Ingo Berensmeyer University of Siegen The Crisis of Modernity and the Postmodern Interlude: John Banville's The Newton Letter The Newton Letter, An Interlude (1982) is the third part of a tetralogy of novels by Irish writer John Banville (1945–) tracing historical configurations of emerging worldpictures from early modernity to the present. It follows two more immediately historical novels, Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), and precedes Mefisto (1986), which deals with the contemporary paradigm shift of chaos theory. The tetralogy must not be mistaken for a mere illustration of scientific problems and paradigm changes; it is not simply 'about' the crisis of Western rationality, nor is it out to support supposedly well-proven arguments about science being, for example, "one Wittgensteinian language game among many" (Lernout 1988, 74). Its focus of interest is not primarily on epistemology, but on issues of – for want of a better word – anthropology, in the sense that science, art, and other cultural practices are regarded as 'life forms' ( Lebensformen, cf. Spranger [1914] 1950). The Newton Letter is an 'interlude' in more than the obvious sense that it mediates between the historical and contemporary sections of a tetralogy of novels. Situated between history and contemporaneity, between postmodernism and its as yet nameless beyond – its position reminiscent of Hermann Broch's "noch nicht und doch schon" ('not yet and yet already') in The Death of Virgil – , it is a turning point in Banville's œuvre and may be said to contain in nuce or en abyme the totality of his endeavours, and a self-parody to boot. Unlike the two previous novels, it does not attempt to present a biographical-historical picture of an eminent scientist; quite on the contrary, its theme is the failure of just such an attempt, and this failure is presented in an ironic mode. As far as the satirical, ironic tone of its writer-narrator is concerned, The Newton Letter is rooted in the Beckettian tradition, and it shares with Beckett certain points of departure: a negation of the possibility of representing 'reality' in writing and a radical questioning of "the very possibility of the historical imagining" (Brown 1991, 169); yet in its reinvestigation of the modern(ist) crisis of art and science it moves – almost despite itself – away from Beckett to develop into an exploration of the possibilities of writing at the contemporary moment. The ironic mode is a prerequisite for addressing the crisis of modernity, because irony is the only possible mode for a literary 'crisis management.' And, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate, there is as yet no other legitimate or appropriate mode of writing for a literature that wants to keep in sync with the developments of modern science and not fall back behind the achievements of experimental modernism. If this is what the beyond of postmodernism is about, then The Newton Letter can certainly be read as an 'after-postmodernist' text. Just as first-generation postmodernists absorbed techniques and strategies of their modernist precursors, The Newton Letter fulfills all the requirements one might construe for qualifying as 'postmodern' (e.g., conscious use of intertextuality, blurring of generic boundaries, pastiche), yet it also offers significantly more than that. This paper will follow the three main narrative strands embedded in The Newton Letter; although very brief (roughly 80 pages), the text has a multi-layered or laminated structure allowing several strands to coexist and to comment on one another; it uses intertextuality as a way of supplementing depth for breadth and transforming the text into a veritable "tissue of quotations" (Barthes 1984, 146) ranging from Milton to Hofmannsthal and Yeats. Banville himself has suggested to read it as a self-parody of his style and techniques, as a way of "sending [himself] up" (1986, 18). The playfulness of this venture should not be underrated: "art," Banville maintains, "can be endangered just as gravely by being taken too seriously as it is by being regarded as redundant" (1981a, 12). The first narrative strand to be examined is the crisis of scientific biography, mirrored in Newton's nervous breakdown of 1693, and the use of a classical modernist text, Hofmannsthal's Chandos letter, as intertextual correlative. The second is an anti-Newtonian layer of everyday, real-life, and irrational problems of marriage and extramarital desires, modelled on Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] , and simultaneously a parody of the Irish 'big house' novel. The third is a Heisenbergian reflection on the problems of observation and perception that cement the biographer's failure in both his work and his dealings with the people around him; this is also related to chaos theory. Finally, these three layers are correlated to provide an answer to the question how contemporary literature, a literature that can no longer easily be qualified as 'postmodernist,' can react to the crisis/crises of (post)modernity which is/are ultimately its own. Crisis I: Newton and the Letter Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said let Newton be, and all was light. It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho! Let Einstein be!' restored the status quo. Newton's epitaph by Alexander Pope (1727), with an additional couplet by J. Bronowski (1961, 27). At the centre of The Newton Letter, albeit invisible and only indirectly present, is the figure of Isaac Newton and the Newtonian search for absolutes. The Newton Letter is about a Newton biography that remains unfinished. Why, of all scientists, is the failure of Banville's biographer connected with Newton? Arthur Koestler, in The Sleepwalkers, which served as Banville's main source for the previous two novels, deliberately leaves out Newton's life and personality, but presents a summary of his scientific achievements instead. The Newtonian synthesis is the union of scattered elements from previous theories (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo) into a simple and coherent theory that remained unquestioned in classical physics until Einstein arrived on the scene and demonstrated that Newtonian mechanics was only a special case in the overall framework of relativity. Koestler deplores that "we know very little about the intimate working of Newton's mind and the method by which he achieved his monumental synthesis" ([1959] 1979, 497); in The Act of Creation, he gives a brief glimpse of Newton as a "phenomenal mixture of monster and saint" ([1964] 1976, 685). This ambiguity is characteristic of the modern understanding of Newton. In the nineteenth century, the image of Newton-as-saint was established in David Brewster's 1855 biography; only much later was there a turn in the opposite direction. Ernst Kretschmer and Cesare Lombroso, among others, analysed Newton-as-monster, as a pathological case. Diagnoses range from paranoia to psychosis, schizophrenia, and senile dementia. For some, Newton came to represent rationality itself – a role in which Voltaire idolised and Blake demonised him; for others, more recently, he has become 'the last magician' because of his interests in alchemy and theology. [1] Newton's solitary lifestyle, his secretiveness, his apparent lack of emotional attachments on the one hand – there is absolutely no potential for romance in his life –, and his enormous scientific output, his extraordinary ability for prolonged ratiocination and his inventiveness in constructing experimental apparatuses to develop and test his theories on the other, make Newton an ambiguous and opaque character, whose personality has ultimately eluded most biographers as it eludes the biographer in Banville's Newton Letter. [2] The novel consists of an unnamed Irish historian's letter to his teacher and friend Clio (short for 'Cliona'). The fact that he calls her "my inspiration" (2) indicates that she may also