The Made Man and the “Minor” Novel:
Erewhon, ANT, and Empire
Anna Neill
T
o draw a line from F. R. Leavis to Bruno Latour would be to trace
how the concept of the “great novel” features in literary criticism’s
recent de-privileging of the human (Latour, “Agency” 9). For Leavis,
of course, novels that earned a place in the Great Tradition captured the essentially moral and psychological characteristics of human life; they demonstrated
a “reverent openness” before such life and an awareness of its possibilities (9).
Above all, they preserved the spontaneity of human minds in a world of utilitarian calculation, allowing the organic impulse to triumph over the mechanical one. Latour, whose work has had enormous influence on the critical turn
against anthropocentrism, has recently defined the “great novel” as a medium
for capturing the entanglements of matter—human and non-human, organic
and non-organic—as it “disseminate[s] the sources of actions” across a vast
field of actors (“Agency” 8). Its form recognizes the networked agency of the
non-human along with the human. And as if to check literary criticism’s lingering Leavisite privileging of the organic, he advocates for a fiction that attempts
Abstract: Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the
complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through
numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine
firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human
things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self-proclaimed “minor” novel,
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications
of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon
shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate
underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer.
Anna Neill (aneill@ku.edu) is Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is
the author of British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce (Palgrave Macmillan,
2002) and Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel (Ohio
State UP, 2013). Her current work includes a forthcoming article in Textual Practice, titled
“Epigenetic Emergence: Reading for Growth in Jane Eyre,” and a monograph in progress,
“Strange Stories and the Descent of Mind.”
VICTORIAN STUDIES, Volume 60, Number 1, pp. 53–73.
Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.60.1.03
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the “interpretation of machines” and gives voice to the hybrid entities generating and generated by technological innovation (Aramis viii).
Latour’s example of a “great novel” is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
(1867). The lengthy nineteenth-century novel with its many-threaded plots
seems a likely choice because it is sensitive to what Charles Dickens called
the “connexion . . . between many people in the innumerable histories of this
world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs are curiously brought together”
(Bleak House [1852–53] 235). Such connections are in turn enabled by manifold agentic forces in which the human does not assume any special status.
Indeed, in Dickens’s writing, connection is assisted by what Hippolyte Taine
described as “an enthusiasm . . . that will make a sort of human” out of a “vulgar
object” (339). These forces and sources of social realignment therefore include
everything from the petty objects of everyday life to the newly-invented contraptions that feed and further industrialization and empire. The first half of this
essay will consider works by Dickens and George Eliot to show how non-human
entities, particularly machines, enable forms of physical and psychological connection that make it possible for their novels to have such enormous social
reach. I will focus on the train as one kind of machine that accrues agency
and transformatively mediates relations among numerous other actors within
far-reaching social and sympathetic networks. The second half will turn to a
self-described “lesser” novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), written and set
in a British colony. In this story, machines, including trains, are extensions
of human bodies and as a result become motive-driven agentic beings. Yet
such beings do not in this novel forge new connections in the social realm
or broaden the scope of sympathy as non-human entities do in, for example,
Eliot’s longer novels. Instead, the intertwining of human and machine in
Erewhon results ultimately in an abstraction and reification of the European
human as a “made man.” Correspondingly, this process makes way for the dispossession and exploitation of the indigenous figures in the novel, who become
less than human in a decidedly hierarchical chain of being.
In this context, my use of the terms “great” (or for Eliot, “serious”) and
“minor” or “lesser” is not evaluative, but rather identifies how the authors
and critics I am discussing represent networked relations between the human
and non-human. I will argue that the relative narrative poverty of Butler’s
Erewhon can be read as an expression of resistance to imperial, machinemediated networks and the abstractions of value that they make possible in
the labor of colonial adventurers. The made men who discover a wealth and
security in the colonies that they lacked in the metropole, the novel shows, rely
on a vast imperial infrastructure in which complex relations between human
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and machine actors make it possible for goods and capital to move rapidly
around the globe. In this interpretation, the shame that Butler professes about
his novel’s feeble plot and thinly-drawn characters appears somewhat disingenuous, for Erewhon is deliberately rejecting the rich agentic networks of what
Latour identifies as the “great novel.”
Butler’s novel teaches us that our current critical romance with antianthropocentric, actor-network-rich forms of representation forgets how a flat
ontology may play out in the history of colonial capital and empire. Even as we
have learned to read against a metaphysics that elevates the human above other
entities, or that ignores the entanglements of human subjects with non-human
objects, we need to remain alert to the histories in which the human and the
non-human find definition and agency. The point here is not to correct Latour,
for whom our habitual and philosophical quarantining of subjects from objects
has meant “withdrawing historicity from the [objective] world” (“Agency” 13).
Rather, it is to attend to the historicity of network itself. Through its “minor”
form, I propose, Erewhon attempts to do exactly that.
