Kepler by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Science As Pyschotherapy

Unlike his introduction of Nicolaus Copernicus in his first volume of his Revolutions trilogy, John Banville gives a very clear key to his interpretation of Johannes Kepler’s life in the second: “…disorder had been the condition of his life from the beginning.” Not only does he set off a much more distinctive character for Kepler than for Copernicus, but Banville also pursues the interaction of that character with the intellectual and social context of the time in a much more interesting way.

Kepler’s neurotic condition - a longing for assurance about the ultimate rationality of the world - is described by Banville in all its stages: the initial trauma created by a chaotic midden of an early family life; subsequently confirmed through a young Lutheran adulthood in an increasingly oppressive Catholic country; and routinised in the shambolic Benatky castle-circus of Tycho Brahe. It Is hardly surprising that the need for an underlying order in the universe would be a response upon which Banville could build a narrative. Science, or more generally thought itself, as psychotherapy.

And this psychotherapeutic narrative, never overdone but muted and hinted at continuously, does provide a convincing coherence to Kepler’s life. His ‘passion’ for astronomy is a sort of self-medication in Banville's story. Kepler’s work is a reflection and projection of his deepest fears of meaninglessness and purposelessness. His but-this-will-interrupt-my-work attitude to politics, religion, and family relations is a persistent part of his character until late in life. Even the death of his second child is primarily an inconvenience rather than a tragedy. A complete indifference to the suffering of his wife is a clear symptom of neurosis not diligence. It only gets to be called genius in history, not because of what it produced but because of where it leads. Neurotic doesn't imply destructive. However when the therapy, carried on as a slavish routine, becomes a solution, an end in itself, it doesn't lead anywhere but to the hell it is trying to avoid.

Is this purely a personal story therefore? Well not really. It is likely that we all get trapped by neurosis of some sort given that every child develops at best a partial, and at worst a distorted take on reality which is then imported into adult life. If the result is success by prevailing standards, this largely unconscious condition is called a life-passion or driving force. If the results are by conventional norms unsuccessful, these same conditions are obsessions, or addictions. Doesn’t a career as a scientist, and not only a scientist, begin with a presumption of an underlying order awaiting discovery? And what would provoke anyone to presume such order and then to embark on a hopeful life of such discovery, if not an absence of order of one sort or another in one’s formative years? And there always is an absence of one sort or another.

In Kepler’s case the therapy was intellectual; in others’ it might be political; in my case it was, in the first instance monastic, and then military. Only late in life did I recognise my own drive to exist in, by creating it, an orderly world as a consistent theme of my life. I too, like Kepler, ultimately chose an intellectual therapy, corporate finance (a discipline just about as solidly based in reason as astrology). Not because I was particularly gifted in either business deal-making or mathematics but because, also like Kepler, I had found a way to survive economically while pursuing the itch for order in an apparently chaotic world. And I too mistook the therapy for a destination. Your garden variety ends-means confusion. Banville has Kepler recognise his error in a letter of 1611 to his step-daughter (I don't know if the letter is authentic). The recognition is traumatic. Recovery is excruciatingly slow. I'm still recovering.

So thank you John Banville for providing a bit of life-affirmation for me. And thank you as well for the typically Banvillian additions to my vocabulary like caparisoned, utraquist, widow's weeds, pavonian and scolopendrine. I love it when the spellchecker gets snookered. Now, old pal, how about an historical biography of Freud and how psychoanalysis went off the rails?

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