Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s wake: relativity, metaphor and modernist literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 254 p. 0-19-818640-1. Hard cover: $90.00
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Einstein’s Wake is an ambitious work which looks at problems and concerns of science, philosophy and literature of the modern period through the lense of important metaphors common to all three. A good deal of ground is covered here including a detailed look at popular journals and examinations of what the four major writers—Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot—would have known of scientific advances of their time.
Whitworth writes with clear superiority in literature. An example of how he is stronger in literature than in philosophy is found in the chapter entitled “Descriptionism: consuming sensations” where Whitworth discusses Bertrand Russell’s description of a table. In describing a table thusly: “to the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard…,” Russell is discussing the reliability of sense impressions and whether they reveal the actual existence of anything. If that is what Whitworth means by the adoption of the “innocent eye trope” then it could be said that Russell very nearly adopts this, but it is doubtful that Russell himself would have said that that was what he was doing. So not surprisingly, the field of literature is the focus of the book. Whitworth’s primary purpose is to examine the effect of advances in scientific knowledge, as it was popularly understood, upon the literature of the period. For instance, the stated purpose of the third chapter called “Descriptionism: consuming sensations” is to examine how “literary writers responded to scientific debate about reality.”
In the introduction, it is evident that Whitworth favours Lakoff and Johnson’s treatment of metaphor. He arrives at a working definition of metaphor along with an examination of their work. Whitworth defines metaphor as “the definition of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.” (p. 10) He admits though that defining metaphor as the unfamiliar presented in familiar terms present difficulties because it is always a question of familiar (or unfamiliar) to whom? Given that metaphor is notoriously difficult to define, it is a good definition to start out with. Along these lines, Whitworth presents a sympathetic account of the function of metaphor in science: i. e. it is not the case that metaphors are merely decorative, but rather that metaphor performs a pioneering function that is particularly useful in foreign conceptual territory. Whitworth goes even further to say that progress in science is not a matter of stripping away all metaphors and so arriving at the literal truth, but rather it is a process of replacing old metaphors with new metaphors about the nature of reality.
Whitworth examines various aspects of how metaphor functions in the introduction, but this is not continued throughout the book. One of the problems with writing about metaphors is that they are particularly susceptible to the treatment of cataloguing. One of the problems with cataloguing a phenomenon is that cataloguing does not say much beyond “here are all the variations.” That is, with cataloguing, the function and purpose of metaphor are not made explicit enough and so are particularly difficult to bring to light. Although Michael Whitworth’s stated aim is “not to catalogue literary content,” that is what sometimes happens in Einstein’s Wake. Whitworth’s intention is to trace the effect of science upon literature through metaphor, but it is often not clear why looking at common metaphors is important for the understanding of either.
This is not to say that Whitworth makes no conclusions about what could be seen as the ‘deeper aspects’ of metaphor. For instance, at the end of the chapter entitled “The secret agent and literary entropy” he says about the metaphorical theme of dissipation that it is a “theme locked into conflict with the theme of evolution.” Still, even this observation is more about the content of particular groups of metaphors, rather than how or why metaphors function as they do within a particular discipline. One could wonder why use metaphor as a means to examine the literature of the Modern period or of any period. Does a coherent picture of literary concerns arise because of an examination of common or prominent metaphors? Or is something important revealed about scientific understanding through looking at dominant metaphors of various periods. Perhaps a more critical eye on this question was needed.
A problem with cataloguing is that it is often not clear why it is meaningful either from the scientific or literary point of view to discuss various common metaphors. If the overall aim of the book is to show through the metaphors found in literature of the time, that science is a progression from metaphor to metaphor, rather than from metaphor to literal truth, this is not made as clear as it should have been. It is probably the case that Whitworth’s intention was not to come to an irrefutable definition of metaphor, nor was it to show how metaphor functions within science, but rather to show how literary works reflect popularized scientific knowledge of the time and Einstein’s Wake does do a particularly good and thorough job of this.