Dirk Vanderbeke
In Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, a science journalist muses about the development of science and literature since the nineteenth century:
It was the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. … The dominant artistic form was the novel, great sprawling narratives which not only charted private fates, but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people read contemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.
Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities, parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and which had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism celebrated formal structural qualities, inner coherence and self-reference. A priesthood guarded the temples of this difficult art against the trespasses of the common man.
(McEwan 1998: 49)
The science that, indeed, became increasingly difficult at the beginning of the twentieth century was physics, which had been, with short interruptions, the master science ever since Newton. The eighteenth century saw a multitude of attempts to extend Newton’s mechanics into spheres traditionally reserved for metaphysical theories and to describe the human rational and emotional faculties in strictly materialistic terms based on causal relationships. Edmund Burke, for example, tried to establish the “natural and mechanical causes for our passions” (Burke 1990: 126), and David Hartley in his 1749 Observations on Man argued that “since the Human Body is composed of the same Matter as the external World, it is reasonable to expect, that its component Particles should be subjected to the same subtle Laws” (quoted in Nuovo 1999: 407).
Despite all the quarrels that have accompanied the discussions between the sciences and literature for the last four centuries, it was Newton’s mechanical worldview that informed the bulk of fiction and even a fair share of poetry, even if the sciences were frequently satirized by authors like Swift or Sterne, or assaulted for their impoverished and reductionist perspective on life by poets like Blake or Shelley. When E.M. Forster defined the difference between story and plot, he made the distinction between “the naked worm of time” (Forster 1988: 42) and “a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” (Forster 1988: 87). In this respect, almost all literature until the present day is firmly grounded in a mechanistic worldview, as that is the physics which may give narrative meaning to our experience. In addition, the scientific innovations of the early twentieth century that not only revolutionized physics but also questioned our perceptions and understanding of reality are of little relevance for the world of human experience.
The theory of relativity is chiefly concerned with the physics of enormous scales, with astronomical phenomena, vast distances, huge masses and movements that approach the speed of light, none of which are likely to have any significant impact on human experience as it is explored in literary works. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, describes phenomena on the sub-atomic level that are equally removed from the sphere of human experience, even if thought experiments, the most famous of which is “Schrödinger’s Cat” (for a fascinating literary exploration, see Bear 1993), discuss the possibility of a transfer to the macroscopic level, and some of the most bewildering phenomena, such as quantum entanglement, are employed for new computer technologies. Nevertheless, when George Gamov published Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (1940), dream stories that present the reader with a world in which the phenomena of relativity and quantum physics appear on the level of human experience, this just gave a literary demonstration of the incompatibility of recent physical theories with our common-sense notions of physical reality.
This suggests that twentieth-century concepts of physics and modernist or postmodernist literature are worlds apart, but nonetheless, some analogies could possibly be found. Jeremy Gray defines modernism in mathematics
as an autonomous body of ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing considerable emphasis on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated – indeed, anxious – rather than a naive relationship with the day-to-day world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group of people, such as a professional or discipline-based group who have a high sense of the seriousness and value of what they are trying to achieve.
(Gray forthcoming: 1)
A lack of “outward reference” can hardly be a suitable criterion for any research in physics, but in the early twentieth century a change towards increasingly theoretical physics could be felt, in which the experiment confirms rather than suggests new theories. After all, it took over a decade to provide the proof for Einstein’s theory of relativity, and what led physicists to accept the new theory almost immediately was not only its plausibility but also its aesthetic quality, frequently described as its “beauty” (Weinberg 1993: 82; I will return to this point in my final section). However, in contrast to pure mathematics, physics can never forgo the ultimate proof, and the “reception of general relativity depended neither on experimental data alone nor on the intrinsic qualities of the theory alone but on a tangled web of theory and experiment” (Weinberg, ibid.).
