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Wollaeger discusses how writer Joseph Conrad and motion picture director Alfred Hitchcock are linked by the historically specific forms taken by their desire for mastery.

I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind.-Joseph Conrad, author's note to The Secret Agent

We should buy this if they don't do something stupid like kill the kid. -Columbia Pictures executive

Deeply invested in discipline, Joseph Conrad, master mariner turned novelist, always addressed Henry James as "cher maitre," signaling mastery as his anxious authorial ideal. Alfred Hitchcock ultimately earned the title "master of suspense" as a mark of his control over his audience and on his sets. Usually linked by a narrative of adaptation-Hitchcock chose to film The Secret Agent (1907) as Sabotage (1936)-Conrad and Hitchcock are also linked by the historically specific forms taken by their desire for mastery.1 In both, the effort to exact a particular kind of attention from the audience folds back into the work as an aesthetic of formal perfection and controlled violence. The will to perfection need not entail violence, of course, but in Conrad and Hitchcock the integrity of the body is sacrificed to an ideal of style as discipline, a strand of modernism that Richard Poirier has traced back through Eliot and Joyce to Pater.2 But where Poirier focuses on style as a form of Paterian ascesis, or self-discipline, I wish to emphasize an aggressively punitive discipline linked to authorial efforts to master the audience.

In the period between The Secret Agent and Sabotage the "art of the novel," as described by James in his prefaces and codified by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921 ), cultivated its distance from the mass market while England's struggling film industry sought to define its authority in relation to both the novel and drama. The pressures to adjust to the changing market for artistic production or else create a fit market, though few, register in the correspondence of virtually every modern author and indicate that behind the seemingly serene mastery of James and Hitchcock and the would-be mastery of Conrad lie anxious efforts to secure the attention of an audience increasingly dif ficult to define, even to locate. Like James, Conrad attempted the theater in his effort to tap into a wider audience-Hitchcock was one of the few theatergoers to catch Conrad's own dramatization of The Secret Agent at London's Ambassadors Theatre in 1922-but traces of his frustrated hopes to bridge the widening gulf between an elite and a middlebrow readership were already inscribed in the novel on which the play is based. While Hitchcock's reasons for turning to Conrad were many, from the historical vantage provided by Hitchcock's ultimate mastery of the mass audience The Secret Agent's articulation of a controlling authorial presence reads as a blueprint for his self-construction as England's first auteur.3

Behind the conjunction of violence and mastery in Conrad and Hitchcock lies a generalized crisis of attention from the i870s on. Building on Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban shock in Baudelaire, Jonathan Crary has highlighted the empirical interest in the physiology of attentiveness and distraction in a series of domains: the latecentury psychology of Freud, William James, Ernst Mach, and others; new theories of scientific management; the rapidly developing advertising industry; and even impressionist painting, which self-consciously determines the position from which the spectator must perceive the painted image.4 Literary modernism inscribes the dialectic of attentiveness and distraction variously: in the minute rendering of sensory response during Leopold Bloom's Dublin odyssey, for instance, and in the posterlike typographic experimentation of futurism and Wyndham Lewis's Blast. Joyce's dissemination of proper protocols of reading in guidebooks and schemata and T. S. Eliot's notes to The Waste Land typ ify modernist efforts to manage reception, while the violent modernist assault that scandalized the bourgeoisie and shattered artistic conventions competed for attention within the crowded space of aesthetic experimentation early in the century.

As a medium, film was ideally suited to triumph in a period when the cumulative shock effects of metropolitan life threatened to overwhelm less effectively assertive cultural productions. Given that the recording apparatus necessarily focuses on the contingent, on the immediacy and flux of everyday life, film was readily assimilated into the modernist aesthetic of the ephemeral described by Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life" (1859-6o). In his Theory of Film Siegfried Kracauer correlates film's mesmeric hold on the viewer with the involuntary physiological and psychological responses elicited by its representation of motion, "the alpha and omega of the medium."5 Indeed, much of the early attraction of film derived from the novel shocks to the senses provided by a locomotive seen barreling toward the camera or from the disorienting shifts of perspective produced by simple editing; even more confusing (yet appealing) was the experience of seeing montage for the first time. Recent developments in computer animation are returning film to its prenarrative origins; hence the popularity of Twister (1996), a film about severe weather conditions whose interest is wholly constituted by state-of-the-art special effects. But at the turn of the century film's intrinsic estranging effects were more pronounced owing to the novelty of its representational mode, which had not yet been domesticated by the disintegrative effects of modernism more generally.

Although discussions of Sabotage typically focus on the montage sequence in which Mrs. Verloc stabs her husband, the violence latent in the modernist will to mastery reaches its most complex articulation in the bombing death of the innocent Stevie.6 In both novel and film, shock effects struggle to compensate for the audience's potential elusiveness by asserting greater control over the artistic materials. Yet the function of shock shifts within the aesthetic trajectory I will trace from Conrad through Hitchcock to Hollywood. While Sabotage looks back to the cultural origins of film, it intensifies and transforms the modernist impulse toward simultaneous shock and distanciation that was already emerging in The Secret Agent. Sabotage allegorizes the way in which the technique of shock, enfolded in narrative and put in the service of ideology, begins to render modernist alienation interpellative.

Manipulation and Mastery: Film, Novel, Advertising

A complex allusion to The Secret Agent in Sabotage underscores the problem of attention to which both respond. More than a bit of intertextual play, the allusion evokes a material history of spectatorship in which the manipulative ambitions of Hitchcock's film are linked to Conrad's novel and to the wiles of advertising through an ad for toothpaste.

