The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre Devin M. Garofalo TONDRE, MICHAEL. The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 240 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $45.00 e-book. Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility traces the relationship between novels and statistical thinking in the Victorian period. It does so to explore how they together configured the real not as a question of what is but rather, and more tantalizingly, what might have been. Taking as its point of departure Henry James’s likening of novels to “loose baggy monsters,” The Physics of Possibility offers “a revised history of the novel” wherein “what was once deemed bad form”—narrative disruptions and digressions, occlusions and abandonments—is in fact “a meaningful legacy of fiction,” rife with “expansive ethical and political aims” that do not abide organicist models of narrative form (1). Tondre revivifies this legacy and its aims by reading for “ensemble effects,” or “moments that break the diegetic frame of a plot” in order to tarry with the conditional, the possible, the might have been (11). These moments mark critical “deviations from the coherence of a fictional world,” conjuring instead “a composite of different possible plots imagined at a given fictional moment or location” (11). To read for ensemble effects is in some sense to read for ghosts—for the strange alter-novels that flicker into view in moments of narrative irresolution and indirection, when narrative “nonhappenings” take forceful if not also fleeting shape (26). As Tondre notes, “ensemble” connotes simultaneity and thus a thinking of the present as a landscape of presents in dynamic formation (26). By the end of the nineteenth century, the word also connotes “statistical ensembles,” or “versions of a physical system, each expressing a possible state of affairs at a given moment” (11). This shift coincides with a broader cultural reconfiguration underway during the Victorian period: namely, the reconceptualization of chance as neither strictly subjective nor objective—as “something more than an illusion” and yet “less than a plain fact” (7). Such irresolutions were the focal point of what Tondre calls the “physics of possibility”: “a conceptual legacy” (19) wherein various thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Henry Maudsley, and James Clerk Maxwell, among others—attempted to statistically “approximate the condition[s]” of the real and the alternatives with which it teems. Reimagining norms not as fateful determinates but potentially realizable fictions, Victorian scientists “cultivated” with their novelist contemporaries a set of “common techniques of representation” (2). Together, they tell a story about statistical data that departs from familiar narratives of biopolitical control. Along the way, these disciplinary crossovers also reveal how novels do science. As Tondre puts it, “latent scientific irresolutions…had singular importance in literature and as literature” (25). If Victorian scientists were unable to [End Page 617] put the unresolved relationship between the real and the possible to rest, novelists took over from there, turning to fiction for what it does best: thinking beyond and outside the “propositional logic of science” to “pose ideas without prescribing truth claims, invite multiple perspectives on what had seemed self-evident, and question what went without saying” (25). Tondre thus attends to the ways “fictional aesthetics are adept at reimagining” (rather than “simply reifying”) “historical realities” (2). This, Tondre argues, is the “lost promise and ameliorative potential” of the Victorian novel (60): it never produces “a single composite claim of truth” (73), preserving instead the ethical potentiality of “stand[ing] outside” or in multivalent relation to “the present” (66). Crucial to the ethics of Tondre’s argument is his engagement with queer theory. The Physics of Possibility tracks alternatives to the organicist telos of the Bildungsroman, exploring how Victorian novels deviate from this norm to noninstrumentalist ends. Reminding his readers that “Victorians conceived of character as a field of possibilities from classical norms of formation,” Tondre tracks “a tradition of realism couched in the conditional or subjunctive mood,” which tends toward failed formation and its “altered futures” (4). Eve Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading—as well as Elizabeth Freeman’s and Heather Love’s respective refusals...