This complex interplay of theoretical prediction and experimental confirmation is even more significant in the case of quantum theory. If the theory of relativity was soon accepted and Einstein embraced as “a cult figure, standing all at once … as individual genius, pre-war pacifist, post-war conciliator and moral example” (Galison 2002: 86), quantum theory failed to enthuse the scientific community or to reach the lay audience for a considerable time. The counterintuitive character of its theories and the bewildering implications of the experimental data are part and parcel of every introduction to quantum physics. Some aphoristic remarks by the masters of modern physics have gained an almost proverbial status: Einstein’s “God does not play dice” and Stephen Hawking’s reply, “God not only plays dice but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen” (Hawking 1977: 40), Niels Bohr’s “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it” and his response to a fellow scientist, “Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true,” are indicative not only of the strange qualties of the quantum world but also of how hard it is to express this unfamiliar reality in a familiar language. In the late twentieth century, New Age philosophers tried to merge quantum physics with various concepts of Eastern philosophy and mysticism (Capra 1977; Zukav 1979), and the aphorisms of the “scientific gurus” indeed have a koan-like feeling, but it is certainly fallacious to take two highly complex theoretical frameworks which both admit to serious problems of linguistic representation and then conclude that the referent must necessarily be similar (Vanderbeke 1995: 12–14).
Nevertheless, it may still be possible to draw some analogies between aspects of quantum physics and developments in the arts and literature. Foremost of these is the acceptance of an epistemological barrier, an irreducible impediment to any easy access to external reality. Quantum physics has taught us that – until further scientific notice – we can only describe sub-atomic nature as nature-under-observation, and the response of nature to our experiments will necessarily be determined by the observational set-up of the experiment. As the probability wave of the quantum object only collapses in consequence of the experiment and its observation, unobserved nature remains inescapably unknowable.
In ways that are both similar and different, modern literature has turned from the depiction of reality to the exploration of reality as experienced by the observing mind. Virginia Woolf’s rejection of the Edwardian literary tools (Woolf 1980: 332) and Marcel Proust’s scorn for a “cinematographic vision” in literature (Proust 2009: 150) may have sprung from the realization that the new media of photography and film were better equipped for the accurate representation of external reality (Lyotard 1984: 74), but the turn towards the “reality we perceive within ourselves” (Proust ibid.) went hand in hand with new forms of writing which no longer took the original building blocks of language for granted: “Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated, syntax disintegrated” (Woolf 1980: 334). And if physicists responded with some despair to their new findings and the persistent failures to integrate them within the classical paradigms, so did some of the modernist authors (Woolf 1980: 334), facing the new challenges with desperate sincerity and tremendous courage.
In addition, some similarities between the latest concepts in physics and some literary phenomena were suggested by William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity: “Here as in recent atomic physics there is a shift in progress, which tends to attach the notion of a probability to the natural object rather than to the fallibility of the human mind” (Empson 1961: 94). Empson here recognizes an analogy between two kinds of uncertainty in the object rather than in the mind of the observer, but then, Empson was in a particularly good position to realize this similarity, as he studied mathematics as well as English at Cambridge University and showed some interest in the latest developments in physics (Bate 1997). Quite similarly, Wayne Booth suggested in The Rhetoric of Fiction:
Now that the scientists have given up the claim that they are seeking one single formulation of a firmly constituted reality, unaffected by the limitations and interests of the observer, perhaps we (in literature) should once again pack up our bags and follow after.
(Booth 1961: 112)
This is not an argument for following science unconditionally but rather for the correction of the previous mistake of doing so. There have always been attempts to adapt methods and restrictions from the sciences to the field of literary criticism, but now it is time, Booth argued, to reclaim our own premises and paths to knowledge, if even the principles of Newtonian physics, of a single unified theory and an independent neutral observation have to be dismissed. According to this line of thought, scientists have, on a different route, learned to acknowledge some of the principles they traditionally scorned and relegated to the domain of literary scholarship.