Latour himself reads Erewhon as a cautionary parable about the segregation of non-human agents from the realms of human passions and politics. In
the story, the Erewhonians—an isolated society hidden in the Southern Alps
of New Zealand—believe that evolution spells the eventual enslavement of
humanity to the machine. Ultimately, they prophesy, technology will arrive at
such a point that it will render humans mere parasites on the very inventions
they have brought to life. Persuaded that they must do everything they can to
prevent the monstrous eventuality of the post-human future, the Erewhonians
destroy all of their machines, or else quarantine them in museums and imprison
or execute anyone suspected of using them. In Aramis, or the Love of Technology
(1993), Latour turns Erewhon into a cautionary allegory about the silencing of
technology. As a means of giving voice to the machine, his account of the failure of Paris’s plan for a personalized rapid transit system (“The Aramis”) in the
1970s and 1980s includes a mish-mash of engineers’ reports, interviews, newspaper articles, technical documents, and other media to augment the fictional
exchange between an engineer and a Sociology professor about the demise of
the project. This assembly of voices (one whose use of documentary fragments
is novelistic in the style of Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1897]) aspires to “[restore]
freedom to all the realities involved before any one of them could succeed in
unifying the others” (Aramis ix). It aims to animate the machine by identifying the enormous cast of actors—or, more properly, actants, since their agency
does not imply consciousness—that first brought Aramis to life and then condemned it to death.
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Aramis therefore is intended to read as a “great novel” in Latour’s sense of
the term. It brings together a disparate collection of events, plans, accidents,
and ambitions that together create a historical drama, in this instance with
a non-human protagonist at its center. This form of narrative looks back to
eighteenth-century speaking “it-narratives” (narrated by coins, banknotes,
and pins). But it also recalls voluminous nineteenth-century narratives, such
as Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), where discarded matter helps to drive
the human plot and lies at the heart of a complex social web; or it invokes, as
I shall discuss below, the networks of sympathy in Eliot’s novels that ultimately
challenge human autonomy. Rather than pointing mutely to the post-human
future—as Latour suggests the Erewhonian machines do—Aramis, like these
capacious nineteenth-century precursors, seeks out and gives voice to nonhuman entities within a tangle of actants.
Victorianists have long been interested in narrative representations of
non-human objects. Victorian drawing rooms remind us, as John Plotz has put
it, how Victorians “loved their things,” as well as how these very things confirmed, expanded, and mobilized domestic English identity in an age of imperial expansion (1).1 Major studies such as Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things (1988),
Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–
1880 (2008), and Andrew H. Miller’s Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and
Victorian Narrative (1995) have traced the movement and representation of
objects within the homogenized or abstracted global spaces created and maintained by the circulation of commodities, even as these studies also recognize
the disturbances and ruptures of such spaces.2 Others, by Elaine Freedgood,
Plotz, and Armstrong (in more recent work), have shown how objects carry a
resonance not entirely reducible to the cycle of production and consumption,
evoking rich material histories and provoking affective attachments that belong
to other kinds of flows and transfers.3 Perhaps most significantly here, Caroline
Levine has foregrounded how the demotion of human actors occurs in networked space: the lengthy Victorian novel affords the depiction of a complex
layering and overlapping of networks in which characters function as nodes,
and through which multiple invisible social forces pass and intersect. All of this
suggests that—while many of the period’s most ambitious works of fiction trace
the dance of subjects and objects within vast commercial, imperial, industrial,
and social networks—objects, including those objects that Victorians made,
cannot be understood entirely within human-driven systems, nor can their
identity and reach be circumscribed by human desire.4
So how do we assess the role of non-human things, especially mechanical
things, in a fiction whose representational reach remains modest? Despite its
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reference to Erewhon, Latour’s twentieth-century Parisian saga really looks back
to the great British nineteenth-century novel in which objects can be emancipated from human consciousness within vast actant networks that individual
minds cannot grasp. On the other hand, Butler’s first-person, somewhat formulaic, novella-length account of the manners of a remote and isolated people does not have scope enough to capture such fantastic webs of agency. In
Latour’s reading, the suppression and silencing of the machines that threaten
to take over in Erewhon is a metaphor for the way that scientific objectivity
dispenses with all non-human agency. But read as a story about colonial New
Zealand, the novel shows us how these mechanical entities become mobilized
within imperial networks precisely because they carry an agency that is at once
independent of human will and desire, and also capable of acting upon these.
Butler reminds us that, even as we try to respect their ontologies and recognize our entanglements with them, such entities are easily reabsorbed into the
stream of capital. Despite the richly interwoven plots of realist novels, then,
Erewhon is paradoxically more alert to the colonial dimensions of narrativized
networks than its more dilatory and metropolitan literary cousins.
The perpetual entanglement of human and non-human agents is richly
portrayed in what might be described as the great novels of the global North. I
will begin with works by Dickens and Eliot that foreground the role of machines
and other non-humans in actor networks, even where the network is the conduit for distinctly human experiences and exchanges of sympathy. The narrative consciousness of these novels outdistances, even rejects, a humanism that
locates narrative authority in the mind. In an implicit challenge to these ambitious narrative forms, I will argue, Erewhon shows how networks that embrace
the motives and machinations of the non-human may not be innocent of
human desire and design. Despite its superficial satire on the narrow vision
of an anti-modern, machine-phobic culture, Erewhon can be read as skeptical of the anti-humanist, network-sensitive reach of the great novel. Reading
Butler’s story carefully can give us pause before we inadvertently re-invoke the
Great Tradition, this time for works of art in which “networks . . . link people
and objects” across great distances (Levine 21).
Novels and Trains
Latour’s reading of War and Peace focuses on the passage in which Prince
Kutuzov decides to begin military engagement. Here, what the narrator calls
“inevitable movement” and “accomplished facts” are recognizably assemblages
of a vast number of events preceding the decision (qtd. in Latour, “Agency” 9).
