Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination Saler, Michael T., 1960- Philosophy and Literature, Volume 28, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 137-149 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/phl.2004.0012 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v028/28.1saler.html Access Provided by University of California, Davis at 11/13/12 3:08AM GMT Michael Saler 137 Notes and Fragments MODERNITY, DISENCHANTMENT, AND THE IRONIC IMAGINATION by Michael Saler W e have many things to be concerned about today. Why, for example, are there numerous people dressed in funny costumes to be found in movie theaters across America? Why is there a Bloomsday, and why do people outside of Dublin actually celebrate it? Why are there detailed concordances to the X-Files, atlases to Middle-Earth, and almost as many published biographies of Sherlock Holmes as there are of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Why are there at least two editions of the Necronomicon, a book that never existed until its title (and little else) was made up by H. P. Lovecraft, a 1920s pulp fiction author? Why will the new edition of the British Dictionary of National Biography, scheduled for publication in 2004, contain entries for John Bull, Springheel Jack, and Robin Hood?1 And—a central impetus behind my own research into these questions—why can’t I find a single copy of my own monograph in any bookstore, but I can find many copies of Hamlet translated into Klingon? (I tell myself it’s because Hamlet was written by Shakespeare.) Potential answers to these questions emerge when we look at the issue of modernity and enchantment in the West. From the late eighteenth century through the present, the dominant understanding of modernity has been that it is incompatible with enchantment. The term “modernity” has usually been understood as encompassing the ongoing diffusion of rationality, secularism, democracy, urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization. These processes, according to Philosophy and Literature, © 2004, 28: 137–149 138 Philosophy and Literature romantic writers in the late eighteenth century, seemed to provide little room for “enchantment”—that sense of delight and astonishment at the wonders, marvels, and mysteries that they believed had been intrinsic to the premodern world view. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Max Weber famously discussed “the disenchantment of the world”—the removal of magic and meaning from life through the processes of rationalization, transforming modern existence into, as he put it, “an iron cage of reason.”2 Weber’s phrases captured the temper of his time: by the late nineteenth century the association between modernity and disenchantment was a common trope in Western Europe and America. The negative effects of industrialization, urbanization, mass politics, and mass culture were widely discussed by intellectuals, and the triumph of scientific naturalism in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to rule out any divine purpose or legible meaning to existence. Adherents of positivism, materialism, and literary realism in the latter half of the century often presented a bleak picture of human existence, governed by bestial instincts that were themselves reducible to mere chemical and physical processes. The discourse of disenchantment was pronounced in the writings of cultural pessimists ranging from Arthur Schopenhauer in the early nineteenth century to Max Nordau, author of Degeneration, at the end of the century. Perhaps proving that you can never get too much of a bad thing, the discourse continued into the new century in the writings of Toynbee, Spengler, Freud, and many others, and it remains a cliché of our time. This widespread association of modernity with disenchantment is too simplistic, however, and perhaps pernicious. It is a performative discourse: it helps create the perspective it describes.3 I don’t want to deny the importance of the critiques of modernity, but the notions of enchantment that accompany these critiques have usually been thin and unrealistic. As it was used from at least the middle ages, enchantment had ambivalent meanings. It signified both “delight” in wonderful things and the potential to be placed under their spell, to be beguiled. It was not either/or, but both/and: the price of living with enchantment was the possibility of being captivated by it, an outcome that might be prevented precisely through being aware of this possibility. While it continued to have these ambivalent meanings in everyday speech, Victorian social theorists preferred to oppose reason and enchantment. Weber defined enchantment in terms of the wonders we Michael Saler 139 secular and sophisticated moderns have lost, whereas Karl Marx thought of enchantment in terms of beguilement: we are enchanted by capitalist ideologies, which can only be vanquished through reason and revolution. (This is, to a large degree, why many Western Marxists held a very negative view of mass culture.) This opposition of modernity and enchantment led me to wonder if there were any