The best undergrad course I took was taught by a very-near-to-retirement professor whose _modus operandi_ was to sit at the front of the class, throw out a few Socratic questions, and after a few students had suggested this or that, he'd say, "Well, turn to page 306 and let's see what the narrator says..." So, we'd turn to page 306 and, despite all our bad guesses and weird pontifications, we'd find that the novel had very explicitly answered the question. Instead of guessing, we should have just stuck to the text and looked to see what _it_ said. For example, in the case of [[Moby Dick (1851)]], if you asked, "So what does the white symbolize?" the correct thing to do wasn't to look up some book on symbols and interpretation and throw out a bunch of possibilities. Instead, you'd turn to chapter 42 ("The Whiteness of the Whale") and you'd find that the answer was an entire chapter making fun of the idea that symbols in novels follow a simple "x = y" format. ## The Secret Agent Ironically, in that same undergrad course, one of the novels we looked at was [[The Secret Agent (1907)]], which playfully encourages these symbolic, x = y readings. The novel involves secret agents and codes, so of course there will be hidden symbols. It's just that it encourages that kind of reading precisely in order to tear it down. ### Tearing down symbols The most obvious "symbols" in the novel are the sets of **triangles** and **circles** that come up again and again. ##### Triangles Mr. Verloc's codename is a delta, or Δ. Character's in the novel get grouped into triads a lot, with the central one being ***V***erlock, ***W***innie, and Ste***v***ie. But these triangles get setup in order to be knocked down. When Mrs Verloc's brother, Stevie, is blown up by Mr. Verloc's scheming and ineptitude, Winnie's whole mental support (triangles are meant to support things) comes crashing down, and she finds herself staring at a whitewashed wall: > But the lamentable circumstances of Stevie’s end, which to Mr Verloc’s mind had only an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her tears at their very source.  It was the effect of a white-hot iron drawn across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, ==set her features into a frozen contemplative immobility addressed to **a whitewashed wall with no writing on it**.== The symbols, the things we imbue with meaning in order to live our day-to-day lives, are rubbish. What's beneath, as Mrs. Verloc learns, is a perfectly blank whiteness "with no writing on it"—that is, a _lack_ of symbols. If you want to know what the "whiteness" represents in the novel, the text is pretty explicit: > Mrs Verloc gazed at the whitewashed wall.  A blank wall—perfectly blank. A blankness to run at and dash your head against.  The white represents blankness ("perfectly blank. A blankess to run at and dash your head against"). It's what's left when you get rid of the structures and symbols we imbue with meaning in order to go about our day-to-day lives. ##### Circles That's why, in contrast to the triangles, there are circles. Okay, so what do the circles represent? ==The novel [[texts tell you what they mean|very explicitly tells you]]==. Stevie sits > very good and quiet at a deal table, ==drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles==, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines ==suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.== That's what the circles represent: "a rendering of cosmic chaos." The words are right there. Stevie loves drawing them: > poor Stevie usually established himself of an evening with paper and pencil for the pastime of drawing these coruscations of ==innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity.== Circles suggest chaos and eternity. The novel is explicit. ##### Eternity Later in the novel, the character Ossipon (note the "circle" in the name—***O***ssipon!) bitterly laments > eternity is a damned hole. The circles are holes of eternity. (Circles are shaped... well, like holes.) If you fall into them you fall into "chaos and eternity." Falling down and into a whole of "chaos and eternity" will usually destroys you. This is why it's so dangerous to descend down or to get to the "bottom" of things, which is precisely what happens to Stevie: > Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values, he wished to go to the bottom of the matter. Stevie loves drawing those circles, and — not unrelatedly! — he loves getting to the "bottom of the matter." This is why he gets blown to bits, and his body is turned into, well... chaos. By contrast, Mrs. Verloc only gets to the "bottom" of things when she's forced to do so. For most of the novel, she specifically avoids it. She feels > profoundly that things do not stand much looking into. Later, in bed, > she lay very still, confirmed in her instinctive conviction that things don’t bear looking into very much. But once Stevie gets blown up, and her symbolic support system is destroyed, Mrs. Verloc _has_ to look into things, and all she finds is that whitewashed wall: chaos and eternity and blankness. If you look into things too much, you find they're all based on nothing. You just discover a kind of horrifying chaos or nihilism. Winnie intuitively knows that the symbolic support systems may be based on nothing, but that's ironically why you need them—precisely in order to avoid facing the fact that there's nothing supporting them! Mrs. Verloc is (perhaps justifiably) terrified of falling into that blankness, descending into that blank eternity which is a "damned hole." Later in the novel, this is why the gallows frightens her so much: > Mrs Verloc, ==**who always refrained from looking deep into things**, was ***compelled*** to look into the very bottom of this thing.== > > [...] > > Mrs Verloc remembered its nature.  It came with a cruel burning pain into her head, as if the words “The drop given was fourteen feet” had been scratched on her brain with a hot needle.  “The drop given was fourteen feet. "The drop given was fourteen feet" describes a gallows execution. That idea of a drop (the idea of falling "into the very bottom of this thing") gets into Mrs. Verloc's head and destroys her. She finally destroys herself by taking off her wedding ring (another ***O*** or circle!) and throwing herself from a boat and into the English channel. She doesn't throw herself into a river (which might suggest comprehensible linear time); she throws herself into a vast, shapeless ocean or abyss of eternity. ### Surviving the chaos In order to survive getting to the "bottom" of things, you have to accept that it's all just chaos. One character who can survive such downward descents into chaos is the Assistant Commissioner: > He left the scene of his daily labours quickly like an unobtrusive shadow.  ==**His descent into the street** was like **the descent into a slimy aquarium** from which the water had been run off.  A murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him.== The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him.  ==**He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish** that can be seen of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.== A few paragraphs further down, he lingers "as though he were a member of the criminal classes." Police. Criminals. It doesn't matter. It's just a game. The rules are arbitrary, but the Assistant Commissioner realizes this, and he's okay with it. That's why he can survive. ### The symbols are arbitrary What the novel suggests is that its own symbols, on a basic level, aren't based on anything. The novel is a [[well-wrought urn]]; it formally enacts its own argument. There's no grand truth undergirding the symbols. No substance. Their meaning does not come from something firm or concrete; instead, the only meaning they have is the meaning with which we (Conrad, you, me) imbue them. If you try to unlock them, you'll find yourself like — to borrow an image from a very different exploration of symbolism and meaning — the symbolic statue representation of Dr Ketterley in [[Piranesi (2020)]]: > I think of Dr Ketterley and an image rises up in my mind. It is the memory of a statue that stands in the nineteenth north-western hall. It is the statue of a man kneeling on his plinth; a sword lies at his side, its blade broken in five pieces. Roundabout lie other broken pieces, the remains of a sphere. The man has used his sword to shatter the sphere because he wanted to understand it, but now he finds that he has destroyed both sphere and sword. This puzzles him, but at the same time part of him refuses to accept that the sphere is broken and worthless. He has picked up some of the fragments and stares at them intently in the hope that they will eventually bring him new knowledge.