This argument for the dependence of the experimental result on the position of its observer has frequently been taken up and expanded beyond its original scope by literary scholars, to show that their own field of inquiry anticipated scientific discoveries and theories. This has, however, to be taken with more than a pinch of salt, and scientists were rightfully annoyed when literary scholars presented the multiple focalizers of a narrative text as equivalent to the relativity of time and space, uncertainty in a character as an analogy of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, or the attractiveness of a femme fatale as an anticipation of a strange attractor. There is a temptation to assume that a similar terminology indicates a common concept or approach, an assumption strengthened by the practice of popular science books to embellish theoretical explanations with epigrams from literary texts that sound vaguely similar. But the terminology of physics is frequently the result of the necessity to give some name to a principle not yet fully understood when it is first encountered, and so the term may sooner or later become an impediment rather than an aid to understanding. When physicists first used the word spin for the property of sub-atomic particles, the planetary model of the atom was still under discussion; by now the word may evoke erroneous associations and assumptions unless we realize that the classical concepts of rotation do not fully apply, if only because some particles have to complete a 180° rotation, some 360° and some 720° to return to their original state. Similarly, the term chaos theory does not indicate that mythical and literary evocations of chaos from Hesiod, Shakespeare, or Milton can be reinterpreted as analogies or even anticipations of non-linear dynamics.
The claim for anticipation, moreover, becomes problematic when a literary text is burdened by several scientific theories it supposedly anticipated. Beckett’s work has been read in the context of quantum physics, chaos theory, and black holes, Borges’s stories as anticipations of bifurcation theory, field models, and quantum phenomena, and every theory can be found somewhere in Finnegans Wake. All these readings are interesting, but if we really suggest that the authors have anticipated each and every development in recent physics, we may not be doing them a favor (see Vanderbeke 2004: 175–243).
One of the persistent points of contention in the discussion of science and literature is the question of influence. Possibly fueled by the anxiety of being relegated to the second rank, literary scholars have frequently insisted on a balance, arguing that science takes place in a complex web of cultural interdependencies to which literature contributes, and thus the trafficofinfluences must be regarded as going in both directions. Few scientists would reject the notion that they work in a social and political environment and within historically contingent conceptual frameworks that have an impact on theory formation and the direction their research can take. However, this does not indicate that science and literature influence each other to an equal degree. Many literary scholars have insisted that such a balance must exist, among them Katherine Hayles:
The premise that influence flows from science to literature implicitly valorizes science as the source of truth to which literature responds. Such an approach ignores the ways in which scientific theories, no less than literary theories and literature, are social constructions that reflect the prevailing concerns of culture.
(Hayles 1989: 317)
With due respect to a scholar of renown, it needs to be pointed out that while scientists strive for independence from external influences, authors actively seek input from all possible sources, and both would fail miserably if there was a balance of influences. Literature responds to developments in art, music, philosophy, the movies, esotericism, and even pornography, yet none of these is automatically elevated to a “source of truth.” Literature is not an empty vessel into which external truth can be poured but rather a predator, searching for suitable matter which it can transform for its own purposes, frequently almost beyond recognition. This is particularly true for literature’s relation to the complex and non-intuitive findings of modern physics, which have been of considerable interest to a host of authors, among them Thomas Pynchon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and John Updike. All of these have acknowledged the influence of physical theories on their work, yet none of them seems to have raised these concepts to any level of higher truth, but rather reworked them into their own creative visions.
The very complexity and strangeness of contemporary physics, however, places it outside the sphere of common knowledge, and while the educated population of the nineteenth century was probably fairly well informed about significant scientific theories of its time, this no longer holds true. Moreover, as neither relativity nor quantum physics is concerned with the physics of human experience, the appropriation of their concepts for narrative purposes poses some problems. In consequence, the introduction of physics into modern and postmodern texts either requires elaborate explanations by the narrator or one of the characters, or else presents the reader with phenomena that are inexplicable and rather seem to bring the text into the realm of fantastic literature. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the protagonist Tyrone Slothrop is mysteriously entangled with the V2 rocket and, as both he and the rocket are linked to the inventor of the strange material Imipolex G, the most radical implication of non-locality and quantum entanglement – everything that has ever been connected within a quantum system remains so – could account for the otherwise inexplicable interaction. Without any further explanation, however, the allusion to quantum entanglement, if it is one, remains obscure and requires some knowledge and creative association on the part of the reader.
