Mass-Observation, Modernism, and Auto-ethnography

“What have you been busy about, Mr Muckerji?”

“Well—you will not be offended—you have a phrase, ‘The show goes on,’ haven’t you? and when that poor child committed suicide, it seemed an occasion—of sociological importance. You know how it is, Mrs, Mendrill, we mass observers are always on duty.”

What was that? D. wondered. He could make no sense of it. . . .

“What do you do,” the manageress said, “with all this information?”

“I type it out on my little Corona and send it to the organizers. We call it Mass Observation.”

“Do they print it?”

“They file it for reference. Perhaps one day in a big book—without my name. We work,” he said regretfully, “for science.”

—Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent (1939) ¹

1

Mr. Muckerji does not know that his dutiful interviewing of neighbors after the death of young Else Crole is putting his own life in peril: the manageress Mrs. Mendrill is the killer, and in the passage above she is angling to discover how much Mr. Muckerji has learned about her crime. Nor does the dogged toiler for science realize that his conversation with her has an unseen auditor in D., the confidential agent of Greene’s title, who is in Britain on a desperate secret mission for his war-torn continental nation and is himself at constant risk of exposure and assassination by the manageress and others. But then, Greene’s joke centers on how completely oblivious this diligent volunteer analyst of British society can be to what is really going on all around him, how incapable he shows himself of grasping the machinations and motive forces that control his social world. Nor does the joke stop there. The notion of a (supposed) suicide’s being “of sociological importance” seems an ironic nod in the direction of Durkheim, whose study of the phenomenon helped inaugurate, and set the standard for, modern social thought. And Greene toys with some ideas fundamental to Mass-Observation, that amateur research organization of the late 1930s to which Mr. Muckerji has pledged himself. Prominent among these is the idea of an “anthropology of ourselves” and the degree of “distance” or alienation from a culture necessary for the scientific understanding of it. To Mass-Observation’s self-distancing proclamation that “we are studying the beliefs and behavior of the British Islanders” (as opposed, say, to the Trobriand Islanders of Malinowski’s classic fieldwork), Greene answers back by making his fictional mass observer “an Indian gentleman” resident in England, to whom we are invited to ascribe an unbridgeable detachment from, not to say a blank incomprehension of, English culture. ² He also gives us the eavesdropping visitor D., placed at a still greater remove from all things English by his foreignness, on which the novel’s other characters comment incessantly, and by his war-transformed consciousness. The literally shell-shocked D. makes his way through the English landscape struck dumb by the kinds of pursuits and consciousness peace makes possible, among which must be counted those of Mass-Observation. His puzzlement about Mr. Muckerji’s activities (“What was that? . . . He could make no sense of it”) is part of his larger bafflement in the face of all those many details of social life, large and small, that a culture’s “insiders” take for granted but that may hold the clue to its operations and identity. As Malinowski declared in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), “foolish indeed and short-sighted would be the man of science who would pass by a whole class of phenomena, ready to be garnered, and leave them to waste, even though he did not see at the moment to what theoretical use they might be put!” It was, after all, in the myriad imponderabilia of native life that “the innumerable threads which keep together the family, the clan, the village community, the tribe” were spun. ³ M-O, as it came to be known, followed suit by arguing that its investigation of Britons’ smoking habits “demonstrate[d] how relevant to the structure of society the study of small details of behaviour...