Reviewed by: Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer Nicholas Dames (bio) Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, edited by Helen Small and Trudi Tate; pp. vii + 255. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £53.00, $74.00. No small part of the intellectual pleasure afforded by a Festschrift is to see what part of the honoree's scholarship is now considered central by those who know it well. While Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis offers no large surprises to those who have profited from Gillian Beer's work, it does mark a small but potentially significant change of emphasis in the uses to which that work is put. As one might expect, questions of the potential alignment and nonalignment of literary and scientific knowledge are foregrounded here, and Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) is never far away from the minds of the contributors, as several essays here reconsider aspects of Darwin's career. But if the enduring interest of Darwin's [End Page 698] Plots was its analysis of the narrative structures that linked formally self-conscious Victorian fiction with evolutionary science, elsewhere in Beer's work we can find a complex interest in the mechanics of description, as in her important 1987 essay "Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery." The Beer presented to us by Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis is less a theorist of narrative than of nonnarrative questions of epistemology and language, of the ways in which literature and science grapple in productively overlapping ways with the dilemma of how to describe the world without letting the tools of description determine in advance the appearance and scope of that described world. The volume's opening essay, Nigel Leask's "Darwin's 'Second Sun': Alexander von Humboldt and the Genesis of The Voyage of the Beagle," strikes this note immediately. For Leask, the descriptive texture of the Voyage, particularly notable in its transformation from rough diary to published journal, is a careful reaction against the exoticism and vivacity of Humboldt's tropics. While the account here of the genesis of the proper tonal range of mid- Victorian professional science will be familiar to most readers, the detail with which Leask demonstrates the many points of contact and divergence between the descriptive practices of Humboldt and Darwin is thoroughly rewarding. As the volume advances, however, questions of description are raised even more explicitly, particularly in relation to the recurrent problem of category versus particular instance. Harriet Ritvo's "Ordering Creation, or Maybe Not," and Helen Small's "Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk," each take interestingly nuanced approaches to the methodological dilemma that classification raised for Victorian scientists and novelists alike. Ritvo's essay restores critical attention to Victorian systematizers—still pervasively, and incorrectly, considered as dry redactors of Linnaean methods—by demonstrating the creativity, inventiveness, and polemical energy of nineteenth-century taxonomic theory. Her account of William MacLeay's little-known "quinary system" is a lucid, and appealingly unusual, case study in the ways in which post-Linnaean taxonomy had to find rather esoteric solutions to the problems presented by the enormous nineteenth-century influx of new organisms. Small's investigation of the impact of Henry Buckle's History of Civilisation in England (1857-61), an impact made all the more telling because of the frequency with which it was debunked and derided, makes fascinating claims for the importance of Buckle's deterministic, statistical method. For Small, Buckle's relatively unnuanced denigration of individual agency in favor of general contexts (nations, races, populations) helped many of his readers come to their own, more complex formulations of the relationship between the one and the many. When she turns to Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native (1878), Small makes the crucial move of studying the novel's discursive moments, particularly the descriptions of Egdon Heath, as reactions to the problem of particular instance versus determining context (or proximity versus grand overview) that Buckle so dramatically raised. As a way into the descriptive practices of Victorian fiction, still a rather unstudied realm, this seems promising and deserving of further investigation. Work like that of...
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Aug 22, 2006
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