Science, Expertise, and Everyday Reality in 1926 by Brian S. Matzke
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All Scientific Stuff: Science, Expertise, and Everyday Reality in 1926 by Brian S. Matzke A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor Eric S. Rabkin, Chair Professor John S. Carson Professor June M. Howard Professor Alan M. Wald Copyright © Brian S. Matzke 2013 Dedication To my parents, Charles Matzke and Janice Beecher, who taught me to read, to write, to think, and to question. ii Acknowledgements Many scholars have mentored and advised me over the years, and I am grateful to all of them for the insights that they have provided and the knowledge that they have imparted. This project began as a paper in John Whittier-Ferguson’s graduate seminar on modernism, and from that beginning, numerous professors’ influences have shaped this book. I would like to thank George Bornstein, John Carson, Gregg Crane, Paul Edwards, Gabrielle Hecht, June Howard, Steve Jackson, Howard Markel, Susan Parrish, Eric Rabkin, Paddy Scannell, Derek Vaillant, Alan Wald, and Patricia Yaeger. In addition to the faculty at the University of Michigan, I received tremendous insights and support from my colleagues both at Michigan and other institutions. Their comments on drafts and their recommendations at every stage of the writing process were invaluable to me. I am grateful to Alex Beringer, Geremy Carnes, MicKenzie Fasteland, Molly Hatcher, Korey Jackson, Chung-Hao Ku, Konstantina Karageorgos, Corinne Martin, Karen McConnell, Nathaniel Mills, Daniel Mintz, and Michael Tondre. Some ideas from the chapter on Amazing Stories have their basis in my work with the Genre Evolution Project, and I am thankful to the members of the project for their inspiration, in particular, Eric Rabkin, Carl Simon, Rebecca Adams, Zach Wright, Meg Hixon, and Dayna Smith. While working on the chapter on Black Mask, the publisher Keith Alan Deutsch provided valuable insights into the history of the magazine, while librarian Octavio Olvera helped me with my research into their archives at UCLA, and Chelsea Weathers helped me obtain Dashiell iii Hammett’s letter to the magazine from the Harry Ransom Center. Curtis Matzke helped me assemble the images. I am thankful to all of them. I am deeply grateful to Paula Teichholtz for her friendship, intelligence, and spirit. iv Preface From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) onward, a widespread view has been of science as cold and isolating and scientists as potentially “mad.” This is one of the oldest stories we tell ourselves about science. But if we think more about it, other narratives come to mind: myths of inventors tinkering in their garages, hoping to strike it rich; mysteries in which forensic analysts catch murderers; medical dramas featuring hard-working doctors. The contrast between Frankenstein and these stories is not only between a vision of science as bad and a vision of science as good, but also between a vision of science as extraordinary and a vision of science as ordinary. Victor Frankenstein’s scientific work is both bad and extraordinary, and the novel suggests that those two features are correlated, but they need not be. When Lord Byron praises Sir Isaac Newton as “the sole mortal who could grapple, / Since Adam—with a fall—or with an apple” he presents an image of the scientist as superhero that is as old as the image of the mad scientist. Conversely, when, on the TV show Breaking Bad, the chemist Walter White becomes a murderous drug dealer, his descent is instigated by a desire to provide for his family, not by the corrupting or alienating influence of his scientific education. These two features—the relative goodness of a scientist and the relative ordinariness of scientific practice—do not parallel one another; rather, they are orthogonal variables in the construction of stories about science. Many cultural critics have commented on the dual visions of science as bad and science as good,1 but the contrast between conceptions of science as extraordinary and science as v everyday has largely gone unexamined. Both extraordinary science and everyday science emerged over time in the popular imagination, but the former gained prominence earlier than the latter, at a time when science itself was relatively young and alien. Popular conceptions of everyday science came to prominence more gradually and more recently. Examples of texts that evince this conception can be found in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and around 1926 it is clearly visible in several different literary contexts at once. This is not to say that 1926 is a watershed, but rather that the year epitomizes the movement of science into everyday life in the popular imagination. By examining how popular conceptions of science emerged at this time, we can understand explicitly the unspoken but ubiquitous notions of science that run throughout our culture today. Stories of everyday science gained popularity because more and more nonscientists became aware of how science was relevant