Keith Williams.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Technology (esp. film) was treated by Victorians with the same supernatural awe as Sherlock Holmes' powers of deduction...."visual conjuring." "By the autumn of 1896 stage magician Georges Melies was experimenting with deliberate visual conjuring made possible by editing and 'stop motion effects'"(Williams 4).
Williams uses the term "realist of the fantastic" to describe Wells. He attributes this term to a letter Joseph Conrad wrote in 1898.
The dissolve = being in two places at one time.
The time traveller's invention resembles visual gadgets of the time, like the kintetoscope. "It's posssible, as Terry Ramsaye argued in 1926, that Wells's machine is more like Edison's kinetoscope: its motion is controlled by a lever not unlike the kinetoscope's crank and it gives a 'private', individual view (although not a miniaturised one). The kinteoscope also afforded the entertainment novelty of seeing ordinary actions temporally speeded up or reversed" (Williams 27-28).
The Time Machine questions human perception of time and The Invisible Man questions human perception of space! (Film questions both of these things....inspiration?)
Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of th Fallacies of Perception (London: Walter Scott, 1897). *****CHECK THIS OUT
"Even more so than the simulacral moving picture, the perfection of the synchronised soundtrack was promoted as a guarantee of the medium's faithful mimiesis of a bodily reality, an extension of the tendency to offer representations as unmediated perceptions, as Armstrong documents. It was argued that whereas film-images can never be anything more than illusions of movement in three-dimensional space, projected from static frames on a two=dimensional surface, recorded sound when played back was an actual vibration of air layers authentically apprehended by the ear..."(Williams 57).
"Suffice it to say that, in the 1890s, the striking convergences between Wells's scientific romances and stories and the new visual technology established a slender but vital critical synergy between literature and the upstart, popular medium, which much two-way traffic has re-energised ever since" (Williams 48).
"Thus Wells' initial coup as COnrad's 'realist of the fantastic' explicitly focuses on the very boundary between virtualism and reality, just as that ambiguity would come to characterise the visual culture of modernity exemplified by cinema. Similarly, like the medium as it evolved, Wells's machine is, as Bignell puts it, 'a curious mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills.' The Time Traveller describes the invention's motion as a kind of 'switchback' (TM 19). (Pioneer director D.W. Griffith would use exactly the same metaphor for the interruption of temporal continuity in cinematic narrative by the past.) Thus the connection between Wells and Paul is a perfect illustration of Jean-Louis Baudry's argument that cinema grew out of a cultural desire 'to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions'." (Williams 30).
After pointing out that the Time Traveller is accused by the Meidcal Man of being a conjurer ("like the ghost you showed us last Christmas?), Williams says "Film was the modern medium in which the conjuror's art became consummately invisible and it was no wonder that magic shops became frequent subjects of early British stop-motion animation. Nevertheless, as Wells acknowledged, it rendered the most fantastic impossibilities paradoxically 'hyperreal'"(Williams 45). (He's talking about this in the context of Wells' short story, "The Magic Shop" 1903.)
absent presences
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Another, separate thought on The Time Machine.
There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in the Time Traveller's role as scientist. He, on the one hand, completely relies on scientific experimentation, is obsessed with it to the point of unreal innovation. But then, at the very end of the novel, the narrator describes him as against scientific innovation. He says, "He, I know -- for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made -- thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." One might assume that his experiences with the Eloi and the Murlochs have influenced him, making him realize that scientific progress isn't always positive, but the narrator makes a point to say that the Time Traveller felt this way "long before the Time Machine was made," meaning that he has always felt this way towards the "Advancement of Mankind" that his scientific experiments contribute to. Why would he feel this way? Is this yet another coexistence of seemingly antithetical discourses? Or might he have been unaware of the irony in his sentiment toward the "Advancement of Mankind," considering his participation in it?
Or, perhaps this explains why the Time Traveller never cares to publicize his findings. He shares his journey with his friends, but when they fail to believe him, he isn't too bothered by it and keeps the Time Machine to himself thereafter. This point of possible contradiction speaks to larger issues surrounding Wells' purporting of the Eloi and Murlochs as, in its projection of the future, its own scientific theory not unlike those of Darwin.
Or, perhaps this explains why the Time Traveller never cares to publicize his findings. He shares his journey with his friends, but when they fail to believe him, he isn't too bothered by it and keeps the Time Machine to himself thereafter. This point of possible contradiction speaks to larger issues surrounding Wells' purporting of the Eloi and Murlochs as, in its projection of the future, its own scientific theory not unlike those of Darwin.
More free writing for Chapter 2 (HG Wells)
While reading Thomsa C. Renzi's H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, I remembered that a large part of what I want to talk about with The Time Machine is the narrative structure and self-reflexive references to narrative itself.
Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)
TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby. He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes. Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative. Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19). Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel. The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses. I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel. If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality.
Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression." This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation. In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary.
Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space. We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.
The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator. Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character? For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings.
[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]
Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream. He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him - "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells). One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality." All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.
"I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM! The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.
[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]
Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)
TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby. He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes. Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative. Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19). Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel. The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses. I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel. If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality.
Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression." This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation. In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary.
Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space. We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.
The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator. Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character? For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings.
[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]
Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream. He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him - "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells). One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality." All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.
"I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM! The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.
[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Some freewriting, a part of chapter 2 (HG Wells).
In addition to the Time Traveller's theory of time as the fourth dimension, there is, of course, the much more well known or recognized portion of the novel - the dystopian prediction for the future of human civilization. As a scientific theory of H.G. Wells himself, how does the representation of man's future as a place where cultural and industrial "progress," as the humans in the Time Traveler's time perceive it, is in fact self-destructive, also operate as a realist project or experiment?
Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future. As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi. Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry. Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid. The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor." These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.
The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience. This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his.
The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality. But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong. The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything. We do not know what happened. We cannot know. The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."
[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]
How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment? Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism. The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon. Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.
Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future. As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi. Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry. Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid. The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor." These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.
The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience. This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his.
The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality. But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong. The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything. We do not know what happened. We cannot know. The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."
[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]
How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment? Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism. The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon. Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.
In Pursuit of Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age
Peter Allan Dale
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
"Lewes' approach is different. It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect. What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic. In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis. Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones." (65-66)
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
"Lewes' approach is different. It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect. What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic. In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis. Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones." (65-66)
Victorian Realism and the Supernatural in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Critics and moviegoers alike, upon seeing Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) in theaters this year, groaned, rolled their eyes, and generally denounced the film as a violation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of the same name. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post, for example, says, “For Downey's Holmes is not just a master of disguise, deductive reasoning and scientific inquiry. Here, he's also a prize-winning pugilist whose brain gets only slightly more of a workout than his fists.” The Nation’s review, while acknowledging “Doyle’s involvement with Spiritualism,” still calls the film a “glorified episode of Scooby-Doo: a mash-up of fisticuffs, fireballs, black-magic rites, ghost-hunting debunkery and also, as an afterthought, a little deductive reasoning.” I could go on ad nausea with these review citations, and all of them would fall under the rubric of what scholars in adaptation studies call the “fidelity studies” model. Ritchie’s film is not fairly judged as a sovereign work, but rather in terms of the degree to which it remains faithful to a “source text” which audiences may or may not already know.
For any given viewer of Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, though, identifying a “source text” is not a simple task. The violence or physicality of Ritchie’s adaptation as well as the prevalence of the supernatural that both of the reviews I have mentioned object to supposedly betray Doyle’s late Victorian popular fiction – his four novels and 56 short stories. But these reviewers, whether they realize it or not, actually refer to the myriad of other film adaptations that have come before Ritchie’s. Descriptions of Holmes as a prizefighter, boxer, martial artist, or swordsman litter Doyle’s stories, and, as I will elaborate on later in this paper, Holmes’ scientific reasoning coexists with or confronts supernatural forces in several of the cases written by Doyle.
Film theorist Robert Stam offers one possible explanation for this discrepancy or confusion of source texts, as he combines Bakhtin’s “dialogism” with Kristeva’s “intertextuality” in order to think of film adaptations as not an attempted imitation of a source text but rather as a text with multiple discourses running through it, one of which happens to be the source novel. Novels already are dialogic, and, according to Stam, films based on those novels can just add to the pile of discourses. The novel-film relationship, then, can be seen as “dense informational network” rather than a parent-child, linear, or uni-directional model. Sherlock Holmes is a prime example of this dense, multi-directional intertextuality. Considering the primacy of film over literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, of new media over old, audiences have adopted not Doyle’s texts but rather a long-standing and well-loved commercial franchise, which includes diverse forms and genres such as film, television, novels, comic books, and video games. Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes in over a dozen films, for example, operates as more of a signified against which all future signifiers could be measured than Doyle’s novels and short stories do. The many adaptations of Doyle’s Holmes have cultivated the prim, proper, and stoic detective who dons a deerstalker hat, and that representation not only circulates alongside any depiction of Holmes in Doyle’s “original” work, but also wields more authority in popular culture.
