The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science Cambridge Studies i...

Author: John Limon

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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Editor

Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board

Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Richard Bridgmen, University of California, Berkeley David Levin, University of Virginia Joel Porte, Cornell University Eric Sundquist, University of California, Berkeley Mike Weaver, Oxford University Selected books in the series Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature Steven Axelrod and Helen Deese (eds.), Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.), Ideology and Classic American Literature Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century George Dekker, The American Historical Romance Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse Albert Gelpi (ed.)> Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region Alfred Hebegger, Henry James and the ' 'Woman Business'' David Halliburton, The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane Susan K. Harris, 19th-century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies John Me Williams, The American Epic: Transformations of a Genre, 1770-1860 David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in Poetry in the Pound Tradition Eric Sigg, The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings For a complete listing of books available in the series, see the pages following the Index.

The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science A Disciplinary History of American Writing JOHN LIMON

The right of ike University of Cambridge to prim and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry Vlll in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521107631 © Cambridge University Press 1990 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1990 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Limon, John. The place of fiction in the time of science : a disciplinary history of American writing / John Limon. p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in American literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-35251-7 1. American fiction — History and criticism. 2. Literature and science - United States. 3. United States - Intellectual life. 4. Science in literature. I. Title. II. Series PS374.S33L56 1990 813.009 -dc20 89-23849 ISBN 978-0-521-35251-2 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-10763-1 paperback

For my mother and father

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments

1. Toward a disciplinary intellectual history 2. Brown's epistemology Romancing Newton The Locked closet A Cartesian plague Hume and repetition Kant and madness Coda 3. Poe's methodology Is science deadly dull? Is there a life science? Undying literature 4. Hawthorne's technology The anxieties of alienation The problems of preemption Treachery betrayed 5. After the revolutions: Brown and Dreiser, Poe and Pynchon, Hawthorne and Mailer Sister Carrie, Brother Arthur Polar similarity The celestial spacecraft Notes Index

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xiii 1 30 30 34 43 51 61 69 70 70 82 96 121 121 135 150 160 160 169 181 191 210

PREFACE

In sympathy for literary Americanists who will not see the necessity of an opening chapter on intellectual history, I offer this apology. I found myself wanting to describe, with typical Americanist transdisciplinary fervor, the relationship of science and American literature, but could find no model of intellectual history that would do justice to the subject that would save the phenomenon (the anxiety of disciplinary relations) and not dissolve it. If I had considered literature (in the manner of Marjorie Hope Nicolson) to be moving gratefully behind science through history, or (in the manner of Karl Popper) as working diligently on problems given to it by science, or (in the manner of Michel Serres) as not essentially different from science, then I would have lost all the border tension between the principalities of literature and science that alone makes sense of the intellectual maneuvers of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Pynchon, and Norman Mailer. Readers of this book will therefore be making a mistake if they believe that the first half of Chapter 1 is engaged in controversies in intellectual history and philosophy of science for their own sake. Within that chapter, I try to slide gracefully from these abstract disputes to introducing the particular intellectual contortions of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne entirely for the purpose of suggesting the ways in which my theoretical and practical concerns have determined each other. Chapter 1 is, as a result, both preamble and conclusion. Nevertheless, I do not advise readers who prefer their evidence before their generalizations to skip to the second chapter. Chapter 1 is Chapter 1 because the following four chapters are incomprehensible without it. I ought next to address those readers who will not welcome such a lengthy discussion of Brown, in particular, or of the scientific concerns of any writer. Brown is crucial because he is one of the founders of American fiction; consequently, I needed him to be one of the founders

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PREFACE

of American fictional-intellectual gamesmanship. He has served that purpose admirably. I also needed to treat at length all of my central figures - Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne - because I understood the professional aspect of the literary negotiation with science to be essential. I wanted to look at the careers made possible by establishing some intellectual breathing room in the lethal scientific atmosphere. I should say in advance that, in trying to describe literature vis-a-vis science, I have discussed literature as if it were something isolable, which certainly exposes me to attack - but, I think, less justifiably than at first it seems. I have attempted to define literature privatively, as against science: that is, as the historically most ambivalent discipline versus the historically secure discipline (this is what turns out to make assimilative intellectual histories - trying to make one history out of two historical senses - misleading); as the professionally most violable discipline versus the professionalizing discipline; as the discipline maximally vulnerable to intellectual history versus the best-fortified source of it in modern times. In short, I have not discussed literature as if it were something in itself, but rather as a discipline defined by what it is not. In this light, I believe I have made the preoccupation with science of a whole line of canonized American writers seem sensibly desperate, as other cross-disciplinary models do not. The historical place of literature in modern times, the intellectual status of literature, and the professional status of literature are at stake. I have tried to suggest the interconnection of these anxieties. The center of the enterprise is the analysis, in Chapters 2-4, of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne. The reason for choosing these three writers is that their careers surround the single most important period in modern history for defining the entanglement of literature and science: the era of the final professionalization of science, incipient at the time of Brown's career and, for most purposes, achieved by the end of Hawthorne's, registered with brilliantly terrified elan in Poe. I do not conceive of professionalization merely as something that happened to science in the course of history, but as the historical sign of science. For this reason, I do not take the careers of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne to be as peculiar as they may appear. I think that they are merely the writers who were witness to the gathering of the professional crisis - not that the crisis had not been drifting toward the nineteenth century from the seventeenth, or that it is now happily dispersed. Still, readers may continue to suspect, well into the book, that Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne lived at a peculiar time, especially since the "problem-situation" (Popper's term) with which they played was roughly the same: the failure of empiricism to account for science. This paradox allowed German metaphysics to make a move to deprofessionalize science, culminating in Naturphilosophie, that seems largely a curi-

PREFACE

xi

osity in our day - and that makes Brown's or Poe's day seem special. In order to mitigate this false impression, I conclude the book with a fifth chapter on Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer. Further, I liken Dreiser and Brown (despite the intervention of Darwin), Pynchon and Poe (despite statistical thermodynamics), and Mailer and Hawthorne (despite cybernetics and computers). The point is not merely to establish the insoluble and redundant nature of literature's problem with science, but to suggest the recalcitrant reflectivity of literary time as opposed to scientific time. Three omissions need to be justified. First, where are the poets, essayists, and playwrights? There is no essential reason I could not have dealt with them. If I had not been determined to stick with prose fiction - as the single most vulnerable area with respect to intellectual history, tied inextricably to concepts but incapable of defining them or working them out - it would have been a treat to study Emerson. His reference to the "half-sight of science" admirably expresses the usual literary condescension to science but, were we to understand the genitive as objective, it also does the job of registering the weakness of that condescension: What writers scorn, they cannot see. Emerson is willing to give science its due: "Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. . . . The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, 'This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true'; had already transformed nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse." Later in Nature, however, Emerson impeaches science for not having "sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world." There was, as it happened, a vision of science that had sufficient humanity in this sense. Naturphilosophie was out to make all science as ideal as Euler, an undertaking that gave rise to Oken's massive discovery, to use Emerson's phrase, of "himself in every great and small thing." Why Emerson should scorn science and not attempt to take it over - in the spirit of the idealists who made his scorn plausible - is a typical question of this book. Second, where, in particular, is Henry Adams in all this? He does not fit either my desire to concentrate on writers primarily of fiction or my structure. Still, he cannot fail to have a presence: He was born at the moment of the literary-scientific crisis, and he may be defined as the first person to whom the crisis was a way of life. The ghost of Adams will have to haunt these pages. He will make his influence felt in the discussion of Dreiser, who inhabited the same scientific problemsituation; he will inform the discussion of his two disciples, Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon. Third, what about American women writers? When I was first formulating this study, I was naively oblivious to gender considerations:

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Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer just seemed to me perfect exemplars of the literary-science problem I wanted to get at. I knew that there could, of course, be writers to whom science did not loom as a problem; I never closely inquired, however, into what characterizes them. I should insist here that science anxiety is not an essential component of greatness. It would say nothing about their merit to find most women writers not enormously bothered. Still, it would not be responsible to suggest, by omitting women from this study, that they are not centrally interested in the subject; George Eliot would, of course, necessarily figure in a study of science and British fiction. I simply am unwilling to generalize. I do note, however, in passing and at somewhat greater length further on, that all male writers who are aware of it take their vulnerability before science as an affront to their masculinity. Finally, a regret about the clarity of the book's model of disciplinary relations. I came across Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots and George Levine's One Culture too late to consider them with sufficient respect in my preliminary theoretical discussion. Both books (the second contains an essay by Beer as well as several essays inspired by her work) seem to take as their disciplinary model the messy profusion of Darwinism, as Beer wonderfully describes it. Beer illustrates the way a Darwinian point only gradually emerges out of an abundance of details, as evolution emerges out of the welter of natural creation; the same may be said of her own detailed and copious work. Despite Levine's title, and as Levine himself is content to admit, the contributors to his volume describe all possible relationships (symmetries, homologies, influences, antagonisms, skews) between science and literature; thus, out of many detailed readings, a sense slowly issues of how culture may be characterized as "one" though it is disunited. (The stark contrast is with Snow's "two cultures," of course, the opposition being not one of unity and disunity but of messy attachment and meticulous avoidance.) In the face of such brilliant appreciations of the energizing muddiness of disciplinary relations, I am hesitant to propose so tidy a model as my own. I only hope that it illuminates the messiness - perhaps as one's brights in a fog do not penetrate so much as highlight the opacity - and does not discourage the further elaboration of disorderliness even in its own terms. There are probably more apologies to be made, especially to those who tried to help me with this book (Richard Hutson, Samuel Haber, Robert Ferguson, Michael Bell, Albert Gelpi, Frances Restuccia, and Frederick Crews), but this is probably enough, for now, to everyone else. I hope that this preface has buffered the imminent plunge into what I call, as if I were going to have adherents, a "disciplinary" intellectual history of American literature.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge those journals that allowed me to use the following articles in revised form: "How to Place Poes's Arthur Gordon Pym in Science-Dominated Intellectual History and How to Extract It Again," North Dakota Quarterly 51 (1983) "Steps Toward an Intellectual History of American Literature," Southwest Review 73 (1988) I would also like to express my appreciation to Williams College and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which together funded a year of writing without which I could not have completed this project.

1 TOWARD A DISCIPLINARY INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Our intellectual age is antidisciplinarian. At approximately the moment that C. P. Snow decided to inform the world, in a lecture that is mysteriously still famous, that intellectual life was divided by scientists and humanists into warring camps, some of the liminal thinkers and writers of our time were shaping our current sense of the full permeability and sympathetic interrelationship of disciplines. Unknown to Snow, but nearly as he spoke, Thomas Kuhn and Paul K. Feyerabend were independently formulating the idea that successive scientific theories manufacture conflicting conceptual universes out of skewed concepts; since successive theories can never be properly measured against each other, scientific revolutions are at least partly irrational. The idea led to much excitement among humanists, and Feyerabend, if not Kuhn, has supported their inference that science can no longer assert its rational superiority to softer disciplines. Meanwhile, in France, Foucault was inventing the episteme, within which disciplines from the arts to the sciences may form a nexus, across which science does not necessarily evolve but rather may be thoroughly revolutionized. Once again, any notion that science differs from other fields by virtue of its unflagging rational progress seemed to have been invalidated. In America, Thomas Pynchon was beginning a career whose moral, for some critics, was that literature had discovered how much its survival depended on surrendering its high-tonedness and high-handedness with respect to illiterate science. Pynchon is still thought to have proved that modern literature must make poetry out of equations and chemical bonds. We might begin a nearly random sampling of subsequent antidisciplinary sentiment with the general unwillingness of contemporary philosophers to endorse any positivistic smugness that, at its smuggest, would identify the extent of science with the extent of knowledge. Richard Rorty wishes to dismiss the whole history of epistemological formulation inaugurated by Descartes's response to the New Science, which

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TOWARD A DISCIPLINARY INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

has married philosophy and science in hauteur toward the rest of the intellectual world ever since. Yeats is quoted in the purge: "Yeats asked the spirits. . . why they had come. The spirits replied, T o bring you metaphors for poetry.'"1 The appeal of this to Rorty's pragmatism is that spirits, like ideas, are valued not for the truth they represent but for the interesting work they promote. Rorty also quotes Harold Bloom along the way: The pragmatist wants to stir up a conversation among disciplines that does not assume the epistemological superiority of any one of them. Other philosophers capitalize on events in the history of science itself to undermine the scientific claim to epistemological superiority. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle may have compelled science to acknowledge that it cannot be physically objective; accordingly, Stephen Toulmin, who used to be a disciplinary purist, has realized that a nonobjective science, a "postmodern" science as he calls it, might as well let down its guard and join softer disciplines in the search for nonobjective knowledge.2 Psychoanalysis, with its acknowledgment of transference and countertransference, and ecology, which studies systems that may include the ecologists themselves and their species, mediate between the hardest sciences like physics and subjective concerns like religion and literature. Toulmin discusses the "parascientific" (if I may use the term to muddle the demarcation of scientific and nonscientific) speculation of such distinguished scientists as Jacques Monod and Franqois Jacob. I might mention, in addition, the parascience of their biological colleague, Francis Crick.3 Crick's theory of "Directed Panspermia" (that bacteria have been transported from another world) sounds, his wife informs him, like science fiction;4 his old partner, James Watson, had already published his scorn for hazy-minded scientists who "wasted their efforts on useless polemics about the origin of life."5 Yet Crick is determined not merely to speculate but also to have us consider his speculation "scientific," despite the fact that it includes a guess about the motives of the beings who sent off the bacteria and - perhaps in a more radical affront to traditional concepts of "science" - despite the fact that the extant rival theory (the prebiotic soup hypothesis) had not arrived at a debilitating crisis. Michel Serres points to statistical thermodynamics as another area in which a breakdown of the classical scientific ideal - in this case, of strictly deterministic laws - has made a reconciliation of science, literature, and other arts appear possible. Serres goes so far as to assert that J. M. W. Turner discovered, "in his own domain," statistical thermodynamics before Boltzmann;6 stochastic art and stochastic science come together art slightly in advance - to usher in the new (antidisciplinary) world. With Boltzmann, Serres tells us, science turned "Venusian" rather than


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"Martial"; no wonder statistical thermodynamics became the scientific preoccupation of Henry Adams and his venerating disciple, Pynchon. In the seamless intellectual world we inhabit, it is unsurprising that scientists themselves are increasingly willing to welcome literary support when they, like Crick, wish to popularize their views. In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker, a mathematics popularizer, makes good use of Borges,7 but Douglas Hofstadter is the champion of antidisciplinary popularizers, implicating all of art in his book Godel, Escher, Bach.H This is a charming piece of science popularization and propaganda, aggressive in its display of wit, imagination, and playfulness for the sake of consternating humanists who had thought themselves the votaries of wit, imagination, and playfulness, but who despise the book's message: Computers may be conscious. In the process, pervasively, Hofstadter insinuates his own intellectual compatibility with the two artists, J. S. Bach and M. C. Escher, who share title roles with the logician Kurt Godel. No literary figure makes it into Hofstadter's title, but Dodgson/Carroll is a tutelary presence in the book. Moreover, in The Mind's /, in which Hofstadter joins forces with Daniel C. Dennett to loosen the vise of humanistic cliches as preparation for a new universe of conscious machines, Rucker's Borges is called in for literary support.9 Stanislaw Lem makes an even more propitious appearance; he and Hofstadter appear to be kindred spirits. Not only does Lem create, in The Cyberiad, a world of humanoid computers, he also shares Hofstadter's characteristic inclinations toward puns, thought experiments, strange loops, neologisms, and narrative nesting devices of befuddling involution.10 This is a list of predilections that does not respect the literary-scientific boundary; evidence of this is that Hugh Kenner appropriated the term "strange loop" - itself Hofstadter's neologism for an analysis of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.] ]

It is as if postmodernist literature and Toulmin's postmodern science are crying out to each other. The mutual invocation that we sense in Hofstadter and Lem might also be registered in Pynchon and Thomas McMahon. McMahon, an academic scientist with a doctorate in fluid mechanics from MIT, is the author of Principles ofAmerican Nuclear Chem-

istry: A Novel (1970), a bildungsroman filled with the narrator's obsessive longing for a woman, a life, and a scientific project as much fun as Los Alamos had been for his father.12 At approximately the moment of the first A-bomb test, the father's mistress (the narrator's fantasy mother and fantasy lover) marries one of his Los Alamos colleagues, and another colleague's wife dies of cancer. Death, love, loss of love, scientific joy, and scientific destructiveness intersect to explode. Entropy is involved, since McMahon locates cancer in the theory of thermodynamics; so is the power of the Virgin, since the mistress is a Catholic named Maryann,

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explicitly associated with Mary. The interplay of these ideas and events is Pynchonesque (and Henry Adamsesque). A decade later, McMahon wrote McKay's Bees, in which several characters are coincidentally interested in bee agriculture; one character who escapes the bee fascination does so by finding the book's one laudable woman, Bernadette; another character, who also manages to escape the bee craze, gets involved with beetles; and there is an escaped slave named Prince Bee.13 McMahon/McKay's recurrent, sometimes hidden B's uncannily recall Pynchon/Stencil's Vs. Their B's and V's are principles of fictional organization superimposed on real settings and, occasionally, historical personages; both authors mix history and fancy, facts and fancy. Science and literature are allies in the search for the goddess Truth because she has pitched her mansion in the place of Fiction. In McMahon, the scientific imagination literally enters the world of "letters"; in Pynchon, letters are returned to science. The conclusion appears to be that a single jurisdiction extends from science to popularization of science to philosophy of science to the rest of philosophy to literary criticism to fiction. A work such of my own which proposes to put Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and, more succinctly, Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer) in relation to the science of their day - will be in the mainstream if it finds literary history easily correspondent, concurrent point for point, with scientific history. It would seem that putting literature into relation with science would require defining "literature" and "science." I forswear at the start, however, any attempt to define literature positively. If, as I propose, the relation of the two disciplines is more difficult than the antidisciplinarians (whose work I hope I have rendered fairly and unconvincingly) imply, the intuition that I have to defend is that the difficulty will appear in a positive demarcation not of literature but of science. A work of history may be considered literature (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire); one may run across The Origin of Species in a Victorian literature class. It is simply not possible to say that these works turn up in literature courses because they are beautifully written (since literature may include ugly writing) or because their truth value may be ignored (since writers may stake their literary claim on truthfulness). They turn up not because they inhabit the well-surveyed borders of literature but because - obviously a necessary, not a sufficient, condition - the boundaries of literature are highly violable. Or put the matter another way: Suppose that a novelist decides to drop his career and become a scientist. He cannot, even if he is Thomas Pynchon, unless he is prepared to reeducate himself. Suppose, on the other hand, that a scientist decides to write a novel; that


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is precisely what Thomas McMahon has done. Both the category of literature and the writing profession are more vulnerable to invasion than science or the scientific profession. To the extent that we think of literature as a discrete category, it is the result of the gradual withdrawal of all other disciplines - whose withdrawal from what comes to be literature partly constitutes them as disciplines - rather than of any exclusiveness that literature itself has ever mustered. In fact, if I refer to literature as a "discipline" at all, it is only as a bow to "interdisciplinary" criticism that includes it. Literature is the abandoned discipline, or, to vary the same pun and oxymoron, the undisciplined discipline. It once was possible to drop everything and become a scientist, as Benjamin Franklin managed to do. So it may with justice be argued that what I am discussing ought to be explicitly limited to the relationship of literature and professionalized science. Science (more or less) accomplished its professionalization in America between 1800 and 1860, that is, between Charles Brockden Brown's career and the end of Hawthorne's, by which I mean at least the following. 1. Professional support for science was extended. In America, the geological surveys created work for geologists. Harvard and Yale opened departments of applied science in 1847, the year of William Barton Rogers 's plan leading to the founding of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania's "first tentative steps toward a separate department of science," two years before Rensselaer "reorganized along polytechnic lines."14 By the 1850s, Joseph Henry's Smithsonian, Alexander Dallas Bache's Coast Survey, and Matthew Fontaine Maury's Naval Observatory were funding science.15 2. Amateur science lost its value. American amateur science had flourished before the nineteenth century, partly because the sheer size of the new continent provided seemingly unlimited opportunities for rock collecting, plant collecting, animal observing, weather observing, and so on. As the continent became taxonomized, however, taxonomy lost its centrality. Furthermore, beginning in the nineteenth century, most of the areas that had remained simple enough for scientific amateurs became highly complex. Lavoisier had simplified chemistry, and Linnaeus had simplified natural history, so that amateurs could participate or follow; subsequently, science increasingly became full-time work or else entirely impossible.16 3. Amateur review of science lost its force. Everyone was apprised of the utility of science even before it was particularly useful, thanks in part to the Washington lobbying of Henry and Bache and the propaganda of the geological surveyors. Even pure science could be funded and defended on the grounds of purported or eventual utility; James Hall, a geological surveyor, announced that research would advance local prosperity, got

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money, and then did the geology that he pleased.17 By the end of the 1840s, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was protecting professional science from public scrutiny. How religious review of science was disarmed is another story, often told.18 If my book, as a result, is interpreted as concerning merely literature and professionalizing or professionalized science, that is all right with me, since my narrative centers on science that is increasingly prestigious, supported, untouchable, and incomprehensible. But one important step toward demarcating modern science in general and distinguishing it from literature in particular is to consider the meaning and implications of its professionalization. I shall say more about delimiting science in terms of its historical form and possibilities. For now, I only record my guess that modern science ought to be isolated not in logical but in historical terms. Professionalization is, I believe, the historical sign of modern science, not a contingent event in its history. This is going too far on too little argumentation. I have meant only to set out my preconception that if science and literature have a boundary dispute, it is because of the territoriality of science, thus relieving me of the obligation to define literature. Intact is my obligation to define science, or at least to survey its borders; to this end I do not have a theory, but I have a strategy. First, it seems essential to give up the impulse to be a Kuhnian, Feyerabendian, Laudanian, or Popperian. One of each of these parties is enough, and I do not wish to convince only already convinced apologists. The strategy is to search in the more radical philosophies of science for what keeps them (wittingly or unwittingly) in the same discourse with more conservative ones. By "radical science philosophies/' I mean those that upset traditional science-literature distinctions - Kuhn's, Feyerabend's, or Serres's - the sort of analysis that stands behind all the antidisciplinary symptoms I began by concatenating. Whatever keeps these systems from being fully radical, whatever keeps science from being essentially identified with literature, ought to put into relief the necessary historical impasses of writers of fiction (trying to assimilate or conquer science) on which I want to found a disciplinary intellectual history of American literature. The result is a minuscule but necessary first step: Literature and science are not essentially indistinguishable, even if Feyerabend is right that "anything goes" in science or if Kuhn is right that scientific revolutions are partly gestalt shifts. Even in the era of Serres's Venusian science, science is not essentially like literature. Feyerabend often comes exceedingly close to collapsing the distinction. He comes nearest in a breathtaking footnote: "The refutation of this belief [Popper's, in the possibility of comparing successive theories in science for verisimilitude] eliminates an important difference (and perhaps


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the only important difference) between science and the arts and makes it possible to speak of styles and preferences in the first, and progress in the latter."19 Feyerabend has just quoted Pound on progress in poetry; what he infers is that you can speak of progress in both art and science, and if it cannot be measured absolutely rationally, it may mean the same thing in both. The generally assertive Feyerabend, however, goes only so far as to say that science and art are perhaps essentially the same. The hesitation may recognize, for example, that if aesthetic considerations play a (now well-documented) role in science as well as art, they may play, as Kuhn believes, a different role: means in science, end in art. More significantly, Feyerabend bases his identification not merely on the importance of style in science but also on progress in poetry. The implicit idea is that in history science seems different, but turns out not to be different, from art. We need to determine whether the notion of "progress" on which Feyerabend bases his identification of art and science - not by denying it to science but by granting it to art - works the same way in both disciplines. Surely, if anything goes in science, as Feyerabend says (if new theories can be adopted against the evidence, if rhetoric is an available and reputable tool for proselytizing on behalf of theories, if style counts, if political factors should be recognized), then it would appear that progress is no more rationally ironclad in science than in art. However, when Feyerabend is hardest pressed to define "anything goes," it turns out to be too weak an abstraction to do the job of identifying (pretensions and ideology aside) science and art. It turns out that Feyerabend means merely this: If you want a simple definition of the scientific method, like induction or falsification, then the only one that will always work (since the scientific method is always up for grabs) is the vacuous "anything goes." "Anything goes" does not imply that anything is science; it implies that nothing can be ruled out by a priori legislation. Suppose that the saying "All's fair in love and war" were rephrased as "Anything goes in love and war." Would that mean that anything is love or war? It would imply that lying might be appropriate behavior for people in love, say, but it does not mean that every time you lie, you're in love. Nor need literature be considered indistinguishable from science, even if literature is something and science can admit anything. We may still believe, apparently, that science always has standards that do in fact exclude nonsciences; we must concede that those standards can always be modified or revolutionized so that nothing can stand as the eternal distinction of science and literature. Here is Feyerabend arriving at this rather conservative gloss himself: "There is not a single rule that remains valid under all circumstances and not a single agency to which

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appeal can always be made/'20 In this light, Feyerabend does not differ essentially from Kuhn. The chief distinction is that Kuhn, though granting that the methodological criteria of science are temporary and local, tends to put his faith in them nonetheless. But a troubling question remains: If the method and logic of science are perennially up for grabs, how do we know science when we see it? Feyerabend may argue that when he critiques science he is merely using standard examples against standard understandings. Kuhn, however, cannot have faith in a nonspecifiable discipline. His way out of this difficulty is to argue that science can indeed by demarcated, but by sociology, not logic. Any given scientific community will get together on how to proceed by modeling a methodological self-definition on a revolutionary exemplar; what will always enforce disciplinary boundaries will not be some unchanging, ideal scientific method but the historical agreement of a group. However, this merely shifts the problem. The puzzle is, in Kuhn's terms, what distinguishes a scientific group from an artistic group, if not logic. To his credit, Kuhn attempts to face that question in a useful essay called "Comment on the Relations of Science and Art."21 What is fascinating to me is that he keeps circling the necessity of distinguishing science and art historically. Kuhn wants to make it plausible that science has a unique historical form, even if it cannot be considered as progressing toward the truth - and even, we might extrapolate for Feyerabend's sake, if art in some sense progresses. The only way to pull this off is by concentrating not on the future but on the past. "Unlike art," says Kuhn starkly, "science destroys its past"; this formulation may be correct whether or not one can rationally assume that the scientific past was further from the truth. Kuhn finally admits that though he knows that the relation of art to the past is different from the relation of science to the past, he does not understand the relation of art to the past. Suppose you were a painter and recognized Rembrandt's genius, and perhaps you even admitted Rembrandt's superiority to yourself. Suppose, further, that you had the technical skill to forge new Rembrandts. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't the art world approve if you did? If Einstein's equations work, I use them. No one accuses me of unoriginality or plagiarism. To stalk the question from the other end: Why should Rembrandt's art be preserved and valued even if the aesthetic problems he was solving no longer strike anyone as worth working on, so that no one could possibly see the aesthetic value of painting in his style? In Kuhn's mystified view, this is tantamount to accepting and valuing - on equal terms with current research - astronomical endeavors to describe the effects of the ether. Kuhn believes that all his ways of distinguishing art and science cluster, and that they follow, in fact, from his description of science as


9

exemplary revolutions succeeded by puzzle solving. A piece of art, Kuhn thinks, is never just a solution to a puzzle; it always has a value in itself, and therefore does not die when the aesthetic puzzle that fosters it dies. Even some of Kuhn's sympathetic critics, however, will not go along with the distinction. If science does not proceed rationally toward the truth, so that old science cannot be rejected as measurably more false than modern science, then why not value the old science? If the old science preceded a revolution, and solved problems that are no longer worked on, why shouldn't scientists value it in a nondestructive spirit in precisely the way that a current artist values Rembrandt: as working on another problem but discovering a brilliant and eternally respectable solution?22 The obvious answer is that scientists are not Kuhnians; they drop the past because they believe it to have been working on current problems less successfully than the present. But this is too simple. Scientists do not value the past on any principle. Here, for example, is the testimony of a scientist and philosopher who is not a Kuhnian, P. B. Medawar, commenting on James Watson's The Double Helix. Medawar wants to explain, in nonpsychological terms, why Watson seems a perfect ingrate with respect to the science that made his discovery of the DNA structure possible. Medawar writes: A scientist's present thoughts and actions are of necessity shaped by what others have done and thought before him; they are the wavefront of a continuous secular process in which The Past does not have a dignified independent existence of its own. Scientific understanding is the integral of a curve of learning; science therefore in some sense comprehends its history within itself.23

This means that science kills not only the unsuccessful but also the successful past, or at least its independent existence. It is precisely the independent existence of art's past - the continuing presence of Rembrandt irrespective of any current problem he helps to solve - that teases Kuhn. In Kuhn's mind, art is always "undead," to use a technical term from Bram Stoker's Dracula. From that standpoint, the historical murderousness of science, merely patricidal in Kuhn or cannibalistic in Medawar, looks perfectly normal. I suggest therefore that we take the contrasting historical behavior of art and science as axiomatic, and abandon the attempt to derive it, as Kuhn unsuccessfully tries to do, from some more essential difference. On the one hand, entirely different senses of how to define science are compatible with what it is agreed must be accounted for: the destruction of the independent existence of science's own past. On the other hand, the double or even duplicitous literary view of the past is one of our perdurable theoretical concerns. Newton modestly said that he could see

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farther than his predecessors because he stood on the shoulders of giants. T. S. Eliot's rejoinder makes a subtle distinction. Do we know more than our ancestors? Eliot answers, yes, but then adds: "and they are that which we know."24 The glance is downward toward the giants, not outward and away from them. If anything, progress is a new perspective on an unmasterable and independently existing past, so Feyerabend cannot refer to progress in art and conclude blandly that now there is no historical distinction from science. In history, science seems different and is different from art — even if both progress. Artists, as Borges would have it, make their visions out of the re-visions of the metaphors of precursors, not by climbing upon their precursors and looking farther into reality. W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom show that the giants are standing on our shoulders. All this theorizing - insofar as it is preoccupied with innovation, and insofar as it deals with the subject paradoxically is a direct corollary of Kuhn's puzzlement seeming perfectly natural to anyone raised with a scientific view of modernity. The double artistic relation of past and present is not peculiarly puzzling on Kuhn's theories - quite the opposite. What ought to puzzle him is that the scientific relation to the past is not double. I want to consider founding an intellectual history of literature on Kuhn's puzzlement. It follows that science and literature should not be related by either of the two most influential methods: history of ideas and "archaeology." Neither borrows its form from the discipline it studies; but when the hardest sciences become involved, both are susceptible to collapsing into scientific history with corollaries. This can only mean that the pretension of historical neutrality is unexpectedly weak in ways that, undiagnosed, would threaten my own project. The history of ideas, largely a creation of A. O. Lovejoy's in the 1930s, was charged with the tracking of durable unit-ideas "in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods."25 Historians of Foucault's persuasion, however, insist that the same idea in a different intellectual setting is a different idea, just as Pierre Menard's Quixote is not Cervantes's. There is little point in conducting a belated critique of the history of ideas, but I might say that Foucault seems to me correct about its paradoxical weakness in recognizing change: Lovejoy grants that Schelling's Naturphilosophie (just across one of Foucault's ruptures) turns the Platonist scheme "upside down," but he nevertheless maintains that the Scale of Being keeps its "essential character."26 Foucault, defending himself against the complaint that his own system cannot handle change, argues that at least he does not trivialize it, and in Lovejoy's inability to see a revolution when he


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sees something turned upside down is evidence that Foucault is partly right. Lovejoy tells us that "one of the results of the quest of unitideas . . . [is] bound to be a livelier sense of the fact that most philosophic systems are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in their components."27 This is overly optimistic about disentangling (original) patterns and (traditional) components.28 Observe, however, that Lovejoy did not merely invite us to track the survival of unit-ideas in different periods; he also urged us to hunt them in "very diverse provinces of thought." It was largely left to Marjorie Hope Nicolson to trace such ideas in provinces of thought as diverse as literature and science; in this project she performed wonders of synthesis. Nevertheless, I shall not imitate her tactics. What I have against Nicolson's technique is simply its readiness to grant so much to scientific history that literary history seems merely to be following gratefully along in its wake. Newton came, for example, and all was Newtonianism, except occasionally when it was anti-Newtonianism.29 In fairness, Nicolson's Newtonian demonstrations seem much more compelling than similar arguments ever seem to be about, for example, Einstein. One finds oneself at slide shows aching with good intentions to see special relativity in the Demoiselles drAvignon. It may, for all I know, be a cliche of Faulkner criticism that The Sound and the Fury — three parts from one time but three standpoints, one part from a different era - is modeled on space-time. I do not need to make absurdities up: Critics have seen relativity in Poe. Nicolson's work, of course, is always sane and grounded, but her primary advantage over hapless theorists of the influence of Einstein is that she deals with preprofessionalized science. If the revolution under consideration is not relativity but the invention of the telescope - well, Milton could visit Galileo and see, for himself, new stars, new moons in the solar system, and mountains on our own moon. The only trouble in describing the influence of these observations on literature is that they were apt to have any influence. As Nicolson herself grants, "the literary adaptations of the telescope were. . . many and various";30 one could feel the smallness of humanity in size or the grandeur of humanity in scope. Clearly, science does not simply create a context for poetry: Since not science itself but only the feeling or meaning of science can appear in literature, the context is partly a function of the text. But this is a challenge to the historical linearity of science, since 1. it opens the possibility of an Eliotic or Borgesian resurrecting of the past by revision, and 2. it challenges the possibility of historical linearity that only a closed disciplinary and professional community can enforce.

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We need a more paradoxical and precise notion than "influence" to chart the possibilities of literary play at the intersection of skewed histories. Foucault himself was dissatisfied with the vagueness of "influence." Further, he condemned the Nicolsonian pattern of influence - "how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works"31 - as positing a too neatly continuous historical sequence, and as allegorical in its practice of referring all discourse back to an original and uncontaminated source of meaning instead of describing systematically the dispersal of statements itself. Let us turn, then, from the interdisciplinary work begun in the 1930s to the antidisciplinary research begun in the 1960s - from Lovejoy and Nicolson to Foucault and Serres. For my project of defining a disciplinary intellectual history, it seems at first promising that Foucault does not deny a distinction between hard sciences and soft sciences. In the modern period, this takes the form of a distinction between real sciences and "human sciences," which are not sciences, to Foucault, at all. Uselessly for my purposes, however, his chief point is that the distinction is based on the degree of formalization in each discipline within the spatially arranged episteme, not on any historical differences. It is not fair to say, for example, that human sciences can become true sciences, for their position within the episteme is in the space of nonscientific knowledge. Sociology cannot become a science because its archaeological location is as the human "science" correspondent to the real science of economics.32 The problem for Foucault is immediately apparent: how to take the degree of formalization that a given discourse manages to achieve in history and flatten its transepistemic progress so as to make it describable within the episteme. (I should acknowledge here that temporal motion is not denied by archaeology, only explained within spatial arrangements of discourses.) Every discursive formation crosses a "threshold of positivity," a moment at which it becomes a particular discourse and not another one, and then a "threshold of epistemologization" when it articulates its method. But only a scientific discourse passes across a "threshold of scientificity," when it purifies its logic and language, and then a "threshold of formalization," when it systematizes its own logic to deploy it.33 This sounds like the sort of analysis that must feature gradual growth and sophistication. Foucault has, however, a strategy for making it work on behalf of his account of the spatially distributed episteme. He takes care to deny that he is describing the progress of science as a whole - first by noting that different sciences pass through these stages at different moments, second by observing that for some sciences the sequence is speeded up, and that for one, mathematics, all the stages come simultaneously. If this is true, then Foucault would seem


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to have won his case for flattening time onto his grid: One naturally wonders why, in a particular era, a particular science achieves a position at a particular stage, which opens all the possibilities of archaeological technique to show what epistemic niche a discourse will find in a given era. It is, nevertheless, a striking fact that sometimes thresholds are crossed within epistemes, sometimes by virtue of revolutions in them. There seems to be a historical motion that goes on without necessary reference to epistemic organizational requirements. Further, though Foucault defines the distinction of sciences and nonsciences formally - and not, say, sociologically or historically - nevertheless the development of scientificity and formalization are aspects of professionalization that will figure largely in this analysis of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne. Sciences do things in history that literature, for example, cannot. So why isn't Foucault, who does not deny this, fundamentally interested in it? The only answer is that he is distracted from it by definition; he describes his mode of analysis as taking "as its point of attack the threshold of epistemologization - the point of cleavage between discursive formations defined by their positivity and epistemological figures that are not necessarily all sciences (and which may never, in fact, succeed in becoming sciences)."34 This means that he will deal with sciences only insofar as they are still formally on the same level with all other discourses, insofar as they are not sciences. Of course, Foucault is interested in what appears at the level of epistemologization that makes possible, in a science, its scientificity; but at his chosen standpoint, the historical distinction of sciences and everything else is only a potentiality. The historical uniqueness of the sciences is compatible with the archaeology of knowledge. Foucault merely chooses to read the sciences at the level where they are not (except implicitly) historically unique. Another form of historical analysis may, of course, locate itself at the scientificity threshold; this type, which Foucault associates with Bachelarcl and Canguilhem, seeks to "discover, for example, how a concept - still overlaid with metaphors or imaginary contents — was purified, and accorded the status and function of a scientific concept."35 This sounds like what happened to the idea of "force" in the nineteenth century. So long as the term retained its metaphorical content, the nineteenth-century intellectual world hung together, from Faraday to Spencer to Norris and Dreiser; when the concept was purified and renamed "energy," science broke free of literature, much philosophy, and much quackery.36 My own analysis will try to look in two directions: toward metaphor and toward scientific concepts. It will consider writers up to Pynchon and Mailer as guards at the historical threshold of scientificity - where Foucault cannot by design track them - who struggle

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to prevent any concept from passing to be purged of metaphorical content. The object of this antiprofessionalizing activity is to undercut the historical sense of science, of which professionalization is the sign and guarantee. If Foucault, by definition of his archaeology, does not deal with the hard sciences at the level of their scientificity, and also, by the way, tends not to deal with art, nevertheless Michel Serres draws sciences and art dauntlessly into his sense of epistemic history. In arguing that J. M. W. Turner (whose fiery scenes prohibit any sense of closed forms or predetermined motion) discovered statistical thermodynamics before Boltzmann, Serres makes use of several techniques authorized by Foucault: 1. He posits a definite rupture in history (which Turner merely registers in advance of science). 2. He does not use a creator's intentions as a guide to understanding a work (discursive rules are always in operation that cannot be known from the inside, so that it does not matter that Turner was ignorant of his own discovery). 3. He ignores sequence within an episteme, so that a later event can define the rules of discourse of an earlier one.37 "The boiler's fire [Serres tells us] atomizes matter and gives it over to chance, which has always been its master. Boltzmann will soon understand it, but Turner, in his own domain, understood it before him."38 Nicolson had argued that Pope's light is derived from Newton's; Michel Serres's claim that Turner's fire predicts Boltzmann's is similar but more exotic. Nicolson has not so much been refuted as transcended (skepticism about Lovejoy's project of transgressing temporal borders has not translated into skepticism about his project of transgressing disciplinary ones; rather the reverse). Nicolson's mistake was to think that it was by a sort of transfusion that an idea moves from one discipline to another, a tricky procedure even though one is the universal donor (science) and one is the universal recipient (literature) of intellectual blood. Serres's move is to dispute the hierarchy - not by making literature the donor, but by denying that intellectual history needs to posit invariant donors and recipients. Nicolson thought it was her problem to show, in tracing Pope's light to Newton, that it was not primarily Milton's. The Serres strategy would devastate the problem by finding in Paradise Lost a proto-Opticks. In fact, since the science of Venus (which in view of statistical thermodynamics acknowledges that it cannot reduce the world to its own determinations; which must give up, therefore, its desire to rule, in two senses, the world; which, as a result, cannot even dominate the other disciplines) has replaced the science of Mars, science seems to have renounced its own hierarchical ambitions. But Serres, I believe, does vi-


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olence to art history in order to make it congruent, even in the age of Venus, with science history. They are more than congruent in Serres; since the advent of modern thermodynamic theory, they seem to be continuous: Turner discovers, "in his own domain," what Boltzmann discovers. Art and science almost simultaneously locate themselves on our side of the last intellectual chasm. The impediment to this kind of analysis, of course, would seem to be that scientific ideas are supposed to be true, which implies that they are discovered when someone glimpses the truth. Charmingly, Serres does not get rid of this objection by blandly asseverating that scientific doctrine is not truth. He concedes that "Two and two make four; heavy bodies fall, according to the law of gravity; entropy increases in a closed system, regardless of the latitude and whatever the ruling class."39 Then how can one relate these ideas to the era's ruling preconceptions? The answer seems to be a retreat: "It is, however, rather easy to distinguish the first conditions which give rise to what is conditioned while leaving the content of what is conditioned independent. They are said to be conditioning and not determining."40 I say that this is a retreat because what Foucault is interested in is determined, so that he can assert that the propositional differences between Marx and Ricardo, for example, are unimportant, and that what archaeology can have no problem in finding is how each filled his epistemic niche.41 But the harder the sciences, and to the degree that one takes their propositions as true and not merely archaeologically inevitable, the more difficult this assured retrodicting is to do; so that Serres arrives at mathematics (two plus two equals four) and physics (gravity, entropy) with a considerable challenge. Nevertheless, by retreating to what conditions but does not determine an idea — that is, to what makes not the law possible (Foucault's interest) but the discovery and orientation of the law possible - Serres is persuasive that he can bring science in all its scientificity into the episteme with literature. Moreover, he is persuasive that he can link them not only on the level of the positive unconscious of an age but also on the level of specific assertions, or at least on the level of the conditions of specific assertions. My reservation is that when one brings the hard sciences into the question, as Nicolson and Serres do, it is always enticing to reduce intellectual history to scientific history with corollaries, even if the corollaries come first; note that what Boltzmann and Turner jointly discover is statistical thermodynamics. One of Serres's weakest assertions is that Turner is a "realist." This term obviously fails to identify Turner's art in any aesthetically descriptive way, since realism would in this sense mean fidelity to whatever happened to be the reigning scientific paradigm.42 The lesson: If you ignore the dissimilarities of disciplines in time,

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you can have the similarity of disciplines (in Foucault, the system of their relations; in Serres, their overlap) in conceptual space. The one way of distinguishing art and science that every theorist seems to run up against is the distinction not of method, logic, or sociology but of history. I again make use of Kuhn: Is it possible that Serres has assimilated art history and science history only by ignoring that science kills its past and art does not, so that the histories must be collated rather than correlated? Far from ignoring this difference, Serres tries to stamp it out. And not by making the Feyerabendian or feminist point that science is not a linear process and ought to admit it, but by turning art into a historicidal process. Why else the odd ending to the chapter on Turner, which congratulates England on its artistic response to the new world of the stochastic flame? "On the continent, the Academy persisted - history and mythology, bloody and cold, ignorant of work and of science. It is true [Serres adds, not wishing to overpraise England] that our neighbors also had the pre-Raphaelite boy scouts."43 The inference can only be that art history will be lined up with science history if art history can kill its past; it cannot, so Serres tries to perform the historicide himself. The science that inaugurates the new Venusian, antidisciplinary era needs to be recognized by art, and when art does not, Serres disciplines it. Kuhn distinguishes art history from science history by a distinction of museums: art hangs in art museums, but science does not exist in science museums. Unfortunately for Serres, museums cherish their pre-Raphaelites.44 After this excursion, it is possible to say simply what disciplinary intellectual history can do that interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary models cannot: It can focus on the historical divergences of disciplines. A plan is still necessary for revealing them. Little use can be made, for example, of Laudan's proposal to begin a new school of intellectual history in line with his expanded category of the rational, a circle that he thinks can be stretched to include literary criticism. But literary movements are not rational even in his prehensile sense (nor does Laudan assert that they are): Even in rationalizing retrospect, a writer's allegiance to, say, Romanticism or Modernism may have too significant a personal component, too little relation to the solution of any empirical problem, or too ambivalent a relation to an empirical problem for us to infer that it is based on a deliberate appraisal of a promising research program. Though Laudan is all for interdisciplinary intellectual history, he quite naturally has nothing to say about a discipline, literature, that has no interior intellectual history. Nevertheless, intellectual historians are attracted to it. Literature, more than any other art, is susceptible to intellectual history (though not of Laudan's kind), but like every other art, it stops short of


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being able to manufacture one. The anomaly is so striking that I wonder if it does not serve as a working definition, a kind of privative demarcation of literature after all. The intellectual instability is at least related to professional instability: Literature, between the technical reconditeness of the sciences on the one hand, and of music, architecture, sculpture, and painting, for example, on the other, has precisely the greatest disciplinary vulnerability (openness to concepts not much mitigated by the possibility of technical preoccupations) to intellectual currents. In short, literature is not opposed to science in this disciplinary study in terms of what it asserts as against science, but in terms of its inability to assert: the professionalizing discipline versus the discipline that cannot professionalize, the best-insulated source of modern intellectual history versus the most vulnerable recipient of intellectual history, the past-destroying discipline versus not the reactionary discipline but the one whose relation to the past is most unsettled. The intersection of these items and the perfect opposition of science and literature are suggested by the fact that highbrow music, unlike literature, is to a large extent protected by its technical obscurity from unmasterable influences, and therefore can, with some success, bypass amateur review and consequently erect an avantgarde tradition more formidable than literature's against scientific progress. The challenge is how to respect the related professional and intellectual vulnerabilities of literature without falling back on trickle-down intellectual history, such as Nicolson's. If literature gets its place in intellectual history by means of its relationship to other disciplines, doesn't it follow that it is a purely passive receptacle of its most systematic ideas? But there is also Popper's trickle-down system, and Popper's can be revised to lend a pattern to my undertaking. Popper wants to begin intellectual history always with a problem that he repeatedly says is "outside of philosophy" (his emphasis), on the grounds that philosophy is not so trivial as to self-inflict the headaches that it tries to cure.45 These questions come, he believes, from science. But the fact is that, despite Popper's own sense of the possibility of disciplinary harmony, the "scientific problem-situations" that he describes are already in philosophy when they get to philosophers. The impact of irrationals, not merely on atomism but on atomism backed by Pythagorean metaphysics, leads to Plato, and not self-contradictions in Newton but contradictions of Newtonian certainties and Humean skepticism lead to Kant. The problem-situation turns out not to be originally external to philosophy but a blemish that appears in philosophy in the light of science. At any rate, the intellectual world, in Popper's view, goes off in search of a solution; so long as literature is not considered, the distinction is not crucial. Unless I have misread them, however, American

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writers do circulate their ideas around problem-situations but do not try to solve them. They find in problem-situations an opportunity to frustrate the historical sense of science, an opportunity to deny progress, because an advance in science may be not only philosophically unprepared, it may be philosophically impossible. This could mean that the doctrine is untrue or that the doctrine is visionary, transphilosophical, from the literary genre of romance. I can now marshal a set of propositions for a disciplinary intellectual history of literature. 1. Literature may be regarded as the ideal type of disciplinary and historical ambiguity, even among the creative arts. In this it is opposed to science, but not merely to science. If the four basic historical senses are that the world improves, the world degenerates, nothing essential changes, and everything changes, then the basic epistemological positions are that the truth increases, the truth was once available but is no longer available, the truth is always at hand, and the truth does not exist; we may label the paradigmatic types science, myth, religion, and fashion. Literature is in strained dialogue with all these forms. 2. The strain in the age of science is felt most intensely by writers of fiction, who are expected to respond to current intellectual trends, who are allowed to propose ideas as part of their unalienated discourse, but who as artists must withhold their unambiguous consent from all systems and ideas. Intellectual fiction writers are by definition quasi-intellectual. 3. Thus they have to be a part of their intellectual era and stay aloof from it. This necessarily becomes a crisis after the professionalization of science, when the artist cannot, in any sense, master science. 4. In its professionalized era, when science can export its sense of the relationship of creative thinkers to their past, the dual relation of artists to their past will either seem perplexing (as to Kuhn) or seem to demand a (Bloomian or Borgesian or Eliotic) theory. 5. The place where fiction writers find a possible interruption in the scientific sense of history is Popper's problem-situation. 6. Writers will try to solve and exacerbate the problem-situation, and can keep their own quasi-intellectual, quasi-progressive enterprise afloat insofar as they do both at once. A disciplinary intellectual history is a record of the incompatibilities of the histories of disciplines. Given that the problem-situation is an aspect of the relation of science and philosophy, the intellectual history of literature in the age of science is primarily the history of a relation to a relation. In mapping the theoretical territory in this way, I hope to avoid the most characteristic mistakes in describing the relationship of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne to science. The most conspicuous attempt to come to terms


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with Brown's relation to science simplifies things excessively by declaring that Arthur Mervyn is Brown's empirical novel for a scientific world. The criticism on Poe and Hawthorne vacillates in its reductions. Several critics announce (1921-39) that Eureka is prophetic science; several (mid-1960s to mid-1970s) insist that Eureka is nothing but a poem. Several scholars (1949-60) argue that Hawthorne scorned science in his stories; several reply (1966-72) that Hawthorne censured only pseudoscientific enthusiasm. It is easy enough to see in this vacillation the influence of critical fashion (the triumph of counterscientific formalism in the response to Eureka) and extracritical effects (the prestige of Einstein and Eddington in early Eureka criticism, the horror of the bomb in postwar Hawthorne criticism).46 I rehearse this history to suggest that the problem is in assuming that artists can have a usefully direct relationship to science (foreshadowing it, criticizing it, etc.) when their strongest and most straightforward purchase on it is in relation to a relation. Considering artists to be always at that remove also rules out the contrary and alluring simplification that if writers do not have a direct relation to science, they must have none at all. The puzzle is that Brown could declare a perfect identity with scientists and then write books arguably skeptical about any possible scientific epistemology, including skepticism; that Poe should have proposed Eureka as simultaneously a poem and the scientific truth; that Hawthorne should have written the "scientific" stories in such a way that they can be read either as attacks on scientists or as defenses of them. It is striking how hard it is to tell whether a work is trying to be scientific, or trying to be friendly or hostile to science, or even trying to have something or nothing to do with science. It is necessary to realize that Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne had a negotiation with science (an odd word to italicize, given that I describe mainly literary strategies in this work; the science that negotiates back is partly posited by literature, but the positing cannot lack verisimilitude, which I shall vouch for throughout). And we need to realize that the crisis of the negotiation was scientific professionalization, for as science professionalized, Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne were variously failing to establish themselves as professional men of letters. This meant (1) that their own success remained pitifully vulnerable to public taste just as science moved free of it and (2) that it simultaneously became more difficult - the other side of the double bind - to fall in with public taste by claiming a parascientific status. Brown died too early to witness the virtual professionalization of science; nevertheless, when his scientific friends, who founded the first important scientific journal in America, The Medical Repository, entered the involved labyrinths of the phlogiston controversy, Brown was forced to admit in his own journal that amateurs

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could only await the expert consensus.47 That was at the turn of the century. Haifa century later, diplomat Hawthorne ruefully observed that the only American literary production that Englishmen seemed to admire was the distinguished successor of The Medical Repository: "Silliman's Journal." Hawthorne read the journal occasionally, but as a tourist in a culture more foreign than England's. Hawthorne did not even attempt to concern himself with the scientific accomplishments, much less the controversies of his day, but rather with scientists and technology. The fact that technology, as a key item of the propaganda that allowed science to professionalize in America, was, to adopt Giedion's famous title, "taking command," tripled the bind. The newly untouchable yet unassimilable science was now producing, at least potentially, America. The simultaneous professionalization of science and the assumption of command by technology, epitomized by the passing of electrical science from amateurs like Franklin to professionals like Joseph Henry, at the same moment as the ubiquitous appearance of Morse's (and Henry's) telegraph that Clifford lauds in Seven Gables, had a shattering literary importance. Poe tried, in Eureka, to write a scientific essay that he claimed was a poem (it was supposed to make both gravity and electricity functions of an aesthetic God), but the poem was forced to contradict his most cherished rules of poesy. Hawthorne doubted the appropriateness of his own style of romance, modifying the form for Seven Gables; he uses the daguerreotype to fit an artistic-cum-scientific epistemology to the America of trains and telegraphs. One hopeless response to omnipresent, invisible science (its circumference nowhere, its center everywhere) is perennially the corrupting of genres: The romance moves toward the novel, the poem toward the essay. Later, an autobiography taken over by entropy and the philosophy of science is rephrased as, sui generis, an "education." And still later, two writers adapt the nonfiction novel for the purpose of describing the American space program. A writer in this sort of intellectual bind needs to stay intellectually fluid. Brown begins by associating art and science and ends by despairing of the association; Poe begins by despising science and ends by trying to assimilate it; Hawthorne condemns technique in his stories (whether magical or mechanical) and tries to join his technical age in Seven Gables. But fiction writers must disguise their evasive intellectual flux by shifting our attention to a science in flux: Brown deals with an uneasily empirical but also rationalistic science; Poe with an alternately mechanical, Baconian and energetic, idealist science; Hawthorne with a science that looks backward to wizardry and forward to technology. This is not to indicate that writers maintain their freedom by dealing with sciences of their own


21

invention. The intellectual fluctuation of authors serves both to move them close to an authentic problem-situation and to keep the situation problematized. Charles Brockden Brown had, of the three writers, the least ironic or manipulative relationship to science; that is not merely to identify him as the empirical author of Arthur Mervyn. A Kantian-Cassirerian reading of the eighteenth century would examine Brown for signs of rationalism as well: Ormond is as rationalistic a book as Mervyn is empirical. At least it should be granted, following I. B. Cohen,48 that there were two eighteenth-century empirical traditions out of Newton - the Principia tradition (mathematical) and the Opticks tradition (experimental). And Brown was born in Philadelphia just when its internecine scientific skirmishing was reaching an armistice - the (more mathematical) American Philosophical Society joining the (more Baconian) American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge.49 Brown was born a Quaker, and Quakers were likely to join the latter society, but Brown had no taste for observation and experimentation. Nevertheless, quasi-mathematical reasoning fails in Ormond, just as observation fails in Mervyn. Brown would seem to have been an American skeptic, except that he believed in Newton absolutely. The contradiction put him in the same problem-situation as Kant, and Brown's last novel, Edgar Huntly, is arguably Kantian. In the intellectual world Poe grew up in, American science philosophy was pedestrian (science as generalization from facts only), but science (the physics of electromagnetism, the chemistry of atoms and affinities) was revolutionary and rich with imaginative hypotheses. Poe played with this disparity throughout his career, so that he could defend his literary space at the outset by attacking science philosophy in "Sonnet - To Science" (but calling it "science") and by using glamorous science and idealist science philosophy to close his career with Eureka (but crediting poetic intuition). As opportunistic as this is, it is also play at an authentic problem-situation. Kant had explained Newtonian truths in relation to philosophical and mathematical certainties; but in the Baconian sciences (not true, apodictic sciences to Kant), elegant hypotheses had the look of truth that did not seem to be necessary in Kant's terms. Meanwhile, experimenters were discovering a world that seemed increasingly alive (witness the development of cytology and the germ theory of disease), energetic, and energetically unified. The genius of Naturphilosophie was to combine these difficulties and solve them together: If Kant said that we can have true science insofar as our a prioris constitute nature - but no farther - then we can have omni-science if and only if our a prioris constitute the world entirely; and the energetic, lively, organized world seemed a mirror of mind, in fact, since it was unifying, seemed the

22


product of its dialectical impulse. Thus Schelling and Hegel attempt to deprofessionalize and co-opt science, and Poe proceeds by trying to coopt Schelling and Hegel. Hawthorne only describes, for his own purposes, science at its border regions: failing to slough entirely its prehistory of magic, socializing with pseudoscience, fraternizing with technology. The inevitable result is that he is used by antiscientific critics, then revised by proscientific critics. Or he is condemned as mixed up; but if one is inclined to believe Martin Green50 that Hawthorne stupidly confused science and magical pseudoscience, one ought to read the universally respected "Silliman's Journal," which had open-minded articles on unicorns and self-moving rocks in Hawthorne's time. If one is inclined to believe that Hawthorne confused science and mechanics, one ought to read Jacob Bigelow, who popularized the term "technology," and Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century philosopher of machinery, both of whom stressed the interpenetration. Hawthorne read Silliman, Bigelow, and Babbage. He almost certainly got what I shall call "technological transcendentalism" from J. B. Stallo, which means that Hawthorne was trying to make idealist Naturphilosophie pertinent to a world of machines. Clifford's phrasing of Stallo's ideas in Seven Gables is the climax of Hawthorne's attempt to believe in science by treating its overlap with magic (more congenial to his mind) and technology (everywhere to observe). But Clifford is a broken man on a spree, and his exuberance is shortlived; with the collapse of his hopes, the cycle ends. The Kantian problem-situation exposed in Brown leads to the post-Kantian problemsituation in Poe, the local American (idealist, technological) solution to which flares and expires in Clifford's momentary enthusiasm. It was, essentially, the weakness of empiricism vis-a-vis first Newtonian physics and then the Baconian sciences that allowed literature to appear to be working on the problem-situation while exploiting it. The era of Seven Gables would be the last moment for feeling the relevance of Naturphilosophie to intellectual problems; by the time of Hawthorne's last novel in 1859, the intellectual world was ready for its new paragon science and the attendant problem-situation. This would again be a challenge to an extant philosophy - but Darwin's challenge to idealism was impossible to meet with yet another expanded appreciation of the mind's constructive force. Henry Adams and Dreiser would exploit this newest paradox (progressing knowledge meeting progressing nature, with no causal or logical connection from the first to the second) by playing opposite yet complementary games. Nothing prevents an intellectual history of literature from laying a purely intellectual grid over a literary career. There are benefits to be reaped in obliviousness to the duplicity of writers in their negotiations


23

with the problem-situation. Brown's incoherence (the traditional reason for ignoring him) can be called into question if Edgar Huntly is a groping approximation of critical philosophy. Poe's disjointed career - and his disjointed novel, Narrative of A. Gordon Pym - can be unified by looking backward from Eureka. (Harry Levin, noting that in Eureka Poe holds the axioms "darkness cannot proceed from light" and "there can be no antipodes" up to scorn, states that Poe had debunked them both in Pym, which ends in the synthesis of opaquely brilliant snow at the bottom of the world.51 This could be the keystone of a theory holding that Poe's dialectically intellectual-aesthetic concerns - not his contradictorily aesthetic versus intellectual concerns - were always moving toward the culmination of idealist science in Eureka.) The inconsistencies of Hawthorne's Seven Gables can be ironed out by lending Stallo's authority to Clifford's ravings that history is a spiral and that the train and telegraph are agents of spirituality. This would mend Hawthorne's torn novel/ romance (on behalf of his career-long defensiveness about romance in the age of mechanical reproduction), which demonstrates that the past lingers endlessly and also that it can be overcome, and that the modern, mechanized world must be of concern to the artist, whose only concern is with spiritual truths. Shall we lay down the intellectual grid? But to tie a literary work to Naturphilosophie, for example, is to tie it to a dead enterprise; the heroic critic who wants to redeem literature by showing it to have intellectual coherence risks saving it by destroying it. Science kills its past, and so the scientific problem-situation must be ephemeral. But Brown's best novels and Pym and Seven Gables are not dead, even if they are undead. The most promising way to characterize literary-intellectual behavior is as inauthentic, historically opportunistic play at an authentic, historically repressive problem-situation. Writers of fiction cannot assimilate science into their work - except for a few secondhand doctrines that are deprived of scientific force or, in fact, identifiability (even in Pynchon) when metaphorized. (The very idea may be to deprive them of scientific specificity.) On the other hand, writers cannot represent science well enough to assail it convincingly. They can be inspired by it, find misty support in it, maintain a studied superiority to it. But they may wish a profounder relationship, and play at the problem-situation is as profound a relation as they can hope for. The intellectual anxiety is inevitably very great, allayed only by strategies that, despite all scientific revolutions, remain constant. The phases of the strategy may be named (1) preemption, (2) treachery, and (3) alienation. 1. Preemption: Writers who wish to preempt science may give the impression that they have absorbed all of it. Hawthorne's Seven Gables,

