The Function of Antagonism: Miroslav Holub and Roald Hoffmann
I
The interdisciplinary study of literature and science aims at giving the lie to C. P. Snow’s charge that there is an unscientific, even anti-scientific, flavour to modern literary culture. The primary goal of ‘one culture’ criticism, as it is sometimes called, has been to overcome perceived antagonisms between the two fields, freeing up traffic in ideas, analysing creative connections and abrasions at the level of language. In the main, that means literary critics subjecting the writing of science, and writing about science, to literary analysis. It does not often mean scientists writing about literature. Current work in ‘literature and science’ is, in short, interdisciplinary principally from the vantage point of the humanities. This is in part why the emphasis in the theoretical and conceptual literature has been so accented towards understanding, connection, creative alliance. More politicised critiques of the epistemological claims of science, and the technological and economic systems supporting it, can play a part in what ‘literature and science’ does, but they have more commonly been the domain of science studies and the history of science. The emphasis in interdisciplinary work has much more typically been on rhetoric – above all on narrative and metaphor – as the common ground between the two fields and the means by which science becomes amenable and accessible to literary analysis.
Within these limits, the institutional successes of this still young field have been impressive. There are journals dedicated to its pursuit, many good books and essays, popular undergraduate and graduate courses, PhDs. There are societies for the study of literature and science in Britain, America, Europe, Australasia. It is bracing, then, to find something more robust than
Had I not started both careers in about the same time, with science as the profession and poetry as a ‘supporting pastime’, I would be gravitating nowadays towards science anyway, because of its viability and vigour. Traditional intellectuals rooted in the traditional humanistic disciplines are losing credibility, not only because of the rising importance of pragmatic global enterprises, solutions, and ways of thinking, but always because of the fact that they are involved basically only in defence of the status quo ante; with the possible exception of sociologists and experimental psychologists, they are growing more and more alienated from real life and vocabulary. They neglect, in favour of ‘eternal values’, the fact that with science and technology we are creating our own new environment, our new nature. (2006a, 13)
A number of dissatisfactions with the humanities jostle for attention here – at some risk of incoherence perhaps. They are dismaying in part because most of them would sit entirely comfortably within the pages of The Two Cultures: not least, the sceptical denomination of the ‘traditional’ culture as represented by the ‘traditional’ humanistic disciplines and the clear implication that those of us who work in the humanities are not the true ‘intellectuals’ of our day (see Snow, 1993, 4, 11).
Familiar also to any reader of The Two Cultures will be the charge that the understanding of life perpetuated by the humanities is culpably out of touch with ‘real life’ today. The sciences have remade our reality, Holub observes, as Snow did before him. They are substantively changing what we mean by ‘nature’, including ‘human nature’, yet the humanities pretend to possess a reservoir of ‘eternal values’ that require no modification or revision in the light of the new reality. ‘If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist’, Snow wrote (1993, 11). Holub gives that observation fresher metaphors – more dynamically vital, more violent:
Scientific activity becomes more and more something like a dynamic planetary process, an offensive, a result of concentrated human energy, ‘the only one which is obviously and undoubtedly cumulative and progressive’ (George Sarton), in spite of the fact that ‘unlike art, science destroys its past’ (Thomas Kuhn). [… As in] the cellular offensive at the very onset of life […] a scientific hidden rampage is now occurring at the onset of a new quality of our life. (2006a, 13)
In two respects, however, the differences between the sciences and the humanities as Holub represents them are plainly not as Snow saw them. When Holub claims that the humanities ‘are growing more and more alienated’ not just from ‘real life’ but from ‘vocabulary’ there is some awkwardness in the grammar (presumably ‘real’ carries over to ‘vocabulary’ as well as life, but what is ‘real vocabulary’?). I take it he has in his sights not the ‘traditional’ practitioners of the humanities, but more recent theoretically informed critics. A paragraph further on, he quotes George Steiner: ‘Courteous inquiries by colleagues in the sciences render more embarrassing the casuistic jargon, the pretentious triviality which now dominate so much of literary theory and humanistic studies’ (Holub, 2006a, 14). The humanities, in Holub’s analysis, are thus doubly out of step with the sciences: they are out of step in one direction by having failed to change with the scientific times, but they are out of step in another because developments in their critical vocabulary have taken them too far from a common language, or if not a common language then a critical language that could hold the respect of the scientific community and educated readers generally.
The second perception of a relatively new divergence between the disciplines is more straightforward, and concerns not the ‘surface’ matter of vocabularies but a deeper matter of ethos. ‘In science’, Holub remarks wryly at the beginning of his talk, ‘one very soon makes an important personal developmental step: self-restraint’.
This definition comes, of course, from long experience with poetry readings by thoroughbred poets, and from scientific workshops where the chairperson would turn off the microphone after the allotted ten minutes even if you were presenting a new Theory of Everything.