To make the source-adaptation relationship even more vexed, one might consider numerous reports in anticipation of the film’s release from news sources (such as the LA Times in the summer of 2008) that Ritchie based his film on a comic book written by producer Lionel Wigram and drawn by John Watkiss. There have since been many debates in the Internet entertainment news world about whether or not this comic book or graphic novel actually exists. It seems as though the Watkiss images do exist, but originally appeared in a pamphlet of concept art drawn in a comic book style, created for the studio pitch of the film. Even though this text doesn’t circulate publicly, can we call it a “source text”? I think we can. The fact that this series of images can be found on the Internet, or even the mere fact that they have been mentioned in interviews and news articles about the film, immediately and inevitably positions them as inter-texts that signify on not only the film itself but the film’s adaptation of Holmes. Many film reviewers complain that Ritchie’s Holmes is too much of an action hero, but, in the context of the comic book genre, this makes perfect sense. One might also use Guy Ritchie’s previous films as yet another inter-text. When viewed in conjunction with a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), or Snatch (2000), Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, again, makes a lot more sense, as a film that operates within several genres in addition to detective fiction or mystery – the caper film, the crime thriller, the buddy film, and British comedy, to name a few.
Then again, one cannot exclusively blame the reviewers of the film for adopting a fidelity studies model. While the narrative of the film itself does not appear to recognizably resemble any one of Doyle’s plots, the film’s end credits, presented in sepia, in the style of early photography and film, still make a point to say that, “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and appear in stories and novels by him.” On the one hand this statement invites spectators to look for the “original” stories and the “original” characters in this adaptation. But a close reading of the statement can imply otherwise; this end credit inter-title at no point uses the more commonly invoked phrases such as “based on” or “adapted from.” It merely states that the characters that appear in this film also happen to appear in stories and novels by Doyle. There is no implied adaptive process, as Doyle is only credited for the characters of Holmes and Watson and not for the film’s narrative.
To defend Ritchie against the negative reviewers, even though that’s primarily what I’ve done thus far, is beside the point. Genre, and specifically genre as inter-text, provides a far more interesting critical lens through which to view debates surrounding Ritchie’s film. Whether it’s the caper film genre, the comic book genre, or the detective fiction genre, there are always several genres making meaning, adding meaning to a film adaptation simultaneously, each with its own set of conventions, expectations, and rules.
What many reviewers of Sherlock Holmes, film or text, fail to realize is that the late Victorian representations of Holmes already contain complex, ambiguous, and messy relationships between genres. It is not as if Doyle’s novels and stories, even if they were to be designated as a singular source text, exist as the clean, pure, and straightforward representation of Holmes. Detective fiction as a named genre did not even exist while Doyle was writing, for predecessors such as Wilkie Collins, using suspense and mystery, were often classified as authors of sensation fiction, shilling shockers, gothic novels, or scientific romances. A major aspect of a Holmes novel that makes it hard to categorize in terms of genre is the blending of scientific or realist discourses with supernatural or anti-realist discourses. Doyle figures Holmes as a man of science, who relies completely on objectivity and reason, but to such an extreme degree that his talents of deduction appear to be supernatural or inexplicable.
In A Study in Scarlet, for example, a friend of Watson first identifies Holmes as “A fellow…working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital” who is “…a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.” When Watson asks if Holmes is a medical student, the friend replies, “No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.” Holmes is even so dedicated to scientific inquiry, says Watson’s friend, that he would be willing to poison someone, not out of malice, but to render an experimental result. This passage characterizes Holmes as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality – he, after all, has never taken “any systematic medical classes” and possesses “out-of-the way knowledge” – that his experiments and results alike seem fantastical.
After this introduction of Holmes, Watson as narrator continues to describe Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ published article, “The Book of Life,” for example, he says,
It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts… So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.
Linking external perception, “a twitch of a muscle,” with access to another person’s interiority, “a man’s inmost thoughts,” creates a cause and effect relationship between Holmes’ observation and what one can only call mind reading. In addition to being compared to a necromancer, the text ascribes adjectives such as “chimerical” and “inhuman” to Holmes. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson implies that Holmes appears to be a witch, when he says, “My dear Holmes…this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” When Holmes places handcuffs on a perpetrator in A Study in Scarlet, they “appeared as if by magic upon his wrists,” and, in The Sign of Four, Watson, while lecturing Holmes about the dangers of using cocaine, refers to Holmes’ detecting skills as “great powers with which you have been endowed.”
One might assume that these realist and supernatural discourses, while blended in Doyle’s texts, are antithetical to one another. Another contextual look at the Victorian period, however, throws this seemingly simple taxonomy into question. Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed in Victorian studies, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that, as George Levine says in The Realistic Imagination, “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. Levine also suggests that Victorians were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). Victorians are far less interesting, says Levine, if we think of them as merely practitioners of mimesis.
The philosophy adopted in this realist experiment appears all over Doyle’s texts because in order to enact a “self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality,” one must keep an open mind that conceives of reality as potentially exceeding normal human perception. Holmes does this exceptionally well, as he is often the only one to think of the impossible as possible and constantly questions the way things seem. In The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes, in a teaching moment with Watson, asks, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” If we think of Holmes as a realist, the seemingly supernatural nature of his work operates not opposed to truth but the very path to it; only by entertaining conventionally unbelievable events is he able to, more so than anyone else, accurately represent reality.
Several of the cases Holmes and Watson solve also feature supernatural phenomena. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a country doctor, Dr. Mortimer, approaches Holmes and Watson about his friend Charles Baskerville, who has just mysteriously died on his estate. Dr. Mortimer confesses that, as a man of science, he, worried for his credibility, kept his discovery of giant paw prints at the scene of the crime a secret; this evidence would prove true the Baskerville family curse, which dooms all Baskervilles to be haunted by a monstrous hound. In an interview with Dr. Mortimer, Holmes asks, “And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?” After Mortimer replies with, “I do not know what to believe,” Holmes explains, “I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,”…“In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task.” Based on these statements, Holmes might not necessarily throw himself whole-heartedly into the supernatural theory Dr. Mortimer proposes, but he does not rule it out as a possibility, and at no point does he say that supernatural forces do not exist in this world – they just aren’t his specialty.
Later on, Holmes off handedly says, “If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men –” and Watson interrupts him, asking for clarification: “Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.” Holmes’ response to this is one that again does not rule out the possibility of the supernatural’s existence, as he retorts, “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” It is far too reductive to characterize Holmes as a detective who only believes in science and uses that science to dispel the supernatural, and the same can be said of the narrative he inhabits as well. Even though the hound that Holmes discovers is an earthly beast covered in phosphorous in order to appear otherworldly, readers still experience a ghost story up until that reveal. That is, just because the realist discourse “wins out” in the end does not mean that the supernatural discourse becomes null and void.
In The Sign of Four, there are several instances where the narrative tells an event as if something supernatural were happening, only to reveal a more realistic explanation later. Watson feels “something eerie and ghost-like” as he and Holmes travel with Miss Morstan to their rendezvous point, and there are two scenes where mysterious faces appear in windows, creating an uncanny feeling for the reader. Watson discovers the face of one of their travel companions in a window, the impossibility of which frightens him, but then reveals that said companion has a twin brother, thus explaining the doppelganger moment. Once again, Doyle provides both a supernatural and a realist narrative, explaining those phenomena away with science and technology, while still giving readers the pleasure of a ghost story. These uncanny moments and potentially supernatural occurrences make the Holmes narratives much harder to pigeonhole in terms of genre; they are not simply and rigidly detective stories that exclusively present “scientific inquiry” as the Washington Post review expects, but rather perform the more exploratory and imaginative Victorian realism discussed earlier.
I would argue that Ritchie’s film provides a similar narrative discourse that mixes the scientific and the supernatural and therefore operates under multiple genres. A representative example of this would be the scene where Standish, a dissenting member of the Four Orders, spontaneously combusts. Ritchie does everything he can to cinematically establish cause and effect between Lord Blackwood’s evil will and the pyrotechnic event. The camera begins with a medium long shot of Standish and cuts to a medium close up of Blackwood. We then get a longer shot of Standish drawing his gun, this time with Blackwood’s face in the foreground, glaring. After a few reaction shots in response to the sudden fire, we get a close up of Blackwood glaring, with an engulfed Standish in the background. This downward gaze establishes a relationship between Blackwood’s interiority and Standish’s fiery demise, thus creating naturalized cause and effect. The camera, through this series of shots and its emphasis on including Blackwood’s face in order to build an association between the him and the fire, tells the audience that they have just witnessed supernatural powers at work.
Only later do we get an explanation of the mechanics of Blackwood’s actions.