represent Clio, the Greek Muse of history. "Words fail me, Clio" (1), the Nabokovian first sentence, is at once a farewell to historiography, a renunciation of the representative powers of language, and an invocation of the literary tradition of modernism. The historian has abandoned his book on Newton, which had almost been completed after seven years of work: "I had only to gather up a few loose ends, and write the conclusion" (6); but "such a project is now for me impossible" (1). In the previous summer, he had rented a lodge on a big, crumbling country estate in the South of Ireland to "put the final touches" to his book (4). Now it is spring again, and he has "fled" (1), though it is not immediately clear where to. Only later, some hints point the reader to Scandinavia, especially Northern Finland – towards the end he mentions "frozen wastes" (80). [3] The historian sees his own crisis as a reflection of Newton's own famous crisis of 1693. That summer, Newton suffered a "nervous collapse" (5) that has continued to baffle his biographers ever since. Explanations range from overwork, depression, and mercury poisoning, to a crisis of religious faith (cf. Hall 1992, 244ff.). Banville's historian has his own hypothesis, which is slowly unveiled in the course of his letter. He argues against the standard biographies, especially the work of a certain Popov [4], whose approach can be taken to represent a kind of Brewsterian idealisation the narrator refers to as "embalming" (21). Although this Popov is in all probability a fiction, the narrator even quotes from "the latest Popov": I met him once, an awful little man with ferret eyes and a greasy suit. Reminded me of an embalmer. Which, come to think of it, is apt. I like his disclaimer: Before the phenomenon of Isaac Newton, the historian, like Freud when he came to contemplate Leonardo, can only shake his head and retire with as much good grace as he can muster. Then out come the syringe and the formalin. That is what I was doing too, embalming old N.'s big corpse, only I did have the grace to pop off before the deathshead grin was properly fixed. (21) The key document of Newton's crisis is "that mad letter" (5) he wrote to his friend, the philosopher John Locke, on 16 September 1693, which one biographer refers to as "[t]he most intimate and the most terrible letter ever penned by Newton" (Hall 1992, 242). Here is the text of this letter in full (which is not completely quoted in Banville's novel): Sr Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me wth woemen & by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly & would not live I answered twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness. For I am now satisfied that what you have done is just & I beg your pardon for my having hard thoughts of you for it & for representing that you struck at ye root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas & designed to pursue in another book & that I took you for a Hobbist. I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking that there was a designe to sell me an office, or to embroile me. I am your most humble & most unfortunate Servant IS. NEWTON (Newton 1961, 280) Banville's historian briefly comments on this letter and then introduces a second letter Newton supposedly wrote to Locke "a few weeks later" and signed "with just the stark surname" (5). This second letter, as can be gleaned from a brief note appended to the novel, "is a fiction" (82). In fact, quite fittingly, parts of the ensuing correspondence between Newton and Locke are lost (cf. Hall 1992, 244, 432 n63). The historian returns "to the second, and longer, of those two strange letters" at roughly the centre of the novel, quoting some passages and adding: "The letter seemed to me now to lie at the centre of my work, perhaps of Newton's too, reflecting and containing all the rest" (50). This comment can safely be translated as a metafictional comment on the structure of The Newton Letter itself and on the function of this letter within the letter. The passages quoted are modelled on another, also fictional and very famous letter: Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Letter of Lord Chandos" [ "Ein Brief" ] of 1902, perhaps the basic text of Austro-German modernism. [5] This is the only intertextual reference Banville makes explicit in an endnote (82). The fact that all others remain unacknowledged points to the centrality of Hofmannsthal's Chandos-letter to The Newton Letter, but it also encourages the reader to search for other hidden references and generally to lose faith in the reliability of Banville's narrator. Hofmannsthal's text, like The Newton Letter, is an elaborate epistolary fiction, assembled from other literary sources (cf. Schultz 1961): it is a letter, dated AD 1603, from Philipp Lord Chandos to his friend Francis Bacon, containing an apology for Chandos's abstention from all literary activity. [6] Chandos writes out of a deep existential and intellectual crisis: he has lost his sense of the "unity" of being (Hofmannsthal 1991, 47), he is no longer capable of "thinking or speaking coherently" (48), he experiences a failure of conceptual language, a failure of "abstract words, which the tongue must use naturally in order to make public any judgement"; it is these words that, in what is perhaps the best-known phrase, "crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi [ zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilze ]" (48 f.). This phrase also already resonates in the first sentence of Banville's novel, "Words fail me, Clio." Like the historian's letter in The Newton Letter, the Chandos letter is a letter of farewell: a farewell to writing, and also an ironic farewell to Francis Bacon. Its underlying story is the – unspoken – conflict between Chandos and Bacon, or between physis and logos, emotion and reason (cf. Riedel 1996, 16f.). Bacon prefigures the modern, rational and experimental approach to nature and natural science; insofar he is a precursor of Newton. Yet Bacon's concept of the idola, the idea that premature conclusions can lead to a misinterpretation of nature, also connects the Chandos letter to The Newton Letter, whose narrator constantly misconstrues his environment (cf. Burgess 1992, 143; Imhof 1987, 339). By attributing Chandos's crisis to Newton, the 'second' Newton letter in The Newton Letter is invested with a double irony: it is the scientist himself who despairs of the abstraction and lifelessness of his work. The longest quotation from Newton's second letter is taken almost verbatim from Hofmannsthal: The language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. (51) [7] Newton's crisis, as interpreted by the historian of The Newton Letter, breaks out when a fire, caused by his dog Diamond overturning a candle, destroys some of his papers: "The joke is, it's not the loss of the precious papers . . . but the simple fact that it doesn't matter. . . . It had needed no candle flame, it was already ashes" (22f.). [8] What dawns upon Newton, and what Banville's historian uses as an explanation for Newton's subsequent turn "to deciphering Genesis and dabbling in alchemy" (23), is the insight into the futility and emptiness of his endeavours. As in the Chandos letter, the underlying crisis is not so much one of signs and words, but one of life and of truth. Deep existential despair has overwhelmed one of "those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect" (50). As in Wittgenstein's observation that, when all scientific questions are answered, the problems of life will not even be touched upon ( Tractatus 6.52), the truths of ordinary life cannot be reconciled with those of science. This concurs with Husserl's diagnosis of the crisis of European science as a result of its loss of significance for life ( "Verlust ihrer Lebensbedeutsamkeit," Husserl [1934] 1992, 3). This historically increasing distance or widening divide between abstract reasoning