Hitchcock's genius for exploiting the materiality of film spectatorship was unmatched by his contemporaries.7 With Psycho, released at a time when viewers wandered in and out whenever they pleased, he forever altered the filmgoing experience by coercing theaters to refuse entry to anyone after the movie began; he also requested that the lights be kept off for a while afterward. As the ad copy put it, "During these thirty seconds of stygian blackness, the suspense of Psycho is indelibly engraved in the mind of the audience, later to be discussed among gaping friends and relations."8 The film itself begins with a tracking shot through an open window into a darkened room, where the gaze finds an empty chair and then, suddenly embodied, sidles over to it and sits down to take in John Gavin and Janet Leigh partially undressed on the bed. From that moment the viewer's voyeurism is located at once on the screen, in the movement of the camera, and in the darkened theater, in the body of the spectator.

Hitchcock endows Sabotage with the body's weight by devoting an unusual amount of attention to chairs: around the dinner table, where Stevie's empty chair will take on a haunted feel; in the Verlocs' cinema, where we frequently see people responding to movies; and at a street vendor's stall, where Stevie stops during his fateful journey toward Piccadilly Circus. On his way out the door with some film tins, Stevie is stopped by a police inspector, Ted Spencer, who is seated with Mrs. Verloc in the Verlocs' empty cinema, with empty chairs ranged around them. Ted observes that the boy is returning Bartholomew the Strangler, a popular thriller descended from the sensation novel. "Have you seen it?" the inspector asks. "Only fourteen times," Stevie replies. Identified with the viewer, Stevie then heads out through a street fair, and as he wanders among the stalls, a vendor catches his attention and swiftly forces him, with the help of the gathered spectators, into a chair. Trapped there, Stevie is forced to listen to a sales pitch for toothpaste as the vendor slathers his hair with oil and his teeth with paste: "Now I ask you, what causes teeth to fall out? . . . The process of decay, inevitable in all human organisms. But decay can be arrested, instantaneously arrested, and by what?" Owing in part to the delay, Stevie will find an ironic answer to the vendor's question in the form of a sudden death.

Although it sometimes resembles a W. C. Fields routine, the vendor's spiel is clearly adapted from Conrad's sardonically portentous passage about entropy in The Secret Agent. There, Winnie Verloc's mother, on her way to a retirement home, stoically reflects that "everything decays, wears out, in this world.... As regards Winnie's sisterly devotion, [however,] her stoicism flinched. She exempted that sentiment from the rule of decay affecting all things human and some things divine? In Hitchcock, Conrad's cosmic decay becomes tooth decay, but in a way that recalls Conrad's unmistakable suggestion that the trip to the nursing home is a journey toward death.

Hitchcock's sly allusion also asks what it takes to "arrest" a viewer or reader. The body tends over the long haul to have its own dismal agenda, but if teeth can be kept in the head, perhaps rear ends can be kept in seats. In a visually powerful moment after Stevie's death, Hitchcock re-creates the resonance of being seated when Verloc kneels down to suggest to his seated wife, Stevie's sister, that they might replace Stevie themselves by having a "kid" (the resonance of "kid brother" competes with undertones of "sacrificial lamb"); she instantly walks away in disgust, and Hitchcock holds the shot on Verloc, now kneeling alone before her suddenly empty chair. Verloc's failure to keep his wife in her seat underscores the success of Hitchcock's more effective surrogate, the insistent vendor. While the vendor's manipulation reproduces the entrapping effect of The Secret Agent, whose overbearing and unforgiving narrator often seems to lock characters into place, the allusion to Conrad also highlights important distinctions between film and fiction. Sitting down with a novel, readers can pause, reread, or skip over the words on the page; in a darkened theater or cinema, the aesthetic event materially envelops the seated spectators, who, short of standing up and leaving, are unable to control it. By embalming and reanimating process in sequential framed images, film continuously arrests decay; it aspires, to borrow T. E. Hulme's formula for a new modernist mode, to a "visual concrete" language that "always endeavors to arrest you, to make you continuously see a physical thing."10

Conrad: Ambivalence and Its Discontents

Particular problems of audience inflect Conrad's efforts "to make you see."11 Unlike Hitchcock, who achieved commercial success relatively early in his career, Conrad did not fare well with the public until Chance (1914), his sixteenth volume in nineteen years. In 1907, while he composed The Secret Agent, Conrad's mind ran "very much on popularity" even as he admitted that his characteristically peculiar treatment of the sensational subject matter probably would never captivate the popular imagination.l2 The novel's Assistant Commissioner, whose grasp of the plot approximates full authorial consciousness, expresses Conrad's preoccupation when he speaks of the pressing need to secure the attention of "the great mass of the public" through a public prosecution of Verloc ( 171 ). Ironically, no sooner does the Assistant Commissioner crack the espionage mechanism than its workings are covered over again by Verloc's death. Thwarted ambition is then located in another authorial surrogate, the Professor, an anarchist wired as a bomb who is explicitly linked with the difficulty of reaching the man on the street.13 Consumed with resentment for the indifferent masses and disdainful of Ossipon's written propaganda, the Professor is committed to what contemporary anarchist discourse called "propaganda by the deed":14 "Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world" (220). The Professor's anxiety about the resistant force of "the mass of mankind" is sometimes overwhelming: "What if nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity-to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints" (67). (Hitchcock, perhaps sensing Conrad's investment in the Professor's frustration, playfully cast Conrad's small, shrunken anarchist with William Dewhurst, a portly man bearing a striking resemblance to Hitchcock himself.) Early in the novel Vladimir seems to corroborate the Professor's sense of the artist's lowly status in his dismissal of museums as targets for attack: "Artists-art critics and such like-people of no account. Nobody minds what they say" (30).

