The Ironic Secret Adapteur – Hitchcock and Hampton Adapting Conrads the Secret Agent
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The Ironic Secret Adapteur: Hitchcock and Hampton adapting Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Rodrigo Alonso LescДєn
The Ironic Secret Adapteur: Hitchcock and Hampton adapting Conrad’s The Secret Agent
The adaptation of the same literary work may give birth to extremely different cinematic products. Written by Joseph Conrad in 1907, the novel The Secret Agent inspired three cinematic adaptations. Here I shall be focusing on the concepts of authorship and adaptation when dealing with the analysis of two of these adaptations: Sabotage (1936) by Alfred Hitchcock and The Secret Agent (1996) by Christopher Hampton. The frontier between one and the other will be given by the use of irony, the element which articulates the narratological structure of the novel.
“I don’t suppose there’s any novelist except Conrad who can be put directly on screen”
Orson Welles
“My task (…) is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel –
it is, before all, to make you see.”
J. Conrad on his Preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus
Edges have always been one of the favourite playgrounds for artists. They have invented bridges, to cross from an artistic medium to another one. This essay might just as fittingly been titled “The frontiers of authorship in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) and Hampton’s The Secret Agent (1996)”, such have been the divergent positions the film directors have adopted in order to portray Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Furthermore, a fundamental word would be missing: irony. According to this fact, the inclusion, exclusion or manipulation of parts of the novel when adapted into film would locate the identities of Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Hampton as authors in respect of that of Conrad. The analysis of these deflections will constitute the corpus of this essay. The purpose is to explore the intertextual relationships between novel and films in terms of authorship.
Not only is irony the print that permeates the texture of the novel, but it is much more: irony is the narratological tool that constitutes the coeur of the story. Many critics like F.R. Leavis (1948:209), Norman Sherry (1973: 198), Jeremy Hawthorn (1979:78, 79), Thomas Mann (Watts 1973: 107) or Edward W. Said (1976: 69), have highlighted this fact before. Even Joseph Conrad confessed this in the Author’s Note of The Secret Agent, not leaving much ground for critics to speculate: “I really think that The Secret Agent is a perfectly genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity” (1958: xxvi).
Conrad’s London (end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th) was not the London neither Hitchcock (1936) nor Hampton (1996) recorded their films, although all of them developed these particular works in the City. Conrad, as he explains in the Author’s Note of The Secret Agent, did find a seed of literary imagination in a casual conversation:
The subject of The Secret Agent —I mean the tale- came to me in the shape of a
few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather
anarchist activities; how brought about I don’t remember now (…) I pointed all
this to my friend, who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his
characteristically casual and omniscient manner: “Oh, that fellow was half an
idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.” (1958: xxiii)
According to Ian Watt, the mentioned friend, “his main informant for the background of The Secret Agent was Ford Maddox Ford” (1973: 236), and the event Ford is informing Conrad about is the Greenwich bomb outrage, an attempt to blow up the observatory which took place the 16th of February, 1894. The public opinion of the time referred to this as an anarchist attack, where the terrorist ended up blowing himself up instead of his target. Two weeks later, the only member of the terrorist’s family, his sister, did commit suicide, closing the tragic circle within that family, but opening the literary space of Conrad’s inspiration for the novel. However, it seems to be clear the literary distance Conrad assumes in relation to that particular historical event. As Watt puts it:
It is impossible to establish with any precision how far Conrad’s version departs
from the facts about the Greenwich Observatory explosion, because the facts
are still not fully known, This is really quite in the normal course of things for a
not particularly important event in which the protagonist died, and in which
double agents, and possibly foreign powers, were involved. Nevertheless,
enough is known to make it possible to show that on some issues Conrad was
closed to the facts and that on others he departed from them. (1973: 232).
Late Victorian London became the most fertile period for agents provocateurs, due to the intense geopolitical movements developing in the continent. Conrad reflected the bleak, gloomy, mysterious activities of people with this profile in the character of Mr. Verloc, the secret agent: a husky, mediocre, self centred and cryptic man. His wife, Winnie Verloc, portrays the pusillanimous silent and obedient housewife who helps Verloc running their soft porn shop in Soho. As Conrad puts it: “Mrs. Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental information”. (160). Winnie’s mother, who lives with the Verloc family, leaves them in order to make more room for her other son, Stevie, a half-wit boy, a boy who needs constant surveillance, the only person Winnie really cares about and the simple reason of her marriage with the secret agent. Winnie’s brother, Stevie, is a retarded boy who draws circles in blank pages in a frenzied way. He becomes tormented about hearing or contemplating violent attitudes. His compromised comprehension of the world never