Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan: The Third Culture Novel [1st ed.] 978-3-030-16374-7;978-3-030-16375-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction (Rachel Holland)....Pages 1-33
Two Cultures in Competition: Martin Amis’s The Information and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd (Rachel Holland)....Pages 35-59
The Postneuronovel: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge (Rachel Holland)....Pages 61-86
Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction (Rachel Holland)....Pages 87-117
Scientific Transcendentalism: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Rachel Holland)....Pages 119-149
Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View (Rachel Holland)....Pages 151-187
Conclusion (Rachel Holland)....Pages 189-200
Back Matter ....Pages 201-211

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan The Third Culture Novel

Rachel Holland

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Catherine Belling Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial Board Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Rachel Holland

Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan The Third Culture Novel

Rachel Holland Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-16374-7 ISBN 978-3-030-16375-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: BlackJack3D/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Sheona

Acknowledgements

Firstly, my sincere and heartfelt thanks go to Mike Greaney for his invaluable input, advice and mentorship throughout this project. I will always be grateful that I had the opportunity to explore and develop my ideas with someone who is insightful, perceptive and unfailingly enthusiastic about the study of literature. I am also very grateful to Arthur Bradley for his excellent reading suggestions, particularly in the areas of my research relating to contemporary philosophy. Andy Tate and Brian Baker have provided me with helpful feedback on draft chapters, for which I thank them both. Thanks are also due to Patricia Waugh for her input in the latter stages of this project, more specifically her suggestions relating to novels of entanglement and the potential futures of the third culture novel.

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Two Cultures in Competition: Martin Amis’s The Information and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd 35 3 The Postneuronovel: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge 61 4 Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction 87 5 Scientific Transcendentalism: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 119 6 Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View 151 7 Conclusion 189 Bibliography 201 Index 209

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The novel is a medium which is constantly adapting. It possesses the ability to absorb material from an array of sources, incorporating and modifying this material to suit its purposes. Perhaps more so than any other art form, the novel has roamed across discursive boundaries throughout its history, stretching, yet never quite undermining, the definitions which sustain it. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his work in the 1930s, famously outlined the impurity and omnivorousness of novelistic discourse. His concept of heteroglossia describes the ceaseless variety of different types of languages which circulate in culture—languages which are informed by diverse world views, values and meanings, always existing in dialogue with each other. The novel, for Bakhtin, allows this dialogue to take place within its pages, where the languages of heteroglossia ‘all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically’.1 In contrast to this plurality, ‘the entire methodological apparatus of the mathematical and natural sciences is directed toward mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves in words, that do not comment on themselves’ [italics in original].2 1 M.

M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 269–422 (p. 292). 2 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, 351.

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_1

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This book will trace the emergence of a new phenomenon in contemporary Western fiction, one in which authors attempt to incorporate scientific conceptions of mute objects and brute things into the space of the novel, in a manner and to an extent not previously witnessed. What I am calling the third culture novel is, in part, a response to the upsurge in interest, most apparent in the last two to three decades, in popular science. Associated with the work of Martin Amis, William Boyd, Richard Powers, David Lodge, Michel Houellebecq, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, this new strand of fiction engages with elements of popular science in a number of ways. These include: researching and relaying information gleaned from scientific publications; challenging or promoting ideas presented by science writers; exploring the moral and ethical implications of these ideas; and testing the limits and capabilities of the novel in relation to scientific discourse. This study will argue that the status and significance of science have undergone a marked and ongoing process of change in the period under discussion, and that this change has impacted upon the novel, particularly the serious literary novel, to a large degree. As elements of science mutate and expand to trespass upon the territory of the novel, the novel conducts a form of counter-attack through its requisitioning of certain aspects of science. The third culture novel incorporates material from neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence, pharmacology, cosmology, mathematics and physics, but it also conducts a dialogue with a particular conception regarding the claims to certainty and objectivity associated with science, sometimes over-simplifying or subsuming all of science under this interpretation. The more radical concepts emerging from quantum theory in the twentieth century are largely overlooked or sidelined in the third culture novel, and instead, it is the more traditional truth claims of science which are of interest to these authors.3 Dominic Head notes the presence in contemporary fiction of ‘an anxiety about the function of the novel that has been brewing for a significant period of time, through modernity and into postmodernity’.4 I would suggest that this anxiety is intensified by the increasing and altering social significance 3 Notable exceptions to this trend include Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2007), novels which all draw relativizing conclusions from the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and which will be discussed further in the conclusion. 4 Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 5.

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

of science, which, while on the one hand offering creative opportunities for writers, threatens to appropriate the traditional concerns of the novel on the other.5 The term ‘third culture’ is one which originates, it seems, with C. P. Snow as a response to criticism of his lecture, outlined below, on the lack of understanding between the two cultures of science and the humanities as they stood in 1959. The social sciences, for Snow, represented an opportunity for combining aspects of what he had previously characterized as two cultures. The term did not, despite Snow’s wishes, become associated with the social sciences, and since Snow’s initial postulating of it, the label ‘third culture’ has resurfaced numerous times as something of a utopian ideal, in which a discourse is imagined based on combining the strengths and capabilities of the traditional two cultures. The term has been used by Charles Davy, John Brockman, E. S. Schaffer, Kevin Kelly and Curtis D. Carbonell, in each case as a title for a book or essay, and in each case also as a label designed by these writers to describe a vision of a future direction (perhaps already in its nascent stages) which will, in their view, benefit our too-rigidly binary culture. The novelists studied here do not consciously or intentionally ally themselves with these various attempts at achieving and labelling a third culture, yet the urge to create a new, less-restricted discourse, one that draws on elements of science and the humanities, is the same. The third culture novel is engaged in a discursive tussle with certain aspects of science, which are in turn competing with elements of humanities culture. The prize for both disciplines is what they perceive to be a third space which encompasses important ideas from both cultures, yet transcends the limits associated with either one in isolation. Third culture novels attempt to constitute this separate, omniscient space, asserting their belief in the unique capabilities of literature in the process. This introduction will provide an outline picture of some important aspects of the relationship between science and humanities culture as it stands at 5 David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2010) provides some interesting comparisons in this context. Shields expresses frustration at what he terms the ‘predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless’ nature of literature that follows a fictional model (p. 118). He advocates the blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction in order to better represent the nature of the contemporary world. Shields is not particularly interested in scientific conceptions of reality, but he shares with third culture novel a desire to make literature more real, albeit through a different set of processes and priorities.

4  R. HOLLAND

present, revealing the ways in which this relationship informs the themes and concerns of the third culture novel. It will also interrogate and problematize some of the ways in which the term ‘science’ is being used, and some of the uses to which the term is being put, in contemporary culture.

Two Cultures Revisited The sciences and the humanities have not always been conceived in terms of the binarism to which we have now become accustomed. Various cultural commentators date the commencement of tensions between the two cultures at differing times, but what they agree upon is, in Stefan Collini’s words, that ‘throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the interpretation of nature was generally regarded as but one element in the all-embracing enterprise of “philosophy”’.6 In fact, the term ‘scientist’ was not a part of common usage until as late as the 1830s or 1840s, when it came to represent specialized practice in the natural sciences. John Cartwright and Brian Baker focus on the relations between science and literature in particular, suggesting that ‘the very boundaries between [the two] shift and weaken as we travel back earlier than the eighteenth century’, when both disciplines operated under a broader conception of knowledge.7 Most commentators mirror Cartwright and Baker’s approach, which is to posit the existence of several ‘episodes’ in which ‘the sense of a fundamental opposition’ between the two cultures has been ‘felt and aired’ (p. 265). The five most important of these episodes can be summarized, in very simplified terms, as follows: • The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth century, which Jonathan Swift satirized in his 1704 Battle of the Books. Swift depicted a tale of anthropomorphized tomes in St. James’s Library, which he set at war with one another in order to represent the opposing viewpoints of the scientifically minded ‘moderns’, such as Francis Bacon, who championed new discoveries

6 Stefan Collini, “Introduction” to C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), para 4. ACLS Humanities ebook. 7 John Cartwright and Brian Baker, Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 265.

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

and the power of reason, versus the classically trained ‘ancients’ who stood for the wisdom and insights of the past. • The Romantic revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wherein a cultural anxiety could be detected regarding the growing influence of the utilitarian preference for measurement and practicality, perceived as being the enemy of imagination and natural morality. A certain romantic concern about science is expressed by Wordsworth’s description of ‘our meddling instinct’ which would ‘murder to dissect’ in his poem “The Tables Turned” (1798). • The debate between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley concerning the relative value of an education focussed on the sciences or the humanities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Arnold responded to assertions from the well-known biologist that training in the sciences was more desirable for society than the prevailing classicism which he saw Arnold as representing by claiming that all of the most worthwhile scientific texts fell under the rubric of literature. • The Snow/Leavis controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which, for most, encapsulates the major issues surrounding any historical or ongoing debate between the two cultures. C. P. Snow, a physical chemist as well as a novelist, sparked an unintended row with the literary critic F. R. Leavis when he bemoaned, in a public lecture at Cambridge in 1959, the lack of communication and understanding between the sciences and the humanities. Snow and Leavis both made exaggerated and, at times, inaccurate claims in a series of lectures and essays, but, as the first chapter of this study will outline, their debates struck a cultural chord which continues to resonate. • The Science Wars of the 1990s in which a small number of the scientific community took issue with what they regarded as the fashionable but risible claims of a small number of scholars from the broadly postmodern humanities, which would relegate the truth claims of science to an equal (and equally constructed) status with all other forms of discourse. In a similar manner to the Snow/Leavis controversy, the significance of the science wars has tended to become over-inflated, and the viewpoints from either side of the two cultures divide over-simplified.

6  R. HOLLAND

What all of the above examples reveal is best described by Patricia Waugh’s assertion that relations between the two cultures have, historically, been the most strained when ‘one form of knowledge lays claim to the exclusive title to all knowledge’.8 Each of these ‘episodes’ is undergirded by fear on the part of representatives of one or both of the two cultures concerning what they perceive to be the imperialist ambitions of their counterparts. This book will argue that the contemporary moment is witnessing a further such episode, in which members of the scientific community are appropriating methods and concepts more traditionally associated with humanities culture in order to aid the creation of a system of values and beliefs based on the ennoblement of science.

