The world is a fluent place. Physicists borrow quarks from Finnegans Wake (itself an encyclopaedia of correspondences) and lend allusions of strangeness and flavour to particle behaviour; there are crashing computers and left-handed neutrinos, the selfish gene and parasitic DNA, the slaving principle in critical-point physics, and an efflorescence of colourfully violent Marvel comic imagery in cosmology; while, curiouser and curiouser still, in the very next room deconstructionists and comparative linguists adopt algebraic protocols, literary critics yield to indeterminacy and even social scientists acquire expertise in confidence intervals.
A mere thirty years ago this oddly engineered pangolin of spare-part imagery and transferred epithets would have been shot dead on hearsay, and its carcase quarantined by scare quotes. Nowadays anthropomorphic fiction-making has journalistic licence. In fact, the further we get from the year of Wittgenstein’s death, 1951, the less inclined we seem to be to guard against it. ‘The truth is much more serious than this fiction’, he once remarked about the simple phrase ‘the cussedness of things’, needled (as it were) by the casual way human qualities get rubbed on to things. The implication, post-Wittgenstein, seems to be that fiction is as serious as truth, or that seriousness itself is a faulty qualifier of either truth or fiction.
Then again our society may be more adept than it knows at living with conflicting epistemologies: the history of technology is also a history of language, for the word technology itself, when first used in the time of Leibniz’s De Arte Combinatoria and the universal language projects of Dalgarno and Wilkins, was a term applied uniquely to grammar—to the science of rhetoric. Three centuries later we are casually aware of how that formal syntactic manipulation of experience undermines the very need it determines: for the concrete. Walter Benjamin noticed this long before anyone else. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, he cited this passage from Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World: ‘The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I venture to do so one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence...’. He goes on to make the telling connection: in all of literature he could find no passage quite so reminiscent of Kafka’s prose. The old symbolic understandings have gone, the experimenter is a species of error in his own experiment.
This is the kind of unexpected correspondence that Professor Carey pounces on (although Eddington is represented here by an excerpt from his other writings), and one of the remote kinships that informs The Faber Book of Science. Science writing, for that is what a fussier title might have suggested—The Faber Book of Popular Science or Story-Telling in Science or Literate Science—has become a nearly fashionable genre; more and more writers are adopting scientific ideas, while more and more scientists find they can maintain a good income as popularising writers. The genre even has its house rag in the Journal for the Public Understanding of Science. While far from ‘[plotting] the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to Chaos Theory’ as the dust-jacket claims (what kind of book would that be?), Professor Carey’s anthology is both challenging and conciliatory. He isn’t afraid to stick his neck out: ‘[science writers] have created a new kind of twentieth-century literature, which demands to be recognised as a separate genre, distinct from the old literary forms’.
What is this new genre? If it is separate then it has something to do with the specificity of what’s being told. Scientists do the telling, and have to tell stories about science to people who are not scientists. While the goal of a general public understanding of science might have been still possible in the time of the Edinburgh Review and de Quincey (even then there were knockers), scientists least of all would presume such things possible now. Our ways of using words are too sectoral, too mutually exclusive. Scientists who write are guided by their readers’ appetite for sensation and ignorance of the subject-matter: anything that emerges from such a process can only be second-rate art, and because the standards of scientific communication have ceased to bear any relation to what passes for good literature, cannot be very good science either. Texts that require a firm grasp of mathematics, like James Clerk Maxwell’s brilliant work on the movement of gases and electromagnetism, resist glamorisation. Literature has no use for progress, and writers—who have no choice but to invent their own problems—cringe at the user-defined status enhancement packs scientists carry around on their backs like the academicians in Swift’s Lagado (jargon). How can the paradigms of what Wittgenstein called ‘our disgusting, soapy-water science’ become the gorgeous bubbles of art? What can literature make of the impersonal? Is facticity a fetish worth having?