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It is this awareness of his own lack of autonomy that actually enables Kutuzov to
defeat Napoleon Bonaparte, whose megalomania is ultimately the cause of his
defeat. In this passage, subjects and objects become confused because agency is
not aligned discretely with a decision-making subject. Such “common ground
of agency,” usually unexamined, is captured in the novel that tracks apparently
individually-motivated decisions to a multitude of actions, including those that
have taken place at a great distance (“Agency” 8).
As Latour recognizes, the War and Peace example represents the dissemination of agency across principally human networks. He therefore moves
from Tolstoy to John MacPhee’s 1990 bestseller, The Control of Nature, reading that novel’s depiction of a struggle between natural forces and the Corps
of Engineers as a drama of competing motives and goals. However, a nineteenth-century precursor to the way Aramis, in particular, has depicted the
entanglements of matter and dissemination of agency beyond the human can
be found in Dickens’s depictions of railway travel. Take, for example, a scene
from Our Mutual Friend in which it becomes hard to discern where the human
drama is distinct from the activity of mechanical actors. About two thirds of the
way through the novel, Bella Wilfer and John Rokesmith start to fall in love. It
is not so much the human as the non-human actors in the scene, however, who
seem attuned to their developing feelings for one another:
The railway, at this point, knowingly shutting a green eye and opening a red one,
they had to run for it. As Bella could not run easily so wrapped up, the Secretary had
to help her. When she took her opposite place in the carriage corner, the brightness
in her face was so charming to behold, that on her exclaiming, “What beautiful stars
and what a glorious night!” the Secretary said “Yes,” but seemed to prefer to see the
night and the stars in the light of her lovely little countenance, to looking out of
the window.
O boofer lady, fascinating boofer lady! If I were but legally executor of Johnny’s will!
If I had but the right to pay your legacy and to take your receipt!—Something to this
purpose surely mingled with the blast of the train as it cleared the stations, all knowingly shutting up their green eyes and opening their red ones when they prepared
to let the boofer lady pass. (594)
I have suggested elsewhere that this passage liberates the narrative voice from
the consciousness of the human characters, who seem only dimly aware of
their blossoming passion. Instead, narrative intuition is distributed among the
“knowing” train stations, blasting train horn, winking lights, and the spirit of
a dead child who once named Bella the “boofer lady.”5 Here, clearly, there
is no discrete, individual human awareness unfolding against a background
of dead or otherwise inanimate objects. Nor is this quite an instance of the
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pathetic fallacy gone mad, in which life and humanity is drained out of people
by things, as Dorothy Van Ghent described in Dickens.6 Instead, knowing
non-human objects take the place of an omniscient, organizing narrator, foretelling connections soon to be revealed among disparate characters and events.
This narrative device does more than simply animate and anthropomorphize
non-human entities. For the railway and the ghost are both “quasi subjects”
(“Agency” 5); they share awareness and—given the sequence of events that will
precipitate the couple’s union—agency with the human subjects who, like them,
are no longer (if indeed they ever were) autonomous entities.
Similarly, in Dombey and Son (1848) the (demonic rather than benevolent)
figure of the train seems at first to be a projection of human feeling. In bitterness at the death of his son, Mr. Dombey finds “a likeness to his misfortune
everywhere” (312). In his mind, the train’s inexorable rush towards its destination becomes a modern incarnation of a scythe-wielding Death. The scenes that
flash before the eyes of the passengers are only so many forms of life that will
inevitably be cut down:
Breasting the wind and light, the shower and sunshine, away, and still away, it rolls
and roars, fierce and rapid, smooth and certain, and great works and massive bridges
crossing up above, fall like a beam of shadow an inch broad, upon the eye, and then
are lost. Away, and still away, onward and onward ever: glimpses of cottage-homes, of
houses, mansions, rich estates, of husbandry and handicraft, of people, of old roads
and paths that look deserted, small, and insignificant as they are left behind: and
so they do, and what else is there but such glimpses, in the track of the indomitable
monster, Death!
Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, plunging down into the earth again, and
working on in such a storm of energy and perseverance, that amidst the darkness
and whirlwind the motion seems reversed, and to tend furiously backward, until a
ray of light upon the wet wall shows its surface flying past like a fierce stream, away
once more into the day, and through the day, with a shrill yell of exultation, roaring,
rattling, tearing on, spurning everything with its dark breath, sometimes pausing for
a minute where a crowd of faces are, that in a minute more are not; sometimes lapping water greedily, and before the spout at which it drinks has ceased to drip upon
the ground, shrieking, roaring, rattling through the purple distance! (311–12)
“The power that force[s] itself upon its iron way” is apparently a figment of
Dombey’s tortured imagination, incongruously assigning intention and appetite to iron and steam (311). Yet the demon engine is more than the creature of his depressed fancy. To some degree it represents a fusion of animal
and machine, where the mechanical cannot be understood in opposition to
the emotional,7 or where humans assume the characteristics of self-regulating
machines.8
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But it is the diminishing of autonomous human faculties that really comes
into focus here. With their fantastic acceleration, trains had enormously
impacted, even annihilated, traditional perceptions of time and space—a phenomenon famously captured in J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed—The
Great Western Railway (1844) where, even as the observing eye falters before the
blurred outline of objects, the mind begins to grasp how forces beyond its powers of representation are shaping perception.9 Rail speed and even rail disaster
(which will ultimately enable multiple plot resolutions in Dombey and Son) occur
in what Nicholas Daly calls “machine time”: a sequence of events too rapid for
the human sensorium to register, let alone trigger a reaction (23). Even while
it outpaces the human mind’s capacity to predict and prepare for events in
its environment, machine time is simultaneously reassuringly predictable and
homogenous, precisely because it does not depend upon human movement or
attention. It is the train, then, and not Dombey’s gothic anthropomorphizing
of it that brings so many varied scenes into one continuous space, positing
connections between rich and poor, and between urban-industrial and rural
spaces. Indeed, lest the reader be too eager to understand the train’s monstrosity as the projection of Dombey’s diseased psychology, or as a metaphor for his
emerging awareness of the destruction nurtured by industrial-imperial greed,
the narrator pulls back to show us what Dombey himself cannot grasp: “As
Mr. Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the
monster who has brought him there has let the light of day in on these things:
not made or caused them” (312). The train—seemingly alive, seizing the scene
with the help of active verbs that allow it to roar and yell and tear and drink,
demonstrate perseverance and exultation, and hurtle human bodies at unnatural speed through landscapes within which they now have almost no immersive experience—is not merely likened to but is itself the source of the sensory
upheaval that amplifies Dombey’s bleak thoughts. As such, it is also revelatory;
it casts light on changes that are otherwise visible only at a scale that human
consciousness cannot grasp: the evacuation of the premodern landscape, the
new disparities of wealth that industrialization has created, and the vanishing of
traditional modes of production. To the extent that narrative can capture such
revelations, it makes new modes of human perception possible.
For Dickens, the train is therefore a key actor in the great novelistic project
that draws numerous and complex connections among disparate places and
events. This perhaps explains why Leavis did not include him among the great
novelists, claiming that (with the exception of Hard Times [1854]) his novels
lacked a “sustained seriousness” (19). The imbrication of machine “knowing,” anticipation, perception, and even design with human motives distracted
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Dickens, in Leavis’s view, from what Leavis championed in Eliot as a “profoundly
serious interest in life” (18). Yet Eliot too shows how the non-human (and even
at times the non-organic) world is deeply implicated in the human one, especially when that world is grasped, by means of sympathy, as a vast web of events
and actors.
Sympathy in the Serious Novel
In Dickens’s writing, our perception and recognition of a vast arena of
interrelated events is made possible by allowing the perspectives, passions, and
motives of non-humans to jostle among those of human beings; in Eliot’s novels, the wide web of sympathy that enables moral life can paradoxically crush
the human psyche. What Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has described in Eliot’s conception of moral sympathy as the “mutual influence of dissimilar destinies” and
“a sense of connection between widely separated lives” involves understanding
how social being is formed in the recognition of difference (42). Sympathy
therefore respects what Eliot calls “inevitable kinship” with the non-human,
the “minim mammal” that is related to the great philosophical mind (Daniel
Deronda [1876] 471), or “contemptible details” like a “dirty old barouche” that
nonetheless must be accounted for in the “turning of lives” (228). This is the
view of sympathy that drives contempt for what she describes in the essay “Silly
Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) as works whose high society authors have “no
close acquaintance with any other form of life” (245). By implication, “serious”
novels endeavor to portray life as a web of sympathies, to capture the recognitions of difference that make social existence possible; they are therefore likely
to be dilatory accounts of minds opening to others as their protagonists are
woven into multiple plots and linked to a wide cast of other characters.10 This
focus on a great network of relations turns narrative authority away from the
autonomous, world-making human subject.
Acknowledging Dickens’s “greatness,” Eliot praised his “power of
rendering . . . external traits,” and added that, were he equally gifted at portraying psychological character, “his books would be the greatest contribution
Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies” (“Natural History”
143). Eliot’s own fiction aims to provoke sympathy, “surpris[ing] even the trivial
and the selfish into . . . attention to what is apart from themselves” by means of
deep psychological portraiture, capturing the complex motives in relation to
others that structure every human action, sometimes beneath the threshold of
conscious awareness (142). In order to grasp such complexity, she argues, we
must begin by recognizing the crudeness of our representational tools. In the
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word “railway,” for example, is embedded not just a familiar station or an image
of track stretching as far as the eye can see, but also a multitude of other concrete items of knowledge and experience, such as would manifest more immediately in the minds of a “‘navvy,’ an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and
a shareholder, [or] a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company”; only
if we combine all these essential facts do we have “the existence and relations
of the thing” (139). Eliot’s conception of “thing” here is quite a lot like Latour’s:
the thing is an assemblage, a collection of “complex facts summed up in [a]
collective term” (140). Only by recognizing the collective nature of things do
we become capable of sympathy.
Of course, Eliot’s teasing out of human connections and relations with
regard to a non-human entity is more concentrated on the institution of the
railway than on its machines. Moreover, in Middlemarch (1871–72), it has been
noticed, the railway is at once something that involves a concrete historical web
of actors and a “preindustrial” organic entity that “breeds” and suffers “infant
struggles,” and whose figuration is in part an effort to hold on to the experiential and the local in the face of the ever-increasing abstraction of value in
economic-industrial modernity (Givner 228). In this combination, the railway
becomes a repository of human sympathy in which face-to-face recognition of
the joys and sufferings of others can be experientially broadened into a wider
world of institutionally driven connections.
