Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel by Helen Thompson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel by Helen Thompson Courtney Weiss Smith Helen Thompson. Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2017. Pp. 368. $59.95. Much exciting, recent scholarly work explores relationships between science and literature in the long eighteenth century. Fictional Matter is an intriguing example, providing a model for rigorous engagement with science on its own terms. Anyone tempted to recycle pervasive critical commonplaces about mechanist philosophy's passive matter and reductionist impulse, empiricism's rejection of unseen causes, or the dualist mind-body split in the period should read this excellent book first. At Fictional Matter's conceptual heart is Robert Boyle's understanding of the corpuscle. In the introduction and first chapter, Ms. Thompson critiques traditional scholarly accounts of Boyle (particularly Shapin and Schaffer's influential Leviathan and the Air-Pump). Against these, her book recovers the complexities of Boyle's understanding of corpuscles: "durable but sometimes divisible, mechanical but attracting, insensible but real." Famously, for example, Boyle suggests that the arrangement of corpuscles in a [End Page 160] particular texture produces the sensation of the color blue in humans. Ms. Thompson shows that such a corpuscular world is one of complex relationships: blue is not inherent in the body that produces it (it is created by arrangement, and light is also necessary). The resulting blue is always subject to change, as that body interacts with other bodies. Moreover, Fictional Matter insists on active verbs like "produces" in such formulations: Boyle's insistence on the generative—even "attracting" and sticky—nature of corpuscles upsets usual ways of aligning mechanism, passivity, and reduction. Crucially, Boyle's corpuscularianism also entails a theory of perception and knowledge. Far from banishing all insensible causes, his philosophy is built on an affirmation of them—corpuscles never seen but known through their very real effects (like color). Also, there is no "mimetic resemblance" between the corpuscular texture and the resulting human idea of blue: reality is "empirically accessed," instead, "through the relational form of experimental knowledge." A corpuscular world is a relational world, and there is no knowledge without people (made of corpuscles themselves) there to know. While Ms. Thompson's work here is painstaking and richly sourced, she also keeps an eye on its biggest theoretical stakes: "corpuscular philosophy offers an alternative genealogy of the mind-body relation" that has real feminist implications. In this model, the person comes to seem less irreducible and more "penetrable," less autonomous and more implicated in the act of knowledge-making. The rest of the book traces the influence of this ontology, epistemology, and model of the human on the eighteenth-century novel. Chapter 2 provides the bridge, demonstrating Boyle's influence on Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and, in turn, the Essay's influence on the English novel. Locke takes up Boyle's corpuscularianism (with some interesting differences) and further emphasizes the implications of anti-essentialist matter theory for theories of language: the only essence humans have access to, "nominal essence," involves the extrinsic denominating of a thing based on its secondary qualities. Ms. Thompson then suggests that essence works similarly for Haywood's female characters. Chapter 3 argues that the Journal of the Plague Year features a model of character resonant with the figure of the plague patient in corpuscular medicine. In the Journal, people have depth but not in the usual psychologized novelistic sense: they are "pervious" to "particulate content that cannot be known, even from the inside." Chapter 4 traces the influence of the science of color on the depiction of race in English novels. The period's science explained blackness in terms of corpuscular arrangements "that refuse to entrench essence": accordingly, skin color and thus race are not biologically fixed in the novels of William Rufus Chetwood; and Penelope Aubin dramatizes both "the readiness of white patriarchy to defend its imperviousness to difference" and the failure of this defense. Chapter 5 demonstrates, in Henry Fielding's fictions, a sustained meditation on the incommensurability between the inner essences and the sensible qualities of characters—and shows that Fielding has this incommensurability throw attention onto the only sensible entities to which his readers...