Between the obvious selections—Galileo on his telescope, Priestley on dephlogisticated air, Leuweenhoek on his little ‘wolves’, Ronald Ross’ discovery of the malaria protozoon in the gastric tract of the Anopheles mosquito, Pierre and Marie Curie scouring pitchblende for radium in their backyard, the invention of electric light—the book contains well-edited extracts from Malthus and Erasmus Darwin, Huxley and Maxwell, a chillingly objective account of parasitic wasps immolating a cricket by Fabre (which Proust, closer to the source, uses waspishly himself in Swann’s Way), Stephen Jay Gould’s sad account of the doyen creationist Philip Gosse, Primo Levi’s story of a carbon atom from The Periodic Table, Armstrong and Aldrin on their moon landing, Oliver Sacks’ classic case-history The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Richard Dawkins—‘It is raining DNA outside.’ We find science as knowledge, and science as method, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Some very obscure journals have been ransacked for their booty. Kekulé’s dream-inventions of the nature of enantiomers—handedness in chemistry—and the aromatic structure of benzene come from the Journal of Chemical Education 1958, 35: 211. (Kekulé’s dream of the latter was to all intents a mythic reappearance of the alchemist’s symbol Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its tail, and clearly too disreputable a source of enlightenment for the 1985 meeting of the American Chemical Association at which two participants flatly refused to accept his story, committed to print like the story of Newton’s apple, long years after the event.) Max Born’s article on quantum mechanics with its proleptically accurate machine-gun imagery is taken from his inaugural lecture at Edinburgh in 1936. Carey has discovered naturalistic impulses in odd places: Maeterlinck, Berlioz at the anatomy table, Steinbeck on sea cucumbers and lice, Orwell on toads, Calvino on a gecko’s belly (but no Proust or Kafka on the airplane, and no Bouvard or Pécuchet, or Zola—the problem being, presumably, to know where to draw the line). Most satisfying of all, in many ways, are the editorial montages where Carey boxes unlikely characters into the framework of a common idea: Freud and Auden; Lamarck, Shaw and Richard Wilbur (it could have been Mandelstam); Lyell and Tennyson; and Roentgen’s X-rays hauled up to apotheosis in the sanatorium on The Magic Mountain. We get lost, pleasantly enough, in detail.
To venture a first definition of this new genre, we would have to say that science writing bespeaks a kind of exceptionalism: it offers either exceptional individuals (Nobel-prize-winning sperm-donors) succumbing to the fairly standard temptation of the Promethean style (‘The solution came to me in a flash’, ‘arrived out of the blue’, ‘hit me like a bomb’), or alternatively, humdrum scientists of modest literary talent in an exceptional situation (which hardly ever happens to be a laboratory). Above all, it has a problem distinguishing ends and means, since the goal of science under controlled conditions can rarely if ever have been to turn a phrase: the discipline of a science is quite a different order of experience from imaginative needs and wants.
A passage of Scientific Sublime of the second type entirely unknown to me comes from William Beebe’s Half Mile Down (1934), an account of a record ocean-dive in a steel bathyscaphe, to depths previously thought lifeless:
After a few minutes I sent up an order; and I knew that we were again sinking. The twilight (the word had become absurd, but I could coin no other) deepened, but we still spoke of its brilliance. It seemed to me that it must be like the last terrific upflare of a flame before it is quenched. I found we were both expecting at any moment to have it blown out, and to enter a zone of absolute darkness. But only by shutting my eyes and opening them again could I realize the terrible slowness of the change from dark blue to blacker blue. On the earth at night in moonlight I can always imagine the yellow of sunshine, the scarlet of invisible blossoms, but here, when the searchlight was off, yellow and orange and red were unthinkable. The blue which filled all space admitted no thought of other colors.