Caught between rapidly diverging markets for popular and elite literature, Conrad hoped that The Secret Agent would succeed by treating "a widely discussed subject" from "a modern point of view" (Letters, 2:439-40). Yet the very modernity of his treatment of espionage, sea adventures, and melodrama had sustained his critical reputation without paying his bills, and The Secret Agent was no exception. Moreover, it repeatedly betrays his ambivalence toward popularity, for despite the occasional strategically "magazinish" story, part of Conrad did not want to write for the emerging mass audience Hitchcock would master.

Consider "the dismal row of newspaper sellers" the Professor and Ossipon pass by after discussing the likely effects of the botched bombing of Greenwich Observatory: "The grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers' ink. The posters, maculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution" (65). Conrad's target is less journalism (although he does heap scorn on this increasingly important rival for readers) than the disconnection between words and their intended audience. The papers, even if they sell, go unread, and posters meant to arrest the attention of distracted urbanites are reduced to a trampled, unheeded collage on the sidewalk: even when the printed word "erupts" into the streets, it rarely makes its presence felt in the world of The Secret Agent.15 Conrad's resentment over the "disregarded distribution" of his own words (which he once compared to bullets) registers in the novel's patent hostility toward character and reader alike. Returning to The Secret Agent in ig ig to write the author's note and to begin the dramatization, Conrad reassured his readers that he had no desire "to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind" but at the same time acknowledged that the "bare bones" would make "a grisly skeleton" on the stage (8).

Linked to his anxieties about mastering the art of the novel, Conrad's ambivalence toward the theater has a long history in his correspondence: the "dread" he mentions in a 1921 letter to John Galsworthy about the dramatization of The Secret Agent harks back to a more openly neurotic letter about actors written to Cunninghame Graham just after the publication of The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (i897).ls Struggling to make the transition from master mariner to professional author, Conrad hoped to stake his reputation on The Nigger; years later he still regarded it as a turning point: "The finishing of `The Nigger' brought to my troubled mind the comforting sense of an accomplished task, and the first consciousness of a certain sort of mastery."17 Yet the first review was quite negative, and in his letter Conrad bitterly rehashes it before responding to Graham's query about Admiral Guinea, a light melodrama by W. E. Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson that had been favorably reviewed by George Bernard Shaw three days before. Noting that he had read but not seen Admiral Guinea, Conrad dismisses the theater as an "amazing freak of folly," only to confess immediately to a "dark and secret ambition" to try his hand at it. Anticipating Hitchcock's animus toward actors, Conrad soon approaches hysteria:

The actors appear to me like a lot of wrongheaded lunatics pretending to be sane. Their malice is stitched with white threads.... To look at them breeds in my melancholy soul thoughts of murder and suicide-such is my anger and my loathing of their transparent pretences. There is a taint of subtle corruption in their blank voices, in their blinking eyes, in the grimacing faces, in the false light in the false passion, in the words that have been learned by heart. But I love a marionette show. Marionettes are beautiful.... I never listen to the text mouthed somewhere out of sight by invisible men who are here to day and rotten tomorrow. (Letters, 1:417-9)

Although Conrad's fear of losing control carries, as in Hitchcock, a range of erotic implications-the marionettes, for instance, "fall upon one another" and "embrace" in a safely distanced fashion-his anxiety evidently attaches to the body per se.18 Drama would seem simultaneously to offer the promise of perfect mastery-the audience is right there to be gripped-and its negation: Frankenstein-like in their monstrous inauthenticity ("Their malice is stitched with white threads"), actors, unlike the novelistic characters on which they are based, can resist their author's intentions. Imagining the need to make his language perform, Conrad is consumed by the elusiveness and deception of language, above all when relocated in the wayward bodies of actors.l9 The opacity of marionettes conceals nothing, and their permanence offsets the untrustworthiness of the living body.20 Unsurprisingly, Conrad's nerves kept him from ever attending any of his play's ten performances.

Of course, the distinction between unmanageable actors and dependable characters is not necessarily so clear; "characters are often known to mutiny against the writer by taking charge of their books."21 Creating effectively rebellious characters, however, is not one of Conrad's strong suits. In The Nigger only the throwing overboard of

James Wait's potentially mutinous body can restore order and permit the ship to regain its heading; in The Secret Agent the narrator polices characters who threaten to grow into full-blooded Forsterian roundness by flattening them into satiric reductions. The narratorial dynamics of a scene detailing Verloc's unhappy ruminations are typical. A long exploratory paragraph describing his descent into "the abyss of moral reflections" is followed in the first sentence of the next paragraph by an astringent qualification that clicks him back in place as an object of our contempt: "Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of meditation, Mr. Verloc did not reach the depth of these abstract considerations" (46). A later scene echoes the language of Conrad's letter when Verloc opens a door "woodenly, stony-eyed, like an automaton whose face had been painted red" ( 149).

