JSTOR

The World We Have Lost

Kathryn M. Olesko*  

IN CHARACTERISTICALLY SELF‐DEPRECATING FASHION, Gustave Flaubert, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest novelists, mocked his craft:

To Flaubert’s pithy remark on novels, we might add that they also corrupt history. Or so most historians believe. The long‐standing debate on the function of the novel in history has failed, always, to achieve consensus on what novels mean both as historical documents (do novels tell us anything reliable about the past?) and as genres of writing (can fictional writing capture the “reality” of the past, not as historical writing does, but in a complementary way?).2 The smallest form of historical writing, the book review, reveals why: when it comes to evaluating historical writing, historians genuflect at the altar of positivism. We may tout interpretation when elaborating upon the passing fancy of trends in history, but when it comes down to it, we are not much different from Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: the cold, hard facts are what matter in the end. Even in the most progressive and popular forms of historical writing and interpretation, what turns the course of our thinking is empirical evidence once ignored but now demonstrated to be relevant. Disciplinary history becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead. So why bother, then, to take a look at historical novels, or, more generally, fictional writing, in the effort to understand what means most to us, the communication and interpretation of the past? Can historical novels “teach history,” as Flaubert suggests? My argument here is that they do have a propaedeutic function, but it is not one confined to the public. Historical novels offer the opportunity for historians to reflect critically on what most take for granted: the relationship between evidence (or what we know as fact) and historical writing—or, more formally expressed, between historical epistemology and narrative structure.3

Certainly we all can think of historical novels whose historical verisimilitude renders them worthy of “teaching history.” Such historical novels populate the perennial reading lists of general education courses, with the consequences of extending the novels’ publishing life spans beyond their “best‐seller” days and of luring novices into disciplinary thinking by teaching them to think first in decidedly undisciplinary ways. Novels with a clear political message come to mind, like those by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Sinclair Lewis, as do lesser‐known examples, such as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), which explores the German preoccupation with “coming to terms with the [Nazi] past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). Other examples, less political, abound. Yet there are also novels whose relationship to history is rendered more complex by stylistic devices that challenge or mask historical context and have an equally if not more important pedagogic function. One thinks here of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Jean‐Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938). These novels depict contemporary life but also distort or suppress historical context through the use of irony, parody, satire, or subversions of the narrative form.4 So they do “teach history,” but in different ways. Rather than rendering a reality that “rings true” with the historical record, these novels invite a careful examination of how, exactly, the artistic and historical dimensions of the novel are related. For the professional historian, they compel critical reflection on the relationship between narrative form and historical content.

I ask these questions about teaching history, though, not of a novel with historical pretensions but, rather, of one chosen precisely because it denies a connection to the historical past: Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World: A Novel, the story of two of Germany’s greatest scientists in the art of measurement, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who are depicted together in episodic conversation and separately in their quotidian worlds during the reactionary period following the French Revolution and Napoleon’s occupation of German lands. On the copyright page (normally not a page one reads particularly carefully, if at all) Kehlmann admonishes that “this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely accidental.”5 Although perhaps it is meant in part as a caveat emptor or even an inoculation against the excoriations of historically minded reviewers, Kehlmann’s epigraph intentionally fabricates an ironic distance between the author and his subject. Similar epigraphs have been used in the past, to the same end: The Red and the Black—with its ironic distance between Stendhal and his main character, the hypocritical Julian Sorel—comes to mind. For readers familiar with Humboldt and Gauss, the irony generates a chuckle. What? you would like to say to Kehlmann; you’re taking these two great, serious, rigorous German scientists, cultural icons in their own age, and turning them into fictional characters? To read the book, you have to get the joke—or at least the meaning of the irony and satire. And therein lies the puzzle, with its clues to the relationship between fiction and history.

