“Soot and Drops of Water”: Particulate Atmospherics and Redundancy in The Secret Agent

Brendan Kavanagh

“Soot and Drops of Water”: Particulate Atmospherics and Redundancy in The Secret Agent

Publication date: 04.05.2016

Yearbook of Conrad Studies, 2015, Vol. 10, pp. 59-73

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843941YC.15.005.4911

Authors

Download full text

PDF

Titles

“Soot and Drops of Water”: Particulate Atmospherics and Redundancy in The Secret Agent

Abstract

This paper examines the saturation of redundant particulates (such as fog, soot, dust and mist) and redundant sign systems in the atmospherics of The Secret Agent, while taking into account late Victorian responses to London’s air pollution. Through applying the information theory concepts of redundancy and information carrying capacity, it extends J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of repetition in Conrad’s work and thereby examines how the text’s minimal redundancy of specific words serves to encode higher levels of significance. The paper demonstrates that The Secret Agent represents the particulate atmosphere of London as a media system, in that its patterned use of minimal redundancy serves to trace the stabilization of collective conditions of immersion in air and sign systems.

Keywords

atmospherics, climatology, redundancy, information theory, media theory, The Secret Agent

References

Download references

Anderson, Katharine. Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bock, Martin. “Joseph Conrad and Germ Theory: Why Captain Allistoun Smiles Thoughtfully”. The Conradian 2006, Vol. 31.2 (Autumn), pp. 1-13.

Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: a History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times. London: Methuen, 1987.

Brimblecombe, Peter. “Perceptions and Effects of Late Victorian Air Pollution”. In: Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution. Ed. E. Melanie DuPuis. New York: NYU Press, 2004, pp. 15-26.

Clapp, Brian William. An Environmental History of Britain. London: Longman, 1994.

Connor, Steven. The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

Connor, Steven. “The Poorest Things Superflous: On Redundancy” (2011). Available online at http://stevenconnor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/redundancy.pdf, accessed: 22/05/2015.

Conrad, Joseph. “Autocracy and War” [1905]. Notes on Life and Letters. New York: Doubleday, 1921.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim [1900]. Ed. Jacques Berthoud. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” [1897]. Ed. J.H. Stape. London: Penguin, 2007.

Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent [1907]. Eds. Bruce Harkness, S.W. Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times [1854]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Flick, Carlos. “The Movement for Smoke Abatement in 19th-Century Britain”. Technology and Culture 1980, Vol. 21.1, pp. 29-50.

Fogel, Aaron. Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Glick, Thomas F. “Science, Technology and the Urban Environment: the Great Stink of 1858”. Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change. Ed. Lester J. Bilsky. New York: Kennikat Press, 1980.

Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel: 1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

James, Henry. Roderick Hudson [1876]. London: Houghton and Mifflin, 1891.

Lodge, O. “Electricity and Gas v. Smoke”. Exhibition Review 6 (1882), p. 2.

MacDuffie, Allan. “Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy”. ELH 2009, Vol. 76 (Spring), pp. 75-98.

Mallios, Peter Lancelot. “Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premonition of Simulation”. In: Conrad in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Carola Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios, Andrea White. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 154-172.

Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

Mosley, Stephen. The Chimney of the World: a History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. Cambridge: White Horse, 2001.

Mukherjee, Pablo. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers, and the Literary Cultures of South Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Napolin, Julie Beth. “‘A Sinister Resonance:’ Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad’s Marlow”. In: Vibratory Modernism. Eds. Anthony Enns, Shelley Trower. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 53-79.

Nicholson, William. Smoke Abatement: a Manual for the Use of Manufacturers, Inspectors, Medical Officers of Health, Engineers, and Others [1905]. London: Charles Griffin, 1927.

Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Porter, Dale H. The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London. Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press, 1998.

Shannon, C., Weaver, W. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Sloterdijk, Peter. “Architecture as an Art of Immersion”. Transl. Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul. Interstices 2011, Vol. 12, pp. 106-109.

Sloterdijk, Peter. “The Nomotop: On the Emergence of Law in the Island of Humanity”. Transl. Felix Koch. Law and Literature 2006, Vol. 18.1 (Spring), pp. 1-14.

Sloterdijk, Peter. “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space”. Harvard Design Magazine 2009, Vol. 30 (February), pp. 1-8.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Terror from the Air. Transl. Amy Patton, Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2009.

Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Transl. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Zuckerman, J. “The Motif of Cannibalism in The Secret Agent”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1968, Vol. 10, pp. 295-299.

Information

Information: Yearbook of Conrad Studies, 2015, Vol. 10, pp. 59-73

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/20843941YC.15.005.4911

Article type: Original article

Authors

Brendan Kavanagh

University of A. Stulginskis, Kaunas

Published at: 04.05.2016

Article status: Open

Licence: None

Percentage share of authors:

Brendan Kavanagh (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

Publication languages:

English

View count: 2228

Number of downloads: 1251

<p>“Soot and Drops of Water”: Particulate Atmospherics and Redundancy in The Secret Agent</p>

Download xml