nineteenth or early twentieth century thinkers who didn’t fit this paradigm, and who attempted to reconcile enchantment with the rational and secular tenets of modernity. Certainly there were a range of responses to the discourse of disenchantment in the late nineteenth century, but these have been seen as largely a reaction against modernity—“the revolt against positivism” in historian H. Stuart Hughes’s well-known phrase.4 This revolt was characterized by a fascination with spiritualism and the occult, a vogue for non-Western religions and art, and a turn to aestheticism, neopaganism, and celebrations of the irrational will. But could there be a form of “rational enchantment?” I believe there was at least one way in which modernity and enchantment have been brought together since at least the 1830s: through what I call the “ironic imagination.” It was not the only form of modern enchantment, but it was, and remains, an important source for it. Ideally, the ironic imagination promises a way to experience wonders and marvels while avoiding enchantment’s potential to beguile. In practice, as we shall see, it may not always be sufficient to achieve this. But the perspective granted to the imagination by an admixture of ironic distance does have the potential to circumvent the alluring sirens of desire that appeal directly to the imagination. Irony provides a ludic space in which reason and imagination cavort, neither succumbing to the other, a utopic ideal similar to that envisioned by Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This ideal fully emerges during the fin-de-siècle, and continues to enchant modern culture today. The ironic imagination is related to Coleridge’s explanation that we experience poetic fiction in an enlightened age through “the willing suspension of disbelief.”5 But those who use the ironic imagination do not so much willingly suspend their disbelief in fictional characters or worlds, as willingly believe in them with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.6 The experience is similar to being aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. The ironic imagination is a form of the modernist “double consciousness” that is found not only in the high modernist works of the late nineteenth and 140 Philosophy and Literature early twentieth centuries, but also in the mass culture of the same period.7 But these mass cultural expressions, while ironic, are not metafictions: that is, they are not so highly self-conscious about their artificial status that they inhibit the possibility of imaginative immersion.8 Instead, they are similar to hoaxes, a term used by H. P. Lovecraft to describe his realistic tales of frightening yet wondrous creatures who invade our world from other dimensions of time and space. In the early twentieth century, Lovecraft recast “supernatural fiction,” which he felt had been discredited by modern science, into the literature of “cosmic fear,” which he felt was compatible with scientific rationality. Lovecraft described how what I am calling the ironic imagination enabled him to write and to read stories of the marvelous in a rationalistic age: [I get a] big kick . . . from taking reality just as it is—accepting all the limitations of the most orthodox science—and then permitting my symbolizing faculty to build outward from the existing facts; rearing a structure of indefinite promise and possibility. . . . But the whole secret of the kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so. I’m probably trying to have my cake and eat it at the same time—to get the intoxication of a sense of cosmic contact and significance as the theists do, and yet to avoid the ignorant ostrich-act whereby they cripple their vision and secure the desiderate results.9 Here we see an example of the conjunction of enchantment and modernity within the ironic imagination. While the ironic imagination is related to the early romantics’ attempts to redress a seemingly disenchanted world through the imagination, it is also different from the romanticist project in at least three respects: First, the romantics tended to define the imagination in metaphysical terms, whereas the ironic imagination is not metaphysical: it emphasizes the provisional, the contingent, and the artificial.10 The second distinction follows from this: whereas the romantics stressed sincerity and authenticity, the ironic imagination is comfortable with the artifices of mass culture, and the phantasmagoria of symbols and representations that accompany a capitalist economic order. Finally, the ironic imagination in the last half of the nineteenth century was accepted by the public in a way that had not been the case for the imagination extolled by the romantics in the early nineteenth century. At that time, the majority of the middle classes did not share the romantics’ enthusiasm for the imagination as an equal or superior partner to reason. Middle class culture in Europe and America through Michael Saler 141 the mid-century was influenced by religious and utilitarian strictures, and for most, the imagination was understood to be subordinate to reason and in need