Treating Science as Poetry

...The procedure may seem superfluous, even perilous...

...And being the learned polymath he is, he manages to delve quite deeply into technical matters, such as the more recent developments in psychoanalysis...

...It is not easy to make sense of Marxism unless one has read the whole of the MarxEngels correspondence...

...In his preface he disclaims any intention of coming forward as a historian of thought...

...I wish, though, that he had not revived that once fashionable pseudoproblem: how to make Marxism rhyme with psychoanalysis...

...Reviewed by GEORGE LICHTHEIM Author, "Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study" Reviewing a new book by Stanley Edgar Hyman is rather like trying to sharpen a new knife...

...The following remarks, then, do not detract from the overriding impression that Hyman's work is a very notable tour de force, to be compared for erudition and breadth of interest only with the writings of Edmund Wilson...

...and the extensive treatment of Freud (based, it is true, largely on Ernest Jones' biography) will give satisfaction not only to Freudians but to all readers who have a proper appreciation of that great man...

...or that Jane Harrison did read the book, and got something out of it...

...Frazer, "an Engels who never found his Marx," is put firmly into place...

...Even the lay critic must admire the skill with which Hyman links biology, anthropology and psychology in an intricate pattern of personal and intellectual relationships transcending national and cultural frontiers: whether it is a matter of Engels' debt to Darwin and Lewis Morgan, or the influence of Frazer's investigations into tribal culture and totemism upon Freud...

...Freud's use of metaphor is revealing, too, though less easy to penetrate—possibly because he had become conscious of the hidden significations concealed within poetic imagery...

...Would Hyman like to try his hand with the Critique of Pure Reason...

...After the specialists have done their worst, his book is likely to stand out as a truly original attempt to break away from the standard approach, with its potted histories taken in isolation...

...The title, The Tangled Bank, is taken from the famous concluding paragraph of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and relates somewhat obscurely to James George Frazer's view of culture as a mighty web or fabric made up of many threads and patchworks...

...None of the Viennese Marxists had much difficulty with it, and they were in a position to know...

...Marx and Engels emerge as impressive figures against an obscure backdrop made up chiefly of personal and literary feuds...

...There is something rather touching about the currently fashionable belief—to which Hyman regrettably lends support in an unfortunate lapse from his usual critical standards—that the late Lord Keynes ranks with the great figures of the Victorian era...

...At any rate, Hyman is consistent within his chosen approach...

...If one treats Capital or The Golden Bough as a work of art, internal cohesion becomes more important than theoretical truth or even historical impact...

...One must not carp too much, however...

...When Marx writes, "The relations between debtors and creditors form a sort of chain," Hyman is reminded of a "Great Chain of Becoming," "as organic and dynamic" as Darwin's tree of life...

...Capital, it seems, is mostly poetry or even "Victorian melodrama...

...and if "the Bible designed to be read as literature" is acceptable to the modern mind, why not The Origin of Species treated as a prose poem...

...its theoretical value is small...

...Hyman would not share this well-advertised opinion, I suspect, if he were compelled to breathe the mental atmosphere of the Bloomsbury set and its descendants...

...Still, the critic has to exercise his traditional prerogative of fault-finding, even if he admires the author's performance...

...The prosaic truth is that to an economist they are considerably more interesting...

...In support of this curious notion Hyman quotes Bernard Shaw—not the most reliable of witnesses—and a characteristically supercilious remark by Keynes...

...or that Engels furnished German Social Democracy with a doctrine which was not quite the original Marxian theory...

...The intellectual hold of the Bloomsbury set over some of the best critical minds in America is a subject to which Hyman himself might devote a future study...

...Can the history of 19th century culture be written in terms of such interrelationships...

...The argument rather pulls the rug from under the pedantic critic, concerned with the intellectual dimension within which these writers moved...

...If he tries to extract the intellectual content by way of literary analysis, he also provides a certain amount of straightforward biography and documented intellectual history, for which students will be grateful...

...In a sense, the four thinkers studied by Hyman can be described as Great Victorians, though Freud falls a little outside this classification...

...No one, though, can sustain a uniform standard of authoritative judgment over so wide a field...

...His book is pervaded by "a Manichaean conflict between light and dark," and his imagery in general betrays an obsessive concern with fight (science) and obscurity (religion...

...This approach is defended against the obvious charge of estheticism on the ground that art has "an ethical as well as an aesthetic dimension, in that it is the work of the moral imagination, imposing order and form on disorderly and anarchic experience...

...and it is difficult to write about Germany if one fails to realize, for example, that Eugen Dühring was a precursor of Hitler...

...Both notions are equally unfounded...

...Why not Lytton Strachey too...

...The book is a study of four writers whom Hyman sees as "among the most important thinkers of the past century...

...My impression is that Hyman knows more about Darwin than about Marx, and more about Freud than about either of his three other central figures...

...This implies a view of the 19th century as a period which came to an end during or shortly after the First World War, an opinion which other historians of culture are likely to share...

...But I still remain unconvinced that "form criticism" can be taken to the length of treating major theoretical works as though they were prose poems...

...There are copious bits of incidental information: it is revealing (but not surprising) to learn that Frazer never read Freud, and did not even acknowledge the copy of Totem and Taboo its author sent him...

...In the case of Marx (and Engels, whom he treats more briefly), Hyman is in part defeated by the German background...

...Hyman has one of the best minds in the business and hardly requires a reviewer to set him straight...

...it has a "dramatic movement" consisting of "four descents into suffering and horror, which we might see as four acts of a drama...

...Instead, we are told once more about Marx's carbuncles and his irritable temper...

...Capital is best understood "as imaginative literature...

...His work, he says, is "a study of the writings of Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as imaginative organizations, as though they were poems...

...I confess to considerable sympathy for Hyman's judgment that "in some respects, the twentieth century is less attractive intellectually than the nineteenth.' Certainly it has not so far produced any great intellectual syntheses...

...Yet, a sediment of doubt remains, reinforced by such passing remarks as that the second and third volumes of Capital are "of considerably less interest" than the first...

...Darwin's work "caught the imagination of its time as a dramatic poem, and a dramatic poem of a very special sort...

...If there are a few absurdities, there is also a wonderful display of erudition and critical acumen in the two fields where Hyman is really at home: modern psychology and its relation to 19th century biology and evolutionism...

...Frazer on the other hand, "perhaps influenced by Darwin's great tree,' thought of human culture as a mighty web woven of the conflicting threads of black magic, red religion, and white science...

...Politics are not discussed, and Bismarck is not mentioned...

...It seems to me that Hyman has effected more than just an interesting pioneering effort...

...Hyman, however, is not primarily concerned with the enduring relevance of the beliefs held by his four culture-heroes...

...In these chapters Hyman flounders about a good deal...

...Darwin is given his proper due as the major fount of the later scientist orthodoxies...

...I do not want to give the impression that Hyman is exclusively concerned with "form criticism...

...No doubt form and content are related ("form is the form of its content," to employ the Hegelian phrase...

...A milieu which regarded Shaw as the equal of Shakespeare, inevitably saw Keynes as superior to Marx...