Beebe’s passage is eerie and calm, a reconstruction after the event that has been worked on to render the shape of mythic time. Ideas become as heavy as objects, and objects lose their solidity. The literariness of the passage pulls the reader up short: what is striking about scientists generally is their naïve realism, their unselfconsciousness about the non-scientific implications of what they do. Something of the same reconstructive intensity happens in Nabokov’s imagination, which rarely if ever functioned at normal atmospheric pressure. The stroke of a butterfly wing above the Oredezh river leads across the walls of time to the convolutes of the most pictorial of autobiographies, Speak, Memory, itself a ‘diabolic’ reworking of another memoir called Conclusive Evidence: ‘by 1910, I had dreamed my way through the first volumes of Seitz’s prodigious picture book Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde…’
As a corollary to the boldness of predictive theory, overambition is almost the defining characteristic of modern literature. Much of twentieth-century literature is a running commentary of misunderstanding in the wake of the sciences. In some cases, the misunderstanding itself became the creative principle: William Carlos Williams developed his new American ‘objectivism’ on the assumption that conventional prosody was Newtonian and his freeing of the metrical fulcrum a shift not entirely dissimilar in its impact to Einsteinian relativity. More fool Williams, one might think, but Carey reproduces part of his very curious poem ‘St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ just to remind us that after Williams came an entire line of major misunderstanders: Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan and Creeley. Even though we may mock Williams’ immodest assumption of relativity theory for his poetry, some of his poems did succeed in articulating a new appreciation of experience, with something like science’s attitude to its material (take his wonderfully exact description of the cyclamen); and it’s interesting to read Miroslav Holub’s declaration—Holub being one of the very few who excel in both science and writing, and a countryman of Kafka to boot—that his first forays into poetry were made by applying the Williams maxim ‘no ideas but in things’. As Holub might say, what poetry has come to be aware of is that it lacks any equivalent for the velocity of light.
One problem is that as science has expanded so has the guilt of literate people about their ignorance. W. H. Auden, who was an avid reader of precisely the type of Scientific American prose included in this book (if only, as someone once wickedly suggested, to see how things had moved on since Lucretius), practically admits that the humanist cupboard is bare: ‘art is the spiritual life, made possible by science’. Nobody reads a novel nowadays to know how we live now, V. S. Naipaul once said (to Ronald Bryden): ‘today, every man’s experience of dislocation is so private that unless a writer absolutely matches that particular man’s experience the writer seems very private and obscure’. Indeed, Carey suggests that ignorance of the natural world has become an aesthetic problem in the arts. He cites the blankness of his own honours students, all intelligent and articulate, but unable to tell him when discussing the speculative Donne line of 1612 (written sixteen years before the publication of Harvey’s De motu cordis) how blood gets from one ventricle to the other. Comparing Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker entirely to its advantage with Martin Amis’ Einstein’s Monsters he states: ‘from the point of view of late twentieth-century thought, Dawkins’ book represents the instructed and Amis’ the uninstructed imagination’. This is a moot point (and unfair on Amis; I would have rather he’d rubbished Jeanette Winterson’s pretentious Written on the Body), and Haldane was saying much the same thing in the last great era of scientific and literary exchange, before war snuffed it out.
Presumably there is more than one form of instructedness. Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘the popular science books written by our scientists aren’t the outcome of hard work, but are written when they’re resting on their laurels’. This is the Wittgenstein, we should remember, who studied mechanical engineering at Manchester, co-designed the house for his sister at 19 Kundmanngasse, and assassinated the old dream of a universal language. He represents the view of science as an activity that stuns into summation, or as Goethe put it in his argument with Newton, ‘the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber’.
There is little sense of the havoc this tradition of linguistic scepticism once wreaked in the philosophy of science, perhaps because Carey’s scientists are predominantly Anglo-American. A poet from the same culture as Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, provided the most succinct statement of a man paralysed by the failure of words to effect any kind of transaction with reality, and it is no accident that young Lord Chandos should address his fictional letter to Francis Bacon (who first invoked the authority of nature against the tenets of scholasticism and is prominently placed in Carey’s foreword as an example of the instructed imagination).
Or take Robert Musil, one of two scientists to write a defining novel of the twentieth century (the other is the Italian Carlo Emilio Gadda). Two years after publishing his novel Young Törless Musil completed his thesis on Ernst Mach’s theories of causality and scientific language. He never renounced his commitment to a philosophically rigorous and scientifically informed way of thinking. Realism was a way to gain reality for the novel in competition with science, an aim itself derived from a bowdlerisation of the scientific paradigm; and while he upholds the intense denominativeness typical of scientific discourse, his oeuvre deliberately abandons the unequivocality of a scientist’s language, the illusion it gives of always being in control. Even in Musil’s time the notion of science as disinterested activity was old hat. ‘The truth is’, he has his protagonist Ulrich say, in that chapter in which it dawns upon him that he is a man without qualities, ‘that science had developed a conception of hard, sober intellectual strength that makes mankind’s old metaphysical and moral notions simply unendurable, although all it can put in their place is the hope that a day, still distant, will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.’