Germans get the joke. Since the book’s publication in 2005, it has sold over a million copies and is now in its thirty‐eighth printing. Europeans get it, too. The book has been translated into thirty‐nine languages and has made Kehlmann an international celebrity on the literary circuit, where he is identified as a harbinger of the next generation of German authors who have rejected the postwar elitism and highbrow seriousness of literature and injected German writing with the laughter and satire of Monty Python and The Simpsons and the magical and imaginary realities of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges. Americans are trying to get it, but they’ve been slow on the uptake. Stateside, the book has been out since late fall 2006, joined by an audio book in January 2007; but it still has not landed on the best‐seller list. There’s time yet, though, for the New World to understand the scientific culture and satire of the Old.

Kehlmann’s story begins and ends with the well‐known seventh meeting of the German Scientific Congress (Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze) in September 1828, when Gauss and Humboldt met for the first time. Between beginning and end Kehlmann makes deft use of alternating complementary chapters to tell the separate stories of how each scientist made it from birth to Berlin. Gauss, for whom counting prime numbers is a nervous tic, and Humboldt, who is an obsessive‐compulsive collector of measuring instruments, are studies in opposites driven by the compulsion to quantify. A common theme in these chapters is the frailty and incomprehensibility of the world in comparison to the certainty and security of mathematics. The final six chapters return to the meeting in Berlin. They are moving for their exposure of Gauss’s tragic flaws as a husband and father and of the scientists’ common realization that in the end fame is confining and life is ephemeral—measuring and numbers may not capture everything or mean anything after all. By the end of the novel there are no numbers, but only that which cannot be measured. It is worth noting that these chapters in a book about numbers are themselves unnumbered (there are sixteen).

Like all historical novelists, Kehlmann fabricates conversations and events, imagines emotions and inner feelings, and distorts historical timelines. He sometimes puts people in places when they could not have been there. Occasionally there are gross inaccuracies that make historians of science wince.6 There is even an element of the phantasmagorical à la Borges in the rendition of Humboldt’s escapades in Latin and South America—a UFO appears at one point—and of futuristic science fiction in the depiction of Gauss, who believes that scientific advances will make life better and easier in the future. Kehlmann has described this part of his work as “broken realism”: a type of prose that “claims to be realistic but adds inconspicuous breaks into a seemingly reliable, repetitive reality.”7

This opportunity to fabricate unreality in the midst of otherwise “historical” facts and events is only one of the types of contradiction that can be explored through fictional writing. It is not one, though, that professional historians would readily imitate. The issue is not merely one of unreality versus reality but, rather, of how contradictions—or, more generally, incompatible evidence—can be convincingly conveyed through writing. As historians we make value judgments, based on professional training and experience, about what evidence to select for the message we wish to communicate. It’s not that the discarded evidence is always false or dubious, but sometimes it “doesn’t fit” the framework we’ve selected and so is deemed “irrelevant.” In other words, both our style of writing and our interpretive framework act as sieves filtering evidence. Sometimes information we discard is later picked up by other historians who wish to tell a different kind of story. One example is the considerable amount of attention now paid to court culture in the history of early modern science in comparison to a generation ago. From one perspective, we can view this selectivity as endemic to the historical profession; indeed, without it we would find ourselves confronted with the impossible task of trying to assemble and make sense of so much data that any analysis would be forestalled by the sheer volume of evidence. From another perspective, however, we can also view the persistence of certain kinds of selectivity as dictated by the disciplinary forms of historical writing. As forms of writing change, so do the processes of selection. A glimpse at the different relationships between selectivity of evidence and form of writing can be achieved, for instance, by comparing articles on the same topic in the journals Archive for History of Exact Sciences, History of Science, Social Studies of Science, and Configurations or by comparing an article in any one of these to the writing in Past and Present, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, or any other similar historical journal. I say only a “glimpse” because it is not customary in our profession either to train graduate students in different forms of writing, including narrative, or to make writing a topic of professional discussion and publication beyond the increasingly pressing market issue of communicability. Historical novels and novels in general, on the other hand, offer us a readily available opportunity to examine the relationship between evidentiary selection and narrative form in a way that is, I believe, transferable to historical writing.