Transcendental Scientism When asked by the Guardian Weekend Magazine, in an interview carried out in October 2014, what his chosen superpower would be, the physicist and media don Professor Brian Cox replied that he would wish ‘to make everyone think rationally’.9 The most cursory interrogation of this statement serves to highlight the many ethical and practical issues raised by Cox’s choice (a Marxist, e.g., might suggest that it would be rational for the successful television presenter to redistribute his wealth amongst the masses, and a neo-Nazi might argue that it would be rational to adopt eugenics in order to rid the world of its weaker members), so that it is worthwhile to consider what it is that Cox actually has in mind when he envisages a society based on ‘rational’ thinking. A clue may lie in the fact that Cox is also a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association, one of the central tenets of which is to ‘look to science instead of religion as the best way to discover and understand the world’.10 Cox’s rational thinking is one which is linked in some way to the scientific method, and it also sets itself in opposition to religious practice and thought. It might seem quite natural for a physicist such as Cox to privilege scientific understanding over any other discourse, yet what is interesting about his stance is not just the dogmatism that 8 Patricia Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–59 (p. 34). 9 Brian Cox in The Guardian Weekend Magazine, 11 October 2014, p. 12. 10 “Humanists UK”, https://humanism.org.uk/, accessed 19 November 2014.

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

it implies, but the fact that the desire to instate a particular, startlingly simplistic, version of reason as the only acceptable model of thought is becoming representative of a small but vocal (and influential) number of the intellectual community. From Richard Dawkins extolling children and young adults to find wonder in ‘The Magic of Reality’11 to Alan Sokal requesting that society recognize the importance of ‘the scientific worldview […] in humanity’s collective decision making’ [his italics], there is a growing sense that science is viewed, in certain quarters, as being a vehicle through which to shape beliefs rather than simply a method and a discipline.12 The pervasiveness of popular science books, programmes and websites suggests that this shift is also reflected in broader society. The ‘I fucking love science’ web page, for example, created by blogger Elise Andrew while studying for a degree in biology in 2012, has over 19 million followers on Facebook at the time of writing. Andrew, in a reflection of the success of her site, has recently been made curator of The Science Channel’s new digital television channel Sci2, as well as collaborating with the online branch of Discovery Channel to create a video series based on her page. IFLScience provides links to articles relating to new scientific discoveries or research, but it also displays inspirational quotations from eminent figures in science, intended to show that ‘science’ can be beautiful. An exemplary recent post shows a quotation from Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel Contact (although the website does not reveal the source of the quote, merely the name of its author), which reads: ‘You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other’ and is prefaced by the words, ‘Whoever said science can’t be romantic?’13 The fact 11 The phrase is taken from the title of Dawkins’ 2011 book which aims to inform youngsters of the scientifically observable facts underlying phenomena which have previously been explained in mythical terms. Dawkins also preaches about the wonder he finds in science in his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, whose title is intended to serve as a rebuff to Keats’s claim in his 1820 poem “Lamia” that science, under its commonly used title of the time ‘philosophy’, will destroy the ‘mysteries’ of the natural world. 12 Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi. 13 “IFL Science”, https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience?hc_location=timeline, accessed 21 November 2014.

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that Carl Sagan was a practising scientist as well as an author is the only possible link to science that the website can claim for these words, yet in the same way that Brian Cox appears to find no contradiction in, on the one hand, rhapsodizing, to a backing track of emotive music, about the ‘amazing’ and ‘beautiful’ nature of the cosmos as it is explained by science in his television series Wonders of the Universe, and, on the other, demanding rationality from all humankind, ‘I fucking love science’ seems unconcerned about the problematic nature of the attempt to ­conflate Sagan’s fictional writings with the practices of his scientific career. Of course, Andrew is a scientific popularizer where Cox is also a practising scientist, but the rhetorical sleight of hand utilized by both of these public figures, whereby science is venerated as being somehow magical and worthy of reverence at the same time that it is used to ­promote ­evidence-based reason, is similar in each case. Sharon Ruston notes, in her introduction to a collection which explores the interfaces between literature and science from the middle ages to the present day, that ‘popular science writers have made it their career to enthuse the public with a sense of wonder at the natural world’, and that they approach this task without the healthy ­self-interrogation which characterizes academic English studies in particular.14 I would suggest that, in some cases, as illustrated by the above examples, this sense of wonder is being directed at the ways in which science conceives of the natural world, or even that science and the natural world are conflated into an all encompassing framework which is then lauded as deserving wonder. Patricia Waugh highlights the ‘oracular’ nature of much recent popular science writing, arguing that biology in the 1990s took a ‘creationist turn’ whereby scientists ‘had come to regard themselves as approaching the last frontiers of knowledge, empowered to give an account of beginnings and ends whilst continuing to insist that the methods of positivist science are the only avenue to knowledge of the world’.15 Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate explore this territory further in their groundbreaking study of what they term the ‘New Atheist Novel’, defined by them as a genre in which we can ‘trace the literary reception of the New Atheism’ as represented by 14 Sharon Ruston, “Introduction” to Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 1–12 (p. 6). 15 Patricia Waugh, “Science and Fiction in the 1990s”, in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005), 57–77 (p. 62).

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the work of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.16 For Bradley and Tate, a central tenet of New Atheist thought is that ‘not only must evolutionary biology be recognized as irrefutably true, but it must also be universally acknowledged as beautiful, awe-inspiring and even poetic’ (p. 9), and New Atheist fiction becomes ‘the acceptable face of transcendence’ for both these novelists and the intellectuals by whom they are influenced (p. 11). This book owes a debt to Bradley and Tate’s study, particularly the ways in which they expose the gap between science as a discipline and the political and ideological uses to which science is being put by certain elements within the public intelligentsia, but where The New Atheist Novel focuses specifically on the ways in which science is pitted against religion in contemporary fiction, my analysis posits the emergence of a third culture novel as a further permutation of a broader social zeitgeist. What we are witnessing is a tendency, gaining cultural currency in a manner that has not previously been witnessed, to stretch certain aspects of science beyond its traditional (and self-defined) remit as a set of practices which value objectivity and experimentally verifiable proof. Science is coming to take on new and varied forms of significance—it is being transformed to the extent that a different terminology is now required in order to distinguish between science as a set of practices and science as a system of belief. In this book, I propose the use of the term ‘transcendental scientism’ to describe this new discourse in which the viewpoint that science constitutes the only viable and definitive form of knowledge is complemented by and conflated with an attempt to promote the perceived consequences of this viewpoint to the status of an overarching set of values and beliefs. Transcendental scientism blurs knowledge and meaning, and it also veers towards the blurring of the scientific method with the objects and artefacts which science studies, with the notion of ‘wonder’ often providing the glue that holds the two together. Transcendental scientism is thus a paradoxical form of rhetoric, since it seeks to create an abstract model out of the idolization of concrete knowledge, repressing or eliding the problems raised by this approach. Transcendental scientism has the potential to carry broad cultural and political implications, particularly since the main target of some of the more combative of its proponents, increasingly so since the attacks 16 Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), 11.

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of 11 September 2001, has been religious thought in its many forms, but for the purposes of this study, the primary focus will be on the ways in which contemporary novelists have responded to a cultural climate in which certain aspects of science, and the material world which is its main object of study, have come not only to assume increasing visibility, but also to commandeer approaches and areas of inquiry traditionally associated with the literary humanities. Transcendental scientism grows out of, and harks back to, the traditions of Enlightenment rationality and liberal humanism and, for this reason, shares links with literary realism, as the chapter on Ian McEwan will reveal. The roots of the current circumstances, wherein transcendental scientism can be seen to be staking claims on ground that has been left partially abandoned by a relativized humanities culture, can be traced back through several historical periods, as the first chapter in particular will briefly illustrate. Where previous historical periods have witnessed clashes between the ‘two cultures’, though, the years from the early 1990s onwards have revealed a stronger impulse than previously seen, from certain quarters at least, towards the creation of a third culture in various guises.

Narrating Science In a study which is arguing, then, that the use of the term ‘science’ is becoming increasingly problematic in relation to contemporary culture, decisions must be taken regarding what terminology is appropriate when discussing the ways in which science is understood and represented by the various novelists and public figures being analysed. The philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers draws our attention to the difference between the practices of science, and what happens to science when it is removed from those practices and becomes a subject that is being relayed or discussed in some way. Its strict rules of objectivity and the requirement for verification by a community of experimenters might seem to separate science from other disciplines, but Stengers argues, The sciences, as they are taught, that is, as they are presented once their results are unlinked from the practices of science “as it is practiced”, do not have a meaning that is appreciably different from a religious engine of war, pointing out the path to salvation, condemning sin and idolatry.17 17 Isabelle

Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 25.

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This suggests that as soon as science comes to take on any form of meaning, it is open to critique of the sort that would undermine the very foundations of its disciplinary code. It is as though the only way in which science could genuinely adhere to its definition of itself is by being ‘dead’ science—never sharing, publicizing or even thinking about the results of any of its experiments. But science, of course, represents so much more—both to its proponents and to the culture of which it is a part—than a set of rigidly prescribed practices, and, in fact, it is rare that when the term science is used it is with the meaning suggested by its own definitions. This expansion of usage is not necessarily a concern in itself, especially since the findings disseminated by the practices of science often impact upon numerous areas of society. Where problems arise, I would argue, is when science is used in a broader sense, one in which meaning, value and morality is implied, but is still assumed to possess the same objective characteristics as when it operates as a practice. When science becomes transcendental, it also tends to become imperialistic, but the justification for this imperialism—the value that it perceives in its adherence to reason and verifiable proof—becomes far more complex and problematic when a transcendent position is assumed. A prominent recent example of this kind of discursive simplification is evinced by Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience, which borrows a term originally coined by the philosopher of science William Whewell to describe the ‘jumping together’ of disparate facts in order to form a unitary theory. As Wilson’s colleague Stephen J. Gould points out, though, Wilson changes Whewell’s original meaning into ‘an extension and alteration’ which entails the reduction of all aspects of life to the physics of basic constituents.18 Wilson is a proud reductionist, justifying his approach by asserting that ‘if brain and mind are at base biological phenomena, it follows that the biological sciences are essential to achieving coherence among all the branches of learning’, and, equally, ‘given that human action comprises events of physical causation, why should the social sciences and humanities be impervious to consilience with the natural sciences?’19 Wilson takes facts discovered within the practices

18 Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities (London: Vintage, 2004), 193. 19 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (London: Abacus, 2001), 9, 88.

