The Anarchy of Love: “The Informer”

Abstract

"THE INFORMER" (1906) is one of a number of Conrad's stories that has enjoyed fresh attention from scholars in recent years. In particular, Keith Carabine (1999) has shown how "the moral satirical idea" is central to understanding the text. This essay, in part, responds to Carabine's fine account in order to develop how Conrad's satire not only critiques the moral disaffection of its protagonists but also takes on the romantic form itself. My aim is to show how the combination of a multiple frame narratives with unreliable narrators infers not only a tale within a tale but also a love story that, in its futility and human complexity, describes a range and depth of emotion that outstrips conventional romance. Fur thermore, in suggesting a comparison between the story and Jacques Derrida's ethics of friendship,1 I argue that the doomed love of Sevrin and the Lady Amateur is a genuinely anarchistic gesture since it describes a Utopian desire that exceeds (and defeats) the comprehension of the anarchist-aesthetes. The very utopianism of this love is heightened by the extent to which it is inexperdy suppressed through the frame