Literary Research: Narration and the Epistemology of the Human Sciences in Alfred Doblin

I

There are novels which display their characters in a constrained, ineluctable situation and observe plot development as in a laboratory—mostly, so as to count the corpses at the end. Such novels are poetic experiments, they probe cause and effect, rules and processes brought to light by their exemplary narratives. Their intent is less representational mimesis than an analysis of natural laws. They are, as Michel Butor put it, "laboratoires du récit" ² in which truth and knowledge are to be demonstrated based on the evidence of a typical case. The literary experiment, like all research, is conducted in a given historical context of knowledge and the knowable; it is part of an 'archive,' which Michel Foucault defined as the "the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events." ³ Literature explores this space of possible statements and discourses by exposing the lives and limbs of its protagonists to its truths. Émile Zola was the first to proclaim the novel an experiment. His manifesto, Le roman expérimental (1870), appropriates the rigor of a médecine expérimentale developed by the physiologist Claude Bernard. It demands a literature that applies scientific hypotheses and methods to material which is essentially fictional, but nonetheless plausible, as a testing ground for "la connaissance de l'homme, la connaissance scientifique, dans son action individuelle et sociale." ⁴ Literature is thus considered to be another laboratory in which knowledge about man is elaborated with the same strategies, and with the same claim to truth, as in physiology, psychology, sociology, or genetics. What is interesting in Zola's poetics is not so much its simplification, which would seem to condemn literature simply to repeat scientific inquiry, but rather the epistemological impulse he would have both share: "Le romancier part à la recherche d'une vérité." ⁵ His formulation expresses the pretension of a poetics that takes its epistemological goal and its conception of truth from the empirical sciences. The process of seeking truth, and the ways of defining it, are derived from contemporary scientific standards, and in Zola's case, from the methods of Claude Bernard, who had introduced experimental intervention into the study of medicine. Zola saw the same approach in Balzac: "Il [Balzac in Cousine Bette] est parti des faits observés, puis il a institué son expérience en soumettant Hulot à une série d'épreuves, en le faisant passer par certains milieux, pour montrer le fonctionnement du méchanisme de sa passion. Il est donc évident qu'il n'y a pas seulement là observation, mais qu'il y a aussi expérimentation, (...) puisqu'il intervient d'une façon directe pour placer son personnage dans des conditions dont il reste le maître." ⁶ It is a scenario that constrains and thus—as Zola remarks—requires observation; at the same time, it remains subject to the controlling interference of the experimenter. As master experimenter, the author commands fate: he both describes and constructs the cases based on the evidence that proves his hypotheses.

As he repeatedly attested in his literary and autobiographical texts, the physician and psychiatrist Alfred Döblin saw himself representing this tradition of an 'epistemological poetics,' as I should like to call it. Just as Zola learned from contemporary physiology and degeneration theory, Döblin ordained: "Man lerne von der Psychiatrie, der einzigen Wissenschaft, die sich mit dem ganzen seelischen Menschen befaßt. . . ." ⁷ The extent to which he thereby shared and summarized the medical, criminological, psychiatric and psychoanalytic understanding of his time as well as the investigative approach of these disciplines has been revealed by recent Döblin research. Wolfgang Schäffner, in his convincing and thorough study, provides an analysis of Döblin's literary production, demonstrating its alignment along psychiatry's technological and disciplinary standards of normalization, and its congruity with psychiatric case...