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of science—the physical causation underlying events in the universe and the biological bases of the human brain—and extends them into practices which operate according to completely different rules and measures. He assumes that the objectivity which helped enable the discovery of these facts will carry over into their expansion to the realms of the social sciences and humanities, possessing an inherent moral framework as a result. He moves too readily, in Gould’s formulation, from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, confusing the material substrates which underpin our behaviour with ethical decisions that continually need to be made.20 In Wilson’s formulation, the very fact that ethical precepts exist makes them ‘likely to be physical products of the brain’, meaning that ‘genes predisposing people toward cooperative behaviour would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole’ (p. 282). In comparison with this common-sense model, Wilson suggests, ‘the melanges of moral reasoning employed by modern societies are, to put the matter simply, a mess’ (p. 283). What Wilson fails to acknowledge is that, even if the physical sciences can one day create models to describe what he calls the ‘instinctual algorithms’ (p. 283) underlying our moral decisions, there would remain many unanswered questions and many necessary decisions to be taken. As Gould argues in his far more subtle and balanced manifesto for ­‘conjunction’ between the two cultures, ‘no factual conclusion of science […] can logically determine an ethical truth’ (p. 17) because ‘science, by its very nature as a quest for factual understanding and explanation, cannot prescribe a moral resolution to any question’ (p. 140). Gould, like Stengers, is alert to the differences between divergent practices and alert to the fact that certain questions are beyond the reach of scientific method. Just as the humanities should not aim to explain the laws and behaviour of sub-atomic particles, science should not attempt to swallow ethics under its rubric. Ethical decisions can, and should, be informed by information disseminated from science, but that information, once it is transferred to an ethical framework, becomes fundamentally different from when it was produced. What the above discussion aims to illustrate, in terms of my choice of terminology, is the fact that whenever the word ‘science’ is used—by myself as a critic, by the novelists under discussion and by other cultural commentators and public intellectuals—the traits which characterize 20 Gould,

243.

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science as a practice become immediately problematized. Once science is removed from its very specific practices, it is inescapably imbued with meaning and, as a consequence, can no longer be understood in purely objective terms. In this sense, there is actually no science in this book at all, despite the central place it occupies both in the title and in the analysis. I have though, for reasons partly of practicality but mainly in order to mirror current cultural usage, chosen to preserve the word science throughout the discussion, without utilizing quotation marks or other appendages which would highlight the problematic nature of the term. Instead, the word is left to stand in its own right, with the understanding implicit that the complexity which it carries is recognized. Added to these complexities is the more nuanced matter of how the type of science that is being discussed will have an effect on the questions of objectivity, rationality and certainty that are so important to the novelists being studied here. Evolutionary biology, for example, will necessitate the use of narrative in a way that mathematics and physics will not (or, at least, to a greater extent than these two), and neuroscience raises more problematic questions regarding consciousness and subjectivity than does the sometimes equally controversial science of genetics. However, these novelists tend not to draw direct attention to the question of divergence between the factual and objective claims of the various branches of science which they negotiate, but instead present each one as an attempt to assert a certain kind of truth, or to represent a realm that is closed off to human subjectivity. Even as the research which is relayed is often very precise, science is represented as much as a world view or a mindset in these novels as it is a specific practice, particularly when it is being compared to a literary mindset. Having said that, the branch or branches of science which each novelist chooses to incorporate into their schema will mirror or in some way support the aims of that novel, and this is often also related to the generic leanings of each text, as the chapters which follow will make clear.

The Third Culture Novel The third culture novel is, in part, an attempt to solve the problem of how to narrate science, without stripping it of its very status as science. At the same time as this, the third culture novel can be seen as a symptom of a problem: that of the long-standing and still unresolved territorial dispute between art and science. The objective and rational qualities

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of science are respected in these novels, and its findings are represented through diligent research, but science is used as a rung over which the novel climbs towards its own overarching space. In this sense, science is a tool utilized by these novels to provide intellectual material and relevance in a changing era, but a tool which also possesses the potential to damage the discourse which employs it. At the same time that narrative alters science, science can undermine narrative when its methods are adhered to closely. For these reasons, the relationship between literature and science in the third culture novel is a dialogical one, but it is also always a conflicted one, even when it may appear on the surface that affairs are harmonious. It is possible to delineate certain characteristics which unite third culture novels, such as Amis’s The Information, Houellebecq’s Atomised or Franzen’s The Corrections, although at times, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these novels can be seen, after Derrida, to be ‘participating’ in literary genres which also have their own unifying traits.21 The question of why third culture novels have come into existence in the last two or three decades is one which is more difficult to answer in any definitive way, but one to which I will provide some suggestions based on my own and others’ observations. My definition of a third culture novel takes three separate but related strands, summed up by the following prerequisites: • An interest in, and a sense of the significance of, the material, physical, non-linguistic universe. • An interest in contemporary scientific understandings of this universe, particularly those relating to genetics, neurology, mathematics and cosmology, as well as a curiosity about scientific understandings of objectivity. • A strong tendency towards a meditation on the novel, which is compared and contrasted with each author’s conception of a scientific worldview, leading ultimately to a defence of the novel. Third culture novels also often, but not always, display ambivalence, if not outright antagonism, towards a particular conception of literary and cultural theory, sometimes positing liberal (post)humanist values as an alternative to what they see as a problematically relativized 21 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”, trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 55–81 (p. 65).

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

(and overly-influential) body of work which places too much emphasis on language and the human subject. Of course, the above definition (or at least parts of it) could be made to apply to earlier novels throughout literary history, but what sets the novels under discussion here apart is, on the one hand, their place in a broader cultural and intellectual moment, and, on the other, the extent to which the first two parts of the above definition threaten to undermine and problematize the third part. Contemporary novels are unavoidably steeped in the various facets of what Richard Rorty has termed the ‘linguistic turn’, meaning that the concept of the material, physical universe and its relations to humanity has enormously altered connotations than it would have, for example, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells.22 In this sense, the significance of the term ‘third culture’ is tied to a particular historical moment, one in which humanities culture is shifting from a position of dominance to one that is less secure. This is not to suggest that previous historical periods cannot be said to have produced their own type of third culture novels, but rather to stress that, when the term is used in this study, it is with an assumption that the contemporary moment informs the discussion. The history of the novel is a relatively short one, and in no other moment of its lifespan has anxiety about the role and function of literature coincided with the sort of threat represented by the degree of intellectual imperialism being witnessed on the part of transcendental scientism. The novels which form the main focus of this study are not the only contemporary fictions which engage to a significant degree with material gleaned from science. Other notable works include Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman (2003), Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2007), Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr. Y (2007), Gavin Extence’s The Universe Versus Alex Woods (2013) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2013). These books will be given more attention in the conclusion to this study, but for now it is worth outlining the reasons why they have not been included under my definition of a third culture novel, despite their obvious fascination with scientific culture and scientific conceptions of reality. The novels mentioned above differ from one another 22 Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

16  R. HOLLAND

in their attitude and responses to science, and in the types of science with which they primarily engage—for example, Gut Symmetries, Ghostwritten and The End of Mr. Y are most concerned with quantum physics and are attracted, albeit in different ways and for different reasons, to the relativizing potential of that branch of science. Flight Behaviour, on the other hand, is most interested in ecology, using scientific approaches to the behaviour of butterflies to forward arguments concerning climate change. None of these novels, though, operate according to the dialectical model found in the third culture novel, whereby science and humanities culture are placed in opposition to one another in order for the novel to transcend this binary. The third culture novel operates according to a model of conflict and competition not found in other contemporary ­fictional engagements with science. The term ‘third culture’ is most readily associated in current times with John Brockman—a literary agent to popular science writers—who popularized it in his 1995 collection, comprising essays by scientists, philosophers and mathematicians in sympathy with his aim to have science communicate directly with the general public. Brockman also founded the Edge Foundation as an offshoot from The Reality Club, with the purported goal being ‘to arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves’.23 In reality, though, it is only a specific kind of ­‘complex and sophisticated mind’ which is allowed publicity on Brockman’s Edge website: that which is steeped in scientific understanding. In 1995, Brockman argued, There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it, and it is the intellectuals with these new ideas and images – those scientists doing things and writing their own books – who drive our times.24

Brockman’s polemical stance seems in part to be a reaction against what he saw as the undeserved dominance of ‘a quarrelsome mandarin class’

23 “Edge”,

edge.org, accessed 25 November 2014. Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 21. 24 John

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

of literary intellectuals, which his ‘third culture’ aimed to challenge.25 In fact, several contributors to the volume made it their task to bring down the towering intellectual despot, represented, it would appear, mainly by literary critics and reviewers. Witness Paul Davies, for example, a physicist and cosmologist, lamenting the fact that scientists are being ‘stamped on by an intellectual mafia’, and Nicholas Humphrey, a research psychologist, suggesting that ‘such people, who are used to being dominant in our culture, are suddenly scared. Since they don’t understand science, their only defence is to say that it doesn’t matter’.26 Literary intellectuals are presented in this kind of discourse as being almost scandalously stubborn and blind, yet also unaccountably powerful and influential, occupying a position which is clearly seen as desirable by the self-proclaimed new breed (it is, after all, ‘scientific’ metaphors that are ‘driv[ing] our times’). The target of much of the spleen of transcendental scientism, as we have seen, has shifted, particularly since 9/11, from literary intellectuals to those who give credence to the religion of any kind. The landscape is now a very complex one, in which the literary culture to which the novel is affiliated is no longer quite so central to the debate.27 Third culture novels, as we shall see, share similarities with Brockman’s interpretation of the term, but they also possess crucial differences. For Brockman, the third culture is little more than the takeover by his version of science of a cultural arena that has been dominated for too long by an undeserving minority—the third culture entails an ousting rather than an amalgamation, with his side occupying a vacated space where it might have aimed for conflation. Third culture novels are less apparently strident in their antagonism towards scientific culture, and they are motivated, in part, by a genuine interest in the implications for humanity of new ideas and paradigms disseminated by scientific research, but what they share with Brockman’s position is a desire, ultimately, to promote their own discipline over and above any other. By pitting science and humanities culture in opposition to each other, third culture novels gain a dialectical 25 Brockman,

19. 25. 27 Martin Willis, for example, referring to the Arnold/Huxley debate in the late nineteenth century, suggests that ‘from a twenty-first century perspective Huxley’s efforts to claim authority for science over literature seem entirely moot’. In Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave, 2015), 36. 26 Brockman,

18  R. HOLLAND

‘leg up’ into a desirably separate third space which provides them with the opportunity to transcend the perceived limitations of the other two intellectual behemoths. Third culture novels negotiate a complex set of roles and relations: They are both within and outside of humanities culture, which, of course, is by no means a unified or uncomplicated set of methods, practices and signifiers. They are also, at times, both within and outside of various facets of scientific culture, from explorations and explications of recent research to engagements with transcendental scientism. At the same time as this, third culture novels often negotiate a strained relationship with literary and cultural theory, particularly in its postmodern and poststructuralist variations. Third culture novels reflect a popular, and often simplified, conception of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the way that they present and interrogate theory—a conception generally associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and others. Derrida’s assertion ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ has come to stand as a byword for a set of ideas which deny any meaningful existence of the world in itself (outside of language and the social signifiers which are by-products of it), along with the notion of a stable, unified human subject, the value of truth and the belief in progress based on reason.28 From Lacan’s argument that ‘it is the world of words which creates the world of things’29 to Foucault’s prediction that man as historical construction will one day ‘be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’, these theories ushered in an era which was at once posthumanist, since it deconstructed the human subject, yet also dependent on the human realm of language for its philosophy.30 28 The quote is from Derrida’s De la Grammatologie, originally published in French in 1967. In her 1976 translation to English, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak chose the term ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ to capture Derrida’s meaning, even though the literal translation is closer to ‘there is no outside-text’. This slippage of meaning, despite being fitting when one considers the central tenets of Derrida’s thought, which stress the deferment and difference which characterize the operation of language, highlights the ways in which a certain strain of poststructuralism came to stand, in a way which was often over-simplified, for theory as a whole. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. 29 Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968), 39. 30 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387.

