Summary
The Professor and Comrade Ossipon, sitting in the former’s apartment, discuss the situation they find themselves in. When Ossipon remarks that Michaelis is not aware of Mr. Verloc’s death, having not read the newspapers out of a sense of being too sensitive to their sensationalistic content, the Professor launches into a tirade against the weak in the world. He argues that the weak must be eliminated so that the strong can remake the world.
As the two of them leave and board a bus, Ossipon broods on a newspaper article on Mrs. Verloc’s suicide on a passenger liner crossing the English Channel. The words of the last line haunt him: “An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness and despair” (224). Different parts of this sentence play over and over in his mind and throw him into a state where he suspects that he is sick or going crazy. He parts from the Professor at the Silenus beer hall, and each of them disappears separately into the street crowds.
Analysis
This uncannily numbered chapter occurs after the two main (violent) climaxes of the novel: Stevie’s death in the Greenwich Bomb Outrage and Mr. Verloc’s death. Two characters recollect and sum up the events, while the final and most horrifying act of violence – Mrs. Verloc’s suicide – is filtered through the medium of the newspaper. In a way, Ossipon in this chapter stands for the reader, who has no direct experience of the violence and tragedy that comes to him or her through a written report (i.e. the novel), but who nonetheless seems to experience everything as though he or she were really there, as though he or she really knew the perpetrator/victim. Conrad’s novelistic technique, after all, stresses visual immediacy as a central component of what art should be able to do.
The passage in which Ossipon – a kind of Comrade to all of us as readers – reads the newspaper and experiences the final climax constitutes one of Conrad’s most remarkable uses of free indirect point of view in the novel, and so deserves close examination:
Comrade Ossipon was well informed. He knew what the gangway man of the steamer had seen: A lady in a black dress and a black veil, wandering at midnight alongside, on the quay. "Are you going by the boat, ma’am," he had asked her encouragingly. "This way." She seemed not to know what to do. He helped her on board. She seemed weak.
And he knew also what the stewardess had seen: A lady in black with a white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies’ cabin. The stewardess induced her to lie down there. The lady seemed quite unwilling to speak, and as if she were in some awful trouble. The next the stewardess knew she was gone from the ladies’ cabin. The stewardess then went on deck to look for her, and Comrade Ossipon was informed that the good woman found the unhappy lady lying down in one of the hooded seats. Her eyes were open, but she would not answer anything that was said to her. She seemed very ill. The stewardess fetched the chief steward, and those two people stood by the side of the hooded seat consulting over their extraordinary and tragic passenger. They talked in audible whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St Malo and the Consul there, of communicating with her people in England. Then they went away to arrange for her removal down below, for indeed by what they could see of her face she seemed to them to be dying. But Comrade Ossipon knew that behind that white mask of despair there was struggling against terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows. He knew (225-6).
At times the narrator makes the fact that Ossipon is receiving information from the newspaper explicit by bracketing said information with quotes and the word “informed.” However, at other times, Ossipon simply “knew,” albeit much more than he could actually know; we know that while reading, his knowledge of Mrs. Verloc allows him to visualize what is happening with much greater detail than is actually written. The gravity of the situation becomes a kind of suggestiveness that makes him not only fill in unwritten, “seen” details but even penetrate into unseen feelings.
