Post on 26-Jan-2023
!‘The First of Men’: Encountering Epistemic Alterity at the Fin de Siècle
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Stefanie Lehmann
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11 December 2013
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A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts (Hons) English Literature
!!
Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
!Supervisor: Dr. Andrew Radford
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Contents !!!!!!
I At the Epistemic Frontier 3
II H. G. Wells and the Question of Judgment 6
III Arthur Conan Doyle and the Detective as Individual 12
IV Joseph Conrad and the Performativity of Authority 20
V Coda: The Postcolonial Perspective 29
I At the Epistemic Frontier
!The considerable importance of excavation, both literal and metaphorical, in fin-de-
siècle literature and culture has been much remarked on in Victorian studies —
whether practiced as a national pastime or, increasingly, within codified and
professionalized disciplines of knowledge. Excavation, considered as the process of
penetrating surfaces, relies on a model of surface and depth that is central to my
project, which will eschew the common critical use of the excavation motif as a
symptom of an increasingly taxonomic, rationalized, and positivistic Victorian society.
Undoubtedly, excavation was undertaken to reach an inner ‘core’ of knowledge —
whether this be psychological, as in sensation fiction and studies of the unconscious;
archaeological, as in Victorian geology; or perhaps teleological, in the Victorians’
intense preoccupation with the course of history. But an often-neglected consequence
of the activity of excavation is the excavator’s contact with the new, the foreign, and
the radically Other: There is no predicting what the excavator, operating at the
interstice of time and place, will reveal. By necessity, she leaves behind her epistemic
‘comfort zone’, surrendering herself to the possibility of unearthing new knowledge
that may radically destabilize her epistemic framework. This phenomenon is not
restricted to excavation undertaken domestically; rather, its prime site is the imperial
encounter — figured here as the liminal site between cultures and epistemic systems.
Fredric Jameson, considering the spatial displacement inherent in imperialism,
posits a concomitant radical imaginative displacement within modernist literature. 1
According to Jameson, imperialism caused a loss of the capacity to cognitively map the
modernist — and late-Victorian, in my analysis — environment. Jameson’s claim has
two major implications for my argument. Firstly, it emphasizes the influence of spatial
shifts on the understanding and mapping of the environment. Secondly, it highlights
the increasing untenability of a model assuming linear, knowable causes and effects, a
theme which will recur throughout my enterprise. I posit that what is implicit in
!!3
Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), p. 156.1
Jameson’s thesis is the idea that a spatial divorce between causes and effects disrupts
epistemic structures. More specifically, I will show how both the empiricist method of
investigation and traditional understandings of causality are disrupted by the imperial
encounter in the fiction of H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad.
Following a recent critical tendency exemplified by Stephen Arata’s concept of ‘reverse
colonization’, I understand this encounter to occur both at the actual imperial frontier
and domestically, invading the hinterlands of the metropolitan ‘center’ or even the
moors of rural England.
To this effect, the first part of my bipartite thesis will demonstrate how recent
readings of Victorian literature have been too strongly influenced by the Foucauldian
model of power-knowledge — a phenomenon which has skewed the critical
perspective towards asserting the Victorians’ univocal self-confidence in their
epistemic methodology. For the most part, my argument will operate on the same
level of abstraction concerning ‘Western knowledge’ as Jameson’s thesis and
Foucault’s model, the latter of which encompasses a number of major shifts in the
Western ‘episteme’ that subsequent critics have adopted. Thus, the epistemic
methodology employed in detective fiction, and in particular in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes saga, is too often critically read as a conservative force for
containment. The same focus on specifically Western epistemic strategies of figuring
the world also recurs in the critical preoccupation, following Saïd’s Orientalism, with
imperialist discourse construction in the work of Joseph Conrad. These critical
tendencies indicate that a readjustment towards those effects of the imperial
encounter that destabilized the nascent Western power-knowledge nexus has become
necessary.
Both the imperial expedition and the process of detection involve the constant
comparison of an epistemic framework and toolkit against new parameters. This
process constitutes a cognitive journey, and its result cannot be a simple
reconfirmation of the starting point. But as the second part of my thesis will show, the
inevitable possibility of something overlooked or unknown — which is, in fact, the
very condition of existence of an Other — was by no means a cause only for anxiety.
Instead, the abandonment of the familiar involved a dimension of pleasure that is
!!4
completely congruent with the logic of both imperial exploration and detection. Arata
notes the ‘erotics of interpretation’ at play in the Holmes stories, and Saïd emphasizes
that pleasure is ‘often left undiscussed’ in ‘many forms of imperial-colonial writing —
evidence that the pleasures of detective fiction and of exploration are, in many ways,
alike. Against the critical canon, I argue that the pleasure lies less in closure and 2
containment after the fact and more in the very encounter itself — wherein the
importance of sensation has been decidedly undervalued. My argument thus seeks to
liberate readings of detective and exploration fiction from the dominant narrative of
Victorian anxiety, in order to recognize the crucial role of pleasure in the process of
detecting and exploring.
The early scientific romances of H. G. Wells serve as emblematic studies of fin-
de-siècle Western authority in its various and volatile incarnations. My first chapter
will focus on the representation of authority figures in The Time Machine and The Island
of Doctor Moreau and will map the bases of Victorian authority, allowing for a
consequent re-figuration of facile readings of Sherlock Holmes as a paragon of
Victorian epistemic authority. I will argue instead that Holmes's representation often
undermines the very logic on which his authority is based. Finally, the third chapter
turns to the imperial texts of Joseph Conrad, wherein models of authority are always
riven by internal contradiction and ambivalence. My argument will conclude with an
attempt to explain my findings with reference to the impact of capitalism on the late-
Victorian subject.
!!5
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 133; 2
Edward Saïd, ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’, in Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 166.
II H. G. Wells and the Question of Judgment !I asked a question, devised some method of getting an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible, or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him. You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. 3
!Excavations in the work of H. G. Wells rarely yield pleasant new knowledge; rather,
his novels reveal visions of humanity deeply tinged with the degenerationist discourse
of the fin de siècle. Wells’s narrators continually find themselves in experientially novel
situations, having to test their previous epistemic hypotheses against new
constellations of space, time, and human behavior. The opening scene of The Time
Machine (1895) is paradigmatic in its interrogation of the very epistemic foundations
of Western physics in the presence of a select group of the new professional classes.
Readings of Wells’s scientific romances as uncertain of the scope and
comprehensiveness of the Western corpus of knowledge, then, easily lend themselves
to my argument that epistemic insecurities proliferated in the imperial encounter. 4
Rejecting such readings for their simplicity, however, I would first like to trace the
ways in which Wells’s texts nonetheless endow their very skeptical narrators with
authority. What will emerge in the process is the diversity of different models of late-
Victorian authority — the different axes along which the narrators and protagonists
could gain or lose authority.