of surveillance to prevent dangerous expressions of desire. This attitude begins to change by the mid-nineteenth century, owing to the spread of secularism, a greater diffusion of economic prosperity, an increase in leisure time, and the irresistible enticements of the new mass culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more venues available for people to exercise their imaginations: these included illustrated, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, museums, circulating libraries, music halls, and even films in their nascent form. These new attractions helped to circumvent residual Victorian emphases on “rational recreation.”11 One of the most important signs of this new tolerance for a lessencumbered imagination was the emergence of children’s literature as a genre in the 1860s. Before this time, children’s literature tended to be didactic and highly moralistic or, in the case of penny dreadfuls, proscribed by the middle classes. But the children’s literature of the 1860s was more accepting of the whimsical free play of a child’s imagination. I stress this change in children’s literature because many of the popular authors of the 1880s and beyond who exemplified the use of the ironic imagination stated that they wanted to recover the enchantment they had experienced as children when reading. The spirit of play and make-believe encouraged by the new children’s literature sowed the seeds for fantastic texts written for adults starting in the 1880s. This less inhibited imagination took on an ironic cast. Scientific skepticism was part of the tenor of the times, but the sheer profusion of visual representations found in mass culture, abetted by the concomitant rise of professional advertising at the end of the century, inculcated an awareness of artifice. This in turn imparted an enhanced momentum to the skeptical, ironic attitude toward this new society of the spectacle that had been developing for decades—an ironic imagination.12 Many postmodern theorists have simply asserted that the public remained passively in thrall to these images, but more recent research indicates that the public enjoyed playing with these “artful deceptions,” even when they knew or suspected fakery. This was recognized by P. T. Barnum when he stated in his autobiography, “The public appears to be disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.”13 By the late nineteenth century, this freer and more ironic use of the 142 Philosophy and Literature imagination was being legitimated by the findings of psychologists, scientists, and philosophers, who stressed the great extent to which perceptions of the “real” were indebted to the imagination and other subjective factors. In the wake of Darwinian evolutionary theory, many writers turned to the imagination as the source for existential meaning and enchantment. Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and Stéphane Melarmé extolled the fictive aspects of existence, and in 1911 the philosopher Hans Vaihinger published a manifesto of “Fictionalism,” entitled The Philosophy of “As If,” in which he discussed the prevalence and utility of fictions in science and in everyday life. (The ironic imagination is very much an “as if” imagination.) Thus, by the turn of the century a more widespread recognition that perceived reality was to some extent an imaginative construct, and that rationality itself was beholden to imaginative insights and desires, made indulgence in the imagination more permissible for adults. One could actively believe, albeit ironically, in marvels and wonders, without compromising one’s standing as a rational and responsible adult. It was during the fin-de-siècle that virtual worlds of the imagination, designed for the habitation of adults and directly addressing the disenchanting aspects of modern realism, appeared in popular fiction as well as more the more recondite works by symbolists and aesthetes. These two branches of fiction, mass and elite, have often been seen as being opposed to one another, but in one respect they had the same end: the creation of autonomous worlds of wonder for a modern age. The popular works, however, did not repudiate rationalism or positivism. Instead, they worked within the rationalist tenets of modernity to facilitate their readers’ immersive experience.14 Several prominent writers of this period opposed the dominance of literary realism, with its disenchanted viewpoint, by combining the empirical detail and apparent scientific objectivity of the realists with the marvels and wonders that realism had banished. Following precedents set by Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells clothed their fantastic tales in the guise of scientific naturalism, creating the genre of the New Romance. Publishers’ artifices made possible by the new halftone printing techniques of the 1880s, such as foldout maps, realistic illustrations, and photographs, complemented the authors’ aim of imbuing their fantasies with an aura of scientific authenticity and contributed to the “reality effect” of these texts. H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for