October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
First Person: Laura Otis
What’s an Archive? A Literary Scholar’s View of the History of Science
Laura Otis, who comes from a background in Biochemistry, Neuroscience, and Comparative Literature, questions the history of science rules.
“Doing the history of science without archival research,” said Michael Hagner, “is like doing biochemistry without lab work.”1 Exasperated by my total lack of interest in archives, Hagner realized he was going to have to say something drastic. For a year I had been excitedly reading published letters and secondary sources, believing that I was making great progress on my book, Müller’s Lab. Hagner, who had invited me to the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, couldn’t understand why I wasn’t going to archives. When he compared it to lab work, I finally got it. From that moment, I realized that the history of science is more like science than it is like literary studies.
One of the things I like best about the history of science is that everyone in it has a good story. No one seems to have decided, at age six, that she wanted to study eighteenth-century microscopes. Almost everyone has come to the field via an interesting, round-about route and has enriched it with the experience he’s acquired. Like many, I’m a former scientist, a biochemistry major who spent eight years decapitating rats, running gels, and reading autoradiographs. What makes me more unusual is that for the past 20 years, I’ve been teaching literature classes, especially courses on literature and science.
My interest in nineteenth-century biology brought me to the 2001 HSS meeting in Denver, where the emphasis on archival research roused my rebellious tendencies. As I listened to the praise of some talks and the condemnation of others, I remembered a phrase we used to use in the lab: “she does good science.” Back there, doing good science meant showing original thinking, reliable data, and rigorous questioning. Being told that one did good science was the highest praise. At HSS, doing good science seemed to mean going to archives, getting data, and doing interesting things with it. Without the archive, the science was no good.
At dinner, one professor told me that he’d had a student who wanted to work on the Spanish neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, but he’d advised him against it because he didn’t think he’d find any archival material. To a literary scholar, this sounded insane. Who would tell an English graduate student not to write on Shakespeare because she wouldn’t find any unknown plays? Admittedly, some literary scholars need to think harder about how the texts they study came into being, and a Shakespearean should know about the different versions and editions of his plays. But in literary studies, archival work is respected, not required. I couldn’t understand why a new interpretation of Cajal – a thinker just as interesting as Shakespeare – wouldn’t be considered a contribution to knowledge.
In literary research, discovery and interpretation are inseparable. You don’t need to have found something new to say something new. No one respects claims made without textual evidence, but the scholarly “news” is an original reading, often inspired by a new comparison between texts. In English departments, we rejoice when scholars recover lost manuscripts, but no one needs to have found one to earn a degree. To be fair, though, I should include the voice of Emory undergraduate Ryan Plocher, who complained that he wasn’t being prepared for graduate study in English because he wasn’t being taught how to do archival research.2
In her ironic book Dust, Carolyn Steedman points out that the historian’s authority comes from having been to the archive.3 What he finds there depends on resources, persistence, and chance. Documents in archives aren’t discovered; they’re rediscovered. They’re not new; they’re reemerging, so that they’re not data in the sense of experimental results. One can never be sure how representative they are. When I think of archives, I think of Darwin’s warning, “the crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.”4 To this random collection we bring our own conflicts, expectations, and experiences, so that “no one historian’s archive is ever like another’s” (Steedman, Dust, 9). In the insistence on archival research, I sensed a quest for purity based on exclusion, a quest to build knowledge reliable because of what it does not contain.
One consequence of the demand for forgotten documents, I could see, was the fierce territorialism in history. One seeks a tightly defined problem, then fights to keep it one’s own. Coming from a field in which thousands of people work on a single author, I couldn’t understand this drive to annihilate the competition. It’s not that literary scholars are morally superior to historians, but with ten thousand people working on Shakespeare, we wouldn’t know who to kill first. In the absence of a plan, we say the more, the merrier. When I realized that a single book could involve 15 years of archival research, however, I began to see why scholars thought of scientists as their own, and why others respected their claims. Investing decades on a project and getting scooped could mean the end of a career. To believe that one can be scooped, however, is to believe that there’s only one version of the story. Isn’t the truth best served when many different scholars approach a scientist, period, or problem, each with his own values and perspective?
