'THIS QUESTIONABLE LITTLE BOOK': NARRATIVE AMBIGUITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE OF SCIENCE

Charlotte Sleigh

To no honest purpose was a man ever made or suffered to speak in the third person ... (Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Book III, Chapter X, §2)

Introduction

There has been some wonderful writing on science and literature over the last twenty years, by and large fine-grained analyses of the interaction of literature and science. The best of it makes the point that their interrelation must be seen as a two-way process. In other words, metaphors are things that are used to construct science, not just things that are inspired in literature by science.

Overviews of science and literature are, however, scarce, and I have found myself wondering how such a thing might be written. The obvious way (and this is the model employed by some books, and especially university courses) is to trace how themes of science have been echoed in the literature of their day. But this is a poor model for writing an overview, inasmuch as it tempts the reader once again to see the interaction of science and literature as one-way.

It occurred to me that a fruitful way to write a history of literature's intersection with modern science might be to focus on narrative authority: the ways in which texts invite their readers to trust or distrust the narrative perspective. Doing this, I suggest, might give a sufficiently continuous sense of the evolution of the novelistic genre while also suggesting specific work on contextualization, so that we do not lose sight of the particularities of the production and reading of any given text. In other words, I propose the treatment of narrative form as a socio-historical phenomenon.

Current approaches to the study of narrative mostly stem, in one way or another, from Gérard Genette's 1972 distinction between voice ('who speaks') and focalization ('who sees'). His concept of 'voice' includes the narrator's involvement in the story, the person – normally first or third – in which it is told, the time of narration and the level of narrative embedding. Thus in the work of Henry James, for example, there can be an intrusive narrative style that is focalized through the protagonist's account. It has been suggested that Genette's narrator voice, the standard against which to measure other narratological elements of the text, is too close to an imputed authorial voice the deadly sin of postmodernism. Another criticism of his work proceeds from the observation that no one has convincingly proposed any theoretical grounds upon which to label an aspect or a portion of the text as 'focalized' or 'voiced'; both, it is therefore claimed, are ungrounded interpretative manoeuvres. There have also been attempts to show that there can be narratorless narrative, which would also pose problems for Genette's division. Finally (in this by no means all-inclusive list), Franz Stanzel has been more concerned to find historically – or perhaps, rather, generically – typical combinations of what Genette calls voice and focalization, rather than seeking always to discriminate between them.

In these poststructural approaches, a sense of how narrative (whether read or written; standpoint, voice, or neither) might be treated as a socio-historical question has by and large been lost. Watt's mid-twentieth century history of the novel has had an ongoing influence, but there has been remarkably little in the same vein until recently, perhaps due to the postmodernist suspicions of grand narrative. My approach is resolutely metalinguistic: a revisitation of the history of literature that is encouraged by recent history of science and its adoption of the 'history of the book'. Though primarily a historiography of material culture, this also invites us, through the evidence it provides, to discover who readers of a given text were, what they made of it, and to what extent the author was engaging in a conversation with them. (It may be appropriate to treat some texts, such as newspaper editorials, as though there were authorial intention at work, while a nineteenth century reading of Milton clearly would not suit this analysis.)

Focusing on narrative authority suggestively echoes the issues of trust in testimony that were raised by Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth, Shapin argued that since early modern times testimony has been an unavoidable part of scientific method, and that, correspondingly, reliance upon testimony – trust – remains a social dimension of epistemology that can never be purged from the practice of science. 'What we know about comets, icebergs and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about these things.'

Michael McKeon, influenced by Bakhtin, has also addressed the establishment of norms of cultural credibility in the early modern period – in his case in and through the construction of the novelistic form. His arguments corroborate Shapin's; McKeon's novels have the cultural function of mediating the difficult early modern issues of truth and virtue, exactly the same...