A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (review)

This book is remarkably ambitious and erudite, even daunting. It has a time span from c. 1830 to the present and features eight categories of causation, and some of them are as mysteriously broad as "Mind" and "Ideas." The concept of causation is itself a contested one. How could any mortal historian get this much material under his control and make it accessible?

The answer is that Kern has a single and simple thesis that he uses to organize every chapter—"a specificity-uncertainty dialectic" to describe the change from the Victorian to the modern. In the chapter on sexuality, he writes, "The increasing specificity and complexity, as well as probability and uncertainty of sexual desire applies especially to knowledge of homosexuality" (187). Or, as knowledge becomes more specific and complex, awareness of its lack increases. This conclusion is repeated for every category studied. Kern is aware that his argument is "as simple as a cliché," but finds its elaboration "endlessly surprising" (26). Readers will inevitably differ in detail about what they do or do not find surprising, but the repetition of the general thesis for every chapter makes for monotonous predictability, an ironic result for a book that emphasizes the theme of uncertainty.

Kern devotes much attention to quantum theory, yet concedes that it "plays only an infrequent and marginal role in historical and literary matters" (365). In spite of his concession, the drift of his book has the effect of blurring the difference between Werner Heisenberg's technical uncertainty principle in physics and a loosely used metaphor. Similarly, Kern acknowledges that explanation, at least in part, can include purposes and reasons, but he emphasizes the role of biochemical entities in neuroscience as "the most basic causal explanation" (15). Nevertheless, he is aware of the distortion involved in his using parts of novels as if they were "criminological or psychiatric case histories" (16). He is good at anticipating objections.

Kern's idea for this book began with his interest in the literary shift from fictional realism to fictional modernism in James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, suggesting "a cultural pivot for a history of causality" (2), because these authors diminished the role of plot and character. The notion of the pivot raises the question of whether Kern's approach is another version of the Whig interpretation of history, ruled implicitly by an idea of progress. Again, Kern is himself aware of it as a temptation and defines his thesis as a "gradational change," rather than a turning point, though he tends to undercut it when he asserts that a fictional character's murderous act in an André Gide novel is "an event of enormous cultural historical significance" (4).

Kern recognizes that the modernists wrote as if they represented a progressive change, an idea that works in science and medicine, but not in art. The literary modernists had successors, for example, who hoped to reinvigorate plot and character, as they did in the English novel. Kern barely mentions American philosophers of uncertainty, such as the pragmatists William James and John Dewey, whereas he bestows much attention on the contemporary Continental proponents of "the linguistic turn." The drift of Kern's book shows that the idea of progress is alive and well, and living in Paris under the name of postmodernism.