and affective concreteness (cf. Claessens 1980, 238f.; Lorenz [1973] 1997) is the core of Newton's crisis in The Newton Letter – a crisis that, as Newton has been chosen to represent rationality, may be taken as representative of the large-scale crisis of Western science in its lack of affective warmth or emotional feedback. Moreover, Newton's letter mirrors the historian's own crisis, "reflecting and containing" it (50). The two crises are continuously correlated, commenting upon one another. Already in the exposition, the historian confesses that he has "lost [his] faith in the primacy of text" (1): he no longer knows "what the truth is, and how to tell it" (2). He is "confused," feels "ridiculous and melodramatic, and comically exposed": "I have shinned up to this high perch and can't see how to get down, and of the spectators below, some are embarrassed and the rest are about to start laughing" (2). Like the Newton of the second letter, he is overwhelmed by "the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas" (11, emphasis original). Like Hofmannsthal's Chandos, he has to abandon writing because "[r]eal people keep getting in the way now, objects, landscapes even. Everything ramifies" (1). Crisis II: Goethe in the Big House In the first – historical – letter to Locke, Isaac Newton had accused the philosopher of having "endeavoured to embroil [him] with woemen." This, one might have guessed it, is exactly what happens to the unsuccessful Newton biographer in Banville's novel . On one of its many levels, The Newton Letter is a postmodern or subverted 'big house' novel, a satire on 'Irish pastoral' (Parkin 1988). [9] The atmosphere of the decaying house is evoked through allusions to a literary – Victorian Gothic – tradition, right down to the Brontësque motif of the 'madwoman in the attic': "It turned out to be a big gloomy pile [10] with ivy and peeling walls and a smashed fanlight over the door, the kind of place where you picture a mad step-daughter locked up in the attic" (3). Like Banville's early novel Birchwood, The Newton Letter features the family name Lawless, a strange child named Michael, and the theme of incest. Furthermore, the basic plot is reminiscent of Aidan Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down (1966), itself an ironic re-examination of the big house genre. In both novels, an academic rents a gate-lodge on an Ascendancy estate and has an affair with the family's daughter. But the most striking and far-reaching intertextual parallel is to be found in the constellation and naming of the characters, which is modelled on Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities], itself a kind of country-house or big house novel. Goethe's foursome of characters is replicated in The Newton Letter : there is Charlotte, the restrained woman of the house; Edward, her weak-willed and self-indulgent husband; Ottilie, the virginal and impressionable niece; and an anonymous visitor called 'the Captain' in Goethe's novel and anonymous in Banville's. [11] There is, in both texts, a park with sycamore trees; tableaux of the nativity are formed; relationships develop and dissolve; there is even, in both novels, a visiting couple known as 'the Mittlers'. [12] All these echos and reverberations add a whole new dimension of allusive significance to The Newton Letter . Thus, Banville's novel can be read as a 'rewrite' of Goethe's Elective Affinities , "a modern reworking" in both form and content, in fact even as "an anti- Wahlverwandtschaften novel" (Burgess 1992, 140, 147). The allusions work mostly by juxtaposition and contrast. Banville shifts the point of view from Goethe's omniscient third-person narrator to a very limited first-person writer-narrator who is involved in the action. Goethe's certainties thus "become deluding misinterpretations of the surface reality of the world" (Burgess 1992, 144). The contrast can be shown at its most striking in the passages of 'spiritual adultery' in both texts – what the narrator of The Newton Letter calls "bouts of ghostly troilism" (53). In the Elective Affinities, there is only one such scene, and its controlled, "clinical detachment" (Burgess 1992, 145) contrasts sharply with a comparable passage in The Newton Letter: In the lamplit twilight inner inclination at once asserted its rights, imagination at once asserted its rights over reality. Eduard held Ottilie in his arms. The Captain hovered back and forth before the soul of Charlotte. The absent and the present were in a miraculous way entwined, seductively and blissfully, each with the other. (Goethe [1809] 1971, 106) [13] In The Newton Letter, on the other hand, the narrator's confused emotions – his idealist, imaginary love for Charlotte and his sexual relationship with Ottilie, which is characterised by "lust, and irritation, and a kind of grinding compassion" (52) – lead to a quite un-Goethean and convoluted image of spiritual adultery, mixed with a dark undercurrent from Poe's "Ligeia" into the bargain: When Ottilie was in my arms I was careful not to speak, for fear of crying out the wrong name – but there were moments too when I was not sure which was the right one, moments even when the two became fused. At first I had conjured Charlotte's presence to be only a witness to the gymnastics in my narrow bed, to lean over us, Ottilie and me, with the puzzled attention of a pure spirit of the night, immune herself to the itch of the flesh yet full of tenderness for these sad mortals struggling among the sheets, but as time went on this ceased to be enough, the sprite had to fold her delicate wings, throw off her silken wisps, and, with a sigh of amused resignation, join us. Then in the moonlight my human girl's blonde hair would turn black, her fingers pale, and she would become something new, neither herself nor the other, but a third – Charlottilie! (48) Goethe's chemical image of 'elective affinities' [14] between people is changed into a genetic image of fluctuating multiplicity, Protean identities, anarchic forces beyond control, "a spawning of multiple selves": "Were all at Ferns dividing thus and multiplying, like amoebas?" (49). In this human, all-too-human confusion, it is small wonder that the historian cannot finish his book on Newton; his relativising experiences make the search for Newtonian absolutes (of space, time, and motion) appear futile and simply impossible – Newton himself, as the historian suggests, had already resigned from this notion before writing the second letter. What remains is uncertainty and confusion in the face of an opaque, intransparent world. Yet still the question remains unanswered why this intertextual game is more than art for art's sake and more than just a five-finger exercise in "literary derivation" (Imhof 1983; idem 1989, 140), and why the allusions to Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, above all, are appropriate and important. The reason may again be found in the historian's occupation with Newton. Newton's primary achievement was the discovery of the laws of gravity, and Banville deliberately exposes his narrator to in a certain sense gravitational effects. Gravity, as defined by Newton, is the "mutual attraction between two bodies" (Koestler [1959] 1979, 499). It only takes a slight pun on the meaning of 'bodies' to arrive at the mutual attraction of human beings; then, the literary locus classicus where this phenomenon is elaborated, using the chemical analogy of 'elective affinities,' is of course Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften. The supreme joke in The Newton Letter is that Goethe was of course a fierce opponent of Newton, especially in his Farbenlehre [Theory of Colours], wherein he insists that colours are a physiological phenomenon of perception in interaction with light (cf. Burwick 1986, 9-53; Goethe [1809] 1989, §§ 15-23). In The Newton Letter, two frames of reference, a Newtonian and a Goethean one, are contrasted and brought to