It would be misleading to devote this book only to Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne, since the inference might be that their peculiar historical struggles had something to do with their peculiarly unsettled time. So I shall update the discussion by a century, to take up Dreiser (in relation to Brown), Pynchon (in relation to Poe), and Mailer (in relation to Hawthorne). But the grouping of Dreiser, Pynchon, and Mailer in itself makes possible an approach to the real essence of the historical negotiation of literature with science. What Dreiser faces in Spencerian evolution is the threat that scientific history is a synecdoche for universal history, since the universe, like science, progresses in the direction of integrating, definite heterogeneity. No more fundamental challenge to any other historical sense can be imagined. Pynchon's use of thermodynamics for his scientific metaphor, then, can be understood as a discovery within science that universal history does not mimic scientific history: The universe is in fact heading for indefinite homogeneity. Dreiser and Pynchon do not put up their own version of history against science; they try to suspend our belief in the universality of the scientific version. Mailer's ambition is to find an alternative, and he does so in perhaps the most radical way possible: by reinventing the Renaissance theory of signatures, which he calls the “metaphysics of form,” to repeal the Scientific Revolution.

SISTER CARRIE, BROTHER ARTHUR

I want to begin by begging the question of whether Dreiser was “influenced” by “science” (the quotation marks show where the question is being begged).