Catastrophe and Development in the Adventure Romance

At the end of the Victorian era, the British were awash in disasters. From the wars and earthquakes reported in newspapers to the rebellions and floods that inundated literary works, catastrophes were everywhere. Britain's fascination with catastrophe has been accounted for variously. Advances in science turned cataclysmic events into golden opportunities for research,¹ while improved communications allowed near-instantaneous reporting, making it possible to read about a volcano while it was erupting across the globe.² Trains wrecked, bridges collapsed, and dams broke at unprecedented rates because builders had little incentive to make these new technologies safe.³ While industrial nations bore witness to a surge in technological disasters, colonial nations were plagued by disasters exasperated by imperial practices.⁴ The growth in science, technology, and empire goes far to explain Britain's new catastrophic imagination but fails to account for catastrophe's particularly tenacious attachment to the adventure romance.⁵ Catastrophe flourished in this genre because it offered a new way of conceptualizing space and time that would be a boon to imperial developments.⁶

Adventure romance emerged in the 1880s precisely when the pace of modernization on a global scale was being stepped up by the New Imperialism; catastrophe migrated into this form shortly thereafter in order to modernize it and make it more capable of modernization.⁷ Although a few theorists have aligned romance with modernity,⁸ nobody has located its modernity in its unique spatiotemporal structure.⁹ Nicholas Daly has demonstrated how adventure romance promotes social change through advancing modern concepts, such as consumerism and professionalism,¹⁰ but such concepts could find no solid ground in romance until a tectonic shift in narrative structure prepared the way. This article makes a new argument: it first asserts that the chronotope of catastrophe smuggles the spatiotemporal configurations necessary for modern economic developments to take hold into the romances of H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jules Verne.¹¹ The article then shows how Bram Stoker's The Snake's Pass (1890) voices profound ambivalence about catastrophe's developmental potential.¹²

If the adventure chronotope defines the adventure genre, as Mikhail Bakhtin asserts, then the romances that thrived between 1880–1920 display a notable divergence from that form because it is more often catastrophe than adventure that defines them. Catastrophe is the chronotope that is best able to promote the sort of radical speed-up in time and concurrent overhaul of space that David Harvey calls "time-space compression" and believes was vital for the capitalist (under)development of New Imperialism to take off.¹³ Catastrophe turns out to be a better mechanism for promoting improvements than adventure because it is capable of interrupting the form. Adventures, characterized by an abstract relation between space and time, are reversible in time and interchangeable in space.¹⁴ Because of their lack of fixity, they threaten to go on forever and depend upon quest to stop them and close off the form.¹⁵ For example, in what many consider the first British adventure romance, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), only after the treasure is retrieved can the protagonists sail home. Catastrophe's unique combination of spatial abstraction and temporal specificity enables a different sort of conclusion. Catastrophe happens just once, late in the adventure sequence, and can therefore alter the narrative structure, replacing quest with a more dramatic but less conclusive ending: the treasure is not retrieved but swept away by disaster, and the hero is sent away empty-handed. Instead of closing off the form, catastrophe extends it in space and time-generating sequels or just new conquests in the shape of another romance. Catastrophe, however, does not work alone. If adventure begets adventure, and catastrophe begets change, together they promote a theory of development. Uncovering how the chronotope of catastrophe works alongside adventure to revamp the romance form is the aim of the following two sections.¹⁶

Space

Catastrophic spaces are bounded.¹⁷ Adventures, on the other hand, require boundless space according to Bakhtin: "in order for the adventure to develop, it needs space, and plenty of it."¹⁸ And this space must...