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

The areas that transcendental scientism is attempting to colonize are those which these novelists perceive as being left unguarded or even dismissed by these somewhat simplistic understandings of theory—concepts such as truth, individuality, moral responsibility, social values and the progress of mankind. Despite the fact that cultural theory is a diverse and complex body of work, full of internal differences and disputes, ‘theory’, for many, has stripped the humanities of the weapons with which to fight this scientific incursion, so that these novels often represent an attempt to belittle, undermine or go beyond ‘theory’, often utilizing concepts gleaned from science, though never in a straightforward or unproblematic way, in order to accomplish this task. As Michael Greaney argues in his study of the uses of theory in contemporary fiction, though, the very act of attempting to banish theory from within the novel’s midst, of ‘envisioning its demise or disappearance’, ensures that it enjoys ‘a rich and indefinitely prolonged afterlife in the pages of contemporary fiction’, and third culture novels prove no exception to this rule.31

Why Science, Why Now? So what reasons can be suggested for why science has come, in the last two to three decades in particular, to assume new kinds of cultural visibility, leading the novel to respond in the ways that it has? It is not so much the case that there is one apparent and decisive explanation for this occurrence, but rather that several important developments have conspired to bring about the circumstances being witnessed. Contemporary philosophy, too, is currently experiencing a period of revived interest in the significance of the material world to thought, an interest which has links to scientific method and enquiry. Gathered together under the banner of speculative realism or speculative materialism, this ‘new breed of thinker’, in the words of Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, in contrast to ‘the repetitive continental focus on texts, discourse, social practices, and human finitude […] is turning once more toward reality itself’.32 For the editors of the first collected volume of 31 Michael Greaney, Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 160. 32 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy”, in The Speculative Turn: Continental and Material Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 1–18 (p. 3).

20  R. HOLLAND

essays from thinkers whom they unite according to the principle that ‘all of them, in one way or another, have begun speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally’, there are three or four key reasons why certain facets of philosophy are effecting this shift (p. 3). Bryant et al. mainly attribute the move away from previous philosophies which have tended to ‘mostly ignore scientific results’ (p. 17) to the challenges raised by ‘the looming ecological catastrophe […] the forward march of neuroscience […] and the ongoing breach of the divide between human and machine’ (p. 3). Philosophy, of course, is a separate discipline with its own history and aims, but links can be drawn between developments in this field and those occurring both in the novel and in culture more broadly. As science is moving in to the human in a variety of ways, other disciplines are withdrawing from a particular conception of what the human is—a conception which has enjoyed a great degree of intellectual predominance in the latter part of the twentieth century. What is often referred to as the ‘standard social science model’, after a paradigm identified in 1992 by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides which conceives of the human subject in terms of a performative construct, is coming to be seen by some as inadequate for confronting not just the sorts of challenges outlined by Bryant and his co-editors, but also the challenge posed by science making inroads into the province of subjectivity. Transcendental scientism champions the sort of humanism associated with the Enlightenment—it proceeds, in other words, as though the last several decades of strong critique of the ideals of progress, truth and individualism are merely a blip on the record of human endeavour, brought about by an insufficient adherence to reason. But at the same time that transcendental scientism aims to occupy a position from which the humanities have largely departed, new research from various branches of science not only mirrors many of the conclusions reached by the broadly postmodern left, but actually threatens to outstrip their relativist credo. As Patricia Waugh points out, ‘scientific assertions that might have produced appalled responses from humanists thirty years or so earlier, seemed [by the year 2000] seamlessly continuous with the world-picture being assembled in much contemporary literary and cultural theory’.33 Waugh refers chiefly to the writing of the human genome

33 Patricia

Waugh, “Science and Fiction in the 1990s”, 58.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

map in 2000, yet other discoveries and innovations can be added equally to her assessment. The ‘forward march of neuroscience’ and the ‘ongoing breach of the divide between human and machine’ referred to above similarly comport with a cultural relativist viewpoint which denies traditional concepts of human uniqueness and agency, along with that perennial bugbear of most consciousness scientists: the ‘ghost in the machine’. As machines and humans come to resemble one another to a degree which far surpasses any previous historical period, and as machines comprise a significant proportion of our daily lives (many would extend this analysis, in a posthumanist vein, to include a significant proportion of our identities), notions of what constitutes a human being have been destabilized from both sides of the two cultures divide. For American novelist Jonathan Franzen, science has impeded the cultural status of the novel in a more tangible sense, since ‘modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction’ than does literature because media such as ‘television, radio, and photographs’ are ‘vivid’ and ‘instantaneous’.34 More recently, he has also criticized new e-book technology which he believes will damage the ‘sense of permanence’ which bound novels create, going so far as to argue that this will be damaging to society as a whole.35 To the suggestions provided by Franzen, Waugh and Bryant et al., I would add some proposals of my own regarding the question of why science has come to assume an altered cultural significance in recent times. The polarization between certain factions of science and the humanities reached its peak, perhaps, in the now infamous ‘Sokal hoax’ of 1996, wherein physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in having a bogus article published in the journal of postmodern cultural studies Social Text despite it being a peer-reviewed journal. The article, entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, spun together scientific fact, made-up nonsense, and Sokal’s imitation of current postmodernist jargon, in a purported attempt to undermine scientific truth claims by unmasking indeterminate elements from Sokal’s own discipline. This affair served to embolden an

34 Jonathan Franzen, “Why Bother?”, in How to Be Alone (London: Harper Perennial, 2002), 55–97 (pp. 65–66). 35 Jonathan Franzen quoted in The Telegraph, 29 January 2012, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society. html, accessed 8 November 2014.

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already flourishing popular science market in its commandeering of narrative techniques and readers’ imaginations in order to claim ownership of concepts such as beauty, wonder and truth. This metaphorical ‘moving in’ to the human was followed the same year by a more literal one, when the cloning of Dolly the sheep by scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh raised questions in the public consciousness about how long it would take science to rewrite the rules of human reproduction and identity in the same way. As advances in science have impinged upon areas of the human that remain somehow sacred or taboo to many, whether in a religious sense or simply a personal one, the popularizing arm of science, represented, amongst many others, by David Mills, Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, John Brockman and Richard Dawkins, has either felt the need or sensed the opportunity to provide a narrative through which to attempt to make sense of this. Alongside this infiltration into the human, other factors, I would suggest, have contributed to a renewed desire for rational certainty—a desire which has tended to be projected upon science. Rapid advances in information technology have meant that knowledge has been democratized to an extent not previously witnessed, so that information which was previously only available to a specialized few can now be accessed by the determined web-surfer from the comfort of their home. As teaching in schools and universities remains largely divided down a two cultures split (where even the more multidisciplinary North American system reserves certain concepts for certain faculties), popular science finds a gap which formal education is yet to fill. At the same time that the Internet democratizes knowledge, it also multiplies our contact with other viewpoints, meaning that social values and ethics can seem (perhaps alarmingly) diverse. When combined with the recent threat posed by religious fundamentalism (and perpetuated by the Western media), the certainty which the humanities have largely shunned has been claimed by a significant section from within the orbit of science. Transcendental scientism tends to go hand-in-hand with atheism, and the rise of the religious right in America in particular has given impetus to pro-science movements there and further afield. As religion becomes increasingly linked with political decision-making in the USA, and lobby groups such as the Christian Coalition continue to expand their influence in government, science has come to be seen by many of those opposed to this blurring of the lines between church and state as the most appropriate and effective check and balance. The religious right has been

1 INTRODUCTION 

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gaining in its influence in American politics and culture since the end of the Second World War,36 so this phenomenon predates the rise of the third culture novel, but the tensions created by the continued growth of conservative Christianity play a part in the cultural conditions surrounding its development. The novels studied in this book were all written from the 1990s onwards, perhaps reflecting, indirectly, a kind of rehabilitation of science and technology in the post-Cold War period. Science, in a world in which the threat of nuclear apocalypse is no longer quite so significant, need not be equated with monstrosity to the same extent. Instead of threatening physical life on earth, science now sits unsettling closely with our notions of who we are, meaning that the third culture novel is impelled to share its concerns with some of those of science. Martin Amis, for example, is haunted by ‘Einstein’s Monsters’ in the 1980s, but preoccupied with the plethora of ‘information’ circulating from science in the 1990s. This expansion of certain aspects of science into the province of meaning has pushed the third culture novel towards the transcendent space which always characterizes it, as it fights to defend the role of the novel in a complex cultural moment.

Critical Perspectives The novels studied in this book have not yet been given attention as a collective phenomenon in contemporary fiction by critics working in the field, despite many of the authors enjoying high standing and significant attention for many decades. Part of the reason for this, I would suggest, lies in the fact that the third culture novel stems from a lineage which has become somewhat marginal in literary criticism of the last three or four decades: the sort of serious literary novel that tackles, or sees itself as tackling, the ‘big’ questions of what it means to be a human being in this universe. The third culture novel does this, referencing material produced by science as an intrinsic element of the task. There is a general consensus amongst the critical community, though, which is represented by Peter Childs’ assertion that

36 For a balanced and detailed study of this complex cultural phenomenon, see William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996).