example, contains numerous Michael Saler 143 footnotes—a mark of objective scholarship—by both the narrator and an unnamed “editor” to correct or elaborate on the narration. (Thus footnote 2, attributed to the narrator, begins “The Kallikrates here referred to by my friend was a Spartan, spoken of by Herodotus (Herod. ix.72) as being remarkable for his beauty. He fell at the glorious battle of Plataea (September 22, B.C. 479) . . . .”) The frontispiece of She is a photograph—another contemporary indicia of truth15—of a “Facsimile of the Sherd of Amenartas,” Haggard’s invented potsherd that provides the protagonists with key information for their fantastic quest in search of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Haggard had an artist friend create the sherd, and had three separate scholars insure that the ancient Greek, Latin, and Old English inscriptions on it were correct; these were also presented in the three languages in the text itself.16 One reviewer called She “a marvelously realistic tale of fantastic adventures,” and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine praised Haggard as “the avatar of the old story-teller, with a flavour of the nineteenth century and scientific explanation.”17 Haggard, explained The Scots Observer, “describes his fabulous action with a realistic minuteness and full relative truth.”18 But accompanying this effort at verisimilitude was an ironic stance, created through the juxtaposition of the incredible nature of the tale and the “scholarly” paratextual apparatus in which it was embedded, and also through Haggard’s own tendency to let his jocular perspective surface in the text. His friend Andrew Lang read a draft of She and suggested he diminish some of the more evidently facetious remarks in the citations: “I’m sure the note about a monograph on Ayesha’s Greek pronounciation for the use of public schools, will show the Public you are laughing—a thing I can never help doing, and the British Public hate it.”19 Lang himself wrote an anonymous parody of She published in 1887, entitled He —said to be “by the author of It”—and his text drew attention to the ironic, realist, and spectacular aspects of Haggard’s work. For example, there is throughout a running dialogue in footnotes between the “PUBLISHER” and the “EDITOR” about the realist aspects of such a fantastic narrative, such as the lengthy translations from ancient Greek and Latin. (“Don’t you think this is a little dull? The public don’t care about dead languages.—PUBLISHER. Story can’t possibly go on without it, as you’ll see. You must have something like this in a romance. Look at Poe’s cipher in the Gold Beetle, and the chart in Treasure Island, and the Portuguese scroll in King Solomon’s Mines.— ED.”)20 And, highlighting the spectacular nature of the new mass 144 Philosophy and Literature consumer society and its role in fostering an ironic imagination among the public, the two discuss ways to sell advertising within the story. Here is an example of one such footnote exchange, instigated by the following line of the story: The wine was procured, as I would advise every African traveler to do, from Messrs. ———1 1. Messrs. Who? Printers in a hurry.—PUBLISHER Suppressed the name. Messrs. ——— gave an impolite response to our suggestions as to mutual arrangements.—ED.21 Haggard’s text was one of many during the period that combined realist detail and paratextual appurtenances to establish a virtual world of the marvelous, acceptable to a public schooled in the ways of the ironic imagination. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, took care that the photographs and illustrations for his The Lost World (1910) appeared to be realistic, going so far as to don make-up, wig, and beard to appear as his character Professor Challenger for the frontispiece photograph. (The straight-faced caption underneath a smiling Challenger read “Professor Challenger in his Study. From a photograph by William Ramford, Hampstead.”) Doyle scrupulously supervised the creation and placement of other photographs, sketches, and illustrations of the Lost World itself and its prehistoric inhabitants. He remarked in a letter to his illustrator, “I feel that we shall make a great joke out of this. . . . I look forward with great interest to see your first studies of fakes.”22 And to take one final example, Rudyard Kipling’s tale about mail delivery by Zeppelins in the 21st century, With the Night Mail (1911, originally published in magazine form in 1905), was published as if it were from a magazine of the period, complete with letters to the Editor, Reviews, an “Aerial Board of Control Report,” and advertisements for zeppelin parts, help wanted, etc. These were “spectacular texts” for a spectacular society, presenting rationally coherent and internally consistent worlds of wonder that could be inhabited imaginatively. At the same time that aesthetes were retreating into art as a way to escape a disenchanted world, mass culture was providing ordinary readers with equally autonomous worlds of the imagination that gratified the sense of wonder without denying modernity. These fantastic