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when it is mechanical, is so inclusively mechanical, from earth to empyrean to epistemology, that it seems to assimilate science in toto. Similarly, Poe, in Eureka, hurls himself into issues of scientific cosmology with abandon. But science is never absorbed by writers, it is always coopted; it serves as a source either of objective correlatives or of solutions to their own dilemmas. Brown seems to have been the victim of an emotional condition whose opposing tendencies were mutually aggravating. He lived, on the one hand, a brief life of extreme and often invited insecurity, rebelling against his religion, family, and professional education, moving from Philadelphia to New York, moving through periodic intellectual enthusiasms, barely escaping the yellow fever, living from hand to mouth the life of a professional litterateur in a country unready to support one. On the other hand, Brown was possessed of a Faustian hunger for secure knowledge, and knowledge of everything - politics, psychology, science. If he was attracted by Humean skepticism on the one hand, so that most of his characters move in almost complete ignorance of their world or themselves, and by Newtonian certainties on the other, so that all his books strive valiantly to rationalize their own mysteries, we can assume that much of the attraction was nonintellectual. Poe's Eureka creates a universe that pulses between multiplicity and unity, writing cosmically his fissiparous misanthropy and his all-embracing narcissism, a single syndrome with alternating effects. Political and religious difficulties may be dignified and rationalized as well. Is science democratic? Hawthorne, who aspired to be democratic, linked science with technology in Seven Gables in the hope that together they would destroy class distinctions. But Poe tried to contain Jacksonianism by transforming the modern, democratic, urban masses, whom he reviled, into atoms of Jehovah's mass in Eureka. Conservative Philadelphians of Brown's day drifted toward astronomy (it is timeless and features deductive, i.e., top-to-bottom, reasoning) and away from natural history - in this way feeling political distinctions within science proper. The question may actually mean several things: Does science tend to equalize standards of living? Is it equally open as a profession to rich and poor? Is it promoted in a democracy? Every facet of the question has produced its own controversy. The last one is central for this disciplinary project, but there is no consensus. Pioneer historians of American science (Cohen, Shryock) found that nineteenth-century America did not promote pure science; Nathan Reingold points to the impressive line from Bowditch to Benjamin Peirce to Newcomb and C. S. Peirce and wonders at the success of pure American science.52 Is science compatible with the Puritan spirit? Poe, following Thomas Dick, a Scottish Secessionist, nineteenth-century liaison, attempts to ere-


25

ate a science equipped with a fall, awful astronomical distances, and an apocalypse. But Hawthorne tries to reject the Puritan past in Seven Gables - though Chillingworth had been a man of science, and the mechanical and Puritan spirits are reunited in The Marble Faun. Brown's friends, with their ties to New Haven, came to value pedestrian Baconianism after the French Revolution, though the most productive sciences in Puritan New England through the mid-nineteenth century were (along with medicine) mathematics and astronomy; the confusion is reflected in Brown.53 Are writers merely mixed up? The Merton thesis seems to establish the Puritan basis of modern science. But Merton, I think, makes the mistake of looking for natural affinities between Puritanism and science instead of interested alliances. If there is a parallel between progressive sanctification and social progress that would entail a commitment to progressive science, it exists largely insofar as Puritans were ready to feel one, and to ignore the skew of lapsarian or eschatological theology and science. Some Anglicans were also attempting a scientific alliance; and it is possible that the Puritan enthusiasm for it was partly based on a desire not to be outflanked by the sectarians, strategically mockable to the extent that they remained antiintellectual, who were also hoping for a partnership.54 Meanwhile, as writers found in science support for their religious and political aims, whatever they were, scientists sold science as anyone's panacea, democratic and elitist, pious and secular. Scientists, at least before professionalization was achieved, even saw the benefit of selling themselves to the literary community: Davy is a poet, Mechanics Magazine (1823) wishes us to remember,55 and poetry flourished in the antebellum volumes of Scientific American. The point is that several questions may be put to science that do not demarcate it. (Is it democratic? pious? beautiful?) These are the questions that writers looking for an aesthetic lift naturally pose. A writer with a personal, aesthetic, political, or religious problem is sure to find at least one version of science that responds to it, serves as a straw man for it, settles it, or, more likely, dignifies it, seems to give the dilemma itself a philosophical point. 2. Treachery: The search for a dignifying metaphor of literary problems brings each of the three writers to a conflict among scientists and among their supporters: empiricism versus rationalism, inductive utilitarianism versus intuitive Naturphilosophie, and so on. This attraction to fratricidal scientific and parascientific warfare is, it is true, a corollary of the fact that authors may use science to dignify, by mirroring, their own interior divisions. The projection would be self-defeating, however, if all they wanted to do was win some scientific prestige for themselves and their conflicts, since the philosophical fissures they refer to only upset scientific dignity. But Brown and Hawthorne, as much as Poe, exuberantly expose

26


these philosophical problems. The Humean objections to empirical methods of arriving at the truth justified the existence of romancers like Brown (as if the romance were a single, preferred methodology and Newton, as Brown asserts, a romancer). The German-British antagonism allowed Poe to assume his cosmological pretensions while continuing to pose as an antiscientific aesthete. Without the magic-science-technology interference, Hawthorne would have been denied a rich source of plausible ambiguities, which forestall self-contradictions. Scientific disunities make possible artistic unities. 3. Alienation: Whatever their aesthetic benefits, preemption and treachery leave science unchallenged as the sign of the times, which necessitates one last, professionally saving (personally harrowing) maneuver: Science need not appear in fiction only as the supreme explanans and explanandum of the present, so that writers concerned with the present must begin with an act of professional abnegation. Gothic writers were alert to seeing in science only a veil thrown over the traditional Gothic villain - who may be a figure of the artist. We come full circle: The author who pretends to have absorbed an alien science may try to repudiate science that feels all too familiar. Brown enlists Newton in the romancer's quest for certainty, the epitome of which is the Gothic villain Ormond's attempt at omniscience. Hawthorne makes Aylmer and Rappaccini into sadistic magician-scientists who have much of Hawthorne in them. Science is at once the haunted house and the trap door. Can we find a model of the complicated disciplinary relationship? The writer does not follow the scientist in time; thus he cannot effectively feign to ignore him and cannot successfully rebel against him. (He may, of course, as a strategic matter, get his example of science from the past.) His anxiety is not precisely Oedipal, nor are Harold Bloomian tactical mystifications available. Poe cannot make Laplace seem an ephebic writer in the grotesque and arabesque line. The writer must live with the scientist, asserting simultaneously and contradictorily his disciplinary equality, incommensurable difference, and disciplinary superiority (laying claim to all the most attractive scientific qualities while securing an exclusively aesthetic space while alienating, by means of the scientist, all the least attractive of his own qualities). The writer is not a son with respect to a father; he may resemble a feminist in a patriarchy. Writers, male or female, are taken as the women of the intellectual world, and science seems the most masculine of disciplines. The public image of the scientist, as confirmed by Evelyn Fox Keller, is first of all masculine, and second of all, oddly, unsexy. To account for this image, Keller's adaptation of object relations psychology to disciplinary politics begins by assuming that science claims to be objective. This attracts men, because the male child learns to make a strict subject-object division by


27

means of his separation from the mother; the female child bases her identity as a human on the same separation, but not her sexual identity, so the separation is not so intensely sought. Scientists are masculine because they seek, in the most absolute way, what every male child seeks. But they are unsexy, because sex and love depend on transgressing strict subject—object divisions. Art is less masculine but sexier in the general imagination.56 The theory is not as ahistorical as it seems, because the sexual identity of males is in part a function of local stereotypes, and the objectivity of science is, at least in some senses, a fiction. Science helps to define masculinity, which helps to define science: There is no necessary, transhistorical masculinity of science. For my part, I would guess that literature turned feminine and science assumed its central role for determining masculinity (though the metaphors of science had, of course, been masculine since Bacon and Descartes) toward the end of the first third of the nineteenth century. At any rate, American scientists were more insecure about their illiteracy than American writers about their objectivity until around 1830; perhaps the masculinity of science is confirmed by its professionalization. From that moment on, scientists could move into the aesthetic world if they did not scorn to, but the writer was excluded from the world of science: Professionalization made disciplines reflect the relative exclusiveness of male and female domains. (It also allowed scientists, better than male writers of canonized fiction, to avoid the affront to masculinity of not being able to make a living.) Writers could only envy the scientist's prestigious territory while simultaneously maintaining the aloof superiority of their own. The process from preemption to alienation looks like the fluctuation from androgyny to female difference. Intellectual history has always been implicitly sexualized, with the starting point generally being the masculinity of science. For Lovejoy, philosophy (not science) is the place where the seed of intellectual life is produced;57 in Nicolson, the scientific seed may fecundate literature, never the reverse. No wonder that Foucault, in decrying this sort of intellectual history, says much the same things about the relationship of disciplines as he says about the relationship of sexes in his introduction to Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a French Her-

maphrodite. Serres hopes that the Martial science defined and promoted by Bacon and Descartes has been returned to Venus by statistical thermodynamics.58 In short, a sexual taxonomy of intellectual history would not be hard to elaborate. Intellectual history moves more easily toward sexual politics than toward the family romance. We can return from sexual politics to my own particular preoccupation with disciplinary history. What Keller's research strikingly illustrates is

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that the history of science may be as nonlinear as science is nonobjective: Despite masculine fantasies, the career of Barbara McClintock demonstrates that science has its productive wanderings from linearity.59 I myself am doubtful that science can wander too far from linearity (i.e., from the destruction of the extravagant past) without ceasing to be science (to know that McClintock was wronged is to note that she has been reabsorbed by the scientific present). If we go ahead and determine to make science unrecognizable, then the most powerful fact in modern intellectual and cultural history disappears. Nevertheless, Keller makes it possible to see the basis of the scientific historical sense for what it is: an effect of masculinity. Clearly, one project of feminism has been to oppose the patricidal wishes of sons with a daughter's sense of maternal continuity. And if we oppose to linearity Kristeva's "women's time," then we can redescribe the fundamental relationship of science and literature as a reflection of the difference between male and female temporality in general.60 Kristeva defines women's time as either circular or monumental (the past lives either by rebirth or independent immortality). In precise antithesis, science is rhetorically either evolutionary (the past is killed by cannibalistic ingestion) or revolutionary (the separateness of the past equals its mortality); this is to say again that science kills its successful and its unsuccessful past. The inference is that scientific time is male time par excellence. A preliminary benefit of seeing this is that it allows a step beyond Donald Pease's attempt to revise American literature as a problematization of American Revolutionary discourse.61 I sympathize with his project, but the revolutionary American rhetoric has a deeper spring than the American Revolution. The discourse of the American Revolution takes place within the discourse of science - it is a single, fundamentally masculine rhetoric. So when Hawthorne tries to connect with a pre-Revolutionary past (as Pease shows), what he discovers in his all too masculine ancestors is the very source of science and American historical linearity. The specifically American literary problem with science is that the American colonies were established at the same time as modern science. But I make this analogy to the modulations of feminism for its suggestive value only. The relationship of literature and science, like the relationship of women and men, is an instance of strong-group—weak-group politics, for which there is by now a well-known algebra. Divisions within the weak group (as between realists and romancers) always mimic divisions that strength posits between itself and weakness (objective science, subjective literature). In the history of the weak group's negotiation with the strong, there must always be both an integrationist and a separatist moment. Neither can do without the other - separation without


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equality is suicide, as is integration without difference. Any weak group x will, of necessity, lead a contradictory ideological life with respect to strong group y, so long as it seeks to define itself in terms of (for or against) y's values, until it forces y into contradictory self-definition in terms of x's values. Insofar as y = some institutionalization of WASPitude, then x will be in contradictory relation to a killing time consciousness: So Mailer, in Of a Fire on the Moon, will oppose CPT (colored people's time) to linear NASA temporality. My own disciplinary intellectual history concentrates on the intellectual politics, akin to sexual politics, of disciplinary history. It refuses to ignore the historical difficulties of disciplinary relations by accepting the scientific form of history as a given, or creating for intellectual history its own ahistorical form, or obscuring historical distinctions that lead to disciplinary ones. It proposes a history of the disciplinary forms of history. In the present case, this involves putting the historical undeath of literature against the historical deadliness of science, so that literature can come into contact with the history of science only by disciplinary contortions for the sake of intellectual and professional survival. The maneuvering will include deceit, self-deception, intrigue, posturing, and play. In its openness to this sort of activity, by stressing the intellectual vulnerability and disingenuousness of literature, intellectual history can portray literature's quasi-intellectual brain, professionally exposed flesh, and historically duplicitous heart; it had only worked at literature's extremities.

2 BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY

ROMANCING

NEWTON

At the age of sixteen, Charles Brockden Brown was an ardent antidisciplinarian, at the last moment for it until our own era. "Knowledge must not be departmentalized," he told his Belles Lettres Club, which met occasionally in Franklin's home in Franklin's Philadelphia, and which was dedicated to considering "science and art within the same circle."! The question is how long Brown's intellectual ecumenism lasted. Starting in 1794 (some seven years after the Belles Lettres pronouncement), Brown gradually made the acquaintance in New York of several prominent scientists and fellow travelers - Elihu Hubbard Smith, Samuel Miller, Edward Miller, Samuel Latham Mitchill - from whom he seems to have learned that the romances he was writing were antiscientific. Of course, when Brown arrived in New York in 1798 with the intention of settling there, he had already started Wieland, which still exhibits Brown's confidence in his compatibility with science: He defends the verisimilitude of Wieland's insanity by an "appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind." This makes colleagues of Benjamin Rush and Erasmus Darwin. But how long after Wieland and after the decision to live in New York was Brown confident that he and scientists were performing analogous investigations in the same spirit? The problem with trying to pinpoint Brown's intellectual orientation at any phase of his novelistic career is that it had no phases. Or rather, it had, at most, two: a major phase for several years {Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly were all published between 1798 and 1800), followed by a minor phase of even briefer duration {Clara Howard and Jane Talbot were published in 1801). The chronology of the composition of these books is muddled, but it is probably true that Brown was at work on these novels for not more than five years, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. So if I make the case that each of Brown's 30

ROMANCING NEWTON

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four major novels is epistemologically distinct, I certainly cannot claim that his career manifests an orderly progression through definite periods. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern which attitudes came together to set off his literary outburst and which ones dissipated to end it. Here Brown's contact with science in New York provides a clue. Granted that Brown's friends in New York, the members of the Friendly Club prominent among them, had their own literary endeavors and read Brown's romances with interest. Yet Brown's repudiation of the romance met with almost unanimous approval. At Brown's death, one obituary praised his "quest of information," his "acquisition of knowledge," and, along these lines, his late rejection of the life of "fancy" for "more solid and severe pursuits."2 These might have been Mrs. (Elizabeth Linn) Brown's words; if so, they certainly would have reflected her husband's attitudes. Even William Dunlap, Brown's biographer and himself a litterateur, describes Brown's shift in intellectual allegiance in terms that sound like a Royal Society manifesto of the 1660s: "From the regions of poetry and romance. . . Mr. Brown, like many others, became a sober recorder of things as they are."3 A friend's criticism may have been damaging: "The pen of poesy, Charles, is not often that of Philosophy and Truth."4 The friend was Elihu Hubbard Smith, and his authority was considerable. He was himself a physician, a student of Rush's (thus representative of the authorities to whom Brown makes his transdisciplinary appeal in the preface to Wieland), a promising scientist at the time of his death by yellow fever, and a founder of The Medical Repository, the first American journal of science. In the last years of Brown's life (he died in 1810), Brown was working not on a last romance but on a geography textbook that considered the planet in its astronomical context - a solid and severe enough pursuit.5 Brown's scientific and scientistic friends were a largely Federalist group with ties to New Haven orthodoxy, united in nothing as strongly as their hatred of the French Revolution and Jacobin rationalism; consequently, science for them was (in theory) the application of a rather modest inductivism. This would have had the effect of simplifying the intellectual status of Brown's literature unilaterally, comprehensively: The romance is precisely what science is not. Therefore they tried, on behalf of their Baconian, Lockean ideals, to influence Brown to be diametrically anti-Brunonian. If Brown knew one thing about himself- he lamented this frequently - it was that he was no observer or classifier. Writing about a trip he took to Rockaway, on Long Island, he admitted: Set me out on the same journey again, and I should scarcely recognise [sic] a foot of the way. I saw trees, and shrubs, and grasses; but I could not name them being as how I am no botanist. About a voyage up the Hudson:

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BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY I have gazed at the passing scene from Stony Point to West Point, with great eagerness, and till my eyes were wearied and pained. How shall I describe them [sic]? I cannot particularize the substance of the rock, or the kind of tree, save oaks and cedars. I am as little versed in the picturesque. I can only describe their influence on me. 6

B r o w n ' s admission is that he is essentially hapless as a natural historian; he is tangibly stronger as an investigator into the relationship of envir o n m e n t and personal psychic states. H e is congenitally a romancer and not a scientist, if the distinction comes d o w n to that. At s o m e point, B r o w n was persuaded that it did, and gave up romance writing for the life of a sober recorder of things as they are. But the intellectual status of literature is not so easily simplified, because science is not. I have mentioned that eighteenth-century Philadelphia science was bifurcated: T h e American Philosophical Society was devoted to the m o r e rationalistic sciences, mathematics and astronomy; the American Society for P r o moting Useful Knowledge specialized in natural history, agricultural science, and invention. T h e union of the rival organizations was accomplished just before B r o w n ' s birth; the first president of the united society was Benjamin Franklin, inventor and experimenter. But the second president was the astronomer David Rittenhouse, pride of the Philosophical Society. We may infer from the alternation that t w o sets of interests were being appeased. There is, at every stage of the history of m o d e r n science, m o r e than one version of science with which to align oneself. B r o w n would have considered himself to be a friend of science, as long as he continued to do so, in its m o r e deductive, speculative, and h y pothetical m o m e n t s . We have one document to help sort this all out: B r o w n ' s article " T h e Difference Between History and R o m a n c e , " which appeared in The Monthly Magazine in April 1800 - well into his literary outburst. 7 T h e title implies that B r o w n does not want to be taken as creating the t w o categories, but rather as w o r k i n g out the demarcation explicitly. O n the one hand is the romancer, presumably B r o w n . O n the other is the (natural) historian (from Latin, historia, from the Greek for inquiry, o b servation). T h e implicit distinction is between B r o w n , w h o cannot o b serve ("being as h o w I am n o botanist"), and natural historians, w h o must. But does the division of subjects specify, or might it be based on, a division of objects? B r o w n hypothesizes that the historian studies lawful nature, the romancer the world of willful and whimsical h u m a n beings. H e rejects this conjecture, however, since "there is a sufficient analogy . . . between objects and modes, in the physical and intellectual world, to justify the use of these distinctions in both cases." In other w o r d s , there are historians and romancers of people, historians and romancers of things. Perhaps (even m o r e constrictively for the Brunonian romancer) w e

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may distinguish history, defined as a "picture of the probable and certain," from romance, defined as a mere "tissue of untruths." This is, however, to bloat the realm of the historian, since Brown's skeptical analysis of the question demonstrates that though the discoverer of causal laws does not deal in "certainties," he does deal in "probabilities"; nevertheless, he does not deal in what can be observed. "Two contemporary and (so to speak) adjacent actions may both be faithfully described, because both may be witnessed; but the connection between them, that quality which constitutes one the effect of the other, is mere matter of conjecture, and comes within the province, not of history, but romance." One key element of the world of probability slips from the historian to the romancer, scuttling the second attempt to discover any implication in the division that constricts or even clearly delimits the romancer's jurisdiction. The romancer's domain, in fact, accrues territory throughout the article. Suppose that Vesuvius erupts - what can the historian do besides collect data? On the other hand, the romancer will imagine the causes of the eruption in "the bowels of the earth"; will trace causes back even so far as the universal creation "out of an immense volcano called chaos"; "will paint the universal dissolution that is hereafter to be produced by the influence of volcanic or internal fire." The romancer, in short, takes as his domain all of science, beyond sense-data, and all of religion and myth in the process. The splendor of the romancer's calling is perhaps not so distinct in the subsequent paragraph: "An historian will form catalogues of stars, and mark their positions at given times. A romancer will arrange them in clusters, and dispose of them in strata, and inform you by what influences the orbs have been drawn into sociable knots and circles." Yet vital strategic work has been packed into these two sentences. Newton has been claimed by the romancers. Not Newton alone among the scientists is a romancer — he is merely, according to Brown, the greatest and purest: "The same man is frequently both historian and romancer. Buffon, Linneus [sic], and Herschel, are examples of this union. Their observations are as diligent as their theories are adventurous. Among the historians of nature, Haller was, perhaps, the most diligent: among romancers, he that came nearest the truth was Newton." One might have expected Moses, Plato, and Shakespeare. It had certainly been evident that historians and romancers did not divide up as scientists and fiction writers, but the extent to which Brown had scientists in mind for his imaginative category is still surprising. Even within this apparently antidisciplinary generosity, however, is the strongest disciplinary self-justification imaginable. Toward the very end of Brown's career as a romancer, this single gesture turns the highest imaginative quest over to scientists even as it converts science into a literary subgenre. The result seems defensive and opportunistic; nevertheless, it was phil-

34

BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY

osophically fated. It follows from an affirmation of Hume's radicalization of Locke, on the one hand, and from Newton's prestige, on the other. If empirical evidence gives knowledge as little as Hume, and Brown, surmise, what is left but to extract Newton from the realm of the empiricists? The problem-situation is Kantian, even if Brown is no Kant. Yet Brown senses, at least, that the romancer's eagerness to find in the data of the empiricists the projections of humankind - mythic origins and consummations of life on earth, sociability meanwhile among the stars - cannot be essentially different from any passion, scientific or otherwise, to find a natural lawfulness. "Experience," Popper learns from Kant, "is creative"; the positing of a theory is of necessity "the result of an almost poetic intuition. " 8 Thus might Brown dispose of E. H. Smith's criticism. The pen of philosophy and truth is always the pen of poesy. In precise opposition to the mutual exclusiveness of science and romance is the idea, the function of an authentic scientific problemsituation, that the greatest science is romance. The latter view could justify or even drive a literary career; more specifically, the latter view in the hostile vicinity of the former might cause an explosion like Brown's career. It is not obvious, therefore, whether we ought to take the article as science philosophy or literary strategy: Brown's demarcation theory, as well as his entire oeuvre, may be read simultaneously as a sympathetic, interested, fraternal alliance with science (against Hume) and a defense of literature (against a Baconian reduction of science, to which he had a strong inclination to surrender). We are headed toward the Kantian "scientific problem-situation"; the process, however, is meant equally to save science for Brown's career as a romancer and to save Brown's career as a romancer from science. THE LOCKED CLOSET

One of Brown's ways of distinguishing the jurisdictions of historian and romancer is, to a reader of his novels (if to no one else), unexpected: That which is done beneath my own inspection it is possible for me certainly to know; but that which is performed at a distance, either in time or place, is the theme of foreign testimony. If it be related by me, I relate not what I have witnessed, but what I derived from others who were witnesses. . . . The truth of the action can be weighed in no scales but those of probability.y There is nothing shocking about the final judgment. That hearsay is uncertain is common wisdom, and judging it in terms of probability is standard Lockian doctrine. What is unexpected is that Brown considers to be certain whatever comes under his own eyes: In Wieland, the historian

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suffers his final humiliation. All propositions, including propositions based on one's own experience, become, in Brown from Wieland on, matters of a romancer's conjecture. The legal language and imagery that Brown employs in his discussion of secondhand knowledge ("testimony," "witnesses," truth weighed on scales) are reapplied in Wieland. It is no longer the testimony of witnesses that must be weighed; it is the testimony, as Brown frequently puts it, of one's own senses. I have moved Brown beyond Locke rather too quickly. In fact, Brown seems, at first, tentative about repudiating Locke. Wieland, a religious enthusiast, and precisely fitting Locke's description of that breed (his "melancholy . . . mixed with devotion," as Locke puts it),10 hears voices, trusts them, consequently goes mad, and murders his entire nuclear family. Wouldn't any reader of Wieland be inclined to prefer Lockean epistemological modesty? No wonder that many readers look to Pleyel, reasonable, Lockean, dull Pleyel, as Brown's spokesman. But there is an impediment: Pleyel, overly trusting of his own senses - again, the auditory sense is depraved - is misled by the Gothic villain Carwin's ventriloquism into doubting Clara Wieland's chastity. This is a serious mistake (it could have led to her death), if not on the level of uxoricide and filicide. Pleyel seems not, after all, to be epistemologically superior to Wieland. The novel is less philosophically certain than it at first appears - than Brown, apparently, hopes it to be. The source of the problem, needless to say, is in Locke himself.11 Locke's belief that whatever knowledge he has about the external world comes from experience puts him, of course, at the mercy of his senses. If asked for a guarantee that his senses are not lying, he cannot give it, because the accuracy of his experiences cannot itself be experienced. All he can say is that impressions, "ideas," have found their way into his mind from outside (for the simple reason that they could not have come from inside), where they are compared and contrasted; the result of this comparing and contrasting is all the knowledge of the external world he has. It seems to follow that there cannot be means whereby to distinguish the empiricist and the madman, Pleyel from Wieland. "If it be true," Locke imagines a critic challenging him, "that all knowledge lies only in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas, the visions of an enthusiast, and the reasonings of a sober man, will be equally certain" (IV, iv, 1). This reads like the crisis of Locke's Essay. Yet the reader who expects a dramatic reversal to follow it is apt to feel tricked. It turns out that there are two cases in which our ideas must correspond to the external world. Complex ideas (except those of substance) are necessarily accurate, since they are the mind's concoction and apply to the world only and wherever the world fits them (the equality of the three angles of a

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triangle to two right angles is a truth about the world only when something in the world happens to be triangular) (IV, iv, 5). Simple ideas about the world are true in the sense that only the world could give rise to them (one's impression of whiteness tells us that there is something in the world with the power to create the impression of whiteness, though nothing in the world is intrinsically white) (IV, iv, 4). Even if it is possible to disregard the difficulty that the premise of this challenge to Locke — the Lockean notion that knowledge consists only in the comparison of ideas to ideas - seems to be ignored in the rebuttal to it, since knowledge in the rebuttal seems to be predicated on the comparison of ideas to things, still there is a lingering doubt whether the enthusiast and the sober man have been essentially demarcated. What Locke has done (assuming that he has committed no philosophical solecism) is to show that particular notions of a sober man have a firmer basis than the visions of an enthusiast. He might have named others: The demonstration of the existence of God, for example, is real knowledge of a sort clearly distinct from visionary assertions. But the oddity is that when Locke seeks to divide enthusiasm from sobriety, he comes up with issues on which any reasonable person and enthusiast might agree. He still lacks a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with enthusiasm from the point of view of empiricism in general, thus the crucial section devoted to it in the fourth edition. And what is wrong with enthusiasm can only be, finally, not that it is less sure than reason in the extremely limited daylight of real knowledge, but that it is not as wary as reason in the twilight regions of judgment and faith. So Wieland9 s complaint about Locke is that Locke is not wary enough — which is to say that where Locke trusts the "testimony of [his] eyes" (IV, xi, 2), Brown's characters are disastrously wrong to trust the testimony of their ears. Both the reasonable Pleyel and the enthusiastic Wieland have perfect trust in the auditory sense; no taxonomy of rationality can be made on that basis. Of course, anyone who takes madness and delusions seriously knows that the existence of a sound does not prove the existence of an external agency producing it. The sober man who believes the contrary is merely an enthusiast for common sense. We return from Locke to the problem of Wieland with much doubt that the "historian's" trust in sense impressions has been sufficiently justified by the great advocate of the "historical, plain method." But Locke does not fall without a struggle in Wieland: Brown continues to look, throughout much of the romance, for the reasonable explanation of things, for a way of distinguishing enthusiasm and philosophical sobriety. What would a reasonable and sober explanation of Wieland's madness look like? At least Brown could reduce madness to causes and classes: The hope of the project would be to analyze the perversions of

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the senses in order to maintain the usefulness of experience by senses sanely employed. A taxonomy and etiology of madness is, in fact, what Brown promises in his "Advertisement": The incidents related are extraordinary and rare. Some of them, perhaps, approach as nearly to the nature of miracles as can be done by that which is not truly miraculous. It is hoped that intelligent readers will not disapprove of the manner in which appearances are solved, but that the solution will be found to correspond with the known principles of human nature. . . . Some readers may think the conduct of the younger Wieland impossible. In support of its possibility the Writer must appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind.12 These physicians no doubt include Erasmus Darwin (footnoted by Brown) and Benjamin Rush; and Rush particularly, a presiding intellect in the materialistic Philadelphia in which Brown was philosophically nurtured, and E. H. Smith's mentor, diagnoses several of the mental diseases in Wieland. Wieland himself has so many (Rushian) reasons to be mad that his madness is more than overdetermined, it is hyperdetermined. Most obviously, Wieland is an enthusiast: Rush speaks of the madness "brought on by a belief in [one's] being a peculiar favourite of heaven, and destined to fulfil some of its high and benevolent decrees." There is insanity in Wieland's background: "a peculiar and hereditary sameness of organization of the nerves, brain, and blood vessels [writes Rush] on which I said formerly the predisposition to madness depended, sometimes pervades whole families, and renders them liable to this disease from a transient or feeble operation of its causes." Wieland is descended in particular from a poet, an unlucky circumstance, since Rush quotes Pinel as demonstrating that "poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians are most subject" to insanity. There is a ventriloquist in Wieland's neighborhood, and ventriloquism may mislead and deprave the auditory sense, which is particularly vulnerable: "false perceptions are more common through the ears than the eyes in mad people." Clara Wieland's descent into at least what Rush calls a "transient paroxysm of madness," sleepwalking, is hyperdetermined by most of her brother's predispositions and (in Rush's language) the morbid state of her sexual appetite as well, the result of the frustration of her desire for Pleyel, her incestuous attraction to her brother, and the sexual charge introduced into her atmosphere by Carwin. 13 Despite all the fantastic explaining Brown does, however, very little is explained. On the contrary, the rich excessiveness of the etiology indicates that Brown does not know himself what set off the chain reaction of mad-

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We seem to be failing utterly to get the depravity of the senses tidily quarantined. The fact is that the book, despite the Advertisement, does not give us, in general, dichotomous explanations (miracles versus known laws of behavior), but rather offers trichotomies (miracles versus mania versus mechanics). This efficiently muddles the possibility of explanation, since indecisiveness about what constitutes a nonmystical explanation always leaves room for the reappearance and reconsideration of the miraculous. Concerning the death of her father by spontaneous combustion, Clara Wieland writes: "Was this the penalty of disobedience? this the stroke of a vindictive and invisible hand? Is it a fresh proof that the Divine Ruler interferes in human affairs, meditates an end, selects and commissions his agents, and enforces, by unequivocal sanctions, submission to his will?" Perhaps, but Brown recalls his commitment to steering the discussion toward human nature and its principles: "Or, was it merely the irregular expansion of the fluid that imparts warmth to our heart and our blood, caused by the fatigue of the preceding day, or flowing, by established laws, from the condition of his thoughts?" (W, 19). This is unsteady: Psychology is wedged in at the end, connected to physical explanations only by the dubious positing of "established laws" for such cases. Brown seems unhappy with Clara's speculation here and adds a footnote directing us to the pertinent medical journals for more information. In fact, one of Brown's magazines contains a purely mechanical, nonpsychological account of spontaneous combustion, which attacks the old, the fat, and the alcoholic but not, apparently, the depressed. One of the victims mentioned in the article "felt a stroke, as if someone had given him a blow over the right arm with a large club"14 and Wieland pere thought that "his right arm received a blow from a heavy club" {W, 18). All explanations - supernatural, psychological, and mechanical - are left open. The trebling of explanations is insistent. "Yet how could I imagine a mere human agency in these events?" Clara cries at the end. "But if the influence was preternatural or maniacal in my brother's case, they [sic] must be equally so in my own" (W, 196). Carwin is the issue: Is he maniacal or demonic, or merely human? Carwin represents the third category throughout most of the book: "Carwin, perhaps," Clara's uncle says, "or heaven, or insanity, prompted the murderer; but Carwin is unknown" (W, 161). "But Carwin is unknown" may mean that Carwin cannot represent a sort of human explanation entirely distinct from supernatural and pathological ones. We are never satisfied about Carwin's motives: The vagueness is necessary, because if you push any of his diverse motives too hard, you arrive back at psychopathology or demonology - the mechanistic alternative fails. A late statement of Clara's

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attempts to maintain the division: "Presently, I considered, that whether Wieland was a maniac, a faithful servant of God, the victim of hellish illusions, or the dupe of human imposture, was by no means certain" (W, 187). But in "hellish illusions," the supernatural-psychological barrier melts in the presence of the demonic, which means that the disciplinary and scientific weakness of psychology manages to ratify the miraculous as against "the known principles of human nature." The single most important Lockean project — to survey the regions of knowledge, opinion, and faith - is put into question in a world in which sense impressions, delusions, and revelations are entirely unsortable. The power of Locke's project depended on a forged alliance between common sense and science. Bertrand Russell's dialogue with Gilbert Ryle, on the question of how Locke managed to reform thinking as thoroughly as Aristotle, is famous. Ryle says that Locke "invented common sense." Russell replies: "By God, Ryle, I believe you are right. No one ever had Common Sense before Locke - and no one but Englishmen have ever had it since."15 But why should common sense have a sudden philosophical success of such grand proportions? Equally revealing is Russell's remark that Locke's reduction of the physical world to matter in motion - influenced by Boyle - was less significant in philosophical terms than in terms of the science it underwrote: "Pragmatically, the theory was useful, however mistaken it may have been theoretically. This is typical of Locke's doctrines."16 It is juxtaposing these two pronouncements that illuminates Locke's power; and at the crux of the alliance between common sense and science is the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. The distinction follows from and endorses the corpuscularian hypothesis: Primary qualities (size, shape, rest, motion) really inhere in macro-things (like a chair or person) because they inhere in constituent micro-things (corpuscles). Secondary qualities (warmth, color, noise) do not inhere in either but result from the striking of corpuscles upon our senses. The reference of both levels of qualities to corpuscles is relief from scholastic "substantial forms"; the division separates what can be put in terms of mechanics and mathematics (primary qualities) from what cannot (secondary). At the same time, the primary-secondary distinction is a corollary of common sense, because it assures us that what we see and feel - insofar as these senses pertain to primary qualities - is really there; that what we hear, smell, and taste is the result of what is really there; and that what has no sensuous effects whatever is not really there. The collapse of the primary—secondary distinction leads to idealism or skepticism, which have philosophical but not commonsense appeal, or (apparently) the capacity to support the science of Boyle and Newton, or the revolutionary capacity to justify common sense and science by each other.

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Back to Wieland: If there is no final distinction to be made between Wieland and Pleyel, or between the sense impressions of the enthusiast and those of the sober, reasonable person - three times Wieland's insanity is referred to his trust in sense impressions (W, 224, 230, 233), which is also Pleyel's downfall - there is one, apparently, between Wieland hearing and Wieland seeing, and between Pleyel hearing and Pleyel seeing. Seeing is accurate but dim in this book; hearing is strong and delusive. This is crucial, given the number of scenes that take place in the dark. We are frequently in Locke's dark closet in Wieland, or rather in Clara's, which has a small window the size of a head, just large enough to make some illumination of its mysteries possible, but better for shadows and the mystifications of ventriloquism. A metaphorical darkness complements the physical obscurity. Clara Wieland, whose given name is significant, loses her reason; Pleyel, "that luminary, of whose effulgencies [Clara] had so long and so liberally partaken" (W, 141), loses his poise; Wieland's wife, in whose face Clara had often found "the tinge of the morning, and the lustre of heaven" (W, 157), loses her life. All of which leaves people in the dark with what they hear. Brown is so alive to the distinction he wishes to make between seeing and hearing that it makes him clumsily overexplicit. Wieland, doubting Pleyel's accusations against Clara's morality, says that "nothing less than my own hearing and vision would convince me" (W, 110), where "Only seeing for myself would convince me" is more colloquial. Pleyel tells Clara that, before her alleged fall, "all delights were meagre and contemptible, compared with those connected with the audience and sight of you" (W, 122). Clara is informed that Wieland was not misled by Carwin but was insane: "Are you sure?" she exclaims, if what follows could conceivably get exclaimed. "Were not these sights, and these sounds, really seen and heard?" (W, 177). Characters who see more than they hear, or the reverse, are forced by Brown into awkward locutions that get the balance exactly right: "Clara," says her uncle, "I have known thee by report, and [enter bathos] in some degree by observation" (W, 162). All this would seem to be the result of Brown's desire to divide the senses in order to discriminate one that works from one that often fails. This is not Locke's method, but it is not far distant. Sight is not absolutely the realistic sense for Locke - it gives us secondary as well as primary qualities - and secondary qualities are not the same as delusions. But it is only by sight and touch that we get primary qualities at all, and by hearing we get only a secondary quality. We can imagine that Brown is saving the senses by urging, as Locke argues, that they may, even if they do not always, register qualities that actually inhere in the world. Perhaps not. So much of Wieland takes place in the dark; so much of

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what is "seen" is seen in dim light and obscurely; so much is "seen" under the influence of what is heard; and enough things are "seen" in dreams (Clara is twice impressed by the confusion of dreams and waking senses in a way that Locke only dismisses) that we wonder if Brown is not setting up hearing in the place of sight as the epitome of the senses. For Locke, sight is the synecdoche of the senses and the analogue of understanding: "The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself" (introd., i). If hearing is the metonymic representative of the senses and therefore the metaphoric representative of Lockean understanding, could Brown be trying to save empiricism? Brown has the advantage of writing after Hume, so he knows the empirical predicament. He has the further advantage, if he wants it, of having in the intellectual atmosphere, nearly as pervasively as Lockian cliches, the Scottish School philosophy to inform him that in fact Locke's epistemology was unnecessarily foredoomed to arrive at skepticism, because we do not see ideas of things, we see things. Thomas Reid believed skepticism to have been a historically inevitable absurdity. One of his favorite devices for ridiculing it was to compare the fantasies philosophers indulge in with the necessary empiricism of a judge: Would any system of justice, Reid wonders occasionally, allow a lawyer to impeach the testimony of a reliable witness by Humean arguments against the reliability of the senses in general? Even after Hume, Brown can save the senses by means of Common Sense, but not Locke's common sense, if he chooses. Though Brown, at first glance like Reid, does not wish to distinguish sharply between the "testimony of senses" (as constant a phrase in Wieland as in Locke) and the testimony of witnesses, he associates them in the least commonsensical way: He is the judge who allows the discrediting of witnesses by means of the discrediting of senses, which he disparages by trusting them no further - to complete the circle - than he would a witness. Grant that Brown, an apostate Quaker and dropout from the legal profession, is not likely to use a concept like "testimony" unadvisedly. Brown runs together his forensic and his epistemological language to the end of undermining empiricism by means of skepticism about justice. "What evidence could possibly suggest conceptions so wild?" Clara demands about Pleyel's accusations. "He has judged me without hearing" (W, 105). Several pages later, Wieland confirms the appropriateness of Clara's choice of metaphors. "You speak," he says, "before a judge who will profit by any pretense to acquit you: who is ready to question his own senses when they plead against you" (W, 109). His senses testify in a court of law - testimony is heard, and pleas are heard, and judges grant hearings. "As I hear, I judge," says Jesus (John

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5:30) in a chapter (which must have particularly interested the critic of law and former Quaker) devoted to a legalistic discussion of testimony and bearing witness: The legal world, unlike the Lockean philosophical world, functions by the auditory sense. If love is blind, then justice is blindfolded. Finally, at the end of the romance, the legal metaphors are realized in Wieland's trial. The trial is primarily heard: "The audience was composed of thousands." This is no accident of diction: The courtroom scene includes "judges, advocates, and auditors," and Wieland addresses "my judges and my auditors" (W, 162, 163, 164), but there are no "spectators." Wieland is making a mistake. He still trusts his ears. What he thinks he is giving — in narrating the story of his possession by the Spirit - is a Testimony. What his auditors in the courtroom hear is lowercase. But the point of shifting the epitome of the senses from eyes to ears is not primarily to justify the legal troping; it is to transform us from Lockean empiricists into the audience of a romance - or, rather, into Lockean empiricists who come to realize the necessity of romance. Readers of Wieland find themselves on a level with all the auditors in the court: unable, as Locke advises us, to subject Revelation to Reason, but without Wieland's scorn for setting up "halting reason, as the measure of truth" (W, 176). In tandem, Locke and Brown show reasonableness about revelation to be necessary and impossible. At one point, Clara's uncle, handing her a transcript of the trial, asks her: "Shall I make him [Wieland] the narrator of his own tale?" (W, 162). Clara reads it, as we read it, as if it were narrated, exactly as the audience of thousands heard it. We have been hearing the story told, as Clara's testimony, all along — with growing mistrust but no alternative to belief. This is the horizontal level of the story, Clara, Wieland, Pleyel, and us; we try to be historians and fail. We are forced to rely on what we hear, but we know that hearing is the most easily depraved of the senses. The question becomes how to know in advance, by sense impressions, that one is sane. Reid tells us that only madmen and philosophers doubt their senses, and only madmen and the delirious make true sense errors.17 But we are nearly all, in Wieland, as epistemologically passive and doubtful as madmen; we take in what our senses tell us, and we hear odd things. The similarity of Wieland and Pleyel, sober man and enthusiast, is just that passivity. Even in Wieland, of course, there are exceptions: Carwin, for example, is a rung above us, above the historical or horizontal axis of the story. Carwin is an experimenter; he plays an active part in the discovery of truth. Perhaps he is what Brown calls a "partial romancer." But Carwin does not know all, he does not know much. To Clara's surprise, he does not even know, until she tells him, the catastrophic results of his "machinations." He is an experimenter with

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no control over his experiments. What he mainly knows, and what all the horizontal characters do not, is that he does experiment. As an empirical scientist, however, he does not get much beyond the empirical common sense of Pleyel. There is even a level on the vertical axis above Carwin: the position occupied by Ludloe. Ludloe appears in the Memoirs in his quality of romancer, in contrast to all of Wieland's failed historians. (Reid: "There are proper limits put to human knowledge. When we pass them we are in fiction and romance.")18 Ludloe knows absolutely; he is the book's Newton. The question is: How does he manage it? To some degree, the answer is that he is a rationalist among empiricists. Like Descartes, he has learned to mistrust his senses; the sense he particularly mistrusts is his hearing. He is never fooled by Carwin's ventriloquism. Can Ludloe's anti-Lockean, anti-Reidian rationalism, however, be any kind of account of his omniscience? His knowledge is a mystery worth exploring. But he must be, within the Lockean terms of Wieland, a dimly perceived figure. In Wieland, we can only learn the necessity, not the technique, of a romancer's science; in Ormond, the mystery of Ludloe becomes the revised essence of the epistemological romance. A CARTESIAN PLAGUE

Larzer Ziff conjectures that Wieland began as a sentimental novel built on eighteenth-century psychology but ended as a kind of Puritan novel based on a notion of original sin. Two of Clara Wieland's Brunonian apothegms are central to his interpretation: "Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted for by no established laws" (W, 87) and "If the senses be depraved, it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding" (W, 35). A case can be made for giving a Puritan spin to these maxims; Clara has no intention that "depraved" be taken to mean "fallen," but Brown, writing through her, could have meant that. My objection to Ziff s speculation is that he, like many others, is too quick to look in Brown for rejections of rationality as a whole. Put a slightly different construction on Clara's words, and they make a case not for innate sinfulness but for innate ideas.19 I almost agree with Ziff: Brown has led us in Wieland very nearly to the point where rationality seems defenseless. But then there is Ludloe's rationality, whatever it consists of, and next, there is Ormond's. Ormond's lends a pattern to Brown's second romance: Almost every character in Ormond comes to experience not passively, but with already formed ideas, impatient with the sluggishness of reality to embody them. They have so many ideas that they cannot - or at least do not - account for them. The pious narrator, Sophia, admits that it "was not prudent

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to unfold all the means by which I gained knowledge of his [Ormond's] actions." Later she nervously repeats herself: "I shall omit to mention the means by which I became acquainted with his character." She gained her knowledge of Ormond, she admits, "surreptitiously" (O, 3, 11112); if Sophia is merely a pious snoop, the fact is without epistemological interest. But each of Brown's books is designed to put its readers in the epistemological position of its characters. Sophia's statements make us aware that we have more information than we have gathered. The oddity ofOrmond, in contrast to all of Brown's other novels, is that it is narrated by a character who simply is not there to witness, either to see or hear, the events of the narration. Ormond is the character with the most, and the least accounted for, intelligence. There is some indication that he, like Sophia, is merely a proficient spy, but no mere spy ever came so close to omniscience. Ormond is repeatedly confused with God. "His means of information [Sophia writes] I did not pretend, and thought it useless to investigate. We cannot hide our actions and thoughts, from one of powerful sagacity. . . . All that duty enjoins, is to design and to execute nothing, which may not be approved by a divine and omniscient observer" (O, 262). The reader, who has heard much about Ormond's omniscience - "I have said that I know all" (O, 149) - scarcely is certain of which omniscient observer Sophia finally is speaking. Furthermore, Ormond can anticipate the future. Like the future of the Newtonian universe, Ormond's "knows not the empire of contingency. An inexorable and immutable decree enjoins it" (O, 258). How is omniscience possible? The answer begins with Descartes's rationalism: References to the "lucid order" of Ormond's arguments and the "mathematical exactness" of his behavior, every element of which is deduced from "strict and inflexible principles" (O, 128), suggests that he is an applied rationalist. This is a promising Faustian position: God and Ormond geometrize. No Brown critic is as preoccupied as Brown himself with the distinction of empiricist and rationalist, with the fact that every character must be defined as one or the other.20 Ormond, following the largely empirical Wieland, is given over to the rationalists. A statement such as this one, from a magazine article of Brown's, seems to guarantee that Brown could not have stayed with empiricism for long: "The more attentively we observe mankind, and study ourselves," Brown writes, "the greater will our uncertainty appear, and the further we will find ourselves from truth." This judgment, perfectly anti-Baconian, is almost exactly duplicated in a later article on a medical controversy concerning the plague: The writer is told by a physician "that the more he collects, investigates and compares, the more inscrutable the question becomes. "21

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Human motivation and the course of a contagion resist Baconian empiricism; the yellow fever is a metaphor of human behavior in Ormond. Ormond himself seems to be a kind of rationalistic William Godwin; Godwin struggled to bring principles to bear on emotions and particular situations in a way that Ormond, as a rationalist, assumes is possible. "Godwin came," wrote E. H. Smith to, and about, Brown, "& all was light."22 The merging of Godwin, God, and Newton implied here is significant. Brown, like most American intellectuals, was an uncomprehending admirer of Newtonian mathematical astronomy. "Who doubts the truth of the Newtonian system?" Brown writes in his magazine, defending Newton's astronomy even against the charge that it may be considered a hypothesis.23 But in the same issue of the magazine in which Brown defends Newton against the most minimal reservation, he withholds judgment in the phlogiston controversy and the controversy over the contagiousness of yellow fever. The question of Ormond is how close one can get to the fluctuating worlds of medicine and chemistry (and human behavior) with geometrical techniques that work in astronomy. The heroine of the story, Constantia, is also a rationalist. Her education is supervised by her feminist father: "Instead of making her a practical musician or pencilist, he conducted her to the school of Newton and Hartley, unveiled to her the mathematical properties of light and sound, taught her as a metaphysician and anatomist, the structure and power of the senses, and discussed with her the principles and progress of human society" (O, 33). The symmetry of this four-tiered edifice is telling. 1. He "conducted her to the school of Newton and Hartley." That is, he acquainted her, first, with the mathematical laws of the heavens and, second, with the conjectured laws of human thought. 2. He "unveiled to her the mathematical properties of light and sound." He brought her, in other words, via Newton's Opticks to the universal subject of light, then (somehow) to the terrestrial subject. 3. He "taught her, as a metaphysician and anatomist, the structure and power of the senses." Returning to Hartley's world, he brought light and sound into contact with human organs, first via metaphysics (the rationalistic approach) and second via anatomy (the empirical approach). Locke proposed anatomy as the first of the sciences. 4. And he "discussed with her the principles and progress of human society." Finally, in the almost completely empirical world of human intercourse, he nevertheless divided its study into (a)

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(timeless) principles (the rationalist's maneuver) and (b) progress (in two senses, the historian's). What is constructed here is a geometry of the sciences; the Cartesian assumptions are that the soundest method of reasoning is from clearest ideas to less clear, by minimized gradations, and that knowledge is perceiving the interconnectedness of the series. Newton (first of the Principia, second of the Opticks) heads the hierarchy - he is here the rationalist's hero. We are told that Mr. Dudley has deferred Constantia's religious education on the grounds that she should not arrive at dubious propositions too quickly in her upbringing: "he laboured... to accustom her to the accuracy of geometrical deduction, and to the view of those evils, that have flowed in all ages, from mistaken piety" (O, 180). Geometry is the first science in the Dudley household - as it is chez Descartes. Helena, the mistress Ormond rejects for the possibility of winning Constantia, fails where Constantia succeeds: She was a proficient in the elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird. She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined the structure of society. She was ignorant of the past or present condition of mankind. (O, 128) Note OrmoncTs customary order of disciplines, from space to time. Helena's first failing is geometry, her second and third are psychology and anthropology, her last is history. On the other hand, Martinette, who exists in the novel to possess the fault of Constantia's virtues, was educated in the same way as the heroine: "Her education seemed not widely different, from that which Constantia had received. It was classical and mathematical" (O, 190). The classical part of Constantia's education is an interesting corollary of the scientific. Her father insisted that she learn Latin first and deduce the Romance languages afterward. On the other hand, the empirical Benjamin Franklin advocated learning the Romance languages first in order to generalize to Latin. That Ormond is as completely populated by rationalists as Wieland by empiricists suggests that we are either trying out a new epistemology, on behalf of Brown's Faustian ambitions, or shooting down another one to deprecate science's. But Constantia's rationalism is a poor thing, a sort of post-Cartesian unhinging of mind and matter. Static in its disjunctions, it seems to posit an unceasing binary confrontation of timeless Newtonian heavens and terrestrial temporality, eternal spirit and corruptible flesh. Her rationalism cannot reach, for one thing, the plaguesome world that is the environment of Ormond: Constantia can hardly believe that something so "wild and uncouth" could attack her Philadelphia (O, 35), because the motionless hierarchies of her cosmos cannot

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admit the darting and contumacious terrors of the plague. Ormond, however, does manage to bring his maxims and principles to everyday life and to the plague. If we can trust the process, then deduction from principles to reality in Ormond is easier than induction from sense-data to reality in Wieland. I have mentioned the mathematical lucidity of Ormond's mind. On one page, we are introduced to "the maxims by which he was accustomed to regulate his private deportment"; on another page, it is allowed that even his ruthless treatment of Helena was "fashioned... on sullen and ferocious principles"; on still another, we get a picture of Ormond as Ludloe, deducing some political scheme from "principles and views remote from vulgar apprehension" (O, 112, 140, 177). This is, however, only half the story. From time to time, Brown seems to believe that Ormond has no fixed principles at all. "Principles, in the looser sense of that term, have little influence on practice. Ormond was, for the most part, governed, like others, by the influences of education and present circumstances" (O, 113). And again: "This man's conduct was directed by the present impulse, and however elaborate his abstract notions, he seldom stopped to settle the agreement between his principles and actions" (O, 133). The fate of rationalism and perhaps of rationality is at stake. Is Brown confused? Constantia's analysis of the situation provides the first clue: "I have always condemned," she says, "the maxims by which you act. Your scheme [he has just left Helena out of his lust for Constantia] is headlong and barbarous" (O, 168). Constantia credits him, even at such a moment, with living by maxims, but it appears that, in a way she could never have suspected, maxims may not all be innate imprints of a beneficent God; they may not all bespeak the superiority of eternity to time (Ormond's schemes are headlong) or of the mind to the body (his schemes are barbarous). Living with principles may turn out to look exactly like living without them: But what might unprincipled principles mean, and how might a moral geometry work for one who is always open to alternative moral geometries? If Descartes's rationalism sees the unchanging substantial wax hidden beneath the accidental wax, if it is predicated on a rhetoric of unmasking, Ormond's is based in a temporary, eternally masked universe. Another way to say this is that Brown develops through Ormond a rationalism of the plague, as horrifying a spectacle as Wieland's empiricism of the law courts. The end is to associate rationalism with the French Revolution (as the analogy of Ormond and Godwin would help him to do). Here are Ormond's "modes of thinking" with respect to marriage: "He could not think with patience of a promise which no time could annul, which pretended to ascertain contingencies and regulate the future" (O, 127).

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We have already heard Ormond declaring his future to be as fixed as that of Newton's solar system; in the chemical or medical or human world in which he lives, however, what is certain about the future is that it will change. "I have," Ormond says, "overlooked ordinary forms: A negligence that has been systematic with me" (O, 153). Which is to say that all he manages to do systematically, as systematically as the plague or the French Revolution, is seek to overthrow systems. He is after, peculiarly, a rationalism of violent contingencies. What this amounts to is a rationalism without axioms - or, rather, with axioms that change, that are not axiomatic. "The universe was to him, a series of events, connected by an undesigning necessity, and an assemblage of forms, to which no beginning or end can be conceived" (O, 180). Descartes's rationalism, however, needed an Archimedean fixed point. Descartes required God to guarantee that what we see clearly and distinctly is, additionally, true; and to prove His existence, he needed arguments that depended on the impossibility of an infinite regress of causal agents. Yet fixed points are not, as it happens, easily come by. God is proved by the same clear and distinct arguments that He is evoked to validate (the notorious circle). Thus in the Meditations, the criteria of clearness and distinctness are generalized from their success in the cogito and endorsed by God; but in the Discourse they appear before the cogito as methodological principles (though again after it, generalized from it); the criteria must precede the cogito if we are to have a noncircular reason for accepting them, but they cannot precede the cogito if rationalism is to justify its own methods. A further mobility of Descartes's fixed points: The primary event of the Meditations is the cogito, out of which the whole world is regenerated, including, if not God, at least the proof of God. Since Descartes has demonstrated the existence of a doubting ego, and since doubting manifests an imperfection, and since every imperfect thing must be produced by something more perfect, then God must exist. On the other hand, Descartes tells us that a sense of imperfection must depend upon a logically prior sense of perfection: Which is logically primary, then, Descartes or God? Descartes, who according to the fable of the Meditations reproduces the world in six days and rests, is quite ambiguous as to the logical fixed point (methodology, cogito, or proof of God) of his universe. Brown is clearer that Ormond's rationalistic self-reliance is a sacrilege. Thus he is also clearer that rationalism cannot provide its own Archimedean ground; the result is that Ormond's reasoning tries to stand on axioms that shift and slide. 1. Ormond thinks: "Marriage is absurd. This flows from the general and incurable imperfection of the female character. No woman [e.g., Helena] can possess that worth which would in-

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5.

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duce me to enter into this contract." The axiom — apparently perfect in its generality - is that women are imperfect. Everything, so far, flows clearly and distinctly from the application of flawless rationality to a flawed object. But Ormond goes on: "This opinion may possibly be erroneous." So much for the axiom. He continues: "but it is undoubtedly true with respect to Helena." The conclusion is intact. Why? "And the uncertainty of the position in general, will increase the necessity of caution in the present case." A new, shakier axiom is introduced. Women may be too imperfect to marry. This is an axiom from within the flawed, changing world. Still, it functions to produce the sought-after conclusion. Or, rather, the conclusion seems to precede its proof: Circularity is inevitable. "That woman may exist whom I should not fear to espouse. This is not her. Some accident may cause our meeting" (O, 122).

By the end of this train of reasoning, such as it is, Ormond is no longer in the necessary world that rationalism would seem to fix in place. He is applying reasoning, with axioms that change momentarily, to the world of blindness and accident, the world of the plague. We are inclined to see in all this merely the perversion of reasoning by emotion. We cannot be sure, however, that Brown does not intend the contrary: that Ormond's emotions are perverted by his reasoning, as Godwin's reasoning led him to prefer the survival of the Archbishop Fenelon to that of his mother, as free thinking led, in the opinion of Brown's friends, to the French Revolution. What we can be sure of is that to live by principles is not necessarily to live justly; Constantia is surprised when Martinette informs her of the "variety of maxims by which the conduct of human beings is regulated" (O, 210), of the existence of non-Euclidean moral geometries, and we respect the audacity of Brown's romance if we are willing to believe that Ormond does live by maxims. The only hope of rationalism, then, is the piety of its principles, rationally ungrounded as they must be. So we return to Constantia's experience in order to judge if it supports this hope. The best places to look are the head-to-head conflicts of the pious rationalism of Constantia and the diabolic rationalism of Ormond. There is logical fun whenever they face each other in direct Cartesian competition. The first explicit conflict between them occurs when Ormond makes his great romantic appeal to Constantia. She calmly takes in his argument that "an incontroulable [sic] destiny" unites them and replies: This appeal to me has made no change in my opinion. I still think that justice requires you to become the husband of Hellen [sic]. ... I cannot love, but when my understanding points out to me the propriety of

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BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY love. Ever since I have known you, I have looked upon you as rightfully belonging to another. Love could not take place in my circumstances. Yet I will not conceal from you my sentiments. I am not sure that in different circumstances, I should not have loved. (O, 167)

That is typical Constantia, insisting that emotions follow reasons. And insisting, as usual, on a dichotomy (Helena or me) that arranges itself as a hierarchy (Helena before me), modeled on the hierarchy of pairs in her education - N e w t o n before Hartley, ideas before senses. So her reason, as ever, leads not to action but to a determination to fix the turbulence of the world. And O r m o n d , on Constantia's premises, can think of n o immediate rejoinder. But that night Omniscience thinks of what he should have said: "It was fully ascertained that he should never be united to this girl. [Helena. Call marriage with her x.] If so, the end c o n t e m plated by Constance [sic. Call marriage with her y], and for the sake of which only, his application was rejected, could never be obtained. Unless her rejection of him [~y], could procure a husband for her friend [ — y ^ x ] , it would, on her o w n principles, be improper and superfluous" (O, 169). By an anachronistic algebra that would have pleased Descartes, this is to say: Helena, w h o logically had only to admit ~(XAV) (you cannot marry us both), which equals by D e M o r g a n ' s law ~xy~y (you must not marry Helena or not marry me, or not marry both of us), and could have added as an emphatic minor premise x (you are marrying Helena), thus deducing ~ y (you are not marrying me), made the mistake of allowing x\/y ("I am not sure that, in different circumstances, I should not have loved"). O r m o n d sees that this is equivalent to t w o conditionals: ~:v—>y and ~y—>x. O f these he examines ~y—»x (his not marrying Constantia implies his marrying Helena). And he adds: but ~ x ("it was fully ascertained that he should never be united to this girl"). E r g o (modus tollendo tollens): ~~~y = y. H e conquers Helena, as he says, " o n her o w n principles." This is typical O r m o n d : converting Constantia's static disjunction into a disjunctive syllogism, making it as efficient as the plague. (Ormond is an O r - m o n d e , in which only O r m o n d k n o w s h o w to operate.) It brings, in other words, Descartes's rationalism to the murderous French R e v olution. But is Constantia's m o r e pious rationalism utterly defenseless? When Constantia must herself act, as w h e n O r m o n d traps her in a r o o m with every intention of raping her, can she maintain her rationality and rationalism? She does think the situation t h r o u g h (O, 284): 1. 2.

M u r d e r would be permissible in such a circumstance, and she does have a penknife handy. O f course, O r m o n d could wrest it from her, but (disjunctive hierarchy) "Death, untimely and violent, was better than the loss of h o n o u r . "

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3. Murder is horrible, if better than dishonor. But (disjunctive hierarchy) the "destruction of another" might be unnecessary, and she might keep Ormond from committing a sin, if "her own destruction" (suicidally) could be accomplished. 4. But maybe all murder and dishonor are avoidable. Perhaps if she tells Ormond of her suicidal intention, that will stymie him. Ormond, however, is purposeful to the end; his answer to her suicide threat is, go ahead: "Living or dead, the prize that I have in view shall be mine" (O, 285). His reasoning here is not stated, though his riposte succeeds by avoiding the most basic of all human disjunctions. Constantia does finally act - the interesting point is that Brown cannot describe her action. He is so committed to her rationality and rationalism that he simply does not know how she can feel the impulses necessary to get her to murder Ormond. We may say that this is the exact moment that the rationalistic hope of Ormond expires, along with the title character. If Ormond's rationalism is the rationalism of the plague, rationalism as murderous weapon, then the melodramatic question becomes: Is violence the end to which Constantia's rationalism itself must come, at long last? Brown cuts away from the scene, to Sophia's recital of her own story as she tracks her friend to the fateful room and discovers, as we discover, the murdered Ormond. It turns out that Constantia has killed him almost accidentally; her stroke was "at random." But her rationality was supposed to conquer the world of accidents; it is the plague (as Arthur Mervyn will again make clear) that works at random. Alexandre Koyre has argued that the three responses to Montaigne's skepticism were Pierre Charron, Bacon, and Descartes24 - are we reduced here (having dissected empiricism and rationalism successively) to piety - to Sophia's antirationalistic faith? Brown has conducted in Ormond a critique of rationalism - italicizing Descartes's need for God as a fixed point, but exposing the illegitimacy of that support and condemning simultaneously the necessary violence of rationalism without it. The critique of rationalism, on the one hand, substitutes faith for science as the grounds of our principles. On the other hand, however, the book is also a critique of the Faustian Gothic romance: Ormond's omniscience is a correlative of Brown's ambitions. The pressure on Brown's career as romancer came simultaneously from science and orthodoxy. The two choices left for Brown seem to be faith or skepticism. HUME AND REPETITION

Arthur Mervyn is Humean man: For my part [writes Hume famously], when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.