[…] Poets love to speak a lot, mainly about poetry. Scientists tend to avoid the terrifying word science. Nobody can discuss ‘immunology’ or ‘palaeontology’. The only thing to speak about in ‘science’ are fuller[e]nes, CD 45* cells, or trilobites. (2006a, 11–12)
This attribution of modesty to scientific enterprise describes a different scientific culture to the one Snow observed. For Snow, the hostility of the humanities to the sciences in the 1950s was in part a reaction against the arrogance of physicists and chemists, particularly ‘Rutherford, trumpeting, “This is the heroic age of science!”’, by contrast with T. S. Eliot, venturing on behalf of ‘his attempts to revive verse-drama that we can hope for very little, but that he would feel content if he […] could prepare the ground for a new Kyd or a new Greene’ (1993, 4–5). In Holub’s account, the arrogance today is all on the part of the humanities. Where scientists aim at narrowly defined statements of truth which can, therefore, hope to be the more complete, those of us who work in the humanities are alarmingly happy to wield the big words – ‘science’, ‘literature’, ‘poetry’, ‘life’. As Holub put it in a subtler and more temperate essay written some years earlier: ‘The aim of a scientific communication is to convey unequivocal information about one facet of a particular aspect of reality to the reader, and to the collective, anonymous thesaurus of scientific data’. Poetry, good poetry at least, he argued, possesses similar qualities: it too has the ‘humility that resists the onslaughts of powerful, prevailing imbecility, verbal or otherwise’; it too practises ‘condensation of meanings, of the net weight of meaning per word’ (2001, 58). Such humility, his last essay implies, is now rarely found in the kinds of critical work rewarded by humanities departments.
The diagnosis of a serious loss of standing for the humanities in recent decades, by contrast with the sciences, should, I think, be worrying, coming from one of the most impressive individuals to combine the professions of poetry and science in the twentieth century. One could, of course, put it down to an individual temperamental bias, but Holub was among the most admired poets of his generation – ‘one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere’ in Ted Hughes’s estimation, ‘a magnificent, astringent genius’ in Tom Paulin’s more colourful phrase (quoted in Holub, 2006b, cover). He valued poetry highly, and he insisted that there was much shared ground between poetry and science. ‘In science, we think in metaphors’, he wrote – even if we think we are happiest when approaching the purity of mathematics (2006b, 435). His sense of the modesty of science would be disputable if it referred to the institutional and economic structures of science, but as a reflection on comparative epistemological procedures it surely has some force. And he is not alone in wanting to turn an epistemological description into a description of an ethos. It is common now to hear from within the humanities themselves that the sciences possess the greater intellectual vitality in our time because they foster the more admirable professional character: a commitment to everyday, practical truths matched to a proper humility about what can credibly be explained in the world. By contrast, the humanities are often perceived as suffering from an unlovely combination of triviality and self-aggrandisement.
In Truth and Truthfulness – the last book published in his lifetime – Bernard Williams gives a specific reason why this should be so. One development, Williams observes, has been more damaging in recent decades than any other to the prestige of the humanities in the eyes of scientists and educated audiences generally: the ready berth given, over several decades now, to those he calls ‘the deniers’ – the philosophers and theorists who would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth obtainable in language, no historical truth free of interpretation, no objective truth untainted by a subject position, no scientific truth uncontrolled by social forces.
Busy people can reasonably become impatient with the humanities, as compared with the natural and applied sciences. This is not because of a false prestige of those sciences, or a naїve view that they consist entirely of everyday truths. It is rather that everyone knows that there are a lot of everyday truths around in the areas of those sciences, as that some telescopes work and some do not, that some bridges fall down and others do not, and the presence and relevance of those everyday truths give these sciences a claim to seriousness that the humanities can easily lose. (2002, 2–3, 10–11)
The intended and actual readership of Williams’s book is, one assumes, largely composed of members of humanities departments, or those who passed through them as students, but it asks us to surrender that identification temporarily, in order to imagine how we must look from without. The postures of ‘denial’ have damaged the respect in which the humanities are held by many scientists and many members of the general public. The combination of a ‘fantastical scepticism’, a readiness to conflate the techniques of rhetoric with false authority and specious political urgency have made too much work in the humanities look at best frivolous, at worst despicable.
Set Williams’s comparison of the humanities with the sciences next to Holub’s and the relationship between the ‘two cultures’ today would appear to be in a worse state than it seemed to Snow. Before this description becomes entirely demoralising, insofar as it holds, the negative perception has purchase at the broadest level of comparison between the disciplines. Interdisciplinary scholarship in literature and science (the Sokal affair notwithstanding) does not typically stand accused with the party of denial. On the contrary, a commitment to understanding the content of science accurately – and historically – at the same time as analysing its rhetoric and its refraction through literature has meant, on the whole, that this field has retained its credibility in its engagements with theory. But more than most fields, it hopes to command an audience beyond itself; above all, it wants scientists to listen. Any perceived irrelevance of the academic humanities in general today must, therefore, be a problem for cross-disciplinary work.