Elsewhere in Eliot’s writing, however, the non-human is what stands at the
limits of sympathy, and the task of the narrative is to push against these limits
and draw the objects that lie outside them into its fold. This, for her, is the
difference between greater and lesser minds. At one extreme lies a form of
sympathy so exquisite that it can distill spiritual meaning and destiny out of
“unnumbered impressions”—Mordecai’s prophetic gift in Daniel Deronda. At
the other extreme lie characters like the self-serving aristocratic Grandcourt,
whose instincts are so narrow as to be like those of an insect, or (strangely kin
to him) the cataleptic Silas Marner. The greatness of psychological realism,
then, lies in its capacity to imitate the expansive mind: to create a “narrow portal” that will filter and make meaningful an “inrush” of perceptions (Deronda
471). At the same time, a single consciousness may not be able to endure such
understanding: in Middlemarch, for instance, the narrator famously describes
how “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would
be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die
of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (192). The price of truly
grasping the social and its fantastic relay of human and non-human actors, in
other words, may be emotional disintegration.
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This paradox at the heart of Eliot’s novels—that sympathy is at once the key
to sociability and also a force that may de-animate the human—anticipates the
non-anthropocentric, object-oriented focus of much current critical thought.
Latour describes “the network of individuals, the welter of equipment, the pullulations of occasions” that make up the stream of human and non-human events
constituting the social (Style 24). But others have proposed more specifically how
sympathy diminishes the human. Blakey Vermeule, for instance, describes how literary forms enhance sympathetic feeling and sociality by engaging in “mind blindness” (68), an opacity in the depiction of character that temporarily de-animates
and dehumanizes the social world in order to exercise the reader’s mind-reading
skills. Hence, strangely, the deliberate shrinking of other minds into objects lies at
the core of social feeling. In a similar vein, Rae Greiner reveals how novelistic realism captures the very failure of minds to grasp the content of other minds; it is only
by preserving the distance between self and other that social order becomes representable.11 And Jonathan Lamb has proposed that acts of sympathetic kindness
are possible only with the crushing of the ego and utter abjection of the human
subject.12 These accounts of sympathy point to the speculative nature of realism: as
Ian Bogost has put it, objects become accessible to thinking subjects only through
an “alien phenomenology” (40). Neither fully accessible nor infinitely removed
from us, objects reveal only those portions of themselves that are in dynamic relation with other objects or parts of objects, including ourselves. Otherwise, they are
secret and unreadable. As a mode of speculative realism, sympathy is full of peril
for the autonomous subject and its confident mapping of a horizon of objects.
The anti-humanism of the great novel is therefore found in the way that it
ranges across so many characters, objects, places, and events, and through so
many pages. Whether concentrated on the discovery of a much larger world
than the ego can ever manage or manipulate, like the awareness that throws
Gwendolen Harleth into a cataleptic fit, or narratively pulled away from human
consciousness to the exhilarated “mind” of an object, as in Dombey and Son, the
great novel’s unravelling of human autonomy is tied to its depiction of a network. This is the vast web of entities through which the human and non-human
are imbricated, or through which sympathy routes minds to other minds even
as it humbles thought in the face of what it cannot grasp and subdue.
The Made Man and the Machine
Erewhon has none of the webby realism of a great novel. Indeed, in his
preface to the revised edition, Butler expresses astonishment that this early
novel received the recognition it did given its “literary inelegancies” (xv) and
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the fact that there was “hardly any story and little attempt to give life and individuality to the characters” (xvi). Of course both characterization and plot are
limited by the genre of utopia (or sometimes dystopia). Although the opening scenes in which the narrator, Higgs, journeys across a mountain range in
search of good grazing land are based on Butler’s own experiences in New
Zealand, the semi-autobiographical aspect of the story quickly recedes.13 Most
of the narrative instead describes the manners and institutional histories of the
strange country into which Higgs stumbles: punishments for illness instead of
crime; a system of coinage that rewards corrupt church ministers; “Colleges
of Unreason”; a discourse on vegetarianism that devalues human rights; and
(my focus here) “The Book of the Machines,” which describes how industrial
revolution was reversed and machines were outlawed in Erewhon. Through
these descriptions, Erewhon seems more interested in outlining the hypocrisies
of English society than in fleshing out the characters and fortunes of the real or
imaginary inhabitants of a remote country in the South Pacific.
Reviewers had mixed responses. The Examiner suggested that the novel
“recalls the memorable performance of Gulliver’s Travels,” but went on to say
that it was “too abstract, too thickly studded with argumentative expostulation
and not sufficiently translated into the concrete forms of daily life to rival . . .
Swift’s satire” (“Erewhon” 432). The Athenaeum condemned it as a “slovenly”
and “inconsistent” satire (492). The Saturday Review praised “a good many ingenious remarks and some caustic hits in the book,” but complained that “on the
whole the allegory seems too farfetched and complicated to have the desirable
brilliancy of effect” (508). Without any real depth of characterization or some
modicum of realism with which to anchor the narrative, these reviews concurred, readers could not be engaged long enough to laugh at the absurdity of
foreign manners, let alone to recognize them as their own.
