CONTENTS

Special Issue: Data Fiction: Naturalism, Narrative, and Numbers

Guest Editors: James Dorson and Regina Schober

Essays
Introduction
James Dorson and Regina Schober ..................................................................... 1

he Vital and the Statistical

Jennifer L. Fleissner ........................................................................................... 9

Hypereconomics: Frank Norris, homas Piketty, and Neoclassical

Economic Romance
Jason Puskar .....................................................................................................28

Rates, Romance, and Regulated Monopoly in Frank Norris’s he Octopus

James Dorson ...................................................................................................50

“A Problem in Small Boat Navigation”: Ocean Metaphors and Emerging

Data Epistemology in Stephen Crane’s “he Open Boat” and Jack London’s
“he Heathen”
Regina Schober ............................................................................................... 70

Counting Success and Measuring Value: Money, Numbers, and Abstraction

in heodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
Ulfried Reichardt..............................................................................................89

Domestic Data and Feminist Momentum: he Narrative Accounting of

Helen Stuart Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Katherine A. Fama ..........................................................................................105

he Wire, Big Data, and the Specter of Naturalism

Laura Bieger ................................................................................................... 127
 Introduction

James Dorson, Freie Universität Berlin

Regina Schober, University of Mannheim

In recent years, technology and business writers have stumbled over each
other to show how new technologies in data collection and management
are revolutionizing our lives. he claim in Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s
and Kenneth Cukier’s bestselling book, Big Data: A Revolution hat Will
Transform How We Work, hink, and Live (2013)—that “the world of big
data is poised to shake up everything from businesses and the sciences to
healthcare, government, education, economics, the humanities, and every
other aspect of society” (11)—is but one example of the great expectations
resting on recent developments in computation and informatics. But if
the technology behind the big data revolution is new, the idea behind it
is not. here is an uncanny resemblance between claims made on behalf
of big data and those made by naturalist iction more than a century ago.
What the inluential MIT computer scientist Alex Pentland in Social Phys-
ics (2014) calls “living laboratories”—i.e., the use of social data obtained
through mobile devices and sensors to “watch human organizations evolve
on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis” (121)—echoes the Sekundenstil
(second-by-second style) of German naturalists like Arno Holz seeking to
describe every detail of reality as it unfolds, but also Émile Zola’s view of
the naturalist novel as modeled on the laboratory experiment for mapping
our desires and habits. Pentland’s use of big data to “observe humans in
just the same way we observe apes or bees and derive rules of behavior, re-
action, and learning” (190) has an unmistakable naturalist ring to it. His
observation that “we are now coming to realize that human behavior is
determined as much by social context as by rational thinking or individ-
ual desires” (59) is hardly news to anyone who has ever read a naturalist
novel. here are also striking similarities between the organizing natural

Studies in American Naturalism • Summer 2017. Vol. 12, No. 1

© 2017 Studies in American Naturalism
2 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 12, no. 1

metaphors of big data discourse, the “oceans,” “mountains,” “loods,” and

“avalanches” of data in Mayer-Schönberger’s and Cukier’s book, and Frank
Norris’s representations of wheat as a natural force in he Octopus (1901)
and he Pit (1903). Even the moral thrust behind collecting all of this
data—to “predict and mitigate inancial crashes, detect and prevent infec-
tious disease, use our natural resources more wisely, and encourage creativ-
ity to lourish and ghettos to diminish” (Pentland 216)—recalls the reform
agendas of the Progressive Era that American literary naturalism had been
associated with.
What are we to do with these parallels? First, the commonalities be-
tween the discourse of big data today and naturalist literature delate some
of the claims about the revolutionary newness of the era of big data. To
be sure, historians of science and statistics have long traced the trium-
phal march of quantitative methods through the natural and social sci-
ences to society at large. Far from being new, the recent hype surround-
ing the power of data takes us back to the beginnings of modern science.
Data-driven research emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
with an increasing desire for predictability as society grew more complex
and the power of providential explanations waned. It was not until the
late nineteenth century, however, that quantiication became an epistemo-
logical paradigm reaching from the natural to the social sciences—with
profound implications for culture and literature. In using a term coined
by Auguste Comte for the title of his book, Pentland implicitly acknowl-
edges the historical debt of big data to the probabilistic revolution in the
sciences. Big data’s dictum to let data speak for itself evokes nineteenth-
century desires for objectivity, the “blind sight” that “bears no trace of the
knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment,
wishing or striving” (Daston and Galison 17). he scientiic neutrality that
data promises has long served political and institutional interests by ofer-
ing a way to mediate social tensions and facilitate communication. A his-
torical perspective on recent debates on the role of data thus places them
in the context of a larger discursive continuum, and it sheds light on the
political and institutional conditions underlying the desire for ever more
and better data.
Insightful as the history of science may be, reading data through nat-
uralist iction ofers something that science studies cannot. Emerging in
the information-hungry times of the late nineteenth century, naturalism is
the irst literary movement permeated by the quantifying spirit. As Mark
Seltzer writes, naturalist iction “everywhere notes numbers and intervals
of time; calibrates time and motion; measures and decomposes values, dis-
 James Dorson and Regina Schober 3