Flaubert, an acute observer of disciplinary behavior and thinking in an age when it was still new, cast this problem of incompatible evidence and its relationship to writing in terms of the story of two clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who embarked on a grand tour of the disciplines, seeking to learn them seriatim. In one chapter they decided to write history—but not French history, because “the details were too numerous to allow them to see the whole” and, in any event, all interpretations were contradictory because they relied on different kinds of evidence selected on the basis of political orientation. It seemed to them that if they could choose a smaller subject, on which they could read all the sources (much in the same fashion that graduate students are advised to have “doable” thesis topics that can be finished in a finite amount of time), they would be able to “condense it into a narrative, which would be a kind of resumé of events, reflecting the whole truth.” They decided to write on a minor figure, the duc d’Angeoulême. He was, admittedly, an idiot; but, they explained, “secondary characters sometimes have enormous influence, and perhaps he was at the hub of affairs!” Every day they went to the municipal library of Caen to learn about the duke. They were particularly happy when the librarian supplied them with a colored lithograph of their subject—who, they noted, had curly hair. The details they assembled of the duke’s life ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, but they were nonetheless convinced that they had mastered their subject. Or so they thought. Then one day, as they were leaving the library, the librarian presented them with another portrait of the duke. And this time his hair was straight! Flaubert describes their consternation thus:

Crushed by the presence of contradictory evidence, Bouvard and Pécuchet threw their hands in the air and abandoned history, concluding that “external facts are not everything” and that “without imagination history is defective.” Unable to reconcile the facts of the duke’s life in historical writing, and now afflicted with historical agraphia, the pair turned instead to historical fiction, the novels of Sir Walter Scott.8 This hilarious story about curly and straight hair raises questions about the connection between evidence and writing, between content and form, between historical epistemology and narrative structure. We as historians certainly don’t flee into the pages of historical novels when evidence deemed incompatible or contradictory surfaces; but when a fictional story suggests that as the path of action, perhaps we should think again.

Let’s now turn to a particular juxtaposition of evidence in Measuring the World, one that combines the rational (or mental) and the physical, including physical pain. On the surface, Measuring the World is about the creation of a metrical net over the wide expanse of reality, a well‐documented historical phenomenon with roots in Enlightenment thinking about rationality. The central chapters take the reader on a whirlwind tour of the mathematical and metrical accomplishments of Gauss and Humboldt, with just enough description to explain what those accomplishments were. We sit in a classroom with Gauss as he finds the algorithm for adding all numbers from 1 to 100 (the answer is 5,050). We share his fears on a balloon ride that leads to first thoughts about the convergence of parallel lines. We traipse with him over hill and dale in the German countryside as he places a net of triangles over the surface of the earth. And, in a famous scene noted by all reviewers, we gasp and laugh when, as he is about to consummate his first marriage, he figures out how best to handle the errors in astronomical measurements: “He threw himself on her, felt her shock, paused for a moment, then she wound her legs around his body, but he apologized, got up, stumbled to the desk, dipped the pen, and without lighting a candle wrote sum of square of diff. betw. obs’d and calc’d > Min.”9 Humboldt’s tour through South America with his companion Aimé Bonpland produces similar moments of calculational opportunity, but in the presence of the beauty of nature rather than that of a woman: the eclipse of the sun enables them to establish their exact coordinates; climbing a mountain and taking temperature readings along the way while observing the natural world shows them that vegetation follows not latitude but isothermal lines; finally, when he and Bonpland have ascended 18,690 feet up Mount Chimborazo and cannot use a barometer, Humboldt boils water and takes its temperature to determine their height—then writes two dozen letters to colleagues announcing their achievement before finally passing out from the lack of oxygen. Kehlmann presents both Gauss and Humboldt as finding solace in their instruments and measurements when unable to cope with the world around them. When Humboldt fails to comprehend a homosexual encounter with a little boy who crawls naked into his bed, he turns to his instruments. When Gauss, whom Kehlmann presents as having kept a Russian prostitute throughout two marriages, learns of the death of his first wife, he turns away and looks through a telescope. Or so Kehlmann tells the story.

