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Exporting the Standard Measure: the Function of Travel in Selected Writings of Richard Harding Davis

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Exporting the Standard Measure: the Function of Travel in Selected Writings of Richard Harding Davis Exporting the Standard Measure: The Function of Travel in Selected Writings of Richard Harding Davis Mark Sullivan A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 Copyright Statement This work is the intellectual property of the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed in the owner(s) of the Intellectual Property Rights. Abstract Through a close reading of selected publications of the American travel writer Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) this thesis illustrates how travel writing is essentially cartographic in nature and will examine how travel writing creates maps in and through discourse. Further, this thesis contends that an approach informed by concepts within the Deleuze and Guattarian framework is ideally suited to a critical engagement with travel writing as it is concerned with the occupation of and traversal through space and a pragmatic approach to semiotics. The theoretical perspective is taken from select works of Deleuze and Guattari. Specifically, it adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to a pragmatic semantics and the consideration of reciprocal processes at work within discourse in order to consider and interrogate the discursive mapping at work within Davis’s travel, amongst wider reflections on Davis’s travel writing. The first chapter undertakes a critical survey of Davis and demonstrates the critical neglect of him. The second justifies the choice of Deleuze and Guattari as the theoretical base of the thesis. The third chapter considers Davis’s domestic travelogue, The West from a Car Window (1892) and engages with the mythologised West that permeated the culture of which Davis was a part. The fourth chapter interrogates the discursive rendering of Belize and Venezuela as they appear in Davis’s travelogue Three Gringos in South America and Venezuela (1896) wherein Davis demonstrates two very different and distinct discursive practices. The fifth chapter provides a close reading of some of Davis’s substantial war correspondence, specifically Cuba in War Time (1897), With both Armies (1900), and With the Allies (1914), and considers the manner in which discourse represents the contest for, invasion and eventual occupation of space. The thesis builds on the idea that travel writing is necessarily a translation of an ostensibly foreign culture, territory or people via a domestic regime of signification, and examines this act of translation as a discursive cartography, a mapping of territory, culture and people. Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Richard Harding Davis and the Case for Travel .................................................... 19 1.1 The critical History of Davis: A ‘literary limbo’ ............................................................... 19 1.2 Toward travel: Richard Harding Davis ‘has been everywhere’ ......................................... 32 Chapter 2: Towards a Discursive Cartography ........................................................................ 49 2.1 The Major and the Minor ................................................................................................... 52 2.2 Reciprocity ......................................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 3: Davis’s Arborescent West ...................................................................................... 72 3.1 Fragmenting the West ........................................................................................................ 81 3.2 Oklahoma City: ‘a freak of our civilisation’ ...................................................................... 91 3.3 The Axiomatic West .......................................................................................................... 95 Chapter 4: The Tracing and the Map ..................................................................................... 108 4.1 The Pragmatics of the Tracing and Map .......................................................................... 111 4.2 A Tracing ......................................................................................................................... 116 4.3 A Map .............................................................................................................................. 123 Chapter 5. Davis’s War Correspondence ............................................................................... 136 5.1 The Axiomatic War Machine........................................................................................... 141 5.2 Belligerents ...................................................................................................................... 159 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 167 A Discursive Cartography...................................................................................................... 167 The Formulation of Home ..................................................................................................... 171 The In-between of Travel and Becoming .............................................................................. 178 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 189 Introduction My aim in this thesis is to illustrate how travel writing is essentially cartographic in nature through the application of a close reading of select publications of the American travel writer Richard Harding Davis (1864 – 1916). These close readings will illustrate the cartographic nature of travel writing and the semantic, political, economic and stylistic make up of that cartography. The driving theme of the thesis is then the manner in which travel writing, and specifically Davis’s travel writing, creates maps in discourse. Supporting this close reading will be a deployment of several concepts within the collaborative works of Giles Deleuze (1925 –1995) and Felix Guattari (1930 – 1992). That Davis is not an extremely well known or even regarded writer will be illustrated in the first chapter which will undertake a critical survey of his writing and existing responses to it. The principal conclusion of this survey is that his hitherto neglected travel writing provides a novel discourse previously unconsidered in any serious critical study outside of some marginal passing references. It is also the contention of this thesis that Deleuze and Guattari’s critical work is often applied to a selective, even restricted collection of authors, so the application of their work to a reading of Davis provides a secondary novelty to the approach of this thesis. The previous applications of Deleuze and Guattari and the different approach this thesis intends to take is considered in more detail in the second chapter wherein the shortcomings of previous applications of Deleuze and Guattari are considered. There are certainly more well-known American journalists and indeed travel writers than Davis: there are war correspondents and travel writers whose output could provide sufficient scope for a thesis concerned with the discursive representation of the traversal, occupation, semantic make up, and movement through space. Yet a reason to focus on Davis is that despite a modicum of celebrity enjoyed in his lifetime, his reputation has not survived. This means that his travel writing has not been subjected to anything that could be considered 1 a close reading before. This lack of previous consideration presents a very real gap in existing knowledge that this thesis aims in part to fill. Davis, active primarily from 1886 to 1915, was providing copy for numerous magazines, publishing collected works of travel articles and visiting as a journalist a broad spectrum of geographies encompassing Russia, Japan, South America, Africa and Europe. The first chapter will expand and articulate the existing gap in critical readings of Davis, and specifically the gap in close readings of Davis’s travel writing and make the case for its value in the context of the thesis. Selected works from Davis’s travel writing output will then provide the discursive basis of the thesis. To return to the substance of Davis’s output and the extent of it. Davis was a writer of substantive volume and the resulting output was so extensive that Henry Cole Quinby’s work, Richard Harding Davis: A Bibliography (1924), a book which serves the sole function of cataloguing Davis’s entire published and unpublished work, runs to two hundred and ninety- three pages. The following chronology is taken from Quinby’s book: 1864 Apr. 18, R.H.D. born at Philadelphia 1879-80 Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia 1880 Sept. to June, 1881, Swarthmore College. 1881 Sept. to June 1882, Ulrich’s Prep. School, Bethlehem, Pa. 1882 Aug. to June, 1885, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa. Editor and chief contributor to The Leigh Burr. 1883 Published Adventures of My Freshman (first book). 1885 Jan., trip to New Orleans as correspondence
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