tances, and actions into intervals, sequences, and statistics” (14). Yet unlike
earlier literature invested in questions prompted by nineteenth-century
science and technology, naturalist texts are not simply about information.
To a far greater extent than any other literary movement, the formal choic-
es of naturalist texts are informed by quantitative methods in the natural
and social sciences. Notorious for its “clumsy” prose, its predilection for
description, and its slices of life, naturalist iction both relects and con-
tributes to the fragmentation of modern life. As the dramatic medical met-
aphors in Zola of surgeons, operations, scalpels, and dissection suggest,
the breaking up of wholes into parts in order to see how they function was
integral to a naturalist poetics. In the case of Zola, the naturalist novel is
information, ready data for the uplift of society. But it would be wrong to
say that the naturalist investment in numbers is merely the product of the
information culture surrounding it. In their introduction to a recent book
with the suggestive title “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013), Lisa Gitelman
and Virginia Jackson write that the social circulation of data as a desired
form of knowledge is predicated on “the imagination of data” (3). In a
number of ways that will be explored in this issue, naturalist texts shaped
the perception of data in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Returning to naturalism as a key actor in the cultural history of data is not
the story of how science and technology determine naturalism, but of how
naturalist texts helped imagine data in new and powerful ways in society.
Bringing the terms data and iction together in the title of this issue is
meant to unsettle received notions about both. he title suggests that data
and iction are intimately linked, a link that is most obvious in naturalist
iction due to its frequent negotiation of scientiic methods. As the sin-
gular form of data implies—datum means something that is given—this
link is what the term data itself is meant to obscure. By deinition, “data”
is the semantic opposite of “iction.” Yet, like iction, data also rely on rep-
resentation: from tables and graphs to the binary code of computers and
neuroimaging. Regardless of whether representation is verbal, visual, or
numerical, it not only implies a way of looking but a way of knowing. As
an aggregative term, “data” suggests that to understand something it must
irst be taken apart and made quantiiable. In contrast, the narrative form
of iction implies that we understand things not by breaking them apart
and adding them up but by linking them causally. Literature could be said
to constitute what Steven Shaviro misses in the information age, namely
“what is more than information: the qualitative dimension of experience
or the continuum of analog space in between all those ones and zeroes”
(249). Be this as it may, the opposition between the languages of science
4 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 12, no. 1