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BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. . . . [We are] nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. 25

Critics who have recognized that Arthur Mervyn may be at any moment pristine or shrewd, and who have usefully pointed to Franklin as an archetype of the interested-innocent American, ought to consider that Arthur may also be rich or poor, active or passive, somber or jocular, anything and its opposite. He has no self whatever. And the world he perceives is Humean. That is to say, he can learn nothing about it; causal laws do not keep it coherent. "Suppose a person" — this is Hume again - "though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to observe any thing farther."26 The project of Arthur Mervyn is to suppose that person. If the novel is filled with fetuses, dead babies, live babies, and birth imagery everywhere, if by one trope or another Arthur Mervyn is continually reborn, then at least one of the objects - others need to be considered - is to force him to lead the life of a skeptical thought experiment. Custom and imagination ought to work where reason falters; nor should we always, even at rigorous moments, resist the process. We do not know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but Hume grants the practical wisdom of trusting that this eventuality "exceed[s] probability" (T, I, iii, 11). For Arthur, nothing exceeds probability; nothing is probable. "Finally," he would say triumphantly, having perceived two successive sunrises, "I am learning something about the world"; two cloudy days, and he would return to inexperience. To be precise, Arthur does not lead a life of adapting rather than understanding because he is himself a skeptic - he is no philosopher at all. Nor does he fail to find, internally or externally, more than momentary impressions or ideas because what a skeptic says is true. Hume is more convinced of nothing than of the inability of anyone - philosophical or vulgar - to experience the skeptic's selfless, acausal world for very long. Brown's treatment of Arthur Mervyn is subtle: He takes Arthur's psychopathology and substitutes for it a skeptic's epistemology. We might refer to Arthur as Humean man if we mean by that an impossible subject who lives skepticism. Hume began his Treatise of Human Nature with the faith that he was enacting the Baconian program; its subtitle is "An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects." The paragon here is Newton, though a skeptic's Newton. In discovering the

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principles of the "union or cohesion among our simple ideas," Hume thinks he has charted the laws of "a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural." He adds modestly: "Its effects are every where conspicuous; but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to explain" (T, I, iii, 11). But in this very modesty, Hume believes himself to be a follower of the master, who "had recourse to an ethereal active fluid to explain his universal attraction; though he was so cautious and modest as to allow, that it was a mere hypothesis" (E, VII, i).27 An intellectual historian of the eighteenth century almost inevitably concurs with my parody of the intellectual historian's credo, that Newton came and all was Newtonianism. Nevertheless, Hume, whatever his intentions, was a sufficient affront to Newton that Kant thought he had to refute the former to save the latter. By plunging us into the Humean world of Arthur Mervyn, Brown, who had himself defended Newton against the imputation that his truths were hypothetical, for a third time prevents our knowing with any security whether we are in a world that is meant to be understood scientifically or antiscientifically, or, rather, whether Brown thinks he is understanding it scientifically or antiscientifically. He has been congratulated for writing, in Arthur Mervyn, an empirical book for a scientific age,28 though the novel may equally well be read as the reductio ad absurdum of empiricism. What we are trying to understand, once again, is the plague, as vehicle with all its tenors (immorality, revolution, anarchy) and as tenor with all its vehicles (brothel, hospital, prison). Arthur Mervyn tries to understand it on its own level.29 In this he is absolutely unlike the major characters of Ormond (Constantia especially), to whom the plague is so much anarchic raw data for the mind to whip into shape. But if the unit of Gothic ignorance in Ormond is the riddle (O, 155, 240), as the unit of ignorance in Wieland is the illusion, for Arthur ignorance takes the form of invincible inexperience. He does not come to the plague with a system; he comes to it blank, open to it without any of the avoidable Baconian idols. He does not, like Constantia, try to hold himself aloof from the plague; he flows with it. As Humean man, he may do so: Changing instantaneously, will-lessly, unstoppably, always determined by environmental conditions, he leads the plague's very life. He is lawlessness, in short, as is his world. Yet Brown seems to think of Arthur as an inductivist who learns the world's laws experimentally; Brown puts his hero and his hero's naive Baconianism to the test with some optimism. The hope of the book, I believe, is to eliminate any theodicy of the plague, theist or deist. The Jeffersonian rationalization is the relevant context: Disease in general is the Benevolent Creator's

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method of promoting benevolence, and the yellow fever in particular is Nature's God's method of discouraging urbanization.30 There are frequent echoes of these Jeffersonian views in Arthur Mervyn, but finally the text rejects them. The plague produces as much indifference (witness the hospital attendants) as benevolence, and country life (witness Arthur's brutal father) is not ideally idyllic. Arthur Mervyn is written to defeat any such systematization. Between Wieland and this book, a crisis has occurred: Elihu Hubbard Smith - translated by Arthur Mervyn into the kindly Dr. Stevens, who takes Arthur in at his own risk - has died of yellow fever during the New York epidemic of 1798, after taking Brown in, though apparently of an infection received from another patient. These facts, whether they provoked guilt or moral outrage in Brown, I believe determined him against regarding the plague as in any sense necessary or meaningful; he wanted it to be merely an event for an empiric or empirical scientist, not for a mythologist or philosopher. Not, that is, for the romancer looking in the plague for a mathematics or meaning. "Thursday morning," wrote Brown to his brother, beginning with a fact. "The die is cast. E. H. S. is dead. O the folly of prediction and the vanity of systems!"31 From Wieland to Arthur Mervyn, then, we have reason to expect an increased valuation of the experimental life: Arthur at least can seem innocent, as Carwin never does. Brown's retreat to empirical modesty in order to deny the yellow fever any moral purpose at all is justified in an exceedingly long article reviewing Noah Webster's book on the plague. Webster shows, for example, that the biblical Jews could expect a plague upon any widespread infraction of the Ten Commandments, and it will be a fact I shall have to explain that in Arthur Mervyn most of them are broken (murder, adultery, and theft are committed; parents are dishonored; covetousness is, so to speak, pandemic). For now I wish only to record Brown's assertions in the Webster article that (1) "physical evils are sometimes the growth of general laws" and (2) "it is never wise to launch, with much confidence, upon the ocean of final causes."32 Final causes, as in Poe, are mainstays of the romancer's science. But Brown is now in favor of strict limits to the guesses we are allowed to make. He is now more or less Baconian, hoping that induction will produce morally neutral general laws, in the absence of final causes from which they may be deduced. To this point, we have mapped Brown's epistemological wanderings. We have not specified what it is that Brown wants to know about. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown tries out a species of environmentalism as a plausible corollary of his empirical reduction. There is a perfect harmony of environment and behavior in the city: pestiferous behavior (the brothel, the jail, and the hospital all have infectious and malevolent atmospheres)

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in a plaguesome world. The country also fosters a specific behavior; at its worst it produces the "brutal violence" and "brutal appetites" (AM, 344, 392) of rustics such as Arthur's father. Human beings who are considered functions of the environment inevitably get depersonified as plants. "She has now arrived at an age [Mrs. Fielding says of Eliza], when longer to remain in a cold and churlish soil, will stunt her growth and wither her blossoms. We must hasten to transplant her to a genial element, and a garden well enclosed" (AM, 409). This horticultural reduction is reminiscent of one of America's greatest eighteenth-century environmentalists, Crevecoeur, who got the trope from Montesquieu, admirer of Hume. This is the perfect anthropology for Humean epistemology. It makes people endlessly variable; in the country Arthur is one thing, in the city another. (Who wrote this, Brown or Hume? "The skin, pores, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners. The different stations of life influence the whole fabric, external and internal." Answer: Hume [T, II, iii, 1].) In the pestilential city, especially, one may be a truly Humean person, as variable as the course of the contagion. This is not absolutely undesirable. It is the adaptability of Arthur Mervyn in an atmosphere that demands it that allows him to rise. The plague is the agent of democracy: The "pits opened alike for the rich and the poor, the known and the unknown" (AM, 225), a statement slightly more approving than its counterpart in Ormond, in which the plague is said to obliterate distinctions not only of rank but of merit. The plague is in conflict with the hierarchical rationality of Ormond and in sympathy with the upwardaiming experimentalism of Arthur Mervyn. In the deductive novel, we worry if Constantia will fall (as if from principles to the world); in the inductive one, if Arthur will rise. The plague promotes both. Epistemology has its politics. There are, for my purposes, two types of environmentalism that should be distinguished - social and natural - and two ways environmentalists may be motivated. One may be an environmentalist - to treat the latter division first - because it enables a science of humanity, as a method of getting around ascientific issues such as free will or individual morality by treating people en masse; those issues lose their significance at the point where life becomes quantifiable. Inversely, one may be an environmentalist precisely in order to save the possibility of human goodness and to justify human freedom by using the environment to absorb all blame for moral failures. If one invoked the environment for both reasons, and many did in the eighteenth century, conflicts appeared - as in Brown. In order to promote the "science of human nature," Brown once urged that regional descriptions should be written by locals, since every

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native is "himself. . . a product of the soil... a sample of the beings which a North American climate, government, and education, will produce."33 This environmental scientism seems compatible with the desire to save human potential for unfallen republican goodness: Brown in his early days refused to blame the individual for injustices, indicting rather "some inherent ineffectiveness in the system itself."34 The self-contradictions come out, however, when we distinguish the two types of environmentalism that this last paragraph, following Brown, seems to confuse. First, there is political or educational environmentalism, which Brown could have picked up from any of the Jeffersonians (Rush, for example, thought "it possible to convert men into republican machines"),35 or from Godwin, whose Caleb Williams was a textbook of political environmentalism. There is, however, a flaw in this sort of theory if the end is to save human goodness or urge human freedom, since the political environment is composed of men. Falkland in Caleb Williams, insofar as he is evil and oppressive, must be anything but a human individual: the law, the aristocracy, death, God, what have you. As a man, he must be as sympathetic as Caleb. Brown seems to have learned the lesson: Welbeck is the source of Arthur's disastrous education, but at times he is as much Arthur's victim as victimizer. The natural environment would seem to be logically preferable for saving human goodness. Yet here there is also a problem. Take Crevecoeur's case: His environmentalism seems to be working soundly when he observes that, because of the greater barrenness of Scotland, seven Scotsmen succeed in America for every four Irishmen. (This is a particular example of a general principle from The Spirit ofLaws.) His anthropology is quantified (the scientific end), and he gets to congratulate Scotsmen even as he exculpates Irishmen (his humanitarian end). But the Irishman was allowed to emigrate to America - suppose he were not? At the catastrophe of his Letters, when the political environment becomes pestilential in one direction (in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn war - specifically, the French Revolution - is the moral equivalent of plague), Crevecoeur has to move toward the infectious natural environment in the other (savagery, in Crevecoeur, is contagious; civilization is not). From the squeeze, we learn the despair of the natural environmentalist: Nature may be escaped from, but it cannot be overturned. What is left for environmentalists, with humanitarian aims beyond their scientific ones, but to make a distinction like one made jokingly by Foucault, crediting nature for virtuous men and blaming the milieu for bad ones?36 Infection and contagion are the environmentalist's nightmare: "The vices of young people," Rush believes, "are generally learned from each other. The vices of adults seldom infect them. By separating them from each other, therefore,... we secure their morals from a principal source

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of corruption."37 Again: The vices of Princeton, says Rush, are to be shunned as "the worst of all infections."38 The environmentalist who wishes to see a natural goodness in humanity, and who wishes to blame human failings on some local manifestation of the environment, is in trouble if an infection cannot be localized: if Princeton is everywhere. (In Cotton Mather, Original Sin is an inherited pandemic contagion.) And Brown ends, I think, not by blaming the plague for a temporary outbreak of immorality, but by seeing a harmony in human amorality and the plague as synecdoche of nature. We get our science if we give up our freedom and innocence. We may observe the fit of amoral environment and amoral society in Arthur Mervyn by noting that neither humanity nor nature is good or evil, free or determined; both work at random. "Some inexplicable process of nature" guides the novel; the yellow fever itself is a "perverseness of nature." To say that nature is perverse is not to say that it is evil: "some benignant power" informs the universe as often as a malignant one (AM, 113, 135, 289). It is "some inexplicable power" (AM, 174) that protects Wallace, at one point, from the plague itself.39 (Remark the haziness of diction: "some power" is at work, "some process." We may be able to eke some laws out of Arthur Mervyn based on the harmony of environment and humanity, but certainly no Final Cause will come into view.) Arthur's randomness is perfectly in tune with nature's. Here plague and Arthur proceed randomly together: "I wandered," he says, "over this deserted mansion, in a considerable degree, at random. Effluvia of a pestilential nature, assailed me from every corner" (AM, 165). Another repetition, with a difference: "I moved forward," Arthur reports of one critical moment, "mechanically and at random" (AM, 117). The point is Hume's: that all free will could logically consist of is randomness, but that randomness is not what we normally take to be the essence of freedom. Arthur follows Welbeck "by a sort of mechanical impulse," which is appropriate, since with respect to his benefactor and malefactor, Arthur says in the next paragraph, he had acted a "servile and mechanical part" (AM, 113-14). Erasmus Darwin distinguished humans from animals by virtue of the human will: "The ideas and actions of brutes, like those of children, are almost perpetually produced by their present pleasures, or their present pains;. . . they seldom busy themselves about the means of procuring future bliss, or avoiding future misery."40 For Darwin, identity also is based on will (since it grows from a voluntary consideration of psychic life beyond present pleasure and pain). The definition of brutal humanity recalls the earlier definition of Humean man: Will-less Mervyn is a perfect specimen. Skepticism and environmentalism are nicely compatible, but the combination is disquieting. Some critics believe that in the second volume, Arthur begins to learn:

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Certainly there is fanfare at the beginning of the volume for the new, improved, voluntary, morally justified, educable Arthur Mervyn. Dr. Stevens proposes to acquaint Arthur with the principles of medicine, "a science... which comprehends the whole system of nature" (AM, 220). If Brown now believes that a "system of nature" is even a scientific possibility, he is ducking the implications of his own plague metaphor. In fact, Brown seems to want to do so: On the same page, he contrasts the new postepidemic Philadelphia (in which education can take place) with the plague days. "Then," Dr. Stevens says, "every day was only a repetition of the disasters of the foregoing." "Repetition" is the key word. For the repeated experience is the system-breaking principle of the entire novel, composed of twin volumes, in which the most important metaliterary terms are forgery, translation, and plagiarism. There are the repeated suicide attempts of Welbeck. There are, even more remarkably, the exactly repeated adventures of Arthur. On one page, engaged with Welbeck in burying a corpse, he is sent off to fetch a light. On his return, "a suspicion [he says] stole into my mind, that Welbeck had taken this opportunity to fly" (AM, 109). However, Welbeck had not; on the next page, Welbeck goes off in search of a spade. What does Arthur suspect? "At length [!] it occurred to me that Welbeck had gone with no intention to return." This is the subjective side of the book's repetitions: Experiences are repeated because characters never learn. Twice Arthur enters Thetford's house unprotected: "Now was I, a second time, in almost equal ignorance of my situation, and of the consequences which impended exploring my way to the same recess" (AM, 143-4). There is an objective side as well: Perhaps characters cannot learn. In a dark house, Arthur runs into an angle of a wall, from which he receives a blow that is "stunning" (AM, 111). Soon thereafter, rushing around in another house, he receives another blow, which once again is "stunning" (AM, 148-9). The random, repetitive violence of the world destroys, literally here, consciousness. The reader, as always in Brown's novels, shares in the epistemological crisis; in Arthur Mervyn we feel much of Arthur's bewilderment and disorientation. There is the challenge posed to the reader of making sense of- or even mnemonically enduring - the pointless repetition of similar names: Clavering, Clemenza, Capper, Carlton, Caleb, Covill, and Curling; Wallace, Walpole, Watson, Wortley, Welbeck, Williams, Mrs. Went worth, and Mrs. Waring. (A Caleb and a Williams: The book itself admits to being a kind of repetition, a translation or plagiarism.) Wortley, narrating his own story, tells how the "names of Welbeck and Watson" were "associated together": "It was possible an interview had happened between these men, and that the fugitive had been someway instrumental

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in Watson's fate. These thoughts were mentioned to Williams, whom the name of Welbeck threw into the utmost perturbation" (AM, 245, my emphasis). For readers, all W names get "associated together," and one more of them does throw us into the utmost perturbation. Arthur himself begins to seem to the reader a walking repetition. He resembles Mile. Lodi's brother and Clavering; his mother "doated on her own image in her daughter and in me" (AM, 343); Mrs. Fielding reminds him of his mother; which means that Arthur may look like Mile. Lodi's brother, Clavering, his mother, his sister, Mrs. Fielding, or, it seems, anyone else. Thus Brown forces us to live a life of random repetition, a life in which induction is exposed to skeptical devastation. Repetition, it is true, is what leads us, according to Hume, to the idea of causality - not, of course, "that the repetition of like objects in like relations of succession and contiguity discovers [anything] new in any one of them; since we can draw no inference from it, nor make it a subject either of our demonstrative or probable reasonings" (T, I, iii, 14). But in us arises the idea of necessary connection, which is a component of our idea of cause. So we need to talk in terms of psychopathology to get Arthur Mervyn to be not a skeptic who entertains only in philosophical moments the subjectivity of causality, or a philosophical layman who happily lives a life of assumed causal coherence, but a monstrous combination, a layman who lives the incoherent life a philosopher merely entertains. Here critics who are not interested in intellectual history are likely to perk up: Arthur Mervyn would be the best textbook example of the "compulsion to repeat" if it were not too obviously exemplary to need any analysis. In Book I, Arthur loses his mother, which starts the action; he ends Book II by marrying a woman whom he calls "mamma": "Are you not my lost mamma come back again" (AM, 429). The two books constitute an elaborate game of fort-da; the repetition is infantilizing. But my claim is not that Brown's Gothic career is based solely on an epistemological problem-situation caused by a conflict of science and philosophy; the argument is that a psychopathological investigation is placed within a problem-situation, so as to turn psychology into philosophy but simultaneously to make the problem-situation more disturbing. Hume's claim would be more destructive if it were reimagined to disallow even the sort of custom-directed imagination that could produce Newton. The mother-losing, mother-regaining fort-da game that is played in Arthur Mervyn is appropriate in a book modeled self-consciously on Oedipus. Arthur enters the plague-ridden city; some mysteries are cleared up simultaneously with the plague; the moral plague nevertheless continues and Arthur is implicated in it, marrying eventually his "mamma." But as critics have noted, the American myth in question is

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that of Franklin: Arthur enters Philadelphia poor, fleeing his family's tyranny, perseveres, is corrupted and stays innocent at once, catches the attention of patrons, and succeeds.41 If the book merges the repetition compulsion with the skeptical end of empiricism, it appropriately reconciles the Oedipus myth with the Franklin myth. The Brunonian Gothic novel always locates a psychopathology within a problem-situation. For Humean man (i.e., empirical man in a world apparently as lawless as the plague), experiences repeat but they do not group - no knowledge is ever produced. The sun rises every day without any implication for meteorology tomorrow. The plague is the symbol of pointless and unpredictable nature and self in Arthur Mervyn, and one may be tempted to allow that the plague in Part II is over. "Then every day was only a repetition"; now, apparently, Arthur can get educated. But is the plague really gone? The brothel remains. So does the prison, whose "impure airs" make it difficult for Arthur to breathe {AM, 254). In the second book, the French Revolution - Brown's perpetual symbol of lawless energy - is explicitly in the background. The plague remains; it proliferates. In Hume, it is "nature" that trivializes skepticism; but what is nature if the plague never ends? That is why, despite claims to the contrary, Arthur is, almost until the end, as stupid (he is oblivious to what is happening between Ascha Fielding and himself) as ever. It is in Book II that Arthur admits to conceiving his ideas about a certain situation (it does not matter which one) "upon such evidence as chance had provided, but this evidence, intricate and dubious as human events and motives are, might be void of truth" {AM, 329). This is another skeptical statement about the weakness of Bacon in the chemist's, physician's, or psychologist's world. If the presiding spirit over Ormond is the rationalist's Newton, the presiding spirits in Arthur Mervyn are Haller and Linnaeus, Arthur's intellectual heroes {AM, 411). We remember from Brown's article that Linnaeus is a partial historian and Haller is the sole example of a complete historian: The romance is turned into a history to radicalize its generative ignorance. This move completes our sense of the malignity of the combination of historical empiricism and environmentalism, which had seemed to promise innocence and science. Environmentalism makes Arthur Mervyn a function of mindless nature. Empiricism denies people the possibility of rising above the blindness of human life - of rising above that nature and human nature whose symbol is the plague. It is not that in an immoral world the disobedience to God's commandments calls down the pestilence; it is that in the amoral, random world of the plague, each of the commandments is broken as often as obeyed.42 In this world Elihu Hubbard Smith's death would fit no dismissive theodicy, but on the other

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hand it would be perfectly meaningless, along with his life. The hope of innocence and empirical knowledge ends in skepticism and squalor. KANT AND MADNESS

Edgar Huntly deserves the attention it has received as an analysis or example of psychopathology, as a doppelganger novel, and sociopathology, as an Indian novel.43 So it may seem doggedly systematic to take its epistemological dimension seriously. Nevertheless, Brown encourages us to do so: "is there a criterion by which truth can always be distinguished?" wonders Edgar Huntly as he begins to doubt it (EH, 90). What has left Huntly epistemologically unsettled is that Clithero, whom he had assumed to be the answer to the mystery of Waldegrave's murder, turns out not to be a solution to that puzzle, but rather a puzzle himself. The trouble, Huntly realizes, is not merely that of an empiricist who needs more facts or a rationalist who needs to reason more clearly and distinctly. Somehow Huntly's meeting with Clithero, in which he discovers that Clithero is beyond his ken, has forced upon him the need for something more potent than either empiricism or rationalism. "I had communed with romancers and historians," Huntly says, "but the impression made upon me by this incident was unexampled in my experience" (EH, 91). We are reminded, once again, of Brown's article on the epistemological duality of romance and history - but now both seem lacking. This is at first inexplicable, since "historian" means "empiricist," and "romancer," at least in the article, seems to mean everything else. However, when Brown is forced to imagine how a Newtonian (romancer's) certainty in his novels is possible, the only gesture he can make is the rationalistic one of positing the applicability of geometrical clarity to the world. It is perfectly obvious that Ormond has more information than he could deduce from axioms, but Brown does not know anything more about it than we do. "Romance" is an epistemological category without content in Brown's novels; it always hides behind rationalism. Brown seems to work himself into the difficulty that Kant diagnoses as the perpetual problem of metaphysics, divided hopelessly (according to "The History of Pure Reason" at the end of the first Critique) into three dualities, all more or less versions of the middle epistemological division between "empiricists" (Aristotle or Locke) and "noologists" (Plato or Leibniz).44 Brown, in the same problem-situation as Kant, at least wants to be regarded as laboring toward a solution to it. I do not know if Brown had any knowledge of The Critique of Pure Reason by 1799, when Edgar Huntly was written. Kant is mentioned, as far as I can tell, for the first time in one of Brown's magazines in 1806;

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he appears in two issues, in the second of which he is admired for understanding chemistry without having witnessed any experiments. 45 It does not make as much difference as it seems to, because I am not making a claim for Brown as sophisticated disciple. What does appear to be the case is that at least some rumor of Kantian metaphysics has arrived in Brown's purview, sufficient to allow an attempt to get beyond Hume. In the cave scene of Edgar Huntly, the hero, searching for Clithero, discovers himself, with no memory of how he got there, in pitch darkness. We discover him, as he discovers himself, awakening; whether or not what he is awakening from is dogmatic slumber, we shall judge. "The scene," Huntly writes of the womb from which he has to struggle to be born, "was pregnant with astonishment and horror" (EH, 158). Edgar has no memory of how he got there; there is a gap in the history of his mental self-unity equal to the blackness of the scene. The blackness is perfect - Edgar sees nothing whatever. So he is not in a Lockean dark closet: Data cannot begin simply to enter him visually. The primary desiderata required for the world to come back to Huntly are, of course, space and time. As for time: "There is no standard by which [it] can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world. From the latter I was totally excluded. The former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months" (EH, 162). Time, prior to the appearance of outer phenomena, already manages to exist as inner sense. But it lacks the coherence that only the principles of substance, causality, and coexistence can lend to it. The genesis of space is described in more detail. Huntly feels his way around the cave, but "the utter darkness disabled me from comparing directions and distances" (EH, 161). So: I now exerted my voice, and cried as loud as my wasted strength would admit. Its echoes were sent back to me in broken and confused sounds and from above. The effort was casual, but some part of that uncertainty in which I was involved, was instantly dispelled by it. In passing through the cavern on the former day, I have mentioned the verge of the pit at which I arrived. To acquaint me as far as was possible, with the dimensions of the place, I had hallooed with all my force, knowing that sound is reflected according to the distance and relative positions of the substances from which it is repelled. The effect produced by my voice on this occasion resembled, with remarkable exactness, the effect which was then produced. Was I then shut up in the same cavern? (EH, 163) Brown is producing for Edgar Huntly a conception of time and space in advance of Huntly's metaphorical birth, in advance (if I translate the allegory correctly) of his empirical experience. Remember that Huntly

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is in perfect darkness: Locke's epistemological metaphor is what Brown's metaphor is produced to challenge. It is sound, curiously, that space depends on; conceivably, we should remember from Wieland that it is by the primacy of sound over sight that Brown had undermined empiricism and disallowed the clean isolation of senses and mental predispositions. At any rate, it is specifically the echo that creates space in Edgar Huntly. Space is discovered by noting what is produced by the subject himself that makes the outer world intelligible at all. When Huntly finally sees his first objects, they "resembled a fixed and obscure flame. . .. Though lustrous themselves they created no illumination around them. .. . These were the eyes of a panther" (EH, 166). When Huntly's eyes first see something, they see eyes. Since there is as yet no external Lockean source of light, I think it is fair to say that the light Huntly sees in the panther's eyes (lustrous but unilluminating) is the self-generated light of his own eyes reflected. The world appears - as echo or mirror - by virtue of projections that bring back news of objects. Similarly, Huntly learns about Clithero, to the degree that he does so, only by discovering himself in his antagonist. Huntly wonders how it is possible that Clithero could have lost a manuscript in his possession when only Clithero himself could have opened his box to get it. "This mystery," Huntly realizes, "vanished when I reflected on the history of my own manuscript. Clithero had buried his treasure with his own hands as mine had been secreted by myself, but both acts had been performed during sleep" (EH, 278). Protagonist and antagonist are sleepwalkers; we are in territory distant from The Critique of Pure Reason when we move into psychopathology. Nevertheless, that Huntly comes to understand something about Clithero by considering the unconscious unity of his own projecting mind - a unity not available to direct inspection, such as Hume attempts, but a conjectural necessity, given the fact that an aspect of the world becomes comprehensible - seems to point in Kant's direction. I would even suggest that Brown is after a kind of Kantian twinning of transcendental idealism and empirical realism. What makes Clithero insane, as Huntly arguably is not, is the utter hegemony of his mind in his world. Clithero prophesies something, and sooner or later the prophecy comes true, because sooner or later he carries the prophecy out. He knows that it is his fate to kill Mrs. Lorimer, so off he goes to kill Mrs. Lorimer. "In how many cases may it be said," Huntly wonders about the syndrome, "that the prediction was the cause of its own fulfilment?" (EH, 92). If Huntly is to maintain his sanity, he has to find a way to acknowledge that he is the source of his own a prioris about the world without contaminating the inevitably empirical aspect of it that largely remains. Kant's empirical realism, as one commentator puts it, ensures

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that "everything is 'left open' that could be left open," which is to say that Kant understands the world a priori only to the extent necessary to understand the world empirically.46 Clithero states that the wilderness maze of Edgar Huntly, in which characters are always bewildered and amazed, is a "scene. . . adapted to my temper" (EH, 89). Huntly himself loves to "hold converse with the solemnities and secrecies of nature" (EH, 94), and "solemnities" seems to repeat Clithero's pathetic fallacy. But "secrecies" is relief from it. Huntly wants to be regarded as the pupil of Sarsefield, who first took Huntly into the wilderness partly for the "picturesque scenes," partly to moralize, but partly to investigate the "botanical and mineral productions" of the area (EH, 97): To Sarsefield as a natural historian, rocks and stones and trees are to some extent, always, rocks and stones and trees. This view of the solution to the symmetrical puzzles of empiricism and rationalism is theorized best in Brown's article "Walstein's School of History." "Truth," according to the doctrine of the school, "flows from the union and relation of many parts. These parts, fallaciously connected [the rationalist's propensity] and viewed separately [the empiricist's], constitute error." The solution turns out to be something called "imposture": Walstein tells Cicero's story in Cicero's voice, and his student writes a story designed to teach virtue by speaking in the voice of Arthur Mervyn.47 Finally, Ormond's technique gets theorized. One knows certainly what one discovers of oneself in the world of objects. That this implies a theory of science is demonstrated in another article, "On the Inequalities of Solar Light." "It is an old remark," Brown writes, "that the commonest appearances in nature, and the most frequent incidents in human life, are, when viewed by the eyes of a philosopher, mysterious and inexplicable." This looks like the beginning of yet another statement of pure skepticism. But "not contented with the facts as they are noted by our senses, our curiosity conjures up a property." Curiosity itself(!) conjures. And curiosity goes on to "assign to [the property] the name of gravitation, measures its influence by numbers and lines, and traces its existence through every part of the universe."48 The conjurer — conjurer first and geometer only second - is Newton. Huntly's conjuring curiosity must succeed if Newton is to be justified; the basis of universal geometry can only be in the mind. As readers, we find ourselves, as ever, in the epistemological crisis of the characters. The cause of ignorance here is solipsism; the only possible remedy is projection; it requires a vigilant Kantian poise to keep the two unmixed. That we, as readers, feel the tension comes out best by observing that critics seem to agree in finding the book the most literarily self-conscious of Brown's productions. It is impossible to miss puns in the dead man's name - Waldegrave - and the name of the place - Solebury

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- where he is killed and Huntly and Clithero are almost interred. Or not to see in Clithero's last name - Edny - a truncated echo of Edgar Huntly.49 In these cases our readerly curiosity is projected, presumably with justice, onto the text; the text responds to us, as in Nabokov, because it mirrors itself. But once Brown makes naming a source of significance, we can hardly know where to stop projecting significance into the novel. Clithero's name contains both "I the hero" and "it the other." Is the source of the word play Brown or the reader? The self-contradictory pun is an emblem of the legitimate question: Is Clithero best conceived as Huntly or anti-Huntly? Does Huntly find himself reflected in the world of objects, or does he make a solipsist's appropriation of it? In other words (moving on to the next trope), should we see in "Edny" a procrustean "Edgar Huntly," or does Clithero "deny" Huntly? A mystery of the book is where the dagger comes from that Clithero discovers just when he wants to murder Mrs. Lorimer. But Huntly has been carrying a tomahawk throughout the book; can we assume that the "dagger" comes by means of an anagram from "Edgar"? In every pun or anagram (tropes of hidden but unnatural identity), two questions are asked simultaneously: Is Clithero inside or outside of Edgar? Is the text inside or outside of us? It is possible to get at the problem - the difficulty of knowing, once one has begun to project a world, where to stop - from the other side, from the outside, in. Just as Arthur Mervyn rhymes skeptical epistemology with one of the features - environmentalism - of eighteenth-century human science, so Edgar Huntly tries to harmonize Kantian epistemology with a more pathetic milieu. Sergio Moravia's outline of the five conditions of the Enlightenment science of humanity reveals how perfectly Brown's books are fitted not only to Enlightenment epistemology but also Enlightenment anthropology. In fact, it is by means of what Moravia calls "epistemological liberalization" that Brown (I have been at pains to show) meets the first condition of an Enlightenment science of humanity: "the pluralization of cognitive strategies." Moravia wants us to see as much of Descartes in the Enlightenment as Locke; we certainly can see as much in Brown, author of Wieland but also of Ormond. The second and third conditions are related: "Bringing to earth the 'whole' of man" and "the rehabilitation of human corporeity." By the former, Moravia indicates the crucial importance of not allowing thought and will, emotion and soul, to transcend science in principle. I have shown Brown's willingness to consider man a machine, and all his thoughts and feelings merely mechanical adaptations. But Moravia goes on to observe that the idea of the body as a "machine mecanique" was so unpersuasive as to lead philosophers to postulate "the existence of a

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dynamic motor outside of the body-machine: and thus anthropological dualism was (re-)born." Those who continued loyal to the principle of "bringing to earth the 'whole' of man" had to reconceptualize the living body as a "complex dynamic and sensitive organism": This is what Moravia means by rehabilitating corporeity. Moravia is always alive to the necessity of this shift from mechanism to dynamism. Thus, when he posits as his fourth condition of Enlightenment anthropology "the discovery of the environment," he congratulates Scottish Common Sense for surpassing Montesquieu in understanding the "social category of environment" and Volney for his modern sense of "the dialectic relationship existing between man and environment." Clearly in Arthur Mervyn, Brown arrives at a mechanical environmentalism that is first physical and then social; by the time of Edgar Huntly (and the very end of Arthur Mervyn, when Arthur emerges as his own author), Brown, Volney's translator, is considering humans as not merely environmental functions and victims. The very spirit of nature in Edgar Huntly reflects human spirit. Moravia's final condition is the "geographical and anthropological openness toward the 'Other.'"50 Brown seems to be working through Moravia's conditions in Moravia's order. Readers have occasionally criticized Edgar Huntly for its failure to integrate the Indian plot with the Clithero plot; most scholarship on the book takes up exclusively one or the other but not both of these themes. But I have already located the "other" in "Clithero": He is madness that Huntly can understand to the extent that he imposes some of his own mental constructs on it. It remains to locate an openness to the other in Huntly's relationship with Indians, which may require some effort, as the book is often censured for turning Indians into murderous beasts. The reward for doing so, however, would be to rationalize thoroughly Brown's novel: Moravia specifies precisely madness and savagery as the two moments of otherness in the Enlightenment. To rationalize the final novel of Brown's major phase in this way by rationalizing the two chief threats, from within and without, to rationality - would complete a nice symmetry. Brown's epistemological journey in the direction of Kant would be mirrored by an anthropological journey toward madness and savagery in which the "otherness" of the unreasonable world would be met and measured, though not assimilated, by an "openness" to it. But Brown goes far beyond openness to savagery in Edgar Huntly. Contrary to most critics, Huntly not only confronts savagery, he embodies it. It is only in understanding this excessive openness - projection that cannot be precluded from going too far - that we can begin to understand how Brown escapes, for the last time, absorption into the scientific vision of his day.

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We return to the center of the book, when Huntly discovers himself in sheer opacity. We have allegorized the dark cave he finds himself in as a womb and as an alternative to Locke's dark closet; now let us consider it as a dark cave. Edgar Huntly has been reduced to a troglodyte and will have to generate all civilization out of himself. Nevertheless, we are not presented with a spectacle of evolution. What is most interesting is the simultaneous presence of all stages of animal and human development within Huntly at any moment. The first living thing that Huntly confronts is the panther, whose eyes are Huntly's eyes mirrored. This is not, as it happens, merely an epistemological projection. Huntly has just been contemplating "the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth" (EH, 164). He sees a panther only after he has been reduced to the moral dimensions of one. Even in less extreme moments, we find out later, Huntly has been unwilling "to be outdone in perspicacity by the lynx, in his sure-footed instinct by the roe. . . . I have ever aspired to transcend the rest of animals in all that is common to the rational and brute, as well as in all by which they are distinguished from each other"(EH, 212). At length Huntly manages to exit from the cave, guided by a fire made just outside it by Indians. Indians are an infinitesimal step above panthers; both are covered by the term "savage," though Indians are identifiably human in their ability to generate light that is not merely lustrous but also illuminating. "It was easy to infer that the fire was kindled," says Huntly, "by men" (EH, 170). Huntly is no more exterior to these men than he was to the panther: There is his name, first of all. (Brown devotes a long translator's footnote to Volney's "mystery" that Indians cannot add agriculture and the domestication of animals to hunting for their sustenance.)51 Further, Huntly's adventures force him to "imbibe" "a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious" (EH, 192). When he runs across Sarsefield, he is in fact mistaken for an Indian and shot at; but this is not exclusively the result of his uncivilizing travails, since he has always been in the habit of carrying a tomahawk. All of this constitutes the book's portrayal of civilization as a tenuous advance in weaponry only: Huntly's own family rifle is used first by whites against Indians, then the reverse, then the reverse again. When Huntly, at one bleak moment, wakes to find himself lying on a dead Indian, his own hair "matted and steeped" with the Indian's blood, we may infer that they have been united in blood brotherhood. Escaping from the cave and killing the necessary Indians, Huntly next makes his way to the very interregnum of savagery and civilization, "Queen Mab's" hut. The old Indian woman lives apart from Indians and whites alike, with /^^//-domesticated animals and on afield"apparently

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. . . upturned by the hoe" (EH, 183, my emphasis). Huntly identifies with humanity at this intermediate stage also, and once again not merely at a particular moment of his self-restoration to civilization: He is the only white to have learned Mab's language, which "wonderfully prepossessed her in my favor" (EH, 209). When he arrives at this hut, Huntly is carrying both a gun and a tomahawk. Next, Huntly makes his way to a modest dwelling, then to a larger and more comfortable home, from the looks of which he guesses "that this was the abode not only of rural competence and innocence, but of some beings, raised by education and fortune, above the intellectual mediocrity of clowns." With the inhabitants of such a house, "methought I could claim consanguinity" (EH, 226). "Consanguinity" is perfect and gives the game away, especially in a novel in which "sanguinary" appears continually as its negative correlative. If Huntly feels consanguinity with the civilized upper class, what was his relation with the panther whose blood he wanted to drink, and the Indian whose blood clotted his hair? The epistemological hope of the book goes out of control when Huntly tumbles beyond sympathy to identification with Clithero; the anthropological position transcends science when Huntly's openness to savagery turns into savagery. Edgar Huntly is not, I believe, evolutionary, though Erasmus Darwin would have stood behind an evolutionary impulse in Brown. Nor is it revolutionary - if anything, it is devolutionary - though Kant may be said to represent an attractive revolutionary discourse. In the "Preface" to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers to the foundation of Greek a priori mathematics as a revolution and then to Bacon's redirection of science along empirical lines as another "intellectual revolution."52 And, of course, his own project has been taken as a second Copernican Revolution.53 Science was a revolutionary discourse before it was evolutionary; the French and American Revolutions may be said to have occurred within this rhetoric.54 But Brown, writing after the American Revolution and so close to the French Revolution that it haunts his books, seems finally to want to join a discourse - as Huntly wanted to converse with Mab - that is more primitive than science, more primitive, in fact, than civilization itself, prerevolutionary no matter which revolution you pick. In the face of skepticism, what he wants to claim as the novelist's exclusive domain is blood knowledge. In this he is ancestor to Cooper, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer — a lineage outside of scientific history altogether. The recapitulation of Enlightenment anthropology and the approach to Kant are corollaries of this radically devolutionary program - masking it, elevating it, confused with it, enabling it.

CODA

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CODA

That was the strategy so long as the strategy lasted. But I have treated the defense of the novel only on its science flank. Simultaneously, it was under attack from religion: Timothy Dwight, for example, believed that "between the Bible and novels there is a gulf fixed."55 The novel's response to this charge already had a history by Brown's day; my only point here is that in Brown's circle, the attack on the novel by piety and science was curiously orchestrated. The Reverend Samuel Miller, whose brother Edward was one of the founders of The Medical Repository, was the appropriate figure to signal the crossfire: No one, Miller thought, had ever read a novel "without suffering both intellectual and moral injury."56 Brown's magazines felt the doubled pressure. The prevalent type of modern novel, says an article written well after Brown's career as a novelist was over, encourages us to spend our time in "the sport of musing, instead of the labour of thinking, in the indulgence of the fairy visions of hope, and the reveries of the perverted imagination, instead of the pursuit of science, the formation of maxims of wisdom, and the establishment of the principles of moral duty."57 We are at the dawn of the scientific co-optation of religious energy and piety in America, which oddly converts, by an impossible translation, the novel's traditional problems into a problem with modernity. Feeling the doubled pressure himself, Brown could only write his two last, decorous, commonplace, dull novels — in which the word "rational" means "unenthusiastic" only58 - and after that, nothing. No one, we may assume, had taken his "reveries of the perverted imagination," as we may characterize his four best novels, to be morality. But no one was likely to have taken them as science either: During Brown's brief career and for twenty years after, science (in the wake of the Faustian rationalism of the French Revolution) had to defend itself in America as modest Baconian induction and nothing more. Brown's maneuvers were doomed; what the maneuvers were designed to conceal - skepticism about science on the one hand, and the craving for omniscient blood knowledge on the other - was even less welcome. When the literary career could no longer defend its intentions as scientific or parascientific or proscientific, it could only come to an end, the death that Brown's obituaries celebrated.

3 POE'S METHODOLOGY

IS SCIENCE DEADLY DULL?

Attend now to the first tactic of the opening strategy of Poe's Byzantine, necessary negotiation with science. The negotiation would last to the final and perhaps climactic performance of his career, Eureka, so that Poe's life as a creative writer would be imperfectly framed against the context of progressive, ingressive science. Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!1 But why "Old" Time, if Poe, who despised progress, loathed science as purveyor of the new? The premise of my answer is that Poe's real quarrel in this poem is not so much with science, which by 1829 was far beyond any "dull realities" that Poe could disdain, as with Bacon - "Hog" in Poe's sometimes scurrilous Eureka. It is Bacon who sets up the very epithet that Poe twists against him: 1. In "Of Innovations," Bacon writes: "It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations, would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived."2 However, though knowledge ought to imitate time's deliberateness, Bacon stipulates that it must move deliberately in the opposite direction, since "time of course alters things to the worse." In "Sonnet," Poe asserts that science, true daughter of Old Time, "alterest all things" in the way a vulture alters carrion. Poe turns Bacon's metaphor against Bacon by portraying the offspring as rather too reminiscent of the parent. 2. In the first book of the Advancement of Learning, Bacon worries that innovation is not "content to add that it must deface." Thus it seems that "the children of time do take after the malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children," so "novelty" seeks to devour "antiquity."3 Here "time" - as parent - is not the quiet, slow innovator of the essay; it is a predator, a parental vulture. The reversal is based on the deification 70


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of time as Cronus, who ate all his children except Zeus (he thought he had eaten Zeus also). Knowledge, therefore, which in "Of Innovations" is directed to mimic Time, in Advancement of Learning is directed not to mimic Time, since Time is now preemptive and all-consuming. The happy opportunity for Poe is that in his "Sonnet" he can make science in its very newness - in its passion for novelty - into the child of Old Time, on Bacon's unwilling authority. 3. By the Novum Organum, Bacon is so interested in usurping the prestige of antiquity that he tries to redefine the present as the real antiquity of world history: History is deprecated in science by the assignment of all newness and oldness to the present. This ought to free us to search for untraditional truths, since "truth is rightly named the daughter of time, not of authority."4 In sum, Poe's metaphor caricatures science by splicing together the worst of all Bacon's metaphors concerning innovation: He agrees with the Novum Organum that Bacon's truth is the "daughter of time," but associates time not with history but with the prehistorical devouring father of The Advancement of Learning. He agrees, then, with The Advancement of Learning that novelty is like Cronus, the predator, but unlike Bacon, he associates science with the hunger for innovation. Science is turned into the villain of "Innovations" in its destructiveness, though in that essay Bacon had wished to absolve time of the reckless sins of its children. I am not arguing, of course, that Poe consciously set up this anti-Baconian trap in every detail, merely that the paternity of science by Cronus is a metaphoric possibility - lurking in Bacon - for Poe's anti-Baconian exploitation. This begins Poe's space-clearing, career-long assault upon Bacon, which would become increasingly tortuous as Poe increasingly had to admit the grandeur of science. In Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), halfway from the antiscientific "Sonnet - To Science" (1829) to the parascientific Eureka (1848), Pym trusts "in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of [his] statements" {Com, III, 53). "Time" is redundant, given "progressing," and "progressing" is redundant, given "science." Eureka is Poe's attempt to demonstrate how science justifies the statements of Pym; yet Pym is partly a burlesque of The New Atlantis. Finally, in Eureka itself, Poe would enlist science to second his discovery that "all is Life - Life - Life within Life - the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine" (Com, XVI, 315). This is a rather different Science - its heroes are Kepler, Laplace, and Alexander von Humboldt, and its enemy is Bacon - from the predatory discipline that has robbed the world specifically of life and divinity: Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star?

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What accounts for the final ambivalence of Eureka's anti-Baconian science, its empirical idealism? But the ambivalence is present in ovo. Even in his sonnet, Poe had yearned to love science: How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Science is, after all, a female - a daughter - not Cronus himself. Not Zeus either, true son of Cronus, who punished his father: We move in "Sonnet - To Science" into the world of sexual politics, not the family romance. The quatrain begins by suggesting that Poe would have wished to marry his masculine art to female, though insufficiently feminine, science. On the other hand, of course, we may not forget that science is not merely a daughter but also a vulture; even in 1848, when Poe had found a way to love science, if not Bacon, and deem her wise, he still was fanatically interested, even to the point of wanting to be taken for Jehovah Himself, in flying the heavens, on an undaunted wing, solo. Poe sees the problem of science as a competition for space - for the sky - and to the end of his career, Poe will be clearing it. Why, in 1829, did Poe write the "Sonnet - To Science"? The answer most flattering to Poe and congenial to traditional intellectual history is that it was the correct moment to write it, or nearly. Not that there was anything dull about science at that moment: In 1820, Oersted got electricity to act upon his magnetic needle, and within several years Ampere provided electromagnetism with a comprehensive theory (it was the beginning of the great era of the unification of force); between 1810 and 1820, Avogadro and Prout put forward atomic hypotheses that were rather too revolutionary for the first age of modern atomic science; in 1824, Carnot published his meditation on the engine and inaugurated thermodynamic theory. The list, almost arbitrary, is meant to suggest that science was not concerned with taxonomizing the duller realities, but was, rather, beginning to hypothesize about the essence of matter and energy. What was deadened and deadening was the science philosophy of the era. Or shortly before: George H. Daniels demonstrates that from the end of the War of 1812 until around 1820, American science philosophy advanced the most pedestrian brand of Baconianism, science as generalization and classification.5 This was science philosophy of and for the pious and conservative. Science had to be no threat, its apologists realized, to Protestant America. Around 1820, according to Daniels, the reaction began, one manifestation of which was the free hypothesizing of respectable scientists such


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as the chemist Robert Hare, who, in the spirit of the elective affinity theorists of his day, believed in the polarity of attractive and repulsive matter as the chemical basis of bodies. Another of Daniels's favorites, the chemist and geologist Lardner Vanuxem, similarly went well beyond Baconian generalization in believing that physics could begin and very nearly end with the division of all matter into two categories: selfrepellent and self-attractive. In Vanuxem's case, the eerie immateriality of his materialism drove him from science to Eastern religion, phrenology, and Egyptology. Hare's concentration on imponderable matter eventually brought him to spiritualism.6 By the 1830s, the parascientific atmosphere was nearly as murky as Hawthorne describes it in The Blithedale Romance. Poe - eventually a partisan of polarity and dematerializing matter - was impeaching science for its dullness at the very last moment for it. If "Sonnet - To Science" fits more or less snugly into intellectual history at all, it does so as a slightly belated criticism of one moment not of science but of the passing science philosophy dominant in one part of the world. But literature always does, and does not, fit snugly into intellectual history. If we want to put Poe's sonnet into relation not merely with American science philosophy but with a wider intellectual scene and historical context, then we can only conclude that Poe wrote "Sonnet To Science" in 1829 because he was born too late to write it in the eighteenth century, before chemistry and Romantic science philosophy had transformed the idea of science sufficiently to make theories such as Hare's and Vanuxem's plausible. More than one critic is half right in saying that the poem is a knee-jerk response not against the American Baconianism of 1815 and after but against Enlightenment mechanism. In fact, the poem had been written, in a slightly different form, at a more opportune time. Here are Schiller's translated words, from the third stanza of "The Gods of Greece." Where now, our scientists declare, Only a soul-less fireball spins, Helios formerly, in tranquil majesty, Steered his golden chariot. All those heights were filled with oreads A dryad lived in every tree, Out of every vase of lovely naiads Gushed the silver-foaming stream. I found this poem quoted in Toulmin and Goodfields's The Architecture of Matter,7 and they found it, just as interestingly, quoted with approval by Virchow. Virchow believed that his great hypothesis - Omnis Cellula e Cellula - would keep science from devastating the kingdom of life.

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Somehow, then, by the mid-nineteenth century at least, science was refusing a traditional Romantic characterization of it. How had this occurred? Part of the answer is that German Romanticism itself had deflected the course of science: Virchow, though explicitly anti-Naturphilosophie (idealist science philosophy, inaugurated by Schelling in the wake of German Romanticism), nevertheless, Josiah Royce argued, was clearly influenced - as theorist and generalist and, I think, as devotee of life by the Naturphilosophen*

Toulmin and Goodfield trace the development of cell theory through Lorenz Oken, who was only less influential than Schelling himself as a Naturphilosoph. Oken believed that all organisms were made up of animalcules; he thought that these animalcules, or infusorial vesicles, multiplied themselves out of mucus; since mucus was, to Oken, the highest form of chemical matter that was not organic, he did not anticipate the dictum Omnis Cellula e Cellula, rather felt that he had located the passageway of individual life out of universal life. Unlike Virchow, Oken did not protect life merely by a clean division from the kingdom of death: "There is nothing properly dead in the world; that only is dead which is not, only the nothing. . . . Everything in the world is endowed with life; the world itself is alive, and continues only, maintains itself, by virtue of its life."9 So the deadly science that Poe portrayed in "Sonnet - To Science" was, according to one prominent interpretation, revealing the universe to be universally alive two or three decades before 1829, and a translation of Oken's work, as well as Stallo's popularization of Oken, Schelling, and Hegel, appeared almost simultaneously with Eureka, which echoed their elaboration of a vitalizing science. Even at the moment that Poe wrote the sonnet, he knew he had reason to be embarrassed by the myopia of it. He used the poem as an introduction to "Al Aaraaf," which depends on an astronomical event of some significance: Tycho Brahe's discovery, in the sixteenth century, of a dying nova.1() This is in curious contradiction to the poem's assertion that science has destroyed the poetry of the heavens. As Poe moved into the decade of Eureka, his use of the poem was more curious still. In 1841, "Sonnet - To Science" appears as the motto of "The Island of the Fay," which anticipates Eureka: "As we find cycle within cycle without end - yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine?" (Col, II, 601). This does not have the ring of science, but the concept will be repeated in much the same language in Eureka, jus-


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tified by ideas from physics and astronomy. A speculation that admits evidence from scientific technique also recurs in Eureka: Our telescopes, and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand - notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood - that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. (Co/, II, 601)

I am not sure what ignorant priests Poe had in mind, but at least Hegel deprecated the contribution of immense interstellar vacancy to the development of life and the progress of consciousness. Poe also had an interest in life, and in life within life; but he feels more comfortable with enormous life, building up his concentric spheres from minuscule humanity: "I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole" (Col, II, 601). How does Poe come to love his vision? The quotation (after a small interval) continues: "whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae [sic] which infest the brain - a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us" (Col, II, 600—1). We are animalcules inhabited by animalcules, and nothing is inanimate when properly regarded; the vision is out of Lorenz Oken's Naturphilosophie. By 1841, Poe is publishing his antiscientific poem as the prologue to a view of the universe that, though he does not yet admit it, is arguably compatible with, may ground the discoveries of, science. Or so the Naturphilosophen thought; in seven more years, Poe would publish his own naturephilosophical science. Poe is, in his sonnet of 1829, in intellectual history to the extent that the poem is a reasonable contemplation not of science in 1829 but of American science philosophy in 1820. He is irrelevant to it, or relevant to it only as a fossil to a paleontologist, in the sense that, by 1829, the scientific universe seemed as open to a dynamic and vital as to a mechanical interpretation, and philosophy - especially in Germany, but to some extent influential for theories such as Hare's and Vanuxem's in America - had several decades earlier worked out a way of taking credit for that vulnerability. We must, however, ask again why Poe wrote his antiscience sonnet in 1829. We have assumed that Poe's criticism of science, however tardy,

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was heartfelt. But in disciplinary intellectual history, no literary relation to science is ever pure. Poe's science surely evacuates a disciplinary space, but only at the expense of Poe's own sympathies, which were not with universal animalculated life. We are animalcules inhabited by animalcules - Poe's Okenian view will inform the triumphant Eureka. It could not have been an idea to please Poe in 1829, however. At best, his taste for the conception must have been strenuously acquired. The cluster of critics who read "The Fall of the House of Usher" back through Eureka are only half correct to see Eurekan hylozoism manifested in the description, say, of the clouds moving with "life-like velocity."11 Granted that the exterior of that story is a reflection of the human interior. "I felt," says the narrator, "that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all" (Co/, II, 401). The pervasive puns on "air" and "atmosphere" seem to put us in a Schellingian, Okenian living nature of objectified mind. Yet "Usher" is, unlike Eureka, about the terror, not the ecstasy, of being an animalcule inhabited by animalcules. Poe does not have cytology in the back of his mind in "Usher"; he has nosology. In the similarly infectious "Shadow - A Parable," a group of friends seeks isolation in a gloomy and impenetrable hall. What they arefleeingis "the black wings of the Pestilence," but the pestilence is at bottom moral: Though the friends escape the physical disease, the "boding and the memory of Evil, that would not be so excluded" (Col, II, 189). The infectiousness in the atmosphere of Usher's home is the moral condition of Roderick himself. "It was no wonder," says the narrator, "that [Usher's] condition terrified - that it infected me" (Col, II, 411). "Life - Life - Life within Life" means, in most places before Eureka, germs everywhere or moral contagion everywhere, not cells or energy or mind everywhere. The great pestilential tale is "The Masque of the Red Death." Again, we learn the lesson that the source of the world's moral contagion is oneself. The prince wants to practice a sort of inoculation: He tries to create a world that has "something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust," in order to withstand the Red Death, whose appearance will set off "a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise - then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust" (Col, II, 673, 674). But the moral homeopathy fails, since the prince is the producer not only of the diseaselike medicine but of the disease. Confronting the Red Death, the prince's face "reddened with rage." His guests, his creations, try to handle the red violence with "violent. . . rudeness" (Col, II, 675, 676). If there are no divisions between interior and exterior, mind and matter, then the world is fallen and contagious.


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Poe's typical hero, far from giving himself ecstatically to the universe in nature-philosophic, Eurekan style, is in terror of his identity. By the time of Eureka, Poe has to invert his picture of the vital universe. He had been influenced, before Eureka, not by Schelling and Oken so much as by the Scottish Secession minister Thomas Dick, a gloomily optimistic science philosopher and popularizer, whose scientific (cometary) apocalypse, a staple of Puritan scientific apocalypse, is borrowed by Poe in "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," who is the source of Poe's anti-Hegelian reverence for the universal bulk, and whose quite un-Hegelian sense of history as "a series of revolting details of the depravity of our species"12 is echoed by Poe's sense of it as a "diseased commotion, moral and physical." "For the infected world at large," Monos says in "Monos and Una," there was "no regeneration save in death" (Col, II, 610, 611). If Poe had been informed of Okenian animalcules early in his career, he would have been most likely to translate his knowledge into Puritan medical-lapsarian paranoia, on the model of Ligeia's tergiversation. Ligeia, a German transcendentalist who, like Emerson, believes herself to be "part and parcel" of God, finds her idealist faith collapsing under pressure into a view of life as a circle "that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot, / And much of Madness and more of Sin, / And Horror the soul of the plot" (Col, II, 318-19). At least by the time of Increase Mather, American Puritans had come to their own terms with science. The best colonial sciences in New England were astronomy and medicine (why New England natural history lagged behind that of the middle and southern colonies is a puzzle in American history of science).13 It is perhaps not too gross a reduction to say that science was preferred by American Puritans insofar as it found disease on earth and perfection in the heavens. The generalization does not fit Cotton Mather, who was polymathic; still, Mather was preoccupied with disease. I want to turn to him now in order to show how Dick's view of the infectious universe and Oken's of a vital and divine one may be usefully confused. Among Mather's most interesting attempts at science was his work promoting and documenting the efficacy of inoculation against contagions.14 Mather did more than advocate blindly, or even statistically, his cure - he had a theory of disease to justify it: "It begins now to be Vehemently Suspected that the Small-Pox may be more of an Animalculated Business, than we have generally been aware of."15 Since this amounts to a rudimentary germ theory, it has attracted the attention of some historians of science, there being no other American reference to the germ theory, apparently, until 1811, in time for Poe.16 The great initial steps in the nineteenth-century vindication of the germ theory

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were by Bassi, whose work on a silkworm disease led him to a theory of contagion (1835-6), and by Henle, w h o published his classic "Von den Miasmen und Kontagien" in 1840; "Usher" was published in 1839, "The Masque of the Red Death" in 1842. But Mather's statement of the theory begins peculiarly, as if he were not sure what he means to imply. Every Part of Matter is Peopled. Every Green Leaf swarms with Inhabitants. The Surfaces of Animals are covered with other Animals. Yea, the most Solid Bodies, even Marble itself, have innumerable Cells, which are crouded with imperceptible Inmates. As there are Infinite Numbers of these, which the Microscopes bring to our View, so there may be inconceivable Myriads yett Smaller than these, which no glasses have yett reach'd unto. The Animals that are much more than Thousands of times Less than the finest Grain of Sand, have their Motions; and so, their Muscles, their Tendons, their Fibres, their Blood, and the Eggs wherein their Propagation is carried on. The universe swarms with the products o f God's exuberance; these sentences are a synopsis o f the microscope's contribution to the visibility of the Great Chain of Being. This is Lorenz Oken's cosmos; but imagine a negative sign in front of it: The eggs of these Insects (and why not the living Insects too!) may insinuate themselves by the Air, and with our Ailments, yea thro* the Pores of our skin; and soon gett into the Juices of our Bodies. They may be convey'd into our Fluids, with the Nourishment which we received, even before we were born; and may ly dormant until the Vessels are grown more capable of bringing them into their Figure and Vigour for Operations. Thus may Diseases be convey'd from the Parents unto their Children, before they are born into the world. . .. And Vast Numbers of these Animals keeping together, may at once make such Invasions, as to render Diseases Epidemical; which those particularly are, that are called, Pestilential. " H o w much," exclaims Mather, "do w e walk thro' unseen Armies o f Numberless Living Things, ready to Sieze and Prey upon us!": Life amid animalcules is a pilgrim's progress. The germ theory provides a physical model o f Original Sin: "Thus may Diseases be convey'd from the Parents unto their Children, before they are born into the world." 1 7 A Puritan's nosology is a Naturphilosoph's biology inverted. What the Puritanic Poe needed to learn, to come to the most attractive science philosophy of his day, was h o w to stop worrying and love the animalcules. Still, at the moment of "Sonnet - T o Science," Poe did not revere the swarming universe any more than Cotton Mather had. Rather, its corrupt vitality threatened the integrity o f his soul. Then w h y is science accused o f killing the world, as if Poe were the sort of Romantic w h o


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in fact spent much time beneath tamarind trees, rejoicing in every bug in the grass? Poe could not have detested science in 1829 for the reasons he gives. Poe should rather have valued science, in its dullest Baconian manifestation, precisely on the grounds that it deadened the world, or that at least it kept the fallen world's contagion quarantined. This was, in fact, Poe's implicit position in at least two stories, "The Man of the Crowd" (on the saving benefits of aloof classification) and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (on the protective power of close observation and empirical generalization). "At first," says the pursuer of the Man of the Crowd, "my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations." He is a classifier, dividing down to genera and species. First he divides, for example, the professionals from "the tribe of clerks," in which tribe he discerns "two remarkable divisions," the junior clerks and the upper clerks, both divisions characteristically marked by "figure, dress, air," and so on (Col, II, 507-9). If classification is science, then the narrator is an anthropological Linnaeus, so long as he stays outside of the crowd he is observing. However, upon descending to the level of the individual - and espying the Man of the Crowd - the narrator perforce leaves generalization behind. He grows dissatisfied with his objectivity, abandoning his comfortable taxonomizing post at the bow window of a coffee house to absorb himself in the exterior world he wishes to examine more personally and intimately. I use the word "absorb" advisedly. The narrator is absorbed from the moment he fixes on the Man of the Crowd (the "countenance... at once arrested and absorbed [my] whole attention") to the moment when he loses him ("He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation"); he admits that his interest finally becomes "all-absorbing" (Col, II, 511, 515). Classification gives way to identification - but identification produces not idealist knowledge beyond the empiricist's ken, but self-destruction and bewilderment. In "A Descent into the Maelstrom," the mirror of "The Man of the Crowd," self-destruction is resisted by Baconianism. The story begins where "The Man of the Crowd" ends, with the threat of absorption, and only observation and generalization produce saving knowledge at the end of it. What threatens to absorb the fisherman who narrates "A Descent into the Maelstrom" is, of course, the whirlpool itself. Halfway down, spinning on the inside of the funnel, the fisherman finds himself, deliriously

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he supposes, making guesses about relative rates of destruction. " 'This fir tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears.'" But guessing, alas, does no good at all - though in Eureka, Poe will congratulate Kepler for guessing the laws of the solar system, as opposed to Newton, who could only rediscover them by drudgery. (It is the invariant naturephilosophical preference.) A Dutch merchant ship, contrary to the guess, plummets before the fir tree. Only one thing does any good: the amassing, as carefully as the crisis allows, of data. "I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed [the term reappears] and then thrown forth by the Moskoestrom." A perfect Baconian, the fisherman taxonomizes and generalizes from his experience: I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that, as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent; - the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere; - the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed [again] the more slowly. (Col, II, 591—2) Needless to say, the narrator's careful Baconianism succeeds in keeping him from being absorbed. If the analysis ended here, however, we would have no reason to expect that Poe would ever jettison his individual-protecting Baconianism to pursue the individual-destroying Naturphilosophie of Eureka. The symmetry of "The Man of the Crowd" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" that I have described is inert. But in one way, the stories are productively antithetical: The difference between them is equal to the distinction between city and nature. What threatens the narrator of "The Man of the Crowd" with absorption is city life, alternately in Poe the tenor and vehicle of germ life. Thus Poe, who hated the liberalism of the nineteenthcentury empirical tradition in England, rediscovers for himself the conservative virtue of empiricism that had made dull, mechanistic Baconianism attractive in America after the French Revolution and an easy target for Poe in "Sonnet - To Science." As opposed to German metaphysics, it keeps the individual intact and swarming, contagious, Jacksonian life alienable. What threatens the identity of the fisherman in "Maelstrom" is the sea, which in Pym will be the setting of Poe's pursuit of the Absolute. Here, then, is at least an anticipation of a turn from Thomas Dick to Schelling: Absorption into divine nature rather than quarantined self-protection begins to appear as the proper mode of Poe's reactionary misanthropy. Though it saves him, therefore, or precisely because it saves him, even


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the fisherman begins to turn against Baconianism. The fisherman has read the standard explanation of the maelstrom (it has "no other cause than the collision of waves rising and falling. . . against a ridge of rocks and shelves"), but he prefers the alternative theory: "Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe" (Co/, II, 582-3). The preferred theory ignores (unlike its rival) the pedestrian Baconian (Newtonian) allegiance to the vera causa criterion, the necessity of finding for an effect a cause known to be of suitable proportions to produce it. The non-Baconian explanation is preferred by the author of the tale as well, since it relates the phenomenon to the Glanvill epigraph: "The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus"

(Col,

II, 577). But Baconianism is the superficial methodology; it keeps one on surfaces, which is all to the good if one is trying not to sink. Should one wish not to sink? If the threat to identity is God in Nature, not the urban masses, then whatever the horror of absorption, it will not be unmixed: "Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me" (Co/, II, 590). At one point the conceptual link is to Eureka, without ambivalence, rather than to "The Man of the Crowd": "It may look like boasting - but what I tell you is truth - I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God's power" (Col, II, 588). This piety does not last. Shortly after feeling it, the fisherman is doing everything he can to save himself via observation. The temporary saintliness is methodologically sterile: No model that we may frame, Glanvill says, is commensurate with the profundity of God in Nature. When Poe decides, in Eureka, that God in Nature is himself, then not only will the horror be replaced completely by the ecstasy of annihilation, but a new methodology, along with a new cosmology, will be allowed to defeat Bacon at long last. In the meantime, Poe has found an anachronistic science, or rather science philosophy, that can be a convincing straw man for the justification of vital, divine poetry (the gap between Baconianism and science relocated as the gap between science and art). That Poe is distinctly terrified by the vital and divine seems to be the condition that he needs his assault on science to mask. Science is misrepresented not so much to define as to conceal Poe's career. Only in these terms can we understand how Poe begins by using the purported deadliness of science to alienate his own disgust with Jacksonian life, and why eventually he will use the

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living universe described by Naturphilosophie to embody his longing for universal death. IS THERE A LIFE SCIENCE?

