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Science & Modernist Literature Michael H. Whitworth. Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ix + 254 pp. $72.00
THIS IS a well-crafted book about the reception of science (especially physics) by modernist literature in England. The book delivers exactly what it promises, although one only discovers the terms of the promise in the book's conclusion. There is no general explanation offered, in particular, no mechanism put forward which would serve as an (much less the) explanatory key for the transportability of scientific terms into literary ones. According to Whitworth, "we can [at best] glimpse fragments of the mechanism-an author reading science in one place, an expository metaphor emerging in their writing elsewhere- but never the full machine." The best place, according to Whitworth, to find the material for mechanisms of transmission or propagation would be institutional: in the generalist journals where science was discussed, often in the kind of florid, poetic, Utopian, or paranoiac metaphors which so easily admit of literary reception. And so his book is a work in cultural history, a careful and well-wrought sociology of scientific popularization pertaining to a patchwork of issues on modern physics and its philosophical compliments: light, particles, relativity, gravity, simultaneity, phenomenalism.
Where these themes make themselves felt in the works of Woolf, Eliot, Lewis, Lawrence and other modernists, the influence is recorded. This makes for an assortment of interesting, and sometimes surprising remarks, especially regarding works of Woolf, where images of waves and particles abound, and where systems of relativity and simultaneity are crucial to the complex structures of consciousness, time, identity and duration characteristic of her novels. The chief value of Whitworth's book resides in its careful articulation of these lines of influence from popularizing journals to novelistic parts or patches. At no point in the book, however, is any work of literature discussed in a holistic manner; instead, works are explored in bits and pieces.
It is crucial to the author's well-reasoned modesty that he everywhere admits that scientific metaphors tend to blend with...