When Holmes and Blackwood have their final face-off in the dramatic climax of the film atop a partially constructed London Bridge, Blackwood’s impending doom, as he slips off the bridge, builds tension while Holmes offers exposition, saying, “There was never any magic, only conjuring tricks.” When he gets to Standish’s death, he explains, “The death of Standish was a real mystery, until you used the same compound to blow up the wharf. An odorless, tasteless flammable liquid, yet it burned with an unusual pinkish hue. Did Standish mistake it for rain? All it took was a spark. A simple rigged bullet in his gun – ingenious.” Throughout this monologue the camera cuts to show spectators a series of flashbacks –Watson warning Holmes on the wharf, Riordan’s laboratory (first with Holmes investigating it, then with Riordan actually experimenting in it), Standish walking up to the temple, Standish firing his gun and subsequently catching on fire, and Riordan putting the rigged bullet in Standish’s gun. Throughout this flashback montage, in stark contrast to the version of the scene presented earlier, there is no sign of Blackwood and therefore no way to attribute the actions to him.
Based on these scenes one can see how Ritchie, like Doyle, deploys multiple genres in the same narrative; his Holmes case contains both a supernatural and a realist narrative just as The Hound of the Baskervilles does. Not only does this challenge the reviewers who might question the supernatural happenings in the film as inauthentic, but it also shows us that to expect a Sherlock Holmes case to obey the laws of a single genre – a “detective story” is nothing short of absurd. Genre, despite being a category designed to include and exclude, is always already hybrid, multiplicitous, and malleable, rules made explicitly to be broken. I hope the literary-historical context about Victorian genres, including realism and the supernatural, can help us better understand Ritchie’s film, but a challenge for scholars in adaptation studies remains. Even though scholarship in adaptation has pronounced fidelity studies passé, the film industry and media still cling to this evaluative mode. Is there any way to get them to let go and move on?
For any given viewer of Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, though, identifying a “source text” is not a simple task. The violence or physicality of Ritchie’s adaptation as well as the prevalence of the supernatural that both of the reviews I have mentioned object to supposedly betray Doyle’s late Victorian popular fiction – his four novels and 56 short stories. But these reviewers, whether they realize it or not, actually refer to the myriad of other film adaptations that have come before Ritchie’s. Descriptions of Holmes as a prizefighter, boxer, martial artist, or swordsman litter Doyle’s stories, and, as I will elaborate on later in this paper, Holmes’ scientific reasoning coexists with or confronts supernatural forces in several of the cases written by Doyle.
Film theorist Robert Stam offers one possible explanation for this discrepancy or confusion of source texts, as he combines Bakhtin’s “dialogism” with Kristeva’s “intertextuality” in order to think of film adaptations as not an attempted imitation of a source text but rather as a text with multiple discourses running through it, one of which happens to be the source novel. Novels already are dialogic, and, according to Stam, films based on those novels can just add to the pile of discourses. The novel-film relationship, then, can be seen as “dense informational network” rather than a parent-child, linear, or uni-directional model. Sherlock Holmes is a prime example of this dense, multi-directional intertextuality. Considering the primacy of film over literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, of new media over old, audiences have adopted not Doyle’s texts but rather a long-standing and well-loved commercial franchise, which includes diverse forms and genres such as film, television, novels, comic books, and video games. Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes in over a dozen films, for example, operates as more of a signified against which all future signifiers could be measured than Doyle’s novels and short stories do. The many adaptations of Doyle’s Holmes have cultivated the prim, proper, and stoic detective who dons a deerstalker hat, and that representation not only circulates alongside any depiction of Holmes in Doyle’s “original” work, but also wields more authority in popular culture.
To make the source-adaptation relationship even more vexed, one might consider numerous reports in anticipation of the film’s release from news sources (such as the LA Times in the summer of 2008) that Ritchie based his film on a comic book written by producer Lionel Wigram and drawn by John Watkiss. There have since been many debates in the Internet entertainment news world about whether or not this comic book or graphic novel actually exists. It seems as though the Watkiss images do exist, but originally appeared in a pamphlet of concept art drawn in a comic book style, created for the studio pitch of the film. Even though this text doesn’t circulate publicly, can we call it a “source text”? I think we can. The fact that this series of images can be found on the Internet, or even the mere fact that they have been mentioned in interviews and news articles about the film, immediately and inevitably positions them as inter-texts that signify on not only the film itself but the film’s adaptation of Holmes. Many film reviewers complain that Ritchie’s Holmes is too much of an action hero, but, in the context of the comic book genre, this makes perfect sense. One might also use Guy Ritchie’s previous films as yet another inter-text. When viewed in conjunction with a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), or Snatch (2000), Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, again, makes a lot more sense, as a film that operates within several genres in addition to detective fiction or mystery – the caper film, the crime thriller, the buddy film, and British comedy, to name a few.
Then again, one cannot exclusively blame the reviewers of the film for adopting a fidelity studies model. While the narrative of the film itself does not appear to recognizably resemble any one of Doyle’s plots, the film’s end credits, presented in sepia, in the style of early photography and film, still make a point to say that, “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and appear in stories and novels by him.” On the one hand this statement invites spectators to look for the “original” stories and the “original” characters in this adaptation. But a close reading of the statement can imply otherwise; this end credit inter-title at no point uses the more commonly invoked phrases such as “based on” or “adapted from.” It merely states that the characters that appear in this film also happen to appear in stories and novels by Doyle. There is no implied adaptive process, as Doyle is only credited for the characters of Holmes and Watson and not for the film’s narrative.
To defend Ritchie against the negative reviewers, even though that’s primarily what I’ve done thus far, is beside the point. Genre, and specifically genre as inter-text, provides a far more interesting critical lens through which to view debates surrounding Ritchie’s film. Whether it’s the caper film genre, the comic book genre, or the detective fiction genre, there are always several genres making meaning, adding meaning to a film adaptation simultaneously, each with its own set of conventions, expectations, and rules.
What many reviewers of Sherlock Holmes, film or text, fail to realize is that the late Victorian representations of Holmes already contain complex, ambiguous, and messy relationships between genres. It is not as if Doyle’s novels and stories, even if they were to be designated as a singular source text, exist as the clean, pure, and straightforward representation of Holmes. Detective fiction as a named genre did not even exist while Doyle was writing, for predecessors such as Wilkie Collins, using suspense and mystery, were often classified as authors of sensation fiction, shilling shockers, gothic novels, or scientific romances. A major aspect of a Holmes novel that makes it hard to categorize in terms of genre is the blending of scientific or realist discourses with supernatural or anti-realist discourses. Doyle figures Holmes as a man of science, who relies completely on objectivity and reason, but to such an extreme degree that his talents of deduction appear to be supernatural or inexplicable.
In A Study in Scarlet, for example, a friend of Watson first identifies Holmes as “A fellow…working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital” who is “…a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.” When Watson asks if Holmes is a medical student, the friend replies, “No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.” Holmes is even so dedicated to scientific inquiry, says Watson’s friend, that he would be willing to poison someone, not out of malice, but to render an experimental result. This passage characterizes Holmes as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality – he, after all, has never taken “any systematic medical classes” and possesses “out-of-the way knowledge” – that his experiments and results alike seem fantastical.
After this introduction of Holmes, Watson as narrator continues to describe Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ published article, “The Book of Life,” for example, he says,
It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts… So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.
Linking external perception, “a twitch of a muscle,” with access to another person’s interiority, “a man’s inmost thoughts,” creates a cause and effect relationship between Holmes’ observation and what one can only call mind reading. In addition to being compared to a necromancer, the text ascribes adjectives such as “chimerical” and “inhuman” to Holmes. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson implies that Holmes appears to be a witch, when he says, “My dear Holmes…this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” When Holmes places handcuffs on a perpetrator in A Study in Scarlet, they “appeared as if by magic upon his wrists,” and, in The Sign of Four, Watson, while lecturing Holmes about the dangers of using cocaine, refers to Holmes’ detecting skills as “great powers with which you have been endowed.”
One might assume that these realist and supernatural discourses, while blended in Doyle’s texts, are antithetical to one another. Another contextual look at the Victorian period, however, throws this seemingly simple taxonomy into question. Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed in Victorian studies, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that, as George Levine says in The Realistic Imagination, “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. Levine also suggests that Victorians were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). Victorians are far less interesting, says Levine, if we think of them as merely practitioners of mimesis.
The philosophy adopted in this realist experiment appears all over Doyle’s texts because in order to enact a “self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality,” one must keep an open mind that conceives of reality as potentially exceeding normal human perception. Holmes does this exceptionally well, as he is often the only one to think of the impossible as possible and constantly questions the way things seem. In The Sign of Four, for example, Holmes, in a teaching moment with Watson, asks, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” If we think of Holmes as a realist, the seemingly supernatural nature of his work operates not opposed to truth but the very path to it; only by entertaining conventionally unbelievable events is he able to, more so than anyone else, accurately represent reality.