If Brown's literary career was framed by his initial confidence in the unity of science and literature and his final concession that they are antagonistic, Poe's is framed by his hostile disavowal of science in "Sonnet, - To Science" and his presumptuous assimilation of it in Eureka. Again, the career in fiction itself looks like a function of the interim ambiguity, an ambiguity kept respectable by the era's problemsituation. There is no very serious problem-situation manifest in the sonnet, it is true; Poe conjures a science so deadly dull that it was not likely to pose any question to the intellectual world at large besides how to avoid it. Nevertheless, by the end of his career, Poe has designed as his saving disciplinary strategy the elaborate co-optation of a science more successful in turning the universe into verse than verse itself. The scientific problem-situation overtook Poe. In its environment, physics and metaphysics appeared to be jointly, if with mutual distrust, engaged in locating the conceptual moment where matter turned into spirit and nature into art. Poe, in Eureka, could only fasten on the problem-situation himself, and try to win back art and spirit for poetry and Poe. I shall describe Poe's local problem-situation in terms of the solution to it advanced by Naturphilosophie, of which Eureka is a late, improvised, and professionally treacherous specimen. In doing so, I have to depart from the usual condescension: If Naturphilosophie has a relation to science, intellectual historians generally assume, it is merely a token of its inchoate doctrine, which can be squeezed into the shape of any scientific theory by opportunistic Naturphilosophen. Certainly, Naturphilosophie as a project was dissentious enough: Within single works (say, Oken's out-of-control Physiophilosophy), within volatile careers (say, Schelling's, which changed shape, as Hegel noted, from book to book), and between bitterly proud Naturphilosophen (especially Hegel and Schelling), there are rampant discrepancies. Nevertheless, we can begin to rescue Naturphilosophie as a serious undertaking by observing that at the turn of the nineteenth century, chemistry represented for philosophy a looming enigma. On the one hand, the sense was widespread that chemistry had replaced Newtonian physics as the paragon science of the day. Brown's friend Samuel Miller trisected the eighteenth century tidily: 1700-35 was the age of Newtonian physics; 1735-70 was the age of Buffon, Linnaeus, and natural history; 1770-1800 was the age of Lavoisier, Priestley, Cavendish, and chemistry.18 On the other hand, no philosophy of science that took the

IS THERE A LIFE SCIENCE?

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revolution in chemistry significantly into account had yet emerged. For Kant, chemistry, along with psychology, was the chief example of a perennial nonscience, a mere "systematic art," since (as opposed to Newtonian physics) its "grounds or principles are ultimately merely empirical," not apodictic.19 Leaving chemistry and science temporarily out of the question, of course we can understand, in purely metaphysical terms, the idealist impatience to get beyond Kant's clean demarcation of noumena and phenomena. Kant had used Judgment as the faculty that shuttled between Reason's domain of noumenal freedom and Understanding's purchase on phenomenal nature. However, insofar as Judgment cooperated with Reason to find purpose - therefore harmony, unity, organization - in nature, it could employ teleology only as a regulative principle, a device for thinking about but not constituting natural objects, essential in thinking about but not constituting organisms. The order, in other words, of the Newtonian heavens is necessary; but in the sublunary world, though it is necessary that we search for an order in it, no particular order is required, because its objects are not constituted by our cognitive faculties. Suppose, however, that hints and contradictions in The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Judgment implied the existence of an underlying ground of noumenal and phenomenal world: Spirit could be regarded as having split into subject and object. And if this split, despite the original unity, seemed in Fichte's pre-nature-philosophic idealism demoralizingly, perpetually unhealable (what could matter, once created, ever be but nonsubject, a test of ethics but not an incarnation of spirit?), then Naturphilosophie could provide a conception of an increasingly thoughtful, incipiently spiritual, potentially liberated nature. As mind found mind in nature, mind realized increasingly its constitution of nature, which means that any science should be eventually teleological and apodictic at once. But to read the progression in purely, internally metaphysical terms is to miss how much the natural sciences in general, and what Hegel quoted others as calling "magneto-electro-chemism" in particular, demanded a new metaphysics.20 The history of chemistry at the turn of the nineteenth century had two separable though intertwining strands: the mechanistic atomic story (Lavoisier through Dalton to the Periodic Table) and the dynamic affinity story. I am more interested in the latter tradition, the prehistory of which involves Newtonian, Boscovichian, and Kantian dynamism; among the first great experiments of which were Nicholson and Carlisle's use of the voltaic battery to decompose water (1800); the main line of which passed through Humphry Davy to Faraday and the hypothesis of the unity and conservation of force.21 The essential

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idea was to find in chemical affinity manifestations of electrical polarity, with the basic identity of electricity and all other forces an essential corollary. The question for any philosophical chemist was why the universe should be identifiable, and why its unity should be concealed and revealed universally in polarity. An answer was possible within Kantianism: Kant's direct gift to Naturphilosophie, after all, was dynamic polarity. But Kant could not provide a rationale for considering magneto-electrochemism to be as certain as Newtonian physics, whose truths were tied closely to the categories or safely within the haven of mathematics. Philosophical chemists needed a way of nominating an as yet unmathematicized chemistry as the new paragon science. "Should Chemistry hereafter confirm this [electro-chemical] idea," Davy exulted, "it would become the most important, and noblest of the Sciences; — for it would refer the diversified and multifarious phaenomena of ye terrestrial universe, to powers as simple and uniform, as those which govern the movements of the heavenly bodies."22 The chemical bridge was furthermore not merely from superlunary to sublunary phenomena, but also from inorganic to organic. Faraday himself, at the center of magnetoelectro-chemical research, had a vision of "the harmonious working of all forces in nature, until at last the molecule rises up in accordance with the mighty purpose ordained for it, and plays its part in the gift of life itself"23

Individual scientists could get their grounds for certainty and their incentive for unifying forces from anywhere at all. Levere argues that Davy, despite his friendship with Coleridge, and Faraday, despite his respect for Whewell and the compatibility of his unifying enterprise with German efforts, got all the support they needed from scienceco-opting traditions within Christianity. (The universe is united and conserved by God; Faraday added that polarity is essential to the unity and conservation of force because the creation of a positive charge must be offset by the creation of a negative charge.)24 But intellectual history needed a non-Christian, post-Humean answer to the question of why nature seemed so energetic, alive, polar, and unified. That is where Naturphilosophie came in. All polarity is a function of the unifying polarity of subject and object. Natural polarity is the objective subject-object: This is what Fichte could not see, so that the objective world could only be an ethical gymnasium.25 Mind and nature objectify each other for themselves and themselves for each other. It is precisely in the incipient teleology of chemistry that the dead world can be observed coming alive,26 for life must be understood, according to the Kantian tradition, teleologically. Throughout the scientific world, the physical view was coming up


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against the new chemical view. In America, the controversy of Denison Olmsted and Robert Hare was characteristic of the period. Olmsted, looking at the concept of matter from the viewpoint of the physicist, thought in terms of bodies, which he defined as a collection of matter existing in a separate form. . . . Inquiries respecting the composition of bodies he was willing to leave to chemistry. But it was exactly those questions that Olmsted would leave to chemistry that interested Hare. . . . His argument was simply that repulsive and attractive matter were the fundamental chemical units of the universe, and all bodies contained both in varying proportions.27 I have observed that Hare eventually put his chemist's vision to the service of spiritualism. The reduction of matter to polar forces was a clear invitation to spiritual scientism in many forms. I am merely saying that Naturphilosophie was responsive to a felt need, and that it located itself in the history of a problem that began in the entanglement of Newton and Hume. Not merely magneto-electro-chemism required philosophical support. Natural history, Samuel Miller's other post-Newtonian paragon science, also seemed to cry out for a metaphysical basis (Schelling took Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to be pointing toward a unified theory of life). Naturphilosophie, of course, obliged - witness Oken's role in the cytological progression to Virchow. Retrospectively from the beginning of our century, Royce would number not only Virchow but also Mayer (who interrelated organic, chemical, and physical processes) among the scientists who had benefited from the precepts of Naturphilosophie. In his talk before the Pathological Club of the Harvard Medical School, a skeptical audience, Royce argued that the Naturphilosophen had served science by advancing three "leading ideas." First, there is a unity of truth behind phenomena. Second, the unity appears on the level of energy. Third, the world is evolutionary. The ideas themselves were not scientific hypotheses, but nonfalsifiable, nonempirical guides to research.28 From magneto-electro-chemism, Royce's best example of the power of his leading ideas to provoke real science would have been Oersted's discovery of the convertibility of magnetism and electricity by an accidental experiment, though he knew from Naturphilosophie that it had to be discoverable somehow. It was by considering such scientific work as Oersted's (and Mayer's) that Thomas Kuhn came to Royce's point on his own in 1959. Kuhn's puzzle was the simultaneous discovery of the conservation offeree by a dozen or so scientists in the 1830s to 1840s. The intriguing mystery, which Royce also posited, was how much of the work was done in Germany. Almost always, somewhere in the background of the discovery, was Naturphilosophie.2) When Poe came to write Eureka (1848), the period of Naturphilosophie1s

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productive influence on science was largely at an end. The reason is not far to seek: Levere identifies 1848 as the watershed by which Faraday "had brought all physical powers except gravity into union with one another, as different polar manifestations of a single original."30 No wonder that as the unity of force was unmasked by several decades of brilliant, conclusive experimentation, scientists felt that they could jettison the a prioris of German metaphysics. Royce specifies 1848 as the end of the scientific fertility of Naturphilosophie: This is the year Virchow stopped seeing it as a danger and pronounced it dead, an ironic tribute to its power. Scientists had good reason to rid themselves of its influence. Naturphilosophie was anti-Baconian, anti-Newtonian insofar as it considered Newton to be a plodding rediscoverer of Kepler's inspirations, anti-Newtonian insofar as it advocated Goethe's theory of color, anti-Lavoisier (it stayed loyal, for example, to the four elements, of which one is fire), and antiatomistic. It prolonged the prescientific, stoical character of chemistry well described by Gillispie: The world is in flux, it is unified by spirit, it is understood by sympathetic participation in it.31 Yet for fifty years, the ante- or anti-Baconianism of Naturphilosophie served as grounds for precisely the post-Baconian sciences. Perhaps it was equally due to its simultaneous vindication and demise that Naturphilosophie - also around 1848 - was having a belated moment of popularity in the English-speaking world. In 1847, Oken's Elements of Physiophilosophy was translated into English; in the same year, Hedge published in America Prose Writers of Germany, which included selections from Schelling and Hegel;32 in 1848, Stallo published his popularization of Schelling, Hegel, and Oken.33 This was the blissfully muddled intellectual scene in which Poe's Eureka appeared. Poe arrived at his science at just the instant when it was no longer science or even pertinent philosophy of science (as he arrived at the "science" of his sonnet when it was no longer science or even science philosophy), but at precisely the instant when it could be exploited for his project of making science philosophy out of a career as prototypical aesthete. The perfect contradiction was wonderfully uncovered and concealed at once. It needs finally to be added - and this made Naturphilosophie perversely even more useful to Poe - that though Schelling, Oken, and Hegel can be read as if they were solving an authentic problem on behalf of science, it is more accurate to read them as manipulating it on behalf of philosophy or art. At the beginning of his analysis of the philosophy of nature, Esposito quotes R. G. Collingwood to the effect that philosophy always works within the "absolute presuppositions" of natural science; then Esposito adds that "to Schelling just the opposite is true."34 The best way to referee the controversy is to make the case, as I make throughout


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for artists, that Schelling and his fellow Naturphilosophen found their way to a scientific-philosophical tension and that their attitude toward it was half-celebratory. Certainly Schelling exalted the artist-genius and deprecated the scientist-drudge, though it was up to the drudge to confirm the insights of the genius, as Newton did for Kepler. If we can think of Naturphilosophie as already inhabiting the artistic response to the problemsituation, we can understand how we find Poe, at the end of his career, not translating Naturphilosophie into poetry or fiction, but writing it himself, as if it were poetry or fiction. Nevertheless, he has selfaggrandizing treacheries of his own in mind. At the center of the methodological acrobatics of Eureka is the attack on Bacon ("Hog"), who, says Poe, "proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts - instantiae Naturae, as they were somewhat affectedly called - and arranging them into general laws" (Com, XVI, 189). The animus is brought up-to-date by a diatribe against Mill, though in the process, Poe is tricky or careless or both. First, Poe adopts Mill's criticism of the idea that axioms are recognized by the inconceivability of their falseness, plagiarizing two of Mill's own examples - "[a] thing cannot act where it is not" and "there cannot be antipodes" - of former axioms that we know to be conceivably false because they are false. Then Poe berates Mill for ignoring his own prohibition of the inconceivability test by admitting the Contradiction Principle. Why does Mill believe, Poe asks, that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree? To this little query there is but one response: — I defy any man living to invent another. The sole answer is this: — "Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be anything else than a tree or not a tree." This, I repeat, is Mr. Mill's sole answer: — he will not pretend to suggest another: — and yet, by his own showing, his answer is clearly no answer at all; for has he not already required us to admit, as an axiom, that ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth? Thus all - absolutely all his argumentation is at sea without a rudder. (Cow, XVI, 194) This may be an actual problem, but Mill, in a response to Hamilton, gets around to giving a solution to it, though in an edition after Poe's death. He claims that an inspection of our mental processes reveals that we simply never believe something and its reverse. Furthermore, we never in fact observe opposites - light and dark, noise and silence simultaneously present in one spot. The Contradiction Principle is therefore merely a generalization from internal and external experience.35 But however precipitate is Poe's diatribe, it is sincere: Poe's hatred of the empirical-Baconian-utilitarian constellation (of which Mill is the latest star) is explicit in his "angelic dialogues."

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Just as ungrateful, but more pervasive and less easy to forgive, is Poe's use of the nature-philosophical constellation, which should have been honored in support of his anti-utilitarianism.36 Poe mentions neither Schelling nor Hegel. Among those in their intellectual neighborhood that Poe does take up are Kant, the transcendentalists, and Humboldt; Poe's use of these thinkers is strange, strained, and often dishonest. No sooner is Kant named than he is mocked as "a Dutchman, the originator of that species of Transcendentalism which, with the change merely of a C for a K, now bears his peculiar name" (Com, XVI, 188— 9). The inanity of the remark indicates that Poe is following his principle that it is wise to savage those from whom one steals. His reduction of nature to force and all forces to two, and his explanation of the necessity of repulsion in addition to attraction - to keep the universe from immediately collapsing (Com, XVI, 211, 212, 214) - both derive from the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, Kant's adumbration of

Naturphilosophie. When Poe wants to adapt Kant's account of the law of gravitation (it declines with the square of the distance because it is dispersed from a point like an illumination), he first goes through much sleight of hand. Poe wonders why Newton or Laplace, so expert in the workings of gravity, or Leibniz, so profound, did not seek to understand the principles by which gravity works. Only after this left-handed generosity does Poe feel free to appropriate Kant's analysis of gravity's "modus operandi" (Com, XVI, 223).37 Kant is blamed for the transcendentalists, from whom Poe could not steal quite so impunitously. They are first mentioned in Eureka as navigators of the "Mare Tenebrarum," an ocean "little frequented in modern days unless by the Transcendentalists and some other divers for crotchets" (Com, XVI, 187-8). This would not seem to be much of a compliment to the Frogpondians - except that Poe says that he himself has fished his inspirational letter of the future (absolutely accurate in its poetic-methodological views) from the same sea. There is more misdirection. Poe, with Mill, wishes to affirm that the opposite of an axiom is always conceivable, but against Mill (as he supposes), he even argues that the negation of the Contradiction Principle might be conceived. He concludes: "That a tree can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the devils, may entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite, or Transcendentalist, does" (Com, XVI, 195). It is an interesting group. There can be little wrong with angelic epistemology, given the proto-Eurekan angelic dialogues. Is it not natural to pair off the devil with the Bedlamites - "Pure Diabolism is but Absolute Insanity," Poe says elsewhere (Com, XVI, 160) - the angels and the transcendentalists? Assuredly Poe does not assert that the negation of the Contradiction Principle is conceivable in order,


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like Mill, to expand the dominion of induction: If Mill argues that light and darkness are never simultaneously present to us, and therefore that their exclusiveness is a generalization from experience, then Poe will conclude Pym by exhibiting a brightness that is darkness, and in Eureka he will back-philosophize Pym by exploding the axiom "darkness cannot proceed from light." Poe reveals, as if against his will, a hidden concord. On the other hand, Poe is nearly gracious to Alexander von Humboldt, to whom, "with very profound respect," Eureka is dedicated. Humboldt receives this dedication as the author of Cosmos - of which Poe had recently read the first volume - an attempt to get scientific facts arranged in a harmonious order. Humboldt's suggestion that nature ought to be looked at as if from the "Peake of Teneriffe" is the unattributed source of Poe's proposal of an imaginary journey to the "top of Aetna" (Com, XVI, 186). Humboldt was almost a nature-philosopher in his passion for the summit view of nature. He had contacts with Naturphilosophen in Weimar and Jena, and even by the time of Cosmos was quoting Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel, and making statements that sound like Naturphilosophie: The most important consequences of physical researches are therefore these: To acknowledge unity in multiplicity; from the individual to embrace all; amidst the discoveries of later ages to prove and separate the individuals, yet not be overwhelmed with the mass; to keep the high destinies of man continually in view; and to comprehend the spirit of nature which lies hid beneath the covering of phenomena. Nevertheless, Humboldt was not a Schellingian or Hegelian: "To embrace the multiplicity of the phenomena of the Cosmos in unity of thought, in the form of a purely rational series, is not, as I conceive, possible in the present state of our empirical knowledge." "It may even be said to be problematical," he adds, "whether this time will ever come." 38 We would be hasty if we inferred, however, that Poe, as an admirer of Humboldt, must not be a Naturphilosoph himself. Exactly at the point that Humboldt separates himself from the Naturphilosophen, Poe separates himself from Humboldt: "But however admirable be the succinctness with which he [Humboldt] has treated each particular point of his topic, the mere multiplicity of these points occasions, necessarily, an amount of detail, and thus an involution of idea, which preclude all individuality of impression" (Com, XVI, 187). The multiplicity of points is just what Humboldt had insisted on. What this maneuvering most clearly suggests is professional embarrassment. Poe wants to forsake his intellectual epoch, or proclaim his superiority to it, but can manage only to mimic or play with it; he has nothing unique to offer or oppose to it. Refusing to respect his embar-

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rassment for the moment, let us take a tour of Naturphilosophie to estimate Poe's debt to it. It is surely from Naturphilosophie that Poe gets all his methodological and cosmological axioms. 1. Nature reflects a spiritual telos. Schelling's belief that "the system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind"39 entitles him to proceed with a "speculative physics" that comes to nature not blank, ready to be surprised, but with anthropomorphic and teleological expectations. M) Poe begins his own Systematic Science with a single teleological premise: "In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation" (Com, XVI, 185-6). This means that nature must be understood as the explosion of the unified Godhead, and as exhibiting an intention to return to it. At the beginning of "The Notion of Nature," Hegel says similarly that "Nature has yielded itself as the Idea in the form oi otherness." He continues: "If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing, how does He come to release Himself into something so clearly unequal to Him? The divine Idea is just this self-release, the expulsion of this other out of itself, and the acceptance of it again."41 At the apocalypse of Eureka, matter is rendered absolutely immaterial: The God that exists historically as both "diffused Matter and Spirit" is reconstituted as the "purely Spiritual and Individual God" (Com, XVI, 313). And Hegel: "The purpose of Nature is to extinguish itself, and to break through its rind of immediate and sensuous being, to consume itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit."42 2. Spirit is revealed as dynamism. Preceding (empirically) and following (ideally) the idea that nature is, in source and potential, spirit is the conception of it as dynamic - as composed of attractive and repulsive forces, not extended and impenetrable atoms. Poe's dynamic conception - "Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion" (Com, XVI, 310) may be traced to Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. It is Schelling, as Esposito tells us, who takes Kant's dynamic matter and turns it into spirit: Matter, according to Schelling, is "spirit intuiting its activities in equilibrium." 43 Coleridge brings the transition into English literature: For since impenetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resistance, its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit', and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum.44 Poe identifies repulsion, in Eureka, as the spiritual force, therefore concluding that "The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand" (Com, XVI, 244).


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3. Dynamic nature is living nature. Spiritual physics and chemistry obscure the boundary of life and nonlife; as the subject goes further into the object, nature is correspondingly vitalized. Poe's view appears simultaneously with the translation of Oken's: "There is no dead matter; it is alive through its being, through the eternal that is in it. Matter has no existence in itself, but it is the Eternal only that exists in it. Everything is God, that is there, and without God there is absolutely nothing." 45 Poe: "In the meantime [waiting for the apocalyptic unity] bear in mind that all is Life - Life - Life within Life - the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine" (Com, XVI, 315). To see life everywhere is, for the Naturphilosoph, to see organization everywhere. Stallo puts the matter with convenient clarity: Every individual organism is the activity of all-comprehending nature embodied in concrete unity, the life of the Whole reflected in a part; or, since life can manifest itself in no other way than in a reciprocation between the Whole and its parts, between World and Monad, every individual organism is a material exhibition of these reciprocating agencies in conspiring, harmonic operation.My

Stallo gets this concept of reciprocity from Hegel (who adapted it from Kant): "Reciprocity presents itself [Hegel says] as a reciprocal causality of presupposed and self-conditioning Substances. Each is in the relation to the others of being at once an Active and a Passive Substance." 47 Reciprocity is the essence of life: "Life has being where inner and outer, cause and effect, ends and means, subjectivity and objectivity etc., are one and the same." 48 These are familiar ideas to the reader of Eureka. Poe calls reciprocity "Divine adaptation" and looks for examples of it - of "constructions" in which "we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse" - mainly in providential arrangements. But the division of God and nonGod, like that of life and nonlife, is illusory. Poe's example is drawn from the nature Pym had approached in a story written ten years before these words: To give an instance: - In polar climates the human frame, to maintain its animal heat, requires for combustion in the capillary system, an abundant supply of highly azotized food, such as train-oil. But again: - in polar climates nearly the sole food afforded man is the oil of abundant seals and whales. Now, whether is oil at hand because imperatively demanded, or the only thing demanded because the only thing to be obtained? It is impossible to decide. There is an absolute reciprocity of adaptation. (Poe's emphasis, Com, XVI, 291-2) 4. Adaptation manifests intelligence. The Naturphilosoph w h o sees life

everywhere in nature, and as a consequence organization everywhere, must see as a corollary not just a nature auspiciously arranged, but a

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nature that is itself intelligent. Schelling's idea could have been found in the Hedge sampling of German thought: "The sublimest arithmetic and geometry are innate in the stars. . . . More distinctly, but still beyond their grasp, the living cognition appears in animals. . . [e.g.,] the little artistic creature, that, without practice or instruction, accomplishes light works of architecture. . . directed by an overpowering spirit/' 49 Poe is fond of illustrating this idea (though not, as it happens, in Eureka). He speaks of the coral worm in strikingly similar terms: "This little creature, the architect of continents, is . . . capable of building ramparts against the sea, with a precision of purpose, and scientific adaptation and arrangement, from which the most skillful engineer might imbibe his best knowledge" (Col, II, 478). Poe is also an admirer of the ingeniously engineering bees (Col, III, 1164) and, in Pym, of the albatrosses and penguins that build their homes with "mathematical accuracy" (Com, III, 155): Everywhere in nature is a geometrical intelligence that expresses itself architecturally. 5. We climb toward life dialectically through all the natural processes. All

nature is living; but if, from the empirical point of view, inorganic nature seems to have struggled to put forth organic nature, from the ideal view nature is increasingly alive as we gain the capacity for seeing it so unifying, mindful, purposeful, free. Electricity is, in Hegel50 and Poe (Com, XVI, 213), recalcitrance in the very face of potential unity; that bodies wish to unite in the first place is, of course, manifest in gravity. That is why Poe, like all Naturphilosophen, must make the special point that gravity is most philosophically defined not as the force that will eventually bring all atoms to a central position, but as the force that will bring them all to each other. "It is not any locality,9'' Poe writes, "either in the concrete or in the abstract, to which I suppose them [the atoms] bound. Nothing like location was conceived as their origin. Their source lies in the principle, Unity" (Com, XVI, 220). Hegel: "One cannot say that this centre [of gravity] is present merely as a nucleus to which matter is drawn, or around which it subsequently agglomerates; the gravity of masses generates such a centre, and material points, by seeking one another, posit it as their common centre of gravity." 51 If Poe read the Hegel section in the Hedge volume, he discovered there his own idea about the gravitational end of matter. According to Hegel: Matter shows that it is weight, by its tendency to one centre of gravity; it is essentially made up of parts, which parts exist separate from, and external to, each other; and it is ever seeking their unity, and thus seeks to abolish itself, - seeks the opposite of what it really is; if it attained this unity, it were no longer matter, it were destroyed; it strives to realize an idea, for in unity it is merely ideal.52


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What Poe adds to this is that the imagined event, the end of matter via gravity, seems possible to him, as it does not to Hegel. Gravity in Eureka brings all matter into contact, and thus ends attraction and repulsion, and thus ends matter, since matter is attraction and repulsion. In more orthodox nature-philosophy, gravity is the sign of the universe's desire for unity rather than its actual manner of unifying. "To know," Schelling writes, "this indifference [of idea and substance, form and essence, thought and being] means to know the absolute center of gravity."53 Poe calls indifference "no-difference" (Com, XVI, 212) and literalizes Schelling's metaphor. If Poe's adaptation of Naturphilosophie seems in general literal-minded and mechanical, nevertheless he underestimates his indebtedness.54 Every preliminary indication is that a half-respectable process has occurred: Between "Sonnet - To Science" and Eureka, Poe has (admirably, openmindedly, though ungratefully) discovered that there was a cosmology, a methodology, an epistemology, in short, a science that kept the universe divine and alive. His radical response to it was to redesign his sense of art in its image. Though Poe had argued that a poem must be short, Eureka claims to be a poem, and no one ever wished it even as long as it is (it is in the tradition of encyclopedic, omniscient Naturphilosophie). The universe, according to Eureka, is a "plot of God": What Poe had taken as his own artistic province, the Naturphilosophen had shown to belong (at least in part) to scientists. It would be tempting to leave the matter here - with Eureka as a naturephilosophic critique of Kant's critique of teleology, a justification for the unity of force as a mirror of divine education. It would be neat to describe Poe's progression from the "Sonnet - To Science" to Eureka as a transcendence of the Usherian phobia of contagion, and also of "Sonnet - To Science" antiintellectualism, by means of age-ofchemistry Naturphilosophie.

Except - there is no chemistry in Eureka. Chemical affinity is not even one of the forces identified with gravity, electricity, magnetism, vitality, and thought. I have mentioned, furthermore, that intelligent nature (geometrizing bees, etc.) is evident in many places in Poe's oeuvre but not in Eureka. The reason is that Eureka has little to do with terrestrial life at all, beyond a brief correlation of mundane and planetary evolution. Eureka is macrocosmic. Poe is much interested in gravity as the final force of cosmic unity, which it is not for the Naturphilosophen. (It is a primitive force for the Germans, a unifying urge of bodies that maintain their distinct identity.) Magnetism is barely mentioned, and the key nature-philosophic idea, polarity, is not directly considered, though the universe is plainly polar. In neglecting magneto-electro-chemism and

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biology, Poe is close-mouthed exactly where the Naturphilosophen are garrulous. Why? The answer appears when we allow the possibility that Poe makes his modern antidisciplinary gestures insidiously; if we discover a sort of Thomas Dickian theology inhabiting Poe's apparently Okenian or Hegelian language, we can get a fix on precisely what historical game Poe is playing with the historical sense of idealist science. On the subject of the ether, Poe sounds rather like Oken but follows Dick. To Oken, "the aether is the first realization of God, the eternal position of the same. It is the first matter of creation."55 In Poe also, the ether seems the first place to look for God in the world, an immaterial influence to the "awful nature" of which all the "various phaenomena of electricity, heat, light, magnetism; and more - of vitality, consciousness, and thought - in a word, of spirituality" may be referred (Com, XVI, 305-6). Poe seems distinctly Okenian in his willingness to find God in Nature; but in Eureka, surprisingly, he reverts to the view that first appeared in the empirical "Marie Roget": "That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt" (Com, XVI, 254). God is separate from nature; nature is hugely if not infinitely beyond us: One-tenth of the words of Eureka are entirely devoted to putting across the universal scope, the purpose of which seems to be entirely to boggle us. In contrast, Hegel saw in the "immeasurable spaces" between the stars "no significance to reason," but rather "externality, emptiness, negative infinity."56 Poe delights in showing just how minute we are. The only way he is eventually reconciled to the aliveness of the universe is by supposing that we are the animalcules that compose it; it is unfallen only when we (apocalypse as cosmic germicide) are stamped out to secure the life of the body as a whole. This is what sets a limit to Poe's borrowing from, say, William Whewell. Whewell enjoys contemplating not so much the size as the craft of the universe. He congratulates Lagrange and Laplace for demonstrating the stability of the solar system. He is plainly embarrassed by the supposed fact that the ether will eventually wreck it, and trusts only that it will last sufficiently long to serve its purpose.57 There is something of this view in Poe: The universe endures in order to exhaust the forms of multiplicity. But Poe has more in common with Dick, who prefers the "sublime discoveries of astronomical science" to any other aspect of science, and who has an eschatological longing that comports with his contrasting sense of the depravity of humanity. Unembarrassed by the temporariness of the universe, Dick looks for evidence that it is ephemeral even in its resilience: "From the fact, that matter appears to be indestructible, we may learn, that the Creator, with the self-same materials which now exist around us, may, after the general conflagration, new-model


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and arrange the globe we inhabit, so as to make a more glorious world to arise out of its ashes." 58 This leads to the Eurekan scientific eschatology. Poe never does share the nature-philosophical reconciliation to the multiplicity, the strife of experience on earth. Stallo writes: "There is combat in nature only because infinite activity, infinite life, is the being of the Divine; and activity, life, is combat, because it is endeavour. Or, can you conceive life without combat, and the Divine without life?. . . No other theodicea than this." 59 Poe writes: In this view [of diversity followed by unity], and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice - of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more - it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes - with a view - if even with a futile view - to the extension of our own Joy. (Com, XVI, 313) Both theodicies are based on the necessity of multiplicity. Stallo, however, revels in the combat of the world: Conflict (polarity) is what it takes to have life (and unity). Poe yearns for the end of the world of combat: Multiplicity is temporary and will end with the apocalypse. So it is no mere accident (of education, of interest) that Poe should speak to the chemistry-induced problem-situation in the language of astronomy. To rationalize endless polar strife is to admire magnetoelectro-chemism; to seek peace is to pine for the equanimity of astronomical physics. Endless polar strife was, of course, acceptable to Naturphilosophen as the form of historical ascent. w Schelling believed that history as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the absolute. Hence one can never point out in history the particular places where the mark of providence, or God Himself, is as it were visible. For God never exists, if the existent is that which presents itself in the objective world; if He existed thus, then we should not; but He continually reveals Himself.6' Here Poe draws the line; history as progressive revelation is nonsense to him. What we can do, the Egyptians could do better; what mathematicians have lately discovered, the bee has known since creation. History exists only to make possible the utter exhaustion of all modes of complexity "during the period in which all things were effecting their return into Unity" (Com, XVI, 291). This makes of history not a progression but a retreat. History occurs while matter seeks its annihilation out of history. Chemistry, as the stage of matter between mechanics and organics, on the way to humanity, is negligible. God awaits our astronomical return from humanity back to spirit.

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By the end of his career, Poe had come full circle. He began by alienating the precise version of science that could have saved him from absorption into the Jacksonian masses and universal, animalculated, germy life. Poe ends in exactly the opposite and identical manner, assimilating the most dangerous version of science for his purposes, managing perversely to enlist the science of life within life in his campaign for annihilation and apocalypse. The idealist strain of Puritanism might have lent credibility to this intellectually duplicitous, historically double enterprise: Edwards in "Concerning the End for which God Created the World" imagines an ever-increasing unity of God as object and creature as subject, with oneness at infinity. It is a Puritan who turned from nature and multiplicity in this eerily pre-Hegelian way: "Nature of one makes many, but Grace, of many makes one; for the Holy Spirit, which is a fire, melts all the Faithful into one mass or lump."62 Schelling and Thomas Dick can be made to look very much alike. In the perverse process, in which Poe apparently joins his intellectual era only to translate it two centuries back, and takes up progressive science only to anticipate the end of time, Jacksonian individualism gets its consummation: The masses, atoms of Jehovah in Diaspora, are melted into one mass, and mass is, at long last, extinguished.63 So the historical danger for Poe of Naturphilosophie and science is diffused, and what Poe earns for his investment in it is justification for a career in the arts, antiscience at first (Poe is an aesthete), proscience at the end (Poe is an intellectual), duplicitous always (where Poe seems to be antiscience, he is less antiscience than where he seems to be proscience). UNDYING LITERATURE It is only by sympathizing with Poe's predicament that we can feel the touching dialectical comedy of his career. At no stage can Poe rest secure in a protected aesthetic bower, an anti-Baconian domain of Arnheim, since his career begins in a flight from science that puts him directly on the path to science. A dismaying turn of events - even more trying if the science he is migrating toward is less congenial than the science he is fleeing from, assuming that quarantining the contagious masses is requisite. In seeing the impossibility of Poe's ever sufficiently justifying his career in relation to - for or against - science, we can see why Poe had to squirm and twist for an entire career. The twisting and squirming are best charted through the tales of ratiocination and the angelic dialogues, two career-long, career-defending projects whose vacillations looked sufficiently like dialectics to be assumed into the Naturphilosophic of Eureka: To avoid science, Poe finally has to write it. The detective C. Auguste Dupin is an Usherian personality determined to apprehend a fallen and infectious world. Both Dupin's and Usher's

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eyes are at times "vacant in expression"; Dupin is manifesting at these moments "an excited, or perhaps . . . a diseased intelligence"; the mansion he shares is "tottering to its fall" (Co/, II, 532-3). And the teeming city that Dupin inhabits can best be understood as the Jacksonian equivalent to the noxious environment from which Usher recoils, not Lorenz Oken's world, but Cotton Mather's updated. For this reason, Richard Wilbur cannot be entirely right in arguing that Dupin's rationality could proceed by an identification, even a guilty one, of itself with such a world.64 In his remarks on "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Wilbur makes much of the fact that Dupin speaks in two distinct voices, one high-pitched and one low, depending on his mood; this becomes meaningful when we learn that the murder he is investigating was committed by a pair of intruders, one (apparently) speaking in a shrill voice (it turns out to be the orangutan's chatter), one in a low voice. Wilbur then italicizes Dupin's odd remark: "Murder. . . has been committed by some third party; and the voices of this third party were those heard in contention" (Col, II, 549). Finally, he contrasts this combination of two voices into one "party" with the division of Dupin into a "Bi-Part Soul," a "double Dupin" (Col, II, 533). These facts suggest that the criminals are a function of Dupin - that in solving the crime, he is exorcising the primate violence in himself. There is, however, a flaw here: Dupin's voice is highest when he is analyzing, and it is marked at such moments by "distinctness of. . . enunciation" (Col, II, 533). But the orangutan is supposed to be an objectification of Dupin's unconscious, not his analytic, mind; its highpitched voice is, appropriately, mdistinct. If we were to infer a methodology, it would be based not on the identity but on the mirror opposition of reasoner and criminal. There is some indication that Dupin can make discoveries by performing mental operations in one direction that the objects of his investigation are performing in the other. (He avoids the failure to sort out left from right that leads to disasters in "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Gold-Bug.") In the introductory part of the story, Dupin follows the narrator's thoughts from association to association: What he does forward, we can all do backward, that is, "retrac[e] the steps by which particular conclusions of. . . [our] minds have been attained" (Col, II, 535). There is also an indication that Poe wishes to distinguish imagination and ratiocination, the poles of his psychic pride, in mirror terms: "resolution [or analysis]," Poe says in an early version of the story, is "strictly akin" to "invention or creation," only "conversed" (Col, II, 527n.). The problem is that even if we manage to conceive of Dupin and the orangutan as symmetrical - analytic criminologist and instinctive criminal - nothing methodologically follows. Dupin simply cannot force his

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way, by identification, into the orangutan's mind. He cannot reverse the direction of the orangutan's thought, as he reverses the narrator's. He cannot use the symmetry of imagination and analysis as a weapon, as he will in "The Purloined Letter." The orangutan does not have an equal and opposite mind; it has barely a mind at all. Dupin is, pace Wilbur and despite Poe's occasional nature-philosophical willingness to see anthropomorphic intelligence in nature, solitary in an alien criminal world in "Rue Morgue." What seems to me most affecting about the story is, consequently, how empirical Dupin has to be - empiricism being, as Poe never fails to remember with professional mortification, the best way to maintain oneself in a moral contagion, from Brown's French Revolution to Poe's Parisian crime. Dupin is not, granted, naively empirical, as the narrator is; on Dupin's superiority to pedestrian Baconianism is based the claim of the story to methodological novelty. Faced with peculiar facts, the narrator can only total them: "I remarked that, while all the witnesses agreed in supposing the gruff voice to be that of a Frenchman, there was much disagreement in regard to the shrill, or, as one individual termed it, the harsh voice" (Col, II, 549). Dupin rightly responds: "That was the evidence itself. . . but it was not the peculiarity of the evidence." There is much deduction in Dupin's method - enough, apparently, to satisfy Poe that despite Dupin's skill in examining the evidence with a singular "minuteness of attention" (Co/, II, 546), his hero is no Baconian inductivist. But Dupin, in "Rue Morgue," is only superior to an American version of Baconianism already vanquished. All the detective can be observed doing, insofar as he is working by a method, is collecting, from newspapers, quite a bit of data; pushing the facts quickly to a hypothesis, from which he deduces consequences; and checking whether the consequences are contradicted by the collection of more data. The misfortune is that in this methodology he is an unwitting but completely faithful disciple ofJohn Stuart Mill: The steps of Mill's "Deductive Method" are induction, ratiocination, and verification. Since in Eureka Mill stands in Poe's scornful repudiation for the entire British Baconian tradition, the telling point is how hard it is for Dupin to go beyond him. Mill is willing to give intuition its due - anything is acceptable in forming a hypothesis. (Both Mill and Dupin believe that intuition is merely subtle logic.)65 Dupin's method contains no more deduction than Mill's. In fact chemistry, from Mill's non-German point of view, is still an apprentice science because it is still "purely experimental," not deductive enough. The weakness of chemistry is that the principle of the Composition of Causes does not apply to it - chemical substances in combination are not additive, as are, for example, mechanical forces - preventing the discipline from being rendered mathe-

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matical.66 Poe will specify the same fact about chemistry (though he refers to the failure of the principle as an inadequacy of mathematics to chemistry) in the one detective story, "The Purloined Letter," he wrote after the appearance of Mill's Logic - the one detective story that goes beyond Mill. Dupin's hypothesis that an orangutan committed the murders certainly defies the traditional Newtonian reliance on a vera causa - but Mill argues for a liberal interpretation of that criterion, referring pertinently to the known efficacy ofjudicial inquiries into homicide. ("As we can ascertain whether a man was murdered or died a natural death, from the indications exhibited by the corpse," so we can make scientific claims about existing facts by invoking well-known but no longer evident agencies.)67 The problem for Poe is that he makes a claim for Dupin's methodological originality, but sometime after his first Dupin story - and probably before "The Purloined Letter" - Poe discovers that the prime inheritor of the Lockian-Baconian tradition advocates methods just as advanced. Which is not to say that Poe is ready to be a Naturphilosoph. The comedy of the ratiocination series is that identification is the highroad to the truth in a world that Poe has no desire whatever to identify with. In no story is Dupin's utter aloofness from the contagious world more monumental than in the middle detective story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." The criminal, for one thing, is never precisely defined and confronted. The urban world that Dupin does confront, the world of public opinion, fails to provide him with an edifying reflection of his own brilliance. "The mass of the people," Dupin says condescendingly, "regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit" (Col, III, 738). Yet there is something troubled in this contumely. It is not only a statement of the vulgar love of meretricious paradoxes; it is itself (paradoxically) a nesting of paradoxes.68 The "mass of the people," who must certainly be proprietors of "the general idea," will regard as profound what contradicts it. The meretriciousness of the epigram is asserted epigrammatically. The epigram minimizes the possibility of reaching the masses with truth, if the epigram, which can reach them, is true. This is not Dupin's only statement of his relationship to the masses. He seems vexed and muddled by the subject, allowing later in the story that "the popular opinion, under certain conditions, is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself - when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner - we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius" (Col, III, 757). This condition, however, is not satisfied in the newspaper-

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misled society of "Marie Roget": Dupin simply cannot trust the people, nor can he work by finding elements of his own consciousness in apparent externality. Poe is forced to create for him a method of gaining certainty in a world that is not an idealist's - in which objects do not mirror subjects. The solution is probability, which guarantees nothing but which can bring us close to absolute assurance: If, the feet of Marie being small, those of the corpse were also small, the increase of probability that the body was that of Marie would not be an increase in a ratio merely arithmetical, but in one highly geometrical, or accumulative. Add to all this shoes as she had been known to wear upon the day of her disappearance, and, although these shoes may be "sold in packages," you so far augment the probability as to verge upon the certain. (Co/, III, 746) Poe is enamored of a methodology that seems to allow one to "calculate upon the unforeseen." "We," says Dupin, joining on his own authority the ranks of the philosophers, "make chance a matter of absolute calculation" (Col, III, 752). Probability is a necessary philosophical tactic for an irredeemably contingent world - hence a non-Eurekan, and n o n nature-philosophic, world. Poe needs for the sake of professional justification something beyond empiricism, but he cannot be an idealist until the world reforms. At the end of the story, Poe wishes to philosophize about probability theory; he is no Laplace. He manages, at his worst moment, to make the clumsy error of assuming that dice, having come up sixes twice in succession, will for that reason be less likely to come up sixes again. But the passage has an importance beyond putting Poe's mathematics on immortal display. The point Poe is making is that Dupin's solution to the mystery of Marie Roget is in all likelihood not the solution to the real crime concerning Mary Rogers on which the story is based - that any succession of coincidences between them makes the possibility of future ones slight. Probability had been used in the story to bring the ideal world of mathematics to bear on the real world of crime and murder, yet its final effect is to underscore the separation of Poe's aesthetic world from reality. It should be conceded that Poe's mathematical error is perhaps too clumsy; we may be meant to see through it and infer the accuracy of Poe's analysis of the Mary Rogers case in "Marie Roget." At any rate, the universe is not yet, as in Eureka, unarguably a plot of God's. In "Marie Roget," Poe is in his terrorized phase, which swings the dialectic to statistical empiricism, in the process creating a tension of beauty and truth. Read "beauty" as "writing" and you have a first approximation of the

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tension of Lacan and Derrida concerning the final detective tale, "The Purloined Letter." It is late in the day to rehearse this controversy, but it is impossible simply to claim an innocent, unmediated possession of "The Purloined Letter," as if its destiny did not at least pass through the hands of Lacan and Derrida. I shall add only one element to Barbara Johnson's account of the recent prolongation - "to prolong" is "to purloin," as Lacan shows - of Parisian one-upmanship begun in "The Purloined Letter" itself.69 The one-upmanship, for my purposes, is best generalized as disciplinary gamesmanship, since - to begin to sort out the maneuvers slowly the Paris police represent science, and science as they practice it is nothing more than Baconianism. The story's symbol of counterproductively minute Baconian investigation is the microscope (Col, III, 980, 981, 985); after the Prefect's technicians make their microscopic search of the Minister D 's home, finding nothing, Dupin urges them "to make a thorough re-search of the premises." Later, however, Dupin reveals that upon hearing of the original search, he "felt entire confidence in his [the Prefect's] having made a satisfactory investigation - so far as his labors extended" (Co/, III, 981, 983). Obviously Dupin had been punning on "premises"; his own premises are macroscopic. Then, in the next century of Parisian intellectual dueling, Derrida, seeking to undermine Lacan's analysis from within, decides to "begin from his [Lacan's] own premisses and with his own framework" (D, 54). This conflates in Lacan both of Dupin's rivals - the buffoonish Prefect, whose premises need to be examined, and the subtle D , whose premises need to be invaded. Once again, it is science that is called into question on behalf of fiction; Derrida launches his assault on the project of "distinguishing] science from fiction" with his introductory assimilation of Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (D, 31-9). The assault is on science and not fiction even if the point is to deny the difference, since it is science and not literature that exists by means of disciplinary withdrawal. No one will doubt, however, that even this complex disciplinary binarism puts the matter too simply to last. A first complication is that though Lacan pretends to be scientific, he is basing his claim on an act of literary criticism; if Dupin demands a "re-search of the [scientific] premises," then what could be more recherche than that? Derrida's complaint is not that Lacan is an unsubtle reader of texts (comparable to the merely Baconian Prefect) but that he draws the frame of science around fiction, while Derrida insists not on drawing a literary frame around science but on using literature as a means of perpetually unframing all such disciplinary questions. Nevertheless, we cannot guilelessly take Derrida's word that Lacan's science frames and Derrida's writing unframes. We

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notice, for example, that in the process of being rebuked for assuming literature into science, Lacan emerges as the twentieth-century avatar not of the Prefect but of Dupin (Lacan makes a claim to this analytic heritage, and Derrida grants the claim to critique the heritage). Science, that is to say, has broken out of its Baconian constrictions. It is in the face of this insurrection that Derrida moves efficiently to reframe the disciplinary issue: Despite the fact that Lacan is now Dupin, the analogy - the Prefect is to Dupin as Lacan (Dupin) is to Derrida - still holds, though now it is transitive. Derrida inserts Lacan so solidly in the position of the Prefect that Johnson has to defend Lacan against identification with the Prefect: She argues that Lacan is not so simple a Euclidean framer of the literary tale as Derrida suggests, and therefore is not comparable to the Prefect who examines D 's apartment by enclosing it and measuring every inch of its framed space (J, 482). Lacan is "framed," as Johnson puns, as a "framer" - isn't science doing the wwframing here? What is Dupin for Poe - a poet who breaks into the premises of science or a scientist who breaks into the premises of fiction? One might deduce from the symmetry of the investigation (Dupin, a poet-cummathematician, invades the premises of D , his intellectual double) that the question is met with absolute indifference. Yet the necessities of disciplinary prestige may be responsible for two asymmetrical effects. First, there is Dupin's insistence that the unpoetic mathematician is helpless, without the reverse point. Second, there is the adversarial doubling of D by the Prefect, a reduction that foreshadows Derrida's strategy of reducing adversarial science to the Prefect's position, whatever its methodological advances. But what is the problem here? Why should Poe be concerned to counter science with something that includes it? Why not counter science with counterscience - that is, with poetry alone? The disciplinary complication - precursor of Freudian psychology is Naturphilosophie. This is more than just an analogy. Derrida's charge against Lacan is that he is guilty of "ideal science" (he does not mean "science" in the Anglo-American sense, but "ideal science" had an "ideal science" in our sense through its Naturphilosophie). As Johnson recaps the matter, Derrida sees in Lacan's preoccupation with Oedipal triads the "dialectical mediation and harmonious normalization or Aufhebung of desire" (J, 472). Which reminds us that the ungainly, gaunt Baconianism that Poe sets up as his disciplinary straw man had already been replaced by a more glamorous, more professionally challenging ideal science, a teleological and therefore a beautiful science. A further twist of the disciplinary knife is that the relationship of Poe's three detective stories - which in Derrida's argument subverts Lacan's attempt to frame the single story, "The Purloined Letter" - may be read as just another dialectical progression, arriving at a methodological synthesis of poetry

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and mathematics that the universe (represented by D ) cannot help mirroring. Between them, poetry and mathematics provide the basis for making the universe appear as a universe. Dupin, the problem is, may be a Naturphilosoph.

The universe of "The Purloined Letter" is set up to be ideal: Objects mirror objects (letters and facsimiles) because objects mirror subjects (D— and Dupin) in an identification that equals knowledge. But the world is rather empty as well - empirically empty - and Poe's disciplinary gamble turns on that fact. Hegel's charge against all previous Naturphilosophie is that it was tautological: A = A; the static identity of light, electricity, magnetism, vitality, and so on was merely an empty formalism. Poe's wager is that he can pass the necessary empirical vacancy off as an effect of science rather than literature. "I never yet encountered the mere mathematician. . . ," Poe has Dupin say, "who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x2 + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to g." Dupin imagines that his asserting that occasions may occur when x2 + px "is not altogether equal to q" could only drive a mathematician to violence (Co/, III, 988). It might drive even nonmathematicians to protest that x2 + px always equals q for the simple reason that they are empty letters, only substitutes for quantities that must fill them exactly or not fill them at all. The empty formalism is, of course, intentional and designed. But Poe's point is that letters are unfilled only in a world without life or crime; neither chemistry nor society, Dupin believes, satisfies Mill's Composition of Causes requirement that a + b = a + b. Science gets accused of just that additive fallacy, and poetry is assigned the role of correcting it. This is the predecessor of Derrida's charge that it is Lacan, not Poe (science, not literature), who has emptied the purloined letter. Derrida maintains that though the letter has no contents for us, it has contents for the characters in the story (blackmail cannot be blank mail). Can Lacan be put in the position of the mathematicians Dupin scorns? The effect of emptying the letter - the effect of saying that the letter's significance is a function of its itinerary, not its contents - is to allow us to believe that the letter can legitimately pass from D to Dupin because they are correspondents. ("The other side of the globe," Thoreau says, "is but the home of our correspondent.") The idealist writes a letter to the world that always already wrote to him: This is conditional on finding a correspondence in the face of all concrete empirical differences. The correspondence of Dupin and D can be discovered by another emptying of letters. As numerous commentators have observed, Dupin and D are... brotherly? Brothers? Twins? Halves of a single self? One might be led to suppose that D stands for Dupin (A = A\ D = D). If ever two were one, then surely D and D. I may as well refute myself,

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as Derrida refutes Lacan, by conceding that, of course, for the characters, D cannot equal Dupin, since they would then be in perfect awareness of the strange fraternity, just as for the characters the contents of the letter make a difference. But for us the purloined letter is empty, and for us the letter D purloined of its contents can mean Dupin. The reality that the text may be presumed to represent has an empirical content where the text itself does not. On the textual, not the mathematical, level, D may correspond with D. What Poe ekes out of "The Purloined Letter," then, is at best a disciplinary standoff. Idealism provides Poe with a way of transcending the empiricism of John Stuart Mill, but only at the price of an empirical vacuity that cannot quite be foisted on mathematics - it is in the writing itself. Hegel's response to the vacuity that is idealism's perennial bugbear is to posit for Naturphilosophie a nature sufficiently resistant to ideal unifying that history is validated. This cannot be Poe's solution - Poe despises history. In political terms, the sacrifice of empirical reality in "The Purloined Letter" is achieved by an absolute avoidance of the virocratic city that is the setting of "Rue Morgue" and "Marie Roget": The fiction of the tale is that the "frantic behavior of a man with a musket" firing into the crowd is merely choreographed by Dupin for his aristocratic maneuvers. For all we know, the queen may be plotting regicide, but empty the letter of its contents and its restoration to the queen can only appear as a stabilizing of political power. The blankness of the letter in Poe's fiction is therefore reinforced by the blanks fired by the man of the crowd in Dupin's: Evacuating the fiction and the fiction-within-fiction of empirical reality equals choreographing the possibility of revolution, and even of history itself. Then what can Poe's response be to the empty unities of his own fiction, if not Hegel's positing of a resistance to unifying that gives meaning to history? The only solution is to end history forcibly. Ideal unity in the angelic tales is made possible by the apocalypse; the angelic dialogues may be justifiably emptied of empirical content because the world has been. Poe must eliminate the world in order to eliminate his city of infectious crime; in the process, empirical emptiness is redeemed as mimesis. The world eliminated, however, Poe still has to repeat much the same dialectical swing; the postapocalyptic angelic tales, despite their transcendent pretensions, can only approach the cosmology of Eureka by means of a dialogue with science even as the detective tales approach its methodology. The unshakability of science and the desire to shirk it are the twin engines of this series as well. The beginning of the process in "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" is characteristically muddled: The angelic unity of subject and object (Eiros and Charmion, spirit and world) seems designed to shame the potentiality of science; yet

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astronomy is never entirely scorned, and seems perhaps finally vindicated. The angels, for whom the "speculative Future" is merged with the "certain Present," are at first sight in apparently absolute contrast with the astronomers, for whom the apocalypse that once and for all replaced scientific temporality with angelic atemporality was "utterly unanticipated"; nevertheless, Eiros allows from the start that astronomers had long contemplated "analogous misfortunes" (Col, II, 456, 457). We are then informed that, as the comet nears, "two or three astronomers" never waver in their belief that contact with it is inevitable: They contemplate not analogous misfortunes but the misfortune itself. Poe calls their wisdom "astronomical knowledge," which seems to exist ideally regardless of the astronomical consensus (Col, II, 458). Finally, all astronomers, their minds cleared by the coming disaster, begin to reason cogently, as do the "theologists." The theologians teach, correctly, that the world will end in fire; the astronomers teach, correctly, that a comet is not ablaze; the syllogism's obvious conclusion is that the comet is not the agent of apocalypse (Col, II, 458-9). Yet it is: It extracts the nitrogen from the air, setting the world to burn in pure oxygen. What is obscured in this development is whether astronomers can or cannot find themselves in possession of "astronomical knowledge." Curiously, however, whatever the fate of the "two or three astronomers" in their debate with learned colleagues, the "astronomical knowledge" that they announce is accepted by the masses in advance of the astronomical community: "Finally, all men saw that astronomical knowledge [as announced by the two or three] lied not, and they awaited the comet" (Col, II, 458). Nor is the disastrous implication of contact neglected. "The people now, dismissing any lingering hope that the astronomers were wrong, experienced all the certainty of evil" (Col, II, 459) - but this is very odd, because not merely obtuse but also reasonable astronomers are at that moment teaching that the comet is harmless. Are the "two or three astronomers" - still in advance of even the reasonable astronomers - now "the astronomers" to whom the people invariably bow? Or do the people know something about the astronomical data that the astronomers do not? Poe is evasive about how much credit to give science; nevertheless the proper eschatological instinct, combined with scientific technique, makes angelic wisdom briefly possible on earth as well as Aidenn. (Death is where matter meets spirit as humanity is unified.) This is the spiritual possibility Eureka incarnates. The unmistakable point in all this misdirection is that "astronomical knowledge," science as apodictic truth, is available to the extent that the people are trustworthy. The approach to science in Poe is always emblematic of his approach to democracy. However, in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," the "Marie Roget"

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of the angelic series, Poe retreats - from the people, therefore from science. This is Poe's most Thomas Dickian dialogue; we note that Dick's protoangelic fantasy - of "ranks and orders" of "intelligencies" [sic], "furnished with moral and intellectual powers capable of appreciating [God's] perfections" - is invoked specifically to assure us that if "all the apostate inhabitants of our world had been swept away as nuisances from the face of creation," there would still be superhuman subjects left to adore God as object.70 Dick gets around to his own version of doxological scientism and eschatological meliorism; Poe, in "Monos and Una," separates the more pessimistic, misanthropic, and obscurantistic sections of Dick's book from the rest, as if dividing oxygen and nitrogen, to set his own eschatological longings ablaze. Monos despises progress: "You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers.. . had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term 'improvement' as applied to the progress of civilization." Monos is anti-Baconian: "Our race" should have "submitted] to the guidance of the natural laws, rather than attempted] their control," a false opposition in Bacon. Monos is antitechnological: "Art - the Arts - arose supreme, and, once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had elevated them to power." Monos implicates Jacksonianism in the syndrome: "wild attempts at omni-prevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not both know and succumb." Monos insists that utilitarians - "rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title which could have been properly applied only to the scorned" - are conspirators in the encouragement of our Faustian hopes (Col, II, 60910). There it all is: The democratic-utilitarian—meliorist—technologicalscientific package that Poe fears and abhors. Yet no writer with an intellectual appetite can clear a fictional space quite as devastatingly as that - let alone a writer whose intellectual appetite was precisely omnivorous. In the final angelic dialogue, "The Power of Words," knowing is the sole good of the universe, even if, in "Monos and Una," knowledge had been the "leading evil" ofjacksonian technological mobocracy. "In for ever knowing," Agathos says, "we are for ever blessed"; it is only the completion of knowledge that is "the curse of a fiend." This reversal has the effect of justifying, finally, the multiplicity, the heteronomy, and the limitation of the world, which spirituality inevitably seeks to deny: "Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe? the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity." This "infinity of matter," the infinity of resistance to the spiritualizing vision, exists to afford "infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know which is for ever un-

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quenchable within it - since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self (Col, III, 1212). "But does not The Most High know all?" Oinos logically worries. "That," Agathos answers, "(since he is The Most Happy) must be still the one thing unknown even to HIM" (Col, III, 1212). It is a peculiar answer, since what God would not know, Agathos would. Further, one would expect that to be The Most Happy, God would need to be ignorant of more than a single thing; but then we notice that God must not know that He does not know whether He knows all; otherwise He would indeed know that He does not know all. Perhaps Poe intends this infinite regress to protect God's infinite happiness. At any rate, God turns out to be only relatively, rather than absolutely, more knowledgeable than angels. It would seem to be a consequence that there is no position of absolute wisdom from which to condemn mere mundane science. In fact, the divine power of "retrogradation," which the Deity possesses in perfection and angels "in every variety of degree, short of the absolute perfection," is possessed by mathematicians, who "found no difficulty, from a given effect, under given conditions, in determining the value of the original impulse" by a technique that need not pause before reaching "the throne of the Godhead" (Col, III, 1214). It is unclear how much further God Himself might retrograde. Of course, all analysis in the direction of divine unity must be offset by creativity in the direction of multiplicity; otherwise, the soul's self would be at risk of exhausting the nutrient multiplicity of objects. "The power of words" of the title refers to the angelic capacity of speaking worlds into existence. Once again, the distinction of God, angels, and humankind is relativized. Oinos mentions that shortly before "the final overthrow of the earth, there were . . . many very successful experiments in what some philosophers were weak enough to denominate the creation of animalculae," but Agathos endorses the philosophical nomenclature by recognizing that those experiments "were, in fact, instances of the secondary creation" - that is, angelic creation - "the only species of creation which has ever been, since the first word spoke into existence the first law" (Col, III, 1213). God spoke once; after that, angels and humans have cocreated everything. The animalcules return! - but hardly as token of our fallenness, rather as token of our angelic creativity. Poe has managed to learn to love the animalcules. The world of microscopic disorder is now a matter of scientific creation in the interest of having something to know. We are almost (in the spirit of idealism) God in "The Power of Words"; Poe cannot yet go all the way. Hesitating, Poe is involved in the proposal of a compromise that he cannot escape, "an intermediate or secondary Nature - a Nature which is not God, nor an emanation of God, but

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which is still Nature, in the sense that it is the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God" (Col, II, 711). Though this is precisely the nature of "The Power of Words," the formulation appears in 'The Landscape Garden," a description of a fictional domain spiritualized not by God's apocalyptic will but by the power of a rich man's money. In that sketch (expanded near the time of the writing of Eureka as 'The Domain of Arnheim"), Poe is so anxious to water his landscape from Heaven's spiritual fountain that it is nearly sodden with spirituality. Nevertheless, the landscape remains landscape, and its gardener, Ellison, can only be a self-contradiction. Ellison gives as his fourth principle of happiness the necessity of an object of pursuit and adds that "the extent of happiness [is] proportioned to the spirituality of this object"; we are advised, however, that "some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism the whole cast of his ethical speculations." He sees the value of creating only "novel moods of purely physical loveliness" (Poe's emphasis, Col, II, 704, 706). Poe seems to wish to locate Ellison and his landscape between materiality and spirituality; the attenuated belief in spirituality through the power of an inherited fortune explains the positing of an angelic squadron between humanity and God. The detective series arrives, in "The Purloined Letter," at the necessity of evacuating the world utterly in order to have an ideal predemocratic unity justified in fiction; it is because the angelic series finds altogether too much democracy in perfect spiritual unity that it models the domain of the angels on the physical domain of an aristocrat. The aristocratic landscape is for Ellison, and for Poe in another sense, an artistic retreat. When Poe can find solace in the idea of democratic individuality as atomized divinity, he can make his attempt to absorb in Eureka what has been barely prevented from absorbing him: popular science. What emerges is how thoroughly Poe's self-contradictions, his movements out to the world (he secures a job, he gets engaged, he gives a reading) and his retreats from it (job abandoned, woman forsaken, audience insulted), his hatred ofJacksonian democracy and his own absurd dependence on it (as well as his own status as lowborn climber), are capable of being absorbed into the dialectical spirit of his age. If Poe cannibalizes Naturphilosophie in Eureka, it is the result of, as well as a defense against, Naturphilosophie's perfect positioning for incorporating Poe. That Poe, despite his assertions of personal and professional superiority, could hardly avoid the predilections of his age - so that, discovering himself at the problem-situation, he could only play insidious games with it - is evident even at the moment he comes closest to plagiarizing Charles Brockden Brown, compendium of the Enlighten-

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ment. I have described Edgar Huntly's awakening in the cave as a Kantian development of Time and Space; at any rate, that is how Poe read it, since in his rewriting of the scene in "The Pit and the Pendulum," the pit is clearly Space and the pendulum Time.71 The borrowing is hard to miss. Brown: "I emerged from oblivion by degrees so slow and so faint, that their succession cannot be marked. When enabled at length to attend to the information which my sense afforded, I was conscious for a time of nothing but existence." Poe: "Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought - a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state." The difference between these similar passages is what makes Poe possible for an intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Poe's description is all antithetical suddenness, Brown's gradualness. The senses that Poe's prisoner develops out of himself do not evolve by slow and continuous degrees. They come and go, blink on and off, each discrete illumination stronger than the last. 1. "Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound - the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating." This is, on good Schellingian principles, the first feeling of life: If it [the intelligence] is to become an object to itself as active in the succession [of its presentations], it must intuit the succession as sustained by an inner principle of activity [i.e., motion]. . .. But an object such as this is said to be alive. Hence the intelligence must intuit itself, not merely qua organization as such, but as a living organization.72 2. "Then a pause in which all is blank." The light switches off: x is followed by ~x. 3. "Then again sound, and motion, and touch - a tingling sensation pervading my frame." Everything rushes back, along with something new. The heartbeat established the inner sense - time. Touch is the sense that establishes contact with the spatial world, as it were, from within. At this point, touch only goes so far in revealing the exterior world as to establish the presence of a body in which the inner sense can reside: The blankness of step 2 returns in a higher, mediated form as bodily limitation, the frame. 4. "Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought — a condition which lasted long." Inner sense plus outer equals consciousness of existence, of a space occupied for a time. 5. "Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state." "True state" implies a

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6.