24  R. HOLLAND fiction over the last 40 years has […] eschewed the novel’s modernist attempt to render depth, preferring to tell a story, which, instead of seeking to offer truth, deep meaning, or philosophical belief, depicts particular aspects of the modern world refracted through the life experience of individuals.37

Childs includes authors studied here, such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan in this assessment, along with others as varied as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk and David Mitchell. This perception of the novel as a reflective medium is also evinced by Dominic Head when he argues that ‘a good deal of contemporary fiction in Britain is written under the sign of “reaction” rather than of “reinvention”’, going on to suggest that the pressure to react to the plethora of different forms of entertainment and wide social changes is compromising the ‘serious literary novel’.38 The concept of change is central to much of the current critical orthodoxy, with contemporary fiction often celebrated for what Jago Morrison calls its ‘range of new developments’, or what Richard Bradford sees as its engagement with a new, ‘transparently public discourse’.39 The novel tends to be viewed in terms of its relation to a changing culture, with little emphasis on the novel in itself, which helps to explain why certain philosophical elements of the third culture novel, in which the concept of the material world in itself takes on a degree of prominence, have yet to be thoroughly explored. Much contemporary criticism focuses on the ways in which the novel engages with society, reflecting back to that society the manner in which it forms and shapes identities. Thus, there is a great deal of writing on contemporary fiction and politics, gender, race, sexuality, postcolonialism, globalization, nationhood, history and technology, but less attention on novelistic ambitions to represent a more stable, universal concept of meaning. The era of high theory has so successfully altered the modes and topics of enquiry practised in English departments, as well as greatly

37 Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970, second edition (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13. 38 Dominic Head, The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2008), 9, 12. 39 Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. Taylor and Francis e-Library. Richard Bradford, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 247.

1 INTRODUCTION 

25

influencing the themes of the novel, that pretensions towards universality have become highly problematic. As much as it has become commonplace to label our critical landscape now ‘after theory’, reflecting the shift away from centrality that a certain strand of theory has gradually effected in the twenty-first century, the pattern established by this era, in which the novel is seen as one intertext amongst the many texts of social discourse, remains well established. Despite the more unfashionable philosophical aspects of the third culture novel being largely overlooked by the critical community, and despite there being no study which accounts for the phenomenon as a whole, the broader field of literature and science criticism has flourished in the period, described by Rod Mengham as ushering in a ‘seachange transforming fiction in English’, since the 1980s.40 As Martin Willis points out, literature and science criticism ‘has predominantly grown from studies that dealt with the relations between science and literature in the nineteenth century’, a period which, in sharp contrast to the current one, was characterized by an acceptance that ‘literature and classical scholarship hold greater sway than the sciences’.41 Since then, in a landscape shaped by an altering power balance between the two cultures, the field has expanded enormously to include work as varied as Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984), which traces the influence of evolutionary theory on the work of the Victorian novelist, to Daniel Cordle’s recent study of ‘the psychological and cultural consequences of living with nuclear weapons’ in fiction from the USA.42 Work on the relationship between modernist literature and science, most notably by Michael H. Whitworth, has recognized the ways in which ‘certain metaphors’ were consistent to both the literature and the science of the period, and that these helped authors to develop their 40 Rod Mengham, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 1. 41 Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave, 2015), 32, 52. 42 Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 2. A valuable and thorough bibliography of ‘primary and critical texts, which interrogate cultural interactions with science, from the early modern period onwards’ can be found on the web pages of the University of South Wales’ Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, http:// literatureandscience.research.southwales.ac.uk/bibliography/bibliography/, last accessed 27 April 2015.

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ideas and ‘shape literary form’.43 Whitworth’s study reveals the ways in which modernist literature responded in a largely allegorical fashion to new scientific paradigms, and work on chaos theory by N. Katherine Hayles extends this notion to postmodern fiction.44 The third culture novel differs from its modernist and postmodernist counterparts, though, in that scientific research is presented in concrete terms within its pages, entering into dialogue with its philosophy in a direct fashion. It is not the metaphorical application of science which most interests third culture novelists, and nor is the variety of science which they incorporate intended as an analogy of cultural patterns. Instead, the relevance and impact of scientific models is addressed head-on, and the science is relayed in often pedagogical fashion. Contemporary studies of literature and science have largely overlooked this development, despite the cultural significance which both science and transcendental scientism have come to assume. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule, and reference has already been made to Bradley and Tate’s work, and to Patricia Waugh’s article on science and fiction in the 1990s, but the general trend in contemporary studies takes a historical rather than philosophical approach. Sharon Ruston’s collection Literature and Science, for example, works from the assumption that ‘we should neither dismiss the literary from the scientific nor the scientific from the literary’, but instead look, in a reflection of the words of C. P. Snow, to ‘produce creative chances’, wherein both disciplines can acknowledge and learn from the presence of their ostensible opposites within themselves.45 Ruston’s compilation ranges from the middle ages to the twentieth century, but does not take account of responses, beyond a chapter on Ian McEwan, of contemporary novelistic engagements with material that is being disseminated from science. Brian Baker and John Cartwright’s co-edited Literature

43 Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1, 3. Gillian Beer has made a similar argument, suggesting that ‘the new physics was just as modernist as literary fiction’, resulting mainly from the fact that scientific paradigms became destabilized in the period and had to be rethought. Gillian Beer, in Martin Willis, Literature and Science, 123. 44 See her Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and her edited collection entitled Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 45 Sharon Ruston, “Introduction” to Literature and Science, 11.

1 INTRODUCTION 

27

and Science (2005) provides a valuable historical survey of the interactions between the two disciplines, but does not analyse contemporary novels which look to science for their philosophical inspiration. A chapter from Baker outlines the ways in which scientific paradigms have influenced the themes and structure of novels in the twentieth century, but, again, this influence is one which is less overt and less central to the aims of the novel than in the texts that I am identifying. E. S. Shaffer’s collection The Third Culture: Literature and Science (1998) also pays no attention to contemporary third culture novels, despite several essays on previous interactions between literature and science. For Shaffer, extending George Levine’s calls in 1987 for an understanding of all culture as ‘one culture’ of discourse,46 the third culture describes our new understandings of the crossover and interaction between the two cultures. Despite her assertion that ‘science is the dominant intellectual discipline’ though, and despite an essay from a very sceptical Willie van Peer on the problems of trying to apply chaos theory and other scientific models to literary studies, Shaffer, revealing her postmodernist credentials, aims to show that ‘the awareness of the element of creativity in science has done much […] to place the arts and sciences on the same plane’.47 Recent work on what Marco Roth has termed the ‘neuronovel’ has begun to explore the ways in which contemporary novelists are responding to advances in neuroscience,48 and a collection of essays on the ‘syndrome novel’, published in 2013, studies the ways in which diseases and disorders of the brain have been represented in contemporary fiction in an era in which ‘we appear to have returned – or turned – to “nature”, or nature, perhaps, as scientifically understood’.49 Work on individual contemporary authors’ engagements with various branches of science is also more sizeable, with the field of criticism on Ian McEwan proving

46 For Levine, ‘science is as social as literature […] it is in large part culturally defined’. George Levine, “Epilogue”, in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 339–342 (p. 339). 47 E. S. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures”, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 1–12, (pp. 2, 6). 48 Chapter 3 on the postneuronovel will outline this criticism in detail. 49 T. J. Lustig and James Peacock, “Introduction”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–16 (p. 9). MyiLibrary eBook.

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particularly fruitful in this respect, as Chapter 6 will describe. However, no single study exists which groups novels together according to the ways in which they ‘take on’ science. This book represents an attempt to correct this situation, by providing an analysis of the philosophical, cultural and aesthetic implications of the contest between science and humanities culture in these novels, while at the same time filling in a significant gap in the study of contemporary literature.

The Shape of the Book The study takes a broadly chronological approach to the novels under discussion and begins with a chapter exploring the trope of competition in The Information (1995) by Martin Amis and Brazzaville Beach (1990) by William Boyd, two novels which are drawn to the implications of new scientific research in cosmology, chaos theory, genetics and systems theory, but which pit science in direct competition with literature. Science is initially invited in by these two novelists, yet when it threatens to overwhelm the space of literature it is promptly and unceremoniously ejected. These two novels are less concerned than are the rest of the novels, studied from the mid-1990s onwards, by the place of literary and cultural theory in debates regarding the value of literature versus the value of science, suggesting that an important shift took place at this time in the relations between literature, science and theory. The next chapter addresses the aforementioned ‘neuronovel’ genre through the analysis of two novels which critics generally assume to be included under this definition. I will argue, though, that Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers and Thinks… (2001) by David Lodge are better classified as postneuronovels if we are to take the prevailing categorizations as our starting point. Despite incorporating detailed research from neuroscience and conveying it with pedagogical determination, these two novels actually undermine materialist conceptions of the self in favour of traditional humanist ones, at the same time that they utilize certain aspects of scientific materialism in order to deprecate a particular conception of literary and cultural theory. Where these two novels do move beyond traditional humanism, though, is in their attempt to provide a material basis for human emotion, positing a moral directive as an integral part of this endeavour. This new materially grounded emotional realm, which is always in some way linked strongly with the territory of the novel, is a feature which can be found in other third culture novels, particularly those of Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood, as we shall see.

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Chapter 4 traces some of the shifts in Continental philosophy outlined above, comparing the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux with that of French novelist Michel Houellebecq. The chapter argues that both the speculative realist philosophy of these two thinkers and the aesthetics of the two novels under discussion, Atomised (1998) and The Possibility of an Island (2005), despite their alliance with materialist models of the universe, actually reach towards a third space, one which is well described by Badiou’s concept of the suture. To be sutured to something is to be tied to it, and the separate space which these three thinkers seek is one which enables their own discipline to transcend the limitations that they perceive to be holding down others. The novel, for Houellebecq, acts as an ‘unsutured’ human substitute, possessing the ability to step beyond the constraints both of subjecthood and recent cultural theory which has made subjecthood seem all-encompassing. In Chapter 5, I will discuss The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood, two novels which, in part, represent an attempt to create links between the sort of materially grounded emotional sphere mentioned above and a conception of the unique, individuated space of the novel. Human emotion is understood in these two anti-consumerist fictions as the fundamental driving force of society, and the proper understanding and respect for emotion is promoted as being the crucial element underlying any successful moral framework. In this sense, not only does their interest in the materiality of the affective realm place these two novels in a position which moves away from literary and cultural theory dominated by the centrality of language in the self and society, it also points towards the development of a new type of literary transcendentalism, one which understands ethics and morality to be grounded in nature because they exist as part of naturally occurring affective phenomena. Emotion in these two texts precedes, outlives and underlies the systems which it has spawned, and the novel is depicted as being a vital arbiter between affect and effect. No consideration of interactions between science and humanities culture in contemporary fiction would be complete without the inclusion of Ian McEwan’s work, and Chapter 6 focuses mainly on Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), the two texts which represent the peak (thus far) in McEwan’s bid to produce an exemplary third culture novel. In Saturday and Solar realism becomes more central than in any of McEwan’s previous works, and literary realism is linked with, and aims to parallel a particular type of realism which McEwan associates with science.

