53.1.Worth.Pdf

Access Provided by National University of Singapore at 03/30/11 2:26AM GMT Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897–1901 Aaron Worth I. eflecting in hisOutline of History (1920) on the past glories of imperial China, and particularly on its precocious invention of Rgunpowder, H. G. Wells marvels that the Chinese “[do] not to this day dominate the world culturally and politically” (635). In specu- lating about the possible causes of this once-great civilization’s puta- tive stagnation, Wells rejects any facilely racialist explanation, invoking only to dismiss, for example, the theory of an innately “conservative” Asian brain, biologically predisposed towards cultural stasis (636). Rather, he locates the seeds of China’s “backwardness,” and therefore the distal cause of its imperial retrogression, at the level of distributed consciousness—namely, in Chinese media, specifically the writing systems that, in Wells’s judgment, must inhibit rather than facilitate the kind of advanced thought and action indispensable to a people with designs of global “domination” (226–27). The symbolic technologies of the Chinese, in other words—their “pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms” (226)—in effect become the tea leaves through whose scrutiny Wells believes he may read the fate of the society that has devised them. Earlier, he had called the Chinese script-system “an instrument which is probably too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and too inflexible in its form to meet the modern need for Abstract: This essay argues that information technologies profoundly inflected late- Victorian conceptions of imperial systems, focusing on the fin-de-siècle writing of H. G. Wells. In imperial satires like The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon, Wells elaborated monitory parables that used technologies like the telegraph and new wire- less to construct an imperial chronotope associating territorial expansion with cultural extinction. Meanwhile, in his prophetic writing of the same period, Wells envisioned technologically saturated utopias premised upon the eradication of all difference. The case of Wells illustrates how media, as prostheses of thought, helped not only to articu- late the imperial anxieties and fantasies of the age but also to gloss over the ideological faultlines between them. AUTUMN 2010 66 AARON WORTH simple, swift, exact, and lucid communications” (227), a fact with ominous implications for its future as a world power: N ow, it is manifest that here in the Chinese writing is a very peculiar and complex system of sign-writing. Probably it is the complexity of her speech and writing, more than any other imaginable cause, that has made China to-day politically, socially, and individually a vast pool of backward people rather than the foremost power in the whole world. (226–27) More than any other imaginable cause—the most unreconstructed McLu- hanite could scarcely adopt a more uncompromising stance with respect to the power of technologies of communication to shape 1 profoundly the cultures within which they operate. In fact, the confident diagnosis offered in this passage consti- tutes a wholly representative moment within Wells’s history of everything; it is a text informed by a thoroughgoing technological determinism, and an abiding belief in the tendency of communications technologies in particular to influence the essential character, and ultimate destiny, of imperial systems. Wells devotes much space to the emergence of various media, from alluvial clay and papyrus to submarine telegraph cables, usually in imperial contexts: an early chapter focused on the empires of antiquity typically introduces each empire with an account of its charac- teristic media, from Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Peruvian quipus, while a subsequent chapter on writing systems reads rather like a roll call of those same empires. Media often function for Wells as lenses for descrying the essence of a culture: he adduces, for example, a supposed resemblance between Mayan writing and the scrib- bling of European madmen in pronouncing the pre-Columbian civiliza- tions to have been irrational and essentially “aberrant” (their “obsession” with bloodshed seems to follow as a matter of course from the unnatural “elaboration” of their script) (194–95). But technologies of communication appear in more active roles as well: when Wells comes to discuss the European colonial enterprises of the modern era (China’s loss is their gain), he credits, or blames, “the increased speed and certainty of trans- port and telegraphic communications,” seemingly above all other factors, for their emergence (1168). And the United States, in Wells’s view, owes its (paradoxically) organic unity entirely to the nineteenth century’s “new 2 means of communication” (1131). But while the composition of the Outline was avowedly spurred by the Great War, the crucible of such ideas should be sought earlier, at VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 53, NO. 1 IM PERIAL TraNSMISSIONS 67 the end of the nineteenth century, the period during which Wells produced the pioneering fiction for which he is best remembered, and a critical moment in the histories of modern imperialism and media alike. The half-decade or so during which virtually all of Wells’s enduring scientific romances appeared, in rapid succession The( Time Machine [1895], The Island of Doctor Moreau [1896], The Invisible Man [1897], The War of the Worlds [1898], When the Sleeper Wakes [1899], and The First Men in the Moon [1901]), as well as his first forays into the realm of cultural and social prophesy (particularly his Anticipations [1901]), saw Britain sprawling toward its imperial climax; it was the heyday of new imperialism with its attendant controversies, vicarious exhilarations, and anxieties of decline. It was also, as Richard Menke and others have shown, a time of fluid, rapidly evolving media ecologies, certainly in the industri- alized West. Moreover, Britain’s empire and its media were enmeshed in a symbiotic relationship, as information technologies were (and are) indispensable to projects of colonial expansion and control—a relationship well understood by Britons, and amply documented in recent years by Daniel Headrick, the outstanding historian of technology and empire. But how did this vital relationship register within imaginative writing of the period? In particular, how did media help to shape the ways in which writers like Wells thought about empires, especially their own? Nearly two decades ago, in his pioneering study The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (1993), Thomas Richards pointed to the importance of the burgeoning fetishization of information in the later nineteenth century within imperial fantasies of the period. Rightly seeing in the rapidly expanding colonial systems of the day a collective crisis of conceptual, as well as political, integration (though he did not put it quite this way), Richards looked to the Victo- rian “knowledge explosion” (5) for something like a master trope used to impose a comforting unity upon the increasingly slippery idea of 3 empire. He found it in the figure of the archive—the collective imagi- nation, crucially but not exclusively within works of fiction, of a vast, Borgesian compendium of knowledge serving to prop up the vulner- able fantasy of British colonial supremacy. Calling the archive “the central myth of the British Empire” (57), and tracing its multifarious incarnations within novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Richards provided a stimulating model for how a work of literary criticism might engage the relationship between Victorian colonial and information systems. AUTUMN 2010 68 AARON WORTH In the years since the publication of Richards’s study, a rich and extensive body of work has emerged within Victorian studies, transforming our understanding of the inflection of nineteenth- century literary production by the new information technologies of the period. Some scholars (Laura Otis is the exemplary figure here) have sought to demonstrate how the emergent metaphor of the communications network seeped across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth century. Other work has illuminated the effects of the new media environment upon the human sensorium, from Ivan Kreilkamp’s phonographic reading of Joseph Conrad to John Picker’s investigation of Victorian soundscapes. The interplay of literary form and new media has been compellingly delineated in the work of Menke, among others. But while such work has often generated valuable local insights regarding the relationship between technology and colonialism in literature, sustained explorations of the topic have not been forth- coming. “The imperial network” may have joined “the imperial archive” as a convenient critical commonplace, but recent studies of nineteenth-century information technologies have kept the colonial world at the margins. Menke’s indispensable Telegraphic Realism: Victo- rian Fiction and Other Information Systems is a salient case in point, reserving as it does its most substantive engagement with empire for the final two pages of its “Coda,” in the brief discussion ofCranford (1851–53) that closes the book. And yet, as we will see, Victorian figura- tions of empire are largely the imaginative progeny of a sustained, reciprocal, and by no means mechanistic exchange between these two historically parallel, similarly fluid, and intimately interlinked conceptual domains. Wells’s fin-de-siècle writing

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