Meat, Flesh, Skin: The Carnality Of The Secret Agent

Abstract

Abstract: This essay considers Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in relation to what I will suggest are several relevant intertexts or sources for it—including Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking 1906 exposé of the conditions in the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle , as well as Classical mythological tales depicting “cannibal feasts.” I point to these sources in order to argue that Conrad uses the novel to consider the question of the overlap between the direct violence of terrorism and the less direct violence of meat production. The novel, I suggest, can be read as an extended meditation on the embodied nature of human flesh.