fictions were not necessarily the “mindless escape” that some have assumed them to be, because the ironic use of footnotes Michael Saler 145 and other scholarly apparatus in the texts allowed the reader to establish some critical distance from what they were reading, and perhaps fostered a critical attitude as well. These paratextual elements also contributed to the texts’ verisimilitude, facilitating immersion. These late Victorian and Edwardian spectacular texts were the precursors of the internally consistent virtual worlds of our contemporary media, like Star Trek, Star Wars, and online computer gaming worlds, all of which have become imaginative habitations for millions.23 The first modern fantasy world to be inhabited this way by a community of fans was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because the trilogy created a rationally coherent and realistically detailed “secondary world” through the use of maps, invented languages, and a meticulously conceived prehistory. As Tolkien himself stated in 1939, when he was writing his epic, “Fantasy is a rational and not an irrational activity.”24 Indeed, if we define virtual reality as a consensual hallucination that is both immersive and interactive,25 then Sherlock Holmes may deserve the title of the first virtual reality character. Holmes’s appearance in the 1890s inspired readers to come together and collectively imagine him as real, as well as participate in his adventures through collective efforts at textual exegesis. (Was Watson shot in the shoulder or the leg? Was his name James or John? Was Sherlock Holmes a woman? etc.) While there had been earlier fictional characters who captured the imagination of the public—Richardson’s Pamela, Goethe’s Werther, Dickens’s Little Nell—Holmes was the first to inspire sober, scholarly biographies (with footnotes) as well as societies on both sides of the Atlantic dedicated to celebrating him as a “real” person. The collective engagement with Holmes by members of the Baker Street Irregulars (USA) and the Sherlock Holmes Society (UK) probably made the texts come alive in a way that isn’t possible through solitary reading. Many of those who “believed” in Holmes in an ironic manner were prominent individuals, whose reputations helped make this form of rational make-believe legitimate for other adults.26 However, a wonderful irony of the Holmes phenomenon is that Arthur Conan Doyle himself was unable to accept the ironic imagination as a satisfactory way to re-enchant modernity. By 1917 he converted to Spiritualism, and in 1920 declared his belief in the existence of fairies. Many of his readers criticized him for indulging in premodern beliefs, while they were busy believing in Sherlock Holmes—a distinctly modern form of enchantment. The Holmes phenomenon has since been extended to other 146 Philosophy and Literature fictional characters (there are biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, and newsgroups and clubs devoted to many others), and also applies to the cult of celebrity revolving around movie stars that became widespread starting in the interwar period. At that time, Hollywood created enchanting personas for the “star” that were often at variance from the real lives of the actors. While there were undoubtedly “naïve believers” who accepted these personas as presented by the media at face value, “ironic believers” were capable of following, and enjoying, the modern mythology created by the Hollywood celebrity industry without succumbing to its illusions. In fact, Hollywood itself evinced a fair degree of ironic self-reflexivity about the spectacles it purveyed. In an early scene from the wonderful Ernst Lubitsch comedy “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), Carole Lombard plays a famous actress, Maria Tura, who is visited by a fan who starts to recount all sorts of fanciful events from her life. Tura is puzzled, until she realizes that the fan is a naïve believer in her movie-star persona, which carries on a romantic existence quite different from that of the genuine Maria Tura. So she politely goes along with the naïve believer and becomes an ironic believer in the fictitious life she is supposed to have led. The scene elicits a laugh even from those who continue to follow the exploits of movie stars, just as many of the activities of the Sherlock Holmes societies contain deliberate notes of self-parody. I hope I’ve been able to suggest that one way in which modernity and enchantment has been reconciled in the last century and a half has been through a greater acceptance and freer use of the imagination, and in particular through the use of the ironic imagination. This may help to explain why we are forced to put up with Star Wars Storm Troopers in movie theaters. It also may explain why at present there is such a vast interest in UFOs, government conspiracies, angels, and the like. I suspect that most who express such interest are “ironic believers,” playing with possibilities they know are highly unlikely but also delightfully enchanting, and that a smaller proportion of adherents are “naïve believers” who don’t just “want to