Abstract

The doctrine of coherence, of the radical interconnectedness of (all) things, was widely proclaimed in the nineteenth century as the cardinal principle of specifically modern, avant-garde and relativistic, intellectual enterprise, particularly in various areas of the natural and social sciences. Not merely a protocol of scientific rationality, the rule of coherence was also idealized as a principle of value. At the same time, a growing number of nineteenth-century thinkers became ever more acutely aware that the doctrine of coherence entailed potentially severe epistemological dilemmas. If all things are exhaustively interconnected and if, therefore, relations and not intrinsic properties of things form the sole objects of scientific inquiry, then all analysis, particularly analysis of causes and effects, is fated to expand uncontrollably and never to be able to attain even provisional conclusions. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) bases its revolutionary approach to literary analysis on the same formulations of the coherence doctrine that were already commonplaces across a broad spectrum of fields in late-Victorian times, prompting questions as to how literary study was able for so many decades to remain impervious to the progressive intellectual trends that had long since transformed nearly every other area of research. The incurable self-contradictions of the coherence doctrine are mystified in Understanding Poetry, but they signal themselves in the assertion of an ethic of critical authoritarianism and in the promotion of a dubious creed of "total interpretation." In postmodern literary studies, one encounters both a strong reaction against the doctrine of coherence and, notably in work inspired by Michel Foucault, a resurgence of it. An instance of the latter is found in D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988), in which the idea of coherence is given totalizing form in the invocation of the fantastic apparition called "Discipline." As a corrective to such an argument, coherence needs to be recognized not as a given or as a fact of nature but as an existential and performative category-and even, as James Frazer laments in a preface to The Golden Bough, a potentially tragic one.

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