“Divine violence, ironic silence, and poetic justice in Conrad’s The Secret Agent”
Prof. Jay Parker
Assistant Professor
English Department
Hang Seng University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
This talk will explore a resonance between Joseph Conrad’s political novel The Secret Agent and Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. I will argue that Conrad draws upon literary techniques, particularly the ironic treatment of silence to explore violence, justice and ambiguity that anticipates elements of Benjamin’s essay. This treatment of Conrad and political theory revolves around a Benjaminian reading of the productive ambiguity of irony in particular and literature in general, to provide a sense of how literature helps us to think through the political uncertainties. I interpret Benjamin’s concept of divine violence as a form of poetic justice, a trope frequently read as unfit for elitist modernist art. Yet Conrad situates literature in relation to popular culture to suggest that both are necessary to articulate and reflect critically upon truth. Divine violence as poetic justice emerges as a standard by which political settlements might be judged, whilst Conrad’s pervasive irony provides a productive ambiguity that works to maintain indeterminacy that is necessary to Benjamin.
Bio:
Jay Parker is Assistant Professor in the English Department of the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He has published articles on Conrad in relation to liberalism and to justice in Textual Practice, Law and Literature and The Conradian. He was awarded the Juliet McLauchlan Prize in 2012 and the Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Award in 2015 for his research on Conrad, and is Advisory Editor for The Conradian. He is currently completing a book on Conrad and Liberalism.