believe,” like Muldur on the X-Files, but actually do believe. If this is true, we can take comfort that such interests do not necessarily mean we inhabit a “demon-haunted world,” in Carl Sagan’s phrase. In fact, since its inception, mass culture appears to be more self-reflexive, and its audience to be savvier than many cultural critics have argued. Nevertheless, enchantment is, and always has been, an ambiguous condition, delighting but also potentially beguiling. Thus the ironic Michael Saler 147 imagination is important to help us keep potential delusions in abeyance through the critical distance it provides. This is particularly important now, when so many of our perceptions of other peoples, cultures, and beliefs are filtered through representations presented by the media. As Arjun Appadurai has argued: Until recently, whatever the force of social change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial . . . and that fantasy and imagination were residual practices, confined to special moments or places. In general, imagination and fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience . . . . As the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on a new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of possible lives offered by the mass media in all their forms. That is, fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies.27 “Fantasy as a social practice”: what an enchanting—and modern—idea. University of California, Davis 1. “Welcome Faces in the Family Album,” Sunday Times, 5 (15 July 2001): 9. 2. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 155; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 318. 3. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 9. 4. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958). 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), p. 169. 6. Concepts that have a family resemblance to the “ironic imagination” have been adumbrated by Neil Harris as the “operational aesthetic,” James Cook as “artful deception,” and Joshua Landy as “Lucid Self-Delusion.” See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little Brown, 1973); James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Joshua Landy, The Cruel Gift: Lucid Self-Delusion in French Literature and German Philosophy, 1851– 1914. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1997. 148 Philosophy and Literature 7. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 206, 208. 8. For the continuum between the immersion afforded by realism and the estranging effects of meta-fictions, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1975). 9. H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume III: 1929–1931, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1971), p. 140. 10. It is true that the “romantic irony” expressed by Fichte and some other romantic writers in the early nineteenth century shared a similar concern for human finitude and contingency, but this was nevertheless cast within an overarching metaphysical framework. See Anne K. Mellors, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 11. Peter Bailey, “The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure,” in Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13–29. 12. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (Berkeley: California University Press, 1998). 13. Cook, op. cit. 14. Symbolist poets did not necessarily conceive of their art as anti-modern or opposed to the findings of contemporary science, but they were critical of positivism and did not accept the dominant rationalist worldview in the way that authors of the New Romance did. See Richard Candida Smith, Mallarme’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 15. For a discussion on how photography was used as evidence by the Victorians, see Jennifer Tucker, “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Imposter: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 378–408. 16. Peter Berresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 108. 17. Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 102, 116. 18. Anonymous, “Modern Men,” The Scots Observer (27 April 1889): 631–32. 19. Ellis, p. 109. 20. Anonymous [Andrew Lang], He (London: Longmans, Green, 1887), p. 15. 21. Ibid., p. 29. 22. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Annotated Lost World, annotated by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin (Indianapolis: Wessex Press, 1996), p. 252. 23. For role-playing games, see Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Michael Saler 149 24. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), p. 45, n.2. 25. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 2. 26. Sherlockians in the early twentieth-century comprised some of the most prominent figures in Britain and America, including journalists like Desmond MacCarthy and Christopher Morley, novelists like Dorothy Sayers and Vincent Starrett, academics like Jacques Barzun, broadcasters like Elmer Davis, and businessmen like Edgar Smith, the vice-chairman of General Motors. 27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 53–54. View publication stats