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At the same time that these two novels are more obviously antagonistic to poststructuralist theory than any of the others studied here, they are also the most self-reflexive in the sense that they serve, in part, as ­propaganda for themselves. Literature is lauded as the ideal medium for conflating and disseminating the most important knowledge from across the two cultures divide, but only literature which operates in precisely the way that McEwan’s does, so that this attempt to take up the broad perspective associated with the third space risks collapsing into the sort of solipsistic navel-gazing for which theory has often been criticized. If in recent times, then, we can detect elements of the transcendental fusing with scientism, we can also witness an urge towards transcendence developing in novels which are otherwise drawn by the idea of material grounding. Differentiated disciplines do not exist in a vacuum, and the roles occupied by science will influence the ground sought by the humanities, in the same way that this process will play out within the various different facets operating inside both of these complex branches of knowledge and understanding. This sort of discursive tussle directly impacts the third culture novel, which is always preoccupied by questions relating to the role and function of literature, and is constantly aiming to stretch the novel to the furthest reaches of its capabilities. Given the conditions outlined above, which have intensified from the early 1990s to the present day, the novel finds itself in a unique and uncertain position. On the one hand, influential and pervasive strands of literary theory have rendered traditional novelistic concerns, such as the concepts of truth, deep meaning, and personal agency, problematic, at the same time that key elements of popular science are embracing them. On the other, advances in neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence and information technology are creating a situation wherein the decentring conclusions of much literary and cultural theory are supported and even extended by scientific research. Confronted with these developments, the novel, particularly the serious literary novel, faces the unpleasant prospect of being squeezed into a space of irrelevance, one in which it is unable to find a role in the current zeitgeist. This is a potentially exciting time for the contemporary novel, but also an anxious one. The third culture novel, as this study will reveal, responds to this situation by utilizing the perceived differences between the two cultures in ways which vary, but which all stem from the desire to elevate the novel to a desirably separate third space. This is not to suggest that these novelists

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have no genuine interest in the material they utilize beyond this specific aim—they most certainly do—but to highlight an important facet of these texts which is largely unacknowledged within them. In this sense, my approach is critical, but only insofar as it seeks to uncover elements of these texts which might not be immediately apparent. At the same time that the circumstances outlined above create exciting opportunities for novelists, the responses from the writers studied here provide stimulating and intriguing material for those who read them.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 269–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bradford, Richard. 2007. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell. Bradley, Arthur, and Andrew Tate. 2010. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11. London: Continuum. Brockman, John. 1995. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. 2011. Towards a Speculative Philosophy. In The Speculative Turn: Continental and Material Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 1–18. Melbourne: re.press. Cartwright, John, and Brian Baker. 2005. Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Childs, Peter. 2012. Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970, second edition. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Cordle, Daniel. 2008. States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cox, Brian. 2014. The Guardian Weekend Magazine, October 11. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 55–81. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Edge. 2014. https://www.edge.org/. Accessed 25 November 2014. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Franzen, Jonathan. 2002. How to Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial. Franzen, Jonathan. 2012. The Telegraph, January 29. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damagingsociety.html. Accessed 8 November 2014.

32  R. HOLLAND Gould, Stephen Jay. 2004. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities. London: Vintage. Greaney, Michael. 2006. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Head, Dominic. 2007. Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Head, Dominic. 2008. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Humanists UK. 2014. https://humanism.org.uk/. Accessed 19 November 2014. IFL Science. 2014. https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience?hc_location=timeline. Accessed 21 November 2014. Lacan, Jacques. 1968. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. London: The John Hopkins University Press. Levine, George. 1987. Epilogue. In One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine, 339–342. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Lustig, T. J., and James Peacock. 2013. Introduction. In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Mengham, Rod. 1999. An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morrison, Jago. 2003. Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge. Rorty, Richard. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruston, Sharon. 2008. Introduction. In Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston, 1–12. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Shaffer, E. S. 1998. Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures’. In The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer, 1–12. Berlin: de Gruyter. Snow, C. P. 2008. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sokal, Alan. 2008. Beyond the Hoax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Waugh, Patricia. 1999. Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value. In The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, 33–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waugh, Patricia. 2005. Science and Fiction in the 1990s. In British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley, 57–77. London: Routledge.

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Whitworth, Michael H. 2001. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, Martin. 2015. Literature and Science. London: Palgrave. Wilson, Edward O. 2001. Consilience. London: Abacus.

CHAPTER 2

Two Cultures in Competition: Martin Amis’s The Information and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

If the epistemological divides that fuel the ‘two cultures debate’ are, in the words of Patricia Waugh, ‘almost as old as Western culture itself’, then, in the modern era at least it is the Snow/Leavis controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s that generally serves as the reference point for any new or ongoing debate.1 Charles Percy Snow, a distinguished scientist as well as a best-selling novelist, was invited to deliver the annual Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959. He took as his subject what he saw as the increasing and worrying lack of communication between the two great intellectual traditions of science and the humanities, seeing it as representative of the current state of affairs that ‘the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had’.2 Both in the Rede Lecture and an essay published a few years later as a ‘second look’, Snow argued that the continuation of the already well-established ‘scientific revolution’ was the single means through which the greatest number of the world’s population could ‘gain the primal things’ taken for granted by most in the West.3 1 Patricia

Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–59 (p. 34). 2 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15. 3 Snow, 79.

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_2

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It was crucial, therefore, for science to be ‘assimilated along with, and as part and parcel of, the whole of our mental experience, and used as naturally as the rest’, in order that society as a whole could work towards the same shared goals.4 The Rede lecture caused, what was for Snow at least, an unexpected furore, with the most notable (and possibly even infamous) response coming from the eminent literary critic F. R. Leavis. In an exchange of letters in The Spectator, followed by another Cambridge public lecture in 1962, Leavis attacked Snow’s style of expression and intellectual credentials in an attempt to undermine his assertions.5 In the case of the Snow/Leavis controversy, it seems, both parties perceived themselves and their disciplines to have fallen victim to a type of intellectual imperialism. For Snow, the most vital and exciting advances of the age were being ignored by a comfortably dominant class of traditional ‘literary’ intellectuals, and for Leavis there was a danger that the scientists were taking over the world, blindly following where technology led them without the subtle but necessary insights provided by a humanistic understanding. If Snow and Leavis, then, were acting as representatives of the two cultures at this point, it appeared that any hope of communion between science and the humanities was far from being realized. Regardless of this apparent impasse, however, intellectuals from both sides of the cultural divide continued to argue that a merging of cultures was both necessary and desirable, and in the 1960s, especially it seemed that ‘hardly anyone denied that the gap existed, was harmful and ought to be closed’.6 In the contemporary landscape, the prospect of uniting the two opposing intellectual behemoths exerts a continuing allure for many a cultural commentator, where the idea can seem to contain an almost inherent sense of rightness. E. S. Shaffer’s position is representative of this type of assumption when she suggests that ‘Romanticism and Post-Modernism may have the similar function of providing a half-way house in which 4 Snow,

16. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). 6 Charles Davy, Towards a Third Culture (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1978 [1961]), 3. See also Harold Gomes Cassidy, The Sciences and The Arts: A New Alliance (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), and Arts v. Science: A Collection of Essays, ed. Alan S. C. Ross (London: Methuen, 1967). 5 F.

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both arts and sciences may be accommodated – and this accommodation is the major need of the intellect in our time’.7 Timothy Clark takes a more pragmatic approach to the perceived problem of alienation between opposing faculties by suggesting ‘setting up interdisciplinary modules [including] an element that might be called “science as a humanities subject” covering the basics of scientific method, the ethics of science, and the status of science in society’, indicating that for him, too, some degree of convergence is both necessary and appropriate.8 However, while calls for dialogue and co-operation between the two cultures persist into the current era, an alternative position, which views the humanities as being in ‘slow, sure, and perhaps inexorable decline’, appears to be gaining momentum and support.9 For John Brockman, as we have seen, the ‘third culture’ means less a meeting point for fruitful discussion between the science and the humanities than the space in which scientists with a gift for the expository can assume their rightful ascendancy. It would seem, however, that the vehemence of the attacks from Brockman et al. has turned out to be unnecessary. A definite shift can be seen to have taken place in the power relations between the two cultures since Snow’s lecture of 1959, with the wealth of popular science books and documentaries ensuring that, as Snow wished, science has become a major part of the contemporary mental experience. The market-driven reforms to universities and their funding systems in the UK, begun by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, have hit the humanities hardest, continuing in the present with funding being focused on STEM subjects (in the UK and USA) and being decided through the evidenceand output-based research excellence framework. The various forms of defence emanating from the humanities quarter have taken on a decidedly more unassuming tone, particularly when compared to Leavis’s calls in 1962 for an ‘English School’ as the social and intellectual centre of

7 E. S. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures’”, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 1–12 (pp. 11–12). 8 Timothy Clark, “Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, 217–237 (p. 237). 9 Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xi.

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every university.10 Instead, we find more modest claims such as that of Curtis D. Carbonell that ‘as long as there are still active agents who must navigate a world of social complexity, we will have expressions of how to do this. And we will discuss these artistic and literary expressions’.11 This is not to suggest that the humanities show indications of abandoning its claims to relevance (and Carbonell also makes the point that higher order ethical questions tend to resist the more reductive approach of science) but to illustrate the altered position from which commentators such as Carbonell now find themselves arguing. As the humanities move further away from its traditional role as the guardian of meaning, transcendental scientism is making assertive strides into the breach left behind, convinced that none but its own evidence-based viewpoint can be considered with any degree of seriousness. In response to this threatened epistemological take-over, Seán Burke argues that the activity of criticism provides the exemplary model for regulating and interrogating the claims of any discourse. He asserts that ‘no doubt scientific investigation can and should continue to develop on objective lines; but it can and must submit to both epistemological scepticism and ethical scrutiny’; and it is the ethical realm occupied by criticism which stands separately from art or science.12 Burke’s lofty claims for the function of criticism betray a desire to transcend normal discursive categories—a desire which has often also been found in discussions of the value of literature, both from its practitioners and the critical community. For Burke here, the ethical realm is in some way superior to the aesthetic and cognitive, in that it takes a kind of Woolfian ‘view from nowhere’ with regard to the ways in which knowledge should be received. Criticism is thus placed in a third realm, occupying a space which the novel has tended to covet or even claim as its own: Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’, compiled of those novelists who could give us life distilled to its most vital elements, great minds capable of taking a step back in order to reflect the world in which most people merely existed, 10 F.