After watching rehearsals of The Secret Agent, Conrad tried to pull strings by writing insistent letters to the producer, Harry Benrimo, about how to improve the performance of particular actors. Conrad's thoughts about the conversations he managed to have with Benrimo, who avoided him when he could, expand his anxieties to encompass the more general problem of filling seats: "An air of unreality, weird unreality, envelopes the words, the ideas and the arguments we exchange, the familiar words of the play, the figures of the people; clings to the very walls, permeates the darkness of the fantastic cavern which I can by no means imagine will ever contain anything so real as an audience of men and women."22 In the context of Conrad's longstanding concern to force a certain aesthetic experience on his audience-"to make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see"-his worries over the play in 1922 transcend opening-night jitters to reflect "one of the major anxieties in the history of modernism": "If the audience is not altogether an absence, it is by no means a reliable presence."23

Hitchcock: From Theater to Cinema to Hollywood

Beyond Sabotage itself, Hitchcock left no commentary on the play Conrad could not bear to watch. Although allusions and verbal nuances indicate that Hitchcock and his collaborators returned closely to the novel, Conrad's dramatization also influenced the film's structure and thematic emphases.24 More important, the mediation of the play is linked to Hitchcock's efforts to establish his cinematic authority as a form of mastery. William Rothman, observing that a transumption of theatrical conventions plays a central role in many great films of this era, argues that Hitchcock's early films establish their authority by announcing their independence from the theater, where most film treatments originated.25 Although Rothman's hyperformalism, reproducing Hitchcock's obsessiveness in its incisive frame-by-frame analysis, underplays history, his insight into the filmic impulse to outdo drama illuminates the cultural dynamics of Hitchcock's early career in England. The camera, with its close-up, point-of-view, and reaction shots, claims access to a realm of privacy unplumbed by theatrical role-playing, and the power to invade a character's innermost being gives the camera and the director a "godlike power" that becomes Hitchcock's obsessive subject (102-3). While Hitchcock considered some of his adaptations from the stage, such as Galsworthy's Skin Game (film, 1931), simply photographed theater, in Sabotage his selfconscious investment in mastery induces him to explore, in a classically modernist gesture, the specifically filmic dimension of his work. Hence a key translation in his adaptation from Conrad: recasting Conrad's meditations on the power of the word, Hitchcock transforms Verloc's shady bookstore into a cinema.

From the outset, then, Hitchcock draws attention to the filmic dimension of a story containing numerous scenes emphasizing reactions to film. With a need for control that may well have exceeded Conrad's, he clearly felt empowered from knowing his audience to a degree Conrad could only have envied.26 Already renowned for sticking closely to the shot-by-shot storyboards he sketched out before setting foot in the studio, Hitchcock had particularly strong reasons for redoubling his efforts to arrest the audience in Sabotage established as England's premier director and as master of the thriller with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935), he had begun to think about Hollywood. World War I had hindered the British film industry, and an American contract would give Hitchcock the opportunity to exploit the latest film technology within a production budget commensurate with his talents.27 In Sabotage he began to focus more intently than ever before on the day-to-day preparation of the treatment and to dominate his partners in collaboration.28 At about the same time he offered his notorious description of actors as cattle. Indeed, Hitchcock's "sole purpose" in Sabotage may have been to achieve the personal prestige necessary to garner a Hollywood contract; the result, however "dazzling" its "virtuosity," has been found "academic, cold, and meretricious."29 (Virtually the same criticisms have been leveled at the "clinical" virtuosity of Conrad's novel.)30 Graham Greene, responding more favorably in the Spectator to the same sense of mastery, observed that Hitchcock had achieved a new level of technical proficiency with Sabotage, a view shared in America by Variety.31

Hitchcock's decision to use a cinematic adaptation of The Secret Agent as an overture to Hollywood was at once logical and perverse. When Michael Balcon signed two American stars in 1935, Hitchcock capitalized, in typically aggressive fashion, on their Hollywood cachet. In Secret Agent, a 1936 film based on Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories (and not to be confused with Sabotage), he cast Robert Young, a leading man who already radiated the geniality that ultimately landed him in Father Knows Best, as the surprise villain. In Sabotage, retitled A Woman Alone for America, Hitchcock undertook a yet more aggressive antagonistic seduction: casting Sylvia Sidney in a story that pivots on the horrible death of her innocent young brother, he showcased her grief to an American public whose taste for sentimentalized innocence made Shirley Temple the number-one box-office attraction from 1935 to 1938.32 Of course, making another thriller could only consolidate Hitchcock's reputation as the master of suspense, and adapting a novel whose technical virtuosity links perfection of style with cruel disregard for the imagined lives of its characters provided a fitting way to broadcast his mastery.

