Why the Novel Matters: A Postmodern Perplex Conference Issue || The Novel as Scientific Discourse:...

The Novel as Scientific Discourse: The Example of ConradAuthor(s): George LevineSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 2/3, Why the Novel Matters: A PostmodernPerplex Conference Issue (Winter - Spring, 1988), pp. 220-227Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345487 .

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The Novel as Scientific Discourse: The Example of Conrad

GEORGE LEVINE

The word "discourse" in its traditional meaning implies rationality, thematic coherence, and sustained argument; it also obviously carries the suggestion of non-fiction. Discourses are about something (presumably). In modem theory, "discourse" implies something else again. With Foucault it implies a cultural and political context so that when, in a characteristic contemporary move of intellectual imperialism, we want to argue that science is only another form of discourse, we mean to be diminishing, or challenging its truth claims, and implicating it in the ideologies it has, by defining itself, excluded. Like other kinds of discourse, the argument implies, science is not exempt from epistem- ological limitations; it has no more claim on the real than biography, or history, or perhaps even fiction. As discourse, science is subject to the kinds of criticism to which we have been trained to subject any text. And as text, it ceases to be a transparent description of nature; it is rather a marker of differ- ence, of absence rather than presence. It becomes a set of linguistic conventions, or of ideological predispositions. So non-fictional, even scientific discourse very rapidly becomes indistinguishable from fiction.

Important as recent concentration on "discourse" has been, differences remain after the assimilation of science to other discourses of power has been completed. There is, after all, more than a little fluttering after power, as well as much silliness, in the move to blur entirely the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Certainly, science does need to be considered in contexts other than those professionally affirmed by scientists; and certainly, science from many perspectives can be seen as participating in the myths of power that dominate within the culture and as developing within the contexts of social and political and economic pressures (and theories). Recent studies by Adrian Desmond, Martin Rudwick, and Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin provide superb case studies of the way this happened in different phases of English science.' Moreover, Malthus did, after all, provide the "Eureka" for Darwin's theory of natural selection; and Adam Smith had laid out in the world of Economics the kinds of mechanisms that Darwin was to find propel- ling evolution, so that Marx could argue that Darwinism simply extended lais- sez-faire economics into nature. Yet Darwinian theory requires different kinds of argument and different kinds of authorization than do political arguments or literature. The equation between a work of fiction and of what we might still call non-fiction must become trivial since the equation would be appropri-

1 See Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London (London: Blond and Briggs, 1982); Steven

Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1987). Rudwick, however, is concerned to demonstrate that the process of scientific thinking and argument, deeply rooted in social and biographical causes, is nevertheless epistemologically sound. In a fascinating final chapter, he considers the question of whether "consensual victory of one particular interpretation was due to its objective superiority in

explanatory terms or to the superior rhetorical skill and firepower of those who advocated it" (p. 438).



GEORGE LEVINE I SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE 221

ate for any works. Short of universal homogenization, there are differences that remain to be accounted for and assimilations that need to be queried.

I don't, however, want to ask for an exemption for science, or to privilege it; I am only suggesting that science is obviously not simply a "fiction," what- ever we might mean by that. Moreover, it needs special attention because it carries with it an authority within the culture that other forms of discourse have often attempted to imitate but have not achieved. Scientific discourse offers itself as non-fiction, as a transparent description, however tentative, of the real. It proposes to be a means to understand the workings of the world, or to the manipulation of that world beyond words. Moreover, it makes an argument, asks to be falsified, and provides quite elaborate procedures for testing; it insists on replication. Now while every aspect of this self-presenta- tion has been importantly challenged by philosophers of science, it would be absurd not to recognize that scientific discourse is another kind of thing from the discourse of the novel. At the very least, we might allow Bas van Frassen's almost minimalist point that science asks acceptance of its proposi- tions even if, as he says, "acceptance is not belief."2

The discourse of Newton's Principia obviously offers itself on terms very different, say, than Tom Jones. One gains nothing from treating them as equivalent, although something might well be gained by thinking of them as related, as expressing in alternative ways certain shared assumptions. Con- sider, first, how one might think about the relation between two less obviously disparate texts ostensibly from different worlds of discourse, say, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy-very much a cultural discourse in the most obvious senses-and Jude the Obscure, which found itself, willy-nilly, in the middle of social battles that Arnold would have recognized if not approved. The two books might be seen as alternative discourses, Arnold's constructing an argument by using materials drawn from social and historical worlds accepted as real by its readers, and Hardy's implying an argument by using fictional materials that are understood to "represent" a real world overlapping and con- tiguous with the "real" world of Culture and Anarchy.

