Literature and Science

            Since the middle of the 19th century, the relationship between literature and science in the contexts of both academia and popular culture has been contentious, fraught with problematic ideas about relative value, and decreasingly mutually invigorating. Though a host of more minor contributing factors might also be profitably discussed, such a degradation has, I think, three principal historical causes: the radical re-forming of the American economy by the forces of industrialization and mechanization, the consequent rise of a new middle class precipitated by unprecedented mercantile opportunities, and the increasing ubiquity of specialization as an academic and cultural value—the reshaping of curricula to meet the demands of emerging industries and their dependent networks of trade. As our academic institutions began to reify boundaries between various fields of study through the construction of new departments and the partition of existing ones, gradually establishing more impenetrable divisions between the disciplines, the formerly common blend of belletristic writing and the more explicatory or analytic prose of scientists—easily identified in the work of prominent 18th- and 19th-century writers like Goethe, Lyell, and Darwin—began to recede into relative obscurity and disappear from public circulation. Although the relationship between literature and science was briefly rejuvenated in the middle of the 20th century as a result of widespread, politically-charged enthusiasm for the growing and previously unthinkable successes of the American space industry, not to mention the popularity of writers like Clarke, Bradbury, and Asimov, both science fiction and literary treatments of scientific topics seem to have fallen once more into a kind of regression or decay. Sci-fi novels, for instance, are often relegated by the academy to the nebulous and generally worthless category of “genre-fiction,” an appellation which merely signifies a perceived lack of literary quality or merit. Complex scientific concepts and discoveries are frequently reduced to the new and unutterably useless form of listicles and accompanying photo slideshows. What perpetuates this separation which ultimately degrades both science writing and belles lettres?

            An incomplete, though I think not unjust answer to this question is simply that the division is maintained and increasingly entrenched by the academy. Being a product of the American public school system (and beyond that, being in possession of an advanced degree) I must, nevertheless, confess to a certain degree of scientific illiteracy—at the very least, to some significant and frankly embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of basic concepts. I cannot, despite my decades of education, balance a chemical equation. I cannot name or accurately describe the process by which discrete sets of DNA are ultimately translated into proteins. I cannot even interpret the periodic table beyond identifying an element and its atomic number. This condition of scientific ignorance is not terribly uncommon among those of us who sought careers outside of the so-called hard sciences, and it is no doubt a reflection of the academy’s oddly bifurcated structure.

            However, a pervasive attitude of disdain and skepticism which has existed among prominent literary figures of the last two hundred years has also no doubt exerted a considerable influence on the diminution of productive interaction between science and literature. In a sonnet addressed to the abstracted and personified figure of science, Poe famously wrote, “Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,/ Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?” Poets of the 19th century particularly, if unsurprisingly struggled grievously with the many and far reaching ways in which science was actively transforming their world. Such an unprecedented, blistering metamorphosis as Western societies of the 19th century underwent inevitably conjured profound and various senses of loss and destruction; we are haunted by these even today. In a meditation on the philosophical consequences of the concept of geologic time, Manley-Hopkins lamented,

“…Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned…”

Some, like Manley-Hopkins, bemoaned a realization of humanity’s disquieting smallness in the scheme of nature. Some grieved for faith in gods which no longer seemed to inhabit the earth, rendered relics of our former ignorance, childish impossibilities. Some escaped for an intellectual and spiritual refuge into the texts antiquity’s dead cultures, while others merely witnessed scientific advance and the changes it wrought and contemplated an apocalypse which seemed somehow ineludible.

            In order to gesture toward healing the academic and cultural rift between the humanities and the sciences which has survived into the 21st century, members of all disciplines might learn to view one another’s professions less incredulously. We might learn to place less effort and emphasis on maintaining and creating curricula around problematic ideas about the relative value of different fields of study. Although humanities departments suffer disproportionately from the pervasive belief in the virtue of the practical application of knowledge and our collective conviction in the notion of progress as driven by scientific endeavor, the often bitter, even hyperbolic reactions to these realities—as evidenced by our poets—have long outlived their usefulness. Literature and science, as John Burroughs argued more than a century ago, might live as partners, each serving the invigoration and enrichment of the other. Where science tends to abstract us from nature through the processes of dissection and categorization, by rending nature as a totality into ten thousand disconnected parts, literary treatments of scientific study might effect a meaningful, if largely metaphorical return to nature through a serious contemplation of humanity’s moral, intellectual, and ecological place within it. As for what might ultimately serve as the catalyst for such a paradigm shift in our education system and in our culture at large, I am at a loss. There are great popularizers of science undeniably worthy of our support who, forced by the need to explore complex concepts with laymen like myself, invoke literature and poetry to connect the public with discoveries of profound depth and philosophical implication. For now, we must try to live and work more sympathetically and interestedly with other disciplines. We must learn to appreciate the worth of interdisciplinarity and of a broad base of knowledge, rather than to offhandedly condemn them—as we often do—as shallow, inferior alternatives to specialization and the ruthless, poetry-less scientific deconstruction of our world into discrete, isolated components.