R. Leavis, Two Cultures? 30. D. Carbonell, “The Third Culture”, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4334, accessed 17 December 2010. 12 Seán Burke, “The Aesthetic, the Cognitive, and the Ethical: Criticism and Discursive Responsibility”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, 199–216 (p. 214). In some ways Burke takes an Arnoldian position here, with criticism representing the clarity of Hellenism, as opposed to the limiting obedience of Hebraism. 11 Curtis

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serving as the ultimate expression of this view of literature. This again raises questions of what the concept of a ‘third culture’ means to its exponents, or if, in fact, it is more often than not a front for what is actually a conception of superiority. John Brockman’s third culture, after all, is merely science becoming the first, if not the only culture. So if the novel has traditionally sought the glamour of separation provided by what can be perceived as a third space (neither science nor humanities but transcendent art), what happens to fiction in a world where science seems to be gaining a monopoly on all the new ideas? Much has been written about fictional responses to the postmodern cultural era, but less has been said about what Marguerite Alexander characterizes as the emergence of ‘the polyglot novelist, prepared to include scientific and technological material in a work of fiction’.13 It would seem that for the novelists discussed in this study, the appropriate response to the ever-increasing dissemination of ideas from science is to include or possibly even absorb these ideas into their fiction, in order to maximize its relevance and respectability. In this way, such novels stake a claim on their own contemporary version of a third culture, in which concerns of the humanities can enter into dialogue with new issues arising from scientific discovery.

Our Stylish Universe: Martin Amis’s The Information Martin Amis’s ninth novel, The Information, is a prime example of the sort of project outlined above.14 Famously published amidst a relative storm of media attention, Amis’s personal life—from his divorce to his teeth to the sacking of his literary agent (and wife of his friend, Julian Barnes)—became a form of pre-publication hype at a moment when it seemed that an author’s persona was rapidly replacing the content of his novels as the main selling point. Of course, in a pleasing instance of postmodern irony, The Information takes as one of its central themes the contemporary phenomenon of literary celebrity (and the ensuing 13 Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 158–159. 14 Science has played a role in other novels by Amis, for example Einstein’s Monsters (1987) deals with nuclear weapons and Night Train (1997) with cosmology, but neither pits science and humanities culture against each other in the way that The Information does.

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impoverishment of the literature in question), adding a tantalizing extra layer to the novel’s more general preoccupation with the role, function and direction of literature. However, while critics and reviewers have been quick to identify this meta-literary focus, along with the concerns relating to information technology, the novel’s interest in the science of cosmology has been left largely unexamined. Writing in 1980 about a new programme linking science and the humanities at San Francisco State University, Michael S. Gregory wonders ‘why there has been little response by serious writers and poets to the enthralling prospects of space exploration’, deciding that history may note this as ‘one of the oddest phenomena of this period’.15 Leaving Gregory’s implicit dismissal of science fiction aside, it nonetheless remains interesting to consider that more traditionally literary forms of fiction have tended largely to ignore the rapid expansion in our conceptions of the universe that has taken place in the last fifty years or so. Amis has gestured towards this issue in earlier fiction such as London Fields (1989), but in The Information he addresses it head-on, incorporating rigorously researched cosmological theories into a full-blown meditation on literature. The Information presents us with two writers of starkly contrasting style, both publishing, or attempting to publish, in the contemporary literary scene. Richard Tull’s long-standing, though perhaps never healthy friendship with Gwyn Barry is rapidly unravelling in the face of the unexplained and unexpected success of Gwyn’s dull novel, Amelior, which ‘would only be remarkable if Gwyn had written it with his foot’.16 As Gwyn continues to prosper in every imaginable way (uxuriousness, literary prizes, ceaseless interviews), Richard sinks deeper into a mire of jealousy, artistic failure and impotence, his only aim in life becoming to ‘fuck Gwyn up’ (p. 38). In Gwyn’s novel, there is no love or hate, and the amelioration implied in the title comes in the form of a commune compiled of multi-cultural, androgynous, politically correct humans who exist together in peace, despite the ills of the modern world. Richard’s books, in contrast, attempt to delineate the meaninglessness and pain of modern existence in a world where communication is impossible, to the (intentionally comical) extent that Richard cannot even describe what his 15 Michael S. Gregory, “The Science-Humanities Program (NEXA) at San Francisco State University: The ‘Two Cultures’ Reconsidered”, Leonardo 13 (1980): 298. 16 Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1995), 140. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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own novels are about (p. 340). To complicate this ostensible dualism, however, there is a third writer who, despite shifts in the intensity of his involvement, remains present throughout the novel as a separate narrative voice. Amis as meta-textual narrator regularly merges his voice with that of Richard, but tends to be most apparent in the passages relaying cosmological facts (‘Uranus has no internal heat source […] Pluto’s mass is about a fifth of the mass of our moon’ etc.) and those questioning the meaning of what is termed ‘the information’ (p. 79). It would be useful at this point to explore the meaning of ‘the information’ in this novel—a meaning which is in no way explicit or straightforward. The narrator regularly informs us that the information is nothing, and also that it ‘comes at night’ (p. 39). In a passage in which we appear to find Martin Amis in a children’s playground, engaging in a form of sign language with a boy, the information becomes quite literally ‘the nothing’, as the boys signs a ‘t’ and an ‘o’. The narrator asks ‘how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?’, although it often seems that in order to be genuinely omniscient in The Information one must actually accept the inevitability of this nothingness (p. 63). David C. Ward points to the contrast in this novel between ‘The Knowledge’ and ‘The Information’, where ‘instead of a body of knowledge which can be known and mastered, “The Information” is something inflicted on and endured by helpless men’, yet something which carries with it a type of truth or inevitability.17 Nothing is ‘the answer to so many of our questions’ from ‘what will happen to me when I die?’ to ‘of what does the universe primarily consist?’ (p. 452), and nothing is to ‘be left with life’ when literature no longer pays the bills (p. 85). Nothing is the universe: a dark, floating, primordial space which resembles the unknowableness of night-time sleep, and the universe is ‘what we [are] made of, how we keep going, and what we will return to’ (p. 65). The information, then, is nothing, but nothing is also everything— in immense and overwhelming incomprehensibility. ‘It might help’, the narrator suggests, to know that ‘the earth revolves at half a kilometre per second’ and ‘the Milky Way is travelling in the general direction of Virgo at 250 kilometres per second’, but quite how this might help is unclear (p. 65). Richard Menke bases his interpretation of the novel on 17 David C. Ward, “A Black Comedy of Manners (Review of The Information)”, Virginia Quarterly Review 72 (1996): 562.

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its portrayal of ‘a world so full of media signals that they all seem on the verge of becoming noise’, yet information technology is only ever a symptom of the fundamental information from the universe which hovers around the edges of the plot in the same way that it quietly dictates the characters’ lives.18 Science journal editor Kevin Kelly succinctly states that ‘the purpose of science is to pursue the truth of the universe. Likewise, the aim of the arts is to express the human condition’, concluding that ‘yes, there’s plenty of overlap’.19 In Amis’s novel, ‘the information’ lies in this very overlap, so it follows that The Information should situate itself in that space. There are, however, some difficulties in accepting this version of events, because from the beginning of the novel, it is apparent that the universal condition of nothingness is only actually universally male, since ‘compared to men, women were Metaphysicals, Donnes and Marvells of brain and heart’ (p. 26). Of course, this statement (and many others like it, generally relating to Richard’s ‘mother earth’ wife, Gina) is given in Richard’s voice, yet Amis as author or narrator does not appear to contradict his protagonist. Added to this, ‘the information’ is never more vital or relevant in this novel than when it relates to literature: the downward progress of which relates to the upward progress of cosmology, which for us humans is ‘the history of increasing humiliation’, in a universe getting bigger all the time ‘with sickening leaps of the human mind’ (p. 436). This means that a tension exists in this novel between the attempted (and in some senses purported) universal viewpoint, and an intense individualism in which what is actually charted is the mid-life crisis of a male literary intellectual. This is not the only way in which The Information appears to pivot on a contradiction, and it soon becomes clear that opposing forces tug at the central ideas of the novel throughout. Amis has discussed in an interview the importance of Milton’s epic poem to this novel, calling Paradise Lost ‘the basic tragedy story of our culture’.20 The poem describes a tale of lost innocence which mirrors 18 Richard Menke, “Mimesis and Informatics in The Information”, in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 137–157 (p. 154). 19 Kevin Kelly, “The Third Culture”, Science 279 (1998): 992. 20 Martin Amis in Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee, “No More Illusions: An Interview with Martin Amis”, The Write Stuff 2, http://www.altx.com/interviews/martin. amis.html, accessed 17 December 2010.

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the shedding of illusion central to ‘the history of the world’, particularly with regard to ‘one’s place in the universe’.21 Of course, Paradise Lost is also a crucial intertext in the sense that it, too, utilizes an extraterrestrial perspective in order to examine man’s position in the world. Does this mean, then, that science here has replaced Milton’s religion as the new cosmic metanarrative? It would seem that this is partly the case, yet in the same way that Milton was unable to resist the literary allure of Lucifer’s plight, Amis is at his sparkling stylistic best when dealing with Richard’s day-to-day obsessions and calamities. The trauma, for example, of Richard hauling the vacuum cleaner ‘in’ to be repaired on a wet Wednesday is expertly evoked by Amis’s descriptions of ‘the traffic trailing its capes of mist’ as Richard is ‘cruelly encumbered’ by such tortures as ‘the tartan flex-tube round his neck like a fat scarf, and then the plug, incensingly adangle between his legs’ (p. 49). Amis describes with hilariously painful physicality and in incessantly vivid detail the small dramas of everyday life, utilizing rich and at times poetic language and imagery to freshen potentially stale situations. The narrator asserts that ‘absolutely unquestionably, the Universe is High Style. And what are we? Flat-Earthers’ (pp. 65–66). Perhaps Catherine Bernard’s hunch that Amis attempts to ‘emulate the “High-Style” of cosmic chaos’ can help to explain the gap between what Amis is telling us about the importance of the universe, and what it is about the novel that is most memorable and appealing: Amis, like Milton before him, is a writer first and foremost, and literature is just better when it stylishly describes human concerns.22 This raises a key question relating to the debates surrounding the two cultures regarding whether, in fact, it is possible or even desirable to attempt to bring science and the humanities together. Could it be that literature is simply far more suited to the traditionally humanistic realm, and writers need not feel impelled to embrace science? This is in some ways an enticing idea, and one with which The Information certainly seems to flirt, yet this novel is also painfully aware that the idea of ‘traditionally humanistic concerns’ is just no longer feasible. Our conceptions of the ‘human’ are now so heavily entangled with scientific ideas that the two cultures have had no choice but to (at least partially) merge, with 21 Amis

in Laurence and McGee, 5. Bernard, “Under the Dark Sun of Melancholia: Writing and Loss in The Information”, in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117–136 (p. 128). 22 Catherine

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the humanities sphere suffering the heaviest casualties. Amis has written of the climate of the early 1970s during which he wrote reviews for the TLS, and times were very different. He describes his existence within a kind of Leavisite bubble of literary glory where Everyone concurred. Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it […] Perhaps the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment was that Art seemed to be winning. [italics in original]23

