He dies while carrying the bomb to explode the Greenwich meridian, artificially recognized as a global standard in We recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought […].
As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack 7. If time according to the Greenwich meridian was not affected in appearance, literary time was shattered and mixed up to juxtapose unjuxtaposable chronotopes.
Winnie, by murdering her husband in revenge, frees herself from social bondage. Transported by passion beyond her usual self, so discreet, mute, deaf and blind, Winnie experiences a revolution into her deeply rooted and repressed desire to put an end to her domestic oppression. He is so frightened that he imagines her to be a serial killer, able to kill men without apparent reason The accumulation of terror leads Ossipon to be the victim of his own terror : he rewrites the scene placing it in a biblical context.
After silencing her fears of dying on the gallows — punishment in use against murderers at the time —,. He felt her now clinging round his legs, and his terror reached its culminating point, became a sort of intoxication, entertained delusions, acquired the characteristics of delirium tremens.
He positively saw snakes now. He saw the woman twined round him like a snake, not to be shaken off. She was not deadly. She was death itself — the companion of life After comparing Winnie to a snake, reminiscence of the Evil in the Genesis, he equates her with death, dropping the comparing element.
This hallucination makes Winnie the primeval fear of humanity. It transforms her once more into the figure of the metaphor itself, into a double agent. If the dynamiter is indeed Zero, the mad bomb-maker, as the instigator of the explosions And if from this character originates the central digressive tale, then the Stevensons are denouncing the inefficiency of propaganda by deed. Indeed, Zero fails all his operations, and his very last fiasco — the accidental bombing of a newspaper stall — leads him to his own death.
Both Conrad and Stevenson translate the bombing of a man in terms of semiotics: the signs being thus violently split and thrown elsewhere echo the construction of both texts in fragments and flashbacks, lies and deeply buried secrets, where the main character is nowhere found in the literal world — the signifier — and the central fact — the terrorist act — is decentred from its orbit, leaving an empty space where the signified should be. Yet, both experience horror when confronted with the deed.
He is unable to face his own choice of representing the rights of Erin by all means, so he turns his back to ethics a second time, like a glorius miles , embodying the paradox of terrorists: they are able to explode others, even children and pregnant women, but are unable to implode themselves. Desborough who is described from the start as genuinely good ends up being the true hero of the novel. This naive reading and trust in the Logos of a storyteller leads the latter to realize her errors of judgment concerning the value of terrorism.
It is as a mask covering multiple persons one after the other. Her skills in storytelling, adapted from the legend of Scheherazade, also recall the powers of the Greek god, Proteus. Indeed, ill at ease with bombs, she devotes herself to the linguistic part of terrorism, though in a very unusual way! No press for her, no pamphlets against the British aggression towards Ireland. Mrs Luxmore sees her daughter as a victim of the nationalist press of the time, and therefore as a victim of the very instrument she uses to convince people to enrol for the Irish cause : propaganda by word.
This vicious circle that turns the fleeing character into a victim of her own beliefs also gives her a possibility to escape.
The anamorphosis thus occurs in both novels on the levels of plot and of narration. Besides, from the opening of their books, the Stevensons and Conrad put an emphasis on their distance from the subject treated. They show their use of comedy and irony as a proof of the non-contagious aspect of their novels. And yet, we can wonder whether these poetic intentions have not been stated as a warning against their own linguistic ambiguities.
Indeed, many critics have noted how terrorism still fascinates them despite their official denials. Melchiori, after a study on the manuscripts of The Dynamiter to define which parts and which sentences of the text had been written by Robert Louis Stevenson and which by Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, comments on the difference of style and tone between both authors. This almost too overt identification of the author with a terrorist has shocked many, leading some to think Conrad was playing a double game in his own text, advocating some political means that are immoral and inhumane.
Although these interpretations may reveal puzzling allegiances on the part of the writers, I am going to show that there are other elements in the text that can be analysed for the impressions they leave on the reader. Hence, the dialogical confrontation between Zero and the dandy Somerset, as well as a comparison between the Professor and Winnie will underline the linguistic means used by the authors to gouge terror out of terrorism. Mystery surrounds this new tenant and louche people visiting him, which highly puzzles the dandy, as he finds himself in a similar situation as Winnie Verloc : a passive witness to a secret society.