Several of the cases Holmes and Watson solve also feature supernatural phenomena. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a country doctor, Dr. Mortimer, approaches Holmes and Watson about his friend Charles Baskerville, who has just mysteriously died on his estate. Dr. Mortimer confesses that, as a man of science, he, worried for his credibility, kept his discovery of giant paw prints at the scene of the crime a secret; this evidence would prove true the Baskerville family curse, which dooms all Baskervilles to be haunted by a monstrous hound. In an interview with Dr. Mortimer, Holmes asks, “And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?” After Mortimer replies with, “I do not know what to believe,” Holmes explains, “I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,”…“In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task.” Based on these statements, Holmes might not necessarily throw himself whole-heartedly into the supernatural theory Dr. Mortimer proposes, but he does not rule it out as a possibility, and at no point does he say that supernatural forces do not exist in this world – they just aren’t his specialty.
Later on, Holmes off handedly says, “If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men –” and Watson interrupts him, asking for clarification: “Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.” Holmes’ response to this is one that again does not rule out the possibility of the supernatural’s existence, as he retorts, “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” It is far too reductive to characterize Holmes as a detective who only believes in science and uses that science to dispel the supernatural, and the same can be said of the narrative he inhabits as well. Even though the hound that Holmes discovers is an earthly beast covered in phosphorous in order to appear otherworldly, readers still experience a ghost story up until that reveal. That is, just because the realist discourse “wins out” in the end does not mean that the supernatural discourse becomes null and void.
In The Sign of Four, there are several instances where the narrative tells an event as if something supernatural were happening, only to reveal a more realistic explanation later. Watson feels “something eerie and ghost-like” as he and Holmes travel with Miss Morstan to their rendezvous point, and there are two scenes where mysterious faces appear in windows, creating an uncanny feeling for the reader. Watson discovers the face of one of their travel companions in a window, the impossibility of which frightens him, but then reveals that said companion has a twin brother, thus explaining the doppelganger moment. Once again, Doyle provides both a supernatural and a realist narrative, explaining those phenomena away with science and technology, while still giving readers the pleasure of a ghost story. These uncanny moments and potentially supernatural occurrences make the Holmes narratives much harder to pigeonhole in terms of genre; they are not simply and rigidly detective stories that exclusively present “scientific inquiry” as the Washington Post review expects, but rather perform the more exploratory and imaginative Victorian realism discussed earlier.
I would argue that Ritchie’s film provides a similar narrative discourse that mixes the scientific and the supernatural and therefore operates under multiple genres. A representative example of this would be the scene where Standish, a dissenting member of the Four Orders, spontaneously combusts. Ritchie does everything he can to cinematically establish cause and effect between Lord Blackwood’s evil will and the pyrotechnic event. The camera begins with a medium long shot of Standish and cuts to a medium close up of Blackwood. We then get a longer shot of Standish drawing his gun, this time with Blackwood’s face in the foreground, glaring. After a few reaction shots in response to the sudden fire, we get a close up of Blackwood glaring, with an engulfed Standish in the background. This downward gaze establishes a relationship between Blackwood’s interiority and Standish’s fiery demise, thus creating naturalized cause and effect. The camera, through this series of shots and its emphasis on including Blackwood’s face in order to build an association between the him and the fire, tells the audience that they have just witnessed supernatural powers at work.
Only later do we get an explanation of the mechanics of Blackwood’s actions.
When Holmes and Blackwood have their final face-off in the dramatic climax of the film atop a partially constructed London Bridge, Blackwood’s impending doom, as he slips off the bridge, builds tension while Holmes offers exposition, saying, “There was never any magic, only conjuring tricks.” When he gets to Standish’s death, he explains, “The death of Standish was a real mystery, until you used the same compound to blow up the wharf. An odorless, tasteless flammable liquid, yet it burned with an unusual pinkish hue. Did Standish mistake it for rain? All it took was a spark. A simple rigged bullet in his gun – ingenious.” Throughout this monologue the camera cuts to show spectators a series of flashbacks –Watson warning Holmes on the wharf, Riordan’s laboratory (first with Holmes investigating it, then with Riordan actually experimenting in it), Standish walking up to the temple, Standish firing his gun and subsequently catching on fire, and Riordan putting the rigged bullet in Standish’s gun. Throughout this flashback montage, in stark contrast to the version of the scene presented earlier, there is no sign of Blackwood and therefore no way to attribute the actions to him.
Based on these scenes one can see how Ritchie, like Doyle, deploys multiple genres in the same narrative; his Holmes case contains both a supernatural and a realist narrative just as The Hound of the Baskervilles does. Not only does this challenge the reviewers who might question the supernatural happenings in the film as inauthentic, but it also shows us that to expect a Sherlock Holmes case to obey the laws of a single genre – a “detective story” is nothing short of absurd. Genre, despite being a category designed to include and exclude, is always already hybrid, multiplicitous, and malleable, rules made explicitly to be broken. I hope the literary-historical context about Victorian genres, including realism and the supernatural, can help us better understand Ritchie’s film, but a challenge for scholars in adaptation studies remains. Even though scholarship in adaptation has pronounced fidelity studies passé, the film industry and media still cling to this evaluative mode. Is there any way to get them to let go and move on?
Friday, May 7, 2010
more unused quotes
“’At this instant a horrible change came over his expression his eyes stared wildly, his jaw dropped, and he yelled, in a voice which I can never forget, “Keep him out! For Christ’s sake keep him out!” We both stared round at the window behind us upon which his gaze was fixed. A face was looking in at us out of the darkness. We could see the whitening of the nose wehre it was pressed against the glass….My brother and I rushed towards the window, but the man was gone.”
Watson says, “Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face – the very face of our companion Thaddeus” (turns out to be his twin brother)
Watson says, “Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me, and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face – the very face of our companion Thaddeus” (turns out to be his twin brother)
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Some Sherlock Holmes quotes
Collecting these for my conference paper, but I won't use them all, so here is where I shall store them for safe keep. As you can see, these are all examples of describing Holmes' scientific practice/theory in supernatural/mystical terms.
Holmes is first described to Watson by a friend, who identifies him as “A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital”… “He is a little queer in his ideas – an enthusiast in some branches of science.”
“A medical student, I suppose?”
“No – I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of his out-of-the way knowledge which would astonish his professors.”
He is so dedicated to scientific inquiry that he would be willing to poison a friend, not out of malice, but to discover something in the experimental results. (Study in Scarlet)
“I have a vivid recollection of that instant, of Holmes’ triumphant expression and the ring of his voice, of the cabman’s dazed, savage face, as he glared at the glittering handcuffs, which had appeared as if by magic upon his wrists.” (Study in Scarlet)
“Sherlock Holmes drew a long breath, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “I should have more faith,” he said; “I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation. Of the two pills in that box one was the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless. I ought to have known that before I ever saw the box at all.”’ (Study in Scarlet)
In describing “The Book of Life”: “it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes of which he had arrived at them they might well consider him a necromancer.”
“The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical – so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.” (Study in Scarlet)
“Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?” (Sign of Four when Watson yells at Holmes for doing cocaine)
“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Sign of Four)
“There is something positively inhuman in you at times.” (Sign of Four)
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence
By Lawrence Frank
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Frank sees Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man everywhere in Holmes. He sees Holmes' philosophy as representative of a shift in worldview post-Darwin, specifically in terms of constructing a history that has no linear origin. The evidence we have is indicative of many vectors; there's no way to unfold a neat and tidy timeline.
He also talks about Arthur Conan Doyle's loss of faith (in Christianity) and turn to agnosticism. Frank then goes on to argue that this influenced Holmes' methods.
"Darwin continued, to write of "the living machinery of nature" (p. 199), appropriating the language of Paley's Natural Theology only to mock it. He suggested that the formerly static Book of Nature was now to be read as a Book of Life that records "the incessant changes to which the organic and inorganic world has been exposed"(Frank 145). --> The "Book of Life" is Holmes' published article.
John Tyndall's "Scientific Use of the Imagination."
"By the time of the serial publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the new historical consciousness had apparently triumphed in England. Doyle would seem to acknowledge this triumph by organizing his novel upon a model that would be immediately accessible to his readers. Dr. Mortimer's walking stick, that "accidental souvenir," is akin to the comparative anatomist's fossil bone or to the geologist's pebble. Like the watch in The Sign of Four (1890), the stick becomes a piece of fragmentary evidence by which Watson, following France's Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) or England's own Richard Owen (1804-1892), reconstructs not a geological epoch or an extinct animal but a living man" (Frank 156).
***Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838). "The geologist and the detective -- for Mantell can be seen as both -- inhabit a world of signs that to the unseeing eyes of others do not exist. Each performs an act bordering on the magical to conjure up meanings out of objects and traces that seem to point to some historical process or succession of events. It is not surprising that Watson, returning from his club after Dr. Mortimer's visit, has an almost hallucinatory experience....The geologist and the detective are sorcerers, part philologists, part Poe-esque cryptographers, living after Babel, who consult literal and figurative documents no longer written in a single, unchanging language"(Frank 162).
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Frank sees Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man everywhere in Holmes. He sees Holmes' philosophy as representative of a shift in worldview post-Darwin, specifically in terms of constructing a history that has no linear origin. The evidence we have is indicative of many vectors; there's no way to unfold a neat and tidy timeline.
He also talks about Arthur Conan Doyle's loss of faith (in Christianity) and turn to agnosticism. Frank then goes on to argue that this influenced Holmes' methods.
"Darwin continued, to write of "the living machinery of nature" (p. 199), appropriating the language of Paley's Natural Theology only to mock it. He suggested that the formerly static Book of Nature was now to be read as a Book of Life that records "the incessant changes to which the organic and inorganic world has been exposed"(Frank 145). --> The "Book of Life" is Holmes' published article.
John Tyndall's "Scientific Use of the Imagination."
"By the time of the serial publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the new historical consciousness had apparently triumphed in England. Doyle would seem to acknowledge this triumph by organizing his novel upon a model that would be immediately accessible to his readers. Dr. Mortimer's walking stick, that "accidental souvenir," is akin to the comparative anatomist's fossil bone or to the geologist's pebble. Like the watch in The Sign of Four (1890), the stick becomes a piece of fragmentary evidence by which Watson, following France's Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) or England's own Richard Owen (1804-1892), reconstructs not a geological epoch or an extinct animal but a living man" (Frank 156).
***Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838). "The geologist and the detective -- for Mantell can be seen as both -- inhabit a world of signs that to the unseeing eyes of others do not exist. Each performs an act bordering on the magical to conjure up meanings out of objects and traces that seem to point to some historical process or succession of events. It is not surprising that Watson, returning from his club after Dr. Mortimer's visit, has an almost hallucinatory experience....The geologist and the detective are sorcerers, part philologists, part Poe-esque cryptographers, living after Babel, who consult literal and figurative documents no longer written in a single, unchanging language"(Frank 162).
Conference Abstract - University of Washington "Adaptation"
Victorian Realism and the Supernatural in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Critics and moviegoers alike, upon seeing Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) in theaters, groaned, rolled their eyes, and generally denounced the film as a violation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of the same name. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post, for example, says, “For Downey's Holmes is not just a master of disguise, deductive reasoning and scientific inquiry. Here, he's also a prize-winning pugilist whose brain gets only slightly more of a workout than his fists.” Reviewers often framed their evaluations of the film in terms of what scholars in adaptation studies call the “fidelity studies” model.
But with what “source text” do these naysayers compare this new installment in the Holmes franchise? Doyle’s late Victorian popular fiction, or the myriad of film adaptations that have come before it? Considering the primacy of film over literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, of new media over old, might Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes in over a dozen films, for example, operate as more of a signified against which all future signifiers will be measured than Doyle’s novels and short stories do? To make the source-adaptation relationship even more vexed, one might consider that Ritchie based his film on a comic book written by screenwriter Lionel Wigram; how does that genre as “source text” inform the portrayal of Holmes, possibly as more of a comic book action hero, in this film? Then again, while the narrative of the film itself does not appear to recognizably resemble any one of Doyle’s plots, the film’s opening credits still make a point to announce and advertise that it is “based on stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” thus inviting spectators to look for the “original” stories and the “original” characters in this adaptation.
After obscuring and complicating the origins of this film adaptation, this paper hopes to, rather than focus on whether or not Guy Ritchie “got it right” in his representation of Holmes, to consider both Doyle’s fiction and Ritchie’s film as creating a complex and intertwined relationship between the real and the supernatural. Doyle figures Holmes as a man of science, who relies completely on objectivity and reason, but to such an extreme degree that his talents of deduction appear to be supernatural or inexplicable. Several of the cases Holmes and Watson solve appear to feature supernatural phenomena, but Holmes explains those phenomena away with science and technology, thus giving readers the pleasure of a “ghost story” and the satisfaction of a more realist narrative all at once. This makes the Holmes narratives much harder to pigeonhole in terms of genre; they are not simply and rigidly detective stories that exclusively present “scientific inquiry” as the Washington Post review expects. I would argue that Ritchie’s film provides a similar narrative discourse that mixes the scientific and the supernatural and therefore operates under multiple genres. How might this use of a hybrid narrative discourse, then, help us understand Ritchie’s adaptation of Holmes, including all the aspects that critics complain about?
Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle
By Andrew Smith
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This book turned out to be a lot less helpful than I would have thought. Some of the historical context might be useful to return to, as Smith starts out with Nordau and Lombroso and then names almost every other doctor/sexologist/scientist who had relevant theories.
Smith's overall argument is that a lot of these scientific theories (which, like all scientific theories, we can read as cultural narratives or ideologies), reflected or responded to anxiety about middle class professional masculinities at the end of the century. (Cue Oscar Wilde's scandal.) He tries to tie together issues of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and science, and I think it just ends up being too much (he even admits that his project was too ambitious in his conclusion...weird).
One idea that was helpful for me was the link between all this cultural context and the figure of the scientist. All the scientist characters I'll be talking about are male, and I'm going to have to address that somehow. In his Doyle chapter Smith argues that Holmes both represents the conflation of rationality and masculinity but also operates outside the bounds of what is culturally acceptable (i.e. he is not interested in heterosexual romance or domestic bliss).
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.
This book turned out to be a lot less helpful than I would have thought. Some of the historical context might be useful to return to, as Smith starts out with Nordau and Lombroso and then names almost every other doctor/sexologist/scientist who had relevant theories.
Smith's overall argument is that a lot of these scientific theories (which, like all scientific theories, we can read as cultural narratives or ideologies), reflected or responded to anxiety about middle class professional masculinities at the end of the century. (Cue Oscar Wilde's scandal.) He tries to tie together issues of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and science, and I think it just ends up being too much (he even admits that his project was too ambitious in his conclusion...weird).
One idea that was helpful for me was the link between all this cultural context and the figure of the scientist. All the scientist characters I'll be talking about are male, and I'm going to have to address that somehow. In his Doyle chapter Smith argues that Holmes both represents the conflation of rationality and masculinity but also operates outside the bounds of what is culturally acceptable (i.e. he is not interested in heterosexual romance or domestic bliss).
Monday, May 3, 2010
Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin De Siecle
By Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Like me, Miller sees film and fiction during the fin de siecle period as being inseparable. She really cannot say one thing about female criminals in literature without also acknowledging how the development of film as technology and entertainment also has implications for her discussion. More specifically, she talks about how Victorians and Edwardians thought of film as reality, or rather as a perfect imitation of reality -- but only for the "yokels" and "bumpkins" who were not cultured enough to grasp realism and fictional representation.
"In 1901, R.W. Paul, one of Britain's first filmmakers, released The Countryman and the Cinematograph, a film that reflexively "explains" cinema just five years into this new narrative form. It depicts a countryman at the movies, who mistakes cinematic illusion for real-world phenomena: he attempts to dance with a lovely on-screen dancing girl and flees a filmic train seemingly moving his direction. Bewildered by these images, he tears down the film screen, only to fin the projector and operator behind it. Movies that mocked the ignorant or uninitiated film viewer were common at the turn of the century; they served as elementary primers on cinema spectatorship, disseminating a culture and ethics of audience behavior for a new form of narrative entertainment"(Miller 1).
"In recent years, crime and criminality have been pervasive topics in studies of late-Victorian literature, but these studies have failed to recognize the distinctiveness of the female criminal as a narrative figure, often overlooking her altogether"(Miller 4).
"The series format as employed by Conan Doyle had a profound influence on film and other twentieth-century narrative forms"(Miller 228 - footnote).
Miller argues that Holmes' theory of observation is consistently thwarted by the female body ("the female body's resistance to interpretation" (Miller 26)); he can apply it to the male body but then the female body confuses him. He doesn't recognize Irene Adler when she, cross-dressed, walks by his front step in "A Scandal in Bohemia."
"...Holmes prioritizes visually mediated knowledge" (Miller 27).
"Victorian narrative often seems to parallel or even predict developments in visual technology, as recent critics have explored with regard to photography and realism. [See, for example, Christ and Jordan, Armstrong (Fiction), or Meisel.] ... In the years surrounding the emergence of cinema in 1896, detective series expressed with particular force a burgeoning shift toward a visually oriented culture of knowledge, and their magazine format was part of this expression" (Miller 27).
