by
Nadia Terki

While Conrad has been referred to in the very aftermath of 9/11 to draw attention to the parallels with Russian Anarchism that his writings (especially The Secret Agent (1907)) reflect, there is still a lack of thorough examination of the way Conrad’s novel reflects those links. General statements in articles or newspapers usually state the existence and the validity of this connection, but do not provide corresponding and necessary analysis of the novel and the way it can be read in light of the post-Cold War and 9/11 periods. Yet, the very fact that there are passing references to the relation between The Secret Agent and contemporary terrorism works as a relevant and necessary foundation for the analysis that concerns Conrad’s narratives and the pre-9/11 period.

Jean Baudrillard in his article “L’Esprit du Terrorisme” argues that ‘by keeping for itself all the cards, it has forced the Other to change the rules of the game.’[1] The United States has forced into being a power that it would later have to face, precisely because of its greed in establishing a new world order that came into existence. Yet it actually created these same entities which threaten that exact same power. Conrad, in The Secret Agent, delves into the complex entities behind state sponsored terrorism through constructing a narrative based on the Russian infiltration of an anarchist group in London, with the aim of pressuring the British authorities to adopt stricter and severe regulations against the anarchist movement that it believed threatened the position and power of the Russian state. The central story, the assemblage of the plot and the authorial omniscient point of view that constitute The Secret Agent enables its adaptability with contemporary terrorism – and state terrorism in particular. 

Cedric Watts formulates the resilience of the narrative in terms of overt and covert plots. He suggests that, in addition to the elements which make up the ensemble of the main story (the overt plot), there are other obscure and ambiguous foundations of the text ‘which at first may have seemed odd or anomalous, obscure or redundant and the whole text is in various ways transformed.’[2] Bearing in mind Watts’ conception of the covert plot as being a puzzling component of the novel, Conrad’s The Secret Agent is mystifying in that it is its covert plot which can directly spark contemporary analysis in relation to state terrorism. This is voiced in the narrative as archetypal of the CIA covert mission in Afghanistan.  Even though this covert plot, as Watts explains it, is a sequence of the novel that is constructed by the author and hidden from the reader (or else constructed by one character and ignored by the others), it rises above the borders of the story to create a larger sense of events. The Secret Agent’s first level of covert plot would be the Russian secret infiltration of the anarchist network in London without the actual knowledge of either the anarchists themselves or the British authorities, along with the absence of awareness about their motivation for doing so. Yet at another level, the covert hidden plot is mirrored in the secret covert mission of the Carter and Reagan administrations in Afghanistan. The intervention was presented as a legitimate assistance provided to the Afghan jihad in their fight against the Soviet intruders. However, the hidden dimension is that the mission was a plot against the USSR’s expansion of its geopolitical hegemony.

In Ghost Wars,[3] Steve Coll presents detailed research on the origins of Al Qaeda and in which he dives into the modes of operation of state terrorism, and echoes Watts’s notion of the covert plot as a narrative technique. Attributing the adjective of ‘ghost’ to state sponsored terrorism suggests that it functions in a covert way through creating an invisible and deceiving shield that diverts the attention of the media as well as the public opinion. In the same way, Conrad uses the story of Verloc the Secret Agent as a way of concealing the more complex narrative about indirect Russian sponsorship of terrorism. Watts maintains that the covert plot is not visible to all – most readers would not even notice the hidden story, purely because it is hidden.[4] Similarly, the fact that state terrorism is almost absent from field is due to its spectral nature.

At one level of the covert plot of The Secret Agent, there is the Russian secret agency involvement in anarchist terror that was solely for their own profit. Vladimir, Mr. Verloc and London’s secret policing agency needed stringent immigration policies to prevent any terrorist conspiracy in a foreign country. They regarded England as an absurd country with ‘sentimental regard for individual liberty.’[5] Hence their aim was not to vindicate and deliver London streets from terrorist networks, but instead to protect and maintain Russian autocracy and supremacy through eliminating the anarchist network. After many US observers concluded that the ‘global balance of power had shifted in favour of the Soviet Union’ after Afghanistan became ‘a pawn on the Kremlin’s chessboard,’[6] President Carter and other US policy makers as well as Ronald Reagan approved military intervention in Afghanistan, as they all agreed that the USSR would have control over the Asian subcontinent if it was not obstructed.[7] The parallel between Anarchism and Contemporary terrorism is not only reflected through the covert plots themselves, the US mission and the Russian secret agency in London, but also through the secrecy that is necessary for their operation.

The pornography shop that Verloc owns similarly functions as a covert to his work as a secret agent. Conrad constructs a whole situation around the character of Verloc as a way of indeed covering his plot about state terrorism. In the same way, the US covert operation was never a mission of supporting an Afghan national cause of driving out the Soviet occupation, it was purely a political and geopolitical strategy of preventing any Soviet expansion in the region that would disrupt American interests that served as a cover for their real aims behind their intervention.[8] Both Conrad and the CIA followed the same modus operandi. They both created a surface situation that concealed the deep and complex state of affairs. The CIA directors claimed that their intervention in Afghanistan was in the aim of assisting the Afghan jihad halt the Russian expansion, while it was a cover to the real aims of preventing the USSR from expanding any further and therefore preserve its own power.[9]

Works Cited
[1] Jean Baudrillard, Michel Valentin, ‘L’esprit du Terrorisme’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (Spring 2002), pp. 403-415. (p. 405).

