!‘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

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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.

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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

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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.

Bibliography !!

Primary Sources

!Conan Doyle, Arthur, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (Hertfordshire:

Wordsworth Editions, 2004).

——, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2012).

——, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin,

2003).

——, The Valley of Fear, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981),

pp. 769-866.

Conrad, Joseph, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, in Last Essays, ed. by Harold Ray

Stevens and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.

3-17.

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