But my interest in the question hasn't so much to do with the truth claims a novel might seem to be making. In the case of Jude, for example, what is interesting is not its obvious place in cultural battles-the marriage question, the woman question-that its first readers, like Mrs. Oliphant, recognized immedi- ately. Hardy's novel evoked such antipathy and passion because it felt au- thentic, and it felt so because of its use of familiar terms of cultural discourse, many of which were borrowed from Arnold's analysis. The fiction oddly con- firms Arnold's outrageous division of culture into the Hebraic and Hellenic, while wildly complicating it. In any case, Jude participates in a discourse already established as descriptive of the culture; and that we might, from another perspective, want to talk of that discourse itself as fictional in no way

2 Bas C. van Frassen, "Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science," in Images of Science, ed. Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 247. Van Frassen's theory of "Constructive Empiricism" is anti-realist, but attempts to account for the success of science by, among other things, demonstrating the irrelevance of truth claims to scientific argument, whose acceptance does not require belief.



222 NOVELI WINTER/SPRING 1988

diminishes the point that the novel uses, participates in, even reshapes cultural discourse.

The case might be more difficult with Newton and Fielding, a connection which, as far as I know, hasn't been made; perhaps it shouldn't be made. And certainly, I don't know enough to make it. But I want to suggest the possibility that the formal structure of Tom Jones owes something to the way Newton's imagination of the world as a mathematically organized phenom- enon reflecting intelligence, and accessible to the abstract intelligence of hu- manity had permeated the culture. The more obvious model is the Christian/ providential one; but Fielding's book might be seen as bringing together various Christian and narrative traditions within the assumptions about order and the constitution of nature itself that Newton's work had fairly recently authorized.

Here as elsewhere, the assumptions and fundamental values of a culture, as they are formulated in the discourse taken generally to be its most authoritative, will almost certainly inform its art. In a way, that is a truism. But the play of assumptions within fiction is often no mere replication of ideas and attitudes already available elsewhere. While the novel will inevitably work with unarticulated cultural assumptions, its form can entail a rich exploration of their implications, sometimes a raising of them to consciousness and a de- mystifying of them, sometimes direct subversion. The symmetries and the po- larities of Tom Jones, the solidity of characterization, the sharpness of definition and the precision of elaboration, the confidence in sequence of cause and effect in unrolling the narrative-all participate in an imagination of experience at least consonant with the Newtonian world, which was, after all, the eighteenth-century world, as well. Traditional narrative, in which cause and effect determine sequence, and in which intrusions implying design are conventional, is largely homologous with the scientific world view of early modern Western history.

However wildly unrealistic it often is, the novel as a genre speaks into (or defines itself against) a recognizable world, made recognizable because it works with the unself-conscious discourse of its own culture. The peculiar interest of science is that against the threats of various kinds of relativism and, indeed, the modern dominance of anti-foundationalist theory, it has seemed to provide one ultimate foundation. Since Newton, at least, it has become the most authoritative discourse, the one by which most people are likely to be intimidated, the one whose assertions are most likely to be accepted. Science clearly did replace religion as the definer of our faith in what the world is really like; and even the most fanatic of believers in the West are likely to seek the sanction of science for much of what they argue and believe. Cre- ationist, anti-evolutionary arguments, note, are themselves full of scientism, insisting that Creationism is a science, and that it is more scientific than evolutionary theory, which is after all, they complain, only a "theory."

But to see it as having achieved the kind of authority hitherto belonging to religion is not to mistake its particular base in power. The very epistemologi-




cal (and therefore, implicitly, social and even "spiritual") authority it has achieved makes it extremely valuable in social discourse. That is, ideology puts scientific discourse to use precisely because science, at least, seems disin- terested, objective, concerned to tell the truth as in itself it really is; science is the most important discourse by which ideology is naturalized. It is the discourse that power needs to use, and the discourse that most needs to be de- mystified. Its pervasiveness in literature testifies to this double use.