Although his ethics and financial situation urge him to denounce the wanted criminal to the police, he befriends with him! The terrorist and the dandy are indeed two sides of the same coin as they both compare themselves to poets and artists while using provocation to be noticed by society.
Propaganda by deed is here shown in its ultimate paradox as it does not choose its victims amidst the political figures responsible for social injustice, but amidst innocent people. With a malleable personality and his mind wandering over art, music, and detective work, he eventually discovers he is the opposite of what he thought to be.
In his rebellion against terrorism he also puts an end to dandyism, too elastic and morally decadent to be a real frontier against terror.
Well then, understand : I want, with every circumstance of infamy and agony, to blow you up! The Stevensons therefore transform a Gothic terrorist tale into a farce where the terrorists are turned into clowns. The values of friendship, family, thus of community, are finally reinstated as Somerset tries to save Zero from his diabolical bombing of the house, and Clara is rescued from terrorist propaganda by Desborough.
Indeed, although the title refers to the figure of the secret agent, a research of its definition and occurrences led us to name several characters with this function, as if the generic possibility implied had been lost, constantly displaced instead and found where it was most unsuspected.
It creates a textual space and time open to equation of contraries, to polyphony, to comparison of different ideologies without the comparing element. It is up to each reader to recreate it or not, depending whether they accept a literary text to be a democratic space, allowing free speech, or, if needed, to compartmentalize it again. As David Mulry has shown, the four anarchists described in The Secret Agent embody historical stages in the development of anarchist theories. In that frame of mind the appeal of violence was strong.
If the first task was to destroy the institutions, violence could be easily considered the main way to achieve the perfect society of freedom and equality. Moreover anarchists were impelled to violence by the simple reason that they rejected politics: they boycotted elections at all levels and therefore were never represented in parliaments or town council. Until the beginning of the 20 th century, when an important sector of anarchism embraced syndicalism and created strong trade unions with a mass following, especially in Spain, anarchists were restricted to activities of propaganda which usually reached a very limited audience, and to violent actions, which at least gave them notoriety.
That was the origin of what 19 th century anarchists called propaganda by the deed, which is probably the first reference to the nowadays commonplace idea that a terrorist act is basically a violent means by which a message reaches an audience either to instill fear or to promote rebellion.
The term propaganda by the deed was initially applied to any kind of action which could have a great impact in public opinion, from an armed insurrection, even if failed, to a massive demonstration, but it was especially applied to assassinations or bombings aimed against the State, the Church or the bourgeoisie. Few workers, the paper said, read revolutionary papers or took part in assemblies but if someone shot at an emperor every worker or peasant would ask himself: What do they want, these assassins?
In the late 19 th century just as today terrorism was the least demanding strategy: it takes only a person to shoot a gun or throw a bomb. In a very few cases the anarchists tried to mount armed insurrections, the first in in the Spanish industrial town of Alcoy, and they were affairs of little importance, as they were unable to muster large numbers of fighters.
On the other hand they attained notoriety by single attacks in which they used daggers, guns or bombs. It all began in and with five attacks, none of them fatal, against the emperor of Germany and the kings of Italy and Spain. The heyday of anarchist terrorism came in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. There were two main types of attacks: assassinations of members of the royalty and statesmen and indiscriminate attacks with bombs.
An assassination was a much simpler undertaking then than today as very important people had much less protection. Between and anarchist assassins managed to kill a president of the French Republic, an empress of Austria, a king of Italy ,a president of the United States and no less than three prime ministers of Spain, not to mention various failed attempts, including one against the shah of Persia while he was visiting Paris.
Regarding mayor bombings, we should at least remember the Haymarket bomb, which killed seven policemen in Chicago in ; the bombing of a theater in Barcelona, which killed twenty spectators in ; the bombing of a religious procession again in Barcelona, which killed twelve people, mostly workers, in ; the bombing at a royal wedding in Madrid that killed 25 people in ; the Wall Street bombing in New York, which killed thirty people in ; and the bombing of a theater in Milan in , with twenty one deaths.
Explosives were not as lethal a hundred years ago and the number of deaths may seem small today but they were real carnages by the standards of the day. Most interesting was the modus operandi of those terrorists as it could be described as a combination of lone wolves and informal networks which provided a fertile breeding ground.