Hitchcock secured the desired contract, but his obsessive control of his artistic materials sustained in Ivor Montagu, who worked with him in the 1930s, the conviction that "a good director must have something of a sadist in him. I do not necessarily mean to a pathological degree, but . . . his looking at things and telling characters to do this, undergo that, is necessarily akin to dominating them, ordering them about" (quoted in Spoto, 149). On the first day of shooting The 39 Steps Hitchcock told his two stars, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, who had not previously met, that he wanted to walk them through a sequence in which they would be handcuffed together while fleeing across the Scottish countryside. At 8:3o A.M., having explained the sequence, Hitchcock snapped on the handcuffs, claimed to have mislaid the key, and vanished until late afternoon. Donat and Carroll were "tired, angry, disheveled, uncomfortable, and acutely embarrassed. But Hitchcock was delighted when the rest of the cast and crew found out about his little trick and were shocked. He wanted to know how many people were discussing the manner in which the humiliated couple had coped with details of a decidedly personal nature" (Spoto, 148). On the spectrum of Hitchcock's practical jokes, from the sophomoric to the actionable, this represents only moderate cruelty: Hitchcock once bet a crew member who was afraid of the dark an extra week's salary that he could not spend the night alone in the studio chained (where else?) to a camera. To fortify the man's spirits, Hitchcock gave him a bottle of brandy, which he had laced with a powerful laxative. The cast and crew returned the next morning to find the man weeping in a pool of his own waste (Spoto, iii) . Spoto savors Hitchcock's "dark side" for its own sake: one anecdote tumbles out after another. But recognizing Hitchcock as sadistic auteur helps draw out the latent cruelty of his icy manipulations of character and viewer in Sabotage while casting retrospective illumination on the underlying violence of Conrad's impulse to master his characters and readers in The Secret Agent.33

Death by Literalization/Death by Cinematography

Repeatedly underscoring his final authority as the (un)maker of his novelistic world, Conrad's open domineering of his characters sheds a different light on his assertion in 1912 that an author "stands confessed in his work," "the only reality in an invented world."34 Hitchcock, who as early as The Lodger (1926) placed himself on the screen, would have appreciated the sentiment. Although he does not make one of his cameos in Sabotage, he signals his authorial presence clearly in the way he sets up its climactic event.

Jonathan Arac argues that Conrad uses Stevie's death to reintegrate otherwise meaningless urban shock into "motive and consequence and meaning."35 By resituating a minimalist anecdote about the historical bombing of Greenwich Observatory in a complicated novelistic network of crossed purposes, Conrad transforms mere information, in the manner of Benjamin's Leskov, into the significance of lived experience, through "storytelling" (185). Stevie's death is thus an "outrage," but not the "gratuitous" outrage Conrad wishes to dismiss in his author's note. But this analysis gets at only half the story. As Andre Gide recognized, Conrad was fascinated by l'acte gratuit, and in The Secret Agent Arac's deeply ethical Conrad is doubled by the anarchistnovelist eager to produce the very rupture of experience that his narrative works to heal.

Conrad's representation of Stevie's death embodies the novel's most spectacular instance of the violence of thematization, or the sense that characters are endowed with the illusion of autonomy, only to be violently processed into expressions of theme.36 Early on the anarchist Karl Yundt describes social relations as a form of cannibalism: the rich are "nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people." Stevie, overhearing him, "swallow[s] the terrifying statement with an audible gulp" (44). Later, after Verloc has exploited him as a bomb courier, Stevie is transformed into "an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast" (70), and the Chief Inspector peers into his remains as if "with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner" (7 ). By the time Verloc sits down to a meal of roast beef "laid out in the likeness of funereal baked meats for Stevie's obsequies" ( igo), one allusion to Hamlet seems to cover for another, for it is a supper not where Stevie eats but where he is eaten. In an uneasy blurring of the literal and the figurative, the cannibalism theme culminates in Verloc's symbolic consumption of Stevie, whose swallowing of Yundt's trope has initiated the pattern.37 By literally and figuratively sacrificing their integrity to the demands of verbal and thematic coherence, Conrad implicates himself in the exploitation that the novel's characters routinely impose on each other.

His treatment of the moment of Stevie's death intensifies the sense that Conrad subjects his characters to gruesome mischief. Stevie tends to respond violently to "tales of injustice and oppression": once he set off some fireworks in a stairwell; another time "a magnanimous indignation" over the inhumane treatment of a horse "swelled his frail chest to bursting" (130). When he is blown to pieces, the bursting and fragmentation that otherwise might remain incidental or comfortably metaphorical turn grotesquely literal. In death Stevie becomes his own characteristic response to suffering by exploding "in the manner of a firework": "After a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone [in his sister's imagination] . . . like the last star of a pyrotechnic display" (195-6). Verloc suffers a similar fate when stabbed: in a novel obsessed with time, his blood drips "with a sound of ticking . . . growing fast and furious like the pulse of an insane clock" (199). The deaths perfect the intricate verbal and thematic designs imposed by authorial fiat on the imagined lives of the characters. Bursting with indignation, Stevie dies in a moment of literalization.

Hitchcock's Stevie dies a correspondingly cinematographic death. Sabotage begins with a self-conscious allusion to the conventions of adaptation, but instead of the trope of a hand turning a novel's title page to initiate a dissolve into the cinematic narrative, Hitchcock substitutes a dictionary page with a definition of sabotage "Wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness." From this point on he repeatedly links the act of sabotage to an investigation of the medium of film. The opening sequence dissolves from a close-up of a faltering lightbulb into a montage that links Verloc's sabotaging of a power station with his ownership of the cinema. A close-up of Oscar Homolka's sinister face as he walks toward the camera through the darkened city gives way to shots of laughing commuters apparently enjoying the blackout in the underground and then to a more restless crowd outside the Bijou cinema, where Mrs. Verloc tries to talk her customers out of demanding their money back. (From the perspective of the completed story, the moment reads as Hitchcock's doubly proleptic concession to his audience's possible revulsion over Stevie's death.) The conjunction of flickering light, power station, and cinema suggests a metonymic linkage between Verloc's sabotage and a desire to control the very medium of cinematic projection. Yet as surrogate director Verloc falls so far short of Hitchcock that his controller later mocks him with a newspaper article showing that the West End experienced Verloc's thriller as a comedy: "When one sets out to put the fear of death into people, it's not helpful to make them laugh." Verloc's failure prompts his superior to assign him a more violent task: placing a bomb timed to detonate in Piccadilly Circus during Lord Mayor's Show Day.