If Williams is right, the source of the trouble is not a want of technical education, which could be corrected (as Snow thought) by an overhaul of the British schooling system, but an urgent need to rediscover the value of truth and truthfulness. We suffer not from a crystallisation of the social forms, underpinned by class, that Snow (1993, 17) saw contributing to a divide between scientists and non-scientists, but from a more basic and damaging failure to cultivate fidelity to the truth, starting (but only starting) with too many non-scientists’ relationship to everyday truths. This puts another cast on Holub’s perception that a difference of ethos has opened up between the two disciplines in recent years. His provocative distinction between modest, truthful scientists and self-indulgent, casuistic writers from the humanities is a misdescription, insofar as it implies that academic protocols derive from a pre-established professional personality or type. Holub is closer to Williams, and more to the point, when he shifts his attention to the question of method, and that aspect of ethos that is fostered by training in and respect for method. Scientists have the edge over other intellectuals, he says at one point, ‘because they have the methodology’ (2006a, 13). It is a more interesting claim if one fills out the silent comparison: the humanities are comparatively weak because they lack fidelity to a coherent methodology.
Is this so? Literary scholarship is not without method. Literary critics have, indeed, an ample repertoire of analytic techniques, strict standards of accuracy to sources, fairly robust systems of peer review. But there are significant disagreements, even now, about the proper objects of literary study, about what should be valued in literature and about the best means of analysing it. And those disagreements are, to a much greater extent than in science, part of what gets taught – they are themselves the objects of study. This is one reason, among several, why literary criticism and cultural criticism are not susceptible to the same criteria of evaluation as the sciences, despite strenuous efforts by research assessment bodies to make them so. There is no literary critical equivalent to the scientific object of study, i.e. natural and physical phenomena, nor to the scientific method, understood as the collection and testing of empirical data through observation and experiment, the testing of hypotheses and the requirements of objectivity and reproducibility.
It is, of course, harder to explain oneself to the rest of the world when one does not ‘have the methodology’ in any simple or single sense. Part of what has to be explained is that the work of the humanities is of an irresolvably different kind to the work of the sciences. One can say with Hobbes that the analysis of the meanings of words constitutes a kind of science (Wood, 2010, 169), but one is then leaning on an older meaning of the word ‘science’ – not yet tied to the notion of scientific objects or to scientific method. A simpler response to Miroslav Holub’s pondering about whether, if he were starting again, he would gravitate towards the sciences or towards poetry, is that he is asking himself the wrong question. A choice between literature and science is not a choice between like things, and whether it produces a vote of confidence for the humanities or for the sciences, the meaning of that vote remains in significant respects inscrutable. The most likely product of a forced choice between the fields is a dispiriting air of unnecessary antagonism. Hence Stanley Fish’s recent rejection of Anthony Kronman’s encouragement to the humanities to offer ourselves as the answer to a ‘crisis in spirit’ generated by the sciences. Only the humanities, Kronman argues in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, can ‘restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt, and which our scientific civilization, with its gadgets and discoveries, obscures’ (quoted in Fish, 2008). As Fish (2008) retorts, this is not a defence of the humanities; it is ‘an attack on everything else’.
The question of method is, in short, a distraction. The only meaningful comparison between the handling of everyday truths in the sciences and in literature involves the fundamental question of whether the two disciplines are alike in fostering the value of truthfulness – meaning sincerity and accuracy in their dealings with those truths. And perhaps the simplest way of giving focus to that comparison, as it affects the field of literature and science specifically, is to consider the problem of how ‘literature’ and ‘science’ respectively engage with the content of scientific knowledge. How can literary criticism give an accurate account of the content of science, as distinct from its rhetoric, without becoming merely a reduced report and without retreating into a form of minimal positivism?
To ask that question is not to deny literature the possibility of convening scientific information – an educative interest in science was, after all, part of the remit of poetry from, say, Hesiod to James Thomson, and post-Romantic poetry has again made it its own. But the facts of science are not necessarily easy for the literary writer and the literary critic to negotiate, especially in a poem, where economy counts. Poems may, of course, have various relations to fact. A minimal relation might involve only an acoustic interest in scientific language: rendering the terminology of science as poetic sound, exploiting the noise it makes. Or a poem may be explicitly about science, putting the language of scientific observation or scientific theory into poetic form in ways that draw attention to its rhetoric and, probably, deform that rhetoric in certain ways. More commonly, poetry uses science as a source of metaphors to give new expression to old subjects such as power, or love, or death, or politics. The contemporary poet, however, faces a problem that Hesiod and Thomson were comparatively unencumbered by – the problem of negotiating the authority of science as a form of fact-based knowledge in the wider culture. An allusion to science in contemporary literature is not simply an allusion to science; it is also an allusion to the authority of science with respect to certain kinds of narrowly defined truth.
By way of examining the handling of that problem in specific works of poetry, the remainder of this essay treats two poets who were or are also by profession scientists: Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and author of four volumes of poetry and numerous articles on the language and aesthetics of science, and Miroslav Holub himself – as indicated already, one of the most respected poets of his day, also an immunologist, who came to feel that his career in science represented the more vital side of his life. Between them, these two writers are exceptionally well placed to demonstrate the difficulties of putting science to work in poetry. In certain respects their poems may be taken as alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between scientific truths and other kinds of truth that poetry has to do with.