So in a cultural moment in which art is no longer winning, literature must make some attempt to find a new niche for itself or risk becoming that most despised of Amis’s categories: the useless imitation of the real thing that he likens to ‘trex’. Anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of Amis’s oeuvre, with its plethora of intertextual references, will know that he cares far too much about literature to allow that to happen. Art and science coexist in this novel, then, in an ambivalent relationship. In some senses, there is fruitful overlap which can provide insight into a certain conception of the human condition; but there are also indications of the sort of animosity that is in no way out of place in an Amis novel. The Information presents us with several sets of dualities, none of which functions entirely harmoniously. Richard and Gina’s marriage is plagued by impotence and deceit, Gwyn’s ostensibly perfect marriage to Lady Demeter turns out to be far from that, Richard’s twin sons Marco and Marius are actually utterly different, and of course, Richard and Gwyn’s friendship is based almost entirely on enmity. What is perhaps most compelling, though, about Richard’s obsession with destroying Gwyn is that it is painfully obvious that Richard’s hatred is directed mainly at himself. As though to hammer this message home, Amis has all of Richard’s revenge attempts backfire onto Richard himself: Gwyn escapes a hired beating in the cinema toilets only for Richard to receive it instead when he goes to try to observe Gwyn’s pain; Richard ends up spending several hours reading through the Los Angeles Times just to check that there is, in fact, no reference to Gwyn (who was, on a disingenuous ‘heads up’ from Richard, supposed to be the one wasting his 23 Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (London: Vintage, 2002), xii.

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time); and Richard’s pathetic attempts at seducing Demeter are made all the more tragic when he discovers Gwyn in a sexual clinch with Gina. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that all of the science in this novel is ultimately much more about literature—as in the case of Richard’s ‘passionate speech’ at a publicity lunch ‘for rich old men’ (p. 25). Responding with disdain to Gwyn’s avowal to ‘never think in terms of men. In terms of women’ but rather ‘in terms of…people’, Richard asks Gwyn to imagine being a spider And you’ve just had your first serious date. You’re limping away from that now, and you’re looking over your shoulder, and there’s your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like it was a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You’d say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders. Or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of…spiders. [italics in original] (pp. 30–31)

Richard’s tirade against this form of political correctness is fuelled not by the damage that it does to relations between the sexes, but only by the damage that it does to literature, in that it makes it ‘no good’ (p. 30). Evolutionary biology is useful in that it can help to explain human nature, but literature is the most important medium through which these explorations can take place. We find this attitude again when Richard is pondering ‘certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to “the WYSIWYG universe”, or “the What You See Is What You Get universe”’, referring to them as ‘those assholes. Whom we ask to do the job of wondering how we’re here […] Sending their minds back sixteen billion years, they reach for catchphrases that were getting old six months ago’ (p. 174). Although this passage seems to be narrated by Richard, it is usually the voice which is closer to Amis that discusses cosmology in the novel, creating a temptation to view Richard here as a cover for Amis’s literary snobbery. It used to be the job of literature and philosophy to wonder how we are here, at least in the more public sphere, and it seems that for Amis the scientists are far from matching up to the style of their cultivated cousins. Perhaps, in one way then, we can view art and science in The Information as yet another bad marriage, an attempted union that is bound to end in failure. It is as though Amis is capitulating to science with regard to the information from the universe, as though he is intrigued and fascinated by these ideas, yet cannot quite bear to let go of

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his sense of the superior value of literature. In the same respect, Richard is embarrassingly antique in his tennis attire when compared to Gwyn’s hi-tech tracksuits, yet ‘his clear superiority owed everything to being middle class’ (p. 105). The popularity of Gwyn’s novels is often accredited to the universe, which is ‘a joke’ and which ‘likes roundness’, suggesting some sort of link between Gwyn and science (p. 113). Gwyn’s books provide ‘the reassurance of honest practicality’ (p. 439), and they sit on the best-seller lists alongside ‘gimp cosmologists’ (p. 120). We are told ‘that which is universal is often simple. Scientific beauty (and beauty, here, was a sound indicator of truth) was often simple’—a sentence which seems curiously archaic and incongruous in a novel so otherwise committed to relativism, but which has the benefit for its author of suggesting that artistic beauty is superior in its naturally more complex structure (p. 186). Referring to his handling of the characters, Julian Loose suggests that ‘perhaps the one thing Amis cannot do, we realize, is communicate a Beckettian sense of exhaustion, or a feeling that he is no longer in control’.24 The same formula can apply where the issue of incorporating science into the novel is concerned: Amis is ultimately in control and will bring science into the service of his literature in any way that he sees fit. If Amis is ultimately in control then, and literature is what The Information is really interested in, what conclusions can be drawn about the purpose of this and other third culture novels? One angle is to suggest that novels such as this one are necessary in order to delineate the modern condition of nothingness, so that we can read it and feel that we are not alone. But the almost poetic insistence by the team sent to option Gwyn’s novel that ‘“there has to be love and hate. So we care.” “So we care.” “So we care”’ chimes too deeply with the thrust of the rest of the novel to allow nothingness the final say (p. 353). Instead, we find a tentative suggestion that novels such as this one can help to reveal what is important in life, by remaining as true to life as possible and that information from science helps to inform that truth. Richard allows his obsession with Gwyn’s success to interfere with his family life: he slaps his son Marco and alienates his wife before realizing that he has been blind to his priorities, ‘he was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia’ (p. 494). 24 Julian Loose in Nicholas Tredell, The Fiction of Martin Amis (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 162.

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Marco has a lucky escape from ‘Barnado Boy’ Steve Cousins who wants to hurt Marco, partly in revenge for Richard’s behaviour towards him and partly because Marco reminds Steve of the child he wishes to eliminate in himself. The Information does not end with an idealized picture of family life, but it does seem to suggest that family can defend against some of the worst that the universe has to offer: we sense that Cousins would not be hurting Marco if he had had a family and that Richard would sink utterly were Gina to throw him out. But in any discussion of Amis’s work, it is impossible to ignore the issue of style. Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate point out that, in Amis’s conception of literature, ‘its moral purpose does not so much lie in its ability to inhabit the lives of others – as Ian McEwan would have it – but rather in enabling us to write and think like no one but ourselves’.25 If style is practised with enough vigilance against cliché, then any moral message will follow in a natural, but almost incidental way. In this sense, one of the main purposes of literature lies in the pleasure gained from an encounter with original style and memorable humour, with meaning and morality forming an important backdrop, yet ultimately serving a derivative function. This model can also describe the way in which scientific ideas are used in The Information: in a decidedly secondary arrangement. Science helps reveal the truth of nothingness, but literature decides on what remains important in the face of that. What we can detect here, then, is another specific version of a third culture exploration, which follows a pattern that is predictable only in that, as in Brockman’s case, it is structured by its own particular ideological framework, serving its own individual purpose.

Structure and Event: William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach In William Boyd’s 1990 novel Brazzaville Beach, mathematical and scientific models play an even more major role in the narrative framework than they do in Amis’s text, yet the relationship between the two cultures in Boyd’s work is less apparently dualistic. Instead, Brazzaville Beach takes it as given that competition is an innate part of any discourse, since it is the foundation of all biological life on earth. So, whereas in The Information the trope of the sudden and painful loss of a previous

25 Arthur

Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel, 38.

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position of power and superiority (represented overtly by Richard and Gwyn’s relationship, but also at a deeper discursive level) pervades the entire narrative, Brazzaville Beach is more preoccupied by the idea of models of movement and flux, and the shifting sands of competition between individuals are taken as part of this broader process. Hope Clearwater is the heroine of Boyd’s novel, which takes three different time frames, describing three relatively proximate periods in Hope’s life and weaves them subtly together. Hope has ‘washed up’ on Brazzaville Beach, somewhere in Central Africa, where she is spending time reflecting on two sequences of events that have left her unable to move on with her life.26 The first of these ‘events’, described in the third person, is Hope’s marriage to the gifted but troubled mathematician John Clearwater, which ends in separation and ultimately the suicide of John. Hope’s sense of guilt is never explicit, but it seems that she needs time to reflect on her part in the deterioration of her relationship, along with her reasons for being attracted to someone who, it becomes clear, was ultimately self-absorbed. Hope decamps to Africa ‘to escape what happened in England’, where she takes up a post as a research assistant at the Grosso Arvore Research Project, observing chimpanzees in their natural habitat as an employee of the worldwide expert on chimp behaviour, Eugene Mallabar (p. 6). When Hope starts to witness violent behaviour amongst the chimps Mallabar refuses to believe her, insisting that his renown as the author of, amongst many other famous books, ‘The Peaceful Primate’, endows him with a knowledge the like of which Hope could only dream. Hope has been detailed to observe the southern ‘splinter group’ of chimps which have broken away from the main clan, taking all of the fertile females with them. The destabilizing that this has effected, it seems, has triggered infanticide amongst the southern females (who are in competition with each other), and deadly attacks by the northerners on the southern males (who want the females back). In an effort to protect his reputation (and the wealth and power with which it has provided him), Mallabar covertly destroys Hope’s evidence, and eventually physically attacks her. Fleeing from this latest catastrophe, Hope finds herself embroiled yet again—this time as a hostage in the civil war that is being fought by various factions in the region. Hope is 26 William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach (London: Penguin, 1991), 3. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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eventually rescued, and, on returning to Grosso Arvore to discover that not only has she lost her job but that Mallabar has commandeered her research findings for an updated version of his forthcoming book, she shoots and kills two of the northern chimps who are about to murder the final southern male. She then moves to an isolated sea-front house on Brazzaville Beach in order to reflect, often through the medium of mathematical models and formulae, on the meaning of all that has befallen her. These mathematical and scientific meditations are printed in italics and appear every few pages or so, describing the ways in which different theories from various branches of these two disciplines account for naturally occurring phenomena. These models are then often tested for their suitability in explaining the human experience of life: from marriage, to time, to crises and ultimately to death. So, for example, we find Hope pondering on whether or not she should have ‘seen the signs’ of her husband’s imminent mental breakdown, and comparing this situation to the precision needed in the building of a skyscraper (p. 67). She relays her husband’s calculations which describe how the margin of error involved in positioning the steel girders that form the foundations of the building must be ‘no greater than an eighth of an inch’, otherwise, ‘eight hundred feet up, that insignificant three-millimetre shift has grown into a fourteen-yard chasm. In science’, Hope concludes, as she looks back over the small missed warnings in her marriage, ‘so in life’ (p. 67). For Francis Gilbert, though, Boyd’s novel does not successfully link science and ