Abstract
This chapter examines the way knowledge is constructed in fiction by H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. Wells’ short story “A Slip Under the Microscope” (1896) and Conrad’s Lord Jim are here considered in terms of how perceptual experience might be modelled as a complex of networks which disrupt and disperse meaning. As a result, knowledge is not only necessarily subjective but must be reconstructed from a range of atomised fragments. Such reconstructions then form a fractal episteme by which the complexities of a newly networked world might be understood by individual observers, but, as will be seen, the episteme presents knowledge to be fluid and unfixed, so that it is never fully settled.
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Notes
- 1.
William Henry Wills, “The Golden City,” Household Words, 29 June 1850, 313.
- 2.
My aim here is not to contribute to what Ketabgian calls a critical “anti-industrial stance” in which technology is presented as antithetical to the true, human aims of novelists. Rather, the fictional episteme explored in this chapter makes clear use of technologies and machines in order to circumvent exactly this kind of antithesis. Such an episteme roughly correlates with the “trained judgement” that Daston and Galison identify in early twentieth-century science. According to Daston and Galison, in the opening years of the twentieth century, the inability of mechanical “blind sight” to account for anomaly and to define normative bounds generated a development of “physiognomic sight” which, not unlike the fractal episteme I find in 1890s’ fiction, required the observer to actively “synthesise, highlight, and grasp relationships in ways that were not reducible to mechanical procedure.” See Ketabgian, 6–11; Daston and Galison, 314.
- 3.
See Daston and Galison, 11–16.
- 4.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 153–154.
- 5.
H.G. Wells, “A Slip Under the Microscope,” in The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories, ed. Patrick Parrinder with notes by Andy Sawyer (London: Penguin, 2007), 89. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
- 6.
One might think here of other literary figures who improved their social standing through learning, such as Bradley Headstone in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, whose knowledge is all “mechanically” acquired and reproduced (218).
- 7.
Joseph Conrad, Letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, 20 December 1897, in vol. 1 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 425.
- 8.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 76.
- 9.
The increasing specialisation of the sciences in this period might also be considered in terms of systems and networks.
- 10.
Conrad’s relationship to technological and scientific advances was often of an interested but critical sceptic. For a general overview, see Matthew Rubery, “Science and Technology,” in Joseph Conrad in Context, ed. Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 237–244; Tiffany Tsao, “Conrad and Exploratory Science,” The Conradian, 33, no. 1 (2008): 43–56.
- 11.
Cedric Watts makes this point about Lord Jim in A Preface to Conrad (London: Longman, 1982), 128–129.
- 12.
This is a recurrent idea in critical views of Conrad’s fiction. Edward W. Said succinctly explains it: “Between the recollecting narrator and the actual tale there is a barrier that is eternally closed.” Ian Watt adds that Conrad “often used delayed decoding” in order to represent the process in which “the semantic gap between the sensations aroused in the individual by an object or event, and their actual cause or meaning, was slowly closed in his consciousness.” See Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 88; Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 270. See also, John G. Peters, Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41–42.
- 13.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Allan H. Simmons (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 29. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
- 14.
Reuben Sanchez argues that Conrad’s narrative progresses in a circular manner oppositional to the apparently linear motion of history, reflecting what Sanchez sees as Jim’s rejection of fact. This might be considered in relation with the historiographical practices that were discussed in Chap. 4. See Reuben Sanchez, “Conrad’s ‘Serried Circle of Facts’ in Lord Jim,” Conradiana, 43, no. 1 (2011): 61–83.
- 15.
Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), 5.
- 16.
Thomas Richards considers Joseph Conrad as an exception to a trend he identifies of Victorian writers contributing to a collective fantasy of a “coherent imperial whole” (7). See Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993).
- 17.
Kidd, Social Evolution, 7. Kidd’s vision of networked society is discussed alongside Nordau in the previous chapter.
- 18.
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 238.
- 19.
Tsao, “Conrad and Exploratory Science,” 46–47.
- 20.
In her account of the psychological discourse of the period, Suzy Anger, for example, notes: “coupled with the emphasis on memory’s deficiencies is the frequently articulated belief that there is (or was) a real way that things happened and that we must learn how to counter memory’s misinterpretations in order to get it right.” Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 170.
- 21.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition, 4th ed. (London: Norton, 2006), 5.
- 22.
Pamela Thurschwell gives a fascinating reading of Henry James’ novella In the Cage (1898) about a telegraph office alongside James’ relationship with his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, to argue that communication technologies such as the telegraph and the typewriter were crucial in “creating transgressive fantasies of access to others who would otherwise be inaccessible.” Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87.
- 23.
Ashley Chantler associates the aunt with the readers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine who have been “manipulated” by “false reports, propaganda, lies, the regurgitated.” See Ashley Chantler, “From Cowper to Conrad: Authenticity at the End of the Century,” in Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900: Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey, ed. Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies, Philip Shaw (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 185.
- 24.
Chantler, “From Cowper to Conrad,” 185.
- 25.
Nordau, Interpretation of History, 17.
- 26.
Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” 216.
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Potter, J. (2018). The Web of Realities in H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad: A Fractal Episteme. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_8
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