Similarly, in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, a novel set in the seventeenth century, various future scientific discoveries are “anticipated” and need to be noticed by the reader, among them the law of gravity (Eco 1996: 363), aspects of relativity (66, 433–34), forces that act by the exchange of particles (167), the “many worlds” theory (66, 267), the creation of the universe by energy and a giant explosion akin to the Big Bang (256), fractals and self-similarity (423–24), and also possibly quantum entanglement. This, however, is hidden in a magical practice, the use of an unguentum armarium or weapon salve to create an instant link between a wounded dog on a ship in the Pacific Ocean and the weapon that cut the wound in England in the attempt to synchronize the time and thus to determine the degrees of longitude. Once more, the reader, hopefully alerted by the other allusions to science, has to notice the similarity between the magical practice and the quantum phenomenon, or else it will go unnoticed.
The alternative way to invoke physics is direct explication, and many recent texts are indebted to popular science books, foremost of all Stephen Hawking’s A Short History of Time and James Gleick’s Chaos. Once a basic understanding has been achieved, the text can then proceed to discuss the implications, an approach often used in didactic novels or “science plays” such as Peter Parnell’s QED to draw connections to other fields of knowledge as, for example, some form of mysticism (Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries), to criticize a science that has lost its relevance for human life (Peter Ackroyd’s First Light), to come to terms with the weirdness of the scientific worldview (Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood), to challenge facile understandings of reality or religious perspectives on science (John Updike’s Roger’s Version), or to discuss the ethics of science (Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists) and discrimination against female scientists (Robert Marc Friedman’s Remembering Miss Meitner).
A particularly interesting approach has been explored by Tom Stoppard, who in his play Hapgood not only treats his audience to a fair dose of scientific explanation but also tries to transfer the phenomena to the world of espionage with its double agents and uncertainties. The epigram to the play is Richard Feynman’s description of the double slit experiment as “a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery” (Feynman 1996: 117, italics in the original). In the course of the play, then, a double agent, a physicist named Kerner, is asked which side he actually belongs to:
KERNER: Oh, you think there’s a what’s what? Your joe. Their sleeper. Paul, what’s what is for zoologists: “Oh, yes – definitely a giraffe.” But a double agent is not a what’s what like a giraffe, a double agent is more like a trick of the light.
BLAIR: Joseph–
KERNER: … Look at the edge of the shadow. It is straight like the edge of the wall that makes it. This means light is particles: little bullets. Bullets go straight. They cannot go round the wall and hit you. If light was waves it would bend round the wall a little, like water bends round a stone in the river.
BLAIR:(Irritated) Yes. Absolutely.
KERNER: So that’s what. When you shine light through a gap in the wall it’s particles. Unfortunately, when you shine the light through two little gaps, side by side, you don’t get a particle pattern like for bullets, you get a wave pattern like for water. The beams of light mix together and–
BLAIR: Joseph, I want to know if you’re ours or theirs, that’s all.
KERNER:I’m telling you but you’re not listening.
(Stoppard 1994: 9)
Empson’s suggestion that ambivalence in literature may share some properties with quantum phenomena is here exemplified, and the dialogue simulates the double slit experiment. The message contains two possible meanings simultaneously, it travels, so to speak, on two distinct paths, and only the question at the end reduces the ambivalence and retroactively states which path of signification has been chosen from the very beginning.
Similarly, in Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, the statement early in the text that the future victim of a murder has found her killer seems straightforward, and the culprit is quite obvious. It is only on the last pages that the reader has to realize that two more possible murderers were present, among them the narrator himself, and that every seemingly unequivocal statement about the assumed killer also applied to the other possible candidates. Once more, ambivalence produces a situation in which a plurality of equally valid possibilities is finally reduced to one, and each previous statement about the future murder has now to be re-attributed. Of course, not every ambivalence indicates the presence of quantum theory as a conceptual background, but in texts that frequently address contemporary physics – which London Fields does – the analogy appears to be more than just coincidental.