It was something similar to the lone wolves attacks inspired by jihadist propaganda of nowadays, such as the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. I will make this point using two pieces of evidence, one from an American anarchist newspaper and the other from a French police report. The American newspaper was the Arbeiter-Zeitung of Chicago, written in German as most of the Chicago anarchists were German immigrants.
Its editor was unjustly condemned to death for the Haymarket bombing, in which he did not in fact take part. It said that the bestr was to act alone or with the least possible number of comrades, as it made easier to avoid detection by the police. Those comrades should not form part of an established group, probably known by the police, and the new group should disband as soon as the action was done.
Finally the action should be done in a place where the comrades were not known. In fact the bomber of Haymarket, who was never arrested, could have been a German anarchist from New York.
Then which was the role of the permanent groups? The Arbeiter-Zeitung explained that the groups would provide the men of action with shelter, money and a milieu in which to find comrades for the action, and afterwards they would use their deed as propaganda for rebellion. I suppose we would all agree that it was a very clever advice and it was followed by many anarchist terrorists in different countries. Anarchism has been since the beginning a truly international movement with strong if informal ties across the frontiers.
So we could move to Paris, where the police had a very good network of informants between the anarchists. In , after various bombings, a police report explained that even if all the anarchists agreed in the use of violence to foster revolution, the attacks were never committed by established groups.
Therefore the police informants who attended their meetings could provide little valuable advice. And it was extremely difficult for the justice to prove that anarchists formed part of a great conspiracy. Anarchist informal networks had their advantages and they resemble some jihadist networks of nowadays. By then anarchism, either peaceful or violent, seemed a spent force.
Then the collapse of communism arrived and the longing for a more libertarian dream came back. Nobody dreams any more of Soviet type socialism. There has been instead a small revival of anarchist thinking.
Could there be also a strong revival of anarchist violence? I think it is not at all probable but in a lesser scale some countries, like those old anarchist strongholds of Italy and Spain, have already suffered some anarchist attacks. They were the result of a new brand of anarchism usually labelled as insurrectionary anarchism. The term insurrectionary anarchism was first used in Italy in the early s. Some of its militants were arrested in as perpetrators of various terrorist crimes.
One of them was Alfredo Bonanno, who was sentenced to six years of prison and is considered the most influential propagandist of insurrectionary anarchism worldwide. He is most well-known for a violent pamphlet he wrote in Armed joy. In it he criticized both capitalism and the professional revolutionaries and opposed the joy of play, even armed play, to all kind of boring seriousness.
According to Bonanno armed struggle must not be professionalized. He rejected the project of an armed party favored by the Red Brigades and other Marxist groups and proposed a free network of affinity groups.
These affinity groups had been the main form of anarchist organization in the late 19 th century and were just informal gatherings of individuals who felt affinity among themselves. Some of these groups were the breeding ground for terrorist acts.
Insurrectionary anarchism spread very soon to other countries. In two policewomen were killed during a bank robbery in the Spanish town of Cordoba. The robbers were three Italian and one Argentinian anarchists and after they were sentenced to prison there was an international movement of anarchist solidarity with them. The killer of the policewomen, the Italian Claudio Lavazza, became a sort of hero. In March he sent an address from a Spanish prison to a meeting to be held in Athens in solidarity with the anarchist prisoners in different counties.
Nowadays, after the death penalty had been rightly abolished in all our countries, this role is played by the imprisoned comrades. In the years and there were bomb attacks against Spanish targets in Italy as a reprisal for the imprisonment of Lavazza and other anarchists in Spain. I think that in these words we can grasp something important, the frame of mind of a terrorist which seems to shoot for the joy of it and as a means of probing to himself that he is really a brave man capable of confronting society.
For this kind of people the long term objective of total revolution seems to be less important than the action in itself. The name of the anarchist group that shoot Adinolfi is also interesting. It called itself the Olga Nucleus in reference to Olga Ikonomidou, arrested in as a member of the anarchist Greek group Conspiracy of Fire Cells,. It emerged in as a federation of four groups that were already responsible of at least 20 attacks, either by explosive devices or letter bombs.
From to the FAI claimed 50 attacks, again most of them by explosive devices or letter bombs. The kneecapping of Adinolfi in was the first and only case in which they shoot a person.
In total they injured ten people and some of the attacks could have resulted in deaths. It is worth noting that ten of those fifty terrorist incidents were letter bombs sent abroad to targets in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain, France and Greece.
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