Problems of Epistemology and Social Science in Popular Detective and Modernist Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO The Knower and the Known: Problems of Epistemology and Social Science in Popular Detective and Modernist Fiction A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Kevin Andrew Hart Committee in charge: Professor Amelia Glaser, Co-Chair Professor Seth Lerer, Co-Chair Professor Frank Biess Professor Michael Davidson Professor Margaret Loose Professor William O’Brien 2018 Copyright Kevin Andrew Hart, 2018 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Kevin Andrew Hart is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair ________________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2018 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………...…… iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………... iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………. v Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………... vii Abstract of the Dissertation………………………………………………………….………… viii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….… 1 Chapter 1- “Was Anyone Anything?”: Tracking the Born Criminal in Classic Detective Fiction………..…………………...…………..………………………………………………… 18 Chapter 2- “Theirhisnothis fellowfaces”: The Dynamism of Social Science in Doyle and Joyce …………………...……………………………………………………………..……………….. 42 Chapter 3- “Nondescript Specimens”: Herbert Spencer’s Social Theory in Ulysses....................65 Chapter 4- “Words Fail Us”: Beckett, Leacock, and Johnson..………………………………… 87 Chapter 5- Graham Greene’s Aesthetics of Design, Sport, and Violence………….................. 119 Conclusion………………..…………………………………………………………………… 151 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………… 161 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisors, Amelia Glaser and Seth Lerer, for their continuous support, feedback, and guidance throughout the development of this project. The innumerable hours that they spent critiquing plans and drafts of the project have strengthened it, and have strengthened my understanding of literary scholarship. I would also like to thank the committee members for their similar contributions to the project’s development. The committee’s enthusiasm for and feedback on my research has been invaluable. The hours that everyone has spent discussing my work with me over coffee, lunch, coffee, dinner, and coffee has helped me think through and refine my research and writing. I am lucky and grateful to have had such a supportive community. I am equally grateful to have spent the past six years working within the larger community of UC San Diego’s Revelle College Humanities Program. The program’s intellectual rigor, its high expectations, and countless stimulating discussions with students, staff, section teachers, and professors have all helped me distill my ideas for this project. Likewise, I am indebted to all of the professors, graduate, and undergraduate students of UC San Diego’s Department of Literature who have helped me think through and develop various stages of this research. This research could not have been completed without several forms of financial assistance. The Dissertation Year Fellowship from UC San Diego’s Department of Literature enabled me to devote the past year to writing and revising the dissertation. And grants from the University of California and from UC San Diego’s Department of Literature enabled me to travel to archives at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Reading, and The British Library, v where library staff helped me sort through and locate manuscripts and materials that would prove essential to my work. Finally, my love and thanks goes to my families in the US and Thailand, to Yaya, Ama, Agong, and to Jill, Jace, and Riya. vi VITA 2003 Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, State University of New York, Plattsburgh 2004-2010 Case Manager, Community House Mental Health Agency, Seattle 2010-2012 Teaching Assistant in Business Writing, Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York 2012 Master of Arts in English Literature, Fordham University, New York 2016 Instructor, University of California, San Diego 2012-2018 Teaching Assistant, Revelle College Humanities Program, University of California, San Diego 2012-2018 Adjunct Faculty, Bryant & Stratton College, Online 2018 Doctor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERATION The Knower and the Known: Problems of Epistemology and Social Science in Popular Detective and Modernist Fiction by Kevin Andrew Hart Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2018 Professor Amelia Glaser, Co-Chair Professor Seth Lerer, Co-Chair This dissertation examines the relationship of modernist literary experimentalism to popular detective fiction from 1890-1945 in Britain and Ireland. The project argues that both literary forms grow out of an emerging challenge to questions of knowledge – how it is generated, rhetorically packaged, and socially applied – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth viii centuries. In particular, classic detective and modernist fiction challenge claims to objective empiricism in the physical and social sciences. Both literary forms suggest that the sciences are enmeshed in cultural methods of analysis, are prone to fall under the influence of presumptions and biases, and tend to work in the service of dominant social groups at the expense of the less powerful. In both literary forms, human populations are too dynamic to classify with accuracy, and demography is influenced by biases against the lower classes. The biological sciences are misused to support theories of criminal determinism which incriminate individuals based on looks and lineage. Theories of natural selection are misapplied to our understanding of human society and socioeconomics. Lexicography is wrongly employed as a tool for linguistic nationalism. And the rhetorical strategies of modernist architecture, sport, and health culture evoke and reinforce martial values. In all, both forms of literature regard scientific positivism with irony and ground its discursive elaborations in social satire. Arguing for a deeper understanding of modernist experimentalism in its engagements both with mass culture and with theoretical discourses in the sciences, the project reads modernist writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene beside popular writers like Conan Doyle, Stephen Leacock, G. K. Chesterton, and obscurer contributors to popular detective fiction. ix Introduction Writing in The New Yorker in 1944, the literary critic Edmund Wilson complains that detective fiction is the stuff of “distasteful parody,” its characters “flat two dimensional…puppets” and its plots formulaic.1 Of particular interest is not Wilson’s denigration of the popular genre, but his use of the word “parody” to belittle it. In Wilson’s sense, the word is dissociated from its dictionary definition and literary context of farcical, inventive mimicry. Instead, Wilson’s “parody” means merely the crudely derivative, poorly imitative, second-rate counterfeit of good writing. Ironically, this limitation on the meaning of “parody” suggests not only that Wilson’s reading of detective fiction might be similarly reductive, but also points the way to a more profitable approach to the genre, an approach which unlike the famous critic’s considers the genre’s relationship to parody in the literary sense of the word. In fact, classic detective fiction contains strong elements of parody as well as social satire. With its emphasis on detection, inductive reasoning, and social management, the popular detective fiction of Victorianism functions as a critical venue for the examination of institutions of knowledge, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the ways in which theoretical disciplines might be pressed into the service of dominant groups at the expense of the less powerful. In effect, classic detective fiction grows out of an emerging challenge to questions of knowledge – how it is generated, rhetorically packaged, and socially applied – in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. 1 Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” The New Yorker, (October 14, 1944). 1 In this manner, the classic detective story is analogous to modernist fiction in Britain and Ireland. Both literary forms embrace socio-epistemological satire in similar ways. Both suggest that the theoretical discourses of Victorianism favor and legitimize existing structures of power. And both assert that the sciences are belied by biases deriving, for instance, from nationalism, classism, and dominant cultural values. In these texts, knowledge about people is particularly hard to obtain. For example, both forms of fiction address early theories of demography and suggest that urban populations, dense and protean, defy sociological categorization. Likewise, both literary forms ridicule the nineteenth-century notion that criminal tendencies are coded in and visible on the body, and both challenge the period’s idea that evolutionary laws obtain in socio-economics and