The problem science poses for modernity as Musil writes it, is not one of meaninglessness, but of valuelessness. The unfinished The Man without Qualities is an examination of the value of experience, and the metaphors by which its characters live. Even within his large novel the essay was always Musil’s privileged mode. This is a problematic choice, since the essay as a mode sets out unaware exactly where it might end up, a reason for writing that is liable to have the person ostensibly holding the lead dragged away for what may be a very long digression indeed. ‘What is truth; said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.’ That was Francis Bacon, again, in the first great collection of essays in English. The essay is a didactic tease.
In light of which Carey could perhaps have included in his selection, as an example of humour in science, a wonderfully funny short parody by the French writer Georges Perec of the material-and-methods style of formal discourse scientists use when they talk to each other (Sir Peter Medawar bluntly called it ‘calculated hypocrisy’), anonymous first-persons-plural addressing their dictaphones after a round of ‘sacrifices’ in the animal cages. ‘Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)’ offers an analysis of throwing tomatoes at divas under controlled conditions, and can be found in the slim volume of the same name. Perec even had the courtesy to write it in that international vehicular language with the simple-Simon syntax known as English.
Tomatoes (Tomato rungisia vulgaris) were thrown by an automatic tomatothrower (Wait & See, 1972) monitored by an all-purpose laboratory computer (DID/92/85/P/331) operated on-line. Repetitive throwing allowed up to 9 projections per sec, thus mimicking the physiological conditions encountered by Sopranoes and other Singers on stage (Tebaldi, 1953). Care was taken to avoid missed projections on upper and/or lower limbs, trunk & buttocks. Only tomatoes affecting faces and necks were taken into account.
Control experiments were made with other projectiles, [such] as apple cores, cabbage runts, hats, roses, pumpkins, bullets, and ketchup (Heinz, 1952).
A kind of unintended humour, if not parody, is commonly found in science writing’s major modes: the mind-stretching (‘gee-whizz mode’ corresponding to the traditional literary idea of the Sublime) or the explanatory (‘faction’), which might, if we want to be fussy, be further subdivided into interpretative, resolutive or expository approaches. Since we have the Merton Professor of English acting as treasonous clerk, in Leavis’ eyes at least, it would have been good to have known a little more about the formal structure of rhetoric in science (though in all fairness perhaps beyond the remit of the book), about the phoney feeling that creeps over many scientists when they are expected to discuss their discipline in non-specialist language. If the facts won’t speak for themselves, then who or what does? What kind of a narrative is it that sets out to flatter the reader’s ignorance? What happens to the peculiarly exacting literalism of scientists when they abandon the reality of phenomena? Don’t we all live parallel to the age to science anyway?—although I know how aspirin works, I still haven’t grasped what my neighbour up the road told me last week about cosmic microwave background radiation. It seems strangely appropriate that when asked to explain what he had just lectured on, the brilliant mathematician Paul Dirac repeated word for word the explanation he had given the first time.
Indeed, the sceptic might notice that any kind of science writing requiring more than a modicum of mathematics has long since been given up as a lost cause. Language is, of course, used metalinguistically in many sciences—as Stanislaw Lem, a glaring omission and one of the few writers who knew his way around axiology, might have said. The sceptical reader might also wonder at the many kinds of science explaining which sidestep language altogether. He might have tried explaining in words how the HIV virus specifically attaches to a cluster designation 4 (CD4) molecule on the surface of a T-lymphocte, or how ‘chromosome walking’ is initiated using an identified gene to pick out clones containing adjacent sequences; and having put the ‘same’ information in graphic form seen what a difference ‘picture theory’ makes to comprehension (Leonardo da Vinci had a related problem: he was an uomo senza lettere who couldn’t communicate fully with the learned men of his time because he was unable to speak Latin). Our sceptic might be startled at the editor of this book cheerfully and willingly exposing himself to charges of first-order philosophical naiveté. He might feel much of current interest in science and writing is simply confused or misguided, and the conflation of genius and pop culture to be another Californianism. Hard science has to leave ambiguity and polysemy outside in the cloakroom; it requires semantically reliable words and sobriety, and any form of narrative which deliberately courts the metaphor, that tool of imitative magic, had better watch its step. If I remain faithful to a metaphor, wrote Kafka in the guise of his investigating dog pondering the mystery of his dogdom, ‘then the goal of my aims, my questions, my enquiries, appears monstrous’. In another dimension: science writing easily becomes to science what Walt Disney is to fairy tales.