Using scientific metaphor is as commonplace now as using Biblical metaphors would have been two hundred years ago. Most obviously, in contemporary writing, there is Pynchon's use of thermodynamics and entropy and his transformation of scientific ideas into something very like fantasy. It's worth recalling, as well, how Lawrence drops into scientific metaphor in his well-known argument against the traditional stable ego of character in The Rainbow: denying the individual, he talks of the ego passing through "allotropic states," of his interest being not in diamond, nor in coal, nor in soot, but in the underlying single element, "carbon." This is old stuff by now, of course, but Lawrence was importantly right in finding the conception of character linked to ostensibly unrelated aspects of science. Equally famous, if perhaps more discredited, is Zola's project described in "The Experimental Novel"-based on Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, and realized in The Rougon-Marquart series. And although the differences are obvious, George Eliot in Middlemarch also self-consciously reflects on narrative as a scientific activity.

But the novelists who really know a lot about science and who self- consciously use it make a small minority. The power of science within our culture is reflected in the way it infiltrates consciousness that knows very little about it. Perhaps to put it more carefully, it shares, as Michel Serres has shown, in the dominant concerns of the culture, is in fact a powerful myth whose shape can be discerned well outside the realms of specifically scientific discourse." Scientific ideas are absorbed, used, and created by a culture that is only partially aware of science as a professional practice.

While there has been much debate about how legitimate it is to transfer scientific ideas to other forms of discourse, literature makes the move frequently and easily through metaphor, sometimes to deny or satirize the transference, sometimes to accomplish it. "Social Darwinism" has often been attacked as an illegitimate metaphorizing of Darwin's biological theory; sociobiology insists that the move is not metaphorical. The constraints of biology determine the constraints of culture. In any case, literature is the place where, in the absorp- tion, use, or rejection of science-consciously or not-the transference most frequently takes place. Criticism requires an alertness to the presence of scientific discourse, or its metaphors, not only because it helps clarify what the texts are doing, but because the texts themselves often constitute a fictional test of the science and of the transference. Participating equally but dif- ferently in the culture's myths and ideologies, science and literature support, reveal, and test each other.

3 See Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Yosus V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).



224 NOVEL IWINTER/SPRING 1988

To make my point, I will concentrate for the rest of this paper on a particular scientific idea, evolutionary gradualism, to suggest how it becomes a part of narrative discourse, is reflected in, reenforced, and ultimately subverted by English nineteenth-century realism and the developing modernism of Joseph Conrad.

The English nineteenth-century novel, reflecting and inspiring dominant assumptions about what reality and nature are really and naturally like, seemed to entail a gradualist reading of change. At the same time, those guiding assumptions about what is real, usually also implying an ethical im- perative to behave "naturally," concealed their own incoherence. Darwin's argument stands behind both the gradualism and the incoherence. Geological and biological gradualism was so fundamental an aspect of the way reality was understood that it helped determine the way novels were written and was almost automatically transferred from the realms of science to the realms of society and politics.4

Certainly, within Victorian realism, which in narrative method stresses con- tinuity and connection, attempt at radical change is perceived as violent, a disruption of normal human and social relations: the disruption of the idea of the organic community or the natural human bond, as in Hetty Sorrel's murder of her illegitimate infant, or Sikes's murder of Nancy.

Victorian realism and Darwinian evolution tend to be mutually supporting imaginations of the real, whose structures are most obviously threatened by the possibility of catastrophic change. Darwin staked everything on the view that Nature does not take leaps. So did Victorian novelists. When Razumov, in Under Western Eyes, scrawls "evolution not revolution," he says no more-though more desperately-than George Eliot did: "what grows up historically can only die out historically."5

The language of The Origin of Species is the nineteenth century's most imag- inative and powerful denial of catastrophic change, and became its most powerful text for the denial of revolutionary change as well. Here is some rather neutrally formulated language, but one can see how easily it could be adapted to political argument:

Why should all the parts and organs of independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so invariably linked together by graduated steps? Why should not Nature have taken a leap from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection can act only by taking ad-

4 Since this paper was completed, Stephen Jay Gould's impressive study of uniformitarian ideas in geology has appeared. Gould brilliantly demonstrates how the idea of deep time in geology and the idea of gradual, directional change were im-

plicated in major ideological and religious attitudes. Neither Hutton nor Lyell, the two great British propagandists for gradualism, produced their theories out of empirical evidence, though both writers were persuasively "scientific." The crossing between "scientific" and cultural discourses was constant and powerful. See Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987).