Yet this poverty of character and narrowness of reach can serve as a route
into the rather complex colonial politics of the novel. One formal way of reading Erewhon as critical toward colonialism is through its sophisticated manipulation of genre. As David Amigoni has pointed out, the novel uses satiric
defamiliarization to challenge assumptions about sovereignty and the human
that come from Darwinian evolutionism as much as from racial anthropology.14
Focusing on the utopia form specifically, Sue Zemka has compellingly argued
that Butler upturns a tradition whose roots are profoundly humanist in order
to undermine a metaphysics of the human upon which colonial ideology rests.
Despite opening scenes that deploy familiar colonial tropes of pastoral harmony through the enclosure of wild lands and the distinctions between civilized
and savage, subhuman peoples, she points out, subsequent chapters repeatedly
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undermine the ontological distinctions that justify colonial expansion. In
particular, the chapters on vegetarianism (in which the Erewhonians risk starvation when they speculate on the suffering of vegetables as well as animals)
and in “The Book of the Machines” (where the boundaries between human
and machine bodies becomes entirely porous) undo the privileged category
of the human. “The figure of the human succumbs to a catastrophic collapse
of its structuring antimonies” in a context wherein the question of what constitutes the human carries an enormous charge (Zemka 465). In what others have
celebrated in the novel as the shattering of the discrete categories of organism
and machine, Zemka identifies an implicit critique of the colonial project. The
defeat of humanism is signaled in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari identify as the desiring machine of Erewhon, in which both bodies and machines are
engineered through an incorporation of the other.15
Yet Erewhon also reminds us that in the relationship between technology
and empire a new kind of human subject appears whose autonomy, value, and
power over others—especially other humans—is predicated on the antihumanism of the machine age. Read this way, the novel does not celebrate the collapse
of human-non-human distinctions at all. Instead it recognizes in that collapse
how the dethroning of discretely human agency is bound up with acts of
enclosure and dispossession brought about by the expansionist pressures and
technological affordances of industrial capitalism. Although far from overtly
anti-colonial, Erewhon’s famously hard-to-pin-down satire in combination with
its “poor” form, or literary “minorness,” indicates ambivalence toward the
richer narratives that entwine humans and non-human objects within immense
social networks.
Strikingly, given that the novel establishes a colonial setting that it later
seems to forget, reviewers either ignored or, like the Athenaeum, outright praised
the opening chapters that precede the narrator’s discovery of Erewhon. These
chapters, which unabashedly applaud the heroic settler spirit, describe Higgs’s
experiences on a Canterbury sheep farm and his journey into the mountains
in search of new grazing land. Based largely on Butler’s own experiences as a
short-term colonist in New Zealand between 1860 and 1864, this section draws
on real events from settler history. In the 1850s, the Crown opened “waste”
lands for farming, a signature act of enclosure in the new colony. Although
most of the available runs had been spoken for by 1860, remoter areas, particularly further west in the MacKenzie country, held out the promise of yetundiscovered grazing land. Higgs, like Butler, becomes an explorer in this
region in hopes that “if I could only find workable country, I might stock it
with borrowed capital, and consider myself a made man” (“A First Year” 7).
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Like Butler, too, he proves to be a temporary resident of the colony, what James
Smithies calls a “transnational entrepreneur” (211). According to Smithies, the
transnational mobility of middle-class Victorians—the quite rapid movement
that many undertook back and forth between metropole and periphery—
belies the too frequent assumption that Butler “was living in a frontier society
consisting solely of pastoralism and wide open spaces” (212). By the 1860s, New
Zealand was both industrialized—a railway system, a telegraph line, and a major
bridge were all in the process of construction in the Canterbury settlement
when Butler arrived—and integrated into a global economy in which sheep’s
wool, in particular, had considerable currency.16 Despite having roughed it in
the wilderness, the made man is profoundly embedded in a highly technologized imperial economy.
Also belonging to these early sections is the novel’s lone Māori character, Higgs’s unreliable guide, improbably named “Chowbok.” Chowbok is a
creation of Victorian racial anthropology: “grotesque,” “fiendish,” excessively
superstitious, and close to primitive nature (13). His character signifies a familiar distinction between the fully human landed settler and the subhuman or
nature-bound landless native, a false characterization that in turn serves to
justify enclosure. This characterization also invokes particular events in New
Zealand’s colonial history, specifically Māori/Pākehā (settler) relations and the
expropriation of Māori land. From the 1840s on, large, loosely demarcated
areas that were not heavily cultivated by Māori became the subject of systematic
blanket purchases wherein the Māori claim was resigned in return for trifles.
These purchases were legitimized through negotiations with chiefs that Crown
officials erroneously asserted were speaking for all claimants. Māori—whose
concept of ownership and land rights was more complex and dynamic than
the European one of fixed, individual property—assumed that they still had
hunting and fishing privileges on these lands until the fencing of plots and the
draining of swamps and wetlands made these impossible.17 At the very time that
Butler was becoming a made man in Canterbury, wars in the North Island’s
Taranaki and the Waikato were challenging Crown land claims and the undermining of communal ownership. In his letters home, later published as A First
Year in Canterbury Settlement (1914), virtually Butler’s only comment on indigenous New Zealand was that “there are few Maoris here; they inhabit the North
Island, and are degenerate in this, so they may be passed over unnoticed” (127).
Yet as indifferent as the novel appears in these early chapters to the devastating effects of enclosure, settlement, and colonial trade on the Māori economic base, it never quite forgets them. By the end of the story, Higgs’s colonial
scheming threatens to reduce the Erewhonian race to utter dispossession, while
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he leaves Erewhon with his confident entrepreneurial spirit of adventure intact.
