Download Stephen Kern. A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder

Reviews of Books
METHODS/THEORY
STEPHEN KERN. A Cultural History of Causality: Science,
Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. 437. $29.95.
“It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision
in each class of things,” Aristotle said, and in Stephen
Kern’s new book, that class of things is breathtakingly
broad. Causality, Kern concedes, is hard to define and
harder to prove. As an interpretive model Kern posits
the “increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity,
probability, and uncertainty of causal knowledge across
170 years,” from 1830, when his study begins, to the
present (p. 13). Kern’s history of causality explores not
only the major scientific and philosophical ideas of modernity, but a sampling of its literary texts as well: his
goal is to integrate a history of science with a history of
literature. To help organize all this causal chaos, Kern
focuses on the act of murder because it so vividly reflects its cultural ethos; because it registers intentionality, motivation, and significance like few other behaviors; and because “after 1830 it attracted increasing
attention to its causal circumstances and motives
among . . . criminologists, sociologists, detectives, statisticians, and forensic psychiatrists, as well as writers of
detective fiction . . . and crime novels” (pp. 2–3).
As a history of science and ideas, Kern’s study succeeds brilliantly. Gathering the disparate knowledge
systems of nearly two centuries into discrete categories,
Kern produces a taxonomy of causality that is cogent
and convincing. Chapters devoted to ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and
ideas do more than organize the history of causal
thought; they offer elegant synopses of the major theories, thinkers, and epistemological shifts underwriting
that history. From Enlightenment positivism to quantum discontinuity; from religion to existentialism, and
phrenology to cybernetics; from Freud to Nietzsche to
Foucault, and from Darwin to Durkheim to Derrida:
Kern ranges comfortably (and profitably) among them
all. Specialist and novice alike will find much here to
learn and admire.
Kern’s attempts to incorporate literary and cultural
representations of murder into his study are ambitious
but problematic. As object of knowledge and representation of culture, killing is inherently fascinating; con-
sequently, wrapping scientific and philosophical discourses around the occasional corpse is guaranteed to
whet the reader’s appetite. Kern’s justification is that
causality alone is simply too broad a topic; he must “focus on a single act in order to document historically
distinctive thinking about its causes” (p. 2). Perhaps,
but while the result is intriguing, the logic is occasionally reductive. That epistemological thought over 170
years has trended toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty is a
provable claim; that novelists have followed this same
trajectory in their representations of murder, however,
is sweepingly speculative and invites selective reading.
Often, Kern’s conclusions are obvious. Tracing the
drawing room primitives of late Victorian fiction to
Charles Darwin, for example—or the repressed, fragmented killers of twentieth-century novels to Sigmund
Freud—is not new, and illuminates the study of neither
social science nor literature.
The chapter on “Mind” is typical of the book’s many
strengths as well as its one major weakness. Deftly,
Kern charts the history of neuroscience, psychology,
and psychiatry and demonstrates how advances in
these fields have influenced cultural conceptions of
murder. From the simplistic hypotheses of craniology
and phrenology in the early 1800s, to the more complex
anatomical-ancestry theories of Cesare Lombroso at
mid-century, to the multifaceted etiological-overdetermination theories pioneered by Freud, to the infinite
uncertainty of contemporary genomics and neurobiology—somehow, Kern channels this riotous flow of ideas
into a framework of meaning at once logical and fluid.
But the logic falters as Kern trolls for these ideas in
the literary fictions of their day. To be fair, certain incompatibilities between the literary and the social system make problems inevitable. For one, literature is in
dialogue not only with culture but with itself: Franz
Kafka responds not just to Freud, but to Gustave Flaubert. Whether Joseph Conrad recapitulates the criminal
anthropology of Lombroso (as Kern claims), he certainly announces himself to practitioners of the modern
European novel. And Theodore Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy (1925) is as much a critique of literary naturalism as a staging of “the specificity-uncertainty dialectic” (p. 253). Furthermore, literary texts speak not
univocally but heteroglossically: like Walt Whitman,
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Methods/Theory
they contain multitudes. This is famously true of Fyodor
Dostoevsky; yet Kern supports his contention that “Victorian writers routinely used monomania to explain
murders” by noting how “Dostoevsky tags Raskolnikov
as a monomaniac, as does a physician in the story” (p.