The opening scene of The Time Machine, as mentioned above, presents the reader
with a destabilization of the laws of physics. When considering the scene formally,
however, the epistemic bases of the natural sciences seem less threatened. The very
first sentence figures the Traveller — whose devotion to these emergent branches of
knowledge renders his naming expendable — in the role of a lecturer, confidently
‘expounding’ something ‘recondite’. Though he is disrupting the tectonics of Western 5
!!6
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 73.3
See Simon James for a very rigorous interpretation in this vein.4
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 1.5
knowledge, then, the Traveller has always already processed the implications of his
findings; his accounts are in the past tense. This capacity to cope with his jarring
experiences, to relate them at ease in ‘that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere’,
suggests not epistemic disorientation, but incorporation, even mastery (ibid.). The
‘recondite matter’ referred to is already, even as it is being enunciated by the Traveller
and read by the reader, in the process of clarification. The explanatory beginning of the
novella, then, promises a near-instantaneous decoding of novel experience.
Furthermore, the text indicates immediately that the process of causation, central to
rational Western thought, will be knowable: ‘I do not mean to ask you to accept
anything without reasonable ground for it’ (ibid.). This faith, based on causality, in a
knowable universe and even an inductively knowable future, is also revealed in a 1902
lecture by Wells: ‘But the imagination, unless it is strengthened by a very sound
training in the laws of causation, wanders like a lost child in the blankness of things to
come’. The Traveller only demonstrates how prior ‘distinction[s]’ were in fact ‘unreal’ 6
— in short, that previous knowledge was founded upon an identifiable and corrigible
mistake in thinking (Time Machine, p. 2). His highly methodical, retrospective discourse
thus serves to incorporate new knowledge into the extant framework — which stands
in stark contrast to the disorienting Conradian encounter with epistemic novelty and
ontological difference. As the other participants’ ignorance is revealed, the Traveller
relishes lecturing on the cutting-edge research of his particular, increasingly
specialized, discipline.
The Morlocks are the best evidence for the Traveller’s proposition that ‘Time is
only a kind of Space’ and can thus be mastered (ibid., p. 3). They are an
anthropological mystery located spatially below the surface and eventually excavated
by the Traveller, thereby exemplifying the surface-depth model of degenerationist
discourse. This particular excavation is riddled with difficulties, as the Traveller
constantly draws attention to his false initial hypotheses. But this very process of
delayed decoding, to use Ian Watt’s term, framed as it is in the narrative, again serves
to emphasize the surmounting of epistemic difficulties rather than their encounter.
The Traveller's excavations also privilege the present moment of excavation: He
!!7
H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1913), p. 21.6
returns from the future with prescient knowledge that will serve a hermeneutics of the
immediate present of society. Thus, while ostensibly self-deprecating declarations like
‘Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough — as most wrong theories
are!’ abound, their effect is, upon analysis, less jarring (ibid., p. 33). The delay of
narrative explanations is short enough, and the reader is already informed, several
pages earlier, of the Traveller’s ‘quietly’ smiling ‘in his old way’ upon return from the
journey (ibid., p. 14). The object of investigation itself is never represented as
anything but knowable and epistemically accessible throughout the narrative. Thus,
the ‘old way’ is never fundamentally disrupted by alterity, and ‘experiments’ are a
currency that the audience of professionals must, by the logic of their epistemic
system, perforce accept (ibid., p. 6). The minute description of the Traveller’s
demonstration attests to the credibility that the narrative, at times associating ‘mystic
words’ and ‘humbug’ with him, nevertheless ultimately grants him (ibid., pp. 3, 6). As
explanations precede ‘unaccountable thing[s]’, the fantastic is contained within the
realistic (ibid., p. 6).
Prendick, in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), is reported, yet again in a framing
section, to have ‘passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5° S. and longitude
105° E., and reappeared in the same part’ (The Island, pp. 1-2). The spatial nature of
‘human knowledge’ here is worth noting; Prendick is mapped as beyond known space,
yet his reappearance and the precise coordinates given of his absence already
undermine the significance of that epistemically blank space. Prendick differs from the
Traveller in that he is an involuntary subject of displacement. However, this endows
him with more textual authority: He is a more relatable because less professional
character, as well as a victim of external circumstance. His methodology in
encountering these new surroundings is much the same as the Traveller’s: The reader
is constantly kept up to date with how Prendick’s hypotheses about the nature of the
foreign terrain are faring, and the presence of Doctor Moreau, a representative of the
professional class despite his fall from grace, keeps an authoritative explanation of
events always within reach. Additionally, just as The Time Machine assures the reader
that ‘it appears incredible to me that any kind of trick [...] could have been played
upon us under these conditions’, Prendick is endowed with perceptual authority even
!!8
when he lacks the skill to assimilate events to his epistemic framework (Time Machine,
pp. 6-7). Prendick's staunch teetotalism, for one, assures the reader that, unlike his
foil Montgomery and the captain, he retains full control of his senses even in a
sensorially challenging environment, where boundaries between species are subject to
effacement. In a reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gwen Hyman connects the
Victorian teetotalism movement with the middle class’s accession of cultural
authority, grounded in a dedicated work ethic — a finding undoubtedly applicable to
Prendick. Compared with the troubled Montgomery and the degenerate Moreau, 7
then, the abstinent Prendick seems a paragon of virtue.
Wells’s two early scientific romances thus operate on multiple planes of
authority. Prendick and the Traveller may at first sight be displaced Western subjects
laboring to cognitively map their environment; but on the plane of narrative, a
different logic is at play. Multiple warnings on the part of a narrator about the
potential inaccuracy of the characters' observations and hypotheses only serves to
involve the reader more intimately in the storyscape. The typical Victorian reader was
already experiencing imperial adventures at the epistemic frontier vicariously through
the explorers of Victorian fiction; this experience becomes all the more thrilling if the
environment is represented in uncertain terms. And by introducing the possibility of
falsity in these narratives, the reader of Wells becomes a textual detective herself,
assuming the responsibility — and pleasure — of investigating the accuracy of the
narrator’s reports and of the narrative as a whole. The reader is thus implicated in the
question of judgment and epistemic authority, rendering her more invested in the
imaginative experiment as a whole. The potentially-true or potentially-false always
evokes more pleasure than the definitely-true or the definitely-false; it plays upon the
reader’s desire for judgment and upon the desire inherent in an encounter with the
unknown. This pleasure of the epistemic borderlands is strikingly likened to death,
another unconventional source of pleasure, by the Traveller: ‘I suppose a suicide who
holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt
!!9
Gwen Hyman, ‘“An Infernal Fire in my Veins”: Gentlemanly Drinking in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Victorian 7
Literature and Culture 36.2 (September 2008) <http://journals.cambridge.org/article_S1060150308080285> [accessed 3 March 2013], pp. 451-469; cf. p. 454.
then’ (Time Machine, p. 17). Wells’s subtitle, ‘An Invention’, places the story firmly in
the realm of the potentially-true, especially considering the Victorians’ confidence in
narratives of technological progress. In the process I have just traced, then, the
narrator is endowed with the authority of the storyteller — the person who holds
power over an audience because of her ability to relate the next part of the story, of the
epistemic terrain that the reader is now implicated in mapping.