What enables us to read this contrast satirically are the intervening chapters in
which the notion of human autonomy is so completely undermined that even
the humanness of the settler may seem uncertain, echoing the fear that Butler
had revealed in his New Zealand journals about becoming identified with his
animal charges. At least temporarily enthralled by the history of Erewhon’s
manners, Higgs reproduces lengthy passages from Erewhon’s revered “The
Book of the Machines,” asking “where does consciousness begin and where
does it end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything?” (234). Not only are we unable to establish
a firm boundary between humans and other life forms, but also the cognitive
talents that we identify as evidence of our evolutionary superiority over other
creatures depend on machine technology. Moreover, machines are becoming
indistinguishable from living things: while primitive tools like the axe and the
hammer “received their impressions through the agency of man’s senses” and
were fed through his stomach, steam-driven machines begin to eat and breathe
and act upon the world independently of their human hosts (239). If we try to
separate animals from machines by declaring that the latter cannot reproduce,
we run quickly into the objection that, while they require the intervention of
human agency to do so, so too does the clover require the agency of the bee. In
addition to the dreadful spectacle of machinate pseudo-humans in “The Book
of the Machines,” chapters on “Rights of Animals” and “Rights of Vegetables”
(added to a later edition of the novel) also draw attention to the blurring of
human/non-human boundaries. As Philip Armstrong has noted, these chapters fictionalize Butler’s peculiar brand of Lamarckism, in which the development of all life forms is connected through unconscious ancestral memory,
thereby bringing human and non-human into evolutionary proximity.
So if it reveals that all entities—both organic and non-organic—emerge
and reproduce within a mighty web that connects them all, why doesn’t
Erewhon attempt a greater map of what Eliot calls “inevitable kinship”? The
answer can perhaps be found in the second chapter focused on “The Book of
the Machines,” which records a rejoinder to the position outlined in the first
(hereafter referred to as the work of “the second author”). This second author
has challenged the arguments that machine technology threatens the dominance of the human species, and argued instead that human inventions are so
entwined in man’s physical being that they should be regarded as “extra corporeal limbs” (267). A man who digs with a spade has an artificially extended
forearm; “an organ commonly called an umbrella” protects us from the rain;
a man’s memory “goes in his pocket book” (269). Yet it is not only objects
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that are, as Martin Heidegger would say, “primordial” and “ready-to-hand” that
should be seen as limb extensions, but also those that may exist remotely from
the body (98). While “lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own
bodies . . . many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now
there, in various parts of the world” (Erewhon 267). They may even be communally owned limbs, “for a train is only a seven-leagued foot that five hundred
may own at once” (268). What is unique to human beings among animals is a
machinate corporeality, the result of deliberate foresight and self-modification
that has made civilization possible, thus further distancing us from our animal relatives, and also from those members of the human species whose tooluse entails less extension. Not only, therefore, are civilized men able to stretch
their bodies out across the globe and through the engines that draw remote
regions of the empire together—mobilizing labor and consolidating capital—
but also their very particular kind of humanness originates in the abstraction
of machine-enhanced labor power in the global marketplace: “it was this [second] writer,” Higgs adds, “who originated the custom of classifying men by
their horse-power” and divides them into categories of “genera, species, varieties, and sub varieties . . . which expressed the number of limbs which they
could command at any moment” (269). In Life and Habit (1878), Butler argues
that organic personality emerges out of inherited memory, through “vast” and
“infinite” repetitions that create types and organize the reproductive script in
nature (50). The machinate human personality, by contrast, is spread across the
planet through newly enclosed and commercially networked spaces of empire.
This affirmation of a machinate humanity seems to earn Higgs’s
approval. But it prompts the reader’s discomfort, particularly as it becomes
associated with Higgs’s own entrepreneurial designs. These are revealed in all
of their hypocrisy at the end of the novel. Having successfully escaped from
Erewhon and returned to London, Higgs develops a scheme for the combined servitude and conversion of the Erewhonians. Sugar plantation owners
in Queensland, he reflects, are “in great want of labour” (316). By luring
adventurous Erewhonians there with the promise that they can amass great
fortunes, he will earn a sizeable enough dividend “which might be spent in
repeating our operation and bringing over other cargoes of Erewhonians,
with fresh consequent profits” (316). The success of this undertaking would
be assured by the expedience of shipping them across the Tasman in conditions that recall those of the Atlantic Passage: “a cargo of seven or eight hundred. . . . packed closely and fed at a very reasonable cost” (316). At the same
time, they would “benefit” from the religious instruction, “whereof they stand
so greatly in need,” provided by their employers. Indeed, other Christian
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colonies might be served in the same way, since “the supply of Erewhonians
would be unlimited” (316). The novel concludes by inviting applications for
shares in the “Erewhon Evangelization Company Ltd.,” and by revealing that
Chowbok has become a Christian missionary, bringing Higgs “some satisfaction that [his] own efforts might have contributed to the change that had
doubtless been wrought upon him” (320). The suggestion that “saving souls”
and “filling pockets” are one and the same project—particularly given that
Butler fled to the colonies in order to escape familial expectation that he
would take orders—brings the satiric target of “The Book of the Machines”
more clearly into focus (317). Higgs’s revelation at the end of his narrative—
that the whole account of Erewhon has been an elaborate advertisement
to potential shareholders—suggests that his hypocritical entrepreneurial
designs have been a target of Butler’s mockery all along.