These moments of enlightenment in the novel, where the rational mind dominates, contrast sharply with recurrent episodes concerning physical or emotional pain. The book begins with matters concerning the physical body: Gauss is about to leave for Berlin, but he is thinking more about the aches and pains of his body than about meeting colleagues at the congress. Kehlmann depicts the young Gauss as a boy who suffered the whippings of both teacher and father, two men who inflicted physical punishment to control their own emotions. A chapter on “Numbers,” wherein Gauss completes his masterwork Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, is overtaken by the pain of one of his decaying molars. Finally, Gauss’s ridicule and criticism of his children, especially the youngest, Eugen, inflicts so much emotional pain on them that in today’s world his actions would constitute child abuse. He even criticizes the eldest, Joseph, for making “irresponsible” errors, on the order of 1/100,000 (the fifth decimal point), in his surveying. For Humboldt, the climb up Mount Chimborazo is notable for its predictably painful bodily effects, including bloody noses and vomiting. And when he has a moment of regret over the pain he inflicted on dogs he threw to crocodiles in order to study the latters’ hunting habits, his guilt is assuaged by the thought that the dogs were only mangy mongrels, not purebreds.

In one sense, the integrated discussion of the physical and the rational is not entirely new: recent trends in the history of science have examined the role of the body in scientific investigation, especially in experimental or nascent experimental work.10 But in the case of Measuring the World a specific historical event brackets Kehlmann’s discussions of the body and pain: Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s campaign to promote physical exercise in Germany for the purpose of preparing for the overthrow of Napoleonic rule in the name of freedom. When the novel opens in 1828, Gauss asks his son Eugen for a book; Eugen gives him a copy of Jahn’s German Gymnastics, a work Gauss browses and then throws down. By that time the 1819 Karlsbad Decrees, a repressive act designed to restore near‐authoritarian order after the fall of Napoleon, had outlawed not only gymnastics but also student fraternities (Burschenschaften) and had restricted student gatherings—all to preserve order and suppress a growing liberal German nationalism. Jahn himself was at first forbidden to live in any city having an educational institution and then, by 1825, was under house arrest for his political activities.11 At the close of the novel, again in Berlin, Jahn returns to the story. Gauss’s persistent, destructive ridicule of Eugen’s penchant for poetry and the young man’s inability to live up to his father’s expectations continue until Eugen can take it no more. He leaves for the streets of Berlin, where he meets up with students eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jahn in a secret subterranean room. There Jahn exhorts his audience to get into shape: “Thinking minus muscles is weakness, it’s slack, it’s insipid, it’s French.”12 The authorities, however, are tipped off to the illegal meeting, bust it, and arrest Eugen and others. Humboldt and Gauss are put in the position of cutting a deal to obtain Eugen’s release from prison, and when he is let out he decides to opt for freedom by emigrating to America.

What should we make of this juxtaposition? The Enlightenment ideal of liberty and, more broadly, the emancipation of the self—all that the use of reason was to achieve—is realized in the story by the cultivation of the physical rather than the rational. What Kehlmann seems to suggest is that the historical emphasis on reason might be too one sided and that the examination of another dimension of the era—the emphasis on the physical development of the body—might be an important, complementary element in the study of the meaning of objectivity and rationality in German history. One clue is Humboldt’s reaction to the ruins of Teotihuacán: “Such a civilization and so much horror, said Humboldt. What a combination! The exact opposite of everything that Germany stood for.” Closer to our discipline, recent studies in the history of laboratory work in a slightly later era indicate that Kehlmann may be on the mark. So have studies of precision measurement where the training of the eye and the hand are central.13 None of these historical works, however, have considered large‐scale and transformative historical movements such as Jahn’s. In an age when manual dexterity meant so much for experimental practice, what was the significance of a concurrent movement in gymnastics? Kehlmann’s fiction may provide clues to understanding an era in terms broader than we have yet examined. “Telling a story,” Kehlmann remarked in an interview, “means imparting an overarching logical structure to events that possessed no such thing in reality.”14 How is that different from what we do as historians?