Finally, Prendick is certainly endowed with the capacity to map the moral terrain
of the novella, as a comparison with Moreau reveals. Though Moreau is clearly meant
to act as a deterrent to scientific extremism, his authority is never completely
abrogated. After all, he seems to typify only the most radical expression of the
positivistic spirit of exploration pervading the period; he is described as having been ‘a
prominent and masterful physiologist, well-known in scientific circles for his
extraordinary imagination and his brutal directness in discussion’ (The Island, p. 30).
Though associated with brutality, ‘directness’ is nevertheless positively charged by its
concurrent association with mastery and intellectual discussion. Paradoxically, then,
while Moreau’s knowledge is contaminated by the morally questionable practice of
vivisection, it also represents the apogee of purity in its strict adherence to the
scientific ethos, much like Holmes’s detection. Indeed, Moreau, like Holmes, is
characterized by excessive devotion to his work: ‘He might perhaps have purchased his
social peace by abandoning his investigations; but he apparently preferred the latter, as
most men would who have once fallen under the overmastering spell of
research’ (ibid., p. 31). The purity of scientific research is hallowed here by its
juxtaposition with the sullied commerciality of the 'social peace'. Moreau forms part of
a new class of men who, in the name of scientific investigation, are willing to
transgress more boundaries than ‘ordinary’ men. Because of this, Moreau stirs the
collective unease of a society that is failing to cognitively map the outgrowths of its
frenzied accumulation of knowledge as epistemic capital. Moreau's commitment to
systematic investigation is reminiscent of Holmes’s own endorsement of precision; yet
Holmes is critically and textually figured as a hero, while Moreau is expelled from his
homeland. Such different readings of these pioneer-scientists attest to the great
diversity of models of authority in circulation at the fin de siècle — an awareness of
!!10
which is crucial in grasping the fragility of the Victorian power-knowledge nexus. The
next chapter will seek to apply these findings by interrogating the epistemic authority
of Sherlock Holmes with regard to the private and public roles of the Victorian
individual.
!!11
III Arthur Conan Doyle and the Detective as Individual !Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. […] His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase 8
!In Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga, the object of figurative excavation is factual
knowledge about crime. To this extent, my argument follows the critical canon; it
diverges on the question of the function of that knowledge, and, by extension, of the
role of Sherlock Holmes as a detective. Holmes’s detective science has been read by
recent studies variously as in line with the rise of forensic science as a method of
classification, as policing the ‘urban jungle’ of fin-de-siècle London, or as congruent
with either late-Victorian degenerationist discourse or the secularization of
omniscience. The common paradigm uniting these and many other readings of 9
Holmes is a Foucauldian one: Critics since D. A. Miller continually make reference to
the Foucauldian carceral power-knowledge model in their readings of detective
fiction. While the framework of Discipline and Punish (1975) is undoubtedly 10
applicable, I will argue that reading Holmes solely as a power for law and justice — a
signifier of the incipient rationalized society of surveillance — is not only simplistic,
but also ignores the fundamental significance of desire in the process of detection.
Few critics have jettisoned the Foucauldian interpretive scheme for detective fiction;
even fewer have acknowledged the concurrent importance of pleasure within the
genre. Despite initially considering the ‘urban jungle’ of London as a ‘playground for 11
thrillseekers like Sherlock Holmes’, McLaughlin only tangentially considers the
!!12
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2012), pp. 74-5.8
Ronald Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Joseph McLaughlin, 9
Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: The UP of Virginia, 2000); Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss; Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Cf. for example Thomas, p. 17; McLaughlin, p. 44; Arata, p. 143; Ascari, pp. 19, 42.10
For recent consciously anti-Foucauldian readings with interpretive emphases that differ from mine, see 11
Christopher Pittard and Lawrence Frank.
possibility that readers might seek ‘the exciting possibility that any reassuring
containment of the other is only a fiction, too’ at the very end of his commentary on
Conan Doyle (McLaughlin, pp. 2, 73). Caroline Reitz promisingly criticizes readings of
‘the detective genre as essentially conservative’ after asserting that Holmes is not ‘a
sure-footed symbol of a knowable universe’. Her conclusion, however, remains 12
entrenched in the terms of conservative policing: ‘The criticism of official authority’ in
Holmes is only ‘an argument for the necessity of better authority through a centralised
system of local knowledge’ (ibid., p. 76). My own analysis, centered around the two
methodology-dominated texts A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890),
will instead stress how Holmes’s personal character resists the logic of ‘pure’
knowledge in the service of conservative policing — indicating the tensions
surrounding authority within the newly emergent professional class.
Sherlock Holmes is, in many ways, a pioneer: Not just the world’s first and only
consulting detective, he is also responsible for popularizing his very personal brand of
‘armchair epistemology’. Watson, upon first being confronted with Holmes’ epistemic
manifesto, dismisses it as ‘ineffable twaddle’; this initial dismissal, much like the
protestations of Wells’s narrators, of course lends the subsequent vindication of the
detective’s methods all the more weight, and Watson goes on to play a pivotal role in
constructing the mythos of Holmes. Holmes’s initial claim that ‘from a drop of water 13
[…] a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having
seen or heard of one or the other’ is corroborated extensively throughout the sleuth’s
career (A Study, p. 14). Such a logician would possess almost preternatural powers of
observation, deduction, and knowledge without ever removing herself spatially. Thus
also Holmes’s successful solving of many cases involving imperial infiltration, or, in
Arata’s terms, reverse colonization. However, in an analysis of the conflict between
Holmes’s armchair epistemology, Jamesons’s cognitive-spatial displacement, and the
!!13
Caroline Reitz, ‘Separated at Birth: Doyle, Kipling, and the Partition of English Detective Fiction’, in 12
Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004), p. 67.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (Hertfordshire: 13
Wordsworth Editions, 2004), p. 15.
concurrent specialization of knowledge, the non-conservative characteristics of
Holmes increasingly demand notice.