7.

8.

9.

relation of self and environment: The sudden desire is to be placed. "Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility." Desire is immediately followed by negative desire; every gain in the self's faculties becomes the new agent of the self's undoing. This negative desire Poe names elsewhere "the imp of the perverse": The establishment of identity posits immediately the desire to merge. "Then a rushing revival of soul and a successful effort to move." Consciousness restored, the will is its newest faculty - desire can be fulfilled. "And now a full memory of the trial, of the judges, of the sable draperies, of the sentence, of the sickness, of the swoon." Desire produces the future, memory reproduces the past. The prisoner is now an identity in psychological time. "Then entire forgetfulness of all that followed; of all that a later day and much earnestness of endeavor have enabled me vaguely to recall" (Co/, II, 683-4).

All this before he opens his eyes: We are witnessing a development of sensation, from the inside out, by discrete alternations. It evokes Schelling's description of the subject creating its own objective limitations and then transgressing them: The self qua subject of this infinite activity is dynamically (potentid) infinite, but the activity itself, in becoming posited as an activity of the self, becomes finite; but in becoming finite, it once more becomes extended out over the boundary, yet in being extended it is also again limited. - And thus this alternation is prolonged ad infinitum. The self that is elevated in this manner to an intelligence is therefore thrown into a perpetual state of expansion and contraction; but this state is precisely that of imaging and producing.73 The self produces a world unconsciously in order to objectify itself to itself. Then it experiences the world it has created, but first only as object, as heteronomy, as nonself. Then, in jerks, by systole and diastole, by beats, to use the Eurekan phrase, of the Heart Divine, the self overcomes each limitation - must overcome them, for eventually the self sees that each limitation is merely self-imposed for the sake of self-perception; must overcome them eternally, for at no stage of the objectification can it not be an objectification. The prisoner is conscious, then trapped within consciousness; he opens his eyes to the world only to perceive it as a prison (it is his own tortured conscience that he sees); he conceives it as a prison in order to understand his predicament empirically, to save himself for the possibility of freedom from it; he is freed from it, but not entirely by his own activity. Ultimately, he is freed by General

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LaSalle, whose name may imply that one is never quite removed from the locked and Lockean room, that the condition is general, that the process is ad infinitum. The story is perhaps more Fichtean than Schellingian: Ego, which has separated into ego and nature, finds itself incarcerated in its product. Naturphilosophie is necessary to tell the story from the view of purposeful nature, so that, at sea, the self finds the mirror of its own freedom. That may be a way of summarizing the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym if it is to be saved for intellectual history. Only one question remains to be answered, and on it hinges our precise sense of what intellectual history has to do with literary history: Is the Narrative ofA. Gordon Pym (1838) a novel that can be located in intellectual history by means of Eureka? Since Pym is halfway from "Sonnet - To Science" to Eureka, we cannot be confident in advance which way it leans. The tardiness of Schelling's and Hegel's reception in America only keeps the question problematic. There was, Esposito finds, some hostile reaction to Schelling before 1835. But "by about 1835 there were signs of change, and by 1840 a highly sympathetic audience for German thought had developed in America."74 As for Hegel: In the early 1830s, a summary of Hegel's views and philosophical lineage appeared in the Encyclopedia Americana, but 1840 seems to have been the opening date of a serious discussion of Hegel in America.75 So Pym, in the middle of the turn on Schelling and at the outset of the debate on Hegel, could have been influenced by German idealism but could have been oblivious to it. Naturphilosophie was perhaps in the air, but the relative humidity was low. We do know that Poe was studying the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1835 and 1840, in preparation for writing "Hans Pfaall."76 "Sonnet - Silence" and "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" are from around the same time as Pym: Duality, eschatology, and science were on his mind when they needed to be. But what is dualistic, apocalyptic, and scientific about Pym? Can we say without the evidence of Eureka? And with that evidence, what do we say? The first connection between Pym and Eureka oddly throws into doubt whether either ought to be taken as an intellectual document. In the introduction to Eureka, Poe's loyalty oscillates between Truth and Beauty in his search for the appropriate genre of his essay; in the introduction to Pym, we are given confusing information as to how much of the manuscript is Pym's "actual" description of his voyage of discovery, how much Poe's artistic contribution. Our own paradoxical sense of Poe's intellectuality begins with Poe's. Eureka, to Poe's satisfaction at least, works the problem out: Poe eventually comes to see the ultimate breakdown of the distinction of subjectivity and objectivity, ideal and real, poetry and science, by the same

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process that pari passu overcomes his distinction between the genius and the "people." A summary of the twin processes would look like this: Poe begins by announcing that Eureka is true, but that it is "as a Poem" that he wishes it to be judged. Midway into Eureka, Poe describes the Nebular Hypothesis as "beautifully true." At the end, he declares that "Poetry and Truth are one" (Com, XVI, 182, 252, 302). Similarly, Poe begins Eureka by scorning philosophers who are influenced by the "vulgar idea" that all matter is attracted to the earth. Toward the end, the "commonly entertained" opinion that all stars will eventually merge into one is given qualified respect. But the peroration of Eureka poses as a mere transcription of the prophecies that "now and then speak to us with low voices" (Com, XVI, 217, 302-3, 312). As mass and masses approach divinity together, even science assumes the teleological beauty of art. We can chart the same trajectory in Pym. The narrative begins with "My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice." "My . . . my . . . my": The story commences with an identity at the center of a universe conceived of as inherited property. The first sentence suggests a solipsist's mirror: " m y " at the beginning, " y m " at the end. The story culminates, however, with Pym's identity-threatening approach to a giant snowman, as we are given a string of "ofs" as if to delay, attenuate, and finally dissolve the very idea of property: "And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow" (Com, III, 5, 242). The ideal process that is replicated in Pym and Eureka (the subject coming to the object) might be said to justify the full interrelating of Pym and Eureka, since it destroys the barriers between subjective art and objective science. Yet this argument is circular. We could not have read the beginning and the end of Pym as proof that the subject is going over into the object unless we knew that Eureka could be used to turn Pym into an allegory of idealist science. That Pym is an idealist allegory, however, is exactly what we are trying to prove by means of the connection. If we could come to Pym's nature-philosophy by some other route, we could connect Eureka and Pym in some noncircular way. Only Eureka, it may appear, can pump Pym full of science philosophy. Eureka alone, for example, allows us to see in the introductory adventure of Pym z nature-philosophic dematerializing of the world: "For God's sake, Augustus," I screamed, now heartily frightened, "what ails you? - what is the matter? - what are you going to do?" "Matter!" he stammered, in the greatest apparent surprise, letting go the tiller at the same moment, and falling forward into the bottom of the boat - "matter - why, nothing is the matter - going home - d - d - don't you see?" (Com, III, 8)

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Eureka turns this into Naturphilosophie thus: When, I say, Matter, finally, expelling the Ether, shall have returned into absolute Unity, - it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be matter without Attraction and without Repulsion - in other words, Matter without Matter - in other words, again, Matter no more. (Com, XVI, 310-11)

Do we have, without question, a pun in Pym? The next line of Eureka bolsters the case: "In sinking into Unity, it [the universe] will sink into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be." The word "sinking" is ubiquitous in Pym. More wordplay unlocks. The black chief Too-wit's lie — "Mattee non we pa pa si," which is translated as "there was no need of arms where all were brothers" (Com, III, 201), and which literally seems pidgin for "it does not matter when we see one father" - turns out to be a restatement of Augustus's "Nothing is the matter - going home - d - d - don't you see?" Only by looking from Eureka to Pym can we give these nonsense syllables sense. We have not yet found a convincing authorization, however, to look from Eureka to Pym. Eureka seems to put Pym in intellectual history by paronomasia, as if the literary name for any coincidence of literature and science were the pun - but the puns are not there unless we assume the connection. Analogies between Pym and Eureka justify looking for more, but so far, our analogies are largely the product of our determination to find them. We may well wonder: Suppose that Poe had died in 1843, five years after Pym and before Eureka; would Pym, in that case, be material for the history of ideas? Yet if Pym - Poe's masterwork, his most inclusive document - is not intellectual, how indebted could Poe's career be to the intellectual problem-situation? We do have suggestive evidence that in Pym Poe is no Lockean empiricist. Locke wrote, in words Poe seems to have remembered, that "though unlearned men well enough understood the words white and black, etc. and had constant notions of the ideas signified by those words; yet there were philosophers found, who had learning and subtilty enough to prove, that snow was black; i.e. to prove that white was black."77 Poe, mocking philosophers in an early work ("Loss of Breath" [Col, II, 154], first written as "A Decided Loss," 1831), himself ridicules one thinker who "maintained that snow was black." When Poe returns to dark snow seven years later, he may conceivably do so as another rebellion against Locke, as an antinominalist abuser of words, a further abuse of which is the assertion (made up by Locke) that "humanity is animality, or rationality, or whiteness";78 yet another abuse of which, according to a later philosopher in the despised line, is the assertion that gravity moves

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things (since, in Bentham's theory of linguistic fictions, there are things that move, not things in the power of transporting nonthings).79 But Poe, as a post-Kantian in Eureka, makes force logically prior to matter; may we assume that Poe, as an idealist in the linguistic fiction Pym, makes qualities functions of ideas (humanity is whiteness), not the reverse? I am arguing that we cannot assume it. Let us temporarily let down our guard, however, on the grounds that a nature-philosophic reading of Pym can only justify itself in the process of solving critical difficulties. The problem of the unity of the book - Pym is, many critics have observed, a hopelessly divided novel - is the place to start, and we ought to begin by admitting that insofar as Eureka is eschatological, we see typology rather than science as the secret unity of Pym. At the precise middle of the novel are enactments of the Protestant sacraments (Pym and Parker's immersion and Parker's sacrifice and cannibalization for the sake of the salvation of the others). The partition allows us to grasp the novel's typological identity: Pym out of the hold of the Grampus is Jonah out of the whale (a grampus is a relative of the whale), foreshadowing the salvational sacrifice of Parker (he becomes the book's Agnus Dei, its lamb-God, as the mirror reversal of the book's previous savior, the dogTiger), foreshadowing the return of Pym out of the avalanche (when Pym is hit by falling stones, he thinks that "the day of universal dissolution was at hand" [Com, III, 203] ). If this sort of rejoinder to the accusation of incoherence takes Pym out of the parascientific world of Poe's own century, we can replace the Old and New Testaments with the Iliad and Odyssey to reinsert it. "History," Schelling said, "is an epic composed in the mind of God. Its two main parts are - first, that which depicts the departure of mankind from its center. . . and secondly, that which depicts the return. The first part is the Iliad, the second, the Odyssey of history."80 Hegel referred to the Phenomenology as a voyage. Stallo quotes Schiller for a comparable metaphor: "This space between the ideal of man's soul / And man's achievement who hath ever passed? / An ocean spreads between us and that goal, / Where anchor ne'er was cast!"81 Call this the challenge that sailor Pym meets in nine months, and what his progress signifies is the approach not only to apocalypse but to the Absolute. Poe again maps eschatology and idealism. Pym approaches the polar Absolute by way of polarities. Most remarkable is the alternation of chaos and order. The "complete chaos" of the hold in which Pym is originally stowed away turns out to have been "purposely arranged" by Augustus to afford maximum concealment; later, when Pym is lost, the chaos returns to chaos. Similarly, the blacks group "as if by accident" for their carefully planned ambush (Com,

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III, 23, 188). Order exists when the nonself (brute nature, savage nature) is invested with intention. It is a question equally of imposing or discovering that intention. Imposing it means making nature serve subjectivity. Discovering it implies a willingness to die subjectively in order to be reborn objectively. Consciousness blinks on and off, as in "The Pit and the Pendulum." Pym wakes up (beginning one cycle) from a dream at last "in possession of" his senses (Com, III, 28). He is no sooner awake than he is confronted, he thinks, by a horrible beast, and his "brain swam" (next page). The beast turns out to be only his dog, and gradually (same page) his "thinking faculties returned." But he is still without food and drink, existing (two pages later) "in a state bordering on insensibility." Two pages later: "At length there returned to [him] some portion of presence of mind." He is, we may say, a type of the artist whose world is created unconsciously to be understood consciously, Poe as poet of "The Raven" and critic of "The Philosophy of Composition"; and the artist is for Schelling the type of divine consciousness, which wakes eternally to the world it has made. It would also require statistical help to determine whether Pym is more frequently willful (or "erect") or will-less ("supine" or "sinking"). Pym's limbs sink on one page; two pages later he sinks, rises again, and (next page) sinks again (Com, III, 31-4). If the world, in Eureka, is "sinking into Unity," then we are entitled to believe that that is the subject of Pym's allegory: We stop being erect, we become supine, we surrender, in terms relevant to sexual-disciplinary politics, to gravity (and to objective nature and to science) - as Pym, in fact, perversely swoons off the cliffs of Tsalal, a prefiguring of his willing will-lessness as he drifts toward the snowman.82 At the final moment of the narrative, at least one opposition is overcome: the antithesis of black and white, blacks and whites, the type and symbol of all antitheses. The white albatrosses that "darkened" the atmosphere, and the Antarctic island with its snowy peaks and black sand, foreshadow and pre-illuminate the synthesis of the black (individual) and the white (universal) principles in the dark snow. Are we working here with Goethe's anti-Newtonian theory of color, endorsed by Naturphilosophen, which makes color not a fragmentation of light, but a mixture of positive unifying light and positive divisive darkness in an eternal confrontation that produces the colorful universe? If so, the antagonism of blacks and whites is a personal and political concern, a matter of pigmentation and power, rewritten as a metaphysical concern, a melting of Poe and blacks like the melting of Poe and urban multitudes in Eureka under the aegis of idealist science. We may conclude that Pym, ending at the pole, is polar. According

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to Hegel, this would make it relevant to the nature-philosophic reconciliation of philosophy and science. In physics, a lot has been said about polarity, and this concept has marked a great advance in the metaphysics of physics, for as a concept it is nothing more nor less than the determination of the necessary relationship between two different terms, which, in so far as the positing of one is also the positing of the other, constitute a unity.83 Further to conceive of the basic polar relationship of multiplicity and unity, of nature and spirit, as a relationship of mirror isomorphs would strengthen the nature-philosophic connection. We recall Hegel's climactic remark that it was his intention to find in nature "the mirror of ourselves . . . a free reflection of spirit."84 We can establish the pertinence of the Hegelian mirror in Pym by means of O'Donnell's attempt to find events after the Jane Guy rescue, following the communion, that precisely parallel events before: motion to the Jane Guy and away, Pym's confinement in the hold and in the hills, the escapes from treachery to sail toward the equator and toward the South Pole, the men overboard on July 5 (summer in the north) and January 10 (summer in the south), and Pym's swooning in the face of his mirror image and Too-wit's.85 But it is more suggestive to consider these paired items to be not parallel but symmetrical. They all involve mirror opposition: toward and away, up and down, north and south, black and white. Let O'Donnell's last example be the clue. Mirror opposition is crucial in a story in which the whites, who naturally understand mirroring, meet the blacks, who have never seen their own reflection. The mirror symmetry is not inert; something is changing as we sail into the looking-glass world. We can put the matter in terms of Poe's metaphor: As Pym progresses, it describes an increasingly toothy universe. We hear, for example, about Tiger's teeth (frequently), about Peters's long teeth (never covered by his lips), about the teeth of the skeleton on the death ship, about sharks' teeth, about the blacks' teeth. By the end of the story, the whites are so willing to join the universal self-destructiveness that they go foolishly into the insular hills to have their individual identities destroyed. "The six men being left on board, our shore-party consisted of thirty-two persons in all. We were armed to the teeth" (Cow, III, 200). The thirty-two whites are Bereniced.86 As we move from the first half of the book to its mirror in the second half, as we progress from self-preservation to self-destruction, from subjectivity to objectivity, we note an unprepared but necessary change in Arthur. Arthur begins as a feckless boy, concerned only with his own adventure and emotions, but ends as a dedicated scientist, concerned with advancing knowledge: "So tempting an opportunity," says Pym,

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"of solving the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded to man, and I confess that I felt myself bursting with indignation at the timid and ill-timed suggestions of our commander." Pym pushes Captain Guy on, and even in retrospect, after almost all of his companions have been killed as a result of his enthusiasm, he is satisfied that he has helped to open the Antarctic up "to the eye of science" (Com, III, 178). But redeemed science, as in Eureka, depends upon the destruction of individuals. All through the Antarctic adventure, Pym observes constantly and closely; he becomes both a botanist and a zoologist, as if on a bizarre Wilkes Expedition. Toward the end of the journey, at Tsalal, he has the opportunity to do a little anthropology as well. Who are the blacks who so nearly end the voyage to the South Pole? The critical tradition - fostered by Bonaparte, Levin, and Fiedler - has been to see in them the images of blacks remembered from Poe's southern past. But Naturphilosophie can translate social-psychological problems into philosophical allegory: The natives may stand for extreme, destructive empiricism and Baconian historicide, which Poe would not have been likely to associate with the blacks he remembered. The islanders are a reprise of Old Testament consciousness that, beginning with Parker's sacrifice, the book has transcended. The King is Tsalemon or Psalemoun: Both versions of his name contain "Salem," short for Jerusalem, where his namesake, Solomon, and David (the psalm man, type of Christ) reigned. In order to return to the nineteenth century, we must go on to wonder what, in idealistic terms, is old in Old Testament consciousness. The chief of the natives is Too-wit (certainly a pun on the scholar's "to wit," as well as a condemnation of excessive cleverness - the blacks have "Too-wit at their head" [Com, III, 211]). They seem stupid but are in fact surprisingly "systematic," and their work shows a treacherous "degree of order"; they are completely analytic, seeking to "divide [the whites'] numbers" (Com, III, 194, 195-6, 188). They are, in short, not idealists; they analyze rather than synthesize, they are and wish to be isolated from the world, which is why Poe arranges for them never to have seen any part of the universe as a mirror. They are Baconians, recognized from the view of an apparently convinced idealist: the island of The New Atlantis is Bensalem; the scientific society is Salomon's House; Jews live there happily in anticipation of their New Jerusalem. Poe's islanders are locked in present time as well as space. NuNu from Klock-klock (Poe's village-clock anticipates Vondervotteimittiss in "The Devil in the Belfry") dies as Pym and Peters sail beyond the Old Testament and Baconian "Old Time" into eternity.87 But eschewing Bacon is not, alas, avoiding science: We need to ask science what happens to Pym and Peters literally, even as we condemn

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Baconian science. The phenomenon that ends the narrative makes its appearance with a decisive clue: A high range of light gray vapour appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks, now darting from east to west, now from west to east, and again presenting a level and uniform summit - in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis. The average height of this vapour, as apparent from our station, was about twenty-five degrees. (Col, III, 238)

Pym is correct in his allusion to the northern lights. Poe bases his description on Dick's account: "It generally appears to rise from a kind of dark cloud or collection of vapours, which runs along from the north to the east and west, and is elevated from 10 to 20 or 30 degrees above the horizon."88 Dick also quotes a description of the aurora australis darkness comes from light, and light from darkness, at the southern pole also. Yet Dick does not present his description with any sense that it has philosophical interest, let alone that it contradicts an axiom. Purer science philosophy intervenes, however, creating out of the hazy science and philosophy of Pym the clairvoyant science philosophy of Eureka allowing us to see the nature-philosophical justification of the arrival, in Pym, at the idealist's unified polarity at the same moment as the arrival at the earth's pole. More specifically: First empiricist and then idealist science philosophy intervenes. In Eureka, two of the axioms that Poe criticizes are "there cannot be antipodes" and "darkness cannot proceed from light." Harry Levin sees that Poe has unsettled them both in Pym.H) Yet Poe almost certainly gets the antipodes example, as well as the topic itself, from the Logic (1843), which comes after Pym. Of course, Poe quarrels with Mill, for reasons of temperament, politics, and professional jealousy. The important point is that Poe extracts from the Logic passages that serve to turn Pym into philosophical discourse retroactively from Eureka, just as Poe takes from the Logic passages that explicitly serve to turn the detective stories into philosophical treatises. (Just after Mill weakens the vera causa criterion by the example of the judicial inquiry, he suggests a good scientific example: the nebular hypothesis. No wonder Poe felt empowered to use Laplace to justify Dupin.) Two years after the publication of the Logic, Humboldt's Cosmos began to be published in translation. Humboldt had spent a lifetime pursuing his interest in magnetic storms; in Cosmos, he describes the aurora borealis, and the aurora australis as well, noting about the latter phenomenon that "dark rays shot upwards from an arch which was directed from east to west."90 Dark rays! Reading this, it must have come to Poe again that Pym could be turned into philosophy retroactively: The magnetic nature of the terminal phenomenon of Pym is what connects the

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geographer's South Pole to the Naturphilosoph's polarity, since the conception is based on the polarity of the magnet. The Eurekan project, it appears, is to turn the disunified Pym (emblem of Poe's disunified career) into coherent science philosophy, a document for intellectual history. The analysis has taken an odd turn. We have been using Eurekan Naturphilosophie to suggest intellectual-historical solutions to Pyrns cruxes; but we have ended by showing that two events of intellectual history essential to the production of Eureka were not available at the time of Pym. Perhaps the intellectual reading of Pym is a mirage. I have said that black and white are at the base of Poe's polarity in the narrative. John Carlos Rowe denies it: "Neither doubles of each other nor polar opposites, white and black constitute one of several binary pairs transformed by the narrative into metaphors for metaphysical and psychic difference." In one sentence, Derrida supplements Hegel: Writing once again is credited with infecting idealist science. In fact, Pym is Rowe's emblem for the undoing of two centuries of criticism in which he regrets the persistence of the "familiar romantic paradigm of Bildung as the dialectical unfolding of oppositions that ultimately intends and is governed by a unifying telos." Eureka does, it would appear, reveal just such a dialectic and telos. But Rowe admits that Poe "would hesitate at [the] unexpected swerve in his metaphysical project" that Rowe gives it.91 It is more than a simple difference of interpretation. Rowe would refuse any sort of intellectual history in principle, since all historicisms "conventionalize the work by effectively reintegrating it into the dominant rhetoric of its cultural period, which is precisely what the text had attempted to violate in the first place." But on this theoretical point, it seems to me, Rowe is weak. The telltale word is "attempted." Curiously, Rowe thinks that an author, despite what he attempts, is "inevitably constrained by . . . historical and linguistic determinants." So what is the basis for Rowe's loyalty to an authorial intention that the text may not manifest? How does Rowe know about it? On the other hand, if the text does, in some degree, manage to burst out of its period, then it is only fair to suppose that the intellectual historian can burst out of his or her own. But Rowe thinks that the historicist critic who claims to be able to treat another period is "always already determined by the rhetoric of his or her social environment."92 It turns out that it is the fact that every critic can only impose his or her preconceptions that entitles Rowe, so he argues, to impose his Derridean ones. If Rowe knows that the text is trying to break loose from its period, then he must have some knowledge of the period - intellectual history is possible. If the text is trying and succeeding, then so might the intel-

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lectual historian's (though it would be wrong). If the text is trying and necessarily failing, then intellectual history is closer to the truth than intertextual criticism (though it would be impossible). By attempting his double argument against historicism (it imposes preconceptions on the unrealizable past, and it integrates texts into a repressive past), Rowe manages a (paradoxical) justification of intellectual history. I do not bring up Rowe at the climactic moment of the Poe chapter merely to have a controversy. I believe that the peculiar difficulties that authors have with science inevitably are duplicated in the peculiar difficulties of literary histories, and these have to be faced. So I end with Pym, between "Sonnet - To Science" and Eureka, at the opening moment of an American discussion of Schelling and Hegel, to make the intellectual situation as problematic, as it can be. One way - not his own - to make sense of Rowe's contradictory remarks and to take the paradox out of his unwilling apology for historicism is to admit that literary history and intellectual history are skewed. The availability of Pym to Rowe's intertextual project, or to any other (read Pym with the Puritan captivity narrative, "The Bear," and Henderson the Rain-King), suggests the nature of textual history, whether this means a history of texts or history conceived textually. On the other hand, the availability of Pym to intellectual history reflects literature's dual historical nature. What a disciplinary intellectual history can preeminently do is register, by means of a split reading, the way in which a book may be "constrained b y . . . historical . . . determinants" yet still "violate" "the dominant rhetoric of its cultural period." Rowe's system is, in one important way, superior to mine. To take Poe's Pym out of living literary history and file it in the library under "Naturphilosophie" is to kill it. The first statement of Poe's literary negotiation with science is about science and history: "Science - true daughter of Old Time thou art." Science destroys its past. The burden of this chapter is that Poe's corpus, created out of an opportunity in the problemsituation that might have absorbed careers such as his own, but finally liberated from that problem for purposes such as Rowe's, is undead.

HA WTHORNE'S TECHNOLOGY

THE ANXIETIES OF ALIENATION

Twice-Told Tales has very few men of science - Aylmer, Rappaccini, and the virtuosi of "The Hall of Fantasy" populate Mosses From an Old Manse - but it does have Doctor Cacaphodel of "The Great Carbuncle." Is Cacaphodel a scientist? This is the sort of question that turns up frequently in Hawthorne criticism: Is Aylmer himself a scientist? Rappaccini himself? We will not get very far in appraising Hawthorne's relation to science if we shirk the issue. But in this case, there is a very good reason for shirking it. It was in 1840 that Whewell decided that the men of inductive science needed a collective name, and made up the epithet "scientist" for them. Twice-Told Tales was published in 1837, before there was any such thing. This is more than an accident of nomenclature, though Whewell proposed the term "scientist" nonchalantly: "We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist." That is all Whewell urged on behalf of the coinage, but in fact, the scientist's right to the appellation had been only recently earned by a momentous historical development that Whewell's book exists to theorize. There were scientists (not just, say, chemists and astronomers) not because the discipline was becoming less specialized, but because there had emerged a "science" whose success in discovering definite truths could be analyzed across a considerable spectrum of specializations. "Astronomy and Geology, Mechanics and Chemistry, Optics and Acoustics, Botany and Physiology, are each recognized as large and substantial collections of undoubted truths." Some truths still belong to nonscientists, but they "have not yet been fixed by means of a distinct and permanent phraseology, and sanctioned by universal reception, and formed into a connected system, and traced through the steps of their gradual discovery and 121

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establishment, so as to make them instructive examples of the nature and progress of truth in general."1 The criteria of scientificity culminate with a historical demarcation: A scientist is a member of a community whose intellectual progress is exemplary. The attractiveness of Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences is that it makes philosophy of science an abstraction from history of science - enough time having elapsed since Bacon so that science as a continuous field of inductive truths might possess a history. Though Whewell proposes "scientist" by analogy to "artist," there is something not quite egalitarian to his disciplinary sense. The passe expression "man of science," Hawthorne's perennial term, is not merely awkward; it is a correlative of "man of letters," an expression appropriate to a prespecialized, preprofessionalized intellectual territory. In 1837, the professional scientists were just at the point of separating themselves once and for all from the amateurs.2 In 1837, furthermore, science was tentatively asserting its theoretical independence from invention and its value apart from it. On the other hand, science, which had shed hermetic magic at around the turn of the seventeenth century, seemed in America in the 1830s and 1840s to be slipping back into magic; mesmerism, for example, is degraded magic, the usual term for "degraded magic" being "pseudoscience." All of these liminal events (in both directions) were useful to Hawthorne, theorist of thresholds, whose imagination connected the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries anyway. The disciplinary strategy was always to read the uncertainty of the border of science with technology and amateur science as the permeability of the border with (applied and pure) magic. In this connection, we notice that the disciplinary status of Cacaphodel is ambiguous: Is he a scientist or a magician? "Oh, wretch, regardless of the interests of science!" he cries at the Aged Seeker, who merely wants to lie down in a cavern with the carbuncle, to die in its embrace. Cacaphodel, a far more ambitious seeker, wants to "crown [his] scientific reputation" with his analysis of the gem. His routine plan is to grind the stone to powder, dissolve it in acid, melt it in a crucible, and set it on fire with a blowpipe - the climax of the operation is the publication of his results.3 On the other hand, Cacaphodel is generally referred to as the "alchymist." And though the term "scientist" was not available to Hawthorne as an alternative, the term "chemist," in the modern sense, was. Why the magical and not the scientific denomination? Hawthorne may intend only a satire: The ancient title is invested with mystery and dignity, as the ludicrous Cacaphodel is not. But if there is nothing of the alchemist about Cacaphodel, then why is he drawn particularly to the Great Carbuncle for his research, as the alchemist to gold? Since the carbuncle


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makes gold seem like dross in comparison (Works, IX, 155), the search for its secret would seem to be a higher alchemy. Yet again: Hawthorne finally asserts that Cacaphodel's experiments work just as well with granite (Works, IX, 164). Cacaphodel is set down deliberately on the magic-science border; the ambiguity, in fact, is unavoidable from the beginning of the story, when we are told in passing that the doctor's researches are in "chemistry and alchymy" (Works, IX, 151). The satire is blurred: Cacaphodel is conceivably ridiculous because scientific or ridiculous because unscientific. At the beginning of his career, Hawthorne is already trifling with intellectual history; he is playing disciplinary games for disciplinary advantages. Far off, however, from the magic-science boundary is the Cynic. The Cynic, unlike all the other characters of the tale, does not believe in the Great Carbuncle, and he wishes to justify his disbelief. Is he the representative of modern scientific materialism? Hawthorne, as he tells us in "Sketches From Memory" in Mosses, learned of the Great Carbuncle on a trip into the interior of New England; among the party was a mineralogist, a "man of science." Though the mineralogist is not quoted on the subject of the carbuncle, in the middle of Hawthorne's discussion of it we are told that the result of the scientist's extensive search for the "Silver Hills" causes him to doubt their existence (Works, X, 429). On the one hand is something like a scientist (Cacaphodel), desirous of searching out the supernatural and mastering it; on the other is something like a scientist (the Cynic) who denies its possibility. The Cynic is as despicable as Cacaphodel is laughable: "He was one of those wretched and evil men, whose yearnings are all downward to the darkness, instead of Heavenward, and who, could they but extinguish the lights which God hath kindled for us, would count the midnight gloom their chiefest glory" (Works, IX, 157). Yet the gross materialism of the Cynic would seem more attractive if the nonmaterial world were represented not by a splendid and benign but a dark and vengeful God - if what the Cynic were blind to was not radiance but rather madness and sin. Hawthorne, when he is done with The Scarlet Letter, creates a series of characters as follows: Holgrave, who is happier forgetting the magical and diabolical past; Coverdale, who is less anxious in his commonsense ignorance than in his dangerous knowledge (the Cynic refers to the Carbuncle as "humbug," which is Coverdale's scientistic word for the Veiled Lady phenomenon); and Kenyon, who is both naturally and willfully ignorant in the face of sin and crime. This is a line, if not of men of science, at least of men in the age of science. The Cynic evolves into an (only skeptical) mechanist when Hawthorne craves a respectable ignorance. If this is true, then Hawthorne is in one way similar to Poe: He begins

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by disdaining a (Cacaphodelian or cynical) variety of science, and comes to see in another (skeptical) variety an answer to his personal and literary needs. But Hawthorne's initial dissociation from science is at once more violent and more timorous than Poe's. Poe merely scorns science, trusting that we will accept his assumption of comfortable superiority to it. Hawthorne tries to inject all that he most abhors in himself (his own sadistic curiosity or blackest atheism) into his scientists. This amounts to another important representation of science: not as a desert inhospitable to beauty, but as a kind of Australia for transporting the criminal element in an author's psyche. The tactic is convenient, but it has its drawbacks. The scientist thus imbued with sadistic curiosity or despair will inevitably look more like a magician or a cynic than a scientist. Science (formerly regarded as a variety of predatory ignorance) finally wins over Poe's Faustian, Gothic imagination. Conversely, by the time of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's own Faustian, Gothic imagination comes to find in science (formerly regarded as Faustian and Gothic) a relief, which is another standard use of science in the Gothic. So thoroughly is Hawthorne duplicitous, so inevitably is it the case that Hawthorne must simultaneously appease and distance science, that he is willing to risk alienating only partially his criminality to another discipline, rather than call a chemist a chemist (not an alchemist) and a mineralogist a mineralogist (not a cynic). Why not call a chemist a chemist and a mineralogist a mineralogist? Hawthorne cannot forsake his own era quite so easily, nor is it in his own best interest, because the magician and the cynic must return, in Hawthorne's three novels about his own time, with magic domesticated into invention and cynicism softened by the scientific age into skepticism. Criticism concerning Hawthorne's relation to science is revealingly contradictory and self-contradictory. Randall Stewart asserts that, for Hawthorne, scientists "painted too bright a picture; they underestimated the human difficulties"; three pages later, his example of a character whose attitude is too "exclusively scientific" is Ethan Brand.4 But Brand is no Aylmer, whose murderously analytic behavior happens at the same time to be naively optimistic. Is science equal, for Hawthorne, to dangerous mechanization? One critic notes Hawthorne's tendency (in "Chiefly About War Matters" and elsewhere) to equate science and mechanics, concluding that Hawthorne despises science (he does not say "technology") because "machines threatened to replace men or to reduce their humanity."5 Or is it equal, as another critic believes, to laughable Cacaphodelian magic? "Hawthorne lived through the age of Lyell and Asa Gray and into that of Darwin and Huxley, but science remained for him a matter related to


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magic and alchemy, not to be taken seriously - rather to be condemned. " 6 That Hawthorne might need to double science in order to travesty it so that Cacaphodel and the Cynic usefully personify its ludicrous and demonic aspects - is a hypothesis critics are unwilling to take up. Or is science science? Hawthorne, argues a third critic, "presents a devastating indictment of modern science [Lyell's and others']. In Aylmer's belief that it was possible to discover 'the secret of creative force' or perfection itself there is the equivalent presumption that marked scientific thought in Hawthorne's day."7 "The Great Carbuncle" is apparently not the only story that causes problems in deciding who are the scientists and who are not, though most readers simplify the matter arbitrarily enough. Critics who do see the demarcation instability call it a muddle and hold Hawthorne responsible. Martin Green is the modern spokesman of this line: "When the stories deal with science, inventions, or magic, for instance, we find a mismating of intellectual categories which seems to imply a startling lack of understanding." His favorite example is "The Artist of the Beautiful": Green will not acknowledge the possibility of a model butterfly that is (1) "the result of deep study of butterflies" (a triumph of science), (2) mechanical (a triumph of invention), and (3) responsive to "thought waves" and the "spiritual quality in a person" (a magical creation).8 Hawthorne may be mixed up, but not as much as modern critics. At any rate, the source of the confusion is neither authorial nor scholarly ineptitude - the source is science. Or, rather, the origin of the problem is in the way science presented itself in the American 1830s. Much more than any other scientist, it was Benjamin Silliman, through his distinguished periodical The American Journal of Science and the Arts, who offered

Americans an American sense of what it meant to be an American scientist for the first time. Even Hawthorne was an occasional reader. What Silliman wished to promote in America was a picture of science at its most pious, which had always previously meant at its most Baconian. Surprisingly, Silliman's strategic modesty involved him in quite laughable efforts of pseudoscience. Silliman justifies an article on self-moving rocks as if he were keeping science democratic: "we have concluded to let the thing take its chances with the public, without in any way committing ourselves to the truth of the opinions entertained." A "Journal" article on unicorns is justified with religious humility: "we shall not be able to fathom the design of the Creator by furnishing Him with our ideas."9 The unexpected effect is that the piety of American science may make it particularly amenable to magical presumption. The paradox serves Edgar Allan Poe, so that his Faustian, megalomaniacal, magical science can pose as modest doxology. On the other hand, it will haunt Hawthorne's search for a science that serves his purposes: To be useful in

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ridding the world of guilt, science has to be so disciplinarily imperious as to threaten the artist himself. If Hawthorne mismated intellectual categories, then so did Silliman and his journalists. Magic (or pseudoscience) was one uncertain border of science; the other was invention. Many of Silliman's writers argued the dependence of invention on science, while several complicated the issue by asserting, with more justice, the dependence of science on invention ("the earlier generation did; the later explained that it had been possible to do"). There were a few disciplinary radicals who insisted (with misplaced clarity, like Martin Green's) that science and invention had nothing in common ("the two kinds of purposes can hardly exist together in the mind").10 If the scientists and science philosophers were not close to a consensus on how to demarcate science and technique, how much can we expect of Hawthorne? The shrewd rejoinder might be that scientists did indeed know the distinction between science and invention. (Invention was largely ascientific tinkering in the first half of the nineteenth century.) The obvious explanation of why there would be a (non-)disciplinarian impulse to fudge the issue is that the democratic case for applied science is always easier than the case for pure science. The argument depends on the existence of applied science as a category. If this were all there was to it, then Hawthorne could be blamed for not seeing through the scientists, for ingenuously mismating the categories that the scientists strategically mismated. But the primary scientific undertaking of the day was the attempt to find the unity of force, the same project that I have already suggested tended to make many empirical scientists sound like Naturphilosophen. This attempt took place peculiarly in the continuous provinces of science, machinery, and metaphysics. The peculiarity of the situation was not so much a problem as an opportunity for the artist, but the artist did not make up the situation. The two great science stories of Mosses From an Old Manse are "The Birthmark" (1843) and "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844). Both were written after Whewell's coining of the term "scientist"; nevertheless, there is confusion in both cases about whether science is in question. "The Birthmark" is the locus classicus of the Hawthorne-science controversy. R. B. Heilman's postbomb article (1949) is perhaps the surest statement of the position that Hawthorne is an antiscience humanist. But Alfred S. Reid's discovery that Aylmer is patterned on Sir Kenelm Digby, a Platonist virtuoso, led him to charge (in the era of the space race) that "Hawthorne is being 'used' by humanist critics to express a strong surge of hostility toward science."11 Both sides manage to agree that science is definite and monolithic; it follows that to discover that Alymer is a


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Platonist is to prove that he is no scientist, and thus to absolve science in general of his crime. Both sides have their points. Aylmer is introduced to us, on the one hand, as a "man of science." Though the word "science" has an ancient as well as a modern meaning, Aylmer is from the very beginning identified as a modern: "In the latter part of the last century, there lived a man of science" (Works, X, 36). Perhaps Aylmer is even more up-todate than that; the marvels with which he amuses his wife Georgiana have much in common with the diorama, the daguerreotype, and the stereoscope.12 On the other hand, Aylmer's science is profound: He may be a "man of science" but no "scientist." "You have deep science!" Georgiana tells him. "Georgiana, you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science" (Works, X, 41), he tells her back. Deep science, such as Chillingworth explicitly practices, will always be black magic to Hawthorne: If in Poe the advantage of superficiality is that one is trying not to drown, in Hawthorne the advantage is that one abhors one's own passion to penetrate. ("Deep into the heart of science" equals "deep in the heart of Georgiana.") We are told of the "enchantment" of Georgiana's pleasure dome; Aylmer refers to his own volumes, albeit smilingly, as "sorcerer's books" (Works, X, 49); he admits his belief in the possibility of the elixir vitae. Aylmer is a modern anachronism. What is going on? If we reject the argument that Hawthorne was so ahistorical as to place the height of alchemy just before his birth, then we are left with the presumption that what critics dispute is a contradiction not meant to be canceled. Hawthorne deliberately focuses our attention on the boundary of magic and science, or perhaps on the boundary of "applied magic" (Frances Yates's term) and applied science. In Aylmer's library are works by "Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head." Hawthorne might have read about some of these figures in Whewell's prehistory of science (from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century). Agrippa, for example, "declaimed against the conditions of the sciences in his time"; nevertheless, "his views of the nature of science. . . are too imperfect and vague to allow us to rank him among the reformers of science." "Paracelsus put himself forwards as a reformer in philosophy" but was "in most respects, a shallow and impudent pretender."13 The famous friar is Roger Bacon, whom Whewell respects more than the rest as a harbinger of science; Hawthorne's game here is to allude perversely only to Bacon's legendary reputation as a magician. Hawthorne is fully aware of their equivocal status; he writes that they "stood in advance of their centuries" but were "imbued with some of their [age's] credulity." Then Hawthorne plays his delicate game by moving the

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ambiguity one (revolutionary) century closer. Aylmer has collected "the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders, or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought" (Works, X, 48). Hawthorne is toying with scientific history: Though he seems to posit the story in modern times, at the end of the eighteenth century, its historical allusion is to the beginning of the seventeenth, before the end of the potency of magic yet after the revolution of modern science. Similarly, if the Cynic is a modern mineralogist and the alchemist is a modern chemist, both these disciplines have been removed two centuries. Norman Mailer, in his relation to science a student of Hawthorne, will write as if the basis of the Apollo 11 moonshot were in seventeenthcentury Massachusetts. The manipulation has its historical pertinence but serves a disciplinary strategy: Both Hawthorne and Mailer manage to make every confrontation of modern science and their own art into a version (or inversion) of the confrontation of seventeenth-century science and Renaissance magic. The artist's comment on a recent moment in scientific history is always a challenge to the scientific appropriation of history itself. Hawthorne's game, however, is not entirely willful; he is, in fact, carrying out his strategy by means of the same problem-situation that Poe exploits. Hawthorne's use of "the latter part of the last century" for his setting puts the action directly at the incipience of Naturphilosophie. When Hawthorne says in the first sentence that Aylmer is an "eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy," we may specifically infer that he is a Naturphilosoph. The elements of the problem-situation are all there in the first paragraph. Aylmer's love of Georgiana is a "spiritual affinity. . . more attractive than any chemical one." On the other hand: "In those days, when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity, and other kindred mysteries of nature, seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman" (Works, X, 36). Aylmer was a chemist in an era when chemistry was revealing a deep pining of matter for matter, and when materialists were working with the apparent spirituality of electricity, as Aminadab with Aylmer. This is the scientific atmosphere Schelling breathed. The analogy of chemical and spiritual affinity, the analogy of chemistry and love, is pure Naturphilosophie. Hawthorne has found in the nature-philosophic ambience the possibility of pretending to talk about science and pretending to talk about pre-science, without choosing. He is in two eras at once, dealing with two intellectual phenomena. Simultaneously, then, he can perform three maneuvers: He can condemn modern science from within scientific his-


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tory; he can condemn magic from within scientific history; and - most usefully for an artist - he can condemn modern science from without scientific history. The first two possibilities allow Hawthorne to act as a modern, either (1) to censure or (2) to celebrate the progress of chemistry, depending on whether Aylmer embodies it or represents the wizardry that should have been left behind. The last possibility is equal to saying (3) that scientific history is really magical history continued by another name - that past-destroying scientific history does not exist. 1. As an artist, Hawthorne has certain despicable qualities. In "The Prophetic Pictures," the Hawthornean painter seems to predict, but in fact creates, a husband's uxoricidal impulse. Aylmer, who is so concerned with Georgiana's trivial imperfection that, like the painter, he does not recognize his own deep spiritual flaw, is himself the direct if unwitting murderer of his wife. The solitary, pathological, even homicidal artist is transformed into a scientist, an act of disciplinary and personal purification. But if the process is disciplinarily cleansing, it is also disciplinarily weak. Georgiana, whose birthmark is an imperfection that is nevertheless sensually beautiful, stands for the aesthetic sense in modern jeopardy. I have said that science, in order to rid the artist of guilt, must be so strong as to threaten the life of art itself; "The Birthmark" is disciplinary allegory. 2. The scientist, of course, owns so many Hawthornean qualities that one can hardly believe he is a scientist. Aylmer's enterprise is compared to Pygmalion's (Kenyon, the mechanical artist of The Marble Faun, is an anti-Pygmalion, reducing, as Miriam says, living flesh to inert matter). As a Naturphilosoph, he is typically Romantic: "ardent, ambitious, imaginative." Finally, in a phrase, Hawthorne makes the stratagem by which he transfers his characteristics to Aylmer so transparent that we can see the maneuver as it happens: "Perhaps every man of genius, in whatever sphere, might recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer's journal" (Works, X, 49). Aylmer's journal is an analogue of Hawthorne's. Famously, the contradictory story comes out of contradictory journal entries: "A person to be the death of his beloved trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so high and holily"; "A person to be in possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely" (Works, VIII, 165). Both fail to suppress the sex of the agent, but the second manages to suppress the sex of the victim. The first is an apology; if the story had turned out to be as unambiguous as this, there would have been no point in implicating science. The second is not; only at the moment Hawthorne decided to involve science was he freed to admit the sex of the victim. But Haw-

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thorne is not certain how far he wants to go in alienating Aylmer's qualities. Insofar as Hawthorne is Aylmer, Aylmer is not a scientist but a wizard, and is equivalent to Hawthorne's wizard-artist of "The Prophetic Pictures." 3. The corollary of making science magical is making the artist modern. If science is magical, then the scientific historicide cannot occur, and as a consequence, neither can science; but Hawthorne can pose as a modern who has managed to get beyond seventeenth-century superstitions. He is not, he implicitly claims, like the Puritan who seized upon science as the best way to purify society. What drives Aylmer is not modernity but futurity; the hope of futurity is spiritual perfection and has to be sought in the alchemical past. Hawthorne accepts the imperfections of the material world in the modern spirit, and modernity is not scientific. It is a nice stratagem: The artist, not entirely cavalierly, but rather using the problem-situation and the scientific tone of the day, manages to return even progress-adoring science to the intersection of the Renaissance and modernity, nullifying modernity and freeing himself to play the modern at the same time. The only problem is that, despite this apparently nineteenth-century willingness to accept Georgiana's imperfections as the sign of her alluring materiality, Hawthorne gives that role in the story to Aminadab, who is materialistic to the point of bestiality. The presence of Aminadab tends to undermine the entire disciplinary and historical strategy, because it forces us to identify Hawthorne with Aylmer, if with anyone, after all. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hawthorne finds a more effective way to estrange the scientist from the author by a modification of the basic three-character structure. If Hawthorne is alienating not only science but, by means of science, a version of himself, then the process does not work if the scientist is not Hawthornean. The predicament is, of course, that if the scientist is too Hawthornean, science is not alienated. Rappaccini, in what he supposes is his triumphant moment, when he has captured Giovanni for his daughter and his vision, is specifically compared to an artist: "As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary, and finally be satisfied with his success" (Works, X, 126). Rappaccini's science can be compared to a more pertinent form of art. We are told that Rappaccini, even in his youth, could not have manifested much "warmth of heart." Baglioni tells Giovanni that Rappaccini's look is "as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature's warmth of love." We are referred to Hawthorne's ironic self-description in the preface of his story: M. de l'Aubepine's allegories


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"steal away the human warmth out of his conception" (Works, X, 95, 107, 92). What this means is that Hawthorne again confronts the murderousness of his allegory, and foists it on his scientists in nearly full view, by transparent and clumsy mechanisms. Insofar as Rappaccini is destructive, his productions are artificial rather than artistic; his flowers glow "with only an evil mockery of beauty" (Works, X, 110). Rappaccini, rather like M. de l'Aubepine but perhaps unlike Hawthorne - who has created the French artist to make the identification with Rappaccini one step harder - is a sham artist. But insofar as Rappaccini is murderous, he is a great scientist. When Giovanni asks, "Are there many men capable of so spiritual a love of science?" (Works, X, 100), he is implicitly comparing Rappaccini to the uxoricidal but noble Aylmer. Even Rappaccini's rival, Baglioni, concedes that though Rappaccini has offered his daughter "as the victim of his insane zeal for science," nevertheless he "is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. . . . Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing" (Works, X, 119).14 Hawthorne's hope is that he can make the personally damning but professionally expiatory move of identifying the most dire, but (here is the crucial if dubious move) the least truly artistic, aspect of his art as the very essence of science. There is, however, a real superiority of "Rappaccini's Daughter" to "The Birthmark" in terms of disciplinary cleansing, marked by the substitution into "The Birthmark" constellation (pathological scientist, disciple, sacrificial woman) of a new star: Giovanni instead of Aminadab. Giovanni establishes by his mere presence, in conjunction with the shift of heroine from wife to daughter, a complete and potentially healthy and procreative second generation, whose opportunities for the benefits of ignorance are destroyed by the first. There are no scions of the fathers in "The Birthmark." The potential for conjugal happiness there is destroyed by the husband himself. A step toward freeing Hawthorne to look for the possibility of a fictional happy ending, such as he writes for The House of the Seven Gables, is to locate the source of sadistic experimentation in the patriarchal past. Rappaccini kills his daughter, not his wife. (More accurately, responsibility for the death of the daughter is spread among several men, most of all two fathers - Rappaccini and Baglioni - least of all, we are permitted to believe, the unwitting Giovanni.) In this respect, Rappaccini is similar to Ethan Brand, though Brand does not kill his own daughter, but another man's: "That daughter, from whom [the "white haired father"] so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale; the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, ab-

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sorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process" (Works, XI, 94). Brand looks upon all of humanity as "the subject of his experiment" (Works, XI, 99).15 As we approach The Scarlet Letter, the magical scientists become destructive fathers in Hawthorne's fictions as Hawthorne retreats to filial passivity. As a strategic move, Hawthorne substitutes for the sexual politics model of disciplinary relations the family romance model. For the sake of disciplinary expiation, he prefers scientists to resemble punishing fathers (like his ancestors) rather than probing husbands (like, after 1842, himself). In the process - this leads to the necessity of further maneuvers - art emerges as heroine rather than male villain. In line with converting the scientist from a husband to a father, Hawthorne modifies the strategy of "The Birthmark" by moving "Rappaccini's Daughter" into the indefinite past. Further, he moves the location to Catholic Italy. This goes very far toward setting Hawthorne up as the yea-saying American freed of the magical experimentation of the Catholic, nay-saying past, as if the nineteenth century, once liberated from science, would be free to become modern. This historical outrage is admirable, but it has a flaw, which is that Hawthorne is most perspicacious when he conceives of science and technology (as in "The Celestial Railroad") as a Puritan heresy. Hawthorne has transported science too far away in "Rappaccini's Daughter": The qualities he wishes to flee he can assign to science, but the science he wishes tofleeis in fact Protestant science, the science of his own heritage. "Rappaccini's Daughter" solves Hawthorne's personal, professional, and historical problems simultaneously only by blatantly falsifying them all. The effect of moving science to Italy is to go too far in denying that it is the correlative of Hawthorne's deadly allegories. In the oscillation, which turns out to be logically inevitable and endless, given the predicament, the next key figure is Chillingworth, the scientist and naturalist of The Scarlet Letter's moralized, spiritualized, and anthropomorphized nature. Science in such a world is magical rather than mechanistic; Chillingworth is psychologist, physician, and magician all in one. He is a "man of science" (Works, I, 123), but we are inclined to believe that the ancient scientia is in question. We know that Chillingworth has studied alchemy and other magic arts, and that when he is most psychologically astute, his trenchancy may be compared to the alchemist's penetration into the essence of nature. "I shall seek this man . . . as I have sought gold in alchemy" (Works, I, 75). He has also picked up hints about magic from the Indians. Greater precision is possible: When we are told that Chillingworth is a Paracelsan, that he has known Sir Kenelm Digby (model of Aylmer) (Works, I, 72, 121), then we realize that he has been intentionally placed


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in the tradition of reforming mystics who were shading over into scientists and physicians. Ficino, for example, wrote for students who were liable to "grow ill or melancholy. This is because the nature of their occupations brings them under the influence of Saturn. . . [which is] inimical to the vital forces of life and youth." Ficino advised students "to avoid as far as possible plants, herbs, animals, stones, and the like belonging to Saturn, and to use and surround themselves with plants, herbs, animals, stones, people, belonging to the more fortunate, cheerful, and life-giving planets, of which the chief are Sol, Jupiter, and Venus." The saturnine scholar Dimmesdale needs Sol and Venus especially, but Chillingworth keeps him in contact with the saturnine plants: "it was observed that he gathered herbs, and the blossoms of wildflowers. . . like one acquainted with [their] hidden virtues" (Works, I, 121). Paracelsus himself, another prime example of the "magus as doctor," was "much influenced by Ficino" insofar as he operated "not only on the patients' bodies but on their imaginations"; he was a magician-psychologistphysician.16 Chillingworth is not a monster sui generis. Hawthorne once again plants us on the boundary of magic and science, but the importance of the move in this case is that the frontier is convincingly relocated to Puritan New England. Chillingworth is a sort of Cotton Mather, who himself lived on the boundary of magic and science, a Newtonian believer in witches. Furthermore: 1. Though he was not a doctor, Mather proposed himself as the great spiritual-physical physician of The Angel o/Bethesda. 2. He was a correspondent of the Royal Society on the subject of psychosomatic diseases, believing in the "power of certain 'antipathies' or imaginations to affect the health of a person or, as in the case of a pregnant woman, to leave a physical mark upon the child." 3. He wrote to the Royal Society about "American medicinal plants, derived largely from Indian medicinal practices."17 Hawthorne, with good reason, located his Paracelsan magus in the Puritan world. He had more available scholarship than Poe's to identify the nature-philosophic version of nineteenth-century science as a sort of inverted Puritan science, so that Chillingworth would seem strange and familiar at once. The oddity is that Chillingworth is not merely a Mather avatar; he is also Rappaccini redux. If one point of Hawthorne's scientific stories is to take Hawthornean characteristics and estrange them professionally, then geographically, temporally, and finally doctrinally, so that his greatest scientist lives the farthest back, farthest away, and among Catholics, then The Scarlet Letter is a reversal. Dimmesdale's relation to Chilling-

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worth is more or less as filial as the relation of Giovanni to Rappaccini, but in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's identification with the son does not allow as easy a condemnation of the father. All of this makes Hawthorne not the modern American aloof from the European, Catholic, magical past but a direct descendant of the founders of modern science out of Renaissance magic. Hawthorne, as it turns out, does not try to shrug off science in The Scarlet Letter. In fact, nineteenth-century science is precisely all that Hawthorne has to put up against seventeenth-century science; there can no longer be any easy, unexamined sense in which Hawthorne simply is the modern, condemning science as if it were pre-Reformation magic. If the Renaissance magus works in a world in which the supernatural, the psychological, and the scientific are conjoined, the modern writer tries to live in a world in which they are disjoined. But it is preeminently science that demands and permits the disjunction. When the A appears in the Boston sky in "The Minister's Vigil," the alternative explanations trisect more discretely than in Wieland. There is the theological: "Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source." There is the psychological: The A might be "the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature" {Works, I, 154, 155). And there is the mechanicoscientific: The A "was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere" {Works, I, 153-4). This is the only explanation that will appeal to the "modern incredulity" that has previously refused to believe that Hester's A was "red-hot with infernal fire" {Works, I, 87-8). The incredulous modern is the amiable descendant of the Cynic in "The Great Carbuncle." One of the magazines the incredulous modern reads is "Silliman's Journal"; in an issue Hawthorne is known to have had in his possession is an article on Halley's comet, the prediction of which "liberated the human mind from those superstitious terrors, which. . . blazing stars had always excited."18 What magical science unites, only mechanical science can put asunder. Not that mechanical science does put the supernatural, psychological, and scientific world asunder in The Scarlet Letter, to believe that the meteor is exclusively a burning rock is not to enter Hawthorne's imaginative space. But neither is rejecting the explanation: Against the unities of magical science, Hawthorne can put up only the divisions of

THE PROBLEMS OF PREEMPTION

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mechanistic science, and within the divisions of mechanistic science Hawthorne can only insist on literary vacillation. In a country founded by the founders of modern science, Hawthorne comes to acknowledge, there can be no complete alienation of one's discomfiting traits by means of science; to ascribe them to scientists, who in the process are necessarily returned to the boundary of magic, is merely to give them to one's ancestors, from whom one inherits them. Hawthorne's ambiguity is largely the result of this disciplinary cul-de-sac. That literature has no epistemology or cosmology of its own - that in terms of intellectual history it must establish a position but can only have a secondary position - is, of course, a problem not uniquely Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's peculiar response to it, however, is to make no Poesque claim for art as the source of discipline-specific explanations, but rather as the explanandum itself of the intellectual world. He posits the embroidered A (as textile a text) as the thing to be interpreted, and then allows theology, psychology, and natural science to interpret it ineptly. Every attempt to assert that the A means just one thing is taken as allegory; once again, Hawthorne's own allegorizing is passed off as science, which drives art to undecidability. (If science is more powerful than art in interpreting the world, it is not more powerful in interpreting art precisely because of its power.) The key disciplinary point is that to save art - from his own allegorizing brutality foisted on science Hawthorne feminizes it as Hester's embroidery. We may see, in fact, in Hester's adultery an emblem of her art, and vice versa: She does not allow either herself or her A to be possessed by a single invariant signification. In Hawthorne this is a matter of disciplinary resistance. If the husband is a man of science, then art is the adulterous wife. But as a disciplinary maneuver, this loses the advantage of setting the disciplinary struggle in the seventeenth century, a benefit of which had been to free the son to invent a modernity safe for art. Science is projected onto the seventeenth century as if onto a mirror; the question of fathers and sons is reflected back as a question of husbands and wives. Making art an adulterous wife is playing into the moralistic hands of science, which, having taken art in marriage by means of the daguerreotype, will try to make it perfectly faithful. THE PROBLEMS OF PREEMPTION

Siegfried Giedion, in Mechanization Takes Command, quotes

Hawthorne's "The Old Manse" to illustrate the pleasantness of anthropocentric nature before the machine: "An orchard has a relation to mankind, and readily connects itself with matters of the heart. The trees possess a domestic character; they have . . . grown humanized."19 Nevertheless, when the universe reflects a tortured conscience, then the hu-

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manization of nature is a projected curse. The garden, tree, and chickens at the House of the Seven Gables are not better off for their connection with matters of the Pyncheon heart. Hawthorne will not underestimate the relief of mechanization for the children of Puritanism. The first issue of "Silliman's Journal" that Hawthorne is known to have read contains a long obituary of the mechanical Reverend John Prince, child of Puritanism, late pastor of the First Church of Salem perhaps Hawthorne checked the magazine out of the Salem Athenaeum to read it. His parents. . . were of Puritan descent, and, as was the case with all who worthily claimed that name, were careful to give their son a good education, and to impress upon his mind a reverent sense of religious truth and duty. His father being a mechanic, a hatter by trade, the son was directed to a similar pursuit. He was early bound out as an apprentice to a pewterer and tinman. The third sentence follows from the second, but is the second a non sequitur? Every time we hear of Dr. Prince's "thirst for knowledge," manifested in a distinguished lifetime of scientific-mechanical tinkering, we are instructed to remember his Puritan ancestors. Still, Dr. Prince was all benignity. He was, the eulogist believes, a " Christian [sic]; for he had the spirit of Christ, which is a spirit of gentleness, tenderness, and love." The lowercase is significant, for Dr. Prince is referred to as a "christian philosopher"; we think of two authors of books each called The Christian Philosopher - Cotton Mather and Poe's Thomas Dick: uppercase Christians who were not all gentleness, tenderness, and love. Hawthorne would have paid special attention to the inverse relationship of Prince's intellectual probing and his benevolence. His "thirst for knowledge. . . was invariably kept within the bounds of prudence, propriety, and good feeling. Probably no man ever lived more free from the charge of being a prier into other persons' affairs, or a tattler of their failings. He did not appear to have a sense to discern the private frailties or follies of men." "Prier" is a prime Hawthornean word; mechanical knowledge is superficial knowledge par excellence. All Prince's Puritan acuteness has been diverted from the rooting out of sin to the pursuit of a better air pump, an improved lucernal and solar microscope, a superior kaleidoscope and telescope stand. Prince was, in short, a "philosophical mechanician."20 Let mechanization take command. If technology is a kind of Puritan heresy, then the machine age might allow Hawthorne, as much as Prince, to shed his Puritan past in the only way it can be shed: by the means it provides. Mechanics solves a personal problem for Hawthorne; at the same time, it brings him to an aesthetic crisis.