and literature overlooks how iction may draw on analytical discourse in

ways that give popular cultural expression to a technical scientiic outlook.
Even in narrative form, literature may help us see the world as informa-
tion, attune us to quantities and patterns, numbers and aggregates. While
the negotiation of data in literature shows how iction may also contribute
to a positivist worldview, the aesthetic forms that data take show that data
is premised on culturally and historically speciic modes of representation.
Mediating between two forms of knowledge—one based on narrative
causality and qualitative, hermeneutical understanding, the other on math-
ematical correlation and quantitative data—naturalism ofers a privileged
space for examining the cultural imagination of data. Yet the navigation of
two distinct spheres of knowledge in naturalism is anything but uncom-
plicated. Naturalist texts imagine data in conlicted ways. Data iction also
implies “data friction” (Gitelman and Jackson 7; our emphasis). If naturalist
texts fail to reconcile the diferences between a hermeneutic and positivistic
worldview, these failures are themselves signiicant and shed light on the
limitations of both forms of knowledge. hreatening the narrative integrity
of the naturalist novel, the fragmentation resulting from its commitment
to description and its running analytical commentary on the story itself
can plunge the naturalist text into the epistemological confusion that its
scientiic investment is meant to escape. As Jennifer Fleissner has argued,
naturalist texts are characterized by “an entrapment in a ‘compulsion to
describe,’ an endless, excessive attempt to gain control over one’s surround-
ings that reveals one’s actual lack of control and concomitant frozenness in
place” (43). Just as the collection of data in society threatens to spin out of
control—the proverbial information overload—data iction also balances
on the brink of aesthetic and epistemological chaos.
Focusing on naturalist iction in the U.S., where concerns with data
are similar, if also somewhat diferent from the European context, the aim
of this issue is to bring to light historical continuities between American
naturalist texts, with their own idiosyncrasies and data paradoxes, and a
contemporary culture of big data. If the digital humanities—itself a prime
example of the reach of quantitative methods today—have recently shown
us what we can learn from reading literature through data, this issue in-
stead asks what we can learn from reading data through literature. By
reading data through the lens of naturalism, the issue hopes to show the
continued relevance of naturalist iction for understanding the modern
discourses it helped shape.
he essays in this volume relect the relationship between data and nat-
uralism in multifaceted ways, negotiating some of the major epistemolog-
 James Dorson and Regina Schober 5

ical and cultural assumptions of late nineteenth-century data iction. he

movement toward quantiication and statistical thinking about persons
and populations has been regarded a key tendency of naturalist iction. In
the opening essay of this issue, Jennifer Fleissner challenges such a histor-
ical narrative of naturalism by examining the relationship between statis-
tical iction and vitalist thinking. While Émile Zola’s and Frank Norris’s
views of naturalism are typically understood as mechanistic—derived as
they are in Zola from Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine—Fleissner
argues that the importance of vitalist thought for nineteenth-century med-
ical writing in fact inlects both of them via the ambivalent posture of Ber-
nard, who referred to himself as a “physical vitalist.” In her reading of Nor-
ris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), Fleissner shows, among other things,
how statistical thinking is subject to a moral critique in the portrayal of
the hero’s antitype, Geary, whose praxes of eicient self-management are
depicted as an attempt to stave of a vitalist understanding of life as an
endless, immeasurable process.
In addition to statistical thinking, the notion of scale plays an import-
ant role in naturalist data iction. Jason Puskar discusses the resonances
and diferences between naturalism and the representation of large-scale
economies in homas Piketty’s widely discussed Capital in the Twenty-First
Century (2014) with its data-driven assessment of economic inequality.
Puskar reads the tensions between realistic diagnostics and romantic mys-
ticism in Norris’s he Pit in the context of competing forms of economic
representation in the late nineteenth century, where the emerging ield of
neoclassical economics was eclipsing the more accessible terms of political
economy and turning economic knowledge into a mathematical science.
Such economic abstractions precipitated what Puskar calls the “hypereco-
nomic,” a view of the economy as a massively distributed system without
the clear or manageable boundaries of a macroeconomy. As Puskar’s anal-
ysis of economic representation in he Pit shows, the surprisingly strong
reliance on realist novels in Capital in the Twenty-First Century can be read
as Piketty’s attempt to turn neoclassical economic romance back into mac-
roeconomic realism.
Extending the link between data and economics, James Dorson exam-
ines the role that statistics play in Norris’s he Octopus in light of late
nineteenth-century debates over the regulation of monopolies. Focusing
on the conlict over freight rates in the novel, which was also at the center
of the “trust problem,” Dorson shows how contemporary attempts to solve
the rate issue by empirically determining what a “fair” rate is are closely
related to Norris’s own attempt to reconcile realism and romance. Inter-
6 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 12, no. 1