This conflict manifests itself in a number of ways. Firstly, it is intrinsic in the
logic of detection: The very idea of the ‘case’ within an investigation is, by necessity,
unfixed and subject to change or revision. The object of investigation must necessarily
remain elusive — hence the suspenseful pleasure of excavating the solution to a
problem. Certainty as to what the ‘case’ entails is only possible in its aftermath —
from the point of retrospective narration. Scott Brewster, in a discussion of Gothic
texts and ‘interpretation in general’, even goes so far as to say: ‘Every sign, every
detail, may conceal secret import: the critic/analyst cannot safely delimit
interpretation or deliver a final reading without the possibility of missing some further
meaning’. Similarly, Christopher Pittard comments that in detective fiction, there is 14
‘no narrative waste’ — anything may become significant. Holmes himself tellingly 15
comments at one point, ‘No data yet […]. It is a capital mistake to theorise before you
have all the evidence. It biases the judgment’ (A Study, p. 20). ‘All the evidence’ may
never be revealed, of course; and any claim of having acquired all available data must
therefore necessarily be a political one. This resistance to neat closure in empiricist
investigation is perhaps best illustrated in The Valley of Fear (1915), where the case’s
fundamental ontological parameters undergo a shift: What begins as an investigation
into the death of Mr. Douglas turns into a conspiracy narrative about secret societies
far away in America, involving the reappearance of the ostensible murder victim.
This spatial displacement of the solution to a crime, mirrored in A Study and The
Sign, is a second indicator of the above mentioned conflict: It betrays the failings of
Holmes’s epistemic model. McLaughlin convincingly foregrounds the continuities
rather than the differences of the two separated parts of A Study, arguing that Holmes
and Jefferson Hope are both ‘heroes’ and ‘representatives of justice’ at different
frontiers (McLaughlin, pp. 44-5). However, I would invoke Jameson’s spatial and
!!14
Scott Brewster, ‘Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David 14
Punter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 485-6.
Christopher Pittard, ‘Introduction: (Mrs.) Hudson’s Soap: Reading Purity in Detective Fiction’, in Purity 15
and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 20.
imaginative displacement here, in order to argue that the complete sundering of a
third-person omniscient narrative from Holmes’s investigations as narrated by the
reverent Watson is evidence of the incapacity of metropolitan London to completely
map and grasp imperial reality. It heightens the impression in the reader that causes
have become divorced from effects in everyday imperial life, and that it is simply no
longer possible for London, or England, to function as an epistemically self-sufficient
entity. Instead, epistemic alterity becomes a constitutive component both of everyday
life and of the overarching fund of Western knowledge. Holmes’s dictum that ‘there is
nothing new under the sun’ and his confidence in establishing causal links between
spatially divorced events are thus contradicted by the formal features of the narratives
(A Study, p. 23). Additionally, the nature of these subsequent, explanatory sections
illuminates the role that the desire of the reader plays in the narrative construction:
The ‘renewal’ of the story through an omniscient narration set entirely abroad mimics
the imperial encounter with the radically Other, thus granting the reader the pleasure
of exploring vicariously. Similar dynamics, then, are at play here as in Wells’s
imaginative experiments: Texts that involve the question of epistemic authority
perform the most pleasurable aspects of their nature for the reader. The relation of
facts by Watson in London is insufficient; what Conan Doyle must grant the reader is
the imaginative displacement of imperialism itself.
The function of Watson as, in effect, a storyteller and hagiographer, is also
relevant to the epistemic dynamics in Conan Doyle. Holmes’s desire for exactitude
and precision, congruent with his stringent determinism, leaves him derisive of
Watson’s retrospective, interpretive accounts: ‘You have attempted to tinge it with
romanticism’. Detection ‘is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in 16
the same cold and unemotional manner’ (ibid.). The normative demand of this
sentiment is, however, constantly interrogated by the narrative. Holmes’s advocacy of
unmediated fact stands in constant tension with his reliance on other people’s
narrated accounts of their motivations. But in this, he resists the very hermeneutics
that are integral to his profession: Causal reasoning is always-already an account, a
!!15
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (Hertfordshire: 16
Wordsworth Editions, 2004), p. 110.
narrative, an interpretation. This is why the police are ‘more at ease’ once ‘we have
our storyteller here safe under lock and key’ — attesting to the epistemic authority of
the criminals in relating their motivations (ibid., p. 203). The insufficiency of
Holmes’s ratiocinative model of pure fact is betrayed when he has to admit, ‘You
forget that we know nothing of all this […] We have not heard your story’ (ibid., p.
186). In this vein, Ronald Thomas has convincingly shown Holmes as reading the
criminal’s body like a text; and the residual language of romance and quest throughout
the Holmes canon continually interrogates the separation of detection and
storytelling, or interpretation, that Holmes would like to establish (Thomas, pp. 3,
203).
Storytelling is not the only element infringing upon the ideal of rational
authority. This ideal is laid out by Conan Doyle through the statements of Holmes and
those of Watson on Holmes’s behalf, and it is indiscriminately perpetuated by critical
interpretations thereafter. Critics too often fail to contrast Holmes’s rhetoric with his
behavior. His personal habits and characteristics in fact corrupt the purity of
knowledge that Holmes aspires to. This in itself should not be a surprise, as the
Holmes stories build upon sensation — a very bodily phenomenon, intimately linked
with desire. Sensation fiction itself has generated a large amount of critical output
with regard to the bodily, but the dominant narrative of Holmes as rational has
occluded the elements of desire (and of the supernatural, as Reitz usefully points out)
in Conan Doyle’s texts (Reitz, p. 76). It is therefore highly ironical that Holmes, 17
while laying out his manifesto of rationality to Watson in The Sign, gives in to the need
for bodily sensation by injecting cocaine (The Sign, p. 110). McLaughlin reads this
Holmesian habit against Sholto’s opium addiction as congruent with the former’s
work ethic (McLaughlin, pp. 57-9). This reading, however, is symptomatic of the gross
critical conflation of the private and public roles of Holmes. Detection is not simply
police work; by its very logic of constant confrontation with an epistemic no-man’s-
land, detection also becomes a riddle, a puzzle, in which the process of solving, and
thus of not-knowing, is as important as the eventual result. Indeed, the text’s
occasional representations of Holmes as animalistic, as in the epigraph to this chapter,
!!16
For typical studies of the bodily dimension of sensation fiction, see Daniel Martin and Nicholas Daly.17
suggest that Holmes’s desire for the ‘chase’ is an instance of reclaiming process from
the capitalist-empiricist emphasis on effect, result, and solution. If we consider,
additionally, the transcultural dimension of competition, the frequent designations of
Holmes as ‘one of the first brains in Europe’ come to indicate that the imperialist
ethos of competition, added to the uncertain place of the individual in the context of
evolutionary theory, render an interpretation of Holmes’s motivations as centered
around his personal pleasure and identity more credible. Virginia Zimmerman 18
convincingly portrays Victorian narrative excavation as serving the revaluation of the
individual, who gains a sense of self from the act of narrating the past. However, a 19
necessary consequence of this position, which she does not explore, is the
simultaneous entrance of this individual into the expanding public sphere, where it
becomes necessary to assert oneself against others in the concurrent climate of
increasingly competitive social Darwinism. Both Holmes and Wells’s characters have
to navigate contested ideologies of Englishness and even of humanity at the post-
anthropocentric fin de siècle. Thus, Holmes’s investigations can and should viably be
read not only as reasserting order in the name of the law and the police, but also as
personal challenges; riddles which generate pleasure in the process of their solution,
even if — or precisely because — they have the potential of destabilizing ‘domestic
truths’ and the familiar epistemic framework of the West, operating on the
assumption of knowable causes and effects.