The most difficult question facing the relation between literature and physics concerns possible interdisciplinary cooperation and common tools for research. The final decades of the twentieth century saw a succession of suggestions from the humanities and literary studies that science, and particularly physics, could not only be investigated in the light of rhetoric and narratology, but could be reduced to linguistic or literary phenomena. Alan Gross, for example, proposed that “there is no line that can be successfully drawn between rhetoric and scientific knowledge” (Gross 1991: 285), Robert Kelley suggested that “reference in scientific discourse operates in essentially the same way as it does in the discourse of the classical realist text” (Kelley 1993: 137), and David Porush turned this already rather bold claim into a prerogative when he argued that “literary language commands techniques that scientific discourse must adopt if it is going to succeed” (Porush 1992: 302). Such rather simplistic and totalizing intrusions that by implication exclude nature from scientific investigation met with hostile responses from the scientific community, culminating in Alan Sokal’s famous hoax, which to some extent cleansed the atmosphere with a heavy dose of well-administered ridicule. It has become quite clear, and should have been long ago, that some prerequisites are indispensable for interdisciplinary research into physics and literature, i.e. an adequate familiarity with the rules of the game in the respective fields of inquiry, a basic acknowledgment of each other’s work and achievements, and an unbiased willingness to be informed by the practitioners – and none of these requirements precludes a serious critique of science.
Arguably, the most important aspect linking literature and physics is the imaginative process, the creation of a concept or theory, and, like scientific works, novels, plays, or poems are founded on certain epistemologies and concepts of reality, even though the theories are scrutinized in very different ways. Similarities in the creative processes have been emphasized by scholars, but also by scientists, discussing the problem of invention and the epistemological status of their findings. The physicist John Bell wrote on “Six possible worlds of quantum mechanics”:
To what extent are these possible worlds fictions? They are like literary fictions in that they are free inventions of the human mind. In theoretical physics sometimes the inventor knows from the beginning that the work is fiction, for example when he deals with a simplified world in which space has only one or two dimensions instead of three. More often it is not known till later, when the hypothesis has proved wrong, that fiction is involved. When being serious, when not exploring deliberately simplified models, the theoretical physicist differs from the novelist in thinking that maybe the story may be true.
(Bell 1988: 195)
One topic that may then offer itself to a common approach is aesthetics, i.e. not only the creative process but also the intuitive response to objects, texts, or theories that the observer experiences as beautiful or sublime. The acceptance of theories in physics has frequently been linked to aesthetic properties, such as elegance in their mathematical formulation, and it could well be worthwhile to explore the aesthetic features that contribute to theory selection and to see whether they share aspects with the experience of beauty in poetics or the arts. Emphasizing that literature and poetry are quite distinct from mathematical equations and that beauty is notoriously difficult to define, Stephen Weinberg lists simplicity, inevitability, and symmetry as decisive features of beautiful theories (Weinberg 1993: 105–31); Graham Farmelo writes that “like a great work of art, a beautiful equation has among its attributes much more than mere attractiveness – it will have universality, simplicity, inevitability, and an elemental power” (Farmelo 2003: xiv), and some analogy in our response to the respective objects of literary appeal may possibly be found.
However, the search for such an analogy between beauty in physics and in literature may force us to alter our perspective and to revise some cherished concepts of literary excellence. Since the early twentieth century, literary criticism has increasingly celebrated a recalcitrance of literature, a resistance to reading and understanding, a voluntary failure to represent or to communicate. But while these aspects are, unquestionably, significant features of modern and postmodern literature and literary theory, recent research into the neuro-psychological aspects of aesthetics indicates that fluency and smoothness of perception, simplicity in the processing of experience, and also symmetry play a decisive role for aesthetic pleasure (Reber et al. 2004).
Simplicity here, of course, does not indicate any kind of banality, but rather a clarity or lucidity that is fully compatible with the complexity of the phenomena under scrutiny, like a nutshell that enfolds infinite space. And it is not difficult to match this requirement with literary concepts, such as Pound’s statement that “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (Pound 1929: 21), or with a multitude of literary texts that, though simple in their form of expression, have managed to generate not only a neverending flow of complex new meanings and interpretations but also a persistent delight. Research into the creative process and responses to formal aesthetic qualities, then, may form an important link between these fields of investigation, and while the differences have to be emphasized and respected by scholars and scientists, the common interest in, and fascination with, the diverse ways in which we can approach physical reality may offer paths to research into the old human conviction that beauty is truth, truth beauty.
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