collision. Human 'gravity,' modelled on Goethe, makes scientific aspirations, modelled on Newton, the discoverer of physical gravity, impossible and leads to the Beckettian farewell to (historical) writing: "I can't go on. I'm not a historian anymore" (70). The fact that Ottilie is pregnant at the end – "the most banal ending of all, and yet the one I least expected" (78) – nicely ties in with this: it is only a small step from gravitas to graviditas, the Latin word for 'pregnancy.' It is this 'heaviness' ( gravitas) that ultimately brings the narrator down from his "high perch" (2), down to earth, to the "important things" that are "unsayable" (79): "I am pregnant myself, in a way," he adds, and concludes the section with a quotation from Rilke, an ironic reference also to the cosmological project of Banville's Doctor Copernicus and Kepler: "Supernumerous existence wells up in my heart" (ibid.; Ninth Duino Elegy, l. 79f.). Crisis III: Heisenberg into Literature After they had thus argued, the Empress began to grow angry at their telescopes, that they could give no better intelligence; for, said she, now I do plainly perceive, that your glasses are false informers, and instead of discovering the truth, delude your senses; wherefore I command you to break them . . . Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666) The Newton Letter centres on the crisis of rationality in modern science – a crisis that can be understood as the crisis of a definite and stable ovserver position allowing a clear distinction between perceived object and perceiving subject, or, in Cartesian terms, res cogitans and res extensa. The narrator, who constantly misconstrues the nature of his surroundings and of the characters he is dealing with – including himself – experiences this crisis very directly and physically (no pun). Unlike Banville's Kepler, The Newton Letter no longer knows an objectifiable truth outside of the observer, who therefore becomes both subject and object of the narrative. This problem of the observer and the accompanying emphasis on the role of language turn The Newton Letter into a literary experiment with basic questions of twentieth-century science. The worldpicture of physics has been subject to major changes in the early years of this century: on the one hand, Einstein's discovery of general relativity transformed our knowledge of the large-scale universe; on the other, quantum mechanics offered new descriptions of the unimaginably small micro-world of sub-atomic particles. [15] Quantum mechanics has led to a radical reevaluation of the role of the observer through its discovery that the act of observation alone suffices to bring about changes in the 'behaviour' of the observed. It is impossible to determine both the location and the impulse of a particle simultaneously: one can only measure either the one or the other (Heisenberg's 'uncertainty relation' or principle of indeterminacy; cf. idem [1958] 1989, 30). Nature does not so much "fall silent when tortured by apparatuses," as Goethe opined (qtd. in Wickert 1995, 67); rather, it strikes back and plays tricks on the observer. Thus, as Heisenberg writes, we cannot "simply describe and explain nature" ([1958] 1989, 69), because "what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (46). The uncertainty principle, on the level of elementary particles, has changed the epistemological outlook of natural science completely: it no longer allows one to speak of 'things' or 'facts,' only of 'potentialities' or 'possibilities' (174), and the physicist no longer encounters nature in his or her experiments, but ultimately finds only his or her own presence. The transfer of physical and mathematical concepts like 'uncertainty,' indeterminacy,' and 'incompleteness' (Gödel's theorem [16]) to non-scientific fields is not without its measure of the frivolous, but whether legitimate or not, they have incontestably seeped into wider cultural areas and left their traces in different contexts – although in watered-down forms and alienated from their discrete physical or mathematical meanings. Science is after all not an insulated activity, but is involved in and informs the larger socio-cultural matrix. Furthermore, ideas do not remain intact when extracted from one setting and installed in another: they are appropriated and adapted to new purposes, "re-imagined in response to other needs" (Beer 1996, 228); whether this is justifiable from the point of view of science or of scientists, is a different question. With respect to quantum mechanics, the transfer has been examined fairly well (cf. Hayles 1984; Beer 1996). In recent years, the 'new science' (Gleick 1988) of chaos theory or 'chaotics,' itself already an emphatically interdisciplinary development, has had a similar, perhaps even stronger, seepage effect on the cultural matrix in general and on literature and theory in particular (cf. Hayles 1990, 3-25; van Peer 1998). Sometimes, cultural trends and scientific tendencies correspond or coincide in an almost uncanny way, as can with some poignancy be argued for chaos theory and poststructuralism – both emphasise, for example, techniques of iteration and recursion, non-linear structures, the importance of the marginal, and unpredictability (cf. Hayles 1991, 11). It seems at times as if certain developments were simply somehow 'in the air' or affected by a larger cultural climate – the Sokal hoax notwithstanding. [17] The new ideas about 'chaos,' a term rich in connotations and associations, became quickly popularised in the eighties and 'transgressed the boundaries' ( pace Sokal) of physics and mathematics proper – leading some researchers in this area to avoid the term 'chaos theory' and choose less suggestive names like 'dynamical systems theory'. Like quantum mechanics, chaos theory postulates a new understanding of nature: order and disorder do not form a stable dichotomy, but order is in fact hidden within chaotic or nonlinear systems (Gleick 1988) or arises out of entropic disorder (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Equally, Banville's tetralogy, written around roughly the same time when chaos theory developed, centres on the creation or institution of order – as supreme fiction and human necessity – out of and against disorder (in Doctor Copernicus and Kepler), and finally, in the eighties, on the reconciliation with disorder, with the inexplicable 'ordinary' ( The Newton Letter ), and on the acceptance of chance, the aleatory, the random, the stochastic ( Mefisto). In critical discussions of Banville's writing, the term 'chaos' appears frequently, but its implications are rarely played out. Yet chaos theory could provide a whole new possible reading of The Newton Letter. If, for example, the random events that occur to the historian and keep him from his work are interpreted as chaotic elements in the novel – the historian getting caught in a recursive feedback loop –, then his letter, or the novel that is The Newton Letter, with all its arranged symmetries, intertextual allusions and self-similar structures, establishes a textual order, or the semblance of an order, out of chaos, or constitutes an order that arises out of, consists of, a multiplicity of nonlinear elements. Everything ramifies in this elaborate fictional game, but everything remains connected, and every detail mirrors or seems to contain in nuce the whole structure of the novel, like a heraldic mise-en-abîme plunging into an intertextual abyss, or like the self-similar structures revealed in fractal geometry. Illusion and delusion abound in The Newton Letter. It is the observer's inability to achieve a 'correct' and exact image of reality that turns The Newton Letter into a literary game with the basic questions and ironies of twentieth-century science and theories of science. The closer we want to scrutinise 'reality,' the more it recedes from us and eludes us, mocks us even. What scientists have had to learn from Planck