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In The Scarlet Letter, the various ambiguities are not absolute, insofar as the purely mechanical-scientific explanations cannot be detached and credited. Obversely, in The House of the Seven Gables, the ambiguities are not absolute because the mechanical-scientific explanations are depended on (though not favored) for the book's claim to modernity. One assumes that the Maule curse can be understood as a supernatural affair. Or perhaps the Maule dominance of the Pyncheons is meant to be understood psychologically: "Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous" (Works, II, 26). The latter possibility hesitates twice: "It may be" and "altogether" hedge the assertion. There is the usual gray area between the supernatural and the psychological; psychology succeeds Naturphilosophie as the chief source of disciplinary hedging. But there is a third sort of explanation, mechanical-scientific and superficial, which wins our unthinking loyalty. When Holgrave informs us that "Old Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition [to cough blood and die during a moment of extreme tension] in the Pyncheon race" (Works, II, 304), he is telling us something that we believe, at least for the reason that it clearly exonerates Clifford. Our belief in it also keeps yet another real possibility from even rising to consciousness: that Holgrave, like perhaps his ancestor Maule, is a murderer of Pyncheons. A familial curse that had looked like a synecdoche of original sin is reduced to a question of medicine, in the Oliver Wendell Holmesian manner. Hawthorne's view would seem to be identified with Holgrave's ("the artist's"). His ambition is apparently to become specifically an artist of the mid-nineteenth century in America, which involves becoming a mechanical-scientific and superficial artist. The very idea seems designed to horrify Edgar Allan Poe. But Hawthorne attempts to abandon Poe's Gothic world, and even his Gothic science, to join the technological superficiality of the period around Poe's death and the writing of Seven Gables. Perhaps the best measure of the excitement is the growth of the "polytechnic idea" in American higher education at the end of the 1840s.21 Further, Prince Albert's invitation to the Great Exhibition of the Progress of Art and Science was recorded in Scientific American in the year Seven Gables was written, and the exhibition was held the year it was published. A less epochal event: In the year of the publication of the novel, a climactic scene of which inevitably takes place on a train, the Salem inventor Charles G. Page built a locomotive "using two of his electric engines, which, with all his improvements, were probably the best of that time."22

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Around the period of the Crystal Palace exhibition, furthermore, there was a flurry of propaganda to the effect that science and technology progressed together - that, in fact, they were embodiments of the same spirit. Only the correct metaphor for the relation (art is the child of science, the parent, the sister, and the handmaid) seems to have been in doubt. Two articles in the "Journal" on the Great Exhibition seek to cement the close but indefinite relationship: Scientists perhaps seized the opportunity to capitalize on dissatisfaction with America's showing at the Crystal Palace to stir up interest in science - the Sputnik ruse.23 Hawthorne knew the hypothesis of the intimacy of arts and science from two books he had read, Charles Babbage's On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures ("the arts and manufactures of the country are intimately connected with the progress of the severer sciences") and Jacob Bigelow's Elements of Technology (the sciences and arts "are so blended together, that it is impossible to make their separation complete"). It was Bigelow who popularized the word "technology" as the term for those arts that "particularly involve applications of science."24 The American propagandists for technology always made the point that it is democratic; and since Seven Gables is Hawthorne's most determined attempt to write a novel for the modern democracy, he justifies his mechanical explanations by the existence of democratic machines, of which the train is the standard example. The apparent relationship of science and mechanics may be more than a matter of professional propaganda; Hawthorne believed that scientists and technologists share in what he diagnoses (in imitation of Carlyle, whom he read) as a habit of mind that inevitably links machines on earth and celestial mechanics. Hawthorne's mechanical world is continuous from the mundane sphere to the heavens. There is the mechanical motion of the characters on the organ-grinder's wheel; the "little society," a disparate group "moved by the self-same impulse," parodies the train's society, "fifty human beings in close relation with [Hepzibah and Clifford], . . . and drawn onward by the same mighty influence." Both resemble the parade, a "broad mass of existence - one great life - one collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it" (Works, II, 163, 257, 165). Is the homogeneous spirit mechanical force? The organ and the train suggest it, and it is, in a passage that ascends from microcosm to macrocosm, suggested again: Clifford sees "an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here-and-there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle, the world [the parade also "rolls"], the end of whose journey is everywhere, and nowhere" (Works, II, 160). The final phrase returns us to the organgrinder figures, whose moneymaking, learning, kissing, and so forth are always ending but never consummated. Force is one, and it is mechanical.


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Machines were not merely the product of a scientific vision; they themselves produced one. The law of the conservation of force is an indirect result of the Industrial Revolution, but technology can do more than sponsor a local scientific hypothesis. Jacques Ellul, the most comprehensive critic of technology, seems at times to be writing commentary on the technological vision of Seven Gables: "more than science, which limits itself to explaining the 'how,' technique desacralizes because it demonstrates . . . that mystery does not exist. Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it."25 If Hawthorne appears to be participating in both phases - bringing mysteries to the light of day (his own constant metaphor) in Seven Gables and publicizing the ability of technology to subdue the supernatural (as the daguerreotype captures and domesticates magic) - it is not surprising. A book Hawthorne read (and whose title will help explicate Seven Gables), David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, does

precisely two things: It explains the old magic scientifically, and it promotes technology as the new, desacralized magic.26 Earlier in his book, Ellul defines "technique" (in order not to limit it to the science of machinery) as "the translation into action of man's concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it."27 It sounds like Hawthorne (or at least the Seven Gables narrator, the persona who speaks on behalf of placing alleged necromancies within a psychological system) in alliance with the clarifying and quantifying Phoebe Pyncheon. Hawthorne is trying out the advantages of living in the mechanical-scientific world - a world of perpetual movement, hence without origins and ends, hence without original and inherited sin or apocalyptic consummation. This is the world that he has discovered in Silliman, Babbage, Bigelow, and Brewster, and observed around him in Salem and elsewhere. Yet Hawthorne had always assumed that an artist is by definition antimechanical; in "Drowne's Wooden Image," the carver is specifically a "mechanical carver" with a "mechanical style" (Works, X, 319), except at the moment that he is transformed into an artist and a wizard. The magical vision is not given up capriciously in Seven Gables. The house is so clearly a body for the Pyncheon soul, the nature surrounding the house (the tree, the garden, the chickens) is so clearly moralized, and Clifford on the edge of his window feeling the magnetism of the world illustrates so unerringly the irrationality of the Imp of the Perverse that several commentators have noted how similar Seven Gables is to a Poe story.28 This is an odd claim to make so soon after announcing that the book seems designed to horrify Poe. The most one can do to make a

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consistent case about Seven Gables is observe that much of the language that implies the unity of spiritual and bodily spheres is used in the description of the past or its lingering. The "act" of one generation is a "germ" that "may and must produce good or evil fruit, in a far distant time"; "the moral diseases which lead to crime, are handed down from one generation to another" (Works, II, 6, 119). Yet Phoebe brings real fresh air and real sunshine into the house, and the formerly demoralized chickens are all the happier for being de-moralized in the new, stainless, mechanical present. The contradiction leads to a generic uncertainty, and whenever there is a generic problem, a disciplinary one is apt to be lurking. Hawthorne's famous preface makes an apology for a version of "romance" that does not forgo the pursuit of truth but requires an untethering from "minute fidelity. . . to the probable and ordinary." The preface, that is to say, resembles nothing so much as Poe's in Eureka, and science is again the pressure behind the subtle indirection. The subject of The House of the Seven Gables exactly puts the genre of the book into question - the book is a metaromance. It is the lingering of the past that is the condition of romance: If the past does not linger, if true "novelty" (Hawthorne's repeated term) exists, then the novel represents it. The novel is the form of long fiction for the age of the daguerreotype. What Hawthorne wishes to claim for the romance - the right to "manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture" (Works, II, 1) - is a late, desperate sentimentalization of what Benjamin famously called "aura." But the most famous crux of the romance (?) makes any simple historical sense impossible, and makes it impossible, therefore, to establish a clear generic claim. Hawthorne in his preface fastens onto his tale the lesson that "the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and. . . becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief" (Works, II, 2), yet he manages to write a novel (?) in which the present escapes its cursed heritage.29 Conversely, if this book is Hawthorne's strong attempt to write about and for the new mechanical world, how is it possible to explain Hawthorne's melancholy - shading off into despair and disgust - at the sight of the mechanical Hepzibah when her spirit has fled? She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the shopbell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague eyes about the shop; proffering them one article after another, and thrusting aside - perversely, as most of them supposed - the identical thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit. . . steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself, as best it may, with little more


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than the mechanism of animal life. It is like death, without death's quiet privilege; its freedom from mortal care. (Works, II, 66-7) Then there is the contempt that Hawthorne feels for another conjoining of the animal and mechanical: the monkey on the organ-grinder's instrument. But is its coin-collecting efficiency meant to distract us from what we would have thought about pretty Phoebe's? There are contradictory intentions in Seven Gables; the problem for Hawthorne is the disciplinary abjectness attendant upon using technology for the sake of a personal and professional approach to America. No comparably astute critic of mechanics is as alive as Hawthorne to the political, artistic, and humanitarian benefits of technology, psychological collectivization, and superficiality. The disciplinary gamble is that these benefits can be accrued without giving up the romance altogether; the odd lemma is that technology might be precisely the mediation of the romance and the novel. There is only one suggestion in the book that the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, spirit and matter, depths and surfaces, may be mediated, and the posited reconciliation is technological; I am thinking of Clifford's discussion of the railroad and telegraph. If Hawthorne cannot share Clifford's faith in the capacity of these machines to endorse a modern romance, then the book not only becomes anachronistic, it becomes incoherent. The train ride of Clifford and Hepzibah is therefore the crisis of the book, the place where novel and romance fuse or sever. Hawthorne's first impulse would be, as always, merely to fear or despise the new mechanical mode of travel, as he had in "The Celestial Railroad," in which the train's engine is "a sort of mechanical demon" managed by Apollyon (Works, X, 190). But Seven Gables represents an attempt to legitimate the oxymoronic celestial railroad as an emblem of the romance and novel reconciled. First, though, Hawthorne faces, if only obliquely, a more insidious question regarding the symbol of the train: Perhaps the train is the emblem of the ordinary rather than the demonic. Is not Phoebe, in her consuming desire to keep everything on "the well-worn track of ordinary life" (Works, II, 142), the real engineer of the train-world, not Apollyon? Hawthorne must demonstrate that the train is extraordinary before he can go on to claim that it is celestial. He must demonstrate, in particular, that the train symbolizes the way off the well-worn track - but in this unpromising endeavor, he is not alone. All Americans wished to see the train not as a sign and symbol of Jacques Ellul's technique - not as a closing down of possibilities in the interest of rote perfection - but as an emblem of the opening up of the world to novelty.

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Hawthorne is testing the value of the nineteenth-century cult of motion - the cult of change - vividly described by Giedion. Its first credo: Motion is valued apart from the question of arriving somewhere. Clifford's celebration of the idea of "livfing] everywhere, and nowhere" (Works, II, 261) recalls the earlier statement of the universal journey whose end "is everywhere and nowhere": The hermetic formula of divinity is no longer employed to describe infinite size, but rather eternal motion. A Scientific American poet manages to reconcile perfection and change, omnipresence and perpetual displacement: God is in each moving star: God draws on the Pleiad car; Let his will on earth be done As in heaven the stars move on Move on! - Keep moving! Progress is the law of loving.30 Further - here Giedion is especially helpful - there was a passion to consider all motion abstracted even from the moving thing; the resulting article of faith was that all motion can be identified. In Seven Gables, the force behind the train, the solar system, progress, social mobility (the two aristocrats, Clifford and Hepzibah, mingle with the hoi polloi of the train), and the American's nervous discontent (Clifford sings the glories of nomadic, Holgravean lives) are coalesced in precisely the manner adopted by Scientific American poets. Hawthorne's summary statement about the train: "Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself!" (Works, II, 257). From a Scientific American poem: "Life is onward: use it / With a forward aim." 31 The two credos might be considered aspects of the faith that was called the "Law of the Conservation of Force": Force is basic, force is one. This is how Ronald E. Martin sums up the faith of William Robert Grove, one of the apostles of the law: "some force [is] behind all phenomena . . . its essence [is] m o t i o n . . . its function [is] causal, a n d . . . it [is] conserved in the universe." "We do not see force," says Grove, "we see motion or moving matter"; this is what Hawthorne sees everywhere, essential and convertible.32 But the cult of motion involved not merely considering but also worshipping motion as the manifestation of basic, conserved force. A corollary is that the faster motion is, the holier. When Clifford shifts his attention from the speed of the train to the time-annihilating swiftness of the telegraph ("Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?" [Works, II, 264]), he is making the standard, revolutionary progression.


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The iron-horse goes dashing by, The turf-steed, panting, lags behind: While the railroad cities onward fly, As swift, aye, swifter than the wind! But steam's too slow: it will not do; The cry is, on! more speed? more power! On! - rack the brain for something new, A thousand miles, at least, an hour! And yet too slow - a fleeter pace! Bring down great heaven's thoroughfare? T'annihilate both time and space, A thought and light past through the air. 'Tis done! he comes! the lightning horse! Lo! thought and time fall far behind! The prize is thine, immortal Morse, A triumph grand of mighty mind!33 Electricity ("the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the allpervading intelligence" [P^orfei, II, 264]) redescribes human c o m m u n i cation as divine self-consciousness. A Scientific American poet does not hesitate to take the hubristic step: the telegraph makes "every thought o f every soul, / . . . omnipresent like a G o d . " "And space disappear^]," another says, "And time is compelled to stand." 34 Clifford, imprisoned for so many years, missed his vocation as a Scientific American poet. H e ascends from machines to technological transcendentalism. Seven Gables is not the first time that Hawthorne revolves the possibilities o f technological transcendentalism: "The Artist o f the Beautiful" anticipates it. Critics o f this work tend not to find the association plausible; those w h o view O w e n Warland as a mechanic laugh at his idealistic aspirations, while those w h o see him as a transcendentalist prefer to minimize his mechanical aptitude. 35 But the apparent confusion was the ideology o f the age. I have tracked the approach to idealism o f the mechanics; could Hawthorne not have noticed the reverse process a m o n g the idealists? Both Emerson and Thoreau flirted with the possibility that the train is the modern incarnation o f transcendentalist ideals. J. B. Stallo (publishing three years before Seven Gables) could have written for Scientific American himself: The science of nature is the science of our era. It is needless here to point out a verification of this. . .; who has not felt conscious of it, while enjoying the "annihilation of space and time," when he was transported with a rapidity next to that of sound on one of our American railroads, his eye at the same time directed to the wires of the electromagnetic telegraph, which at that moment perchance winged a thought

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HAWTHORNE'S TECHNOLOGY onward literally with the swiftness of the lightning's flash? Ay, the peace between the Ideal and the Real is being concluded; the shifting phenomena of the material world reveal to our earnest gaze, with everincreasing distinctness, not the energy only, but the life, of an absolute intelligence.36

Clifford seems to paraphrase the last words of Stallo's remarks with his o w n homage to the telegraph as "the mighty physical power, the allpervading intelligence." Stallo is trying to Americanize Naturphilosophie. At the point where idealism assimilates technology, H a w t h o r n e can approach his American democracy. H a w t h o r n e can even find a w a y to approach Jacksonian America without abandoning the past by means of Stallo's formula. Stallo: Because every "particular organic f o r m " wants to be a unit as well as part of the whole, history "will be self-returning, as it were, circular. Yet, since a mere retracing of a previous course would preclude all actual advance, and consequently all real development, the term of any evolution will never coincide with its outset, but fall beyond it; the development of all individual forms will be a spiral."37 Clifford: "You are

aware, my dear Sir - you must have observed it, in your own experience - that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve" {Works, II, 259).38 To grasp how it is possible for Hawthorne to have found his way to an area approached by both mechanics and idealists, we need to return to the problem-situation. Kuhn, in his article on the simultaneous discovery of the conservation of force, asks the basic question: "Why, in the years 1830-1850, did so many of the experiments and concepts required for a full statement of energy conservation lie so close to the surface of scientific consciousness?" His answer has three parts. First, there was the evidence of laboratory conversion processes themselves: "chemical affinity" into electricity into heat or light, magnetism into motion into electricity, and so on. Second, there was the concern with engines, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, so that "of the nine [scientists] who succeeded, partially or completely, in quantifying conversion processes, all but Mayer and Helmholtz were either trained as engineers or were working directly on engines when they made their contributions to energy conservation."39 Engines were conversion devices: On the Hawthornean railroad, heat is converted into physical motion, which is converted into upward and downward social mobility. This is how mechanization's assumption of command leads to science, which leads to Hawthorne. I have already made much of the third part of Kuhn's answer. Colding studied with Oersted, Liebig with Schelling; Him cites Oken and Kant;


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Mayer had close friends who knew Naturphilosophie; Helmholtz's father was a minor Naturphilosoph. In a note, however, Kuhn reminds us that Naturphilosophie was itself a product of the study of conversion processes.40 So the train in Seven Gables brings the Industrial Revolution and science into contact with idealist metaphysics. Those who think that Hawthorne stupidly mismated categories have only to refer to Stallo or Kuhn; the mismating is a result of the central scientific problem of the day. Technological transcendentalism takes the book's paradoxes and contradictions and renders them unnecessary. The unity of force was the unity of magical, scientific, and technological spheres, of the past and present, of spirit and matter. The problem is only this: Hawthorne could not believe it. It would be perfectly plausible to read The House of the Seven Gables as if it found scientific idealism as useful as Poe had in Eureka. Hawthorne more than Poe aspired to be reconciled to the democracy: Clifford, feeling the magnetism of the people as they parade beneath his window, is feeling the perversion of the Imp of the Perverse that is translated into Eurekan universal unifying. But Hawthorne, feeling the tug of the masses as if of magnetic matter, nevertheless finally despises massification. Unity is homogeneity, bulk. To expect to get through mass to ideality is equal to hoping to find in Judge Pyncheon's corpulence the new growth of spirit. Judge Pyncheon's countenance has a "quicker mobility" than his ancestor the Colonel's. Hawthorne goes on to wonder whether the difference is a measure of "the great system of human progress, which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us by refining away our grosser attributes of body" (Works, II, 121). This is the hope of the ascending spiral curve, of railroad transcendentalism, of Americanized Naturphilosophie, of speed as spirit, and it is grotesque. The ideal and the real were manifestly in some sort of new relationship; if this were not the case, then The House of the Seven Gables had no reason to be written. The spiritualization of mechanics could not be credited; the mechanization of magic might be. The technical term in Hawthorne's day for the concept he needed for this eventuality was "natural magic" - an ancient term recently lent a new meaning by David Brewster. The natural magical solution explains away the supernatural by means of mechanical expertise and attempts to satisfy our craving for mystery with the new, improved magic that technology can produce. The procedure is strong enough to drive out of the world what Holgrave and perhaps Hawthorne want driven out: sin, class hatred, guilt. On the other hand, it invalidates Hawthorne's art.

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The term "natural magic" had a distinguished history. It originally marked a distinction from "demonic magic": "There is a good magic," Pico says, "an allowable magic which is not forbidden, and it is magia naturalis."4* Demonic magicians derived their power from unnatural and direct intercourse with the demonic world; natural magicians worked by drawing powers scattered in nature itself by Providence. Thus, when Brewster in his determination to discredit the old magic used by tyrants and priests to suppress the superstitious populace, and in his desire to present the "vast miracle"42 of modern science as a preferable and democratic source of wonderment and power, uses for his own purposes the term "natural magic," he ingeniously translates a powerful diction. Hawthorne knew the term from several sources. He read, for instance, an article on natural magic in "Silliman's Journal" (on "spectral illusions" that are "occasionally alarming the young and the superstitious"),43 which may remind us that one of Hawthorne's early, and double-edged, references to the modern desire for the naturalization of magic had referred to the editor himself: "There was [in "A Virtuoso's Collection"] a small vase of oracular gas from Delphos, which, I trust, will be submitted to the scientific analysis of Professor Silliman" (Works, X, 486). (This transforms the alchemist of "The Great Carbuncle" into an amiable modern chemist.) Hawthorne, we know, read Brewster's book itself. So when Phoebe's "homely witchcraft," her canny uncanniness, is also referred to as "a kind of natural magic, that enables those favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them" (Works, II, 71, 72), the phraseology is not casual. Her natural magic discovers what is hidden: We note the connection of her talents to the powers of daguerreotypy. Her natural magic brightens a house that had been the image of an "old maid's heart" (Works, II, 72): Natural magic separates the environment from its inhabitant, thus distinguishing the House of the Seven Gables from the House of Usher. The natural magical explanations of the book are not mocked. When, in "The Celestial Railroad," Mr. Smooth-it-away "took occasion to prove that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence" (it is merely a "half-extinct volcano, in which the Directors [of the line] had caused forges to be set up, for the manufacture of rail-road iron" [Works, X, 194]), he fatally underestimates the devil's hegemony. But in Seven Gables, Hawthorne himself tries out the persona of Mr. Smooth-it-away, and is happy to find a comparable example of natural magic: "Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifermatches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet" (Works, II, 36). As the train and telegraph epitomize the solution of technological


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transcendentalism to the book's paradoxes, the epitome of the natural magic solution is daguerreotypy. Our discussion necessarily arrives at the modern, scientific daguerreotypist, and the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which might as well have been the subtitle of this book and The Marble Faun as well. We must first deal with the fact that Holgrave is not only a daguerreotypist - he is a mesmerist descended from magicians. We cannot quite ignore the fact that Hawthorne has granted to him the prying, sin-discovering powers he had previously granted to his wizard-artists. But Hawthorne had a hatred of mesmerism, not as what spiritualizes matter but as a grotesque category mistake: "what delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous than to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual?"44 So Holgrave's mesmerism is not likely to put his daguerreotypy in a more refined light. The point Hawthorne is making in both professional designations is that Holgrave is what we might call "technical man"; if Brewster's "technology" describes the intersection of science and mechanics, then we need a cognate term, Ellul's "technique," to describe the intersection of technology and human behavior. To Ellul, magic is another technique, another mode of subduing inspiration on behalf of a specialized, determinate perfectionism. Ellul sees in magic and scientific mechanics two independent technical traditions (since magic does not progress). Hawthorne sees the progression of the latter out of the former. On one side of Holgrave's animal magnetism is Old Maule's wizardry; on the other side is the magnetism of the experimental scientists. Technology, Babbage hopes, will provide a "holier spell" for the subduing of nature;45 Holgrave's technology is sanitized magic. Therefore Hawthorne will use scientific and magical language interchangeably, even within paragraphs, and will not worry excessively about the form technique takes at any particular moment, except when he wants specifically to play on the scientific respectability of daguerreotypy as its modern expression. Science was fascinated by daguerreotypy in the antebellum period. The "perfection and fidelity" of daguerreotype pictures, uncovering "details . . . which are not perceivable to the naked eye in the original subjects," is reported enthusiastically in "Silliman's Journal," as if the daguerreotype were a preserving microscope.46 The world of mechanics was equally stimulated: The first patent claim listed for 1851 in Scientific American is for an improvement in the daguerreotype.47 The interest of science and mechanics in this invention was not, however, only for detection's and invention's sake. Right up to the time of Seven Gables, the development of the daguerreotype was creating in scientists and technologists a confidence that they could win control of aesthetics - that in fact they could help to foster a parascientific aesthetics of minute accuracy and a suppressed, objectified sensuality. One writer in "Silli-

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man's Journal" is happy that daguerreotypy will make us dissatisfied with "bad drawing" - "however splendidly," he adds condescendingly, "it may be colored."48 Daguerreotypy stands precisely where the relationship of science and art was most direct and most strained. The necessity of Hawthorne's moving to this point to attempt to absorb science explains how he winds up very nearly absorbed by science. Is daguerreotypy part of the scientific historicide or an agent of artistic undeath? It was dangerously ambiguous: On the one hand, like the train, it is a piece of revolutionary technology; on the other hand, it stops motion and reveals permanence by unveiling the traditional Pyncheon hidden in Jaffrey. (Their poisonous powers are revealed physiognomically. The daguerreotype makes possible a pseudoscientific renewal of the Renaissance theory of signatures.) Is it an art of surfaces or depths? Holgrave denies that he has the "intuitive sympathy" to understand either Judge Pyncheon or Clifford - he says he is a "mere observer" (Works, II, 179). The implication is that depths are not observable, may not be captured in an image. Nevertheless, he wants to penetrate beneath surfaces: "Had I your opportunities," he tells Phoebe, "no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummet-line" (Works, II, 178). Yet Phoebe herself rejects the depths. Working by sunlight, she plummets modestly: "When he is cheerful - when the sun shines into his mind - then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no farther" (Works, II, 178). "There is a wonderful insight in heaven's broad and simple sunshine," says Holgrave, defending his art. "While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it" (Works, II, 91). It seems like bragging even in this quasi-novel. "The painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits" (Works, II, 59) is the Seven Gables formulation of an idea that runs throughout Hawthorne's work: Painters are the quintessential artistic wizards. The paradoxical claim for a deep daguerreotypy is diagnosed by Benjamin. At the moment that photography, the "first truly revolutionary means of reproduction," becomes the model of pictorial art, as the art of ritual gives over to the art of politics, as cult value gives way to exhibition value, then a particular form of nostalgia is inevitable. "It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face."49 The daguerreotype in particular, and natural magic in general, represent Hawthorne's trepid attempt to live in a world of explicable wonders and


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moderate depths, as well as his nostalgia, along with its repudiation, for a lost cult of the family. Hawthorne is between a romancer and a novelist in Seven Gables - a painterly daguerreotypist, a natural magician. "Natural magic," with a prescientific as well as a scientific meaning, barely allows the historical and disciplinary maneuvers of the book. That is, the book has to be modern yet resist the modernity it itself formulates in terms of daguerreotypy, machines, science, novelty, and the novel. To the extent that the book is a novel, science has converted art into a faithful wife: The dualfidelityis to science and the commonplace plausibilities. Modern art is Phoebe. Hawthorne finds in science an authorization of his own longing to escape the shadow-world of sin and guilt. But for science to authorize anything at all, it must take the place of the author. We recall that Silliman's scientism was so strategically pious that it could not insist on a demarcation that excluded mesmerism and phrenology; it takes a strong science to anathematize the more vivid and disreputable forms of "scientific" Faustianism. So Hawthorne needs a strong technology to drive magical technique out of the world; the problem is that the requirement brings him to a cosmology that calls into question the romance. He attempts to use science, and he hopes that what he uses will be modest, but the attempt is based on a misjudgment of the strength that is required for the job he asks of it. What he has his reasons for promoting does not promote him in return. Phoebe represents beauty in a scientific world; she is organized, efficient, and streamlined. Actually, "beauty" is the wrong word. Throughout Seven Gables, Clifford pursues and emblematizes the beautiful; the recurrent word for Phoebe is "pretty." Odd how little the "artist" Holgrave has anything to do with aesthetics. Daguerreotypy is for him a method of pursuing goodness and truth, as the art of politics replaces the art of ritual. In the disciplinary struggle over history, the position of beauty is assumed by the aging figure back from the dead, undead, trying to survive by reconceiving the nature of technological advances like the train and the telegraph as the nature of the soap bubble. Holgrave and Clifford both pursue Phoebe; only when Phoebe has earned her own historical sorrow does she graduate from pretty to beautiful in Clifford's eyes. But her prettiness had always been beautiful to the eyes of Holgrave and technique. A Scientific American writer complains that inventions at the Great Exhibition are judged for beauty, not utility: "When utility and beauty can go hand in hand, so let them go, and so we should like to see them; but when one has been sacrificed to the other, let it be the

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latter."50 Until her contact with Clifford, Phoebe is without depths; she speaks for a world where depths are denied, where beauty, even spiritual beauty, is skin deep, where sensuous beauty must indeed be sacrificed for utility. This is a world in which Hawthorne will find no lasting professional comfort. When Brewster, in Natural Magic, gives a physical account of hallucinations ("to strip the phenomenon of every attribute of the marvelous") and realizes that he has not managed to explain them away, he simply stops: "Here we reach the gulf which human intelligence cannot pass; and if the presumptuous mind of man shall dare to extend its speculations further, it will do it only to evince its incapacity to mortify its pride."51 With this Phoebe-like pronouncement ("When he is cheerful .. . then I venture to peep in, just as far as the sun reaches, but no farther"), Brewster puts into relief, within The House of the Seven Gables, the rationale of The Blithedale Romance.

Phoebe is the appropriate object and emblem of the daguerreotypist's art or the novelist's, but not the romancer's. Her strength and superficiality prohibit the rapacious penetration that Hawthorne's earlier heroines are tragically susceptible to - she is not the victim of the magical scientist's experiments. She is the willing object of the mechanical artist's, who does not kill her but keeps her faithful. Only the latter is art's fate in the age of mechanical reproduction. (It is Hester's adultery that reproduces nonmechanically.) Technique conquers. Does it matter that in the process Holgrave gives up his socialism for Phoebe's conservative capitalism? It does not: His Fourierism is as technical as capitalist Salem. (In Ellul's technological society as in Hawthorne's, political binarisms are trivialized by nineteenth-century technique.) The important point is how quickly Holgrave is ready to give up his socialism, as quickly as he had given up several professional incarnations. I have considered Hawthorne's problem in terms of the inability to professionalize as against the professionalizing success of science; Benjamin adds that in the age of mechanical reproduction, anyone can be an artist or an expert on art. Precisely as science professionalizes, art does not merely fail to professionalize, it amateurizes. What Hawthorne fears, in the wedding of science and art in photography, is that if it renders art merely faithful, it allows technique its adulteries. Marrying art is a commitment, for science, equal to taking it up as a hobby. TREACHERY BETRAYED

Two of the traditional literary uses of science have been exhausted in Hawthorne's work by the time of Seven Gables: Scapegoatscience has been replaced by savior-science, but the blessings of saviorscience have proved to be mixed. The oddity is that Hawthorne does not therefore reject science outright in The Blithedale Romance. Rather,

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he has Coverdale define modernity dialectically in terms of the ascent of science and the persistence of magic. "It was a period," Coverdale says of the era of The Blithedale Romance, "when science (though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won credence, in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as rubbish" (Works, III, 187). Three periods have been distinguished, none of which is the present, two of which are nevertheless modern: After the "elder times" (a term that, by opposition to a century of modernity, reduces several millennia to mere antiquity) comes Enlightenment skepticism, followed by the return of the rubbish in the 1830s and the 1840s, when the magicscience border seemed once again permeable. And Coverdale can bring the dialectic to the date of the writing of the present romance (1852): "Now-a-days, in the management of his 'subject,' 'clairvoyant/ or 'medium,' the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific experiment." This is as opposed to "twelve or fifteen years ago," the period of the tale, when the "apparent miracle" of mesmerism was set "in the strongest attitude of opposition to ordinary facts" (Works, III, 5-6). Materialistic, nonmagical science has made gains, registered by the imitations of the degraded magicians, but it is not so strong as to destroy the pseudoscientists and their pretensions utterly. Three eras of "modern" science have failed to put the Westervelts out of business - a sign that the disciplining of science has not yet been completed.52 Is the book posited on the dialectical advance of science, out of magic, or the eternal persistence of magic, even at the heart of science? Westervelt exists to make the former case credible: His exhibition is magic in retreat, entertainment for moderns. His preperformance address is "eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead materialism" (Works, III, 200). This is a reversal: Hawthorne, who generally takes science and infuses it with wizardry, here contemplates wizardry and finds in it nothing deeper than the materialism of his century. When the charlatan speaks of a "new era that was dawning upon the world" that would "link soul to soul, and the present life with what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood" (Works, III, 200), his cant does not merely undermine his own prestige in the novel, but also Clifford's in Seven Gables and the entire hope of transcendental technology. The play of magic at the border of matter and spirit is over; matter is omnipresent. But that is not Hawthorne's only representation of the situation; a typical Hawthornean chiasmus brings Hollingsworth, though "hammered out of iron" (Works, III, 28), though without spiritual ambitions,

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increasingly into contact with magical language. Hollingsworth, says Coverdale, "proposed to collect [sin] out of a thousand human hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of transmuting it into virtue! Had I but touched his extended hand, Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own conception of all these matters" (Works, III, 134). The diction of Hollingsworth's experimental penetration comes from Westervelt's mesmerism and magical alchemy, even as Westervelt's magic is shown to possess Hollingsworthian solidity. To sort this out, we can only focus on Coverdale; as the book's disciplinary theorist and intellectual historian, he is the one character who can choose his (scientific or magical) terms self-consciously. The easy case to argue is that what Coverdale makes clear is the apparent rise of science and the actual persistence of magic. Coverdale's comfortable, scientistic common sense is displayed at the beginning of the book; despite his show of open-mindedness, he considers the Veiled Lady phenomenon to be "the revival of an old humbug," not the "birth of a new science" (Works, III, 5). But this complacency is what the opacity of the plot calls into question. Coverdale's scientism is already unmasked at the time of his illness: "Zenobia is an enchantress!. . . That flower in her hair is a talisman" (Works, III, 45). Increasingly, we see in his commonsense superficiality not a Holgravean attempt to substitute a respectably modern empiricism for an outmoded credulity, but an ultimately futile protection against his own psychology and the interpersonal muddle it creates. In Holgrave's fetishistic alternation of avowals and disavowals, the only benefit of the scientific ideology is to rule profound knowledge out of bounds. It fails. But to conclude that magic therefore succeeds would be hasty. It is true that we are told, insistently, that deep knowledge - wizard's knowledge - is what we are after. Zenobia accuses Coverdale of "groping for human emotions in the dark corners of the heart" (Works, III, 214): The word "grope" conveys the ugly clumsiness of Coverdale's endeavor, but we cannot deny the necessity of penetrating deeper than Phoebe's or the daguerreotypist's light. Walking along the river in which Zenobia will drown herself, Coverdale wonders how deep it is and what lies "beneath the inscrutable depth" (Works, III, 208). This responds precisely to Seven Gables rhetoric, which tells us that in America someone is always at the drowning point and which is a determined effort to keep afloat. Apparently Hawthorne is returning us from mechanical science to the vision of his early magus-scientist stories: If deep into the heart of science was formerly deep into the heart of Georgiana, it is now deep into the heart of Zenobia. But if the question is how much of Zenobia's heart is revealed, I think

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the answer is, not very much. And I think that the failure of Westervelt's magic and Coverdale's commonsense materialism is the key to the failure to know Zenobia in this book. There is no authentic magus-scientist upon whom Hawthorne can foist his own desire to plummet deeply; there is no authentic mechanical scientist upon whose authority Hawthorne can ground his own exhausted willingness to rest content with thresholds and surfaces. For Aylmer's deliberate, experimental penetration to the heart of Georgiana are substituted Coverdale's horrifying (and horrified) stabs in the dark. Coverdale's increasingly magical rather than scientistic vocabulary does not reveal deep knowledge - only the existence of deep knowledge that cannot be assimilated or faced. The final revelation of the book has nothing to do with Zenobia and the profound truths she took to the profundity of the river, but rather with Priscilla. Aficionados of fetishism will note that all that is preserved of Zenobia is her shoe; for the penetration of magical technique and the superficiality of scientific technique, Hawthorne can only substitute a fetishist's fluctuations. If Coverdale's scientistic predilections do in fact perform the useful job of exposing Westervelt's magic, all his magical language can succeed in doing is exposing the cowardice of scientistic disavowal. Nowhere is there anything like a strong epistemology, methodology, or cosmology. The romance has nothing to put up against science; it survives merely by putting a received, hapless scientism and a corrupt or merely verbal wizardry up against each other. Science and magic are finally not opposite but rather are exposed as twin aspects of the increasingly fetishistic nature of Hawthorne's devotion to romance. This comes out best in the tissue of phony blindnesses and equally phony revelations of The Marble Faun. The pathos of thefinaltwo books is that the benefits Hawthorne can earn strategically either by retreating to the past (The Scarlet Letter) or retreating from the past to the present (The House of the Seven Gables) are not available at all in his final two romances, which can only play his mirror strategies off against each other, neutralizing them. If The Blithedale Romance is the stronger of the two books, this is the result of its dramatizing more pointedly what it does not know, yet what it cannot avoid knowing: the disciplinary weakness of art in general as the particular weakness of Coverdale's art. The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's last-ditch disciplinary wager: The gamble is that a romance might survive by means of the contradictory suggestions that in Italy, Americans could find absolution for the sin of Puritan technique and justification for the hygienic utility of Puritan technique. The former alternative can only be indulged momentarily; it exists chiefly to ironize the latter, so that the romance might barely live.

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We are once again in Rappaccini's country, and Miriam - her sensual beauty somehow transformed, under the influence of an older man, into deadliness - is Rappaccini's daughter, fatal to nature and innocence. But in this nineteenth-century plot is acted out the necessary reaction of American art to Beatrice/Miriam: Modern art must be mechanized to flee her killing sensuality. The trick is to redeem this cowardice; the redemption can come only in the sanctity of the marriage of American art and science. But a romance can only give its equivocal blessings. To put the matter this way is to be more cruel and less delicate than Hawthorne himself can afford to be in his treatment of Kenyon and Hilda, in each of whom and in both together (since technologized art performs the fetishist's task here of obscuring sexual difference) art and science are wed. Hilda, in particular, is handled gingerly. She is not an original artist, merely a copyist; nevertheless Hawthorne allows that her copies of masterpieces have a certain "magic splendor." Yet we do not quite believe it, and it is uncertain whether Hawthorne does. She is described as a "handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own" (Works, IV, 60, 61). Not even a minor enchantress, but still in the vicinity of magic: She is in one world but of another, perhaps. So Hawthorne might say that she is "a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism" for getting the original vision of a genius down on canvas. Still, Hilda is not like other copyists, "Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines"; she is "no such machine as this." A machine of another sort? Not exactly: "She wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle" (Works, IV, 5960). If Hawthorne is saying anything clearly, it is that Hilda is, like Phoebe Pyncheon, a natural magician. But Hawthorne may not be saying anything clearly. He may, on the other hand, be saying something obliquely about the logic of the secondary, which is the theme of the book: first time genius (or innocence, or nature), second time (in every case) mechanics. At its most sweeping, Hawthorne's analysis of this logic can seem to arrive at the proposition that everything that is not Edenic is technique, no matter how ingenious or ingenuous or genuine is the spirit of the technician. In these terms, even Hilda's miraculous purity of purpose and appreciation can only be executed mechanically; at dark moments, even the geniuses whom she copies can seem like engineers. We shall calibrate how willing Hawthorne is to pursue his logic this far. In portraying Kenyon, he allows himself to demonstrate exactly how attractive even pure Hilda might be to the creator of art in the era of mechanical reproduction. For Kenyon is a sculptor, and sculpture is inhabited by technique to a degree that rivals daguerreotypy. Both Brewster and Babbage were interested in Watt's invention of a

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"machine for copying or reducing statues and sculpture of all kinds." 53 Hawthorne, less interested in technology than technique, is fascinated by human machines: The process of actually chiseling the marble is not done by the sculptor but by "a class of men whose merely mechanical skill is . . . exquisite." First time genius, second time mechanics. Lest we think that this gives too much credit to the original sculptor in clay - in this case, Kenyon - Hawthorne lets us know that the mechanicalness of sculpture is precisely its defining aspect in the modern world. And how much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons and button-holes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths — and these, at our present epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown — would be abated, if we were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit for such pretty performances, as immortalized in marble! They are not his work, but that of some nameless machine in human shape. (Works, IV, 115) The machine-man copies (the machine age values his copying) not spirit or even the human body, but machine-produced and reproduced articles of clothing. Mechanical art reproduces mechanical production. Even Kenyon has his magical moments, but the funniest and most acute comment about his talent is Miriam's: "These busts, now, much as I seem to scorn them, make me feel as if you were a magician. You turn feverish men into cool, quiet, marble" (Works, IV, 119). Kenyon is a counterPygmalion, and his magic has the coldness of technique. Miriam herself can certainly make a magical claim for her painting, but the happy ending of the book is Kenyon's and Hilda's freedom from her sensuous, enthralling, yet enthralled "witchcraft," that is, her art (Works, IV, 48). The disciplinary struggle is a struggle for history. Hilda, and especially Kenyon, can make a case for having achieved what Miriam desires: an escape from history defined as postlapsarian temporality. History is lapsed time. Modern sculpture flees it by the frank ephemerality of its taste. (Scientific history internalized by artists may assimilate art to the history of fashion.) But Miriam is tied to the whole inescapable, undead past of art by the recurrent physiognomy of her sinful and penitent model. Modern technique is in fact juxtaposed to two historical senses; the confusion and artfulness of the book consist in how Hawthorne mixes them up. The all too blatant inverse symmetry of Hilda and Kenyon, and Miriam and Donatello (Hilda saves Kenyon as Miriam dooms Donatello), may distract us from the symmetry of Donatello and the model about Miriam; the latter configuration is the key to the historical duplicity of the romance. In the model's sinfulness and piety is religious temporality: All sin and all penitence are eternally original. But Donatello represents mythic history (as Hawthorne explicitly puts it), history as

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gradual decline from a golden to an iron age. Both forms of history make their demand on art. Immediately after we see in Donatello an atavistic repetition of Praxiteles' faun, we see in the model (looking, when we first are introduced to him, not like a faun but like a satyr another way of putting the intersection of humanity and pointed-eared animality) the attenuated but still breathing history of Christian portraiture of saints and sinners. With respect to these two historical claims on art, the scientific claim might be expected to have varying effects. Science might be taken as determinate technique with respect to mythic history, but as a liberation from lapsed history. This is partly the case: American superficiality and science look bad when Donatello is unfallen and much better when he is fallen. What is remarkable, therefore, is that Hawthorne refuses, after Donatello's fall, to say unambiguously that mechanics is a liberation from sin, the hope of The House of the Seven Gables. Here is the most peculiar passage, which must bear a lot of weight as an explicit vision of modernity. It is the iron rule in our days, to require an object and a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than we were born in.... No life now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the tiniestrivuletto turn. {Works, IV, 239) The simplicity of this reconciliation of Christian and mythic history — the fallen world is the iron age - cannot withstand close inspection. Hawthorne is here speculating, through Kenyon, about Donatello's misery. But his despair is the result not of the triumph of utility but of the triumph of sin. When Kenyon's Hawthornean speculation concludes ("We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right"), he may be indicting technique, but not Donatello's homicide, which did not manifest a resolution to go right at all. Nevertheless, we know that Kenyon is not merely misled about the source of Donatello's melancholy; he later advises Donatello to go to America, where "each generation has only its own sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary Past were piled upon the back of the Present" {Works, IV, 302). This is to know precisely that Donatello's problem is sin, not (American) technique; the persistence of the sorrowful past, not the mechanization of the present. What is at stake is whether American sin (if mechanization be a sin) is a new or an ancient sorrow. But the book suggests that the opposition must be a false one: Sin is always original, because it is always repeated. Original sin is always original, it might be said, because it is one sin over and over. And the nonexistence of the American past (if we grant the incredible premise) merely guarantees the originality, in other words the (mechanical) repetition, of original sin.

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Repetition is technique: In the indistinctness of the past and present, the original and the repeated, we necessarily lose track of what is not technique. Hawthorne may have hoped that in (classical? Catholic? carnivalesque?) Italy, he could escape technique; he does not. The line of British criticism that is always ready to accuse Hawthorne of mixing genres is especially outraged by The Marble Faun. One of its spokesmen is Leslie Stephen, who assumes that Kenyon's preoccupation with Roman baking at a critical moment registers a failed confluence of romance and memoir. "I should fancy [says Kenyon] that Minerva (in revenge for the desecration of her temple) had slily poured vinegar into the batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in the acetous fermentation" (Works, IV, 152). "When the high-spirited girl is on the way to meet her tormentor," Stephen questions, "why should we be worried by a gratuitous remark about Roman baking?"54 Part of the answer is that the book is about the resistance to approaching Miriam's tragedy. Just before Kenyon's remark, the group of nightwandering artists had visited the Trevi Fountain. "What would be done with this water-power," one artist jokes, "if we had it in one of our American cities? Would they employ it to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill, I wonder!" (Works, IV, 145—6). Hawthorne is delaying Miriam's crisis with American machinery as long as he can. Delaying it with the question of the vinegar fermentation of bread is, it turns out, perfect. Giedion: "In the 'fifties, bread, in its very substance as a material, was attacked by mechanization. For the sake of increased production, carbonic acid, instead of the slower-working ferments, was mixed with the dough."55 It took only fifty years to apply Dalton and Gay-Lussac on gas expansion to the production of bread; in Kenyon's remarks (and the book's preoccupation with the slower-working ferments of Rome [Works, IV, 51, 418]), we get a whiff not so much of Rome as of technologized England and America. Kenyon, the man, in two senses, of marble, partisan of the colorless and odorless, will be an early convert, clearly, to white bread. Protestant America is given over to technique. Nevertheless, the romance cannot escape it in Catholic Italy. Catholicism itself is a "contrivance," if not a contrivance of "mere men." Its mighty machinery was forged and put together, not on middle earth, but either above or below. If there were but angels to work it, (instead of the very different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety-valves,) the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its origin. (Works, IV, 345) The final word is crucial. Anything that is not original is technique. That fact alone guarantees that technique will not be escaped no matter how lengthy or distant the flight. Further, every possibility of recapturing one's origins (Donatello may be unfallen? a remnant of the Golden Age?)

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only implies the repetition of the fall, the endurance of Original Sin as repeated sin. Everything that is original is repeated is technique. It would do Donatello no good tofleeto America, because America, to the extent that it seems innocent, merely doubles Donatello. Thus American machinery, which seems to be, if not prelapsarian, alapsarian, is itself the guarantee and sign of the American fall. Another way of putting it is that American mechanicalness is not innocent of good and evil; it is a fetishization of surfaces, a refusal to affirm what it knows of good and evil, so that the fall might be repeated and ingenuously denied forever. Kenyon's knowledge increases at precisely the rate of his disavowal of knowledge. When he first considers Miriam's relation to her model, he knows that there must be a great error in her life: "how great, Kenyon dared not think" (Works, IV, 108). When, after the murder, he ponders what has changed Donatello, he decides that it must have been "some calamity (which I need not shape out in my conjectures)" (Works, IV, 281). An interior voice, dedicated to putting an end to Kenyon's speculations, often whispers to him "Hush!" (Works, IV, 189). Later, the voice gets exteriorized: "Oh, hush," is Hilda's response to Kenyon's meditation on the fortunateness of the fall (Works, IV, 460). In Kenyon's admiration for Hilda's willful blindness and asexuality, as opposed to Miriam's sensuous knowledge, we sense the full extent of his fetishism. Freudian students of the subject will find it too obvious to be worth observing that the mystery the book ends with is the question of the existence of Donatello's pointed ears beneath his curly hair. My only remark is the final oddity that the book's title to the status of romance (which does not need to answer all questions) is dependent on Kenyon's superficial mechanicalness. It is Kenyon's final refusal to answer questions about Donatello's ears that defends the romance against demands for information, the inference being that the romance is finally only a technique for holding knowledge at bay in precisely the way that scientific technicians require. The romance itself, and not the novel, turns into the form of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Which means that neither mechanics nor mystery provides Hawthorne with a way of knowing. In The Blithedale Romance, the magical language associated with HoUingsworth's or Zenobia's sexuality only signifies that Coverdale's commonsense modernity cannot penetrate it. In The Marble Faun, the mechanicalness of Catholic Italy only means that no romance will penetrate Miriam's sexual mysteries. To science's expanding knowledge of surfaces, Hawthorne can only oppose - or, rather, offer - his literary techniques for refusing to know depths. (Similarly in Brown, romance poses as the genre of supraempirical knowledge but survives as the genre of subempirical mystification, of the varieties of ignorance.)

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At the moment that Hawthorne exposes his art as technique — but technique not as handmaid of science but as a fetishization of surfaces - his pretension, as a romancer, to a deeper truth than science's is obviated. "My secret is not a pearl," says Miriam, "yet a man might drown himself in plunging after it!" Kenyon and Hawthorne use their new form of mechanized romance as a way of not plunging. Her secret, Miriam reiterates just afterward, "is no precious pearl" - it is a "dark-red carbuncle" (Works, IV, 130). The Cynic's cynicism returns as the mechanical artist's skepticism when the carbuncle is not brilliant but bloody. But the mechanical artist is left with nothing positive as an alternative to science, and nothing negative either: only epistemological and cosmological privation. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne had tried to believe in progress as an ascending spiral curve, in imitation of the idealist J. B. Stallo. In the succession of problem-situations I am tracing, every solution leads to a new problem: If Naturphilosophie saw in magneto-electrochemism the unfolding of spirit out of matter, and thus solved the crisis of metaphysics in the age of chemistry, then the next problem was that nature-philosophical progress helped prepare the way for Darwinian evolution, which returned spirit to animality. Harry Levin noticed that The Marble Faun (1859) concerns the descent (in two senses) of humankind from animals in precisely the right year for it. Hawthorne's annihilation of his own idealistic aspirations is accomplished by showing, in The Marble Faun, that spirit does not advance; everything repeats; the repetition is the essence of human mechanicalness that marks our descent, our falling away, from animality but gives us no vision as compensation.