Holmes is more than capable of mapping both London and crime — as
evidenced in the taxi drive in The Sign and in his frequent references to the ‘annals of
crime’ — yet he lacks what Watson considers crucial and ‘civilized’ knowledge in other
areas: ‘I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the
composition of the Solar System’ (The Sign, p. 124; A Study, p. 11). The selective
nature of Holmes’s knowledge not only makes him a founder of a nascent specialized
discourse, it also draws attention to the fact that he is constantly assessing different
areas of knowledge as to their adequacy for the pleasures of ‘the game’. Knowledge
!!17
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 18
771.
Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 178.19
thus becomes highly personalized and instrumentalized. In this context, Holmes’s
addiction merits revisiting: ‘Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brainwork. What
else is there to live for? […] Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?’ (The
Sign, p. 115). Holmes’s cocaine addiction is equated with detection as a source of
pleasure, or at least of relief from boredom. In this, it uncannily resembles Prendick’s
justification for joining the scientific community: ‘I had taken to natural history as a
relief from the dulness of my comfortable independence’ (The Island, p. 7). These
statements of motivation, as well as the narrative splits examined earlier, suggest that
modern, rationalized existence in the West was not sufficient unto itself, as
imperialism resulted in an extension and displacement of the imagination. In light of
this evidence, readings like Jon Thompson’s which confine the imperialist elements in
the Holmes saga to an Orientalist framework are reductive, eliding the seminal
importance of imperial artifacts and Others as sources of pleasure for the
disenchanted, ‘comfortable’ middle-class Victorian citizen. 20
Not only is there a dimension of personal pleasure in Holmes’s detection; his
person is also recurrently associated with classes or forces that contaminate the purity
of his knowledge — which is increasingly revealed to be dependent on sources
external to himself and spatially displaced from his armchair. The most imperially
resonant of these is his underground information network of ‘street Arabs’. Holmes is
fluent in the habits and activities of different social strata, epitomized by his
temporally proximate encounter with two different spheres in The Sign. He readily
reminds the ‘prize-fighter’ of their previous encounter, who then remembers Holmes’s
famed ‘cross-hit’; only a few pages later, Holmes says, ‘quietly’ and in complete
assurance of his reputation, ‘I think you must recollect me, Mr Athelney Jones’, and is
promptly recognized as ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes, the theorist’ (The Sign, pp. 134, 143).
Holmes draws on children, the lower classes, and even Toby the dog in constructing
his epistemic authority, navigating these Others of the imperial metropolis with ease.
Additionally, Holmes relishes the experience of dressing up as an Other, a member of a
lower social class: ‘We both started in our chairs. There was Holmes sitting close to us
!!18
Jon Thompson, ‘The Adventurous Detective: Conan Doyle and Imperialism’, in Fiction, Crime, and Empire: 20
Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 68-73.
with an air of quiet amusement’ (ibid., p. 170). Watson declares himself convinced by
the performance: ‘You would have made an actor, and a rare one. You had the proper
workhouse cough’ (ibid.). Holmes’s successful passing for an Other reveals the
inherent performativity of authority. Holmes’s knowledge is never pure; it originates 21
from diverse sources in the ‘cesspool’ of imperial London, and Holmes the individual
certainly extracts pleasure from the performative aspect of his authority, hinting at the
possibility of occult depths under the pristine surfaces of Holmes’s own mind (A
Study, p. 4).
Crucially, the variously-sourced, impure nature of Holmes’s knowledge reveals a
focus on effects over causes: As long as the crime is solved, the origin of the
knowledge that led to its solution is irrelevant. Reitz comes to a similar conclusion in
comparing Sherlock’s and Mycroft’s forms of knowledge: ‘The mysteries of the
modern world, as Doyle implies, can only be penetrated and, even more important, the
chinks in the armor of state security can only be fixed if local knowledge and global
knowledge are cross-indexed’ (Reitz, p. 69). Despite eschewing Reitz’s focus on state
security, my argument has equally shown the necessity for ‘cross-indexing’ of
different, and sometimes impure, forms of late-Victorian knowledge. The increasing
proliferation of diverse and unorthodox sources of knowledge required their
concurrent utilization in the service of expanding capitalist markets. Thompson’s
reading of the ‘calculating machine’ Holmes as ‘the quintessential empiricist’ becomes
relevant here: Invoking a Frankfurt School view of empiricism, he argues that in the
Holmes canon ‘the values of empiricism—the emphasis on quantification and utility
over qualitative considerations—are the same ones that have come to structure and
regulate capitalist economies’ (The Sign, p. 119; Thompson, pp. 66, 67). My argument
shares Thompson’s specific focus on capitalism in linking the phenomenon of ‘cross-
indexing’ to the epistemic dynamics of the incipient late-capitalist system as a whole
— as an analysis of Conrad’s imperial fictions in the final chapter will clarify.
!!19
Ed Wiltse similarly comments: ‘His ability to become absolutely other leaves him marked by that 21
otherness’. ‘“So constant an expectation”: Sherlock Holmes and Seriality’, Narrative 6.2 (May 1998) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107142> [accessed 11 November 2013], p. 113.
IV Joseph Conrad and the Performativity of Authority !We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. 22
!Excavation is perhaps most visibly an imperial practice, and thus a question of politics,
in the work of Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s explicit focus on questions of imperial
ideology has prompted critics to emphasize how the politics of his texts operate on the
level of discourse and language. Edward Saïd’s seminal reading of Heart of Darkness
(1899) as criticizing imperialist discourse by way of imperialist discourse has perhaps
founded this particular critical tradition, which still produces scions today, as
evidenced for example by Robert Hampson’s and Amad Acheraïou’s recent criticism. 23
In contrast, I will argue that this focus on hegemonic discourse construction and the
(mis)representation of the colonial Other, while clearly important, also elides the
converse effect of the imperial encounter: The destabilization of Western epistemic
certainty and authority through the confrontation with radical, irreducible alterity.
