Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1997 by Stuart Peterfreund

The fourteen chapters of this volume are all reprints of previously published articles or book chapters that appeared over a roughly seven-year span -- from the publication of the seminal volume One Culture, edited by George Levine (Beer's Chapter 7), to the publication of Ambix, 41 (March 1994 [Beer's Chapter 14]). Despite their various origins, the essays do hold up as a collection, in large measure because Beer frames them astutely as "all concern[ing] the crossings we make as readers between fields (sometimes, it seems, on open ground or over stiles, sometimes crouching behind barbed wire or plucked by brambles)" (1). The particular strength of Beer's Open Fields, as the title and the metaphorical exfoliation cited above suggest, is in her categorical unwillingness to permit any consideration of the epistemological without simultaneously considering the ontological. One comes to know what s/he knows by traversing -- and in the process, negotiating -- cultural spaces that mediate, and ultimately transform what s/he knows. This process holds true no less for the scientist coming to do science than for the novelist coming to do fiction.

Beer's focal interest, therefore, is on the subject position, and specifically on "the intimacy between intellectual issues and emotional desires and fears" (8). While providing her with an horizon adequate to engaging the texts she selects, Beer's focus raises two questions, that to her own mind "haunt this collection of essays: How does human encounter, actual or imagined, play into the making of theory? How do people reach new ideas within language, which is so freighted with communal pasts? Together, these raise further questions: about scientific writing and the depth to which it is imbued with cultural experience; about the capacity of human beings to respond to fresh knowledge as experience" (9).

As befits the author of Darwin's Plots (1983), the first section, containing six of the fourteen essays collected -- nearly half of the present volume -- concerns itself with "Darwinian Encounters." The first essay, "Four Bodies on the Beagle: Touch, Sight, and Writing in a Darwinian Letter," focuses on a letter by Darwin "addressed to his school and college friend Charles Whitley" (21). The letter contains a puzzling passage that links Darwin, as writerly body, with the body of a Fuegian, who gazes at him; with the body of Titian's Venus (i.e., Venus and Cupid with a Lute-Player), who gazes side-long out of the picture plane; and with the body of a "small animal," gazeless because dead (presumably, shot by Darwin himself), that Darwin envisions eviscerating to prepare as a zoological specimen. Beer reads the passage as attempting to mediate Darwin's "sense of fascinated helplessness at finding himself unable to interpret the profound difference of the other man (i.e., the Fuegian)" (25). In his state of helplessness, Darwin recalls the other bodies as a way of trying out an erotics of interpretation versus an adversative struggle of interpretation, ultimately writing himself into a state in which the gaze is averted; the pleasure of the gaze, subverted; the subject, disembodied; and his subject-matter, unsexed.

In the second essay, "Can the Native Return?" Beer turns the Victorian engagement with the idea of progress upside down, making a start out of the question begged by Clym Yeobright's actions in Hardy's Return of the Native (1878): Can the Native return? Relying on various accounts of what followed upon Captain Fitzroy's return of the native Fuegians Jemmy Button, York Minster, and Fuegia Basket to their homeland, then turning to Sir John Franklin's last Arctic expedition (1846), Beer sees these texts, along with the researches of Dorset poet and linguist William Barnes, as both underwriting the question and overdetermining its answer. "In Hardy's imagination, as in that of other Victorian writers, return is not possible without the idea of retrogression" (53).

In the third and fourth essays, "Travelling the Other Way: Travel Narratives and Truth Claims," and "Speaking for the Others: Relativism and Authority in Victorian Anthropological Writing," Beer concerns herself with the way that the cultural practices typified by the travel narrative and anthropological writing in the first half of the nineteenth century had two simultaneous and related effects: remarking the otherness of the object of the discourse, while at the same time marginalizing that object by deploying that otherness against the cultural backdrop of the British upper classes. Since the third essay focuses principally on the 1830s, it does not address what happened in the second half of the century; however, the fourth essay argues that in the second half of the century, writers as diverse as Henry Mayhew, writing in London Labour and the London Poor, and Robert Browning, writing in "Caliban upon Setebos," attempted to interrupt "that equable, overbearing conversation among peers," and "to listen to other voices, beneath and beyond those of the dominant interpreters ..." (81).