These kinds of arguments don’t dismay Professor Carey. He does his best to make good those old taboos, anthropomorphism and animism, showing how the better science explainers use them adroitly to engage the reader’s understanding. Instead of being embarrassed by animism, for example, he recruits it as an ally: we cannot help but invest our humanity in the things around us. Perhaps a more subtle Darwinian justification for the mixed genre approach to the language of science writing is the increasing recognition of how patterns emerge within non-equilibrium biological systems solely by virtue of the cooperative dynamics of the system itself; that the ordering parameters of culture and science might at a deep level work like those of language. Here our sceptic might add: and all myths reflect the societies they come from, including myths about language, and in the way they rank their ontological priorities reflect what a society refuses as much as what it accepts.
Science writing—like any kind of writing—is always risking the metaphor: it cannot help but be partially affected by the assumptions and imagery of its time, but then forgets that in a discussion about conflict in nature a metaphor—with its slippery, proximate, leap-frogging metapharand—is now being treated as a literal in human affairs.
Think of Copernicus and Kepler, or the severely rebuking editor’s note that Peacock inserted into his edition of Thomas Young’s Reply to the Animadversion of the Edinburgh Reviewers of 1804 in which Young first developed the idea of the propagation of light as a waveform based on his experiments years earlier with sound in organ-pipes. The survival of the fittest in the struggle for life is also, as the Encyclopedia britannica entry reminds us, a metaphor: ‘fittest’ hardly ever implies a particulate genotype but an array of genotypes which enhance population survival; ‘survival’ does not require catastrophe to make for effective selection; and ‘struggle’ does not mean Achilles versus Hector. These are rhetorical terms; and in any case the entire expression chimes like a tautology. (Darwin actually argued for the comparative, the fitter, not the superlative: what may be beneficial under one set of circumstances may be a hindrance under another.) It is surely extraordinary too that ‘selfish’ has been used to characterise the gene, when what is intended is something like ‘optimising’. No wonder the Tree of Life looks wormy. Fit metaphor is image and idea, as Aristotle said in his Poetics. At which level we might recognise Darwin’s insight, sub specie linguae, to be the flip-side of Ovid’s continuity of forms (and note in passing that metamorphosis was Kafka’s way of purifying his writing of metaphor). It is a characteristic of pseudo-science that it relies on the suggestive force of words rather than hard instances or actual models.
There are disappointingly few poems in this anthology. Professor Carey claims there are very few poems ‘about’ science tout court: he should read more poetry. He includes a piece of dated bluster by Ted Hughes which illustrates all the worst anthropomorphic aspects of being awed by science, but inexplicably fails to include anything by Marianne Moore, A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Edwin Morgan, Holub himself (‘Metaphors face extinction / in a situation which itself is a metaphor. / And the whales are facing extinction / in a situation which itself is a killer whale’) or even James Fenton’s campily ironic Victorian revampings of the Pitt-Rivers Museum and Lyell’s Principles of Geology in his sequence Exempla. Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris de choses is the closest thing the twentieth century offers to Lucretius, but it isn’t here. Coleridge’s quip is advanced as an explanation for poetry’s bias against science: ‘I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton’, and the lack of science-mindedness among poets attributed to an unjustified assumption of superiority. Yeats put it even more defiantly: ‘The discoveries of science can never affect reality’; his reality, he meant. In fact, with the notable exception of Hugh MacDiarmid, most poets have avoided the heroic mode in science not because they feel superior to it, but exactly for the opposite reason, as Auden’s humble-pie aphorism illustrates. There is a broad array of poems on science that would quite flatly gainsay both Coleridge and Yeats, proving that Wordsworth’s famous prophecy in the preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads of the day when Science ‘shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood’ has substance after all.