Kehlmann at one point projects Humboldt as his alter ego: “Writing a novel, said Humboldt, seemed to him the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future.” In many respects, Measuring the World is about the present: about Germany, Germanness, and a particularly Prussian variety of precision. When Humboldt, for instance, turns to calculating his coordinates from a solar eclipse, he asks: “Did one always have to be so German?”15 But Kehlmann’s work is about the present in another important respect. It is a part of the recent spate of fictional or ambiguously historical “little books” (and sometimes bigger ones) on topics in history of science that began with Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1995), such as Alan Cutler’s The Seashell on the Mountaintop (2003), Matthias Gerwald’s Die Entdecker: Historischer Roman über Alexander von Humboldt (2001), Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (2004), James A. Connor’s Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother (2004), and Iain McCalman’s The Last Alchemist (2004). A number of those books, including Longitude and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon (1997), have been about measurement. Another genre that has reinforced this trend is film, with The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain (1995) and the BBC documentary Longitude (1999), based on the book, which aired in the United States on A&E in 2000. Never before have there been so many historical novels on science or measurement. As historians we might ask why, in this postmodern era dominated by science and technology, these historical novels—largely fictional works grounded in narrative—have become documents of our own age.

There was a time in the nineteenth century when history was a form of literature, and especially so in France. Montesquieu and Voltaire in the eighteenth century and Michelet and others in the nineteenth used their literary talents to produce a type of history that was stylistic and polemical but not as scholarly as what emerged across the Rhine after Ranke. For most of the century the literary tradition dominated history even in France’s universities. The development of the French novel, especially the so‐called realistic novel, reinforced the popularity of the literary form in history and encouraged reflection on historical writing of the type that Flaubert penned. The notion that history was an art form embedded narrative as the principal form of historical writing. This artistic orientation in history ended before World War I, though, with the professionalization of the historical discipline in France and the development of systematic curricula for teaching historians. Critical reflection on narrative persisted, however, both in literature (one thinks of Sartre’s Nausea, which contains theoretical reflections on history as well as on the writing of literature and on the relationship between the two) and in history (with the emergence of the Annales school of historical writing in the 1920s). Prominent members of that school—Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and, later, Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie—challenged the conventions of historical writing by questioning the temporal dimension of history, which led to a new narrative form exemplified by Braudel’s magisterial The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), and by integrating into historical writing new topics such as mental states (history of mentalities) and the environment. Although heavily influenced by the social sciences, the Annales school’s indebtedness to earlier varieties of French history wherein artistic forms of writing permitted broader conceptions of temporality and a wider selection of topics, including those that were beneath the surface such as mental states, is clear.16 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Few historians, though, practice history as art today. There are some exceptional contemporary historians who have decided that the only way to write about their subjects is in a genre that blurs the line between history and literature. Long‐standing and popular examples are Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth‐Century France (1987) and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980) and Night Battles (1983). The conceptual complexity of their works derives in large part from their innovations in historical writing, innovations that can be traced back to narrative traditions in literature where the treatment of multiple points of view and other incompatible types of evidence was well established. Not surprisingly, historical summaries of their works often amount to caricatures because they fail to capture these multiple points of view or truths that literary writing is capable of exploring and expressing. Notably, both historians have reflected in deep ways on the relationship between the evidentiary foundation and artistic expression of history.17 Both emphasize the ability of literary writing to deal with contradictions and incompatibilities in the way historical writing cannot. More recent examples of the same combination of history and literature include Steven Ozment’s The Bürgermeister’s Daughter (1996) and, in history of science, Lisa Jardine’s The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (2004). For its combination of the mystery and intrigue of a scavenger hunt, a personal travelogue, and serious scholarship on the editions of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read (2004) also fits into this hybrid genre, as does Ken Alder’s The Measure of All Things (2002). In all of these cases the desire to incorporate multiple perspectives prompted the authors—consciously or not—to adopt a more literary style of writing. To have written on the topics and themes of these books in a more disciplined historical style would have destroyed their subjects, replaced artfully combined incompatibilities with artificial harmony, and severely limited the books’ intellectual appeal. To date, however, the urge to explore the artistic qualities of historical writing and to reflect on them in critical ways has been far more prevalent in the historical discipline than in the history of science.18 The recent spate of historical novels on topics in the history of science suggests that it’s time for historians of science to follow the discipline’s lead.