Laboratory Literature: Science and Fiction in the Place of Production. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Matthew James Hadley IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Cesare Casarino October 2013 © Matthew Hadley 2013 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their patience, generosity, and care as teachers, mentors, and friends. To my advisor Cesare Casarino, whose ship I boarded shortly after coming to graduate school, I thank you for never making me walk the plank, even when I wanted to myself, and for showing me how the ship could carry me to the laboratory. There are a few people who deserve special thanks: Paige Sweet who read, edited, and commented on many incoherent and semi-incoherent versions of my chapters; Matt Stoddard who told me when I first asked for his help, and before he had done anything, that I should thank him profusely and gratuitously—I’ll just say that he was right, I should; And Laura Zebuhr, whose generosity and guidance with this dissertation, which carried me through to the end, taught me the meaning of true friendship. A warm thank you to my parents and my sisters for their unwavering love and support. Finally, to Chris Durler, whose help extends far beyond the practical and concrete, I offer my deepest gratitude. Graduate school changes a person, and I was lucky enough to share a home with someone who not only stood by my side from the very beginning, but also took on the more formidable challenge of growing with me. ii Dedication To my daughter Sylvie, who came into the world just before this dissertation, and will forever be first. iii Abstract In this dissertation, I claim that the figure of the scientific laboratory in literature serves as a means for the literary text to reflect upon its own conditions of possibility, its processes of production, and its socio-cultural functions, all of which enact an autocritique of literature by literature. In representing production within the scientific laboratory, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (chapter one) and H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau (chapter two) demonstrate how this space of scientific labor is a model for the space of literary production. Elaborating the claim that an isomorphy exists between these two spaces, I offer new insights into the processes and effects of literary inscription. With this focus on literary production, I read these literary texts from the perspective of the material and affective processes that constitute a literary object rather than from a point of view on the finalized product alone. I argue that the novel itself becomes a laboratory, a space of experimentation in and through which one enacts and reenacts the myriad living processes associated with literary discourse. In my third chapter, I further develop this perspective through a reading of bodies and social groups in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy that take on the qualities of scientific or literary laboratories, and often both at once. I specifically pay attention to Butler’s use of genetics and genetic engineering in both the content and formal characteristics of her novels. Here, I take the laboratory as a concept for thinking through both literary labor, as well as the function of speculative fictions and utopian thought in the biotech industry and the life sciences. Finally, in my fourth and final chapter on Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus, I consider the iv function of the laboratory as a social apparatus for not only producing discourses on (human) life, but also for bringing new forms of life themselves into existence. As in the previous chapters, the laboratory is here a site in and through which the work’s conditions of possibility are made visible, enabling the film to critique the roles of venture capital, marketing, and finance in contemporary forms of laboratory labor that come to blur the line between the fictional and the scientific. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: A LABORATORY OF ONE’S OWN………..………………………………………………..…1 CHAPTER ONE: MARY SHELLEY’S “LITERARY LABORATORY”: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE EMERGENCE OF LABORATORY SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE…...28 CHAPTER TWO: WELL’S “STUBBORN BEAST FLESH”: THE LABORATORY, CONTROL, AND RESISTANCE IN THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU………...……………………….…..95 CHAPTER THREE: THE GENETIC ENGINEERING OF OCTAVIA BUTLER: BIOCAPITAL AND THE LABORATORY IN THE XENOGENESIS TRILOGY……………………………….……….142 CHAPTER FOUR: RIDLEY SCOTT’S PROMETHEUS: THE AMBIGUOUS PLACE OF LABOR AND THE GLOBAL LABORATORY……………………………………………………….……………211 WORKS CITED…………………………...……………………………………………...…...250 1 INTRODUCTION “A Laboratory of One’s Own” In October of 1928, Virginia Woolf gave two lectures at the Cambridge women’s colleges Newnham and Girton on the subject “Women and Fiction.” She later expanded these two talks into the book A Room of One’s Own in which Woolf tells the story of the process that led her to the deceivingly simple claim that in order to write fiction, women need money and a room of their own. I begin with a close reading of Woolf’s text/talk in order to highlight the primary concepts and dynamics at work in my dissertation overall. The text’s first claim is that her story itself will be fictional, and that the narrator is not one individual but any and all, a spokeswoman of sorts for the tradition of women writing that she considers at length: “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please--it is not a matter of any importance” (5). The immediate transposition of what she claims to be her story into a fictional register challenges the codes and conventions of the academic lecture, unsettling her text’s relationship to truth and fiction. Not only does the text produce a new type of reader or listener, a new hybrid interpretive ear, it also presents a narrative that cannot be passively recorded, as with facts, but rather must be interpreted and engaged. As she says, “One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.” Woolf constructs her listener as an actor in the drama who must “seek out this truth...to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping” (5). In this sense, one can 2 already witness Woolf’s attempts to conceptualize the space of her lectures—and by extension the space of her writing—as a site of experimentation. Furthermore, this talk is not presented as a final product of her labor, redrawn, cleaned, and perfectly shaped into a visible truth. Rather, Woolf invites the audience into her own laboratory, giving them a tour through the place and time of her labor that led to her central claim. Woolf’s invitation to speak on woman and fiction should be situated within the historical context of a moral panic in Britain that revolved around Radclyffe Hall’s racey novel The Well of Loneliness, which becomes a key allusion in her address. Hall’s novel was at the center of a highly publicized obscenity trial in response to the novel’s depiction of an explicit lesbian relationship, one based explicitly on sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s theories in Psychopathia Sexualis. This spectacularized trial opposed a literary intelligentsia to the governmental and social forces of censorship, and posed the questions of women, sexuality, writing, and their relationships as a central problematic for the time. This controversy transformed Britain itself into a space of social experimentation and investigation through which dissenting voices clashed with the deployment of an entire apparatus of reactionary social forces aimed to stabilize the turbulent problematic of sex, woman, and writing. Along with a wide range of social actors, Woolf herself contributed an antagonistic voice to the clamor.1 In the fifth chapter of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf brings the raging public debate into the room, so to speak, through a direct naming of the chief magistrate residing at the obscenity trial, Sir Chartres Biron. He is named, or more precisely, his “figure” snaps into view, during the narrator’s reenactment of a critical reading of a novel. The 1 For further information on the controversy surrounding Hall’s novel and its central role in the emergence of modern lesbian culture in Britain see Doan 1-30. 3 figure of this man is so poignantly seared onto the mind of this fictional speaker that she stops in mid-sentence (marked in the text by an ellipsis) to assure herself that this man is literally not present: “I am sorry to break so abruptly,” she continues after the caesura, “Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me?” (82). The reference to the magistrate, one who was making headlines at the time of her lectures, places before the audience/reader the sensationalized sexual scandal that had consumed the public eye. This was not the first time the figure of a man had ruptured the narrator’s train of thought (for example, she is channeled onto the proper path for women, or barred entrance to the male only library by University functionaries). However, Biron is the only one of these otherwise nameless regulatory personae mentioned by name, a name that functions to ground what she is about to say in a concurrent and heated social and literary controversy in Britain regarding precisely the topic of discussion suggested to her from the beginning.