249). But correlation is not causality; Kern ignores both
Dostoevsky’s irony (Dr. Zosimov is a fool and his argument a distraction) and Raskolnikov’s more salient
engagement with utilitarianism and the political radicalism of the 1840s and 1860s. Further, some terms
(“Victorian”) and authors (Emile Zola) are overused,
inviting generalization. And other causal agents are under utilized (Karl Marx) or omitted entirely (imperialism, for example, which in 1830 was just entering its
golden age).
Notwithstanding such lapses, this book is highly recommended to everyone interested in smart and engaging interdisciplinary scholarship.
PETER OKUN
Davis and Elkins College
JEREMY D. POPKIN. History, Historians, and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. x,
339. $35.00.
In recent years autobiographies have become ever more
highly esteemed as sources for historical research. At
the same time, more and more historians have themselves published their life stories. Jeremy D. Popkin analyzes both tendencies in this study on history, historians, and autobiography. He has read more than 300
autobiographies, mainly by English and American historians but also including French, German, Dutch, and
Italian works. Popkin makes clear that this is a very interesting body of texts, because historians who have
turned into autobiographers unconsciously demolish
the existing wall between historiography and autobiography. When in the nineteenth century truth and objectivity became the professional standard among historians, the genre of autobiography fell into disgrace
and was left to literary critics. Historians writing their
life stories are, on the one hand, bound to the rules of
this narrative and literary form, but, on the other hand,
they are dedicated to the professional standards of their
discipline. In fact, they are aware that their autobiographies are likely to be read more critically than those
written by members of other professions. Their own life
story should reinforce their historical work by showing
truth and credibility.
Popkin starts by positioning himself within the current debate on narrative theory. In an interesting and
informative chapter he criticizes in particular Hayden
White and Paul Ricoeur for largely ignoring autobiographical writing while discussing the problem of history and fiction. He concludes that the hybrid genre of
autobiography does not fit into their approach. Autobiography is, as he writes, both historical and fictional,
both private and public, both truthful and imagined.
The genre must therefore be distinguished from both
history and fiction. Popkin, citing David Carr, stresses
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that autobiography is primarily making sense of experience by giving it narrative form.
The value of Popkin’s approach becomes clear in his
chapter on two historians whose autobiographies have
been included in the literary canon for many years: Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams. By reading them as
historians, Popkin offers new insights to an already
great body of literature on these authors, for instance
by showing that both Gibbon and Adams believed that
their personal experiences helped them in understanding the past. Not all 327 autobiographers listed in the
bibliography are discussed in depth, and in chapters on
vocation and career their works serve to sketch an impression of the historical profession in the twentieth
century. Bookish children from middle-class backgrounds, as most historians have been, often picked up
their vocation from parents or teachers. They were also
often inspired by children’s books like those by Jules
Verne and Karl May, which is interesting, because despite these literary models they chose to write nonfiction. For Popkin this is a telling detail, as he concludes
that historians are obviously motivated by a wish to tell
stories. With few exceptions historians are reluctant to
write about their careers. Most are silent about their
academic successes, failures, and frustrations, and few
pages are spent on the daily life of teaching courses and
doing administrative work. On the contrary, most authors want to show that they had another life besides
their profession. Therefore they often describe their
own lives against the background of great events. Since
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, autobiography
has been seen as a genre that should focus on the innermost experience and not world events, but many historians simply could not cast off their professional
background. Often only those historians who were involved in politics became aware of how little an individual could accomplish, or lost faith in the ideas they
once had believed. Holocaust memoirs are discussed in
a separate chapter, in which Popkin concludes that
these authors more than others came to realize how
much personal narrative contributes to understanding
the past. The testimony of first-person accounts also
have great importance in view of the campaign to deny
the reality of the Holocaust.
At some places it could have been useful to set this
body of texts in an even wider perspective. The silence
about careers, for instance, is surprising when contrasted with academic novels in which university life is
described as a theater of politics and passions. And the
positive tone of most of these autobiographies may also
have been enhanced by the current pressure to produce
positive resumés.
This book is a very original and important contribution to both the study of autobiography and that of historiography. In addition to his analysis of autobiographies of historians, Popkin gives new insights about the
relationship between narrative and history. Maybe every historian should write an autobiography at some
APRIL 2006