A Rage for Order: Fetishism, Self-Betrayal, and Exploitation in The Secret Agent

Abstract

�� ��� Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon The maker’s rage to order words of the sea Words of the fragrant portals, dimly- starred, And of ourselves and our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. —Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” Discussing the ideological contradictions at play in The Secret Agent in terms of the novel’s “metaphysical materialism,” Terry Eagleton identifies its central dimension as a product of a “radical conservative subensemble” distinguished by “radical skepticism about progress, change, causality and temporality” (23–32). For Eagleton, the novel’s naturalist form, while endorsing the normative assumptions of the bourgeois world by conflating time and space into an eternal present, simultaneously, through the violent change, motion, and spiritual vision represented by Winnie, Verloc, and Stevie respectively, attempts to present an alternative set of humane values distinct from bourgeois ones. Although Eagleton doesn’t explore it in great depth, the textual process that he describes has a clear parallel in the social and economic mechanisms that Karl Marx identifies in his theory of commodity fetishism. Even as the text works to expose the historical foundations of the subordination of human life to the imperatives of the commodity system, its metaphysical materialism presents the belief in social progress as an illusion shared by the bourgeoisie and revolutionists alike. The destructive effects of the system of commodity fetishism appear both in the novel’s characterization of capitalist society as well as the psychological impoverishment of its central characters. Understood as an attempt to come to terms with the forms of social and economic domination produced by the fetishizing of social relations, the