and Heisenberg is a new humility, a continuation of that humility that had announced itself with the Copernican revolution and later with Nietzsche: ultimately, reality is unknowable, and we have to content ourselves with playing blindman's buff on the backs of things ( "ein tastendes Spiel auf dem Rücken der Dinge," Nietzsche [1873] 1988, 876). The act of observation constitutes an intrusion that will not be effaced; in this sense, we are "interloper[s]" ( NL 5) in the garden of Nature, and we will remain intruders even when we have begun to recognise ourselves as such and, like Valéry – or nowadays perhaps Luhmann – achieve the ability to observe ourselves observing. We are thus forever expelled from the paradise of pure cognition: "Farewell, happy fields!", Banville's historian quotes Milton [18] (76). From an ingenuous state of innocuous separation between res cogitans and res extensa , we are thrown into a post-paradisal state of self-consciousness and relativity. When we search for 'nature,' it is always our relation to nature that we find; method and object can no longer be kept 'properly' separate (cf. Heisenberg 1955, 21). It is this dilemma that Banville's historian is caught in. His acts of observation on the Lawless family, impelled by his "hunger of curiosity" (11), lead to irrevocable disturbances, in them as well as within himself. He is, as Newton's letter has it, 'embroiled'. The stereotypic view he has of the big house and its inhabitants is his own imposition onto his environment of images he brings to it; thus he becomes a victim of his own delusions and illusions, his own expectations, prejudices, and fictions. He repeatedly fails at 'making sense' of his surroundings, misinterprets and misconstrues relationships and situations. He is constantly forced to correct, to reshuffle and reassemble the relations among the members of the Lawless family and only gets to understand them correctly at the end, when it is too late. Already on arrival he mistakes a middle-aged woman for a girl and vice versa: "I had got them nearly right, but the wrong way round" (3). Reality will never converge with his preconceptions. This is first worked out in rather harmless details: he sees rats where there are none (8); the illustrations in the guidebooks he has brought with him will "not match up with the real specimens" of trees and birds (5); but it is even more conspicuous in the ever-changing "grand design" (6; 81) which he devises of the Lawlesses' family situation. He constructs lawful behaviour for what is in itself 'lawless'. Thus he imagines their family history as a "pastoral mime" of the decline of Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy (12). Appearances deceive him to see in their everyday behaviour "the unmistakable stamp of their class" (ibid.). Himself the "product of a post-peasant Catholic upbringing" (ibid.), he projects well-known big house clichés onto the Lawless family: I had them spotted for patricians from the start. . . . Protestants, of course, landed, the land gone now to gombeen men and compulsory purchase, the family fortune wasted by tax, death duties, inflation. But how bravely, how beautifully they bore their losses! Observing them, I understood that breeding such as theirs is a preparation not for squiredom itself, but for that distant day, which for the Lawlesses had arrived, when the trappings of glory are gone and only style remains. (Ibid.) But he is deceived. Only later does he learn the truth from a casual remark referring to Mass: "They were Catholics? My entire conception of them had to be revised" (54). The clichéd pigeonholing extends to minor characters, for example when the businessman Mr Prunty is introduced with the words "I had seen him before: he was a type" (62) – namely the typical 'gombeen man' or usurer of a classic big house narrative. These stereotypes even affect his self-perception: "We must have looked like an illustration from a Victorian novelette," he writes at one point (24). But The Newton Letter is more than merely a big house novel in the age of Baudrillard. The text subverts the traditional national Irish agenda of 'religious' partitions, with their respective cultural semanticisations; it also mocks the academic appendage of this agenda. At one point, the narrator adds a footnote and cites "Polkolski, F.X., Interface Tribal Situations in Southeast Ireland: a structuralist study (M.I.T. 1980)" (70). Even the location of the Newton Letter 'big house' at Ferns in Co. Wexford may be intended as a satirical blow to Irish nationalism; Ferns, as one can learn from any good travel guide, was "for several hundred years, up to the 13th century, the administrative capital of Leinster . . . . It was the base for the MacMurroughs, the kings of Leinster, and in particular for Dermot MacMurrough, the king who brought the Normans to Ireland" (Smallman et al. 1996, 245) – the event that began the long history of colonialism in Ireland. The historian is placed in the position of an ethnologist who becomes aware that his presence disturbs the tribal procedures he wants to observe: "I was like an embarrassed anthropologist realising that what he had for months taken to be the ordinary muddle of tribal life is really an immense intricate ceremony, in which the tiniest gesture is foreordained and vital, in which he is the only part that does not fit" (58f.). He mistakes Edward's 'hollowness' for a consequence of alcoholism (cf. 7, 34), whereas Edward is in fact dying of cancer; Edward is not Charlotte's brother, but a former nurseryman on the estate; Charlotte's aristocratic aloofness turns out to be an effect of her being "doped to the gills" with valium (65); yet the greatest enigma to him is the position of the child Michael in the family tableau. At first, he thinks Michael is Charlotte's and Edward's son; then, Ottilie's (20); he imagines an affair between Ottilie and some farmhand; then again, the past is "utterly revised" (40) to reveal Michael as the offspring of an illicit affair between Ottilie and Edward. This reshuffling of connections, a thematic echo from Birchwood, ends with the revelation that Michael is the son of a farmhand and another girl, adopted by Charlotte because she could not have any children of her own (67). In a number of mythical allusions, Michael first functions as Cupid (12, 27, 42) until he finally assumes the role of the archangel Michael who leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise: "Not a golden bow and arrow, but a flaming sword would have suited him now" (76). The narrator's disillusionment is curtly summarised towards the end: "I spent a summer in the country, I slept with one woman and thought I was in love with another; I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life" (79). The humbling that the intellectual has to experience in the face of "the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas" (11), the revelation that the observer disturbs and disrupts what he wants to observe, has taught him a new humility, a new sense of his position in the world: "So much is unsayable: all the important things. . . . I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost" (79; cf. McIlroy 1992, 128). But even this confusion does not lead to the final renunciation of any attempt at verbal utterance. As in Hofmannsthal's Chandos letter and Rilke's Duino Elegies, the radical critique of language and the denial of its ability to capture reality give way to a, however tentative, affirmation of the powers of – literary – language to achieve a different kind of contact with ever elusive reality through oblique reference, through a making-visible of things "as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be" (Rilke, Ninth Elegy, l. 35f.), or, as Banville's historian has it, "as if the mere saying itself would be redemption" (50). Although this solution is only a fictional one – and acknowledged as fiction by this crucial 'as if' (cf. Vaihinger 