Conrad’s narrators struggle to retain their faith in Western epistemic structures when
confronted with cognitively new terrain — so much so, in fact, that their epistemic
skepticism permeates the domain of ontology, as reflected in the many ontological
ghosts in Conrad. I will trace this argument across ‘An Outpost of Progress’ and
‘Karain’, with Heart of Darkness and ‘Youth’ haunting the margins of this chapter.
No commentary on Conrad can bypass an examination of the ghostly Marlow.
Michael Valdez Moses, one of the few critics eschewing both Foucault's and Saïd’s
interpretive frameworks, identifies the archetypal ‘Conradian scene of the imperial
!!20
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 138-9.22
Robert Hampson, ‘Encountering the Other: “Race” and Gender in “The Lagoon” and “Karain”’, in Cross-23
Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), cf. p. 122; Amad Acheraïou, ‘Colonial Encounters and Cultural Contests: Confrontation of Orientalist and Occidentalist Discourses in “Karain: A Memory”’, Conradiana 39.2 (Summer 2007) <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cnd/summary/v039/39.2acheraiou.html> [accessed 5 October 2013], cf. pp. 153-4.
encounter’ as ‘one of disorientation’, symbolized by the Conradian ship. My 24
argument follows Valdez Moses’ in positing the paramount importance of
disorientation in Conrad, but I would offer a different location, one explicitly rejected
by Valdez Moses, for the paradigmatic imperial encounter. It takes place not at the
imperial periphery on a ship, but rather at home in the West, where many Conradian
narrators return, burdened with novel knowledge that troubles their previous
convictions. The specific scene I allude to takes place early in Heart of Darkness, when 25
Marlow has just left the Company’s offices, newly endowed with the authority and
resources to begin his expedition. Marlow begins
to feel quite uneasy. You know I am not used to such ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy—I don’t know—something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. […] In the street—I don’t know why—a queer feeling came to me that I was an impostor.
(Heart of Darkness, pp. 111, 113) !Marlow exhibits an impostor syndrome. His smooth endowment with authority
strikes him as uneasy and somehow fraudulent; if we add the lexicon of suspicion
employed throughout these pages and the ‘uncanny and fateful’ knitting women, the
scene takes on a decidedly Gothic cast (ibid., p. 111). This eruption of the past, of
mythological figures, into the highly rationalized, bureaucratized present induces self-
doubt and is symptomatic of the troubled relationship of Conrad’s narrators to their
authority and to the Western epistemic framework it is based on. This framework,
presuming a certain basic availability of authoritative knowledge to middle-class men,
suffers as much from the imperial encounter with alterity as from the increasing
specialization of knowledge. The interjections in the above quotation are crucial: Not
only does Marlow feel uneasy in this pivotal moment in his career, he also cannot
quite articulate the reason — much like Jackson at the end of ‘Karain’, as I will explore
below. Additionally, the idea of a ‘conspiracy’ mirrors the many epistemic asymmetries
!!21
Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics’, in 24
Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, ed. by Richard Bergam and Michael Valdez Moses (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), pp. 44-45.
Though the ship is a canny choice of course — not in the least because it has often been used as a 25
metaphor for coherentism within philosophical epistemology.
that Conradian explorers are subjected to. While participation in unequal economies
of knowledge does grant them superiority at times, it also — and much more
importantly — alerts them to the potential inadequacy of their epistemic model. By
situating the paradigmatic Conradian scene of disorientation in the West, then, I
suggest that the Western fund of epistemic certainties was equally subject to
skepticism at home as abroad. The rest of the narrative of Heart of Darkness never
completely succeeds in assimilating the ostensibly colonized, inscribed space of the
Orient, which remains clouded in impressionistic language. The periphery of the
empire in Conrad thus resists a homogeneous subsumption into the Western model of
power-knowledge.
The figure of Marlow warrants further commentary specifically with regard to
Conradian authority models. Though his audience is continually portrayed as amused
and exasperated by his propensity to ‘spin yarns’, this scenario is a similar one to that
found in Wells (ibid., p. 105). The derogatory description of Marlow’s stories is
eventually belied by the prominence his narrations take in the texts as a whole.
Marlow’s self-doubt, however, seems more authentic than his Wellsian relatives’, as
evidenced by the impressionistic quality of his descriptions of foreign space, radically
different from Wells’s methodical hypothesizing and conjecturing. It is important to
note, however, that although Marlow is afflicted by self-doubt, he still stands out as an
accepted authority model within the Conradian universe. Conrad may proffer Marlow
to us haphazardly, but never in a radically critical fashion. It is especially in contrast
with those models of authority that Conrad very obviously rejects that Marlow gains
credence and authority.
‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897) shows the reader the rejected authority models
of the Conradian universe in Kayerts and Carlier. Barely distinct in the pronunciation
of their names, these are two men distinguished only by their general incapacity. The
story identifies them as evolutionary degenerates profiting from a welfare society; the
premises and specifics of their failures warrant close investigation, however. Firstly,
both are associated with obesity and illness and lack the ability to physically navigate
!!22
the African terrain. While Makola manages the risky foreign politics of their outpost, 26
Kayerts and Carlier are shown to ignore the slavery issue and indulge in their gluttony
instead: ‘At mid-day they made a hearty meal’ (ibid., p. 17). This association of
indulgence with a dearth in authority significantly reoccurs in the intense
preoccupation with Verloc’s obesity in The Secret Agent (1907). Secondly, Kayerts and 27
Carlier are described throughout the story as seeing and surveying — but from an
entirely stationary point of view, and without the hermeneutic skill to extract valuable
information from their environment. The fact that Conrad chooses to focus on
Kayerts’s and Carlier’s capacity to see but not interpret recalls Holmes’s criticism of
Watson: ‘You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear’ (The Adventures, p.
3). These two characteristics of Kayerts and Carlier also illuminate their difference
from Marlow. I would resuscitate Valdez Moses’s focus on the ship here: Marlow is
usually located on a ship and thus associated with movement. Obstacles to a ship’s
movement are always emphasized in Conrad’s narratives (especially in ‘Youth’),
indicating the importance of movement and dynamism in his universe. Conversely,
while on ‘the first day [Kayerts and Carlier] were very active’, this activity gradually
subsides: ‘Kayerts sat on his chair and looked down on the proceedings,
understanding nothing’ (‘Outpost’, pp. 6, 7). Conrad’s tone is derisive throughout:
‘They were like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with
them […] but unable to see the general aspect of things’ (ibid., p. 7). This
characterization invokes an almost phenomenological framework, much like Heart of
Darkness; Kayerts, Carlier, and Marlow are all lone consciousnesses in unknown
territory. However, while Kayerts and Carlier are confined to their armchairs and
certainly incapable of Holmesian deduction, Marlow can extrapolate beyond
immediate visual impressions, as evidenced by his abundant internal reflections.