rogating the link between he Octopus and statistical discourse, he argues

that Presley’s artistic struggle to write an epic romance is only resolved in
the end through a vision of statistical regularity, a resolution that Dor-
son calls the novel’s statistical romance. But as he Octopus at the same
time highlights the limitations of a statistical solution to the conlict over
freight rates, he argues that the novel not only attunes readers to a statis-
tical view of reality, but also anticipates the regulatory problems that fol-
lowed from a data-driven approach to economic regulation.
Nature metaphors play a central role in Regina Schober’s contribution.
Based on the assumption that sea imagery has always pervaded concep-
tualizations of data and knowledge, Schober reads Stephen Crane’s “he
Open Boat” (1897) and Jack London’s “he Heathen” (1909) to exam-
ine the cultural and ideological functions of sea imagery in relation to an
emerging data epistemology. In these texts, Schober argues, the ocean both
exempliies and challenges the potentials and limitations of human knowl-
edge in the context of large and unimaginable sets of information includ-
ed in natural laws. hrough the naturalization of data and the staging of a
complex force that dramatically shifts between allowing for and resisting
human control, Schober claims that in these stories the ocean metaphor
frames the treatment of data in a rather speciic way. First, it obscures the
constructedness and contingency of data; and second, by granting a sub-
stantial yet not complete amount of narrative agency to an environmental
force, it emphasizes the posthuman embeddedness of individual agency
while simultaneously evoking the image of a living organism that can (po-
tentially) be “read,” if not tamed.
Katherine Fama, by extending the analysis of data iction to the do-
mestic bookkeeping in Helen Stuart Campbell’s Miss Melinda’s Oppor-
tunity (1886) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did (1909–
10), shows how Campbell’s and Gilman’s narrative accounting provide a
domestic counterpoint to naturalist investments in data. By representing
household data organized into lengthy budgets, inventories, and inancial
ledgers, the two novels avoid romantic or institutional interventions in fa-
vor of business plans designed by women with modern economic and cler-
ical skills. hese narrative accounts harness skillsets newly familiar to their
female readers, detailing speciic innovations in home economics, feminist
reforms, and women’s cohabitation in order to reigure women’s domestic
independence.
he link between economic numbers and women’s independence is
also explored in heodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Ulfried Reich-
ardt’s contribution discusses how the novel negotiates the relationship
 James Dorson and Regina Schober 7

between the money economy in modern metropoles and its efects on

subject-formation. Drawing on Georg Simmel, Reichardt argues that the
abstractions of quantiication and counting had the democratizing ef-
fect of lowering the requirements for social participation. If money is the
“great equalizer” (Simmel), it allows for a signiicant extension of indi-
vidual freedom at the same time as it radically abstracts from substantial,
qualitative, or “inner” values. Reichardt closes his essay by showing how
such a number-centered character depiction returns with a vengeance in
postmodern inance iction (such as Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis), rendering
Sister Carrie a paradigmatic precursor to contemporary data iction.
Laura Bieger’s concluding essay shifts the focus to contemporary cul-
ture by tracing naturalist data iction in recent American television. Bieger
argues that he Wire (2002–2008) revives the naturalist tradition in its fo-
cus on gathering, deciphering, and connecting pieces of information to a
meaningful and narratively compelling whole. She demonstrates how the
rationale behind he Wire’s obsessive data gathering is to ight the octopus-
like operations of organized crime. he epic sweep of he Wire is also strik-
ingly Octopus-like, covering Baltimore’s urban ghettos, the postindustrial
devaluation of labor, the corrosion of institutions, and the systemic repro-
duction of poverty, drug-addiction, violence, and injustice. he Wire’s cre-
ators may even have aimed at reviving Norris’s attempt to produce a work
of iction that not only tells and shows, but also proves something. Such a
desire to prove something, Bieger concludes, becomes especially vexed in
an age in which the distinction between information and knowledge is be-
coming increasingly tenuous. Yet if the rise of big data thrives on precisely
this leveling, contemporary data iction has a pivotal role to play in staging
and exploring some of its messier implications.

James Dorson is an assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute

for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author
of Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac
McCarthy’s Westerns (2016), as well as essays on David Foster Wallace, Edith
Wharton, and American literary naturalism. His research interests include
critical theory, labor iction, and literature and economics. He is currently
writing a book on the relationship between naturalism and the rise of
management thought at the turn of the twentieth century.

Regina Schober is an assistant professor at the American Studies

Department of the University of Mannheim. She is the author of Unexpected
Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics (2011)
8 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 12, no. 1

and co-editor of the special issue Network heory and American Culture of
Amerikastudien (with Ulfried Reichardt and Heike Schäfer, 2015) as well
as of the book he Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the
Pleasure of Non-Conformity (with Katharina Motyl, 2017). Her primary
research interests include network aesthetics and epistemologies, literature
of the information age, cultural negotiations of the quantiied self, and
adaptation studies.

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