1922, 154-69) – this fiction is infinitely necessary. Closing his letter, the historian decides that "in the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it" (81), but he does not say what form this book will take. Perhaps, but this remains indeterminable, it is the one in the reader's hands – as in Sartre's Nausea, whose protagonist writes a historical biography but gives it up when he is overcome by existential fatigue, and in the end decides to write a work of fiction instead (cf. Imhof 1989, 151). A final note on the place from where the historian writes his letter. Why, of all places, the Northern polar region? In Doctor Copernicus , the icy North was evoked to enhance the opposition between the warmth of life and the coldness of science. In The Newton Letter , by analogy, the Northward movement – a frame that can also be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – may be taken as a correlative to the historian's own increasing inner 'coldness'. But one may also regard it as an allusion to the teleological nineteenth-century image of the world's 'heat death' at absolute degree zero (about -273°C) – an implication of the second law of thermodynamics made explicit by William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, in 1852 (cf. Hayles 1990, 39). This teleology corresponds also to the straight, 'heliotropic' upward movement that has brought the historian to his "high perch" (2) "up here, in the light" (80), to that place of ending that is also a point of departure, from which he sets out to write and from which he closes his letter (yet we do not know whether he actually sends it off or if it ever reaches its destination), ending on a note of resignation and uncertainty. Beginning and end of the novel reject the teleological worldpicture of the nineteenth century. The coming of spring symbolises, however "banal," a new beginning that subverts the teleology and finality of 'heat death,' of equilibrium and immobility, by reinstating natural rhythms of seasonal circularity and eternal return. "Something is moving under the ice" (80). The historian's inner life is subject to a similar mobility. Already at the beginning he has asserted that his "retirement from life" will only be temporary (1); at the end, he can still not achieve any certainty about his future. He plans a return to Ferns without the false certainties and the positivist coldness of nineteenth-century science, but neither can he imagine turning his back completely upon science and enjoying the simple country life of "a nurseryman . . . wear[ing] tweeds" (81). The outcome remains undecided. There is a wavering between the two positions, a "wary" half-embrace of uncertainty and indeterminacy, and a fearful acknowledgement of the forces of disorder. [I]n the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it: such a renunciation is not of this world. Yet I'm wary. Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken and deceived, in the midst of new ruins? (81) These questions need to be read less as rhetorical than ironical questions (and the Greek word for 'irony', eirneia, is related to the verb eíro, 'to ask, to question'). They undermine any teleology by a deferral of closure and by pointing towards the openness of an unknowable and unpredictable future. They close the letter and open it up simultaneously. The irreconcilable opposition of decision and uncertainty remains unresolved in an ironic tension. The ironic mode of The Newton Letter is the only possible mode, ironically, for a literature that wants to be serious about its acknowledgement of the consequences of modern science and does not want to fall back behind the achievements of literary modernism; a literature that acknowledges "the impossibility finally of making the world our own," a literature "aware of its own possibilities and its own limits," and one that "knows that truth is arbitrary, that reality is multifarious, that language is not a clear lens" (Banville 1981b, 16f.). Irony and oblique reference are modes which literature, unless it wants to fall into silence, can employ in order to find an appropriate reaction to the crisis of modernity – and thus to its own crisis. The novel, modernity's most characteristic literary medium, in the crisis of its traditional conventions, has demonstrated most conspicuously its relatedness to the crisis of modernity at large. [19] Its conventions are grounded in a concept of reality that has become increasingly more questionable after diverse revolutionary upheavals from psychoanalysis to quantum mechanics – to name only two, which curiously coincide historically (both Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Planck's theory of quanta were published in 1900) –, upheavals which are, after all, nothing else than further modernising and postmodernising thrusts in cultural history. The Newton Letter can be seen as a reaction not only to the crisis of modernity in its effects on science, scientific biography, and literature, but also to the crisis of postmodernist writing that, after a vigorous phase of formal experiment and renewal, has become increasingly conventional and manoeuvered itself into the cul-de-sac of an "aesthetics of mere freshening-up" (Fluck 1997, 41). Banville moves towards what, using a somewhat awkward term, one might call 'post-avantgarde'. He appears on the one hand to return to more 'substantial' narrative forms and plots, while maintaining a 'modernist,' almost Jamesian awareness or control of language and style; yet, on the other hand, his writing takes a decisive step forward by readdressing the historical conditions of its own crisis. In Banville's writing (and I would tend to argue that Banville, with and after the tetralogy, has moved to a less conspicuously postmodernist position), this crisis is overstepped by reflecting on its historical conditions. Reculer pour mieux sauter: in this way, Banville's texts are an enquiry, a progressive series of investigations into the cultural history of European modernity with its underlying assumptions, out of which his own position towards the present end of the historical spectrum, "at the fag-end of this theory-tormented century" (Banville 1996, x) can be reevaluated. The crisis of modernity and postmodern writing is Banville's point of departure; the breakdown of the subject-object-dualism in Western rationality, the loss of innocence with regard to language and other forms of representation are prerequisites for him. He reflects on the historical conditions of the modern/postmodern dilemma; and, reading his texts, one increasingly feels that 'modernity' and 'crisis' might always have belonged together, the more so if one locates the beginning of modernity in the Copernican decentering, relativisation and dynamisation of the formerly stable observer of an equally stable universe. If, in The Newton Letter, the correlation of these diverse crises from science to everyday life does not lead to a solution of the crisis of modernity, it does lead to an elucidation of its historical background, and thus enables the continuation of literary discourse on a different level of reflection. The crisis of modernity and the crisis of the (post)modern novel are handled with a specific sort of irony, subjected to a change of perspective, a new kind of questioning. The text thus gains a new potential and creates an interludic 'play space' beyond putative certainties. And finally, the fact that what I take to be Banville's primary object of reflection, the epoch of modernity, is after all inextricably intertwined with the history of his medium, the novel, is what makes Banville's way beyond the crisis of contemporary writing particularly alluring. [Notes] 1 For this recent shift in perspective, see Koyré 1965 and Wagner 1969. Recent biographies (e.g., Hall 1992) are based on previously unavailable material such as Newton's complete correspondence. [2] In a review of a volume of essays on