[2] Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984), p. 30.

[3] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10,2001 (London: Penguin Books, 2004).

[4] Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 30-31.

[5] Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Penguin Group, 1984), p. 64.

[6] Steve Galster, ‘Afghanistan: The Making of the U.S. Policy 1973-1990’, The September 11th Sourcebooks, The National Security Archive (October 9, 2001). http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/essay.html [last accessed 12/10/1027].

[7] Ibid.

[8] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 147.

[9] Ibid., p. 147.
 

by
​Sam Saunders

by
​Agustin Cadena

Since the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ was launched in 2006, Mexico has become the most violent country among those which are not officially at war. The Mexican government recently released data showing that between 2007 and 2014 – a period that accounts for some of the bloodiest years of the nation’s war against drug cartels – more than 164,000 people were victims of homicide. The numbers seem to have decreased, but not substantially.
 
Now, if we examine the news, we realise that most of the drug traffic related violence takes place in rural areas or in small towns. The question would be: how is it, then, that most novels of the ongoing Mexican crime fiction boom are set in an urban context? From the early works by Rodolfo Usigli and Rafael Bernal in the 1940s to the books of the youngest generation, represented by Iván Farías (born 1976) and Hilario Peña (born 1979), Mexican crime novels can be used for the study of the representations of urban space in narrative fiction. Most of them take place in different neighbourhoods of Mexico City, but there are an increasing number of alternative urban settings, such as Tijuana, Mazatlán, Campeche, or Culiacán. Only a few works or short sequences take place in the dry rural landscapes that newspapers usually show in connexion with organized crime in Mexico, drug related violence or State sponsored violence.
 
In Latin America, in general, literature about these issues has become a genre in itself, known internationally as narco novela. And here we should notice that narco novela and crime fiction are two different genres that rarely overlap. Very few works, among them some novels by Elmer Mendoza or Francisco Hagenbeck, as well as Yuri Herrera’s Los Trabajos del Reino (Kingdom Cons), are read as both narco narrative and crime fiction.
           
It is not a sacrifice of historicity for tradition’s sake. Even if the violence that stems from drug trafficking is so much under the international spotlights, there is a lot of traditional, old-school crime in Mexico, and traditional psychopaths like the main character in César Güemes’ Soñar una Bestia (Dreaming of a Beast), one of the most urban of the whole collection in the sense that it goes back to the dark, underworld atmospheres typical of early representations of the city as the axis of modern angst.
           
Such fascination with Raymond Chandler’s ‘mean streets’ can be traced to the obvious fact that Chandler himself and the whole hard-boiled school are still our main influences. But there is another reason, and it goes back to the development of main stream Mexican fiction, from the French imitations of 19th century writers (like Federico Gamboa) to the emergence of modernism.
           
Mexican literature owes its best authors to the 1910 Revolution, with its emphasis on the need to give a voice to the unprivileged, the ‘underdogs’ of Mariano Azuela. The immediate consequence of this was the Novela de la Revolución, and its first major figure was Azuela. It is commonly attributed to him the no small achievement of crafting the first modern urban narrative of our literary history (though it would be possible to argue that Federico Gamboa did that a couple of decades before). This work is La Luciérnaga (The Lightworm), a novella that features prostitutes and criminals of the most appalling breed.
           
Now, if we accept that this is the founding piece of Mexican modern realism, it is tempting to point at another landmark. When José Revueltas died, in 1976, the press headlines rushed to say ‘the last of the realistic writers has died’. In the opening scene of Revueltas’ last long novel – Los Errores (The Mistakes) – we meet a pimp named Mario Cobián. He arrives to a seedy hotel carrying a small shoulder bag and a heavy trunk. Inside this there is a homosexual midget, Cobián’s accomplice. They plan to burglarize a moneylender’s office. The novel goes on weaving the plan. At the end of it, both the moneylender and the midget will have been murdered. There are only streets, squalid neighbourhoods, and dark alleys, like in a videogame.
           
Of course, it can be argued that since its origins in Edgar Allan Poe or the first proto-detectives imagined by Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo, crime fiction has been given urban settings. And the majority of the novels – American, English, French, German, Scandinavian, etc. – take place in cities. However there are still many notable exceptions, even in the founders of the hard-boiled school, and there are authors in the genre completely identified with rural or semi rural spaces, like Camilla Läckberg.
           
However, it is important to track these influences to understand the expectations of many readers in Europe and North America, in the sense that Mexican – and in general Latin American crime fiction - wrongly confused with narco novela should be a reflection of the violence unleashed by the drug wars. There are several differences: the urban setting vs. the rural landscape, the individual heroes and antiheroes of crime novels as opposed to the collective characters that appear many times in narco novelas (drug cartels, police corporations), the apparent lack of social and political criticism in crime stories, etc., and even the narrative lineage, as Mexican crime fiction comes mainly from the American hard-boiled school, while narco novela could be more accurately traced back to the Novela de la Revolución. The last, but perhaps most important difference is in the marketing timing: narco novela seems to be receding in the public taste, both at home and abroad, while crime fiction is at its peak in popularity.

Author Biography
Agustin Cadena is a Mexican writer and literary scholar, currently teaching at Debrecen University, Hungary. He has published over 30 books, most of them mystery fiction for young readers. Many of his stories can be found online, translated into English and several other languages.