II
Probably Roald Hoffmann’s best-known poem is ‘Giving In’:
At 1.4 million atmospheres
xenon, a gas, goes metallic.
Between squeezed single-bevel
diamond anvils jagged bits
laser form spherules. No one
has seen liquid carbon. Try
to imagine that dense world
between ungiving diamonds
as the pressure mounts, and
the latticework of a salt
gives, nucleating at defects
a shift to a tighter order.
Try to see graphite boil. Try
to imagine a hand, in a press,
in a cellar in Buenos Aires,
a low-tech press, easily
turned with one hand, easily
cracking a finger in another
man’s hand, the jagged bone
coming through, to be crushed
again. No. Go back, up, up
like the deep diver with
a severed line, up, quickly,
to the orderly world of ruby
and hydrogen at 2.5 megabar,
the hydrogen coloring near
metallization, but you hear
the scream in the cellar, don’t
you, and the diver rises too fast.
This poem was first published in the Paris Review in 1991. That it appealed to the editors of the Faber collection of poems about science, A Quark for Mister Mark (Riordan and Turney, eds, 2000), is, presumably, because its first twenty-two lines describe an almost paradigmatic metaphorical effort to connect a situation in science and a situation in the wider world. Seemingly inert or unreactive forms of matter will ‘give in’ and deform chemically under sufficient pressure; how much more ‘easily’ the hand of a man will give in (or the man himself may give in) under the torturer’s pressure. A subtler connective question is also offered to the reader in these opening lines: how does one imagine either process, not visible to the ordinary eye? How can one visualise the invisible chemical processes by which xenon gas becomes a metal, graphite planes form spherules, carbon turns to liquid, a salt alters into something ‘tighter’, graphite boils? By analogy, how can one make present to oneself the process by which a man’s hand becomes something that is no longer functionally a hand?
To spell out these questions is to say more than the metaphorical juxtaposition of two kinds of pressure makes explicit by itself. The poem leaves quite a lot to its reader, including the decision about whether what we are being asked to imagine in the torture cell in Buenos Aires is primarily a material process, or (harder still to make present to oneself) the pain of the tortured man, or the mangling of a society requisite for one man’s hand to do such a thing to another man’s hand. That the poem does not quite succeed is not because of the foregrounding of scientific information here. Hoffmann is acutely aware that the language of science may alienate as quickly as it attracts, so the vocabulary of chemistry is sparingly employed, the more technical terms ‘xenon’, ‘YAG laser’, requiring in context no explanatory footnotes. The degree of inexplicitness about what is being said through science about our capacity to imagine torture is also not necessarily a problem – though ‘Giving In’ would be a stronger poem if there were a more genuine equation between the dilemmas: ‘Try to see graphite boil. Try / to imagine a hand, in a press’. These are not comfortably equivalent efforts: the first is a problem of knowledge, or the expression of knowledge, the second is ethical (or one assumes it is ethical). The risk is that a failure of imagination within chemistry will appear inconsequential seen against the political and moral failure involved in our inability fully to imagine the pain of others.
Perhaps this is why Hoffmann feels the need to muddy the metaphorical waters. With the introduction of the diving metaphor the poem becomes all of a sudden melodramatic and sentimental, forcing on its readers an admission of incompetence in the imagining of torture which is at odds with its own earlier competence and which seems to me incoherently expressed by the new metaphor: ‘No. Go back up, up / like the deep diver with / a severed line, up, quickly’. Why is the line severed? Is this an act of sabotage, or just bad luck? The poem talks its reader into a preference for the world of chemistry, imagined (stereotypically) as a world of orderly manipulations of matter, which nevertheless cannot be a complete refuge from the disorder of the political world. Yet it seems a sinister voice which insinuates that, try as you might to avoid doing so, ‘you hear / the scream in the cellar, don’t / you’ and so presses on the reader a desire for ignorance that is not necessarily the reader’s but that is not displaceable onto an implied reader. Does the diver die at the end of the poem? That would be one possible result of rising too quickly from the depths. Is the act of imagination then being imagined as lethal? It is not so in chemistry; why should it be in politics? In short, the poem has not sorted out what the limits of its own analogy must be. The effect of its final lines is then to renege on the subtler implications of its own metaphoric connection between problems of visualisation in chemistry and in politics, and to push the reader into an attitude of panic which not all readers will want to be pushed into.
Part of the usefulness of metaphor, as Hoffmann has remarked on more than one occasion, is that, properly employed, the inevitably imperfect fit between the metaphor and the thing described should keep the scientific writer honest: ‘A naked metaphor clearly shows the analogy’s limitations, its capacity for misinterpretation and its productive extensions. It aids its creator as well as its audience’ (2006, 407). The problem in ‘Giving In’ comes not with the science, or with the science–politics analogy, but with the late introduction of a false assumption that the political and ethical imagination must flinch and fail – an assumption that starts to falsify a metaphor which until then was working well enough.