"Holmes' deepest cultural impact, however, was in many ways a specifically visual one. Conan Doyle provided his audience with an unusually visible fictional world. Many critics have discussed the "iconic" status of Holmes, the crystallization of his image in early theatrical and filmic productions, the accumulated visual detail in Conan Doyle's brand of realism, the stories' emphasis on observation and surveillance, Holmes's particularly visual mode of detection, and the author's own special interest in visual perception. Trained as a physician, Conan Doyle had received advanced preparation in ophthalmology, and as an eye specialist he was highly attuned to the human capacity for visual perception and misperception. It is hardly surprising, then, that the stories challenge the foundations of vision and knowledge amid newly imagistic and consumerist cultural terrain; nor is it surprising that the stories exhibit, as I argue, a profound ambivalence about the image-centric culture that they seemingly showcase" (Miller 29).
quote from "The Gloria Scott": "Holmes had remarkable powers, carefully cultivated, of seeing in teh dark"
in "Empty House" Holmes mentions atavism indirectly: "I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors"
A lot of the interpretations of Jekyll/Hyde I do (connecting atavism with Hyde's description, for example) also happens in a lot of the Holmes narratives, apparently. Miller lists several, including a description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem." She also argues, or rather points out that, female criminals, unlike male criminals are beautiful rather than deformed and grotesque.
"The central predicament of the case also emphasizes the primacy of visual knowledge: the king's former lover, Adler, possesses a photograph of the two together, and he fears she will blackmail him on the even of his impending marriage. Holmes treats photography in this case as fetishized or idealized form of reality and an utterly transparent window into history. His conversation with the king presumes the superiority of imagistic signification over writing: "If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?" (Miller 42).
She describes discrepancy between image provided by magazine illustrator of "clue" (a shoe) and the description of it in the text ---she concludes this indicates visual perception as a framing as opposed to reliably objective method.
The Holmes stories very obviously demonstrate textual representation's subjectivity, but Miller argues that with women specifically they also raise awareness of visual representation's subjectivity as well (VERY IMPORTANT FOR ME - USE THIS TO RESPOND TO HOW DOYLE SEEMS LESS INTO REALISM AS EXPERIMENT THAN THE OTHER AUTHORS.)
Miller says, "Throughout the series, Conan Doyle suggests that women present a challenge to conventional Western conceptions of truth as associated with public space, visibility, and transparency" (Miller 49).
"...Conan Doyle's stories put forth a far more compound and ambivalent theory of gender, vision, and the public than has been previously acknowledged; they support the authority of the gaze and locate ontology in image, except when depicting women criminals. In these instances, Conan Doyle's detective fiction prefigures filmic genres like film noir, in which femme fatales reveal a great "truth" about the visual landscape of modern urban culture: that the unknowable is not signified by the invisible, but by a peculiarly modern disjunction between the visible and the real" (Miller 69).
OTHER SCHOLARS: Kate Flint and Jonathan Crary ("crisis in perception")
OTHER SOURCES: Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (English version of Lombroso's Criminal Man), Andre Bazin "ontology of the photographic image"
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Like me, Miller sees film and fiction during the fin de siecle period as being inseparable. She really cannot say one thing about female criminals in literature without also acknowledging how the development of film as technology and entertainment also has implications for her discussion. More specifically, she talks about how Victorians and Edwardians thought of film as reality, or rather as a perfect imitation of reality -- but only for the "yokels" and "bumpkins" who were not cultured enough to grasp realism and fictional representation.
"In 1901, R.W. Paul, one of Britain's first filmmakers, released The Countryman and the Cinematograph, a film that reflexively "explains" cinema just five years into this new narrative form. It depicts a countryman at the movies, who mistakes cinematic illusion for real-world phenomena: he attempts to dance with a lovely on-screen dancing girl and flees a filmic train seemingly moving his direction. Bewildered by these images, he tears down the film screen, only to fin the projector and operator behind it. Movies that mocked the ignorant or uninitiated film viewer were common at the turn of the century; they served as elementary primers on cinema spectatorship, disseminating a culture and ethics of audience behavior for a new form of narrative entertainment"(Miller 1).
"In recent years, crime and criminality have been pervasive topics in studies of late-Victorian literature, but these studies have failed to recognize the distinctiveness of the female criminal as a narrative figure, often overlooking her altogether"(Miller 4).
"The series format as employed by Conan Doyle had a profound influence on film and other twentieth-century narrative forms"(Miller 228 - footnote).
Miller argues that Holmes' theory of observation is consistently thwarted by the female body ("the female body's resistance to interpretation" (Miller 26)); he can apply it to the male body but then the female body confuses him. He doesn't recognize Irene Adler when she, cross-dressed, walks by his front step in "A Scandal in Bohemia."
"...Holmes prioritizes visually mediated knowledge" (Miller 27).
"Victorian narrative often seems to parallel or even predict developments in visual technology, as recent critics have explored with regard to photography and realism. [See, for example, Christ and Jordan, Armstrong (Fiction), or Meisel.] ... In the years surrounding the emergence of cinema in 1896, detective series expressed with particular force a burgeoning shift toward a visually oriented culture of knowledge, and their magazine format was part of this expression" (Miller 27).
"Holmes' deepest cultural impact, however, was in many ways a specifically visual one. Conan Doyle provided his audience with an unusually visible fictional world. Many critics have discussed the "iconic" status of Holmes, the crystallization of his image in early theatrical and filmic productions, the accumulated visual detail in Conan Doyle's brand of realism, the stories' emphasis on observation and surveillance, Holmes's particularly visual mode of detection, and the author's own special interest in visual perception. Trained as a physician, Conan Doyle had received advanced preparation in ophthalmology, and as an eye specialist he was highly attuned to the human capacity for visual perception and misperception. It is hardly surprising, then, that the stories challenge the foundations of vision and knowledge amid newly imagistic and consumerist cultural terrain; nor is it surprising that the stories exhibit, as I argue, a profound ambivalence about the image-centric culture that they seemingly showcase" (Miller 29).
quote from "The Gloria Scott": "Holmes had remarkable powers, carefully cultivated, of seeing in teh dark"
in "Empty House" Holmes mentions atavism indirectly: "I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors"
A lot of the interpretations of Jekyll/Hyde I do (connecting atavism with Hyde's description, for example) also happens in a lot of the Holmes narratives, apparently. Miller lists several, including a description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem." She also argues, or rather points out that, female criminals, unlike male criminals are beautiful rather than deformed and grotesque.
"The central predicament of the case also emphasizes the primacy of visual knowledge: the king's former lover, Adler, possesses a photograph of the two together, and he fears she will blackmail him on the even of his impending marriage. Holmes treats photography in this case as fetishized or idealized form of reality and an utterly transparent window into history. His conversation with the king presumes the superiority of imagistic signification over writing: "If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?" (Miller 42).
She describes discrepancy between image provided by magazine illustrator of "clue" (a shoe) and the description of it in the text ---she concludes this indicates visual perception as a framing as opposed to reliably objective method.
The Holmes stories very obviously demonstrate textual representation's subjectivity, but Miller argues that with women specifically they also raise awareness of visual representation's subjectivity as well (VERY IMPORTANT FOR ME - USE THIS TO RESPOND TO HOW DOYLE SEEMS LESS INTO REALISM AS EXPERIMENT THAN THE OTHER AUTHORS.)
Miller says, "Throughout the series, Conan Doyle suggests that women present a challenge to conventional Western conceptions of truth as associated with public space, visibility, and transparency" (Miller 49).
"...Conan Doyle's stories put forth a far more compound and ambivalent theory of gender, vision, and the public than has been previously acknowledged; they support the authority of the gaze and locate ontology in image, except when depicting women criminals. In these instances, Conan Doyle's detective fiction prefigures filmic genres like film noir, in which femme fatales reveal a great "truth" about the visual landscape of modern urban culture: that the unknowable is not signified by the invisible, but by a peculiarly modern disjunction between the visible and the real" (Miller 69).
OTHER SCHOLARS: Kate Flint and Jonathan Crary ("crisis in perception")
OTHER SOURCES: Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (English version of Lombroso's Criminal Man), Andre Bazin "ontology of the photographic image"
The work begins.
Even though I technically don't have my prospectus approved, I'm going to go ahead and get started anyway. The first chapter I'm going to work on is the HG Wells chapter, which is now Chapter 2. Some things to research:
HG Wells' biographical info - how he related to scientific practice
Henri Bergson's duration theory
other scientific theories related to either time travel (the fourth dimension) or invisibility
Historical context seems to be a logical starting place here. Then I can get back into close reading.
Oh wait! I'm giving a conference paper at the University of Washington in a few weeks on Sherlock Holmes. Maybe I should start with that....and then switch back to Wells when that's done. Things to look for include:
what people have to say about Sherlock Holmes in terms of realism/the supernatural
biographical info on Doyle - how he related to scientific practice
was Holmes' method completely fictional or were there emerging practices like his in the Victorian period?
HG Wells' biographical info - how he related to scientific practice
Henri Bergson's duration theory
other scientific theories related to either time travel (the fourth dimension) or invisibility
Historical context seems to be a logical starting place here. Then I can get back into close reading.
Oh wait! I'm giving a conference paper at the University of Washington in a few weeks on Sherlock Holmes. Maybe I should start with that....and then switch back to Wells when that's done. Things to look for include:
what people have to say about Sherlock Holmes in terms of realism/the supernatural
biographical info on Doyle - how he related to scientific practice
was Holmes' method completely fictional or were there emerging practices like his in the Victorian period?
Yet another prospectus draft....
I'm really hoping this is the last one. It's more or less the same as the last couple, but with the chapter descriptions massively stripped down.
Testing Reality’s Limits: “Mad” Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction
Introduction
Written between 1887 and 1901, the novels of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker gravitate towards one another in several vectors. They share a historical moment – the late Victorian period or fin de siècle – as well as the genre of popular fiction. In reaction to the pricier “triple decker” realist novels of the period, these shorter novels earned numerous labels that set them apart from other publications–the novella, the scientific romance, the shilling shocker, and the neo-Gothic novel . Many of them also feature a fringe or “mad” scientist, and this common figure will be the focus of this dissertation.
As any legitimate scientist would, the characters in these novels wield scientific discourse authoritatively; the “madness” perceived by other characters, then, results from their asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality and having radical ideas or theories based on such questions. Jack Griffin, as title character of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, upsets the accepted relationship between visual perception and ontology when he conducts an experiment that renders himself invisible, thus proving that something or someone can exist without being seen; in the novel, seeing fails to precipitate knowledge and no longer produces representations that evidence being. In Wells’ later novel, The Time Machine, the Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, calling into question previous notions of a three-dimensional world. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes appropriates the scientific method in order to enact a kind of divination or mind reading when he claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation. Propelling the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, leading to the grizzly struggle with his brutish alter ego, Mr. Hyde. Finally, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Van Helsing, a medical doctor, and thus a man of science, who not only believes in but actively hunts vampires.
As one can already see from a brief sketch of each novel’s premise, these mad scientist figures not only represent but also embody the frequent coexistence of scientific and supernatural discourses in the late Victorian novel. Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are primarily empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity. I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hare-brained experiments, but also directly address issues spurred by the realism often associated with “triple deckers,” the highbrow three-volume novels of Victorian literature . The realist project or “the realist experiment,” as recently recast by critics such as Caroline Levine and George Levine, does not merely attempt to produce or reproduce the real but rather questions reality’s very nature and our ability to see, know, and contain it . These novels, with their unique blending of the real/scientific and the unreal/supernatural, are very much in that spirit.
When framed as contending with issues of reality, these popular novels that feature mad scientists reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism, which has already been located by scholars in the writings of thinkers such as John Ruskin and Walter Pater, as well as novelists traditionally categorized as realists. Both Victorian writers contemplating realism, such as George Eliot, and characters featured in popular novels, such as the Invisible Man, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being. Eliot does so explicitly in her writing by inserting reflections such as the pier-glass parable in Middlemarch, and the Invisible Man does so by attempting, through his experiments, to exist as a man without a visual representation . Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might conceive of and represent that reality – one is just less literary and more literal than the other.
These novels have been historically characterized as anti-realist, by Victorians and scholars of Victorian literature alike, and isolated in genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, or romance, and this dissertation will bridge gaps across genre lines by contextualizing popular fiction in a larger dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel . By examining these texts in order to, rather than construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period, synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, the dissertation will show that conversations about realism cannot ignore and must include late Victorian popular fiction not only because it has yet to be done, but because until it is done, the Victorian novel puzzle will remain incomplete.
Victorian science and literature were not closed discursive circuits, and critics have devised several metaphors to describe the free-flowing exchange of ideas across disciplines; John Kucich calls “cross pollination” what Paul Fayter calls “two-way traffic.” Science was very much a part of the popular imagination, as Victorians often practiced an often-sophisticated amateur science in the home – collecting butterflies or fossils, for example. Victorian themselves were, in actual scientific practices and philosophical treatises, always already testing the reality they knew and open to new knowledge formation in the form of burgeoning scientific theories. These novels, then, were not in of themselves controversial, but rather reflective of the scientific controversies and upsets actually occurring in Victorian England. This dissertation will provide its readers with as much historical context about Victorian scientific debates as is necessary to understand how these popular novels interfaced with the scientific discourse of the day.
One such scientific upset was the development of film as a technology, which had major turning points in the latter half of the century, around the same time these novels were published. In 1889 William Friese-Greene invents a camera “capable of producing short sequences of pictures” (5), and many historians claim that Augustin Le Prince to have shot the first films between 1888 and 1890. Such innovations in the technology continued until the first film screenings in Britain in 1896 . The development of photography and then later film within Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians conceptualized reality in terms of time and space. As Roland Barthes implies, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality than other forms such as painting or prose, but in fact distorts reality . The form of film itself, with its ability to create an illusion of movement from still images and synthetically splice together events and images, complicates and heightens realism’s concern with the relationship between representation and reality.
The differences and similarities between the novel and a contemporary film adaptation, being of different historical moments and narrative genres, often show that the exploration of realism through scientific inquiry is one unique to the Victorian “source” narratives . The 2002 film adaptation of The Time Machine, for example, adds a romantic subplot, which motivates the Time Traveller’s scientific pursuits; the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake tendency is noticeably absent in the film. This addition of romance and subtraction of scientific curiosity reflects back on Wells' text, emphasizing the importance of experimentation to its narrative. One can make the same argument for several adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Existing Scholarship
Many scholars have made connections between Victorian scientific discoveries and literary representations, and most attribute realist tendencies in novels to new and emerging technologies of the period. Richard Menke, for example, in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3). By framing Victorian culture as obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism.
In attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, however, such works rarely integrate a variety of fictional genres. Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend. Similarly, work by scholars such as Robert Mighall, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys establish the genre of the “Victorian Gothic” as a discrete literary arena. This dissertation will fulfill a need in the field to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism.
This is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new concept. Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre . This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, and realism.
Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. George Levine, in The Realistic Imagination, suggests that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today: “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). I would like to see how the authors I’ve clustered here, whom Levine does not address, might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.” Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.
Under this new definition of realism, popular fiction that cannot be seen as representing reality objectively becomes ripe for exploration. Caroline Levine has already begun this work in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt in her treatment of sensation fiction. She compellingly argues, for example, for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43). Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis . In thinking of how this project will draw from Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title of the dissertation to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.” Levine discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will take the next logical step and carry her work even later into the 19th century and further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker.
Chapter Descriptions
Introduction
The intellectual background provided in this prospectus will be amplified in an introduction that will provide all relevant historical context, discuss the rationale behind including film adaptations of the novels studied, and form a working definition of realism for the project.
Chapter 1: Victorian Science, the Scientist, and Classic Realist Novelists
By looking at the role of science in works by novelists considered to be classic realists, this chapter will serve as a “control” in the discussion of realism, anchoring the dissertation. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) are two appropriate works for such a purpose, seeing as they are conventionally realist but also feature scientist figures.
Chapter 2: The Limitations of Human Consciousness and Perception in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897)
Victorian science and philosophy orbit Wells’ The Time Machine. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, published in 1889, for example, outlines a theory of duration, positing that human perception maps time onto space instead of understanding its own movement . A few years later, in 1894, Sim Newcomb published an article about the fourth dimension in Nature, which Wells read. Bergson’s theory parallels that of Wells’ Time Traveller: “there is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it” (Wells 2). Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic. Two years later, Wells again illustrates the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man. Griffin, an “experimental investigator,” (Wells 15) tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment. The very existence of Griffin confounds those around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him; he is not represented in any tangible way. Through an examination of Wells’ work, this chapter will explore how these novels challenge the assumption that seeing is knowing or that observation produces an accurate representation of reality.
Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
The influence of Darwin’s theories can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction. Atavism or degeneration, proposed and used by scientists such as criminologist Cesare Lombroso and physician and social critic Max Simon Nordau , speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not devolve. Like Wells’ Time Traveller, Van Helsing and Dr. Seward from Dracula and Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, casting “unreal” phenomena – Mr. Hyde the brute and Dracula the vampire – as real products of biological evolution.
Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
In the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. Even though they are in fact based on observation, the narrative often describes Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ writing, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle 20). And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.
Works Cited
Primary Works
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sign of Four. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Broadview, 2004.
Ritchie, Guy. Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros., 2009.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Wells, H.G. The Invisible Man. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Wells, Simon. The Time Machine. Dreamworks, 2002.
Secondary Works
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Routledge, 1983.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Science Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Fantina, Richard and Kimberly Harrison, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Fayter, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.
Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2006.
