to German and American culture. This chapter also considers Alfred Hitchcock’s reimaging of Conrad’s idiot figure in his masterly adaptation, Sabotage (1936), which can similarly be positioned on the fulcrum between realism and modernism. Although he made alterations to the plot and characters and generally disregarded his source texts (claiming ‘if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema’), as I argue, Hitchcock can be shown to remain reasonably faithful to Conrad’s symbolic and ironic approach.4