Another of Hoffmann’s poems, ‘Grand Unification’, from his 1990 collection Gaps and Verges, does not make that mistake of overweighting analogy:
This is just a rule; strings that meet,
wriggling in their roughened-up space-time,
if their tips just touch, they must merge,
and bigger lines, loops, necklaces or thatchings
self-assemble. This is so. But it is not real,
it’s just a rule. Loops tangle, there is an exchange
of quantum numbers, the stray collision
sets the strings rotating, rippling, a whip
and then the extra snap looses a particle
(boson or fermion) and light, any color. The math
says it must be so. Mind you, this is not: people,
passing, a look that locks on some missed braid
of a future. This is not: a hummingbird’s tie
to the sweet and red, tie testing stasis.
And it is not the interlace of frost, another
season’s nonlinear history of steam meanders.
Nor: rope dancers … For those you need words.
But here just watch the math, follow it across
or around or down, just follow its unhusking
to the small world, where intuition is strung
out as far as it will give, but equations
work as well here as for real billiard balls,
whirling dervishes or galaxies (there is no need
for me to say all this). In this smallness infinities,
anomalies slough off, the loops vibrate, a keen
undulation, clockwise rippling nothingness
in ten dimensions. Twenty-six the other way.
This fits. But it’s not all. The dimensions
must compactify, in a silent crumpling, curling
in of what there’s room for, into inwards’ innards.
The quantum numbers then come out naturally,
strung out on a loop that is gravity, the source
of all interactions. We are so near understanding
everything. I believe, reasons without words,
classy symmetries. It’s a rule. And up scale the sun
shines, frost melts and zing! go the strings of my heart.
This poem plays in the gap between lived reality, where words are necessary for description, and the rule-bound, mathematical domain of string theory, where (if Stephen Hawking and others are right) the grand unifying theory which ties together ‘all [physical] interactions’ will be found. The narrative progress of the poem is towards a declaration of love for those emotional and aesthetic experiences which mathematics will never satisfactorily describe to us (the pathos of missed human interconnections, the beauty of the hummingbird suspended in air at the feeder, the aesthetic effects of frost and steam, the grace of the rope dancer). All these things admit of physical and mathematical descriptions at some level, but all exceed them: ‘up scale’ (on a bigger scale, but also at a higher level), above the classy (or classification-bound) symmetries of mathematics, ‘zing! go the strings of my heart’.
Many of Hoffmann’s poems are structured, like this one, on imaginary oppositions between science and poetry, from which poetry almost always comes out ahead. (See, for example, ‘The Difference Between Art and Science’, from the same volume.) Hoffmann is a Romanticist – if not in style (though the lyric poems describing places tend in that direction), then in terms of his attachment to the idea that poetry expresses the highest achievements of the human spirit. One of the problems is that he is at the same time a famous scientist, and an impassioned proselytiser for science, so that one does not quite believe that the choice should necessarily be for poetry. ‘Grand Unification’ is a stronger poem than some others in that genre, because the language makes connections which run against the grain of the supposed choice or fracture off from it setting different, more complicated ideas running, and keeping the comparison between science and art from hardening into a false moral. The reference to ‘intuition […] strung / out as far as it will give’, for example, visually echoed in the stringing out of the phrase across the line break; the pressure on the verb ‘compactify’ to enact the concision and the compressed energy of mathematical expression; and the recessive play (more noticeable to the eye than to the ear) on ‘in’ (‘curling / in of what there’s room for, into inwards’ innards’) – these things make the poem as attuned to the difficulty of rendering the mathematics of physical chemistry in words as to the difficulty of capturing those more conventional forms of beauty in the world, a bird, frost, a dancer.
One has the sense here of the language of science being, as Hoffmann is fond of commenting in his many writings on the rhetoric and aesthetics of chemistry, ‘a language under stress’. ‘The practice of science demands precise meanings’, he says in an interview with his former student, the physicist and artist Enrique Martinez Celaya – ‘Which must be defined in beautifully imprecise words. Mathematical equations and chemical structures are required to be explained in words. All the time, new concepts, begging for new words, force themselves on us’ (Hoffmann and Celaya, 2004). The message that imprecision and complexity may be more beautiful than simplicity, both in chemistry and in art, is one Hoffmann has worked hard to convey in lectures, articles, books, and via his website (www.roaldhoffmann.com). The duality between difference and identity, he says in the same interview with Celaya, is ‘one of the great dualities’: ‘Subconsciously, the question of identity powers chemistry. This is why I entitled one of my books The Same and Not the Same. When I was younger I was more inclined to see the likeness in things – using one theoretical approach to explain all molecules. As I got older, I found ways to favor difference.’