to them. Many new technologies helped shape America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—electric lights and wireless radios, Model T’s and telephones, aspirins and airplanes, mimeographs and mustard gas. These technologies, explicitly framed as products of science, transformed work, leisure, and warfare. At the same time, developments in evolutionary biology, medicine, and the social sciences meant that humans could increasingly be objects of scientific study. More and more aspects of people’s lives could be understood scientifically, from how they worked to how they dreamed to how they had sex. By 1926, even people with little scientific expertise had a strong appreciation for the significant degree to which science helped construct the material reality of their everyday lives as well as their concept of that reality. And with that appreciation came new ways of being in and talking about the world. This book explores key texts that reveal how those ways grew to be pervasive in our culture. vi Table of Contents DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii PREFACE v LIST OF FIGURES ix LIST OF APPENDICES x ABSTRACT xi CHAPTER 1 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND EVERYDAY REALITY 1 FROM “THIS ROUGH MAGIC” TO “THIS MAN GODDARD” Case study: The Great Gatsby 5 The cultural status of science: A brief history 10 The emergence of science as an everyday thing 24 Expertise and literary characters 29 Literary realism in the depiction of everyday science 35 Genres, their users, and the cultures of letters that coalesce around them 38 CHAPTER 2 “EXTRAVAGANT FICTION TODAY…….COLD FACT TOMORROW.” 46 AMAZING STORIES AND FAMILIAR SCIENCE FICTION “A New Sort of Magazine”: The inaugural issue 47 Science fiction theory and familiarization 53 “Eyes of a poet”: The scientist’s friends and family 61 Electro-importing: Personal connections through technology 69 Space soap operas: Women and domesticity in Amazing Stories 75 Women as readers 76 Clare Winger Harris 79 Lee Hawkins Garby 86 Technological utopianism: Science and the great war 94 Amazing Stories’ weird tale: “The Colour Out of Space” 99 vii CHAPTER 3 “CRIMINALS ARE SO DAMNED UNSCIENTIFIC” 108 BLACK MASK AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE GUT The image of the detective 109 “A new type of detective story” 115 Crime under a microscope 122 Calculation, observation, ingenuity: The great detective as Renaissance man 128 The scientific detective: Philo Vance 135 “Play the game alone”: Independence from authority 139 “That little fat guy”: The detective’s body 146 “From Adam's apple to ankles”: Knowledge and relationships in Red Harvest 159 “Knots in my stomach”: Intuition 162 “These are facts”: The Maltese Falcon 165 CHAPTER 4 “WHERE’S YOUR CONTROL?” 172 THE INDIVIDUAL VS. INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY IN SINCLAIR LEWIS’S ARROWSMITH “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous”: Lewis refuses the Pulitzer Prize 173 “A Standardized Citizen”: From Main Street to The Microbe Hunters 180 “Control, control, control”: The ideology of pure science 187 “How much I don’t know!”: Expertise in the colonial laboratory 193 Mis’able monasteries and men of measured merriment: Institutional authority 198 “Far from reality”: Lewis accepts the Nobel Prize 205 CONCLUSION: “I MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GREAT SCIENTIST” 208 APPENDICES 214 NOTES 235 WORKS CITED 245 viii List of Figures Figure 1. Cover of Amazing Stories, April 1926, by Frank Paul. 49 Figure 2. Currier and Ives lithograph, Central Park, Winter: The Skating Pond, 1862, 51 by Charles Parsons. Figure 3. Cover of Amazing Stories, December 1926, by Frank Paul. 80 Figure 4. Covers of Black Mask, (clockwise from top left) August 1925, November 111 1925, February 1926, April 1925. Artist unknown. Figure 5. Illustration of Sherlock Holmes accompanying A Study in Scarlet, originally 112 published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in November 1987, by D.H. Friston. Figure 6. Advertisement for blank cartridge pistol in Black Mask, February 1929. 114 Figure 7. Advertisement for Earle Liederman’s “Muscular Development” in Black 148 Mask, February 1929. Figure 8. Advertisement for Coyne Electrical School in Black Mask, February 1929. 150 Figure 9. Cover of Black Mask, September 1929. Artist unknown. 170 Figure 10. Advertisement for Chemical Institute of New York in Amazing Stories, 226 October 1926. ix List of Appendices Appendix I: The Genealogy of Science Fiction and the Problem of Gernsback 214 Appendix II: Nontraditional Expertise in Amazing Stories 224 Appendix III: Black Mask and the Birth of a Hardboiled Culture of Letters 228 Appendix IV: J.S. Fletcher and the Scientific McGuffin 232 x Abstract This dissertation explores a key period in the development of science as an everyday thing as reflected in the important cultures of letters containing the pulp magazines Amazing Stories and Black Mask and the novel Arrowsmith, respectively science fiction, hardboiled detective fiction, and the realist novel.