Newton, Banville comments on Newton's "coldness," his "desiccation and remoteness," which he regards as the "price to pay" for the gift of piercing concentration. "What Newton was searching for was nothing less than the essence." "If he is Faust, he is less Goethe's passionate hero than Thomas Mann's ice-cold Adrian Leverkühn" (Banville 1989, 533). [3] The film version ( Reflections, directed by Kevin Billington, screenplay by John Banville; Court House Films, 1983) omits this framework (cf. Burgess 1992, 147). [4] The name might be derived from Waiting for Godot. Although in the published version of Beckett's play, the name is given as 'Fartov' (cf. Beckett 1990, 42), Beckett was forced to change it to 'Popov' for the first West End production in 1955 on grounds of 'decency.' [5] Hofmannsthal's text was not recognised as the 'magna charta' of Austro-German modernism until after 1945 (cf. Riedel 1996, 1f.), when critics saw in it a paradigm of the modernist crisis, of linguistic alienation and despair in modernity; cf. Hermann Broch's 1947/8 essay "Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit" (Broch 1975). Recently, attention has been drawn to the fact that what underlies the Chandos letter is not so much a crisis of language as such, but a crisis of abstract or conceptual language which is compensated for by the metaphoric power of language to create images (Riedel 1996, 4f.). [6] "Dies ist der Brief, den Philipp Lord Chandos . . . schrieb, um sich bei diesem Freunde wegen des gänzlichen Verzichtes auf literarische Betätigung zu entschuldigen" (Hofmannsthal 1991, 45). Cf. Banville's historian's "I won't try to apologise" (1). [7] Cf.: ". . . weil die Sprache, in welcher nicht nur zu schreiben, sondern auch zu denken mir vielleicht gegeben wäre, weder die lateinische noch die englische noch die italienische und spanische ist, sondern eine Sprache, von deren Worten mir auch nicht eines bekannt ist, eine Sprache, in welcher die stummen Dinge zu mir sprechen, und in welcher ich vielleicht einst im Grabe vor einem unbekannten Richter mich verantworten werde" (Hofmannsthal 1991, 54). [8] A look into any reliable Newton biography shows that Banville's historian cannot be a very accurate one. He does assert that "even the dog is a fiction" (22), but there is no evidence of a conflagration in Newton's rooms in the summer of 1693, although there are "[s]everal tales of fire . . . connected with Newton" (Hall 1992, 141), some of Newton's manuscripts bear marks of fire, and the story of the dog was related by Newton himself, yet much later. These stories are "more likely to be false than true" (Hall 1992, 296). [9] Staple element of a very Irish genre, the big house features prominently in Banville's Birchwood (1973), and also to a lesser extent in Mefisto (1986) and The Book of Evidence (1989). [10] The word 'pile,' in classical English country house poetry (Johnson, Carew, Herrick), denotes "a large and lofty building" (Burgstaller 1992, 249), often with connotations of gloom. [11] In the film version, the historian's name is Willie Master (Imhof 1989, 151), an allusion to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and a continuation of the ironic references to Goethe in The Newton Letter. Imhof sees possible parallels in that both the historian and Wilhelm Meister are "cured through erring" and that both are prone to misjudging people (ibid.). [12] Further notable parallels are: the improvement of the estate; gardening; the relationship between landlord and tenants. These concerns occur in both texts. The main actions in both novels takes place exclusively in the house and the surrounding park (cf. Imhof 1989, 146f.; Burgstaller 1992, 248 n10; Burgess 1992, passim). [13] "In der Lampendämmerung sogleich behauptete die innre Neigung, behauptete die Einbildungskraft ihre Rechte über das Wirkliche. Eduard hielt nur Ottilien in seinen Armen; Charlotten schwebte der Hauptmann näher oder ferner vor der Seele, und so verwebten, wundersam genug, sich Abwesendes und Gegenwärtiges reizend und wonnevoll durcheinander" (Goethe [1809] 1994, 85). [14] The term was introduced in a chemical treatise by Torbern Bergman ( De attractionibus electivis, 1775). Certain chemical elements will dissolve their bindings when other elements approach them, and form new combinations with these others. Goethe transposed this observation to human behaviour. [15] Ernst Cassirer, as early as the 1920s and 1930s, recognised that Einstein's theory is by and large a continuation and final clarification of classical physical thought, whereas quantum mechanics constitutes a genuine break with this tradition: "The quantum theory, as has been repeatedly emphasized, stands in far greater contrast to classical physics than does the general theory of relativity. The latter . . . can be incorporated without great difficulty into the mode of thought of classical physics. Planck says of it that it has brought classical physics to its consummation . . . . Of the quantum theory, however, he remarks that it had the effect of a dangerous foreign explosive which has already caused a gaping rift throughout the entire structure" (1966 [1937], 109; see also idem 1980 [1921], 107). – Whether the recent discoveries in the field of complex 'chaotic' systems constitute a similar paradigm shift, or even a rift, is still a debatable issue (for affirmative views, see Hayles 1991, 2; Vaas 1991, 750). [16] In Gödel 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that it is impossible to prove a system's consistency by means formalised within the system, so that formal closure of an axiomatic system is impossible. [17] In 1996, Alan Sokal, physics professor at NYU, aroused some scandal and embarrassment when Social Text published his bogus article, tellingly entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in which he denied, without proof, the existence of an external world and declared that "physical 'reality' . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct" (Sokal 1998 [1996], 200). This 'experiment with cultural studies' has since become known as 'the Sokal hoax' and led to a renewed discussion of the legitimacy of interdisciplinary studies of science and the social construction and transmission of knowledge. Sokal's own outlook, more clearly visible in his recent publication Intellectual Impostures (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), appears to imply a return to by now almost forgotten positions, familiar from Snow's Two Cultures ; Derrida's only comment is reported to have been "le pauvre Sokal." For this, and for a perceptive counter-attack, see Sturrock 1998. – As a cultural phenomenon, the very possibility of such a hoax to pass unnoticed into a magazine like Social Text is perhaps more interesting than the question of its purpose, legitimacy, or success. [18] Words spoken by Satan after his downfall: ". . . Farewell happy Fields / Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail / Infernal world . . ." (Milton [1667] 1968/89 , 12, l. 249ff.). [19] For this point, see Hans Blumenberg's groundbreaking essay on changing concepts of reality in Western culture and the possibility of the novel (Blumenberg 1964). The point is now on the verge of becoming watered down to a truism: cf., for instance, Bohnenkamp 1989, 23: "The development of the novel as a literary form seems to have paralleled the rise of the Newtonian and Darwinian paradigms. In the twentieth century, however, the death of the one heralded the death of the other." This parallel between classical physics and the novel is extensively argued in Nadeau 1981, 183-97; there is, of course, as with any truism, 'something to it,' but this schema is much too simplistic to account for texts like Tristram Shandy or even Wuthering Heights, as Nadeau himself admits (185); thus its practicability appears in the final analysis rather questionable. Works Cited Primary texts Banville, John (1982) 1992. The Newton Letter. An Interlude. London: Minerva. Beckett, Samuel 1990. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1808) 1989. Zur Farbenlehre. Ed. Peter Schmidt. Sämtliche Werke, Munich ed., vol. 10. München: Hanser. — (1809) 1971. Elective Affinities. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. — (1809) 1994. Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Frankfurt: Insel. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1902) 1991. "Ein Brief." Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 31. Ed. Ellen Ritter. Frankfurt: Fischer. 45-55. Milton, John (1667) 1968/89. Paradise Lost. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Newton, Isaac 1961. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3. Ed. H.W. Turnbull. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Rilke, Rainer Maria 1963. Duino Elegies . Trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. 4th ed. London: Hogarth Press. Secondary texts Banville, John 1981a. "'My Readers, That Small Band, Deserve a Rest.' An Interview with John Banville." By Rüdiger Imhof. Irish University Review 11.1: 5-12. — 1981b. "A Talk." Irish University Review 11.1: 13-17. — 1986. "Out of Chaos Comes Order. John Banville Interviewed by Ciaran Carty." Sunday Tribune [Dublin] 14 Sep., 18. — 1989. "The Flight of the Inventor." Rev. of Let Newton Be!: A New Perspective on his Life and Works, ed. John Fauvel et al. Times Literary Supplement 31 Mar., 533. — 1996. "Introduction. George Steiner's Fiction." The Deeps of the Sea and Other Fiction, by George Steiner. London: Faber & Faber. vii-xi. Barthes, Roland 1984. Image Music Text. Sel. and trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Beer, Gillian 1996. Open Fields. Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blumenberg, Hans 1964. "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans." Nachahmung und Illusion. Ed. Hans-Robert Jauss. München: Fink. Bohnenkamp, Dennis 1989. "Post-Einsteinian Physics and Literature: Toward a New Poetics." Mosaic 22.3: 19-30. Brewster, David (1855) 1965. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Isaac Newton. Edinburgh. Rpt. New York: Johnson. Broch, Hermann (1947/8) 1975. "Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit. Eine Studie." Kommentierte Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Vol. 9.1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 111-284. Bronowski, Jacob 1961. Science and Human Values. London: Hutchinson. Brown, Terence 1991. "Redeeming the Time. The Novels of John McGahern and John Banville." The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 . Ed. James Acheson. London: Macmillan. 159-173. Burgess, Gordon J.A. 1992. "An Irish Die Wahlverwandtschaften ." German Life and Letters 45.2: 140-48. Burgstaller, Susanne 1992. "'This Lawless House.' John Banville's Post-Modernist Treatment of the Big-House Motif in Birchwood and The Newton Letter. " Ancestral Voices. The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Otto Rauchbauer. Hildesheim: Olms. 239-56. Burwick, Frederick 1986. The Damnation of Newton. Goethe's Color Theory and Romantic Perception. Berlin: de Gruyter. Cassirer, Ernst (1921) 1980. Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen. In idem, Zur modernen Physik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 1-125. — (1937) 1966. Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics. Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality. Trans. O. Theodor Benfey. New Haven, London: Yale UP. Claessens, Dieter 1980. Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte. Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Fluck, Winfried 1997. "'Nach der Postmoderne'. Erscheinungsformen des amerikanischen Gegenwartsromans." Projekte des Romans nach der Moderne. Ed. Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus and Karheinz Stierle. München: Fink. 39-63. Gleick, James (1987) 1988. Chaos. Making a New Science. London: Cardinal. Gödel, Kurt 1931. "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173-98. Hall, Alfred Rupert 1992. Isaac Newton. Adventurer in Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Hayles, N. Katherine 1984. The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell UP. — 1990. Chaos Bound. Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP. —, ed. 1991. Chaos and Order. Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Heisenberg, Werner 1955. Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik. Hamburg: Rowohlt. — (1958) 1989. Physics and Philosophy. The Revolution in Modern Science. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Husserl, Edmund (1936/54) 1992. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Elisabeth Ströker. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Vol. 8. 165-276. Imhof, Rüdiger 1987. "German Influences on John Banville and Aidan Higgins." Literary Interrelations. Ireland, England and the World. Vol. 2. Comparison and Impact. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok. Tübingen: Narr. 335-347. — 1989. John Banville. A Critical Introduction. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. Koestler, Arthur (1959) 1979. The Sleepwalkers. A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. London: Hutchinson. — (1964) 1976. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson. Koyré, Alexandre 1965. Newtonian Studies. London: Chapman & Hall. Lernout, Geert 1988. "Banville and Being. The Newton Letter and History." History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 67-77. Lorenz, Konrad (1973) 1997. Die Rückseite des Spiegels. Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens. München, Zürich: Piper. McIlroy, Brian 1992. "Reconstructing Artistic and Scientific Paradigms: John Banville's The Newton Letter. " Mosaic 25.1: 121-33. Nadeau, Robert 1981. Readings from the New Book of Nature. Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1873) 1988. "Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne." Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 2nd ed. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin: de Gruyter. Vol. 1. 873-90. Parkin, Andrew 1988. "Shadows of Destruction. The 'Big House' in Contemporary Irish Literature." Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature. Ed. Michael Kenneally. Gerards Cross. Smythe. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers 1984. Order out of Chaos. Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam. Riedel, Wolfgang 1996. "Homo Natura". Literarische Anthropologie um 1900. Berlin: de Gruyter. Schultz, H. Stefan 1961. "Hofmannsthal and Bacon. The Sources of the Chandos Letter." Comparative Literature 13: 1-15. Smallman, Tom et al. 1996. Ireland. 2nd ed. Hawthorn, Vic.: Lonely Planet. Sokal, Alan (1996) 1998. "Transgressing the Boundaries. Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Social Text 46/47 Spring/Summer 1996, 217-52. Rpt. in Sokal and Bricmont 1998, 199-240. Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont 1998. Intellectual Impostures. Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science. London: Profile. Spranger, Eduard (1914) 1950. Lebensformen. Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie und Ethik der Persönlichkeit. 8th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Sturrock, John 1998. "Le pauvre Sokal." London Review of Books 16 July 1998, 8-9. Vaas, Rüdiger 1991. "Die Welt als Würfelspiel. Ordnung und Chaos im Universum." Universitas 8: 736-50. Vaihinger, Hans (1911) 1922. Die Philosophie des Als Ob. System der theoretischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. 7th and 8th printing. Leipzig: Felix Meiner. Van Peer, Willie 1998. "Sense and Nonsense of Chaos Theory in Literary Studies." The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 40-48. Wagner, Fritz 1969. Neue Diskussionen über Newtons Wissenschaftsbegriff. München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Wickert, Johannes 1995. Isaac Newton. Reinbek: Rowohlt.