When I asked about the appeal of the archive, one senior historian of science spoke to me of the thrill of the hunt. To many historians, she explained, doing original scholarship means doing detective work, which leads to the discovery – or rediscovery – of something new. “What’s the news here?” demands the reader who does good history. “Tell me something that I don’t know.”
To me, scholarship has always meant something quite different. I work by reading carefully and describing connections no one has noticed – at least, as far as I can tell. Rather than a detective or a hunter, I see myself as an interpreter and translator, making ideas from one field available to people in another so that they can apply them to their own projects. My books are patchwork quilts in which the scholarship is the selection, placement, and combining. My news is the revelation of relationships rather than the unearthing of new materials, in essence a creative process.
I began to appreciate the way historians think about archives only when Raine Daston appealed to me as a literary scholar. Hagner had reached the scientist in me, but it was only when she explained history as narrative-creation that I realized what was happening. To tell a plausible story from fragments you’ve deciphered, she explained, is a lot harder than building a narrative from published accounts. It is, as Carolyn Steedman puts it, “to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater” (Steedman, Dust, 18). To prove that one can be an historian, one has to do this at least once, and do it well. It’s a rite of passage I have yet to undergo.
But as Hagner, Plocher, and Daston were trying to tell me, there are better reasons to do archival research. It’s a reality check, and unlike many literary and science studies scholars, I share scientists’ and historians commitment to a real physical world that can be altered by people’s actions. Even if writing history means constructing narratives out of fragments, I want them to approach that reality as closely as possible. At its worst, literary research is purposeless language about language, an endless funhouse of reflected surfaces. HSS members appeal to me because like scientists, they want to know what happened, not what X wrote about what Y thought about what Z heard happened.
In the six years I’ve been a member of HSS, I’ve moved from bewilderment to indignation to curiosity, and the book I’ve written, Müller’s Lab, reflects what I’ve learned. I first saw the project as a study of what a lab is and how the modern laboratory emerged. Instead, it became a multi-perspective narrative study, systematically comparing the way that seven students (Jakob Henle, Theodor Schwann, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Hermann Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, Robert Remak, and Ernst Haeckel) represented their teacher, Johannes Müller. In it, I’ve done my best to show how differently the history of a scientist can be written depending on his students’ experiences and agenda.5 It draws both upon my belief, as a literary scholar, that texts from the past should continually be re-read from new perspectives, and on my conviction as an emerging historian that I have a responsibility to represent the past as accurately as possible. The book benefited from the archival research that I eventually did.
As a former scientist, an English teacher, and a writer of fiction, I see creativity as an essential part of the quest for truth. Interpretive studies play a vital role in the history of science, complementing works that make new archival findings available. I find the writing of scientists as interesting as the writing of novelists and think that Goethe’s Farbenlehre and Darwin’s Origin of Species deserve as many re-readings as Shakespeare’s plays. Doesn’t our knowledge of past science benefit equally from the recovery of forgotten documents and the reevaluation of known documents from new points of view? I like the history of science because it isn’t biochemistry – because I can contribute to it by judging and creating narratives.
Laura Otis is a professor of English at Emory University. Her books include Organic Memory, Membranes, Networking, Literature and Science in the 19th Century: An Anthology, Vacation Stories (an English translation of Ramón y Cajal’s Cuentos de Vacaciones), and Müller’s Lab, just published by Oxford University Press.
1 When we spoke recently, Hagner assured me that he does not think historical research means exclusively archival research. On that occasion, he felt that he needed to use strong terms because I was crippling my project by ignoring the vital role of archival materials.
2 Ryan Plocher, “My Last Course Evaluation,” Loose Canons 10.2 (2007): 10. Plocher received his B.A. from Emory in May 2007 with the highest honors. I am paraphrasing his article in Loose Canons, a publication of the Emory English Department.
3 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 145.
4Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition [1859] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 487.
5 Gabriel Finkelstein and Nicholas Jardine have already observed the biases in du Bois-Reymond’s and Virchow’s accounts of Müller. See Gabriel Ward Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: The Making of a Liberal German Scientist (1818-1851),” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, November, 1996, 173-74, and Nicholas Jardine, “The Mantle of Müller and the Ghost of Goethe: Interactions between the Sciences and Their Histories,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 306.