The chain of circumstances that culminates in Stevie's death contributes to the foregrounding of cinematic experience. The first link is cast when Ted, posing as a greengrocer bearing a selection of lettuces, barges into the Verlocs' living area, separated by a narrow space from their movie theater. As the detective turns to leave, a small window, or fanlight, suddenly falls open with a screech, prompting him to joke that he thought someone was being killed. "Somebody probably is," Verloc responds, "there on the screen." The consequences for the unfolding plot are profound. Later Ted passes through the cinema and enters the narrow space to spy on Verloc and his conspirators through the fanlight opening. A film is playing: the images are visible on the back of the screen, and the soundtrack, as well as the audience's laughter, is continuously audible as the detective scrambles up to his hidden vantage. Eavesdropping on the "real people" behind the film within a film, Ted hears virtually nothing before his hand, visible in a reverse shot from within the anarchist assembly, betrays his presence and he is pulled into the room through the opening. Because one of the conspirators recognizes him as a policeman, they all scatter, and Verloc is left to perform the bombing himself. But when Ted, worried about the mysterious plotting, intensifies surveillance of the cinema, Verloc is unable to leave the house and presses Stevie into service in his place.

The self-reflexive moments in these sequences-the repeated play between film and the reality it claims to represent and between the screen and the viewer in danger of being pulled through it-recall a similar scene in the novel in which a player piano occasionally starts up on its own as Ossipon talks with the Professor about the explosion near Greenwich Observatory. The apparently random autonomy of Hitchcock's fanlight and Conrad's piano has a dual effect. It evokes both the uncanny senselessness of the urban scene, where objects have a kind of life and people can be virtually inanimate, and the director's or author's arbitrary manipulations. The conventionally invisible hand of authorial intention, "the only reality in an invented world," fleetingly makes its presence felt in acts of extravagant self-assertion, which in Sabotage and The Secret Agent alike reaches its most devastating urgency in relation to Stevie.

Knowing that the bomb on his dining-room table is timed to detonate at 1:45, Verloc sends Stevie out to a claim check in Piccadilly Circus to drop off some film tins and a package said to contain a "projector gadget" in need of repair. What is really broken, of course, is his plot. Hitchcock thus invites his audience to see Verloc's machinations, played out before Stevie with theatrical nonchalance, as akin to the whirring of the machinery not far behind the viewers' backs as it projects images over their heads through a small window similar to the fanlight in Verloc's parlor.

Sabotage's original full treatment, which frequently departs from the shooting script, displays an even more pointed interest in the technology of film. There, as a movie plays, Ted gets Stevie to show him "the projection box" and its "apparatus" as well as the loudspeakers, as a pretext to getting a peek into the parlor through the fanlight.38

When Ted clambers up by the loudspeakers to spy, "we see that the wire is torn from a terminal and his foot causes an intermittent noise to come from the screen-in fact, the drama of the film is rather wrecked by the queer effect of the voices due to the terminal being short-circuited by Ted's foot" (35). Literally drawing Ted's body into the apparatus, the full treatment comically articulates Hitchcock's interest in the physicality of spectatorship and highlights the degree to which embodied characters, if not properly subordinated, may interfere with the director's intentions.

Sabotage links the materiality of the cinema with its manipulative power in at least two ways: by reminding us (once through Verloc and once through a bus conductor) of the explosiveness of nitrate film and by reserving the movie's most artfully cinematic treatment for the sequence in which a "projector gadget" and film tins explode in a crowded bus. Calling attention to the calculated artifice of montage, the sequence throws into relief both the narrative and the spectacular dimensions of Stevie's death while implicating the viewer in the network of circumstances that make it inevitable.

On his way to the center of the city, Stevie is forced to walk through the busy streets for a time, because film tins are not allowed on public vehicles. After enduring the delay with the vendor, Stevie tries to push his way through a crowd waiting for the Lord Mayor's Show Day parade but is stopped by a policeman, who makes him wait for the procession to pass.39 At the end of the parade, Stevie realizes that he must talk his way onto a crowded bus if he is to be on time; happily, he finds a seat next to a woman holding a puppy. Stevie thinks he is along just for the ride. But taking a seat in Sabotage is never a simple matter.

Now the already brisk pace of Hitchcock's editing sharply increases: with approximately forty shots in the two minutes between Stevie's entry onto the bus and the explosion, the sequence approaches in complexity the famous shower sequence in Psycho. Just as Hitchcock would deliberately outrage his audience by killing off Janet Leigh, an established star, so early, his need to shock dictates the circumstances of Stevie's death.40 In both scenes editing reduces the actor's body until, domesticated by formal technique, it surrenders its inwardness and will to the logic of the image.41 In Sabotage rapid intercutting during the mounting crisis of Stevie's bus trip (replaying Conrad's surreal account of the "Cab of Death" that takes Winnie's mother to her final resting place) epitomizes the fragmentation of continuity and the body that lies at the heart of the filmic effect. Recalling the stylistic decomposition of Stevie in Conrad, the relationship between editing and acting entails for Hitchcock domination through dissection: actor becomes cattle becomes marionette; star becomes body becomes body double becomes body part. Hence the prescience of Conrad's describing Stevie's exploded body as "nameless fragments" (71).