5 AFTER THE REVOLUTIONS: BROWN AND DREISER, POE AND PYNCHON, HAWTHORNE AND MAILER

It would be misleading to devote this book only to Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne, since the inference might be that their peculiar historical struggles had something to do with their peculiarly unsettled time. So I shall update the discussion by a century, to take up Dreiser (in relation to Brown), Pynchon (in relation to Poe), and Mailer (in relation to Hawthorne). But the grouping of Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer in itself makes possible an approach to the real essence of the historical negotiation of literature with science. What Dreiser faces in Spencerian evolution is the threat that scientific history is a synecdoche for universal history, since the universe, like science, progresses in the direction of integrating, definite heterogeneity. No more fundamental challenge to any other historical sense can be imagined. Pynchon's use of thermodynamics for his scientific metaphor, then, can be understood as a discovery within science that universal history does not mimic scientific history: The universe is in fact heading for indefinite homogeneity. Dreiser and Pynchon do not put up their own version of history against science; they try to suspend our belief in the universality of the scientific version. Mailer's ambition is to find an alternative, and he does so in perhaps the most radical way possible: by reinventing the Renaissance theory of signatures, which he calls the "metaphysics of form," to repeal the Scientific Revolution. SISTER CARRIE, BROTHER ARTHUR

I want to begin by begging the question of whether Dreiser was "influenced" by "science" (the quotation marks show where the question is being begged). One critic, despite his reservation that "science did not appeal to Dreiser," nevertheless believes that Dreiser arrived at mechanistic determinism by way of "contact with the scientific thought of the late nineteenth century"; he footnotes his agreement with a predecessor who had argued that Dreiser inherited his "disposition to regard human 160

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behavior... as a chemical phenomenon" "direct from science."1 The words "contact" and "direct" suggest a determination not to evade the question I begged by putting "influence" and "science" in quotation marks, but the idea that Dreiser had contact, direct or indirect, with the science he found unappealing must be questioned. If Dreiser follows the form I have established, then looking for the contact of Dreiser with science (for example, Darwin) will be tempting and futile; Dreiser will instead be discovered hovering around a problemsituation, his relation to science mediated by philosophy, which is not itself disinterested with respect to the problem-situation. Voila: The most sensitive critic of the literary response to science at the turn of the twentieth century observes that "Sister Carrie is imbued with a certain amount of cosmic Spencerianism." 2 This sets up two questions for disciplinary intellectual history: How much Spencer is in Dreiser? How much Darwin is in Spencer? The easiest way to estimate the influence of Spencer on Dreiser is to quote Sister Carrie on the rise and fall of Hurstwood: A man's fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth. Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states. Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction. Given time enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave side. (Carrie, 239) A quick Spencerian gloss: The "youthful accretion" is called "evolution," marked by a "predominant integration of matter and dissipation of motion." 3 The "tendency toward decay" is "dissolution" (Dreiser himself calls it "dissolution" later in the paragraph). The balance is called "equilibration." The corporeal analogy is pure Spencer. Dreiser has clearly been instructed by First Principles, which he read prior to writing Sister Carrie: When evolution [Spencer announces] has run its course - when the aggregate has at length . . . reached that equilibrium in which all changes end; it thereafter remains subject to all actions in its environment which may increase the quantity of motion it contains, and which in the lapse of time are sure, either slowly or suddenly, to give its parts such excess of motion as will cause disintegration.4 Meanwhile, of course, as Hurstwood disintegrates, Carrie seems to be an evolving force, because she adapts to all transplantations. "Does a shrub dwindle," asks Spencer, "in poor soil. . . or die outright if removed to a cold climate?" But the "acclimatization of plants" is always

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possible; some plants can adapt.5 Acclimatization is a Spencerian, not a Darwinian, emphasis. The direct adaptation of an organism to its environment is acknowledged but minimized by Darwin, who stresses the indirection of natural selection.6 Dreiser sees the analogy of shrub and heroine in Spencerian terms: "Transplantation is not always successful in the matter of flowers and maidens. . . . It would have been better if her acclimatization had been more gradual - less rigid" (Carrie, 41). Nevertheless, Carrie does get acclimated, and she does, in short, grow (in social stature and independence), as she settles down (evolution is marked by an integration and growth together with a dissipation of motion). She moves, in Spencerian terms, from an indefinite to a definite state - her calling better defined, her economic status more and more stable. She moves, furthermore, from Columbia City to Chicago to New York, cities that themselves represent an evolution marked by an integration of matter and a progression from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity. Columbia City has, presumably, the least clear class and professional segregation; in Chicago, Drouet associates with Hurstwood, who associates with celebrities and the medium rich, but class and professional distinctions, however vague at the borders, exist. In New York, classes are more definite, as Hurstwood learns, as are professional zones like the garment district and Broadway. At the end of the inverse processes, of course, Carrie has established herself in New York, while Hurstwood, past his point of equilibrium, gains motion, moving from room to room at night, walking the streets by day, until he dies. Dreiser refuses to exaggerate his pity for him; he is more Spencerian than Darwinian, since Darwin, acknowledging that saving the maladapted poor may inhibit evolution, nevertheless believes that the desire to help them is an evolutionary advance, and will not advocate doing away with it for a contingent advantage.7 "Social Darwinism" is largely Spencerianism, and Carrie is a Spencerian heroine, at long last in a position to conquer the department store, perhaps the best symbol in Dreiser of Spencer's evolution as growth in size and definite heterogeneity. The preliminary judgment is that Sister Carrie is Spencerian. But is Spencer science? That is to say: Is Spencer's philosophy in the service of science and, in particular, Darwinian biology? One is tempted to argue that Spencer was a Lamarckian and leave it at that - or, at most, to find some elements of Spencer compatible with Darwinism, though unnecessary to it. But in fairness to Spencer, it is proper to allow that the essence and the scope of Darwinism were not immediately apparent to all. It was not clear whether the Darwinians who followed Darwin in focusing


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on natural selection, or the Darwinians who followed Darwin in pluralistic open-mindedness with respect to the mechanism of evolution, were the true Darwinians; or whether Social Darwinists, who like Darwin saw the evolutionary disadvantage of charity, or Christian Darwinists, who like Darwin considered charity an evolutionary victory, got the real meaning. It was precisely the ambiguities of adapting Darwin to matters of human society, and the special ambiguity of Spencer's particular relationship to the science itself, that Dreiser found useful. Dreiser got his position in intellectual history by means of his free borrowings from Spencer, which is not to say that he got it by means of an obviously discredited and wrongheaded popularizer. Darwin, curiously, won the case for evolution but not, until the twentieth century, for Darwinian evolution. In getting close to Spencer, Dreiser got close to evolution - the paradigmatic scientific idea of his time - in a form metaphorically adaptable for literary use, yet apparently predicated on literal science. We have to state the scientific problem-situation of Dreiser's era so as to implicate Henry Adams as well; the quickest way to unite them is to remember, with Ronald Martin, how attracted Adams was to Spencerian certainties, manifest amid the pervasive skepticisms of the Education. But even insofar as Adams was a late Victorian skeptic, influenced by the new "philosophy of science" (Pearson, Poincare, Mach), it is possible to see that he is a citizen of the same intellectual world as Dreiser, if we take both Spencer and the new philosophy of science as pieces of the breakup of nature-philosophic (and, in general, idealistic) unities. To witness the transition from Naturphilosophie to the new philosophy of science, we need only track J. B. Stallo, whose work on Hegel, Schelling, and Oken was crucial to the intellectual environment of Poe and Hawthorne, but who is known to students of American literature primarily because he is mentioned in Adams's Education as the author of The Concepts and Theories ofModern Physics, a work of modern philosophy

of science slightly ante litteram. But if the mature Stallo, correspondent of Mach, thought of his Naturphilosophie as juvenilia, nevertheless it taught him to see the influence of concepts on data. Similarly, Poincare was a kind of Kantian who knew - in the wake of non-Euclidean geometries - that though the mind sees its own structuring in the structure of nature, what it sees is never the only order possible. If non-Euclidean geometries exist, then Newton cannot be shown to be necessarily correct - and the problem-situation that led to Kant and Brown, and onward to Schelling and Poe, assumes a new aspect. Evolutionary biology has to be accommodated, as Naturphilosophie had defined itself by accommodating chemistry and Kant had had to explain Newtonian physics. But philosophy could not account for evolution as another logically

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necessary corollary of an expanded sense of the mind's expanding hegemony if the mind was not necessarily correlated with nature. Spencer too can be described as a sort of Naturphilosoph to whom something happened: What happened, first of all, was his own early discovery of evolution in Lamarck and the suggestions of basic evolutionary principles in the embryology of Baer. He was in the spirit of Naturphilosophie in his desire to unite all the sciences in a vision that revealed increasing unity in increasing multiplicity, to trace that unity to what he called "persistence of force," and to reduce all phenomena to simple, necessary laws and, further, to an originary principle. Thus he was as interested as Poe in Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis. With some justification does Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, at the beginning of Adams's Democracy, discuss Spencer as an aspect of German transcendentalism. Yet Spencer, like the philosophers of science, eschews joining Kant and the Naturphilosophen in seeking to ground science in a posited expansion of the mind's capacity for truth. In the beginning, according to Spencer, was not Mind (increasingly revealed) but the Unknowable (never to be approached by human intellect). This simple distinction manifests a world of difference. If mind is a product of evolution, then all unifications and unities, including those of evolution, do not depend on it. We might try another version of the problem-situation, then: Given Naturphilosophie, how can Darwinism be? Nature-philosophy had been open to evolution, but only as a reflection of the mind's increasing capacity to realize itself in nature. If the philosophers of science, however, agreed with the Naturphilosophen that the mind does seek unity and imposes it on the world, nevertheless they refused to assert that this compels the world to seek unity; thus their disciple, Henry Adams, saw Darwinism as simply one more unifying superstition. If Spencer agreed with the Naturphilosophen that the world seeks unity, nevertheless he did not agree that this is the imposition of minds like his own; thus Darwinism is one more example of the necessities of force. Naturphilosophie split in half, and the pieces were Spencer and the philosophy of science. Given the failure of Naturphilosophie, how can any science be grounded? In Spencer, all phenomena can be shown to be evolutionary, and all evolution can be traced to necessary redistributions of matter and motion, and these redistributions are proved to be necessary corollaries of the persistence of force, and behind the persistence of force is - the Unknowable. Spencer's science leads to its own ungrounding; the result is that Dreiser can conceive of his own literature as itself part of evolutionary history and as no less apodictic than science for analyzing evolutionary history. The philosophy of science that reaches Henry Adams allows him to consider science as mental impositions on nature. This similarly has the result of leaving him free to toy - projecting some of his own


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calculations onto nature - with the science whose modern prestige he elaborately bows before. Dreiser's literary era had more scientistic quackery - Dreiser, Norris, London, even Adams - than any era since Poe's. Why? It was an era of great scientific optimism, but the claims of science were simultaneously losing their metaphysical basis. As in the 1830s, no one could say with authority what science was or meant or could explain. How much freedom the problem-situation allows Dreiser is evident in the single passage in Sister Carrie in which Spencer is mentioned. For all the liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic philosophers, we have but an infantile perception of morals. There is more in the subject than mere conformity to a law of evolution. It is yet deeper than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose's subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of morals. (Carrie, 68) The irony of the passage is that it both alludes to Spencer as a philosopher whose influence Dreiser was pleased to admit and slights that influence. "Evolution" gives way to "alchemy" - as if Dreiser's point is that science is still very limited, and magical literature has much to teach it. Yet how little that could have been Dreiser's full intention is revealed by the passage on Hurstwood's decline ("it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates" [Carrie, 240]), which, as Martin tells us, shows that Dreiser had been reading a scientistic quack named Elmer Gates.8 What fascinates Dreiser is not chemistry or alchemy, in contradistinction to one another, but alchemy that can pose as chemistry, like Gates's; the problem-situation allowed confusion as to what qualified as science and what did not, which allowed Dreiser to pose as a scientist as he took every novelistic liberty. I mean by this that Dreiser could write his book, when he wanted to, according to no extraliterary system at all. I have outlined how Hurstwood's decline fits the Spencerian paradigm of dissolution, and indeed, every stage is clearly put in relation to stages of the ascent of humanity (his new position at Warren Street in New York is beneath his old position in Chicago; when he cannot succeed as a traveling salesman, he is lower than Drouet; when he refuses to struggle to get a job, he is inferior to the early Carrie; finally, he cannot equal the vitality of the beggars he had scorned). Yet if Spencer must acknowledge dissolution as the result

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o f the continuation o f the same forces that brought evolution to its peak, in the case of Hurstwood it is not at all clear that the same force that pushed him up pulls him down. Dreiser hints that he knows something that Spencer does not of w h y the heart thrills, about the rose's subtle alchemy. Why does Hurstwood fall into dissolution? First o f all, it is his bad luck in running into Caroline Meeber - but then, there is something not unlucky but fated. When he steals the money that leads to his undoing, there are indications that he is under the control of impulses he cannot fathom. "Why don't I shut the safe?" his mind said to itself, lingering. "What makes me pause here?" (Carrie, 191) And later: While the money was in his hand the lock clicked. It had sprung! Did he do it? (Carrie, 193) He is enthralled in ways that he is incapable of examining, or Dreiser of analyzing. Later, there are signs that the increasing velocity o f Hurstwood's collapse is the result of the guilt he feels over his initial larceny. "You couldn't associate with [Mrs. Vance], anyway. They've got too much money." "Who said I wanted to?" said Carrie, fiercely. "Well, you act like it, rowing around over my looks. You'd think I'd committed - " Carrie interrupted . . . . (Carrie, 266) Or again: "I don't see how we ran up such a bill as that," said Carrie. "Well, we ate it," said Hurstwood. "It's funny," she replied, still doubting. "What's the use of your standing there and talking like that, now?" he asked. "Do you think I've had it alone? You talk as if I'd taken something." (Carrie, 296) Just after this scene, Hurstwood steals once more — if becoming a scab is understood as taking money out of another man's pocket - and manages to be adequately punished for it. If Hurstwood is destroying himself, he is no emblem of Spencer's universe, which does not have any provision for self-destruction except as the further, unintended consequence o f progress. What Dreiser seems to be illustrating (despite his empiricist's position that the mind is "a mere reflection of sensory impressions" [Carrie, 203]) is the Imp of the Perverse - an irrational demon amok in the rational universe. The Imp of the Perverse cannot be a Spencerian


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psychological category. Later in his career, Dreiser will be an enthusiast of Freud, which is to say two things at once. First, writers will always be attracted to "transscientific" anomalies. Second, they will generally be impressed with any "scientific" system that subsequently explains them - but, of course, literary careers will flourish only so long as temporary loopholes can be found. Novelists must be intellectual and antiintellectual at every moment they are novelists. Is Carrie's rise really evolutionary? But she is a fair approximation of Spencer's "primitive man": "conceptions of general facts are deficient in primitive man; prevision of distant results is impossible to him; his belief is relatively rigid; he lacks abstract ideas."9 And what about Drouet, who neither rises nor falls? He is a good example of what Henry Adams calls "evolution that does not evolve" - a sort of human Pteraspis, like Grant. As a book about evolution, Sister Carrie is reminiscent of Adams's introduction to Lyell: The challenge is more salient than the endorsement. Darwin and Spencer are not merely two events in the history of science; what Spencer finds in evolution (Darwinian or not) is the basis for a universal scientism and (central to the endeavor) for creating a universal history that progresses like science history. The importance of the history of science for Spencer is marked by the essay in which he forcefully tries to win it from Oken, Hegel (note the competition with Naturphilosophie), and Comte.10 Spencer's first move is to posit the beginning of science in primitive thought that itself rose out of instincts — to do for science and intellectual evolution what Darwin did in The Descent of Man for humans and biological evolution. If this can be brought off, then the news is bad for literature — science has the universe on its side. The largest step has been taken in creating an intellectual world in which the preservation of the literary past will need a special explanation and the historicide of science, according to which all of the past not cannibalized for present use is destroyed, will seem as natural as evolution. To discover in Drouet a sort of evolution that will not evolve, then, is to discover a loophole for literature and literary history. Likewise, the extent to which Carrie is merely a primitive sort of energy that does not progress but just rolls on - a juggernaut out of the Midwest - is the extent to which Dreiser sidesteps not merely Spencer but scientific history. If Sister Carrie and First Principles do not make a perfect fit, I can suggest a better one: Sister Carrie and Arthur Mervyn. Mervyn, in his perpetual innocence, is every mother's son, every sister's brother; in his lack of sophistication, he is correspondent to the universal sister, Carrie. They both advance from country to city, discover there promiscuity and monetary corruption and the two of them combined, and progress financially by means of increasingly respectable alliances until respectability itself is

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achieved. "Carrie had no excellent home principles fixed upon her" (Carrie, 60), and neither had Arthur. The euphemism for this moral adaptability is that they are both experimentally open and alert; not only does Darwinian history look like scientific history, but Darwinian adaptation looks like the experimental hostility to authority. But what, precisely, have Darwin and Spencer made possible for an American literary tradition that can, on either side of Darwin, discover in Arthur and Carrie an eternal American energy that does not evolve? Here is the passage from Sister Carrie that I have used to show the link of Spencer and Dreiser: "Transplantation is not always successful in the matter of flowers and maidens. . . . It would have been better if the acclimatization had been more gradual - less rigid." Here is the epitome of Arthur Mervyn's environmentalism: "She [Eliza] has now arrived at an age when longer to remain in a cold and churlish soil will stunt her growth and wither her blossoms. We must hasten to transplant her to a genial element and a garden well enclosed."11 Of course, this does not seem to allow Eliza the possibility of adapting - but Arthur himself is a champion of adaptation for survival, which ought to be no surprise on any model of intellectual history, since the book was contemporaneous with the first publications on evolution by Lamarck; further, if influence is demanded, Erasmus Darwin supplies it five years in advance of Arthur Mervyn. (The American edition of Zoonomia, published just after Arthur Mervyn, was introduced by Brown's friend Samuel Latham Mitchill.) Any reader who wishes to put Sister Carrie into intellectual history will do well to wonder: Is the book Lamarckian (like Spencer) or Darwinian? Erasmus or Charles? That the question would be crucial if Dreiser were a scientist, and more or less undecidable and trivial otherwise, is the entire point. The American literary tradition that Arthur Mervyn and Sister Carrie both belong to is the continuing confrontation of the country and the city. As well they might: Both authors left home (no excellent home principles fixed upon them) for the literary life in New York. Both developed careers in the arts out of unpromising beginnings (we note that Arthur ends up an author and Carrie a celebrated actress). Both were trained in religions they defected from, though they retain a moralism that they can be observed repressing. (Dreiser, confronting a model of Hurstwood, reports that "the still strongly puritan and moralistic streak in me was shocked beyond measure." And he calls New York a "sinful Magdalen.")12 They are, then, attracted to scientific-philosophical systems that both excuse (we are functions of forces) and congratulate (the forces reward adaptive life). At any rate, Arthur Mervyn shows how little naturalism required Darwin and Spencer to commence. Dreiser is famously post-Darwinian and

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post-Spencerian; nevertheless, the primitive force embodied by Drouet and especially Carrie not only does not evolve but connects Dreiser to a literary tradition that itself does not evolve. Thus he fends off simultaneously both an event in scientific history and the model of scientific history at once, even as he makes a literary profit by seeming to embrace them. POLAR SIMILARITY

The career of Thomas Pynchon, better than any other, allows us to divine what it is that literary people are after when they invoke science. I have used Eureka to rationalize Poe's literary career retrospectively; many critics, despite Pynchon's own warnings, have used his early short story "Entropy" to rationalize his career prospectively. Sentences such as these, by Tony Tanner, are not atypical in Pynchon criticism: "Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the outset. The title of his first important short story is 'Entropy' and it contains specific references to Henry Adams."13 Tanner's remark sets up a very neat opposition to Poe. If behind Poe is a nature-philosophic sense that the world is unifying and humanizing, entropy tells us that the world is disunifying and, by extension, dehumanizing. One way to trace the change from Poe to Pynchon is by contemplating their use of mirrors. Poe's mirror is essentially Hegel's: The world mirrors the mind, a hypothesis that implies a history of temporal mirrorings. Poe's opinion was that whites could be privy to this truth; it would be borne out at the end of Pym when Arthur sails into an electrical storm that looks like a human one. The transition from Poe to Pynchon is mediated by Nabokov: In Lolita the Hegelian application of spatial mirroring to history is undermined by Nabokov's point that only by aesthetic violence is temporal mirroring a possibility. "Our Glass Lake" (a spatial mirror that seems to promise Humbert's return to youth and young love) turns out to be "Hourglass Lake" (converting spatial symmetry to temporal asymmetry). In "Spring in Fialta," Nabokov constructs a perfect temporal mirror, but as in much of his work, a death represents the aesthetic violence necessary to make time, like space, reflect itself. Finally, in Pynchon, mirror-time is the province only of K's inhuman plastic surgeon, Schoenmaker, whose clock is reflected in a mirror, leading to this speculation: "was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time."14 But Schoenmaker's violence is grosser than Nabokov's, marking the devastation that aesthetics does to a reality that is unprotected, in Pynchon's

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case, by inverted commas. The meditation on mirror-time seems equally in the mind of Pynchon and one of his most nearly human characters, Rachel Owlglass, enemy of Schoenmaker; her name focuses our attention not merely on time but more specifically on nighttime, the "owl-hours," as Pynchon calls the night (K, 412), when the world is given over to statues, day having been lost irrevocably. What entropy teaches is that time is irreversible; the premise of classical mechanics - that if time were reversed and the planets ran backward, the universe would not be importantly different - is overturned by the second law of thermodynamics, and Pynchon is its prophet. It is not that any of this is wrong, precisely; I simply want to consider what our attraction to this sort of analysis means and what its hidden premises are. What are literary people after when they invoke science? The answer has three phases but is substantially unified. 1. The desire is for a master metaphor

In his introduction to Slow Learner, admittedly a piece of writing so disarming that it makes one anxious to rearm, Pynchon pronounces that literature is serious insofar as it concerns death.15 His subject is always death - personal, national, global. What precisely is gained by calling death entropy? In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, the symbol "K" is borrowed from baseball statistics, in which it means "struck out," and is used to mean "killed." What does the science metaphor do for us that the sports metaphor cannot? I believe that the answer is that, in science, writers and critics may seek not just another metaphor, but a metaphor of a peculiarly selfdenying kind; to trace a metaphor to science is to trace it to a discourse with an entirely different, in fact a nonmetaphoric, purchase on reality. A master metaphor can be masterful only insofar as it stands outside the metaphorical discourse. The problem is that science can provide no such thing, nor does Pynchon think it can. A title can seem to be an extratextual comment; call a story "Entropy" and you encourage a dozen critics immediately to search for the relevant scientific popularizations; call a story at the beginning of your career "Entropy" and it will keep popularizations in print for decades, if you are a good enough writer. But to the extent that those critics think that the title is a pointer to an entirely external discourse, they are mistaken. It would be churlish to criticize all the articles on Pynchon and thermodynamics, or Pynchon and information theory, from which I have learned a great deal. What I fail to see is why there are so many of them: The justification can only be that the scientific way into Pynchon's fiction is paramount. Why is it not one way among

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many? Suppose Frost's "West-Running Brook" were called "Entropy": The stream of everything that runs away. The universal cataract of death That spends to nothingness - and unresisted, Save by some strange resistance in itself. . . Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook.

Then suddenly a half-dozen articles would appear, and what would be left when the dust settled would be the same poem we already had. Frost was explicit about the metaphoricity even of science, but that is a larger point than my own. What I am merely indicating is the recalcitrant metaphoricity of science in literature. What Tanner, as powerfully as anyone, has observed is that Pynchon's great theme is the dehumanization and mechanization of human life. There is no point in arguing that Tanner calls that dehumanization entropy without textual support; Pynchon calls it entropy also. What is wrong is featuring the metaphor as if it tells us something from a discourse different from the one we find ourselves, when we read Pynchon, amidst. Here is Tanner on V.: If one theme of the book is the acceleration of entropy, another is the avoidance of human relationships based on reciprocal recognition of the reality of the partner. Instead of the recognitions of love, there are only the projected fantasies of lust. These two phenomena - entropy and the dread of love - may well be linked in some way, for they show a parallel movement towards the state of lasting inanimateness, and share an aspiration to eradicate consciousness and revert to thing-status. (P, 23)

But the final sentence, which appears to unite facts of two different orders (psychology, physics), is a tautology. Entropy no more aspires to eradicate consciousness than a thermometer aspires to a fever. Even if we grant Tanner his personification, does it make sense to say that entropy aspires to revert to thing-status? Entropy is bad business in the long run for humans and things, particularly the things Pynchon cares most about: machines. The dread of love equals entropy only if entropy has already been metaphorized to mean the dread of love. Entropy explains nothing in the text because our sense of what it means comes directly Jrom the text. We have not joined an independent discourse. Pynchon is tricky on this point. In his discussion of the story "Entropy" in the foreword to Slow Learner, Pynchon says that the "theme" (his quotation marks) of "Entropy" is derivative of Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings and Henry Adams's Education. What he

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claims to have received from The Human Use ofHuman Beings is "Wiener's spectacle of universal heat-death and mathematical stillness" (SL, 13). The problem is that Wiener's book does not happen to be a spectacle of universal heat-death (the end point of entropy). Many things scare Wiener, but entropy is not one of them: "the theory of entropy, and the considerations of the ultimate heat-death of the universe, need not have such profoundly depressing moral consequences as they seem to possess at first sight" - for while the universe as a whole quiets to stasis, local pockets of productivity and communication remain possible for eons, during which humans will have more pressing things to worry about. One of them is the tightening association of humans and machines in the twentieth century - the increasing use, as Wiener says, of humans as "second-rate surrogates for possible machines in the future." Wiener's own cybernetics is the study of the parallels of human and machine, and Wiener is courageous enough to see that his own work may be perverted to encourage what he most dreads. He quotes at length a review of his earlier book, Cybernetics, which sees in his vision "the adventure of our century: hesitation between an indefinite turbulence of human affairs and the rise of a prodigious Leviathan."*6 That sentence is Pynchonesque, but the scientific name of the mechanization of humans is taken to be "cybernetics," not "entropy." It might as well be "behaviorism"; and Beckett traces the "aspiration t o . . . revert to thing status" not to Clausius, Boltzmann, and Gibbs but to Geulincx. Science can provide master metaphors only if what is borrowed from it is not already metaphorized in order that it may be borrowed. But Pynchon does not intend an especially prestigious metaphor. A passage from "Entropy" that Tanner quotes concerns the depressed Callisto, who "found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own world" (SL, 88). No master metaphor - merely an adequate metaphor for local phenomena. 2. The desire is for a disciplinary democracy

This project registers again a hopeless longing for something inside literature that retains its citizenship in a discipline foreign to literature. The idea here is that Pynchon has brought science into his books for its own sake, in its own terms, as an aspect of his own universally inclusive ambitions. Why Pynchon might have wanted to be so egalitarian and inclusive - even to the point of deprecating his own genre and profession - is a question with several interesting answers. Edward Mendelson, for example, classifies Gravity's Rainbow not as a novel but as an "encyclopedic narrative," which, like every other member of the genre (e.g., The Divine Comedy, Moby-Dick), contains "a full account of at least

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one technology or science" as part of its program to represent an emerging culture.17 Richard Poirier does not stress the enduring tradition of literature-transcending literature; rather, he lauds Pynchon's courage in the face of his quite modern recognition that science may have greater force than literature. Pynchon, Poirier claims, is "not so literary as to think it odd, an in joke, that literary techniques are perhaps less powerfully revealing about human nature and history than are scientific ones." What Pynchon admits, though Mailer cannot, is "that the Novelist's imagination is often less inclusive or daring than the imagination of mathematics or organic chemistry" (P, 173, 174). Both positions, Mendelson's and Poirier's, are themselves inclusive and daring. Pynchon's work is thingy and omniscient, like Mendelson's other "encyclopedic narratives," and does indeed refuse to compromise itself by maintaining a studied condescension toward science. Still, in saying that Mendelson's and Poirier's positions are inclusive and daring, I do not mean to suggest that they are not also very odd. Both manage to use what one would have thought was a novel to play down the power of either novels or novelists. For all I know, Mendelson's generic taxonomy is correct, but for some reason, his impulse is not to credit the novel (Melville's, Joyce's, or Pynchon's) as the triumphant modern form of the encyclopedic narrative. Similarly, Poirier thinks that somehow an inclusive and daring novel manages to show that the novelist's imagination may be less inclusive and daring than a chemist's. The best way to get at the oddity of these views, I believe, is to wonder about just how much science - of the sort that transmutes the novel into an encyclopedic narrative or reveals the comparative weakness of novelistic techniques - is in any of Pynchon's books. What would it mean to say that any of them contains "a full account of at least one technology or science"? Mendelson's own elaboration is merely this: "Gravity's Rainbow is expert in ballistics, chemistry, and mathematics" (MP, 164). To refer to scientific fields expertly, however, is a considerably smaller accomplishment than to give a full account of them. We cannot assume that Mendelson means the more modest formulation and overstates the grander, because it is central to his conception of Pynchon as encyclopedist rather than novelist that he does not merely refer to science but includes it on something like a one-discipline-one-vote basis with artistic concerns. I want to insist, on the contrary, that Gravity's Rainbow admits no science into its literary domain without serious, subversive questioning. What Gravity's Rainbow calls most explicitly into question is the scientific unidirectionality of time. Whether it is cause and effect that determines time's arrow or the statistical unraveling of entropy, it is impossible, given Slothrop, to be sure that time moves only forward. Both sorts of

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science - Pointsman's "stone determinacy" (GR, 86) and Mexico's statistics - fail to explain Slothrop's talent. Always the literary challenge to science will attack the scientific time sense. The primary implication is that science cannot comprehend death. Slothrop's talent is to register, without seeing them, the arrival of V-2 rockets before they land; since the V-2 is faster than sound, he has to sense it before he can sense it. If you are not Slothrop and you sense the V-2 coming, then it is not coming at you. But Slothrop would indeed be capable of sensing the V-2 coming at him. The rocket is an emblem as well as an agent of death: If you experience it, it is not for you. And Slothrop does, by the end of Gravity's Rainbow, seem to experience his own destruction. The book is pervasively about experiencing death while one is still alive - thus all the Dracula references, thus the mediums called in by desperate science. The point is to experience what Pynchon calls the "Other Side" of what Pynchon calls the "Wall." On the Other Side one can hear "about the future (no serial time over there)" (GR, 624). Recall Pynchon's comment that literature is serious insofar as it concerns death; the inference is that science cannot be serious in the way literature can, because there is no empirical access to the Other Side. The Other Side is not merely death as opposed to life, but spirit as opposed to matter (GR, 165). It is, then, entropy, first among other scientific concepts, that literature needs to challenge if literature depends, finally, on time's reversibility, on knowing death by undoing it, even as science promotes it by refusing to know it. Pynchon, at long last, cannot escape Nabokov's syndrome, though all the destructiveness has been put on the side of temporal invariability. Slothrop is a "sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise" (GR, 143). The book may be about entropy, the subject taken up from Wiener and Henry Adams, but it lives on the basis of denying it. Far from being able to comprehend death, science, like the V-2 rocket, is its emblem and agent. The accumulation and centralization of energy might mean anarchy or they might mean order, as Henry Adams remarked; radium means either that "force [is] inexhaustible" or that we had stumbled upon a new technique for squandering it, and ourselves as well. Either way, the bombs that were doubling in power every ten years at the turn of the century would eventually fall in odd relation to Slothrop, whose psychic talent allows him to make nonsense of what Adams calls, even in the presence of bombs, the "rates of progress."18 But Adams anticipates Slothrop in his discovery that whether you are contemplating bombs or entropy, you are worrying about death, and that though whole cities or universes may die at once, every individual dies microcosmically. Almost anything that one might say on the subject of science in Henry Adams is apt to be partial: He never quite stops being evolutionary in

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the presence of entropy; he never quite forswears mechanics in the presence of radiation; he never quite stops hoping for causes and essential laws, even in the presence of Pearson, Mach, and Poincare. Perhaps all that one can say without qualification is that at the end of the Education, science represents the death that literature earns its seriousness by considering. Beginning in Chapter XXI, "Twenty Years After," death is everywhere, as is science, not coincidentally. At the end of that chapter, Adams give his opinion on bankers with the apology: "Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices" (HA, 330). At the beginning of the next one, Adams finds himself "drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle." He is like an "extinct" statesman who suffers, after six months of oblivion, "newspaper-death": "Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave" (HA, 331). The chapter that begins thus morbidly is "Chicago"; at the Exposition of 1893, Adams lingers "long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave history a new phase" (HA, 342). But a new historical phase for society is death for individuals. As Adams says, society is immortal but people are not, which means that society can welcome past-destroying science but that Adams is a dead man, as he says, two and a half decades before he dies. Science gains energy at the end of the Education as Adams loses himself; science in this way is experienced personally by Adams as if it were his own death in advance. He senses the bombs of World War II dropping before they drop. The comprehensive, Spencerian historical challenge of science - how other disciplines might justify themselves if the universe progresses in the scientific manner - begins to look reasonably friendly. What is peculiar about literature must be sacrificed to evolutionary necessities, but literature cannot help redeeming itself as science if everything progresses. Adams imagines a complicity of the universe more desperate yet: The universe pursues heat-death; science discovers radium to energize its finest bombs; scientific understanding, no longer aimed progressively in the direction of truth, arrives at what Adams calls, pointedly enough, the "void of death" (HA, 460). This last is "eternal bliss to the mathematicians, but turned the historian green with horror" (HA, 455). Only the new twentieth-century man or woman might embrace the mathematician in his ecstasy, but the citizen of the twentieth century is not apt to be a litterateur. The new citizen cannot be a litterateur if Henry Adams is the type of the literary man: a seventeenth-century relic, an eighteenthcentury remnant, speaking to our century as profoundly as anyone has yet spoken to it because he is, more profoundly than any writer before or since, temperamentally and professionally undead, surviving as if by half-lives in every century he adumbrates. It is science that broke Adams's "historical neck" (HA, 382) - that is what science exists occasionally to

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do - but he lived on nonetheless. This makes him, as much as Slothrop, a "thermodynamic surprise." Science is the best context for revolving the subject that makes literature serious. It cannot be ignored; it can hardly be deprecated. (It can hardly be understood! Pynchon: "But do not underestimate the shallowness of my understanding" [SL, 13]. Henry Adams: "Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not!" [HA, 343].) From Adams to Pynchon, there is no possibility of condescension toward the extraordinarily imaginative and ratiocinative quest carried forward by modern science. But science exists in Pynchon's novels for the novels' sake, even if the novels intend to redesign literature: Science as death's emblem makes the novel serious. V. does not make as many important allusions to science as Gravity's Rainbow, but its narrator's statement on science and literature, prompted by the poetic career of Fausto Maijstral, is exactly appropriate to Pynchon's art: Living as he docs much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its functions; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great L i e . . . . (V., 305) Which is finally to say that the task of writers is not simply to get beyond literariness to science, but to disguise science in all the literariness that art allows and to recognize the product as a fiction. The point is not to include the world that is beyond the metaphor and the novel, which is impossible metaphorically in a novel, but to know what one is doing as a writer and not a scientist. In this way, a novelist in fact asserts his superiority to science, because he understands metaphors as scientists do not, and so alludes to a reality that is always covered by them. It is paradoxical but apparently necessary that the egalitarian instinct, when it appears in literature, always manages to reinforce the hierarchical superiority of literature. This is a fact that Poirier knows: "Above all, [uncomprehending readers will] be discomfited by a novelist who posits a world in which experience is often most meaningfully assembled in ways considered alternative, often antithetical to literature, like science, or inferior to literature, like film and comic books." But Poirier adds: "If literature is superior to any of these things, then it takes a book as stylistically wide-ranging as Gravity's Rainbow to prove it" (P, 177). The one book courageous enough to hypothesize the possible supe-

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riority of science is, ipso facto, the one book superior to science. Gravity's Rainbow joins the history of American novels that manage to use their historical weakness (an openness to other forms of discourse, a corollary of the failure to professionalize) as a basis for historical revenge: Literature can take anything and metaphorize it, and metaphoric history cannot progress. Metaphors are the guarantee, therefore, of undeath - and undeath is the trope of anachronism that science exists to invalidate. Pynchon is a guard at the scientificity threshold. The point about Maijstral is that in the metaphorizing process, we glimpse Adams's "void of death" - not by ignoring the process or crediting another one. 3. The desire is for a preeminent sign of the time

The assumption is that attaching literature to science is the best way to register its historical position, since it is changes in science (and technology) that mark an era uniquely. This idea is circular and, insofar as it can be rescued from its own circularity, wrong with respect to Pynchon. The idea is circular in that looking to science and technology for evidence of change in the world will necessarily reveal that the world has changed in the image of science and technology. But why assume that the world changes in general the way science changes in particular? This is Spencer's model, but the scientific model of the universe that Pynchon invokes is anti-Spencerian: Callisto, in "Entropy," discovers in American consumerism a "tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos" (SL, 88). He looks, that is, at precisely the consumerism that Dreiser discovered and recognizes the antithesis of Spencerianism. This is a nice local joke, but the grander joke is that Pynchon is using science to describe a universal history that is not like scientific history, but rather like degenerative mythic history. It is not an accident, then, that Pynchon has found his way to the same science that preoccupies the similarly polymathic Michel Serres. What Serres sees in statistical thermodynamics and its corollaries in information theory is evidence that science has to give up its Martial determinism (since statistical thermodynamics is statistical), its Martial ambition to rule the world (since thermodynamics is the science of the unruly fire), and its Martial superiority to all other disciplines (because of the parallel of universal flux and all varieties of human flux). Science has passed from Mars to Venus - a nice development for Pynchon to pursue in V. The happy oddity is again that reducing science to the size of literature always reduces science to less than the size of literature, so that Serres's editors can proclaim (1) "There is no hierarchy of cultural formations" in Serres and (2) "Hermes privileges literature."19 To describe science in such a

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way that it can be incorporated into literature is to make metaphor dominant by virtue of its inclusiveness and law subservient by virtue of its exclusiveness. If Pynchon finds his way to science, it is not because science is the sign of the time. Rather, it is because Pynchon's sense of the time found entropy as a metaphor, and in fact a metaphor peculiarly unfit to imply a science that is the preeminent historical measure. Pynchon lets us know directly that if entropy is his own metaphor, and even his own metaphor of his time, it is not his time's metaphor of his time. The narrator of V. tells us that in the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man has become something which absorbs Xrays, gamma rays, and neutrons. (K, 265) The next sentence is "Such at least was Oley Bergomask's notion of progress," which means that it is not necessarily Pynchon's. Pynchon may have reservations about the apportioning of metaphors itself, or, more likely, may not wish to give the name of "progress" to the development. To metaphorize science is to ironize progress. At any rate, the effect of the passage is to make us wonder, i/Pynchon thinks of man as governed by the second law of thermodynamics, why we had thought that made Pynchon up-to-date. The parallels with thermodynamics in information theory are a much more recent discovery, but at best, perhaps, Pynchon has one foot in the twentieth century. Like Henry Adams, he has another in the nineteenth, with its thermodynamic preoccupations, and the angle of the inverted V widens as that foot slips in the direction of the Puritans' century. Pynchon assigns the entropic metaphor to Poe's era, and if we read Poe through Michel Serres's eyes, we might discover that Pynchon is right. We might find that Pym predicts Boltzmann - that Pym is entropic rather than unifying - as Turner predicts Boltzmann in Serres's essay. I made much of the destruction of the thirty-two whites on Tsalal - "armed to the teeth"; I said they were "Bereniced." Certainly this rhymes with the destruction of Esther's nose by Schoenmaker and with the ascendancy of psychodontia - the science of the relationship of teeth and souls — in V. Antihuman destruction is on the rise. Of course, Pym escapes the massacre of the teeth-sailors in Pym and sails onward toward the South Pole. But in V., similarly, Godolphin pursues his dream, his V, at the pole. Granted that it would be easy to put these events in opposition. Arthur

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Gordon Pym is called "Gordon" at one critical moment in order to allow him to mispronounce it "Goddin." This lets us know that his pursuit of the pole is a pursuit of divinity by means of a series of boats, one of which (between the Penguin and the Jane Guy in the evolution) is the Grampus. If Poe's evolution is from dolphin to God, it may be argued that Pynchon's dissolution is from God to dolphin. But this opposition seems less clear as one examines it. Godolphin pursues the pole as "one of the two motionless places in the gyrating world" in order to have "peace to solve Vheissu's riddle" (K, 189). We seem to have an antithesis: the disunified gaudiness of Vheissu, the unified whiteness of the pole; the disturbance of Vheissu, the peace of the pole. But then the antithesis breaks. What Vheissu turns out to represent is "what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation" (V., 190). And as the antithesis within Godolphin's dream breaks, so necessarily does the opposition of Poe and Pynchon. Poe's dream of humanity joining God at the pole - as Pym sails into the giant snowman - may be fitted with perfect justice to Pynchon's analysis of the desire to be a thing. The dream of being God is the desire of being annihilated, as Poe's Eureka remarkably demonstrates. Just as one could read Pym as asserting that the world is ordering or disordering, depending on whether one lays down as a grid Naturphilosophie or thermodynamics, so one could see disordering or ordering in Pynchon. From the first sentence of V., the ordering is fantastic: "Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia" (K, 1). This is, in particular, typological ordering, the Christian program for manufacturing temporal mirrors. There is a mirror in the middle, and it is made of time: The 55 of 1955 is a double v. The sentence begins with Eve and ends with the virgin, the usual typological pair; in fact, "Christmas Eve" is a typological pun, since the "Christmas Eve" is Mary. Is the passage also from blackness (the levis) to whiteness (the virgin), from the profane (Benny) to the sacred (the virgin again), from Jewish priests (the levis again) to Christians and cowboys? One also notes that the second word has a v in the middle and is a palindrome. This is a critical search resembling the one Herbert Stencil is on, a search simultaneously for progress and unity. It is a search of the sort that Henry Adams deemed exhausted by the end of the nineteenth century, exhausted by Hegel and Herbert Spencer, after whom Herbert Stencil may be named. How do we know unity when we see it? The locus classicus of the issue is, of course, Adams's Education, halfway from Pym to Pynchon, and so nicely situated for upsetting our faith either in Poe's orderings or in Pynchon's disorderings. It takes Adams part of a lifetime to justify

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replacing a nineteenth-century optimism about the growth of unity with a twentieth-century taste for multiplicity; but statistical thermodynamics means that at "the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, but that the unity was chaos" (HA, 406). Even this conclusion turns out to be too simple; from the point of view of the new philosophy of science, there is no final synthesis at all, even a final synthesis that might as well be called afinaldissolution. Poincare posits that beneath every simplicity is a complexity, and beneath every complexity a simplicity, "and so on without ever being able to foresee the last term." That history goes through cycles of alternating phases is precisely the "point that Adams, after fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender" (HA, 455) - to entropy. The ultimate lesson would seem to be that unity or disunity is not something that one precisely knows how to identify at sight. What Pynchon adds is that, therefore, we will see it when we are instructed to do so. If that is the case, then "Entropy," as a title of a short story, may be taken as an instruction to perform a kind of reading. So would an essay like Eureka, declared to be the culmination of a career. But there is no reason to trust a title more than a tale or an essay more than a novel. If there is one scene in Pynchon's oeuvre that has attracted scientific explication, it is the confrontation of Oedipa Maas and Nefastis in The Crying of Lot 49, and the attempt of Nefastis to defeat entropy by making the metaphoric connection of thermodynamic and information entropy into objective reality. The assumption of critics, of course, is that Nefastis must fail and entropy must triumph. That is simply to trust science and not faith, even a nature-philosophic or Spencerian (scientistic) faith like that of Nefastis. But the book allows both visions of history and concludes before either is confirmed or disproved. We do not know if Pynchon's world is disintegrating or self-mirroring. I insist on the ambiguity and the scientism even of the hopeful and faithful alternative because I want to preserve Pynchon's usefulness for what I take to be the next problem-situation: As physics ("stark mad in metaphysics," as Adams says [HA, 382]) pushes gleefully toward a Theory of Everything - a theory of universal origins, of essences deeper than matter and energy, a theory perhaps even of purpose, a modern Naturphilosophie - literary theory continues to abominate origins, essences, and intentions. I do not believe physics will find what it is looking for, but the most important fact of disciplinary relations is about to be the utter lack of sympathy of the philosophy most influential in the literary world for what physicists are, at any rate, brilliantly attempting. The antidisciplinarian age is ending as physics increasingly takes over territory abandoned by the humanities, though antidisciplinarians will for a time contrive to find in quantum physics and quarks the evidence they require for a great assimilation. Current philosophy cannot justify a Theory of

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Everything; current philosophy does not wish to. Pynchon at least feels its pull; despite literary theory, the pull is aesthetic, and aesthetics is expanded to the dimensions of the universe, so that the challenge to art is infinite. (On the level of Stephen Hawking's abstractions, time does mirror itself like space, which means that science may have achieved Nabokov's ultimate aesthetic ambition, as art itself comes to prefer the inconsequences of metonymy.) If, on the one hand, the Theory of Everything looks like an intellectual apocalypse, and on the other hand thermodynamics describes a world that comes to an intellectual whimper, then what is left to literature but a strategic reservation and irony about all past-destroying futures? THE CELESTIAL SPACECRAFT

In Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer sets out to elucidate the metaphysics of technology: Yes, he had come to believe. . . that probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of the world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness.20 The sentence is surely not the most luminous one Mailer has written, but it manages to convey its point. "Technique": Mailer has received, by one means or another, the diction of Jacques Ellul. (Technology is not a thing in the world but a vision of a machine-centered universe.) "Modern" twice: The book was, when written, up-to-date - up to the minute - so that the word "modern," which has an elastic denotation, seems provisionally qualified to encompass all modernities, including our own. Mailer is out to write a history of the present, of a present not served by technology but produced by technology, down to the soul that may not be greater (according to Douglas Hofstadter's spoonerism) than the hum of its parts. And the sentence, though not particularly lucid, is alive - a fact worth noting, since Mailer will see his battle with technology defined most vividly as a question of style. If technique is a vision, then Mailer will put up a competing vision, perfectly characterized by the description of a consciousness with pores. On the other hand, try reading with Mailer's eyes these two sentences - functions of poreless, in fact disembodied, minds - picked from a wide selection of similar sentences out of two books on cybernetics. It is known that it takes courage to look ahead and accept the future, because it is incongruent with our experience.

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But the sentence is a paradox because it speaks of courage quite timidly. It takes courage also to look at a future that one knows about; it is NASA-think to pretend that the feeling of danger necessarily diminishes with understanding. The cowardice of pretending to reduce fears by making the future "congruent with out experience" is exemplified in the first three words: "It is known." Anything can become congruent with our experience, and made to seem harmless, by such a technique. Or take this sentence: It is believed that the whole development of machines that can learn and think is a vital product of the general theory of cybernetics, and, of course, first cousin to the process of automation.21

This is not from a paragraph designed to debunk what "is believed." "It is believed" is used to mean both "I believe" and "everyone in cybernetics agrees." Cybernetics seems well on its way toward making a race (of first cousins) in the image of its theories. These are easy points to score against men who do not suppose that their intelligence and courage must be manifest in a prose style, to which Mailer commits much of his. The point is to place Mailer - in Of a Fire on the Moon contesting the world of man-machines, ego death, sexlessness, and plastic prose - in a specific intellectual moment. Information theory, game theory, and computers come together around 1950 to give birth and nurturing to cybernetics, and cybernetics is the helmsman on the trip to the moon. Furthermore, AI (artificial intelligence) research, by the time of the Apollo 11 liftoff, is underway: Mailer reprints a computer poem, which smells like vinyl to him (Moon, 354). Either we are no more complicated than machines (the old vision of technique, from La Mettrie to Skinner) or machines are not necessarily less complicated than us (the new vision of technique, represented by AI men Dennett and Hofstadter). We seem to witness, in Of a Fire on the Moon, the complete triumph of twentieth-century technique. Yet modern intellectual (and technological) history is not the only history Mailer lives in. Of a Fire on the Moon can be read as Mailer's recalcitrance not only to his own moment in history but to the full scientific-technological vision that has produced the modern sense of what a moment in history might be. On Mailer's beloved moon, which is where, as far as my book is concerned, the sexual politics of disciplinary history must culminate, the astronauts' time sense begins to go awry. "Do you have a time estimate for us until you're ready to start cabin depress? Over." "Fifteen minutes maybe?" (Moon, 411; see also 396)


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Further, space and time begin to be confused ("the moon had properties of light so mysterious as to suggest that a shift of direction might be its equivalent for a passage of time" [Moon, 410]). Mailer is delighted with all such confusions, for the astronauts' time - scientific-technological time par excellence, container of orderly progress - is his terror. It is WASP time (in contrast to CPT, colored people's time), itself as timebound, Mailer hopes, as WASPitude, an invention of the seventeenth century. Against this, Mailer wants to put up his own sense of time - time as an unprogressing dialectic of continuity and decay. He wants to announce, in effect, to NASA: You've conquered space, but time is mine. So the battle of Mailer and science becomes a battle of histories, scientificprogressive history against a version of literary history according to which old works survive to measure how much of technique's decay is manifest in new works. Mailer is a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe, theoretician of the Imp of the Perverse: "It occurred to [Mailer] on the instant that one's fear of height might be at least a partial function of the importance of one's ego"; "Like the eye of a victim just murdered, the earth stared back at [Armstrong]" (Moon, 56, 413). His fear of ego destruction, like Poe's, produces by reaction a belief that the world is entirely writing, his own writing - even his own body's writing - writ large ("as if the moon, properly read, could betray as much of the real character of the heavens as the lines on a man's hand could enrich an eye which understood a world where histories might be written in the hieroglyphics of some universal form neatly concealed in the crack of the palm" [Moon, 286]). Or Mailer is a belated Melville: The rocket is "white as the white of Melville's Moby Dick," a "mechanical white whale" (Moon, 100, 219). In each of these references lurks the idea that science is the agent of decadence in history, because the tradition of American romance that Mailer is trying to force himself into has been contaminated by a scientific history that does not read in the world a hieroglyph of the relationship of ego and God. Of a Fire on the Moon is a paradox: Mailer has to highlight all the modernity of an event, the Apollo 11 moonshot, in order to revive what the moonshot is trying to make obsolete, an idea of time in conflict with the very possibility of modernity. Mailer has to join his scientific-intellectual era or not speak about it, which is the literary intellectual's perpetual dilemma. Mailer joins: "with that part of his brain which would insist on remaining a technological child of his century, he had to admire the splendors of the design for reentry" (Moon, 442). But that admiration is itself timeless. Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables admired the train and telegraph, though with less effort at comprehension. The bind

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for literary intellectuals is that h o w e v e r m u c h they m a y wish to escape scientific history, they are children of the times; h o w e v e r m u c h they w a n t to be in it, they are children of the past. Therefore the conflict of the 1960s writer with his era merely duplicates the conflict of the 1850s writer with his, and b o t h are seventeenth-century dilemmas that literature inevitably repeats. T h e first point that Mailer wants to m a k e about technology is that it is a Puritan invention ("a Puritan ethic in the whisper of e m p t y spaces" [Moon, 227]): T h e b o o k on Apollo 11 is, from first to last, a meditation on W A S P i t u d e . W i t h g o o d reason, Mailer goes back to the last m o m e n t before the invention of Puritanism for the vision he is going to put u p against science and technology. If we agree that the urge to create a language is basic to man, so basic that one can begin to define his nature by saying he is an animal with the irrepressible desire to develop formal speech, why must it be altogether uncomfortable to assume other categories of nature would not attempt to shape forms that could delineate their inner meaning, why indeed is it not as natural for nature to shape itself as for man to speak? On that assumption could commence a metaphysics of form. (Moon, 292) M o r e particularly: Would the moon yet answer the fundamental question of form — that all forms which looked alike were in some undiscovered logic thereby alike? — which is to say that if the skin of the moon was reminiscent of boiled milk and cancer cells and acne, so then - would a theory yet emerge which could revolve at some ease through the metaphors of the moon and find the link of metaphysical reason between cancer, acne, blisterings of paint and the wrinkled ridges of a boiled and skinthick milk? (Moon, 290-1) O n e can be grateful to such a theory for the dignity it lends to Mailer's gift of metaphor. But there is a pathos to these lucubrations: Mailer hopes that a m o o n s h o t , t r i u m p h of science and technology, will provide the experimental p r o o f of an antiscientific theory. As for the idea that Mailer is about to " c o m m e n c e a metaphysics of f o r m " - not only had the theory already c o m m e n c e d before Mailer, it had been entirely developed, elucidated, and dismissed. T h e n e w metaphysics of form is the Renaissance theory of signatures: Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing


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them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. More particularly: In order that we may know that aconite will cure our eye disease, or that ground walnut mixed with spirits of wine will ease a headache, there must of course be some mark that will make us aware of these things: otherwise, the secret would remain indefinitely dormant. Would we ever know that there is a relation of twinship or rivalry between a man and his planet, if there were no sign upon his body or among the wrinkles of his face that he is an emulator of Mars and akin to Saturn?22

So Foucault describes an episteme that he supposes to have once been general among the disciplines but now to be dead. Nevertheless, American writers, from Poe, who has Pym read the hieroglyphics of his cave, and Hawthorne, who imputes a magic to daguerreotypy by assigning it the ability to reveal significant likenesses between generations of Pyncheons, to Mailer, who wants to describe the attractive resemblance of the iron of astronauts and the iron at the center of the stars, like the Renaissance kinship of men and Saturn, continually have to reinvent the episteme as the newest response to the newest science. Metaphors are signs of the historical ambivalence in literature, signatures in one episteme posing as decorations in another. What can writers who would like to confront science do but reinvent magic? But as magicians, they are not likely to be taken for intellectuals. From nature-philosophic parascience to Spencerian parascience to Mailer's hope that the triumph of technology will reveal a new metaphysics of the metaphor, every attempt to deal with science (contradicting and co-opting) looks like nothing so much as the sixteenth century running into the seventeenth. Even writers who suppose that they are dealing with scientific history are part of a history that is not only nonscientific, but also in opposition to the very idea of history that science promotes. The association of science and technology with Puritanism is, of course, the Merton hypothesis; two of our best theoreticians of WASPitude, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Norman Mailer, understand the ambiguities of the coupling. Hawthorne, in both The House of the Seven Gables and "The Celestial Railroad," the two great precursors of Of a Fire on the Moon, is unable to give a clear picture except of the ambiguities. The technological Salem of Seven Gables is the product of both seventeenth-century witchcraft (Holgrave the daguerreotypist is a Maule, ancestor of Mailer's magical blacks) and seventeenth-century Protestantism; the railroad men of "The Celestial Railroad" are descendants of Bunyan who ignore Bunyan. Technology is an aspect of the Puritan

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ethos that has destroyed the basis of the Puritan religion: fear of God, fear of death, hatred of sin, fear of Hell. So much of Mailer's criticism of technology is based on Hawthorne's that one sees that Hawthorne, whose presence in Fire is more disguised than Melville's, is the more fundamental influence. From the celestial train to the celestial spaceship, not much changes. Mailer, like Hawthorne, wonders if God or the devil is served by the technological advance: "Did God voyage out for NASA, or was the Devil our line of sight to the stars?" (Moon, 80). (Mailer is not misled by the fact that the technologists "engaged the deepest primitive taboos, but... all but parodied the conventional in public manner" [Moon, 46]. Nor is Hawthorne in "The Celestial Railroad.") Mailer, like Hawthorne, thinks that the new technology is a blasphemy against death: "Yes, wouldn't it be in the purview of the Wasp, damn corporate Wasp, to disturb the purlieus of the dead [the moon]?" (Moon, 109). (We remember that Judge Pyncheon digs up old Maule's grave and that Hawthorne's Vanity Fair ignores the dying.) Mailer, like Hawthorne, thinks that technology is an attempt to deny original sin: "Technology," he is told by a black professor with whom he agrees, "begins when men are ready to believe that the sins of the fathers are not visited on the sons" (Moon, 140). (Hawthorne, in Seven Gables, hopes through Clifford that the train and the telegraph halt the transmission of Pyncheon sins.) And Mailer, like Hawthorne, thinks that technology is the prettification of Apollyon's Hell. Mailer makes a point of confusing Apollo and Apollyon: "was the Devil chief engineer of the ship which went to the moon?" (Moon, 208-9). Apollyon is precisely the "chief engineer" of the celestial railroad. If there is a difference between Hawthorne and Mailer, it is that Hawthorne, in Seven Gables though not in "The Celestial Railroad," indulges a greater hope in antilapsarian technology. Though both Seven Gables and Of a Fire on the Moon begin with the murder of a patriarch - Colonel Pyncheon, Papa Hemingway - only Mailer and not Hawthorne looks with horror at the technological attempt of the sons to get away with the murder without a curse. It is the cursedness of the fathers that we were trying to destroy, our cursed roots in sin and death: "Collins and his machine were like a coin on edge in the universe, the acme of technology, the acme of uprooted existence" (Moon, 418). Clifford in his machine is the acme of deracinated existence - only he is enjoying it. The reversal is that Mailer, hater of WASPitude and its technology, turns out to be more of a Puritan than Hawthorne, almost as Puritanic as the Puritans. At the end of Mailer's Gothic history, he returns to Provincetown: "Provincetown was country for witches: here the Pilgrims had landed" (Moon, 461). Provincetown is Salem, and Mailer is Mather, an amateur of science but a believer in witchcraft at once. He is, in a single


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work, the self-contradictory Hawthorne of Seven Gables and "The Celestial Railroad," detesting Puritanism and out-Bunyaning Bunyan. What these complexities prove is that Mailer, despite cybernetics, computer technology, and AI, can only repeat Hawthorne's ambivalences, and that both return their own struggles with the science of their day to the basic seventeenth-century antithesis of science and magic. Both then take the obvious next step of wondering how much magic the new science perpetuates. When Mailer says of the moon trip that "it was as if technology had determined to invoke the god of magic it had already slain" (Moon, 161), he is retroactively theorizing the development of magic in Holgrave's daguerreotypy - the implicit concept is natural magic. Both plant their modern histories in Cotton Mather's Massachusetts. The similarity reveals a literary history that does not progress with scientific history; that in fact cannot move with science into the modern world at all, even to oppose it; that lingers always on the threshold of scientificity, where all ambiguous intellectual games are playable. That both Mailer and Hawthorne plant their conflict with science in the original intellectual soil of America shows how much is at stake for the American novelist, America and science being related inventions. The question is whether America exists for the historical sense of another discipline. I have ended this book by crossing two frontiers: from science to technology and from the novel to the nonfiction novel. In fact, it is partly the nonexistence (for the writer) of the first boundary that makes possible the crossing of the second. Technology is most often science made visible in fiction; in Mailer it is that, and more. Mailer begins with the opposition of perfectionist science and imperfect engineering, and one might be tempted to put down technology simply on the side of engineering. But Mailer's view of the matter is complex, so that though he winds up at a simple statement of the matter ("But he [Mailer] could not regard science apart from technology" [Moon, 143]), he gets there by an interesting route: by means of ball bearings, which, NASA exults, will be produced more perfectly in proportion to the decrease in gravity. Mailer extrapolates that "once perfect ball bearings could be installed, the action of the machines might become a whole order of efficiency closer to the laws of physics, rather than to the adjustments and counterbalances of engineering" (Moon, 147). This is not so tangential to metaphysics as it seems, since Mailer's project is designed to keep engineering and science separate (the "psychology of machines," a fully dwf/cybernetic concept to liken machines and humans, is based on the eternal imperfection of engineering: So long as machines act up, perhaps they have wills and desires). If technology smooths out the imperfections of the world, then it will take Mailer's

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world of sin, decay, and death and hand it over to the scientists for conversion into ball bearings. So technology is not merely visible science; it is also transforming more and more of the world into visible science. It is the common asymptote of engineering and science, along which the difference becomes infinitesimal. Which means that the artist's last-ditch self-justification - that after the sciences divide the world, there is always a remainder - could be decreasingly powerful to eternity. Any artist who faces this catastrophe questions his art form. Hawthorne, self-defined romancer, comes closer to the novel in Seven Gables than anywhere else. Of course, Hawthorne tries to romanticize the scientific technologization of the world. The climax of Hawthorne's attempt is Clifford's paean to the world-uniting, space-destroying, thoughtuniversalizing telegraph; more than a hundred years later, Mailer is struck by what he seems to take as a new development. "The real fact," Mailer perceives, "was that distance was now an abstract concept; men performing brave and heroic acts were communing over radio whatever the distance" (Moon, 106). But Mailer, unlike Hawthorne, can only see in this technologization of bravery the end, not the attenuation, of romance: "it was as if the astronauts were there to demonstrate that heroism's previous relation to romance had been highly improper - it was technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit mates of the brave" (Moon, 108).23 The romance rendered irrelevant, can the novel hold? I do not want to say that the space program's reconciliation of engineering and science is the source of the nonfiction novel, which certainly has other traditional subjects: politics, drugs, and murder. But it is a striking fact that two of tiie founders of the nonfiction novel, Mailer and Tom Wolfe, both get around to the space program, even if Wolfe's Mercury Project is the comic, human, goofy side of the adventure and Mailer's Apollo flight the apocalyptic, demonic, and perfectionist side. Both are about uncommunicative men who are fitted to machines according to a cyberneticist's dream, and both put up style as their countervision. No matter that Wolfe puts up his style as if to equal the goofy energy of Mercury, and Mailer his as the representative of what an astronaut dreads. Both channel all of a novelist's style into matters of "technique": The nonfiction novel is at least partly an attempt to live in a scientist's historical moment and keep free of that moment and that history at once. Mailer learned his stance and some of his style from Henry Adams; what Adams taught Mailer was how to blend speculation on science with autobiography, egolessness with ego, a twentieth-century world with a seventeenth-century view of it - invisibility, in every case, with personality. What Adams always wants to say is double, and every doubling is historical: I see that science is changing the world, but the Adamses


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are unchanged since Adam. Or, technology is evolving, but Grant alone upsets evolution. (Time is progressive, time is circular, time is decay.) Mailer, too, out to describe the new world transformed by technology into the image of science, maintains his belief in both primordial truths and degeneration. Adams calls himself a "Conservative Christian Anarchist," which is how Mailer, Adamsesque modern and Adamsesque Puritan, comes to call himself a "Left Conservative." They both find themselves in two histories at once. Which always leads to a generic question. Is Hawthorne a painterly romancer, or must he move on to a novel that gets its aesthetic from daguerreotypy? Does Eureka fit Poe's definition of a poem? Is Adams's work an autobiography or, sui generis, an "education"? Or the precursor of the nonfiction novel? What is 2L nonfiction novel? Disciplines have different histories, so that writers who find themselves torn between histories try to live in two different disciplines at once. The fudging of genres must always fail to accomplish this, however, since even in undermining the distinctions upon which science bases its difference from literature - fact and fancy, truth and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity - the novel (as opposed to the romance), the naturalistic novel (as opposed to the realistic novel), the education (as opposed to the autobiography), and the nonfiction novel (as opposed to fictional fiction) rely on those distinctions to justify their own experimental power. The relationship of literature and science cannot be worked out.

NOTES

1. TOWARD A DISCIPLINARY INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), 359. 2. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982). For the analysis of postmodern science, see especially 217-74. 3. In Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). 4. Compare Stanislaw Lem, "Project Genesis," The New Yorker, 2 November 1981, 48-53. 5. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA, ed. Gunther S. Stent (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 46. 6. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue B. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 58. 7. Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (Boston: Birkhauser, 1982). 8. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 9. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self& Soul (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 10. Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (New York, Seabury, 1974). 11. Hugh Kenner, at the Albuquerque James Joyce Convention, 1981. 12. Thomas McMahon, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel (Boston: Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown, 1970). 13. Thomas McMahon, McKay's Bees (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 14. Bruce Sinclair, "The Promise of the Future: Technological Education," in George H. Daniels, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Science: A Reappraisal (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), 260-1. 15. Mark Beach, "Was There a Scientific Lazzaroni?," in Daniels, Reappraisal, 116. See also Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 18461876 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 171-200. This necessary book would have saved me several weeks of work if it had been published earlier. My admiration for it will have to be registered only in several footnotes. 191

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16. See, for the struggle to make a full-time professional life in science, A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: 1810-1888 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959). Bruce points out that there was a great amount of North American collecting to be done after the Mexican Cession (204-5), but the character of the work was much more professional by the mid-nineteenth century. 17. Walter B. Hendrickson, "Nineteenth-Century State Geological Surveys: Early Government Support of Science," in Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in America Since 1820 (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 131-46. 18. For case studies on the attempts of the orthodox in Hawthorne's time to make an alliance with science, see Stanley Guralnick, "Geology and Religion Before Darwin: The Case of Edward Hitchcock, Theologian and Geologist (1793-1864)," his, 63 (1972), 529-43; and Dupree's biography of Gray. For the generally doxological usefulness of science, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977). For the ambiguously orthodox implications of Laplace (which attracted Poe), see Ronald L. Numbers, Creation by Natural Law: Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1977). For an overview of the whole subject of professionalization, see George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968). From this work, I have borrowed my sense of a strong move toward professionalization early in the nineteenth century and many of the terms of my discussion. The dates Bruce gives for the "launching" (i.e., the professionalization) of American science are 1846-76. But, of course, he acknowledges the unavoidable arbitrariness of his dating, and he concentrates on professionalization as an institutional, not an intellectual, matter. This is to say that science was passing out of amateur hands before 1846. Still, Bruce's dates should remind us how novel the institutional professionalization of science would have seemed to Poe and Hawthorne. 19. Paul K. Feyerabend, Problems of Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 160. 20. Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975), 180. 21. Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), 340-51. 22. Gary Gutting, Introd. to Paradigms & Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 15-18. 23. Peter B. Medawar, "Lucky Jim," in Watson, Double Helix, ed. Stent, 221. 24. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays: 19111932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 6. 25. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1948), xiv. 26. For Lovejoy on the temporalization of the Great Chain, see The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), 242-87, and, for the Naturphilosophen, 315-33. 27. Lovejoy, Great Chain, 3.