5 Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 54. Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pin-

ney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 287.




vantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must ad- vance by the shortest and slowest steps.6

For Darwin, this is not merely a description of Nature, but a defense of science; for science itself was at stake in this argument. Uniformitarianism, al- lowing no causes but such as are now in operation, was what Darwin learned from his mentor in geology, Charles Lyell. Once the possibility were allowed of intrusion beyond the explanatory power of natural law, natural law could not be relied upon either for inference or prediction. George Eliot, we remem- ber, similarly depended heavily for her moral teaching on laws of necessary sequence, and the deterministic implications of her narratives issue from the same extension of scientific law to human activity.

But there is a gap in the Darwinian argument-as in realist narratives-through which chance and potential disruption emerge. We may understand why natural selection allows some variations to survive and others not, but the variation is a sudden and unexplained intrusion on the lawful pro- cesses of nature. The variation appears as "chance" (although Darwin wished to avoid the implication) and as sudden and unexplained as the intrusion of Haldin into Razumov's rooms at the beginning of Under Western Eyes. Into the law-bound system that Darwin was attempting to create, lawlessness immedi- ately thrusts itself.

While the uniformitarian basis of Darwin's arguments, which parallel closely the methods and themes of realistic fiction, implicitly denies the possibility of successful revolution, the true generating power of Darwin's theory was what he could not reduce to law, nor account for by gradualism.7 The great spokesman for gradualism, Darwin needed to disguise or downplay those aspects of his theory and argument that would not fit uniformitarian theory. And in its duality, Darwin's theory exposes by analogy fundamental contradictions in the Victorian realist project, which also entails an implicit commitment to gradualism but invariably must include in its resolution ele- ments that resist gradualist interpretation. The determination to view all experience from the perspective of the ordinary closes out the possibility of real change and locks all characters into an organic-determinist system. But the conventions of coincidence by which even a novel like Middlemarch releases its protagonists from social or psychological imprisonment do not so much represent a retreat from the ideals of realism as a necessary element in any imagination of the possibility of real change and growth in the realist's world.

6 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, first edition, ed. J.W. Burrow (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 223-224.

7 Although it was possible to derive from Darwin's arguments, stripped of their creative multivalence, a strictly determinist and rather bleak view of the workings of nature, his language and the structure of his argument left a wide space for cre- ativity. Gillian Beer has analyzed his language in several works to show how important to Darwin's science was the unre- solved excess of meaning in his language. "He gives room," she says, "for mystery, for exploration, and insists upon the dark space behind the summary formulation of 'the struggle for life.'" See "Darwin's Reading and the Fictions of Develop- ment," in David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 572. Beer also argues that "it was the element of obscurity, of metaphor whose peripheries remain undescribed, that made the Origin so incendi- ary-and that allowed it to be appropriated by thinkers of so many diverse political persuasions" (p. 574). This is certainly partly the case; but I would want to argue that any scientific argument might be put to almost any political use because scientific argument allows metaphorical extension.



226 NOVELI WINTER/SPRING 1988

Conrad's fiction is at least as ideologically conservative as that of the real- ists who preceded him and whose techniques he was coming to reject. The use of science for such ideologically conservative purposes suggests again how the authoritative discourse of science is implicated in a broader cultural discourse. Science can be used spuriously to authorize political positions. What is interesting about Conrad in this respect is that while his narratives reflect the breakdown of belief in Darwinian gradualism, that very breakdown is taken for authority for an even more intense and irrational conservatism. That is, as he rejects the conventions of narrative that have traditionally been allied with anti-revolutionary political attitudes, he explicitly commits himself even more ferociously to such attitudes while-as, say, with the famous figure of the sailor in Heart of Darkness-he invokes arbitrarily the discredited traditional realist and gradualist positions to reaffirm the necessity of political sta- bility.

