The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference by Helmut Müller-Sievers

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference by Helmut Müller-Sievers Joseph D. O'Neil Helmut Müller-Sievers. The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 270 pp. Helmut Müller-Sievers's essay collection covers the announced theme from several perspectives: literary studies as a science, representations of science in literature, and literature as science and technology. Divided into three major sections, these twelve essays and a substantial introduction address the conjunction of Literatur and Wissenschaft as their author has elaborated it since the mid-1990s, when his Epigenesis: Naturphilosophie im Sprachdenken Wilhelm von Humboldts (Schöningh, 1994) and its expanded version, Self-Generation: Biology, Literature, Philosophy around 1800 (Stanford University Press, 1997), appeared. Readers of his critique of epigenesis and Naturphilosophie will recognize in the present volume both the origins and subsequent development of this critical perspective. The first chapter recapitulates the insights of these early works. If Self-Generation admonished its readers to seek the mechanical, human-made underpinnings of organic models of biology and culture, against the perennial victories of autopoiesis, this volume insists in its entirety on the search for the suppressed or forgotten critical notion that will cast cultural and natural phenomena in a different light. The result is that the apparently disparate collection produces a series of differends that run through and beneath the collected essays, such that the "implied genitive" in Literaturwissenschaft is recast not as the plodding, Teutonic search for certainty or at least exhaustive documentation but as "the marker of irreducible conflict, preposterous confusion, or felicitous allegiance" between the literary artifact and the claims of science, literary or natural. In other words, the author argues that literature colludes in and is produced by the important scientific developments from circa 1800 to after 1850: the rise of epigenesis and developments in anatomy, physiology, and mechanics. The early work in reproductive biology, presented here in the first and second chapters, is complemented by two chapters on orientation, one on Kant's "orientation in thinking" and the other on Romantic geography (Erdkunde); the latter chapter seems to have something against maps in favor of subjective and [End Page 319] intuitive notions of place. While Müller-Sievers remains skeptical of Idealist and Romantic models and their successors throughout, his is not a critique that simply reduces Idealism or Romanticism to an aesthetic ideology or a forerunner of National Socialism; Müller-Sievers criticizes the a priori tendency to avoid "historical and textual specificity" in such readings, here in the case of Andrzej Warminski (156). This volume is shaped by close and careful readings of, for example, Nietzsche's philological work ("A Tremendous Chasm"), Kant's use of colons ("What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?"), and the relationship of Schelling's use of the term Deconstruktion to Derrida's deconstruction (with which Müller-Sievers has clear affinities). The revelation of the textual and ideological mechanism that propels the organism becomes a fascination with dynamic, nonorganic models, whether scientific or literary. For example, an analysis of the role of rhythm and accent in Greek poetry (and thus, by extension, functions of the body) reveals that Nietzsche's evocation of the Dionysian in the Birth of Tragedy is not that of a primal substance but of a decadent form of the Apollonian. Investigations of Büchner's work on the nervous system show that Büchner's language and compositional form resist both Naturphilosophie and the "hyper-Romantic expressivity" that his specialist critics attribute to him; by implication, then, Büchner also resists the critics' desire for an "intact, natural language that speaks … of the wholeness of the world in both science and literature" (89). Müller-Sievers's task throughout this collection is to resist this desire, focusing instead on formal, historical, and rhetorical detail without the pretension to explain once and for all a single, proper relationship among literature, criticism, and science. Whether it refers to the scientific character of literary studies or the relationship between literature and the natural sciences, Müller-Sievers's recasting of the literature-science relationship extends to new (and, true to his earlier...