Favouring difference and imperfection in analogy is a gain for poetry. It does not of itself necessarily save a poem from didacticism – and the risk of didacticism is sometimes there in Hoffmann’s verse, as he himself seems to recognise. He is, by temperament and vocation, a teacher, an enthusiast for the cause of explaining the beauty of chemistry to ‘the partially literate masses’ (2006, 406). Several poems in his first three volumes, The Metamict State (1987), Gaps and Verges (1990) and Memory Effects (1999), read in whole or in part like mini-tutorials in aspects of chemistry or physics. A few have headnotes or footnotes explaining chemical phenomena or acknowledging a source in scientific or technical journals. Hoffmann’s most recent volume Soliton (2002) is more self-ironising on that score. ‘His poems / were not dreamy, but full // of exasperating / facts’, runs a sentence in ‘Fields of Vision’ (ll. 39–42). If the danger for the poems is that the knowledge content of the science will overwhelm, it is worth reflecting more sympathetically that there is a danger for the scientist-poet that he may have access to an audience only because his intellectual authority as a scientist buys him a hearing for poems which wear their knowledge on their sleeve, as it were. Enrique Martinez Celaya asks him at one point:
Do you ever feel that your fame as a scientist may create an aura around the poems, which prevents an honest read, or worse yet, make the poems into curiosities?
One can hear the reluctance to go with the question in Hoffmann’s initial answer before he concedes the point:
Perhaps, in small part. As far as I can tell, submitting my poems on chemistry department stationery has no effect at all on their being read or accepted. The poems about science do a little better in getting accepted than the others. I don’t think they’re better. So maybe they have some curiosity value. (Hoffmann and Celaya, 2004)
Given the difficulties with analogy, and the question of how the authority of the scientist may play into the reception of his poetic writing, Hoffmann’s best poems about science have tended to be those where the chemist’s interest in the problem of visualising the physical forms of molecules finds an outlet in the quasi-concrete formal possibilities of poetry. In ‘Heat: Hot, as _____: Cold’ (Hoffmann and Torrence, 1993, 46), for example, a gesture towards concrete poetry is plainly that – gestural. This is not fully a concrete poem (not a true representation of molecular activity) – but its elements of concreteness allow it to have fun with concepts from chemistry in ways that are common to Hoffmann’s scientific writing, but perhaps not common enough in his verse:
Deep in,
they’re there, they’re
at it all the time, it’s jai
alai on the hot molecular fronton –
a bounce off wall onto the packed aleatory
dance floor where sideswipes are medium of exchange,
momentum trades sealed in swift carom sequences,
or just that quick kick in the rear, the haphazard
locomotion of the warm, warm world.
But spring nights grow cold in Ithaca;
the containing walls, glass or metal,
are a jagged rough rut of tethered
masses, still vibrant, but now
retarding, in each collision,
the cooling molecules.
There, they’re there,
still there,
in deep,
slow
.
The expansion and contraction of the line lengths is the most obvious aspect of play with poetic form here, evoking the molecular expansion and contraction produced by heat and cold. The shape of the poem is also more exactly (and in Hoffmann’s words) ‘an attempt to reflect the distribution of speeds of atoms or molecules in a gas, with the number of molecules plotted horizontally, their increasing speeds going down. i.e. […] the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution, turned by ninety degrees’. The ‘joke’ of the poem is that molecules are, in fact, quickest at the end, not ‘slow’ (personal correspondence). The left-hand margin stays fixed; only the right moves, as if the lines are bouncing further then less far from the wall. Strict typographic mirroring would require the poem to stop at ‘in deep’, but it tails over, deliberately untidy, not quite ‘the same’ at both ends. In the contraction down to that performative molecular full stop, there is perhaps an allusive nod to James Joyce’s Ulysses, to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table and even, according to Hoffmann himself (personal correspondence), to Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981, 171). (The version of the poem reproduced on Hoffmann’s website omits the final full stop, producing a nearer mirror between the opening ‘Deep in,’ and the penultimate line ‘in deep,’. The final line of this version of the text is ‘slowed’, not ‘slow’. There are other significant variants, including the introduction of a line break following ‘warm, warm world.’)
The typographic compaction of the title ‘Heat: Hot, as _____: Cold’ is another kind of formal experimentalism, exploiting the materiality of type. The unexpected compression against the colon at each end, and the visual expansiveness of the underscored word space conjure expansion and contraction without breaking bonds. The incompletion of the title’s analogy (heat is to hot as what is to cold?) which would capture the likeness between molecular activity and the bouncing of balls in jai alai (a variety of pelota) reminds us that metaphors are the thought experiments of science, as Hoffmann himself (2006, 406) has said, and that good ones allow us to see their limitations. In case we are tempted to take this specific analogy too seriously, it is plainly deflated by the flipness of ‘or just that quick kick in the rear’. And a sense of words straining to describe molecular activity is reinforced by the difficulties the poem presents for any reader who wants to vocalise it: how does one read that underscored word space? How, equally, does one read the cold still end point of the poem as it returns from the heated exuberance of jai alai in Spain to the cold of a Cornell winter? How does one signal the cancelled word ‘motion’ that the ear expects after ‘slow’? How does one read the full stop, or as American English would have it, just ‘stop’ (or ‘period’)?