Where the great Victorian novel represents the tangle of human and
non-human beings through the intertwining of agencies that gives depth and
complexity to human characters, or that animates non-human ones, Erewhon
highlights a modern form of human autonomy that is nonetheless bound closely
to the machine. The “machinate mammal” is the made man: a being abstracted
into the profits that he draws from his land or other colonial ventures, and that
he multiplies through the trading networks of the empire (Erewhon 267). At
the same time, he extends himself through technologies that enable the rapid
movement of goods and money across great distances, and that draw the farthest
reaches of that empire into one magnificent network. As a man of business,
then, Higgs is marvelously disembodied: he is a specimen of what the second
author calls “those mighty organisms . . . our leading bankers and merchants
[who] speak to their congeners through the length and breadth of the land in
a second of time; [and whose] rich and subtle souls can defy all material impediment.” In contrast, the poor and dispossessed remain “clogged and hampered
by matter, which sticks fast about them as treacle to the wings of a fly.” These
lesser beings are immune to the transformative power of steam, track, or telegraph; their “dull” ears “must take days or weeks to hear what another would
tell them from a distance, instead of hearing it in a second as is done by the
more highly organized classes” (270). Applauding how the train has become
an adaptive extension of the body in the figure of the made man, the second
author concludes:
Who shall deny that one who can tack on a special train to his identity, and go wheresoever he will whensoever he pleases, is more highly organized than he who, should
he wish for the same power, might wish for the wings of a bird with an equal chance
of getting them; and whose legs are his only means of locomotion? (270)
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Although he suffers no Gulliver-like humiliation at the end of Erewhon, Higgs
too becomes the object of his author’s satire as the profit-lust of the made man,
harnessed to the networking technologies of imperial commerce, so clearly
feeds on the primitive, sluggish bodies of the poor and the colonized.
Latour uses “The Book of the Machines” as a parable for the silencing of the
non-human in rather the same way that Karl Marx compresses Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719) into an allegory for the pre-social determination of value
in Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867). In order to produce these accounts,
both Latour and Marx have to forget the presence of colonized and classed subjects in narratives that combine the projects of enclosure and global commercial
enterprise. These are, for Butler, the matter-heavy, primitive bodies of those who
cannot participate in the profit-making extension of limbs from the commercial
core into the industrializing peripheries of empire. They are specifically and historically not entangled with the remote, machinate non-human. As much as giving
voice to the passions of machines may deepen and broaden representations of the
social in the great novel of the North, Butler’s “The Book of the Machines” reveals
how, in a small country in the South Pacific, machine life can quickly transform
into colonial capital, separating the disembodied and powerfully networked colonizer from the bodies of forced laborers and increasingly landless peoples.
In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005),
Latour again praises Erewhon for drawing attention to the role of non-humans
in social networks where they ordinarily remain invisible or muted. Butler, he
suggests, alerts us to the value of “good” texts, those that “take into account at
least some of the many quirks of their recalcitrant objects” (125). Above all, a
good text “traces a network” in which every participant, human or non-human,
is an actor (128). Yet through its complex satiric layering, Erewhon offers a caution. In our enthusiasm for the great novel’s exquisite tracing of network and
its patient attention to the non-human, Butler warns, we may forget to read for
histories of dispossession and dehumanization in which networks themselves
remain far from innocent.
University of Kansas
NOTES
I wish to thank Rae Greiner, Ivan Kreilkamp, Kathryn Conrad, and my anonymous readers for their enormously thorough and helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. See also Grossman, Gibson, Brake, Hensley, Worth.
2. See Freedgood, 1–29.
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3. See Isobel Armstrong.
4. I combine studies of “objects” and “things” here, but these are philosophically
distinct. Latour proposes that we recognize the webby nature of both, challenging
Heidegger’s distinction between the “thing” (as a form of gathering that reveals being)
and the “object” (which is held in standing reserve by the regime of modern technology).
Latour asks “what would happen . . . if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology, the Gegenstand [the object; literally, a “standing against”], as if it had the rich and
complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing ?” (“Critique” 233). In Brown’s very different
account, “things” are former objects that have ceased, even momentarily, to work for us
either as shapers of subjectivity or circuits of production, distribution, and consumption
(4). On the application of thing theory to Victorian Studies, see Boehm, Sattaur.
5. See Neill, 87–88.
6. See Van Ghent.
7. See Deleuze and Guattari, 284–86; Ketabgian, 55.
8. See Sussman, Victorian Technology, 38.
9. See Schivelbusch.
10. Eliot’s self-consciously shorter works, like Silas Marner (1861) or The Lifted Veil
(1859), are equally “serious” in their concentration on the failure of sympathy (see Neill,
107–21).
11. See Greiner, 1–23.
12. See Lamb.
13. While the narrator is not named in Erewhon, he is named in Erewhon Revisited
(1901). I identify him as “Higgs” here to minimize any confusion that might arise in my
discussion of “The Book of the Machines,” in which he is summarizing the writings of two
Erewhonian authors.
14. See Amigoni, 149–50.
15. Sussman has described how Butler simultaneously recognizes the animalization
of the machine and the machine as the principle mode of human development. See
Victorians and the Machine, 135–61.
16. See Philip Armstrong, 442.
17. See Orange; Anderson et al., 246–48.
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