MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD by JANE E. GATEWOOD (Under the Direction of Adam Parkes) ABSTRACT By turning to the advent of moving images in the 1870s, I demonstrate that the aesthetic and formal shifts evident in the modern novel are not only the embodiment of subjective vision and a reaction to changing norms of aesthetic representation informed by technological mediation, but that these changes occurred much earlier than has previously been thought. By tracing a dialectic between moving images and modern novelists, I demonstrate that these authors and their progeny were not only interested in moving images but that the aesthetic of moving images and the debates surrounding them were integral to their developing literary style and form. Rather than situate the predominant link between cinema and modern literature in works of the Twenties and Thirties, this study explores the nascent relationship between the written word and visual media emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that while early film very often aspired to novelistic narrative, the novel likewise made compelling turns toward moving images much earlier than previously thought. My project will link two key progenitors of literary modernity—Henry James and Joseph Conrad—with early motion pictures and emergent cinema. By following such a path, we arrive at a more comprehensive picture of the form, as well as the function, of the modern novel. INDEX WORDS: Eadward Muybridge, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, cinema, modernism, moving images, motion pictures, instantaneous photography MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD by JANE E. GATEWOOD BA, Emory University, 1998 MA, Montana State University-Bozeman, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Jane E. Gatewood All Rights Reserved MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD by JANE E. GATEWOOD Major Professor: Adam Parkes Committee: Jed Rasula Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2010 iv DEDICATION For my parents, who have always supported me unconditionally. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Numerous people, libraries, archives, and institutions have contributed to the completion of this dissertation, and I am indebted to them. Several people offered significant guidance and input on this project, and I thank Adam Parkes and Laura Wright both for their initial and continued insight and guidance regarding its direction and construction. The UGA English Department and my faculty committee—Adam Parkes, Jed Rasula, and Hugh Ruppersburg—have all contributed considerable insight to this project and to them I am more than grateful. Numerous archives and archivists have assisted with my research and with locating materials, and to whom I am immeasurably indebted: Michael Boggan and Stephen Roper at the British Library; Fred Baum at the Library of Congress; Sean Delaney and many others at the British Film Institute; Ron Magliozzi and Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie Morris and Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library of Harvard University; Stephen Crook, Nina Schneider, Isaac Gewirtz, and Philip Milito of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I thank Dean Maureen Grasso, the University of Georgia Graduate School, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their financial support of my research. Likewise, I thank the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, London; and the School for Advanced Study, University of London, for their intellectual and logistical support. Goodenough College and the Goodenough Trust deserve thanks for the wonderful accommodation offered in the heart of London, and the UGA at Oxford Program, William Kretzschmar, and Ralph Hanna deserve thanks for first introducing me vi to archives in the U.K. I would also like to thank the archivists at the Beineke Library, Yale University for their assistance with Joseph Conrad’s “film play,” and I would like to thank Peter Underwood of Pennington Solicitors (U.K.) for permission to cite it. Kavita Pandit and the staff of the UGA Office of International Education have all offered collegial assistance and support for this project and to them I am more than indebted. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their intellectual and emotional guidance and support: James McClung, Kalpen Trivedi, Christine Albright, Peter Appel, Elizabeth Inglesby, Rachel Norwood, and Kathleen Anderson have all offered academic and moral support and deserve recognition and thanks; Winfield Terry deserves special appreciation for the consideration and understanding he has shown for this project during the time I have known him; and my family—Charles, Joan, Andrew, and Claudia Gatewood—and my many pets have all been more than accommodating during the time I have devoted to this venture, and I thank them for their unconditional love and support for me and for this endeavor. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................1 2 Unseen Views: Photographic Motion Studies and the Art of Fiction .............30 Eadweard Muybrige’s Motion Studies .....................................................36 Instantaneous Vision and Henry James’s Modern Realism ......................41 Henry James and the Muybridge Debate ..................................................45 Realist Vision and the Art of Fiction ........................................................57 3 The Image of Movement and the Crisis of Representation ............................76 Henry James, Moving Images, and Cinema .............................................80 Unnatural Vision and Uncanny Views .....................................................87 Spectatorial Perspectives and Shifting Points of View .............................95 4 Rendering Visuality: Conrad’s Visual Fictions ............................................107 Joseph Conrad and Visual Narrative Structures .....................................111 Instantaneity in The Secret Agent ...........................................................121 Aesthetics of Indeterminacy ...................................................................128 5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................134 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................140 viii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 2.1: Eadweard Muybridge "Sally Gardner Running at a 1:40 Gait" ......................32 Figure 2.2: Comic: “New Zoöpraxiscopic Views of an Eminent Actor in Action” ..........51 Figure 2.3: Comic: “Country Fair [After Muybridge]” .....................................................51 Figure 2.4: Comic: “Full Cry” ...........................................................................................52 Figure 2.5: Ernest Meissonier, Friedland-1807 .................................................................65 Figure 3.1: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 1, Male Walking ...............99 Figure 4.1: Pneumatic Regulator for Clocks ....................................................................124 Figure 4.2: Pneumatic Clock............................................................................................124 There is scarcely any branch of animal mechanics which has given rise to more labour and greater controversy than the paces of the horse.– Etienne-Jules Marey, 1873 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.-- Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight1 The first motion pictures, “movies,” were not cinema. To historians of the cinema, this statement will offer nothing new, but to historians of literature it suggests alternative perspectives from which to view the history of literature’s connection with the movies, making the easy conflation of terms such as “cinema,” “film,” “motion pictures,” and “movies” problematic in literary studies. Distinguishing between “cinema” and “motion pictures” forces us to shift the critical focus upon the intersection between motion pictures and literature temporally backward from the 1920s and 1930s to the late nineteenth century when photographic moving images first emerged.2 Assessing and analyzing this earlier shift is precisely what my study sets out to do. By doing so, I extend recent arguments linking literary modernism with cinema back into the 1870s, into what Tom Gunning has called the “chaotic curiosity shop of early modern life,” demonstrating 1 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Theory and History of Literature V. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 161. 2 Photographic motion pictures should be distinguished from animated drawing projected through magic lanterns which were extant as early as the seventeenth century. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, ed. Charles Harpole,