The elements of concretion in ‘Heat: Hot, as _____: Cold’ make it one of Hoffmann’s more satisfying poems about science, because their performative air allows him to be instructive without the poem becoming limitingly didactic. This is, after all, a nature poem (a comparison of climates and, to an extent, cultures) as well as a science poem. The formal experimentation is consistent with the scientific knowledge content of the poems because it represents the effort of visualisation without (as in ‘Giving In’) turning that effort to a false moral. Not that concrete poetry is the only answer or necessarily the best answer for incorporating molecular chemistry into science (too much exploitation of such formal techniques would rapidly become mannerist) – but in this particular case it enables coherence between scientific content and poetic form without the science being bent to a purpose not its own.
III
‘Even a gifted poet and a major scientist in one person, like […] Hoffman[n],’ Miroslav Holub (2001, 55) remarks, ‘cannot render the essence of his science in poems and writes rather about circumstances’. This looks like a compliment, and probably is one, but it also helps to define some of the differences between Hoffmann and Holub, whose writing about science is rarely ‘circumstantial’ in the peripheral sense implied here and whose late poems especially insist upon the hard facticity of their scientific allusions. In the final pages of his lecture ‘Rampage, or Science in Poetry’, Holub looks back over his poetic career and describes a shift away from the metaphoric use of science in an early poem such as the much-anthologised ‘In the Microscope’, to a kind of moral, as well as artistic, emphasis upon the ‘sober’ rationality of science:
In my opinion, the scientific allusions in a poem like ‘The Rampage’ are some kind of anchors in the high sea of feelings, sympathies, hates, impressions, and memories.[…] The poem is hitting a firm ground underneath the relativity of human winning and losing. (2006a, 23)
In ‘The Rampage’, for example, an allusion to adenosine triphosphate is used:
not in the hope a poetry reader would be aware of the cellular energy metabolism, but just as an impressive, hard, reliable, chemical term in an intelligible metaphoric situation. There is nothing scientific about adenosine triphosphates and villous membranes in ‘The Rampage’, but there may be something of the scientific hard-centred approach in the essential idea or theme of the poem, the lingering counterpoint of the cellular drive and the human. (2006a, 18)
One does not have to wait for a late poem like ‘The Rampage’ to find Holub’s interest in using science within poetry being allied to a revulsion against the irrational, anti-progressive tendencies in human affairs, a revulsion that, in the Prague poems most obviously, is often part of the force of his observations on politics. Part of what an early poem such as ‘Home, I’ borrows from Samuel Beckett, for example, is an interest in the intractability of the literal, a wish to protect the literal from the corrosions and manipulations of metaphoric reading. Many other poems from the early volumes are about a kind of political virtue to be found in respecting the stubbornness of facts (‘Zito the Magician’, ‘Inventions’, almost all the classroom poems). But science ups the stakes, as it were, for such an ethical reading, by introducing the idea of a grounding scientific ethos – a ‘hard-centredness’ that ‘Rampage’, the essay, would have us believe is the preserve more of the scientist than of the poet.
Right across Holub’s poetic career, the association of science ‘in the broadest sense’ (2006b, 131) with reason and with the true exercise of freedom produces a strong reaction against Romanticism, against the indulgence of feeling for its own sake, but also against any kind of rigidification of one’s perception of facts into unexamined stability. ‘Energy’ and ‘drive’ are key positive terms in Holub’s critical and poetic writing. ‘The Rampage’ is to that extent typical, turning its description of the cellular battle or stampede of sperm up the oviduct to the implication that nothing about our lives thereafter is as intensely driven as this cellular rush ‘to be or not to be’.
The belief that the facts which are the terrain of science provide a mooring against the flux of perception and emotion is perhaps most obvious in poems like this, which are explicitly about scientific observations under the microscope, but it is discernible also, and more subtly, in the shaping of a particular kind of surrealism in Holub’s poems from his middle and later periods. This is a surrealism toughened by adherence to scientific facts and to the ethos of scientific discovery. Take, for example, ‘Whale Songs’:
At two o’clock in the morning
I hear my mitral valve
from the depth of the dim, blood-filled tunnel
which is me. Cellular receptors
fit with a metallic click
into the locks
and the cells are me and the locks are me.
From some symphonic distance
there sounds the song of the whales,
and it contains me.
In some black castle
Sleeping Beauty has pricked herself on a thorn,
which is me. The clock has stopped
– in our house clocks stop at any moment
because she will prick herself at any moment,
on a tiny crock shard,
on a word,
on a milk tooth,
on a toy that has fallen into the gutter –
and so there’s a still life, nature morte,
with me in the genetic background.
A paper kite stiffens in the air,
and yet, Einstein says, Time is always going, but never gone,
and yet, my mother says, ten years after her death,
Oh yes, oh yes,
and a clock starts again,
the Invisible passes through the room like a ball of lightning,
Sleeping Beauty lays eggs full of little spiders,
and whales re-enter the tunnel
and I start again
being the machine
for the production
of myself.
