The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science

204 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and danger. By the 1950s, these criticisms came together in a growing and—for science—dangerous public mood of disappointment. Scien­ tists had historically made huge promises, a cure for cancer being the paradigm, few of which it had fulfilled. The strength of LaFollette’s analysis is consistently to locate science popularization in what she calls the political incorporation of science over the course of this century. Scientific leaders such as George El­ lery Hale, Robert Millikan, and Vannevar Bush manipulated imagery as part of a political process of obtaining research funds and retaining the power of self-determination in research. LaFollette argues that public support for science provided considerable political strength for the scientists’ claims, and that support declined only as respect for all “leading American Institutions” declined in the 1960s. The limitations of LaFollette’s scholarship derive from her isolation of the journalistic imagery of science from the broad themes of American historiography. She has defined her work narrowly as a contribution to the history of journalism rather than broadly to the history of American science and technology. She has disclosed and charted, but not explained, the commitment of public opinion to science—what she calls “making science their own.” It would be a mistake, though, to argue that the generalized journalistic image of science examined by LaFollette had no importance, as compared to the popular images examined by Burnham and Weart, for instance. Not until after World War II did the political processes of funding disciplinary science become located in special interest groups and their subgovernmental institutions, where the confused prewarjour­ nalistic images of science had little political clout. What needs to be done is to show how the domain of public imagery functioned politically. Ronald C. Tobey Dr. Tobey teaches in the Department of History at the University of California at Riverside. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing. ByJohn Limon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 216; notes, index. $29.95. In this idiosyncratic volume, John Limon wants to reestablish boundaries eroded by the “antidisciplinary” tendencies of the present. Limon discounts the affinities between literature and science alleged by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Karl Popper, Michel Serres, and Michel Foucault by arguing that American writers have struggled since the 19th century against the domination of science. During the first half of that century, as the closing ranks of maturing disciplines relegated writers to amateur status, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 205 and Nathaniel Hawthorne allied themselves with the German Naturphilosophen , whose intent was to “deprofessionalize” the sciences, and thus tried to subvert scientific interpretations of reality with scientistic metaphors. Limon detects similar strategies even now in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Pynchon, and Norman Mailer. Writers have been outmaneuvered, however, because American culture has institutionalized science’s slash-and-burn approach to history, a notion Limon extrapolates from Thomas Kuhn’s observation that scientific disciplines destroy their antecedents. By contrast, artists and writers assume a usable past; for them time is fluid and ideas recurrent. Those differences help explain why modern writers remain nostalgic for a Newtonian era in which time was metaphorically reversible and why today’s deconstructionist literary critics, resentful of historical marginalization, have revived the epistemological disputes of Hume and Kant in an attempt to destabilize current scientific models. Though Limon appears to concede that the war is lost, he finds dignity in the skirmishes conducted by his heroes. The book’s tone is that of a southerner touring Confederate battlefields, redramatizing crucial events in the conflict. In the best chapter in the book, Limon points out that Hawthorne, having read Babbage and Bigelow, grasped the distinctions between science and engineering, (perhaps) understood that literature is itself a technology, and appreciated the aesthetic and democratic advan­ tages of a world remade by artifice, yet he could not find in a culture so reconstituted room for his romantic obsessions. Unhappy with the absence of spirituality in a progressive idealism he wanted to endorse (the parallel that suggests itself is Robert E. Lee and the Lost Cause), Hawthorne decided that literature must

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