NOTES TO PP. 11-19

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28. For a vituperatively anti-Foucauldian criticism of Lovejoy's methodology, see Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 182. 29. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's "Opticks" and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946). 30. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), 40-1. 31. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 137. 32. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973), 344-87. 33. Foucault, Archaeology, 186-7. 34. Foucault, Archaeology, 190. 35. Foucault, Archaeology, 190. 36. See Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe ofForce (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1981). 37. The last two archaeological axioms are made explicit in Archaeology, 130, 167. 38. Serres, Hermes, 58. 39. Serres, Hermes, 106. 40. Serres, Hermes, 106. 41. Foucault, Order of Things, 261-2. 42. Serres, Hermes, 57. 43. Serres, Hermes, 62. 44. It would be foolishly oversimple to find in Serres only this sort of reduction to scientism. I am, rather, examining the pressures that may incline even Serres to the historical sense of science; in its gravitational field, even the brightest comet may find itself, naturally as it appears, slowing to a fall. 45. See Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Rejutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 66-96. 46. On Brown and empiricism: William L. Hedges, "Benjamin Rush, Charles Brockden Brown and the American Plague Year," Early American Literature, 7 (1973), 307. On Poe's prophetic science: Paul Valery, "Au sujet d'Eureka," trans. Malcolm Cowley, in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), 103-10; George Worstadt, "Poe and Einstein," Open Court, 44 (1930), 173-80; Clayton Hoagland, "The Universe of Eureka," The Southern Literary Messenger, 1 (1939), 307—13. On Eureka as poetry: Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 252; Curtis M. Brooks, "The Cosmic God: Science and the Creative Imagination in Eureka," in Poe as Literary Cosmologer: Studies in Eureka: A Symposium, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1975), 64. On Hawthorne's criticisms of science: R. B. Heilman, "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science as Religion," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 48 (1949), 57583; W. R. Thompson, "Aminadab in Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark,' " Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955), 413-15; Edward H. Rosenberry, "Hawthorne's Al-

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legory of Science: 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' " American Literature, 32 (1960), 3 9 46. On Hawthorne's criticism of pseudoscientific enthusiasm: Alfred S. Reid, "Hawthorne's Humanism: The Birthmark' and Sir Kenelm Digby," American Literature, 38 (1966), 337-51 (Aylmer is not a scientist but a kind of Platonist virtuoso); Nina Baym, "The Head, the Heart, and the Unpardonable Sin," New England Quarterly, 40 (1967), 31-47 (science is a matter of intellect, and the pseudoscientific sinners in Hawthorne sin necessarily in their hearts); M. D. Uroff, "The Doctors in 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' " Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 27 (1972), 61-70 (Hawthorne is not against science but against emotionally engaged doctors). 47. [Charles Brockden Brown] in The American Review, and Literary Journal, 1 (1801), 141. 48. Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956). 49. For the intricacies of Philadelphia science, see Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America: 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1956), 127-45. 50. Re-Appraisals: Some Commonsense Readings of American Literature (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1963), 278. 51. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 130. 52. I. Bernard Cohen, "Science in America: The Nineteenth Century," in Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 167-89; Richard Harrison Shryock, "American Indifference to Basic Science during the Nineteenth Century," Archives Internationales d'Histoire de Science, 5 (1948), 50-65; Nathan Reingold, "American Indifference to Basic Research: A Reappraisal," in Daniels, Reappraisal, 48. On the subject of the openness of science to the masses, see Robert V. Bruce, "A Statistical Profile of American Scientists, 1846-1876," in Daniels, Reappraisal, 63-94. Bruce finds that, as a profession, antebellum science tended to be closed off, for example, to the sons of unskilled laborers, despite standard claims of the availability of science to all men of intelligence. Nevertheless, there were indeed efforts in antebellum America to bring science to the people; see Reingold in Daniels, Reappraisal, 61. One of the results of these efforts (still common) is a sensationalistic newspaper science; for this, see Donald Zochert, "Science and the Common Man in Ante-Bellum America," in Reingold, Science in America, 7—32. 53. The fact that New England natural history, as opposed to mathematics and astronomy, was peculiarly late-blooming is noted in Raymond Phineas Sterns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), 176; Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 313-14; Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 150. For the statistical superiority of Massachusetts and Connecticut science to that of the other states in the mid-nineteenth century (most marked in astronomy and mathematics), see Bruce, in Daniels, Reappraisal, 63-94. 54. Robert K. Merton, Science and Technology in Seventeenth Century England (Bruges, Belgium: Saint Catherine Press, 1938). The reference to progressive

NOTES TO PP. 25-32

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sanctification is on 592. To be sure, Merton mentions the "inconvenient eschatology" of the Puritans. Merton also wishes to stipulate that he is looking for the background of science in the Puritan ethos, not in Puritan theology. But if Puritan theology (its inconvenient lapsarian emphases, as well as its inconvenient eschatology) may be ignored in a discussion of the Puritan ethos, then the ethos itself would have to be considered largely an effect of forces stronger than theology, and ultimate explanations would have to revert to these forces. Merton, however, wishes to place Puritanism among the primary causes of science, not a twin effect, so he is forced to invoke theology. Richard S. Westfall, in Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964) is less willing than Merton to attach science to Puritanism (several of its most committed publicists were Anglican churchmen). There was, rather, a political scramble to ally with science; Perry Miller describes the other side of it (Puritans against the sects) in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), 220. 55. Mechanics Magazine, 1 (1823), iii. 56. See Evelyn Fox Keller, "Gender and Science," in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), 187-205. 57. Lovejoy, Great Chain, 17; Lovejoy, Essays, 8. 58. See also my article, "The Double Helix as Literature," Raritan, 5 (Winter 1986), 26-47, in which I take Watson's book to be quasi-disciplinary and quasisexual. 59. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983). 60. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986). 61. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 2. BROWN'S EPISTEMOLOGY 1. David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), 43, 45. 2. Clark, Brown, 292. 3. William Dunlap, Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown (London: Henry Colburn, 1822), 182. 4. James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 164. 5. It was to be called A System of General Geography and was to include a "topographical, statistical, and descriptive survey of the planet Earth, as well as an account of the Earth as a planetary body in the solar system." The manuscript was lost; the prospectus has survived. Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), 234. 6. Dunlap, Memoirs, 62, 160. 7. [Charles Brockden Brown], "The Difference Between History and Romance," The Monthly Magazine, and American Review, 2 (1800), 251-3. Brown's

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name is not attached to the article, but, beyond the fact that Brown was the author of most of what he published, the fact that he would have had a unique interest among his friends in defining the romance gives me much confidence in attributing the article to him. Before me, Warner Berthoff has analyzed the article as Brown's. 8. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Rejutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 192, 193. 9. [Brown], "History and Romance," 253. 10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in The Works of John Locke (London, 1823; rpt. Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963), IV, xix, 5. All further references to Locke will be inserted parenthetically in the text. 11. For another Lockean reading of Brown, see Arthur Kimball, Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown (McMinnville, Ore.: Linfield Research Institute, 1968). 12. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or The Transformation: An American Tale, printed along with Memoirs ofCarwin the Biloquist (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1977), 3. This is the first volume of the Bicentennial Edition, gen. ed. Sidney J. Krause, which is now available for all of Brown's novels. All further references to Wieland will be inserted parenthetically in the text, abbreviated W. References to Ormond; or The Secret Witness (v. 2, 1982) will be inserted in the text and abbreviated O; references to Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (v. 3, 1980) will be inserted in the text and abbreviated AM; references to Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (v. 4, 1984) will be inserted in the text and abbreviated EH. 13. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, 2nd ed. (1812; rpt. Philadelphia: John Richardson, 1818), 158 (on religious madness), 48 (on hereditary madness), 63 (on artistic madness), 148 (on aurally induced madness), 347-56 (on sexually instigated madness), 304 (on sleepwalking). The publication of this book came after Brown's novels by a decade, but we know that Brown got Rush's psychology from E. H. Smith (see Warfel, Brown, 43). 14. Rev. of Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, The American Review, and Literary Journal, 1 (1801), 338, 339. 15. Quoted in R. S. Woolhouse, Locke (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 185. 16. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 606. For an account of the scientific problem-situation by which Locke must be understood, see Peter Alexander, "Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities," in I. C. Tipton, ed., Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 62-76; and Woolhouse, Locke. 17. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. James Walker (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 60, 209-10. 18. Thomas Reid, Thomas Reid's Lectures on the Fine Arts, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 28. 19. Larzer Ziff, "A Reading of Wieland," PMLA 77 (1962), 51-7. For a source of Wieland in Cajetan Tschink's rationalistic Geisterseher, in which fallible senses

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are rejected for infallible reason, see Harry R. Warfel, ''Charles Brockden Brown's German Sources/' Modern Language Quarterly, 1 (1940), 357-65. 20. See Harvey Milton Craft, "The Opposition of Mechanistic and Organic Thought in the Major Novels of Charles Brockden Brown," diss., Tulane University, 1964, 116, for an assimilation of empiricist Arthur Mervyn (and Clara Wieland) with Edgar Huntly, who begins as a rationalist, however he ends; see William L. Hedges, "Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions," Early American Literature, 9 (1974), 122—3, for another epistemological assimilation of Arthur and Edgar; see John Clemen, "Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown's Major Novels," Early American Literature, 10 (1975), 214, for an excessive likening of Arthur and Ormond. 21. [Charles Brockden Brown], "Walstein's School of History," The Monthly Magazine, 1 (1799), 336; [Brown], in The Literary Magazine, and American Register, 1 (1803), 8. The first article must certainly be by Brown: It tells Arthur Mervyn's story in Arthur's voice. If the author of the second article is not the same as the first, the coincidence is striking. 22. Cronin, Diary, 171. 23. [Charles Brockden Brown], in The American Review, 1 (1801), 73. This sentiment is expressed repeatedly in Brown's magazines, though it cannot be known certainly which times by Brown himself. 24. Alexandre Koyre, introd., Descartes: Philosophical Writings, trans, and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), ix-xiii. 25. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1888; 2nd ed. 1978), I, iv, 6. All further references to this edition, abbreviated T, will be inserted in the text. 26. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), V, i. All further references to this edition, abbreviated E, will be inserted in the text. 27. For Adam Smith's elaboration of Hume's Newton, see D. D. Raphael, " The true old Humean philosophy' and its influence on Adam Smith," in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers, ed. G. P. Morice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1977), 23-38. Also: Andrew S. Skinner, "Adam Smith: Science and the Role of the Imagination," in Hume and the Enlightenment, ed. William B. Todd (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1974), 164-88. 28. William L. Hedges, "Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, and the American Plague Year," Early American Literature, 7 (1973), 303—4. 29. For Brown's letter to his brother James on the relation of ignorance and the plague, see Clark, Brown, 156. 30. See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Boston: Beacon, 1948), 51, 53. The first of the two rationalizations is by Benjamin Smith Barton, the second by Jefferson himself. 31. Quoted in Dunlap, Memoirs, 87. 32. [Charles Brockden Brown], rev. of A BriefHistory ofEpidemic and Pestilential Diseases, by Noah Webster, The Monthly Magazine, 2 (1800), 32-3, 295. 33. Clark, Brown, 144.

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34. Dunlap, Memoirs, 68. 35. Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2nd ed. (1798; rpt. Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 14. The machine image is as prevalent as the plague image in Crevecoeur: "we are machines," he says, "fashioned by every circumstance around us." 36. Foucault's joke: "temperate climates are caused by nature, intemperate climates by the milieu." Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973), 213. 37. Rush, Essays, 14. 38. Quoted in Hedges, "American Plague Year," 299. 39. An article, presumably by Brown, in The American Register, or, General Repository of History, Politics, & Science, 6 (1806), concerns a discussion between three men on the comparative evils of bad government and plague. The third character surprises the other two by saying that he benefited from the plague. Why? His health failed; he relinquished his business, went to the country, and met a "young lady, who added three hundred pounds a year, to youth, beauty, and virtue" (451). This is a romantic and financial success story such as the one Arthur tells. The plague is not benign or malignant exclusively. 40. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (London: T. Johnson, 1801), I, 264-5. 41. It is due to the force of W. B. Berthoff s readings that the oddly selfinterested innocence of Mervyn is an established critical fact. See "Adventures of the Young Man: An Approach to Charles Brockden Brown," American Quarterly, 9 (1957), 421-34, and his introduction to Arthur Mervyn (San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), vii—xviii. His point of view informs that of James H. Justus, who, in "Arthur Mervyn, American," American Literature, 42 (1970), 304—24, makes the Mervyn—Franklin connection. 42. Rush's environmentalism and materialism are functioning consistently when he decides that murder and theft (the two activities that distinguish Welbeck in this novel) are diseases of the will, "not vices." He wants to treat thieves and murderers, not punish them. Rush, Medical Inquiries, 264. 43. Sidney J. Krause's Historical Essay, appended to the Kent State edition of Edgar Huntly, is especially good on these subjects (320-30 and 357-90). 44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963), A 854-5, B 882-3. 45. The American Register, 6 (1806), 297; 8 (1807), 71. 46. Arthur Melnick, Kant's Analogies of Experience (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), 156. 47. [Brown], "Walstein's School," 337, 407-8. 48. [Charles Brockden Brown], "On the Inequalities of Solar Light," The Monthly Magazine, 1 (1799), 81. 49. See Krause's Historical Essay, 318, 321. 50. Sergio Moravia, "The Enlightenment and the Science of Man," a talk sponsored by The Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California Berkeley, 24 May 1979. 51. Charles Brockden Brown, trans., A View of the Soil and Climate ofthe United

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States of America, by C. F. Volney (Philadelphia: J. Conrad, 1804), 377. For Brown's differences with Volney, see Cecilia Tichi, "Charles Brockden Brown, Translator," American Literature, 44 (1972), 1-12. 52. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xi, xii. 53. See Ermanno Bencivenga, Kant's Copernican Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), for a full elaboration of what it meant for Kant to consider himself a revolutionary, especially vis-a-vis Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 54. Jay Fliegelman describes the American Revolution as an attempt to replace monumental and circular history with past-destroying, progressive history (without noting the influence of science) in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 42. 55. Quoted in Lillie Demming Loshe, The Early American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1907), 1. 56. Quoted in Kimball, Rational Fictions, 84. 57. The Literary Magazine, 4 (1805), 8. 58. Mrs. Fiedler says that Mr. Talbot loved Jane "with a rational affection" in Jane Talbot (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1986), 231. This use of the word is justified by an article in The Literary Magazine, 6 (1806), 351, in which the "most deplorable" effect of the French Revolution is said to be "the injury which it has done to the cause of rational freedom." 3. POE'S METHODOLOGY 1. Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Works ofEdgar Allan Poe, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969-78), I, 91. Whenever possible, I shall use this edition. It is not possible for Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Eureka. Citations from these works will refer to the Monticello Edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: George D. Sproul, 1902). I shall abbreviate the former "Co/" and the latter "Com," and insert further references to them in the text. 2. Richard Whately, ed., Bacon's Essays: With Annotations (New York: C. S. Francis, 1857), 225. 3. Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 15. 4. Bacon, Advancement, 121. 5. George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), 63-85. 6. Daniels, American Science, 118-37. 7. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture ofMatter (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 355. Much of the background of the following pages has been provided by this necessary book. 8. Josiah Royce, "Some Relations between Philosophy and Science in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Science, 38 (1913), 577. 9. Lorenz Oken, Elements ofPhysiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), 23, 184-90. See also Toulmin and Goodfield, Architecture, 347ff. 10. See Mabbott's footnote, Col, I, 120, and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great

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Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 317-25. 11. See Maurice Beebe, "The Universe of Roderick Usher," in Poe: A Collection ofCritical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967); David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 288; Thomas J. Rountree, 'Toe's Universe: The House of Usher and the Narrator," Tulane Studies in English, 20 (1972), 123-34. All agree that "Usher," as Halliburton says, "states in narrative terms what Poe was later to formulate conceptually in Eureka." Herbert F. Smith, in "Usher's Madness and Poe's Organicism: A Source," American Literature, 39 (1967), 379—89, connects the two, though he thinks that in Eureka Poe finds a way to make men supreme in the living world. 12. Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher, or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion, 10th ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1826; Glasgow: William Collins, 1846), I, 18. 13. Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America: 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1956), 313-14, quotes Manasseh Cutler on the reasons for the lack of botanical research in New England: It is not taught in the colleges, and it is not useful. But the first reason is an effect rather than a cause; the second prompts the question: Is astronomy more useful? Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 150, notes the political (it seems too democratic) and religious (it seems atheistic) biases against natural history in New England. See also Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), 176. 14. See Stearns, Science, 423—6. 15. Cotton Mather, The Angel ofBethesda, ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1972), 94. 16. Mather, Angel, Jones note, 323, based on a personal communication from Richard H. Shryock. 17. Mather, Angel, 43-4, 47. 18. Quoted in Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation: 17761830 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 93-4. 19. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James Ellington (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 4. 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols., trans, and ed. M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), II, 108. 21. The atomic story is mainly the focus of Toulmin and Goodfield. For the dynamic story, see Trevor H. Levere's excellent Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1800-1865 (London: Clarendon Press of Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). 22. Levere, Affinity and Matter, 45. 23. Levere, Affinity and Matter, 76. 24. Levere, Affinity and Matter, 100. 25. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Spelling's System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1977), 81-2.

NOTES TO PP. 84-90

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26. See Hegel, Nature, II, 219. 27. Daniels, American Science, 127. 28. Royce, "Relations," 572-5. 29. Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), 63-104. 30. Levere, Affinity and Matter, 99. 31. Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960), 180-92. 32. Frederic H. Hedge, Prose Writers of Germany, 2nd ed. (1847; rpt. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1870). 33. J. B. Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature: With an Outline of its Recent Developments Among the Germans, Embracing the Philosophical Systems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken's System of Nature (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848). 34. Joseph L. Esposito, Schelling's Idealism and Philosophy of Nature (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1977), 47. 35. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), 239. 36. Poe's sense of Naturphilosophie, and of German idealism in general, came largely from reports: He read about Kant (and found Fichte and Schelling mentioned) in Carlyle, got much of Schelling from Coleridge, and at least heard about Hegel from Whewell. Then there were translated extracts: Poe probably read a little of Fichte, Humboldt, and Schelling in Mrs. Sarah Austin's Fragments from German Prose Writers; whether Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847) was out in time for Poe to read up on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, I do not know. He read, in time for it to influence Eureka, Humboldt's Cosmos. Finally, it was in the air. It was reflected in Emerson's Nature; Agassiz brought a version of it to America himself. Poe thought himself an expert on German metaphysics all along: Kant, Fichte, and Schelling are occasionally invoked, sometimes not mockingly (Morella likes Fichte and Schelling in a story written three years before Pym). For the dissemination of Schelling in America, see Esposito, Schelling's Idealism, especially 187-95. For the dissemination of Hegel in America, see Loyd D. Easton, Hegel's First American Followers (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1966). 37. William Whewell, in Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London: H. G. Bohn, 1862), 195-7, attributes the inverse square explanation to Buffon. It is, of course, unclear precisely where Poe got every element of Eureka; Poe patches together his Philosophy of Nature. For the modus operandi of gravity in Kant, see Metaphysical Foundations, 70-1. 38. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Survey of the General Physical History of the Universe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), 3, 21, 22. 39. Quoted in Frederick deWolfe Bolman's introduction to his translation of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Ages of the World (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), 13. 40. For Hegel's assurance that speculative physics can precede physics (e.g., the discovery of electromagnetism), see Hegel, Nature, II, 108.

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41. Hegel, Nature, I, 205. 42. Hegel, Nature, III, 212. 43. Esposito, Schelling's Idealism, 55. 44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), I, 88. 45. Oken, Elements, 38. 46. Stallo, General Principles, 15. 47. Quoted in J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958), 219. 48. Hegel, Nature, III, 11. 49. Hedge, Prose Writers, 512. 50. Hegel, Nature, II, 170. 51. Hegel, Nature, I, 250. 52. Hedge, Prose Writers, 451. 53. Quoted in Bolman, introd. to Schelling, Ages, 18. 54. For Poe as non-Naturphilosoph, see Frederick William Conner, Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to

Robinson (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), 12-20, 67-91.1 was originally set on the Naturphilosophie track by this book and learned much from it. However, I think that before separating Poe from Naturphilosophie, one needs to go further than Conner in establishing his engagement with it. 55. Oken, Elements, 39. 56. Hegel, Nature, I, 258. 57. Whewell, Astronomy, 176-7. 58. Dick, Christian Philosopher, I, 22; II, 149. 59. Stallo, General Principles, 47. 60. See Lovejoy, Great Chain, 317-26, for the temporalization of God in Naturphilosophie. 61. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1978), 211. 62. William Dell, quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), 14. 63. In "Mellonta Tauta," Poe may have discovered this pun on "mass." The citizens of Poe's future state justify war and disease: "Were they [meaning us] so blind as not to perceive that the destruction of a myriad of individuals is only so much positive advantage to the mass!" (Col, III, 1294). A Eurekan pun? At another point in the story, the narrator recalls the sensation she felt when looking out the window of a speeding train: "Everything seemed unique — in one mass" (III, 1299). 64. Richard Wilbur, "Recent Studies of Edgar Allan Poe," New York Review of Books, 9, no. 1 (1967), 26-7. 65. Mill, Logic, 190. 66. Mill, Logic, 219, 371. 67. Mill, Logic, 506. 68. See Robert Daniel, "Poe's Detective God," Furioso, 6 (1951), 48. 69. See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on The Purloined Letter/" trans. Jeffrey

NOTES TO PP. 106-15

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Mehlman, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 38—72 (the "purloined" etymology is discussed on p. 59); Jacques Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron, and M.-R. Logan, Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), 31—113 (references to which will be inserted in the text abbreviated D); Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 38-72 (references to which will be inserted in the text abbreviated J). 70. Dick, Christian Philosopher, I, 61-2. 71. The similarity was first noticed in David Lee Clark, "The Sources of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum," Modem Language Notes, 44 (1929), 349-56. The Schellingian influence comes out strongly in the description of the downward course of the pendulum, with its obvious equivalence of space measures ("Inch by inch - line by line") and time measures ("with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages"). In Schelling, the mutual restrictiveness of time and space proves that they are products of one self: "Hence the most basic measure of time is the space traversed by a uniformly moving body therein, and the most basic measure of space is the time that a uniformly moving body requires in order to traverse it" (Schelling, System, 104). Also, time, first, puts the self in an alien world (we are at time's mercy) and, second, makes it realize its superiority to the world (consciousness is eternal, whereas the world passes). See Esposito, Schelling's Idealism, 106, 109, 113. So the pendulum will terrorize and free the prisoner. 72. Schelling, System, 124. 73. Schelling, System, 76. 74. Esposito, Schelling's Idealism, 187. 75. Easton, American Followers, 4—13 et passim. 76. Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa, 1925), 134. 77. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in The Works of John Locke (London: 1823; rpt. Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963), III, x, x. 78. Locke, Essay, III, viii, i. 79. See C. K. Ogden, introd. and ed., Bentham's Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932). 80. See Esposito, Schelling's Idealism, 156. The statement is from somewhat after the period of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. The compatibility of his phases is controversial. 81. Stallo, General Principles, 219n. The translation that Stallo quotes is from "The Ideal and the Actual Life," in Poems of Schiller (New York: John W. Lovell, n.d.), 201-5. 82. In its preoccupation with will, Pym may be considered an outdoors "Ligeia," which was written in the same year. Ligeia, like the author of Eureka, "has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science" (Col, I, 319): This is the world that Pym, in his voyage, traverses. "Ligeia," then, makes the connection of Pym and Eureka to German thought directly, since the story takes place in Germany, and its heroine is immersed in the "many mysteries of. . . transcendentalism" (316). "MS. Found in a Bottle,"

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which is about another parascientific journey to the South Pole, also shores up the German connection; the narrator makes fun of the Germans and their "eloquent madness" until he becomes, at the pole, eloquently mad himself. 83. Hegel, Nature, I, 210-11. 84. Hegel, Nature, III, 213. 85. Charles O'Donnell, "From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space," PMLA, 77 (1962), 89. 86. Would anyone who had not read Hegel's nature-philosophy believe how prominent a place teeth have in breaking down the subject—object duality, as they will again in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons? "Appetitive organic being," Hegel writes, "aware of itself as the unity of itself and of that confronting it, and so seeing through the determinate being of the object, is shape, which is oriented outwards, and armed. Its teeth derive from its bones and its claws from its skin"; it turns itself inside out to take the outside in. Hegel, Nature, III, 151. 87. What are these Baconian Jews doing right at the door of the Absolute? Perhaps another part of the answer is found in The Phenomenology of Mind, in which the phrenologist, like the Jew, rejects truth in its very presence. The phrenologist sees, accurately enough, that matter must reflect mind. But having arrived, through matter, at the very gate of the mind, he fails to enter. Rather, he reduces consciousness to corpse. Consciousness does not shape its environment, he seems to assert; it is imprisoned by it. "Just so it may be said of the Jews that it is precisely because they stand directly before the door of salvation, that they are and have been the most reprobate and abandoned. . . . " Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 366. 88. Dick, Christian Philosopher, I, 151. 89. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 130. 90. Humboldt, Cosmos, 122n. 91. John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 106, 7, 109. 92. Rowe, Custom House, 11, 12. 4. HAWTHORNE'S TECHNOLOGY 1. William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (1840; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967, a facsimile of the 1847 ed.), II, 560; I, 14; I, 7. 2. See George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968). 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962-80), IX, 154. All further references to this edition, abbreviated Works, will be inserted in the text. 4. Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948), 245, 248.

NOTES TO PP. 124-37

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5. Henry G. Fairbanks, "Hawthorne and the Machine Age," American Literature, 28 (1956), 161. 6. John T. Frederick, The Darkened Sky: Nineteenth-Century American Novelists and Religion (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 27. 7. William Bysshe Stein, Hawthorne's Faust: A Study of the Devil Archetype (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1953), 91. 8. Martin Green, Re-Appraisals: Some Commonsense Readings in American Literature (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1963), 278. 9. Benjamin Silliman, "Remarks," The American Journal of Science and the Arts, 5 (1832), 34; J. F. Laterrade, "An Attempt to Prove the Existence of the Unicorn," AJS, 21 (1832), 126. All further references to "Silliman's Journal" in the notes will use the abbreviation AJS. 10. William Whewell, "Inaugural Lecture, the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science," AJS, 63 (1852), 354; "Notice of Prof. Olmsted's Introduction to Natural Philosophy," AJS, 23 (1833), 354. 11. R. B. Heilman, "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science as Religion," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 48 (1949), 575-83; Alfred S. Reid, "Hawthorne's Humanism: 'The Birthmark' and Sir Kenelm Digby," American Literature, 38 (1966), 349n. 12. See H. Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction ofthe Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 14. 13. Whewell, Philosophy, II, 186. 14. For the incorporation of Rappaccini into the Heilman argument, see Edward H. Rosenberry, "Hawthorne's Allegory of Science: 'Rappaccini's Daughter,'" American Literature, 32 (1960), 39-46. 15. For a treatment of Brand as an Enlightenment mechanist, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 272-3. 16. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 62-3, 150-1. 17. Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies ofAmerica (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), 414. 18. AJS, 31 (1837), 144. 19. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), 133. 20. Charles W. Upham, "Memoir of Rev. John Prince, LL.D.,"4/S, 31 (1837), 201-21. All information about Hawthorne's reading comes from Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading 1823-1850 (New York: New York Public Library, 1949). 21. See Bruce Sinclair, "The Promise of the Future: Technical Education," in Nineteenth-Century American Science: A Reappraisal, ed. George H. Daniels (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), 260-1. 22. George H. Daniels, Jackson, 220. Page is, by the way, mentioned in one of the issues of "Silliman's Journal" that Hawthorne is known to have read, though for work on the galvanic battery (v. 32), and published in another of the volumes Hawthorne read (v. 33) his experiments on electromagnetism.

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For the state of science in Salem as Hawthorne grew up there, see Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 70, 295. 23. Whewell, "Inaugural Lecture," 354; Lyon Playfair, "On the Chemical Principles Involved in the Manufactures of the Great Exhibition," AJS, 64 (1852), 20. 24. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1832), 374; Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1829), v, 1. 25. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 142. 26. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832). 27. Ellul, Technological Society, 43. 28. Roy R. Male, Jr., in "Hawthorne and the Concept of Sympathy," PMLA, 68 (1953), 140—1, compares Clifford's appreciation of electricity to Poe's in Eureka: Both seem to see in it a bridge of mind and matter. Maurice Beebe, in "The Fall of the House of Pyncheon," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 11 (1956), 1—17, compares Seven Gables to "Usher," which is considered congruent with Eureka. He also usefully contrasts the "circle-unity" of "Usher" to the spiral of Seven Gables. 29. The place to start in tracking the controversy that ensues is F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 332: He believes the preface and not the happy ending. So does Richard F. Fleck, despite the fact that he is the author of "Industrial Imagery in The House of the Seven Gables," The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal: 1975, 273-6; he finds such imagery "curious" in a book "so dominated by the past" (273). Hubert H. Hoeltje, on the other hand, in Inward Sky: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1962), 353, believes the happy ending and not the preface. Francis Joseph Battaglia, in "The House of the Seven Gables: New Light on Old Problems," PMLA, 82 (1967), 579-90, tries to show that both preface and ending are believable, since the preface asserts that the period of inherited sin will last only "until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms." Larzer Ziff, in "The Ethical Dimension of The Custom House,' " Modern Language Notes, 73 (1958), 338-44, looks forward to Seven Gables (from the perspective of The Scarlet Letter) as an attempt to balance past and present, inner and outer worlds. 30. Goodwin Barmby, "Move On," Scientific American, 3 (1847), 17. 31. "Life," Scientific American, 3 (1847), 57. 32. Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1981), 18, 20. 33. "The Lightning Horse," Scientific American, 3 (1847), 17. 34. James G. Peabody, "The Magnetic Telegraph," Scientific American, 3 (1847), 81; "Telegraph," Scientific American, 3 (1848), 129. 35. A contemporary review published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1847 — reprinted in Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. Donald Crowley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 106-10 - finds unbelievable the idea that the "mechanist" should be "animated with the feelings proper to the artist." The anonymous reviewer is the ancestor of Martin Green. The British, in general,

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are not as open to transcendental technology. But modern critics in America tend to play down the mechanical side of Owen. J. T. McCullen, in "Influences on Hawthorne's The Artist of the Beautiful/" Emerson Society Quarterly, 50 supp. (I Quarter 1968), 43-6, notes that Owen is a mechanic but represents his desire as the "attainment of a capacity for transcendence." Richard Harter Fogle - in Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light & the Dark (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1952) - also observes that Owen is a mechanic but goes on to define his true religion as Platonism. 36. J. B. Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature: With an Outline of Some of its Recent Developments Among the Germans, Embracing the Philosophical Systems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken's System of Nature (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848), 183. 37. Stallo, General Principles, 16. 38. Roy R. Male, in Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1957), 133, mentions that Clifford's speech is "faintly reminiscent of Naturphilosophie"; the identification is otherwise largely neglected. 39. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), 73-4, 83, 90-1, 104. 40. See Kuhn, Essential Tension, 98, 99. 41. Yates, Giordano Bruno, 88. 42. Brewster, Letters, 18. 43. AJS, 33 (1838), 258-61. 44. See the Old Manse Edition of The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), XVIII, 309. 45. Babbage, Machinery, 385. Here is Frances Yates's description of the "applied magic" ofJohannes Trithemius. "Trithemius aims at using [the] angelic network for the very practical purpose of transmitting messages to people at a distance by telepathy; he also seems to hope to gain from it knowledge 'of everything that is happening in the world!'.. . Trithemius lived too soon. He would be very happy in putting through a trunk-call to a friend at a distance, or watching everything that is going on in the world with his television set." Yates, Giordano Bruno, 145-6. 46. John Robison, "Perfection of the Art, as stated in Notes on Daguerre's Photography," AJS, 37 (1839), 184. 47. Scientific American, 6 (1851), 134. 48. Robison, "Perfection," 185. 49. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 224-6. 50. Scientific American, 7 (1851), 13. 51. Brewster, Letters, 53. 52. Hoeltje, Inward Sky, 388, finds the origin of the Veiled Lady in "that Mysterious Lady whose apparently superhuman powers had been astonishing or delighting the good people of Boston and Salem in 1843." For a thorough consideration of the pseudoscientific background of Hawthorne in general, see Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne's Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in NineteenthCentury Life and Letters (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).

208

NOTES TO PP. 155-73

53. Brewster, Letters, 261-2. See also Babbage, Machinery, 100. Bigelow, too, is interested in sculpture from the point of view of technology; see Elements, 2, 7, 106-7. 54. Leslie Stephen, "Hours in a Library," Cornhill Magazine, 26 (1872), in Crowley, Hawthorne, 493. See also "Transformation," Universal Review, 3 (1860), in Crowley, Hawthorne, 364. 55. Giedion, Mechanization, 181, 184. 5. AFTER THE REVOLUTIONS 1. Charles C. Walcutt, "Theodore Dreiser: The Wonder and Terror of Life," in Donald Pizer, ed., Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 500, 502 (Walcutt approvingly quotes Joseph W. Beach, 502n). I use this edition for all page references, inserted in the text, with the abbreviation Carrie. 2. Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1981), 251. 3. F. Howard Collins, An Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy, introd. Herbert Spencer (1887; New York: D. Appleton, 1889), viii-ix. 4. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; Philadelphia: David McKay, 1880), 437. 5. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics and The Man Versus the State (Social Statics, 1851, The Man Versus the State, 1884; first published together, 1892; New York: D. Appleton, 1913), 28, 29. 6. See Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; New York: P. F. Collier, 1909), 152-5. 7. See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 136. 8. Martin, American Literature, 252. 9. Collins, Epitome, 348. 10. Herbert Spencer, "The Genesis of Science," in Illustrations of Universal Progress (New York: D. Appleton, 1880), 116-93. 11. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1887), II, 191. 12: See the Pizer edition of Sister Carrie, 387, 398. 13. Tony Tanner, "V. and V - 2 , " in Edward Mendelson, ed., Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 16. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text with the abbreviation P. 14. Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963; New York: Bantam, 1985), 36. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text. 15. Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 5. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text with the abbreviation SL. 16. Norbert Wiener, The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 26, 2, 209. 17. Edward Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia," in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 164. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text with the abbreviation MP.

NOTES TO PP. 174-88

209

18. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 494-5. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text with the abbreviation HA. 19. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), xix, xxx. 20. Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 471. Further references to this edition will be inserted in the text with the abbreviation Moon. 21. The first sentence is from T. C. Helvey, The Age of Information: An Interdisciplinary Survey ofCybernetics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1971), 28. The second is from F. H. George, The Brain as a Computer (New York: Pergamon Press, 1961), 29. 22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973), 17, 26. 23. The idea that romance has something to do with bravery is Mailer's, not Hawthorne's. The conception of the romance they seem to share is that it has to do with mysteries, intuited truths, and psychological penetration, all of which the machine age discourages.

INDEX

Adams, Henry, 3, 4, 20, 22, 163-5, 167, 169, 171, 174-6, 177, 178, 179-80, 188-9 adaptation, 91-2, 161-2, 167-8; see also Darwin, Charles; evolution Agassiz, Louis, 201 n36 alchemy, 122-5, 127, 132, 152, 165; see also chemistry; magic American Journal of Science and the Arts, 20, 22, 125-6, 134, 136, 146, 147-8, 205n22; see also Silliman, Benjamin American Philosophical Society, 21, 32 American Revolution, 28, 68, 199n54 American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, 21, 32 anatomy, 45 apocalypse, 25, 90, 95, 104, 105, 111, 114, 181 Aristotle, 39, 61 art contrast with science, 7-10, 87 and its history, 8-10, 14-15, 16, 18, 155-6 and mechanical reproduction, 135, 147— 50, 154, 155 relations with science, 2, 14—15, 81, 147-9, 154 see also literature artificial intelligence, see cybernetics astronomy, 11, 24, 25, 31, 32, 45, 74-5, 77, 94-5, 105, 112, 134, 138, 194n53, 200nl3; see also space program atomism, 17, 39, 72, 83, 86 Babbage, Charles, 22, 138, 147, 154-5 Bacon, Francis, and Baconian science Brown and, 25, 31, 45, 51, 53, 54, 60, 68,69 210

and history of science, 52, 69, 73, 122 Naturphilosophie and, 21, 22, 68, 86 Poe and, 70-2, 79, 80-1, 87, 98, 101-2, 106, 117-18, 204n87 religion and, 125 scientific metaphors in, 27 see also science Bacon, Roger, 127 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 164 Bate, W. J., 10 Beckett, Samuel, 172 Benjamin, Walter, 148, 150 Bentham, Jeremy, 114 Bible, 114, 117; see also religion Bigelow, Jacob, 22, 138 biology, 73-4, 95; see also medicine Bloom, Harold, 2, 10, 26 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 2-3, 14-15, 172, 178 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 10 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 24 Boyle, Robert, 39 Brahe, Tycho, 74 Brewster, David, 139, 145-6, 147, 150, 154-5 Brown, Charles Brockden, 158 biographical details, 21, 24, 30-1 criticism, 18-19, 23, 43, 52, 57-8, 61, 64 and madness, 30, 35, 36-40, 42-3, 59, 61, 63 and rationalism, 21, 43-51 and romance, 26, 30, 31-5, 36, 43, 51, 61, 195-6n7 science in his day, 19-21, 30-2 and the senses, 35-43, 47, 62-3 works: Arthur Mervyn, 19, 21, 30, 51-61, 65, 66, 167-8, 197n21

INDEX Clara Howard, 30 "The Difference Between History and Romance," 32-4, 195-6n7 Edgar Huntly, 21, 23, 30, 61-8, 108-9 "On the Inequalities of Solar Light," 64 Jane Talbot, 30, 199n58 Ormond, 21, 26, 30, 43-51, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61, 64, 65 A System of General Geography, 195n5 "Walstein's School of History," 64, 197n21 Wieland, 30, 31, 34-43, 46, 47, 54, 65, 134, 196-7nl9 Brown, Elizabeth Linn, 31 Bruce, Robert V., 191nl5, 192nnl6-17, 194n52 Buffon, Georges, comte de, 33, 82, 85, 201n37 Bunyan, John, 185, 187 Carlyle, Thomas, 138, 201n36 chemistry, 5, 21, 45, 62, 73, 82-6, 90, 9 3 4, 95, 98-9, 103, 122-3, 128-9, 159, 165 Cohen, I. Bernard, 21, 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 84, 90, 201 n36 Collingwood, R. G., 86 consumerism, 177 contagion, see infection; plague; yellow fever Cooper, James Fenimore, 68 Coover, Robert, 170 Crevecoeur, J. Hector, 55, 56, 198n35 Crick, Francis, 2, 3 cybernetics, 3, 172, 181-2, 187, 188; see also mechanization cytology, 21, 73-4, 76 daguerreotypy, 20, 135, 139, 140, 146, 147-50, 154, 185, 187 Dalton, John, 83, 157 Daniels, George H., 72-3, 192nl7 Darwin, Charles, and Darwinism, 4, 22, 124, 159, 160-4, 167-9; see also evolution Darwin, Erasmus, 30, 37, 57, 68, 85, 168 Davy, Humphry, 25, 83, 84 democracy, 24, 54, 99-100, 105-6, 108, 125, 126, 138, 142, 144, 146, 176, 194n52; see also Jacksonianism Dennett, Daniel C , 3, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 101-4, 119 Descartes, Rene, 1, 27, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 65 Dick, Thomas, 24, 77, 80, 94-5, 96, 106, 118, 136 Digby, Kenelm, 126, 132

211 disciplines antidisciplinarianism, 1—4, 12, 180 boundaries, 4-5, 8, 12-13, 14, 27, 1012, 172-3 hierarchies of, 1, 2, 14, 100-1, 102, 176 histories of, 18, 29 influences between, 11-16, 26 see also art; literature; professionalization; science Dreiser, Theodore, 13 criticism, 160—1 and Spencer, 22, 161-9, 177 works: Sister Carrie, 161-2, 165-9 Dunlap, William, 31 Dwight, Timothy, 69 ecology, 2 Edwards, Jonathan, 96 Einstein, Albert, 8, 11, 19 electricity and electromagnetism, 20, 21, 72, 84, 85, 92, 93-4, 128, 143, 205n22, 206n28 Eliot, T. S., 10 Ellul, Jacques, 139, 141, 147, 150, 181; see also technique Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 77, 143, 201n36 empiricism, 19, 21, 22, 34, 36, 41, 43, 445, 46, 47, 51, 53-4, 60-1, 63-4, 7981, 94, 98-100, 104, 117-18, 152, 166 Enlightenment, 65-6, 68, 73, 108-9, 151 entropy, 3, 169, 170-2, 173-5, 178, 180; see also thermodynamics environmentalism, 54-7, 60, 65-6, 168, 198nn36,42 Esposito, Joseph L., 86, 90, 111 evolution, 68, 85, 161-4, 166, 167, 169, 174-5, 179, 189; see also Darwin Faraday, Michael, 13, 83, 84, 86 Faulkner, William, 11, 68 feminist criticism, 16, 26-8; see also sexual politics fetishism, 153, 154, 158-9 Feyerabend, Paul K., 1, 6-8, 10, 16 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 83, 84, 111, 201n36 final causes, 54, 57; see also teleology force, 13, 84, 85-6, 88, 92, 93, 114, 126, 138-9, 142, 144-5, 164, 168-9 Foucault, Michel, 1, 10-14, 15, 27, 56, 184-5, 198n35 Franklin, Benjamin, 5, 20, 30, 32, 46, 52, 59-60 free will, 55, 57 French Revolution, 25, 31, 47-8, 49, 50, 56, 60, 68, 69, 80, 98, 199n58

212

INDEX

Freud, Sigmund, 101, 167 Frost, Robert, 171 Gates, Elmer, 165 geology, 5-6, 192nl6 geometry, 46, 47, 163 germ theory, 21, 77-8; see also plague Giedion, Siegfried, 20, 135, 142, 157 Gillispie, Charles Coulston, 86 Godwin, William, 45, 49, 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 86, 89, 115 Goodfield, June, 73-4 Gothic, 26, 51, 59, 60, 137; see also romance Grant, Ulysses S., 167, 189 gravity, 20, 88, 92-3, 112, 115, 201n37 Great Exhibition of the Progress of Art and Science, 137-8, 149 Green, Martin, 22, 125, 126, 206n35 Grove, William Robert, 142 Hall, James, 5-6 Haller, Albrecht von, 33, 60 Hare, Robert, 73, 75, 85 Hartley, David, 45, 50 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 163 criticism, 19, 22, 28, 124-5, 126, 157, 159, 206n29, 206-7n35 and magic, 122-30, 132-5, 137, 139, 145-7, 148-9, 150, 151-3, 154, 155, 165, 185, 187 and mechanization, 22, 23—4, 124, 134— 45, 154-8 and the past, 28, 128-9, 130, 131, 132, 140-1, 144, 149, 155-6, 185-7 science in his day, 20, 125-6, 137, 192nl8, 205-6n22 works: "The Artist of the Beautiful," 125, 143, 206-7n35 "The Birthmark," 26, 126-30, 131, 132, 152-3 The Blithedale Romance, 73, 150-3, 158 "The Celestial Railroad," 132, 141, 146, 185-7 "Chiefly About War Matters," 124 "Drowne's Wooden Image," 139 "The Great Carbuncle," 121-5, 134, 146, 159 "The Hall of Fantasy," 121 The House of the Seven Gables, 20, 22, 23-4, 25, 124, 131, 136-50, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 159, 183, 185-7, 188, 206nn28-9 journal, 129-30 The Marble Faun, 129, 147, 153-9

Mossesfroman Old Manse, 121, 126 "The Old Manse," 135 "The Prophetic Pictures," 129, 130 "Rappaccini's Daughter," 26, 126, 1302, 133-4, 154 The Scarlet Letter, 123, 132-5, 137, 150, 153, 206n29 "Sketches from Memory," 123 Twice-Told Tales, 121 "A Virtuoso's Collection," 146 Hedge, Frederic H., 86, 92, 201n36 Hegel, G. W. F., 22, 74, 75, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92-3, 94, 103, 104, 111, 114, 115-16, 119, 120, 163, 167, 169, 179, 201n36, 204nn86-7 Heilman, R. B., 126 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 144, 145 Hemingway, Ernest, 68, 186 Henry, Joseph, 5, 20 history of ideas, 10-16, 113, 119, 163, 168 literature's relation to its, 8-10, 14-15, 16, 18, 155-6 in Naturphilosophie, 95, 104, 114, 144, 167 and romance, 32-4, 60, 61 of science, 27-8, 121-2, 128, 167-9, 187 see also evolution; natural history; progress; science, historical sense of; time Hofstadter, Douglas, 3, 181, 182 Humboldt, Alexander von, 71, 88, 89, 118-19, 201n36 Hume, David, 24, 26, 34, 41, 51-3, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 85; see also skepticism Imp of the Perverse, 109, 139, 145, 166-7, 183 Indians, American, 61, 66, 67-8 Industrial Revolution, 139, 144 infection, 56-7, 76-7, 96, 104; see also germ theory; plague information theory, 170, 177, 178, 180; see also cybernetics innate ideas, 43—4 innovation, see progress invention, 122, 126, 136, 137-8, 149; see also mechanization; progress; technology Jacksonianism, 24, 80, 81, 96, 97, 106, 108, 144; see also democracy Jefferson, Thomas, and Jeffersonianism, 53-4, 56 Johnson, Barbara, 101, 102 Joyce, James, 3, 173

INDEX Kant, Immanuel, and Kantianism, 17, 21, 22, 34, 53, 61-4, 65, 66, 68, 83-4, 88, 90, 91, 144, 163, 164, 199n53, 201nn36-7; see also Naturphilosophie Keller, Evelyn Fox, 26-8 Kenner, Hugh, 3 Kepler, Johann, 71, 80, 86, 87 Koyre, Alexandre, 51 Kristeva, Julia, 28 Kuhn, Thomas, 1, 6, 7, 8-9, 10, 16, 18, 85, 144-5

213

Lacan, Jacques, 101-4 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, chevalier de, and Lamarckianism, 162, 164, 168 Laplace, Pierre Simon, marquis de, 26, 71, 88, 94, 100, 118, 164 Laudan, Larry, 16 Lavoisier, Antoine, 5, 82, 83, 86; see also chemistry Lem, Stanislaw, 3 Levere, Trevor H., 84, 86 Levin, Harry, 23, 117, 118, 159 Linnaeus, Carolus, 5, 33, 60, 79, 82 literature antidisciplinarian, 5, 14, 17, 18, 33, 177, 180 careers in, 19, 22, 27, 30-1, 96, 119, 167, 168, 169 definition, 4—5, 6 genres, 20, 140, 149, 157, 158, 188-9 historical sense of, 8-10, 14-15, 16, 18, 120, 155-6, 167, 169, 177-8, 183-4, 187 intellectual history of, 16-18, 22-3, 29, 32, 111, 135 negotiates with science, 1-4, 11-12, 14, 19, 23-6, 69, 70, 101-4, 111-13, 11920, 128-30, 132, 134-5, 141, 149, 150, 164-5, 166-7, 170, 175-7, 180-1 and sexuality, 26-8, 132, 135, 149 undead, 9, 23, 29, 148, 149 unprofessional, 5, 14, 17, 19, 150 see also art; novel; romance Locke, John, 31, 34-6, 39-42, 45, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 111, 113, 196nl6 London, Jack, 165 Lovejoy, A. O., 10-11, 12, 14, 27 Lyell, Charles, 124, 125, 167

165, 185, 187, 207n45, 207n52; see also spiritualism magnetism, 93, 118-19, 139, 145; see also electricity Mailer, Norman, 13, 68, 160, 173 and Puritanism, 128, 184-6 time in, 29, 181-3 works: Of a Fire on the Moon, 29, 181-9 Martin, Ronald, 163, 165 materialism, 73, 108, 123, 130, 151, 153, 198n42 mathematics, 12, 15, 17, 21, 25, 39, 68, 84, 95, 98-9, 100, 102-3, 104, 107, 175, 194n53 Mather, Cotton, 57, 77-8, 97, 133, 136, 186, 187 Mather, Increase, 77 Mayer, Julius Robert von, 85, 144, 145 Mechanics Magazine, 25 mechanization, 134-9, 142-5, 171-2, 2067n35 machine-men, 65-6, 124, 140-1, 154-5, 172, 182, 187, 198n35 see also cybernetics; technology Medawar, P. B., 9 Medical Repository, The, 19, 20, 31, 69 medicine, 25, 44-5, 58, 77, 133, 137 Melville, Herman, 68, 172, 173, 183, 186 Mendelson, Edward, 172—3 Merton, Robert K., 25, 185, 194-5n54 mesmerism, 122, 147, 149, 151; see also magic; pseudoscience metaphor, 2, 10, 13-14, 23, 27, 170-2, 176-8, 184-5 microscope, 101, 147 Mill, John Stuart, 87, 88-9, 98-9, 103, 104, 118 Miller, Edward, 30, 69 Miller, Samuel, 30, 69, 82, 85 Milton, John, 11, 14 mirrors, 116, 169-70, 179, 181 Mitchill, Samuel Latham, 30, 168 modernity, 10, 69, 130, 132, 137, 149, 151, 156, 181, 183; see also history; progress Montesquieu, Charles, baron de, 55, 66 Moravia, Sergio, 65—6 multiplicity, see unity and multiplicity

McClintock, Barbara, 28 Mach, Ernest, 163, 175 machines, see cybernetics; mechanization; technology McMahon, Thomas, 3—4, 5 magic, 20, 22, 122-30, 132-5, 137, 139, 145-7, 148-9, 150, 151-3, 154, 155,

Nabokov, Vladimir, 65, 169, 174, 181 natural history, 5, 24, 31-2, 64, 77, 82, 85, 194n53, 200nl3; see also biology; taxonomy naturalism, 168-9 Naturphilosophie, 23, 204n86 breakup of, 74, 86-7, 163-5

214

INDEX

Naturphilosophie (cont.) and chemistry, 82-7, 91, 93-5, 159 and force, 83-6, 88, 92, 144-5 Hawthorne and, 22, 128, 129, 137, 145 modern, 180, 185 Poe and, 21-2, 74, 75, 78, 80, 85-6, 8793, 95, 96, 99, 102-3, 108, 111-20, 163, 164, 169, 179, 201n36, 202n54, 203-4n82 reception in America, 144, 201 n36 and science history, 10, 74, 75, 167 nebular hypothesis, 112, 118, 164 Newton, Isaac, and Newtonian physics in Brown, 21, 24, 26, 33-4, 44, 45-6, 48, 50, 53, 60, 61, 64 and Naturphilosophie, 17, 85, 86, 87, 115, 163 paradigmatic science, 9-10,11,14,33-4, 39, 43, 45_6, 52-3, 59, 82, 83, 84, 133 Poe and, 80, 88, 99 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 11-12, 14, 15, 27 Norris, Frank, 13, 165 novel, 20, 69, 140, 150, 158, 166, 172-3, 176, 187-9; see also literature O'Donnell, Charles, 116 Oedipus, 59-60 Oersted, Hans Christian, 72, 144 Oken, Lorenz, 74-8, 82, 85, 86, 91, 94, 97, 144, 163, 167 Olmsted, Denison, 85 original sin, 43, 78, 137, 156, 157-8, 186; see also Puritanism; religion Page, Charles G., 137, 205n22 Paracelsus, 127, 132, 133 Pearson, Karl, 163, 175 Pease, Donald, 28 philosophy of science, 6—10, 21, 72—3, 75, 81, 82-3, 86, 112, 118, 122, 126, 1634, 180; see also Bacon, Francis; Naturphilosophie phlogiston, 19-20, 45 photography, see daguerreotypy phrenology, 149, 204n87 physics, 180—1; see also entropy; force; gravity; Newton; thermodynamics Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, conte de, 146 plague, 44, 46-7, 48, 49, 51, 53-5, 56-7, 58, 59, 60, 76-7, 93, 198nn35,39; see also yellow fever Plato and Platonism, 17, 33, 61, 126-7 Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 54, 128, 135, 139, 165, 183

criticism, 18-19, 23, 73, 76, 100-4, 117, 119-20 emotional response to science, 70-2, 76-9, 81-2, 87-8, 93-6, 106, 108, 123-4, 125, 127 and Naturphilosophie, 21-2, 74, 75, 78, 80, 85-6, 87-93, 95, 96, 99, 102-3, 108, 111-20, 163, 164, 169, 179, 201n36, 202n54, 203-4n82 science in his day, 21-2, 24, 72-9, 82-6, 192nl8 works: "Al Aaraaf," 74 "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," 77, 105-6 "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,"77, 104-5, 111 "A Decided Loss," 113 "A Descent into the Maelstrom," 79-81 "The Domain of Arnheim," 108 Eureka, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24-5, 70-2, 745, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87-96, 98, 100, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111-14, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 140, 145, 169, 179, 180, 189, 200nll, 201nn36-7, 203n82, 206n28 "The Fall of the House of Usher," 76, 78, 93, 96-7, 146, 200nll, 206n28 "The Gold Bug," 97 "The Island of the Fay," 74 "The Landscape Garden," 108 "Ligeia," 203n82 "Loss of Breath," 113 "The Man of the Crowd," 79-81 "The Masque of the Red Death," 76, 78 "Mellonta Tauta," 202n63 "MS. Found in a Bottle," 203-4n82 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 96-9, 104 "The Mystery of Marie Roget," 94, 99100, 104, 105 Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, 23, 71, 80, 89, 91, 92, 111-20, 169, 178-9, 185, 203n82 "The Philosophy of Composition," 118 "The Pit and the Pendulum," 97, 10911, 115, 203n71 "The Power of Words," 106-8 "The Purloined Letter," 98, 99, 101-4, 108 The Raven," 118 'Shadow - A Parable," 76 'Sonnet — Silence," 111 "Sonnet - To Science," 21, 70-6, 78, 80, 82, 86, 93, 111, 120

INDEX "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," 111 poetry, 20, 34, 81, 102-3, 112, 176 in Scientific American, 25, 142-3 see also literature Poincare, Henri, 163, 175, 180 Poirier, Richard, 173, 176 polarity, 84-5, 88, 93, 95, 111-12, 114-16, 118-19, 178-9 Popper, Karl, 6, 17-18, 34 positivism, 1-2 Pound, Ezra, 7 Prince, John, 136 probability, 100 problem-situations, 17-18, 21-3, 34, 59, 60, 61, 82-7, 108, 113, 116, 120, 126, 128, 130, 144-5, 159, 161, 163-5, 180-1, 196nl6 professionalization literature's failure, 5, 14, 17, 19, 150 of science, 5-6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 1920, 22, 25, 27, 122, 150, 192nnl6-18, 194n52 progress, 1, 7-10, 18, 70-1, 95, 106, 122, 138, 141-2, 145, 147, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 187; see also modernity; science pseudoscience, 122, 125-6, 165, 207n52; see also magic; mesmerism psychology and madness, 2, 30, 35, 36-9, 42-3, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 83, 137 Puritanism, 24-5, 43, 77-9, 96, 128, 130, 132-4, 136, 153, 178, 184-7, 1945nn53-4, 200nl3; see also religion Pynchon, Thomas bridge between literature and science, 1, 3, 4, 14, 23, 169, 170, 172-7 criticism, 169, 170-1, 172-3 and thermodynamics, 160, 169-72, 1745, 177-8, 180-1 works: The Crying of Lot 49, 180 "Entropy," 169, 170—2, 177, 180 Gravity's Rainbow 172-4, 176-7 Slow Learner, 170, 171-2 V., 169-71, 176, 177-9 railroad, 137, 138, 141-5, 146-7, 148, 183 rationalism, 21, 43, 44-51, 61, 64, 96-100, 199n58 realism, 15 Reid, Alfred S., 126 Reid, Thomas, 41, 42, 43 Reingold, Nathan, 24 relativity, 11; see also Einstein religion, 6, 35, 46, 48, 51, 69, 72, 84, 114,

215 123, 125, 136, 149, 154, 168, 186; see also Puritanism; spirituality Rembrandt van Rijn, 8, 9 revolutions, scientific, 1, 6, 8-9, 13, 68, 199n53; see also American Revolution; Bacon, Francis; French Revolution romance, 20, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31-5, 36, 43, 51, 54, 60, 61, 140, 141, 149, 150, 151, 153-4, 157, 158-9, 183, 188, 189, 195-6n7, 209n23 history and, 32-4, 60, 61 see also literature; novel Romanticism, 74, 129; see also Naturphilosophie Rorty, Richard, 1-2 Rowe, John Carlos, 119-20 Royce, Josiah, 74, 85, 86 Rucker, Rudy, 3 Rush, Benjamin, 30, 31, 37, 56-7, 196nl3, 198nn35,42 Russell, Bertrand, 39 Ryle, Gilbert, 39 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 10, 22, 74, 77, 80, 82, 85, 86-7, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 109-11, 114, 115, 120, 128, 144, 163, 201n36, 203n71 Schiller, Friedrich von, 73, 114 science conflicts within, 19, 25-6 definition, 1, 4, 7-8, 13, 121-2, 126, 165 hard and soft, 2, 12, 15, 32 historical sense of, 8-10, 11-14, 15, 16, 18, 23, 28, 29, 71, 94, 117, 120, 1289, 130, 148, 156, 160, 167, 169, 174, 175, 181, 185, 193n44, 199n54 history of, 27-8, 121-2, 128, 167-9, 187 and philosophy, see problem-situations philosophy of, see philosophy of science politics and, 24 "postmodern," 2-4 professionalization, see professionalization, of science propaganda for, 5-6, 20, 69, 138 and romance, 32-4 and sexuality, 26-8, 72, 135, 149 sign of the times, 177-9 and technology, 20, 24, 138-9, 144, 187 see also disciplines; progress Scientific American, 25, 137, 142-4, 147, 149-50 sculpture, 154-5 Serres, Michel, 2-3, 6, 12, 14-16, 27, 177-8, 193n44 sexual politics, 26-8, 72, 115, 131-2, 135, 149

216

INDEX

Shryock, Richard Harrison, 24 Silliman, Benjamin, 125-6, 149 his journal, see American Journal ofScience and the Arts skepticism, 21, 24, 39, 41, 51-2, 59-61, 64, 65, 68, 124, 163; see also Hume Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 30, 31, 34, 45, 54, 60-1, 196nl3 Snow, C. P., 1 social classes, 24, 142, 144, 162, 194n52; see also democracy space and time, 46, 62-3, 109, 180, 203n71 space program, 20, 181—7; see also astronomy Spencer, Herbert, 13, 161-9, 175, 177, 179, 180, 185 spiritualism, 73, 84, 147; see also magic Stallo, J. B., 22, 23, 74, 86, 91, 95, 114, 143-4, 145, 159, 163 Stem, Gertrude, 204n86 Stephen, Leslie, 157 Stewart, Randall, 124 Stoker, Bram, 9, 174 Tanner, Tony, 169, 171, 172 taxonomy, 5, 79; see also natural history technique, 20, 139, 141, 150, 154-5, 1569 181 2 188 " ' L ' technology Hawthorne and, 22, 23-4, 124, 134-45, - 1 5 4 " 8 * ™ ^ ,™ o . . . .o-, science and, 20, 24, 138-9, 144, 187 transcendental, 22, 145, 146-7, 151, 206-7n35 see also invention; mechanization; progress telegraph, 20, 142-4, 146-7, 183, 188 teleology, 83, 84, 90, 93, 102, 112, 180; see also final causes telescope, U; see also astronomy thermodynamics, 2-3, 14-15, 27, 72, 160, 170, 177-8, 179, 180, 181; see also entropy

Thoreau, Henry David, 103, 143 time and gender, 28 in Mailer, 29, 181-3 in Pynchon, 169-70, 173-4 and space, 46, 62-3, 109, 180, 203n71 see also history; progress Toulmin, Stephen, 2, 3, 73-4 train, see railroad transcendentalism, 63, 88, 143-4, 164 technological, 22, 145, 146-7, 151, 2067n35 Trithemius, Johannes, 207n45 Tschink, Cajetan, 196—7nl9 Turner, J. M. W., 2, 14-15, 16, 178 typology, 114, 179 a n d multiplicity, 21, 24, 85, 89, 90, y ^ 94_5f%> j 0 4 j 1 0 6 _ 7 ' 1 0 8 ; 1 U 115-16, 144, 145, 164, 169, 179-80; see aUo jsiaturphilosophie utilitarianism, 106 unit

__ Vanuxem, Lardner, 73, 75 Virchow, Rudolf, 73-80, 85, 86 Volney, Constantin, comte de, 66, 67 Watson, James, 2, 9 j a m e s 154_5

Watt

Webster> Noah?

54

Whewell, William, 84, 94, 121-2, 126, 1 2 7 201nn36-7 Wiener, Norbert, 171-2 Wilbur, Richard, 97, 98 Wolfe Tom 188 Yates

> dances, 127, 207n45 ' William Butler' 2 ell y °™ f e v e r ' 24, 45, 53-4, 57; see also infection; plague

Yeats

Ziff, Larzer, 43

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Editor

Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modern ism Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature Steven Axelrod and Helen Deese (eds.), Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.), Ideology and Classic American Literature Mitchell Breitweiser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality Lawrence Buell, New England Literature Culture: From the Revolution to the Renaissance Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898— 1917 Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century George Dekker, The American Historical Romance Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse Albert Gelpi (ed.), Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism Paul Giles, Hart Crane: The Contexts ofT h e Bridge Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region Alfred Hebegger, Henry James and the "Woman Business" David Halliburton, The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane Susan K. Harris, 19th-century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies Margaret Holley, The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value Lothar Honnighausen, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization Lynn Keller, Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition Anne Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing

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