Marlow’s epistemic authority, then, is modeled after the imperialist ideal of the
curious, fearless explorer who attempts to ‘read’ the imperial jungle much like Holmes
!!23
Joseph Conrad, ‘An Outpost of Progress’, in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2008), cf. pp. 26
3, 6.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), cf. Chapter 2, 27
especially pp. 24-6.
‘reads’ the urban one. Even though Marlow is plagued by self-doubt, his hermeneutic
skill grants him infinitely more narrative authority than Kayerts and Carlier.
Another crucial comparison to be made in ‘Outpost’ is with Makola, who is
continuously depicted as active in the narrative fore- and background, as well as
surviving generations of white administrators. While Kayerts and Carlier are
introduced in unflattering physical terms, Makola is introduced in terms of his
‘wanderings’ — an epithet also connected with Karain and Marlow elsewhere — and
skills:
The natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood book-keeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits. 28
Later, and concurrently with the demise of the white men, Makola is represented in
the opposite metaphorical terms of virility and associated with life: ‘“Yes […] I think
he died of fever. Bury him tomorrow.” And he went away slowly to his expectant wife,
leaving the two white men alone’ (‘Outpost’, p. 23). Makola both survives the
narrative and creates progeny — contributing to the perpetuation of life and
contributing an important effect both to the economy of the story and to the
overarching capitalist economy, in the form of an additional productive body. Makola’s
future child stands in stark contrast to the childishness of Kayerts and Carlier, who
‘walked arm in arm, drawing close to one another as children do in the dark’ (ibid., p.
5). Their authority is here shown to be relational, lent to each other reciprocally. As
such, Western authority as a whole is exposed, especially in the violence and
irreverence of the final scene, as a system with no positive terms, operating on mutual
reassurance and not grounded in any authentic foundation.
As in Conan Doyle, however, in Conrad there is also room for pleasure in this
destabilization of epistemic authority, as is visible in the final scene of ‘Youth’ (1902).
‘Youth’ is concerned with ageing, which, much like the process of ‘memory’ that is
crucial to ‘Karain’, involves the continuous assessment of previous hypotheses about
!!24
Joseph Conrad, ‘Karain’, in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 37; Heart of Darkness, 28
p. 105; ‘Outpost’, p. 3.
the world against new experiential data and actual lived existence. Marlow’s
intercalated repetition of ‘O! Youth!’ acknowledges the disparities inevitably revealed
by such an assessment. The final scene shows the young and authority-craving Marlow
waking up in unfamiliar territory to an eerie scene:
And then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. […] And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. […] The East looked at them without a sound. 29
!This scene constitutes an uncanny encounter with the gaze of the Oriental Other.
Crucially, however, Marlow does not perceive this gaze as subjugating in a Foucauldian
sense; rather, he takes pleasure in being exhibited in such a way: ‘And this is all that is
left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of
youth!’ (ibid., pp. 98-9). In the disorienting Conradian encounter with alterity, then,
this very disorientation can constitute a source of pleasure.
To return to ‘An Outpost’, what is most striking about Makola’s characterization
is the juxtaposition of his able manner with his irremediably Oriental convictions. He
is a skillful and productive body for the Western economy despite cherishing ‘in his
innermost heart the worship of evil spirits’. The surface-depth model of my argument
reappears here, and equally the focus on effects over causes. Makola is represented as
superior to the Western men despite the fact that an excavation of the foundations of
his beliefs would unearth ideas completely unassimilable to the Western epistemic
framework. Crucially, the African on the steamer in Heart of Darkness is presented in
the same terms: ‘What he knew was this—that should the water in that transparent
thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry […] and take a terrible
vengeance’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 140). Not only does this part of the narrative equate
the demands of Western capitalism with ‘strange witchcraft’, it also indicates, as I
have argued throughout, the primacy of results over causes. Conrad’s texts are the
most economically inflected, which is why an interpretive proposition based on
capitalism becomes especially apposite here: The knowledge economy of Western
capitalism distinguishes neither between Oriental and Occidental epistemic
!!25
Joseph Conrad, ‘Youth’, in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 98.29
foundations for action, nor between the racial identities of productive bodies. This
proposition also explains the above conflation of categories of modernity and pre-
enlightened magic, very much recalling Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Similarly, purity of knowledge is a Victorian value 30
increasingly shown to be ‘hollow at the core’; Sherlock Holmes’s knowledge does not
remain uncontaminated — nor does it need to (Heart of Darkness, p. 165). Causes and
effects thus become increasingly divorced within a capitalist epistemic model, with the
importance of the former waning in favor of productive economic output. This finding
is congruent with Jameson’s thesis, and I will attempt to formulate its importance for
late-Victorian identity in particular in the conclusion.
I have argued that critical attention has privileged the nature of imperialist
discourse in Conrad’s texts over their ambiguous models of authority. In this vein,
Acheraïou’s recent article on ‘Karain’ (1897) is centered around the narrative
authority of the West over the East — a conclusion which I would like to deconstruct.
The multifaceted representation of Karain means the story can’t be reduced to a
parable of the appropriation of Oriental storytelling by condescending Westerners. To
paraphrase Acheraïou's reading, the theatrical presentation of Karain renders him a
spectacle within the larger fetishization of the Orient by the West (Acheraïou, cf. pp.
155, 163). While this does not seem incorrect per se, it does elide both the reverent
language of the story and the descriptions of Karain as integral to the space he rules.
Karain stands ‘erect’, ‘in a martial pose’, with his ‘head held high’: These are not the
descriptors of dismissal (‘Karain’, p. 64). Even after the death of his spirit-adviser,
when Karain appears in a humbled, prostrate manner before them, the Westerners’
behavior is indicative of the desire to preserve Karain’s authority above all. Their belief
systems may not be compatible, but what is of the foremost importance to them after
hearing Karain's account is to preserve this mythical, pre-civilized, almost utopian
enclave over which he rules. In the age of Weberian disenchantment, as explored in
The Secret Agent, the West needs to preserve the possibility of a more enchanted
lifestyle just as Holmes needs his cocaine. The metropolitan London of Wells, Conan
!!26
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. by 30
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002). Cf. especially Chapter 1.
Doyle, and Conrad thus stands in stark contrast to Karain’s realm, a space
characterized by plenitude and self-sufficiency: ‘There could be nothing outside’ (ibid.,
p. 32).