According to Professor Carey, science and theology are not mutually antagonistic since the latter ‘might, without any paradox, be regarded as a science, committed to persistently questioning and reinterpreting the available evidence about God’. True enough; but the Bible does not present hypotheses, it affirms revealed truths. It was the church and science as institutions that were at loggerheads, for both were religion’s claimants: what was the rationalistic essence of Protestantism became, a generation later, the Scientific Revolution. The most powerful impetus of the latter was the search for hidden divinity (as attested by every page of Newton or even Locke, with his Most Knowing Being), and even in the Enlightenment science was still entangled in the search for authority: pantheism made something of a comeback in the nineteenth century. Yet Musil noted that the human mind began to win its most tangible successes only when it jettisoned the notion of God. Even so, ‘the notion that haunted him [The Man without Qualities] was this: “Suppose precisely this ungodliness were the appropriate contemporary way to God! Every age has its own way there, corresponding to its most potent spiritual resources: might it then not be our destiny, the destiny of an age of ingenious and enterprising experience, to reject all dreams, legends and sophistries solely because on the heights of discovery about the natural world we shall turn towards him again and shall begin to achieve a relationship based on experience?”’ A recent broad survey suggested that about forty percent of American scientists believe in some kind of Supreme Being, exactly the same percentage as recorded in a similar survey at the start of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, Carey suggests science is an enterprise which, by its very mode of conviction, is fatally vulnerable to contamination by politics. Science’s lack of place for moralizing—the very substance of politics—is, he asserts, a condition of its strength and purity. Who could doubt it? Even so, he blithely skirts any (Frankfurt School) idea that modern politics may have hatched out of the same disintegration of the social body as the technosciences, and ignores the troublesome complicity between violence and technology. Take, for example, the curious link between Pasteur’s development of the germ theory and his hatred of mass society and socialism, which is mentioned in a brief biographical excerpt in the book. The scientific credentials of Pasteur’s vindication of the germ theory were never at any point advanced or retarded by that hatred. But they were deformed; and half a century later we find Louis-Ferdinand Céline, doctor and novelist, risking the Pasteurian metaphor in one of his scabrous anti-semitic books where he talks about the Jews as a bacteriological inoculum. The recurrence of Pasteur’s concept in such a debased, excessive form should suggest what is really at work. Myth in the modern scientific context tries to justify itself with facts, since facts always appears to mean something by themselves, thereby dispelling just those questions of value Musil was so interested in.
The implicit moral thrust to Carey’s own argument is: we should be sparing with metaphor. Why add to the world’s available reality when there’s already so much there? The overinvestment in metaphor and magical technological energies characteristic of some science writing (some people call it science fiction, but it might just as profitably be called inverted archaeology) may simply be a way of hiding the essentially pedestrian nature of the original activity. I was gratified to find confirmation of this in Miroslav Holub’s wonderfully breezy book The Dimension of the Present Moment, where he maintains that administrative duties, cleaning up, telephoning, waiting in queues and being a citizen effectively account for ninety-five percent of his working time, leaving a less than significant amount of time for interrogating the null hypothesis.
All things considered, there are some splendid texts in this book, none of them so preoccupied with discovery as to obliterate the hum of the real. Carey enlarges the imaginative boundaries of an issue that should be of pressing importance to our culture; there may simply not be enough unprejudiced participants. There is no better description of how we respond imaginatively to scientific explanations of our world than Lévi-Strauss’ introduction to his book Histoire de Lynx: ‘everything occurs as the converse of oral societies in which hard facts (connaissances positives) were very much inferior to the powers of the imagination. In our society, hard facts exceed the powers of the imagination to such an extent that the only resource of the imagination, incapable of apprehending the world even as it is being revealed to it, is to turn towards myth.’ That is exactly what Musil expressed with aphoristic lucidity in The Man Without Qualities: ‘we have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream’.
As things are, I prefer to read Kafka to Eddington, not necessarily because Eddington is a terrible old bore but because Kafka in his weightless way allows for what we might call the possibility of failure. That is the one quality in our long history of defamiliarisation with ourselves that science, and science writing all the more so, cannot risk. Science is a successfully unstable venture, successful because it is unstable. One crucial distinction between writing and science is that failure in the latter is kin, not just etymologically, to falsity. Where imaginative writing is helpless in the face of reality, it is only by trying and failing, and failing better, as Beckett tried to do again and again, that he encountered that sense of not-quite-arriving we call reality. The first writer to tell us that was another Irishman, Laurence Sterne, who, for all the literary high jinks he got up to as he journeyed around Europe in that age of lamplighters and lucifactors, kept insisting all we have is a ‘terribly weak human voice’.