Hitchcock's cutting between public clocks visible from the bus, the heavy traffic, Stevie's increasing agitation, the traffic lights, and the film tins links the rhythms of the city, the passage of time, and the experience of tension with the medium of film. Just as a traffic light clicks to Go, Stevie begins to pet the puppy, and the intercut clocks culminate in a full-frame, straight-on close-up of a clock face; the time is precisely 1:45. After a tighter close-up of the tip of the minute hand, which suddenly sweeps upward the breadth of the frame from 1:45 to 1:46, the film seems to freeze for a split second in the very act of representing the passage of time-perhaps the miraculous escape one still expects is imminent-then a quick cut to the package gives way to two rapid shots of the exploding bus. Then comes the cruelest cut of all: the image of the wrecked bus is instantly displaced by an interior shot of the Verloc home, where Ted has been questioning Verloc in the presence of his wife. All three are laughing. "Well," Verloc comments, "now everything seems to be alright."42

By cutting to a scene of laughter precisely at the moment of the explosion, Hitchcock both foregrounds it as spectacle and implicates his viewers in the horror they have just witnessed. In a film notable for its visual wit, the sharply ironic conjunction holds up an unforgiving mirror to spectators who have paid to be entertained by, it turns out, the death of an innocent child. In later years Hitchcock claimed to agree with Francois Truffaut's critique of Stevie's death as "almost an abuse of directorial power" ( log) and confessed to Peter Bogdanovich that he had made "a cardinal error there in terms of suspense" ( ig).43 But as Hitchcock himself probably recognized, the scene's unnerving power derives from its giving viewers precisely what they want: closure and release from the suspense, even at the expense of a character's life.44

The sequence from the moment Stevie leaves the house is a picaresque series of arrested moments haunted by the demands of narrative. Momentarily drawn to the vendor's pitch, Stevie is rendered part of the spectacle when he is forced to sit in the vendor's chair; escaping the chair, he pauses over the wares on display in a stall; hoping to cross the street, he is instead made to watch a parade. All the while, the ticktock music of the soundtrack-and, once, a fine overlay shot in which a slow zoom on a handwritten note revealing the time of detonation is superimposed on Stevie's striding legs-pressures such moments of arrest back into the flow of the plot. Nonetheless, wandering among spectacles, resisting them, drawn into them, Stevie finally becomes one, "the last star of a pyrotechnic display."

Yet narrative is as implicated in Stevie's death as spectacle is. The montage sequence, manipulating the pace at which reality unfolds, paradoxically expresses the desire to triumph over time even as it records the impossibility of doing so in the fatal sweep of the minute hand. As Stevie is waylaid by the parade, Hitchcock conflates the film apparatus with two agents of destruction, time and the bomb, by means of a close-up of Stevie's package that dissolves into an overlay of turning gears and a spinning flywheel. The image simultaneously suggests the bomb mechanism, the workings of an ordinary clock, and the fictitious "projector gadget." One thinks of Verloc's death in The Secret Agent, in which the clock trope describing his dripping blood evokes the body's subordination to mechanical time, and of a film precisely contemporaneous with Sabotage, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), in which the little tramp is wound through the massive cogs of an industrial machine that also resembles the film apparatus. Insofar as the cinematic narrative destroys Stevie in its gears, his fate is a tragic version of Chaplin's shtick. Appropriately, the only clue to Stevie's identity after the blast is found by Ted: a twisted piece of film canister.

Literalizing the stylistic vivisection peculiar to montage and taking place at the precise juncture where the rhythms of narrative and the shock of spectacle meet, Stevie's journey through the kaleidoscopic street fair becomes an allegory of the social origins of film. Film found its first cultural foothold as an exhibit in traveling fairs. Prior to 19o7, trick films (featuring, for instance, disappearing objects and people), vignettes of actuality (sometimes filmed from moving vehicles), and erotic films, often interspersed with live vaudeville acts, were designed primarily "to solicit the attention of the spectator" coming to see a new mechanism on display.45 Hitchcock invokes the "cinema of attractions" in Stevie's halting progress through Lord Mayor's Show Day, as well as in the trick photography used later to simulate his grief-stricken sister's hallucinations, but he subordinates it to the rigorous suspense structure that soon endeared him to Hollywood, where "classic cinema" came to institutionalize the dominance of narrative structure and diegetic absorption over spectacular display.

Picking Up the Pieces

Conrad's Stevie is sacrificed to a fantasy of empowerment. Profoundly moved by every word he reads-the dramatization describes him as a "perfect slave to verbal suggestion" ( ig)-Stevie stands in for the readers whose attention Conrad seeks even as he serves to affront the readers Conrad already has. After reading of Winnie's suicide, Ossipon feels his "brain pulsating . . . to the rhythm of journalistic phrases" (231), and the Professor is quick to point out that Ossipon's writing will never have a comparable impact. Conrad's words aspire to go the newspaper's one better: literalizing Stevie, they have the power to kill. As readers, we fare better than Stevie, yet with Conrad's disjunct chronology drawing us into Winnie's gradual recognition that her beloved younger brother died in the bombing, not Verloc, the novel summons considerable power to shock. Blandly named "time shifts" by Ford Madox Ford, Conrad's extravagant manipulations of chronology, like the inscription of his imagined audience in framed narrations, typify his efforts to master his readers.46

The death of Hitchcock's Stevie, we have seen, has specifically cinematic resonance. As the major narrative art to emerge from nineteenth-century modernization, film in general is absorbed in a transformation of perception in mass society in which a sense of the personal is produced as already lost. The human body may itself become mechanized, its present moment locked into an imposed narrative; think of Chaplin in Modern Times, continuing to tighten bolts after the production line has stopped. Or, reversing the comedy, the body, like Ted's foot, may be drawn into the mechanism, only to emerge intact, in Chaplin's case, with a balletic grace unknown to the machine.