Herbert, Stephen. A History of Early Film, Volume 1. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Kucich, John. “Scientific Ascendency.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Levine, George Lewis. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
O’Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Rausch, Andrew J. Turning Points in Film History. New York: Citadel Press Books, 2004.
Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys. Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Smajic, Srdjan. “Supernatural Realism.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 42.1 (Spring 2009): 1-22.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920. 53.2 (Spring 2010): 170-181.
Testing Reality’s Limits: “Mad” Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction
Introduction
Written between 1887 and 1901, the novels of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker gravitate towards one another in several vectors. They share a historical moment – the late Victorian period or fin de siècle – as well as the genre of popular fiction. In reaction to the pricier “triple decker” realist novels of the period, these shorter novels earned numerous labels that set them apart from other publications–the novella, the scientific romance, the shilling shocker, and the neo-Gothic novel . Many of them also feature a fringe or “mad” scientist, and this common figure will be the focus of this dissertation.
As any legitimate scientist would, the characters in these novels wield scientific discourse authoritatively; the “madness” perceived by other characters, then, results from their asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality and having radical ideas or theories based on such questions. Jack Griffin, as title character of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, upsets the accepted relationship between visual perception and ontology when he conducts an experiment that renders himself invisible, thus proving that something or someone can exist without being seen; in the novel, seeing fails to precipitate knowledge and no longer produces representations that evidence being. In Wells’ later novel, The Time Machine, the Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, calling into question previous notions of a three-dimensional world. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes appropriates the scientific method in order to enact a kind of divination or mind reading when he claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation. Propelling the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, leading to the grizzly struggle with his brutish alter ego, Mr. Hyde. Finally, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Van Helsing, a medical doctor, and thus a man of science, who not only believes in but actively hunts vampires.
As one can already see from a brief sketch of each novel’s premise, these mad scientist figures not only represent but also embody the frequent coexistence of scientific and supernatural discourses in the late Victorian novel. Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are primarily empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity. I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hare-brained experiments, but also directly address issues spurred by the realism often associated with “triple deckers,” the highbrow three-volume novels of Victorian literature . The realist project or “the realist experiment,” as recently recast by critics such as Caroline Levine and George Levine, does not merely attempt to produce or reproduce the real but rather questions reality’s very nature and our ability to see, know, and contain it . These novels, with their unique blending of the real/scientific and the unreal/supernatural, are very much in that spirit.
When framed as contending with issues of reality, these popular novels that feature mad scientists reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism, which has already been located by scholars in the writings of thinkers such as John Ruskin and Walter Pater, as well as novelists traditionally categorized as realists. Both Victorian writers contemplating realism, such as George Eliot, and characters featured in popular novels, such as the Invisible Man, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being. Eliot does so explicitly in her writing by inserting reflections such as the pier-glass parable in Middlemarch, and the Invisible Man does so by attempting, through his experiments, to exist as a man without a visual representation . Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might conceive of and represent that reality – one is just less literary and more literal than the other.
These novels have been historically characterized as anti-realist, by Victorians and scholars of Victorian literature alike, and isolated in genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, or romance, and this dissertation will bridge gaps across genre lines by contextualizing popular fiction in a larger dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel . By examining these texts in order to, rather than construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period, synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, the dissertation will show that conversations about realism cannot ignore and must include late Victorian popular fiction not only because it has yet to be done, but because until it is done, the Victorian novel puzzle will remain incomplete.
Victorian science and literature were not closed discursive circuits, and critics have devised several metaphors to describe the free-flowing exchange of ideas across disciplines; John Kucich calls “cross pollination” what Paul Fayter calls “two-way traffic.” Science was very much a part of the popular imagination, as Victorians often practiced an often-sophisticated amateur science in the home – collecting butterflies or fossils, for example. Victorian themselves were, in actual scientific practices and philosophical treatises, always already testing the reality they knew and open to new knowledge formation in the form of burgeoning scientific theories. These novels, then, were not in of themselves controversial, but rather reflective of the scientific controversies and upsets actually occurring in Victorian England. This dissertation will provide its readers with as much historical context about Victorian scientific debates as is necessary to understand how these popular novels interfaced with the scientific discourse of the day.
One such scientific upset was the development of film as a technology, which had major turning points in the latter half of the century, around the same time these novels were published. In 1889 William Friese-Greene invents a camera “capable of producing short sequences of pictures” (5), and many historians claim that Augustin Le Prince to have shot the first films between 1888 and 1890. Such innovations in the technology continued until the first film screenings in Britain in 1896 . The development of photography and then later film within Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians conceptualized reality in terms of time and space. As Roland Barthes implies, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality than other forms such as painting or prose, but in fact distorts reality . The form of film itself, with its ability to create an illusion of movement from still images and synthetically splice together events and images, complicates and heightens realism’s concern with the relationship between representation and reality.
The differences and similarities between the novel and a contemporary film adaptation, being of different historical moments and narrative genres, often show that the exploration of realism through scientific inquiry is one unique to the Victorian “source” narratives . The 2002 film adaptation of The Time Machine, for example, adds a romantic subplot, which motivates the Time Traveller’s scientific pursuits; the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake tendency is noticeably absent in the film. This addition of romance and subtraction of scientific curiosity reflects back on Wells' text, emphasizing the importance of experimentation to its narrative. One can make the same argument for several adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Existing Scholarship
Many scholars have made connections between Victorian scientific discoveries and literary representations, and most attribute realist tendencies in novels to new and emerging technologies of the period. Richard Menke, for example, in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3). By framing Victorian culture as obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism.
In attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, however, such works rarely integrate a variety of fictional genres. Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend. Similarly, work by scholars such as Robert Mighall, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys establish the genre of the “Victorian Gothic” as a discrete literary arena. This dissertation will fulfill a need in the field to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism.
This is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new concept. Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre . This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, and realism.
Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. George Levine, in The Realistic Imagination, suggests that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today: “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). I would like to see how the authors I’ve clustered here, whom Levine does not address, might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.” Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.
Under this new definition of realism, popular fiction that cannot be seen as representing reality objectively becomes ripe for exploration. Caroline Levine has already begun this work in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt in her treatment of sensation fiction. She compellingly argues, for example, for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43). Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis . In thinking of how this project will draw from Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title of the dissertation to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.” Levine discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will take the next logical step and carry her work even later into the 19th century and further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker.
Chapter Descriptions
Introduction
The intellectual background provided in this prospectus will be amplified in an introduction that will provide all relevant historical context, discuss the rationale behind including film adaptations of the novels studied, and form a working definition of realism for the project.
Chapter 1: Victorian Science, the Scientist, and Classic Realist Novelists
By looking at the role of science in works by novelists considered to be classic realists, this chapter will serve as a “control” in the discussion of realism, anchoring the dissertation. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) are two appropriate works for such a purpose, seeing as they are conventionally realist but also feature scientist figures.
Chapter 2: The Limitations of Human Consciousness and Perception in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897)
Victorian science and philosophy orbit Wells’ The Time Machine. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, published in 1889, for example, outlines a theory of duration, positing that human perception maps time onto space instead of understanding its own movement . A few years later, in 1894, Sim Newcomb published an article about the fourth dimension in Nature, which Wells read. Bergson’s theory parallels that of Wells’ Time Traveller: “there is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it” (Wells 2). Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic. Two years later, Wells again illustrates the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man. Griffin, an “experimental investigator,” (Wells 15) tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment. The very existence of Griffin confounds those around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him; he is not represented in any tangible way. Through an examination of Wells’ work, this chapter will explore how these novels challenge the assumption that seeing is knowing or that observation produces an accurate representation of reality.
Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
The influence of Darwin’s theories can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction. Atavism or degeneration, proposed and used by scientists such as criminologist Cesare Lombroso and physician and social critic Max Simon Nordau , speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not devolve. Like Wells’ Time Traveller, Van Helsing and Dr. Seward from Dracula and Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, casting “unreal” phenomena – Mr. Hyde the brute and Dracula the vampire – as real products of biological evolution.
Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
In the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. Even though they are in fact based on observation, the narrative often describes Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ writing, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle 20). And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.
Works Cited
Primary Works
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sign of Four. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Broadview, 2004.
Ritchie, Guy. Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros., 2009.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Wells, H.G. The Invisible Man. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Wells, Simon. The Time Machine. Dreamworks, 2002.
Secondary Works
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Routledge, 1983.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Science Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Fantina, Richard and Kimberly Harrison, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Fayter, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.
Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2006.
Herbert, Stephen. A History of Early Film, Volume 1. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Kucich, John. “Scientific Ascendency.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Levine, George Lewis. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
O’Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Rausch, Andrew J. Turning Points in Film History. New York: Citadel Press Books, 2004.
Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys. Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Smajic, Srdjan. “Supernatural Realism.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 42.1 (Spring 2009): 1-22.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920. 53.2 (Spring 2010): 170-181.
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