Unanswered Questions
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Unanswered Questions Real and Imagined Worlds: The Novel and Social Science By Morroe Berger Harvard. 303 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State...
...This is an interesting way of viewing the Enlightenment and its search for universal law, but it leaves unanswered the matter of motivation...
...As an historian, I would lastly insist that greater notice be taken of chronology...
...Well, stranger things happen in California, I thought, not realizing the contact would be infectious: I now approach recent American history through concepts like mobility, acculturation, family structure, and personality formation...
...He does cite psychoanalyst O. Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, 1950, a volume containing a wealth of insights on Crusoe...
...Berger ultimately observes that "the study of the relations between the fictional and the real worlds, in whatever period of time, is only in its infancy...
...Why was there such a strong urge to control...
...Parents who had been accustomed to swaddling and beating youngsters now sought to have children develop their own internal restraints, and perhaps this early training manifested itself later in the world of letters...
...The novel and social science," says Berger, "have similar antecedents in the 18th century, both seeking to describe and to explain social behavior in new ways...
...How to treat those cumbersome terms and weighty notions in a fashion attractive to a nonacademic audience-that is, undergraduates and the reading public-is a real challenge, and Berger's study of the novel and social science promised to be illuminating...
...I took several similarly inspiring history courses, which set me on my present course, but I never heard the word social science at Princeton or in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania...
...Although Berger discusses (and questions) the familiar explanations found in examining the emerging middle class and the movement to privacy, individualism and domesticity, he provides no new thoughts on the simultaneous origins of the modern novel and social science...
...The widening of literary horizons was balanced by an attempt to bring experience under control through the imposition of fictional or philosophical order...
...Real and Imagined Worlds closes with a discussion of the challenge of science to literature, conceding that "Science and art thus have the goal of understanding, which they pursue in different ways...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University It was not until I reached Princeton University, where Morroe Berger is professor of sociology, that I learned to appreciate works of fiction as more than onerous assignments designed to yield book reports...
...It strikes me as illustrative of one of the real weaknesses of this book that Berger can compare Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Michael Tournier's Friday (1967) without mentioning that somewhere between the publication of the two, Sigmund Freud emerged...
...It should also include a good deal more material on the issues currently considered most important by social scientists, thus making more concrete the comparisons to the artists' treatments of the same or similar problems...
...But Real and Imagined Worlds, to my disappointment, sheds little light on the relationship between these two ways of depicting life...
...There is a brief genuflection to C. P. Snow's thoughts on the two cultures, with a final plea for balance and a warning that the "separate spheres of science and literature must also be appreciated without trying to impose a spurious unity or stir up a contest...
...The prose is happily absent of social science jargon, but the conclusions are unsurprising...
...Do I hear any objections...
...E. D. H. Johnson's lectures on the Victorian novel were an esthetic experience, especially to an engineer who had thought thermodynamics was the highest form of art...
...The technique is one of plodding book by book-robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies, Bread and Wine, Tom Jones, Middlemarch, to name only the more prominent...
...I was lumped with psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists in the School of Behavioral and Social Science...
...The problem is not precision but presentation...
...The sociology of literature has its chief task before it: to make more precise, in the face of formidable barriers, the connections between fiction and history, literature and life...
...A study of this sort ought not to neglect the difference between artist and analyst, showing the contrast in their perceptions, working materials and tasks...
...The body of Real and Imagined Worlds deals with the way the novel has handled subjects that are common to social science, which is to say most of life: human association and culture, political power and class, social commentary and "sociopsychological" insights...
...In that period, he tells us, writers of fiction and philosophers turned from the narrow confines of mythology and divinity, of closed systems of thought and singular concern with the royal courts, to a wider world of social observation, taking all of life as fit for consideration...
...He overlooks, for example, the alteration in child-rearing practices that occurred in late 17th-century England...
...When I reached San Francisco State I found myself separated from the teachers of philosophy and literature, who were in the School of Humanities...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22