The progress of the poem is, as often in these lightly surreal poems, a kind of filmic or dream procession from image to image without strong narrative connections. But the poem is at the same time, and more importantly, a lucid description of waking at 2 a.m. with one’s heart hammering, made suddenly conscious of one’s own biological condition, at once alarmed by the portent of death (and the memory of earlier deaths) and reassured by the evidence of one’s own functioning. The whale is a recurrent touchstone of Holub’s poetry – an allusion to William Carlos Williams’s lines ‘There is / the / microscopic / anatomy // of the whale / this is / reassuring’ (quoted Holub, 2006a, 24) – lines that Holub insists should be taken without irony. Einstein’s description of time is also invoked without irony, though his presence in the poem as a source of authority on one’s own continuation has the colour of a joke. It is allusive rather than metaphoric, at once ‘true’ and deliberately out of context. Similarly, the image of Sleeping Beauty about to prick herself and (according to the fairy tale) go to sleep operates at once appropriately and deliberately inappropriately, in that it both mimics and reverses the speaker’s situation – waking alert then feeling self-awareness subsiding again as the body goes back to its normal silent functioning.
Later poems that exploit allusion to science in this manner are, typically, bleaker. This is ‘Intensive Care Unit’, from his last published volume The Rampage (1997):
God’s insects stuck on pins
betrayed heroes of the abdominal cavity.
Cracked faience of whining puppets,
human soul dripping from plastic tubes.
Behind white curtains a scene
from the war of the salamanders
is endlessly getting ready.
And liturgies change
and souls change
and blushings and palenesses change
and winged prophets change
and writers of chronicles change and
gods change.
But amikacin,
the antibiotic,
is the only one.
This is a superficially surreal but at base literal and emphatically secular description of an intensive care ward, in which the personnel of the hospital act out mock-religious ceremonies of attempted cure and the true God, the ‘only one’, is not the doctor (‘gods change’ – small g) but the drug which keeps infection at bay, amikacin, used for treating severe, hospital-acquired infections. The second half of the poem reads as a self-parodic litany – grand and windy, in the way that litany itself is almost self-parodyingly grand and windy. (It is worth noticing, in passing, how well this mode comes across in translation, perhaps because the litanies we are familiar with from the Old Testament and elsewhere are already translations.) The element of parody sets up the pole of ‘poetry’ and poetic language as affecting, familiar, traditional but not very specific – as against the anchoring ‘fact’, the drug that actually works, that will in truth ‘save’ you and that consequently has a name to describe it which is new to the language and new to poetry. (This is surely the first appearance of ‘amikacin’ in a poem.) So the last three lines show how good science and good poetry can coincide in our modern language, as against the parodied idiom of the ancient, though superficially changeable, traditions of verse, prophecy, chronicle.
‘Intensive Care Unit’ would be a triumphalist poem by a scientist rather than an ethical achievement by a scientist-poet if it were not for a persistent undercutting of the authority of science. That undercutting starts with the dehumanised quality of the hospital scene, where patients like pinned insects, gutted carcasses, broken dolls, are subjected to technological solutions to human problems. Readers familiar with Holub’s many poems about puppets will know, on the other hand, that as mimicries of the human they regularly attract a kind of complicated identification in Holub’s poetry – at once endearing and specious – as the ‘Cracked faience of whining puppets’ may be here. The ‘war of the salamanders’ glances at a novel by Karel Čapek, more usually translated as ‘War with the Newts’, a dark satire on Nazi science. Not that the drug itself is sinister, of course. It makes people better. But if the humility of mere accuracy and the sense that drugs should not be treated as God (both of which are exemplified by the poem) are lost, and all is made secondary to scientific progress, then one would be left with Nazi science, a false religion always worshipping the latest drug. That possibility is hinted at, perhaps, in the sinister accuracy of the word ‘amikacin’, which achieves the pure poetry of denotation.
Above all, the structure of litany and parody works to place amikacin at an only temporary apogee. The ancient and parodiable resources of poetic language and tradition are there to show that science, too, is parodiable: gods and winged prophets have changed and by implication always will; the scientific quest is, by the same token, endless and the supreme always provisional. The neologistic aspect of the drug’s name should also alert us that the ‘one’ is not everlasting. Some other drug will come along soon as a better treatment for MRSA and C. difficile. Scientists in their priestcraft are already busy endlessly getting ready the next generation of answers. There is humility even in the precision of the word ‘amikacin’ and the ephemeral quality of its uniqueness – a humility proper to science, and which poetry here takes on through its alertness to the exactness of language required to define something particular and new.
‘Intensive Care Unit’ gives a more justly equitable account of the ethics of science and poetry than Holub’s own last prose writing on the subject does. By making poetry and science work together to record the achievements of science, but also the provisionality of its answers, it resists the antagonistic choice between ‘poetry’ and ‘science’ offered in ‘Rampage, or Science in Poetry’. It goes beyond the ethical case Holub makes there for science as a perceptual anchor for poetry. Science in poetry can be that, but the reverse may also be true: poetry, as this poem shows supremely well, may be a way of anchoring science, of keeping its provisional truths true to their provisionality.