Figuring the sacrifice of the personal in more starkly horrifying fashion, Stevie's death marks the ambivalent advent of film as the dominant art of modernity: Mrs. Verloc's love for her brother clearly compensates for the inadequate intimacy of her marriage, and the loss of what, she tells Ted, means "everything" to her is turned inside out as a spectacle within a narrative designed for public consumption. Extending the spectacle of Stevie's death, Hitchcock makes Mrs. Verloc faint in the crowded street when she reads about the bombing in the newspaper. An earlier scene has anticipated the morbid evacuation of the personal epitomized in Stevie's death: when Hitchcock's Professor, who stores his explosives in the kitchen, opens a cupboard, his granddaughter's doll tumbles out from between deadly jars of tomato sauce and strawberry jam. The scene evokes at once Hitchcock's disdain for the clumsy actors who enact his fable and a volatile conflation of domesticity and terrorism.47 Film spectatorship, mediating between public and private spheres during the emergence of mass culture, promised the recovery of the private within the public conditions of viewing.48 Sabotage insists on the persistence of loss within the effort of recovery.

The manipulative shock aesthetic Hitchcock drew out of Conrad constitutes a pervasive yet not inevitable consequence of early-century modernization. As if in reaction to modernist aggression, Jean Renoir used deep focus and sustained shots in Rules of the Game (1939) to create an openness diametrically opposed to Hitchcock's often claustrophobic mastery. Actors wander in and out of Renoir's deep frame with a casual freedom that draws viewers into a capacious cinematic world.49 But even though comparable filmic effects survive today, Hitchcock's closed aesthetic dominates mainstream Hollywood. Accelerated and amplified by the expansion of consumer culture and the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the film industry, his shrewd attention to viewer response, marketing, and self-promotion has led to investment in the blockbuster, and efforts to duplicate the success of Jaws (1975) or the Star Wars trilogy (1977-83) tend not to invite one to linger in a richly ambiguous mise-en-scene. Hitchcock's financially successful heirs are more likely to use cuts, angles, and close-ups to jolt the audience into a predetermined response. Moreover, Sergei Eisenstein's influential work on montage has fostered the notion that such techniques mark what counts as a specifically cinematic practice.50 Far from suggesting that detailed attention to setups and editing produces bad art or that cinema after Hitchcock has steadily declined, I hope to have traced an aesthetic trajectory according to which mainstream film aspires to perfect techniques of manipulation that were emerging in Conrad's protomodernism and then were developed by Hitchcock.

Sabotage thus occupies an equivocal position within the cultural and historical developments that have contributed to the marginalization of less manipulative aesthetics.51 For Hitchcock challenged the conventions of classical cinema even as his hunger for a Hollywood contract helped consolidate them. One surreal, dislocated scene featuring a Disney cartoon recapitulates the film's general strategy by offering an object lesson in the dangers of absorption, an effect of narrative that classical cinema took over from the realist novel. The cartoon sequence may be experienced at once as a realistic evocation of trauma and as a self-reflexive instance of extreme manipulation, in which Mrs. Verloc becomes, like Stevie with the vendor, Hitchcock's demonstration model or Conrad's marionette.52 Nearly catatonic after learning of Stevie's death, she wanders away from her husband into the cinema, where Walt Disney's Who Killed Cock Robin? is playing. Ringing the last changes on the film's bird motif and introducing another conspicuously American element, the cartoon shows Cock Robin courting a Mae West bird while the audience laughs appreciatively at his Crosbyesque crooning. Even Mrs. Verloc, momentarily escaping from her grief into the romantic fantasy of the cartoon, begins to smile and laugh, when suddenly a shadowy figure shoots an arrow through Cock Robin's heart. Precisely as her grief is forced back into consciousness, the cook informs her that dinner is ready. As if sleepwalking, she returns to the dinner table, where, faced with Stevie's empty chair and a warm joint of meat, she soon stabs her husband to death in a celebrated montage sequence. In 1941 Preston Sturges would use a Disney cartoon at the climax of Sullivan's Travels to represent the comic relief that Depression-era audiences were thought to desire; Hitchcock makes Mrs. Verloc's cinematic absorption in a quintessentially innocent entertainment explode in her face.

The magnetic repulsion of Sabotage may have earned Hitchcock a Hollywood contract; like Conrad's novel, however, the movie was not a popular success. In the long run Hitchcock's superior ability to ironize the conventions of popular entertainment without emptying them of consolation allowed him to straddle more successfully than Conrad an audience that might include Graham Greene and a real-life Mrs. Verloc in adjacent seats. The story of his success begins with Sabotage, where Hitchcock, aligning himself through the vendor with the power of advertising, lets the residual ethical coordinates of Conrad fall away to reveal what most concerns him, the empty chair in which he wishes to pin his audience while the bomb continues to tick. At the same time, his modernist play with the film within a film encourages the viewer to keep a skeptical eye on the space behind the screen, where conspirators gather to inspire our uneasiness.