Most narratives turn on the convergence of at least two narrative lines, as when Haldin and Razumov meet. But such convergence almost always has the effect of surprise or even shock. We can even detect this in the way Dar- win uses it, for in order to bring home to us the interdependence of all organ- isms he seeks for examples that emphasize the unlikeliness of convergences. There is a quality of wonder as Darwin explains how the enclosure acts helped "determine the existence of Scotch fir": careful study had shown him that where cattle graze the fir gets no chance to grow. Then he goes on to show that "in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle."8 Clearly, the enclosure acts were not designed to affect the growth of Scotch fir, nor do the flies of Paraguay act in order to affect the life of cattle. Any "design" to be inferred from the intersection must be the consequence of omniscience. In fiction, novelists must devise plausible ways to bring narrative lines not ostensibly related to each other by design or intention into contact. Seen from this perspective, the device of omniscient narrator is not an accident of nineteenth-century realism, but a condition of it. Once allow not only that limitation of perspective is a condition of all actors, but that omniscience is impossible, and the realist project of discovering the paths of necessary sequence breaks down. It becomes conceivable not only that none has the power to discover the paths, but that the paths are not there in the first place.

The conservative Professor of Under Western Eyes radically subverts the gradualism of Darwinian evolution in the very way he tells his story. He becomes spokesman for other aspects of the Darwinian program-the element of chance, and the fundamentally irrational and inhuman energies of nature. The Professor's story implies-with the authority of Darwinian science behind it-the arbitrariness of the very civilization that Darwinian science had been used to authorize in the earlier tradition. "Words, as is well known," the Pro- fessor notoriously says, "are the great foes of reality."9 Ironically, science lies

8 The Origin of Species, p. 124.

9 Under Western Eyes, p.1.




behind this, the science that posits an irrational source and material explana- tion for life. In Under Western Eyes, narrative is a series of disruptions, and ex- planations are delayed as long as possible, in some cases never clearly made. The realist preoccupation with ordinary details becomes, in Conrad, phantas- magoric. Ironically, in every respect Conrad's world and Conrad's fiction an- nounce the separation of language from its material base, the unnaturalness, then, of language, and of fiction itself.

The scientific discourse of Conrad's fiction leads to the positing of a reality beyond language, but a reality from which fictions protect him. That reality is, indeed, revolutionary, in the sense that it is governed not by regularities, but by irrationalities, by forces incomprehensible to human consciousness, and violently threatening. Aware of the artificality of human constructs, Con- rad does not move to a revolutionary displacement: instead he is committed to supporting them in their artificiality against the deep irrationality of phe- nomena.

Absorbing scientific ideas, Conrad writes narratives filled with the pain of living in a world governed by the assumptions of the scientific enterprise and the traditions by which science had come to assert its Huxleyan imperialism in relation to all knowledge. Conrad explores the difficulties of seeing the human within the context of the nature science was describing. Conrad's modernism is not an escape for scientific discourse but another selective use of it; and its profound authority shapes his world. It informs his critique of a realism which was itself based in a "scientific" discourse. His techniques of disruption, discontinuity, of elaborating a radical distrust of language, lead to a vision of the world that totally undercuts the gradualism in which Darwin and Victorian realism had invested so much. As he describes a revolutionary, chance-ridden, disruptive nature, he sees the anti-revolutionary stance of realism itself as a conventional and arbitrary construction of nineteenth-century bourgeois imagination, like the domestic dullness of Geneva presided over by a statue of Rousseau. He exposes the contradictions latent in that construction in the image of the revolutionary cabal developing in the heart of Geneva. Ra- zumov, ironically, is saved by being thrust into the irrational truth of nature; he becomes a scientist in that by losing his capacity to hear words, he stops being a foe of reality.

Conrad finds sanction for his chancy world in the very Darwin whose gradualism was a scientific manifestation of realist ideology. He finds in Dar- win's revelation of the irrational sources of human rationality evidence for the arbitrariness of civilization. He finds in the mechanical and mindless and anti- teleological structure of Darwin's world clues for the writing of a new kind of disruptive and fragmented narrative. And ironically, he seeks in the gradualist conventions of Darwin's narrative, his overt refusal of mystery and irrational disruption of law, the moral sanction for an anti-revolutionary position which he did not find endorsed in nature.

The relation between science and narrative here is characteristically com- plex. The two discourses provide a running commentary and critique of each other. And the critic gains immensely from learning how to hear the dia- logue.



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