Science in/as Literature

SCIENCE IN/AS LITERATURE

How Does Science Interact with literature?

Excerpted from Gillian Beer

"Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science."

Reading: 2 Purposes

In the mid and late 19th century the humanities were still in the ascendant in

school and university studies, whereas now the appeal to authority is usually in the

direction of science. In that way our present situation differs also from that

described 30 years ago by C.P. Snow in The two cultures (1).

The language available alike to 19th century creative writers and scientists had

been forged out of past literature, the Bible, phnialotusoraplh y, theology, the

demotic of the streets or the clubs. Scientists as various as James Clerk Maxwell

and Charles Lyell habitually seamed their sentences with literary allusion and

incorporated literature into the argumentative structures of their work (as Lyell

does Ovid and Clerk Maxwell Tennyson.)...

To the Victorians, whether preoccupied with science or literature or politics -

and however conscious they might be of the fickleness of signification - the concept

of the mother-tongue was crucial. In the case of English the 'mother-tongue' was

idealized as the English of past literature above all. Scientific writers in the

Victorian period were immersed in the general language of the tribe, yet needed

to formulate their own stable professional dialects with which to communicate with

each other. By that means they would be able to change the level of description so

as to engage with new theoretical and technical questions. They would also limit

the range of possible interpretation, and, it was their hope, misinterpretation. But

they were reluctant to allow writing on scientific issues to remain on the linguistic

periphery. They thus claimed congruity with poetry, perceived as the authoritative

utterance within current language.

The theme announced for this lecture, 'the presentation of science through

literature' might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator

for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation.

That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize

interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific

and literary discourses overlap, but unstably. Victorian writers, scientific and

literary, held to the ideal of the 'mother-tongue'; in our own time the variety of

professional and personal dialects is emphasised instead. Yet the expectation

lingers that it should be possible to translate stably from one to another. This

expectation may prove unrealistic.

More is to be gained from analysing the transformations that occur when ideas

change creative context and encounter fresh readers. The fleeting and discontinuous

may be as significant in our reading as the secure locking of equivalent

meanings. Questions can change their import when posed within different genres.

Recognizing scientific reference within works of literature may not be as straightforward a business as it seems. To put it at its most direct: how do we recognize science once it is in literature? Can such reference to scientific material be drained again of its relations within the literary work and returned to autonomy?

Gerald Holton speaks of the 'themata' of a period, a term which is an attempt

to move away from the concept Zeitgeist with its inherent animism (5). The

banishing of Zeitgeist has usefully uncovered a series of difficulties: how to describe

the relations between intellectual fields within a historical period? How to relate

them to social and economic movements? How to articulate the interactions

between apparently remote preoccupations? How to analyse the close written

relations between authors who probably never read each others' work? How to

explain the concurrent appearance of similar ideas in science and in literature

without inevitably forging causal links? And how to avoid stabilizing the argument

so that one form of knowledge becomes again the origin of all others?

structuralism/discourse

Content:

What sort of relationships does Young trace? In what directions?

For what purposes?

What sorts of literary/cultural issues/traditions is he engaging with?

Major changes have taken place since the time of the controversy over the 'two

cultures'. Scientific events are now the daily currency of our newspapers. A great

writer, Primo Levi, has, in The Periodic Table and other works, demonstrated that

being human and being a scientist may be the same heroic task when the worst

comes (6). A number of working scientists, as well as many philosophers, have

analysed the potency of language in their own practice. Writers as various as

Francois Jacob and Michel Serres have emphasised the simultaneity of science and

myth as systems for containing (and constraining) possibility. Some scientists have

expressed scientific controversy and theory in non-mathematical terms accessible

to general intelligent readers: one thinks, among others, of Stephen Jay Gould,

Stephen Weinberg, Steven Rose, Stephen Hawking, Ilya Prirogine, Richard Dawkins.

Such writing joins a powerful tradition of re-imagined science, represented

among the Victorians by writers such as John Tyndall, T.H. Huxley, James Clerk

Maxwell, Richard Proctor, W.K. Clifford. In our own century no-one has surpassed

the condensed lucidity of Eddington who, for the time of reading, allows the reader

to comprehend scientific problems well beyond his or her intellectual reach, though

it has to be acknowledged that the burst of clarity is not secure for ever. Alongside

him in the late 20s and 30s were figures such as James Jeans and Julian Huxley and

H.G. Wells, who elucidated scientific questions in such a way that readers were

aware not of the remoteness but of the urgent closeness of those questions to the

practical, emotional, political, and economic issues particular to the times. They

were made aware, too, of endlessly recurring issues in human society and in life

beyond the human

Another, more general though shifty, source of understanding has become

available. The power of television to represent scientific thinking in the form

simultaneously of words and images has opened access to issues hard properly to

represent in words alone. I am sure that working scientists flinch at some of the

simplifications and misprisions that result, since at some point algebra must begin,

but the spirited leap of enquiry generated both by the works of high popularization

and by translation for the screen means that scientific work at present enters the

concourse of interpretation rapidly and powerfully. It becomes part of the imaginative

currency of the community. It is set in multiple interpretative relationships

and helps to construe the times. All the more, science has itself to become more

conscious of how it depends on language and on society.

Indeed,the new alliances between scientists and humanists in a bleak economic

and educational environment in this country for higher education should not make

us too sanguine; they may themselves be a symptom of the extent of the danger we

face, which obliges the sinking of real differences.

Academic: What does it mean to read criticism as a graduate student?

Tips/Tricks

Larger Discourses

Post-Modernism

Science in/as literature

Animal studies/ ecocritism/the Anthropocene

When Did it Happen?

Why Should We Study it Here?

New Historicism/Cultural Studies

2 program Goals:

• Rhetorical Acuity /Theoretical Exploration
• Common Core Standards

Still happening, but in part has become newly needed since the nineteenth century and professionalization of science (scientist as word first appeared in 1830s)

1959: C.P. Snow "The Two Cultures"

Personal Focus:

What is "science and literature?"

Citizenship Goal:

People can Understand Science!

It's ok, there are about a million definitions/subfields

Literary Darwinism alone could also be....

http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_topic=evolution

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science <--influence--> literature/culture

entropy--> Crying of Lot 49

theories of race--> Uncle Tom's Cabin

Darwin's Natural Selection <---Victorian Capitalism

science as a form of mastery/dominance <---gender relations

ordered, mechanical universe <--- God the Watchmaker