A thoughtful reading guide to The Secret Agent: A semiotic text
A thoughtful reading guide to The Secret Agent: A semiotic text

Summary/Abstract: Written by an armchair detective/semiotician, this truncated version of a longer reading guide demonstrates Terence Hawkes’ Structuralism and Semiotics dictum that any semiotic “way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures” is not static (6). Such dynamism, Hawkes points out, owes its momentum to the early twentieth-century revised understanding of the nature of perception. This understanding contains an inherent bias which affects what is perceived: “[t]he true nature of things [lies] not in things themselves, but in the relationship which we construct, and then perceive, between them” (7). In constructing one reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: a Simple Tale this guide relies on Michel Foucault’s elaboration in Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) of the relationship between signifiers such as “correspondence”, “lie”, “mirror” as well as other encoded, cryptic, allegorical, verb / nouns and things. By example more than by explanation or interpretation, the guide foregrounds Conrad’s amusement at the “droll connections between incongruous ideas” (16) which the mind makes. The guide’s strategy of employing examples of mental semiotic processes borrows Conrad’s strategy of employing a pseudo detective story as a structuring method. As a detective text, The Secret Agent draws attention to its own self-reflexive modus operandi: it drops clues to Charles Sanders Peirce’s secret agent: semiotics. The guide invites its readers to likewise discern word’s hidden “matter.”

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