The desire for preservation in ‘Karain’ has important implications for authority
models. Having witnessed the collapse of Karain’s authority and knowing that it
depended in the first place on the spirit-adviser — to ward off an ontologically liminal
being completely incompatible with Western epistemology — the Westerners and the
reader are confronted with the inherent performativity of authority. Nonetheless, the
men act to preserve Karain’s authority, and in the process realize that this newfound
knowledge about the performative nature of authority is also applicable to the English
monarch, the representative of Western authority in the story. They ‘had to invent
details at last to satisfy [Karain’s] craving curiosity; and our loyalty must be pardoned,
for we tried to make them fit for his august and resplendent ideal’ (ibid., p. 36). The
bleak ideal that the Queen represents is here exposed; additionally, the syntactic
ambiguity of the quotation leaves it unclear whether the ‘ideal’ refers to the Queen in
Karain's view, or whether Karain himself has become the ideal. The Westerners’
ostensibly superior knowledge becomes not only irrelevant but even a cause for
embarrassment, revealing the shortcomings of their own ideals. Karain is permitted to
relate his narrative in an elevated register, in sentences ‘complicated like arabesques’;
it is only fitting that the narrator becomes embarrassed on his companion’s behalf:
‘We could hear him rummaging in his pigeon-hole of a cabin. Was the fellow actually
going to bed? Karain sighed. It was intolerable!’ (ibid., pp. 31, 60). After Karain’s
expansive, transporting narrative — upholding archaic values irrelevant to rationalized
Western society — the Westerners’ cabins can only be ‘pigeon-holes’ in comparison.
And as opposed to Kayerts and Carlier, who gain their authority from circumstance
and relationality, Karain is ‘an essential condition for the existence of his land and his
people’ (ibid., p. 32).
Most importantly, however, Acheraïou’s reading completely elides the crucial
final scene, in which, reminiscent of Prendick’s final feelings towards the metropolis,
the memory of Karain, too, haunts the Englishmen. London has become colorless,
‘sombre and ceaseless’, in comparison to the world of Karain (ibid., p. 66). Crucially, it
!!27
is the domain of reality that is affected: ‘It is strong and alive; […] but I’ll be hanged if
it is yet as real to me as … as the other thing … say, Karain’s story’ (ibid, p. 67). The
corrosion of Western epistemic confidence, here and elsewhere in Conrad, seems to
have a secondary effect on the nature of ‘thing[s]’ as perceived by Conradian
characters. Ontological ghosts haunt Conrad’s oeuvre pervasively — be it Marlow’s
characterization as ‘no more to us than a voice’, the haunting of London by Kurtz’s
and Karain’s specters, Kayerts’ and Carlier’s ontological exchangeability, or the eerie
double of the captain in ‘The Secret Sharer’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 130). In line with my
overall argument, I would posit that this recurrent motif is the necessary result of
Conrad’s navigation of epistemic borderlands: After the perception of the irreducible
alterity of certain spaces of the earth, ‘home truths’ are inevitably relativized. The
impact of Karain’s story — his fiction — on what Jackson considers real indicates how
the encounter with epistemically Other spaces induces a radical transvaluation of
fundamental methods of understanding reality. And as the spectacle of Karain exposes
epistemic authority to be a precarious and performative construct, specters proliferate.
!!28
V Coda: The Postcolonial Perspective !This study has sought to interrogate facile readings of the literary paragons of
exploration and detection as emblematic of a Victorian spirit of epistemic confidence.
As I have tried to show, such reductive readings elide the fundamental logic of the
detective and exploration projects — one based equally on pleasure and desire in
encountering the unknown as on containment and anxiety. Nonetheless, the sheer
dominance of critical narratives centered around Victorian anxiety, as well as the
reality of the many socio-historical changes at the fin de siècle, prompts the question of
whether my findings might not provide an explanation for the anxiety narrative — one
that reconciles the importance of desire with the dynamics of capitalism. It is here that
the entertainment of a postcolonial perspective becomes worthwhile.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s immensely influential Empire (2000)
provides a millennial reconsideration of critical views on the nature of imperialism,
with particular reference to capitalism. Hardt and Negri’s claim is that late-capitalist
Empire operates at precisely that locus which postmodernists seek to preserve — that
of difference. They read the postmodernist principles of anti-essentialist difference 31
and anti-hierarchical networks of information, the focus on localized resistance to
totalizing power, as precisely enabling the expansion of capitalism in its constant search
for new markets. This argument is potentially very relevant to the increasing
privileging, within a capitalist framework, of effects over causes that I have traced in
the texts of Wells, Conan Doyle, and Conrad. Hardt and Negri’s thesis might indicate
that the real reason for anxiety at the fin de siècle was not simply the encounter with
alterity, but the growing awareness that capitalism, in its focus on effects, rendered
irrelevant national, personal, professional, or racial difference as long as bodies
remained productive. The process of the globalization of capitalism would operate
precisely through the kind of pleasurable encounter with alterity which I have traced,
even while gradually eroding alterity by subsuming it.
!!29
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), cf. pp. 137-143 and especially 31
p. 142.
Thus, it may be worth investigating whether the Foucauldian paradigm, which
locates power in the creation of difference in the nineteenth century, is not altogether
misapplied in the critical attempt to explain the pervasive anxieties of the fin de siècle.
Rosemary Jann usefully outlines how the Foucauldian view of changing identity
politics in the nineteenth century applies to the Holmes canon: The elaborate
typologies in the Holmes stories ‘create the distinctions that they purport to observe’
and ‘can be seen as playing an important part in the increasing specification of
individuality that for Michel Foucault is directly proportional to [social control]’. In 32
contrast, my argument has traced the erosion both of purely-sourced knowledge and
of individual specificity in the service of expansionist capitalism. As Hardt and Negri’s
perspective seems to suggest, the erosion of difference by its very acceptance — ‘Long
live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!’ — accounts for the collapse of the
difference between performative and ‘authentic’ authority, as the subject’s identity is
devalued in favor of economic output (Hardt and Negri, p. 138).
Hardt and Negri, of course, do not wish to associate themselves with
postcolonialism; they imply that it is rigid categories like these that are most inimical
to any self-reflexive critical project. Nonetheless, they share a general impetus with
postcolonial theory and with the deconstructive moment. The same impetus has also
informed my argument in its disavowal of monolithic readings of texts, especially texts
as politically charged as the literature of empire — even if the particular monolithic
reading happens to be in favor of excavating the voice of the subaltern.
!!!!!!!
!!30
Rosemary Jann, ‘Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body’, ELH 57.3 (Autumn 1990) <http 32
//xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/jann.pdf> [accessed 2 December 2013], p. 686.
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——, The Valley of Fear, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981),
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