(Previous installments: Part I )
Many works of pseudo-scientific synthesis were popular. As Linyard thinks to himself: "Every one now read scientific books and expressed an opinion on them ... the inaccessible goddess whom the Professor had served in his youth now offered her charm to the market-place" (314). And yet, he counters, "it was not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science masquerading in the garb of the real divinity." Wharton undercuts Linyard here: science is the goddess most worthy of worship transforms science into a religion, at least in the mind of Linyard. His perspective on scientific inquiry is skewed, which may be why his idea is mistaken for the very pseudo-science it mocks; namely, works in which "ancient dogma and modern discovery were depicted in a close embrace under the lime-lights of a hazy transcendentalism" (315). As to his idea,
the divine, incomparable idea was simply that he should avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He would write a skit on the "popular" scientific book; he would so heap platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false analogy, so use his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the ignorant, that even the gross crowd would join in the laugh against its augurs. And the laugh should be something more than the distension of mental muscles; it should be the trumpet-blast bringing down the walls of ignorance, or at least the little stone striking the giant between the eyes. (315)
Wharton may be suggesting that his ability to pull this off is marred by the pseudo-scientific quality of his "superior knowledge." At this time, the disciplines had yet to coalesce into the neat units interdisciplinarians now smash: biology, psychology, sociology, literature, philosophy, botany, you name a department and William James taught the exact same course on Herbert Spencer in it. When Linyard pitches his manuscript to an old college friend in publishing, Harviss initially considers even reading the manuscript a favor. When he reads it and mistakenly believes Linyard to "have come round a little—have fallen in line" (316), he immediately orders the publication of The Vital Thing. Linyard returns a fortnight later, and upon learning that it will be published as the very thing it mocks, he laughs himself into a whirl, recovers, then "succomb[s] to a fresh access, from the vortex of which he managed to fling out" (317).
Once Harviss recovers from his flushes of embarrassment, he proposes that Linyard not "insist on an ironical interpretation [addressed] to a very small class of readers," that "if you'll let me handle this book as a genuine thing I'll guarantee to make it go" (317). Linyard accedes, charmed by "the enlarged circumference of the joke" (317). Here, then, is another possible gloss on the title: it could document the descent of Linyard, as he puts aside his scientific qualms for monetary gains. Harviss offers him a $1,000 advance, no small reward for setting aside his scruples. That he begins to rationalize his decision the moment he leaves Harviss' office evidences his discomfort: "after all, nothing was changed in the situation; not a word of the book was to be altered ... The change was merely in the publisher's point of view" (317).
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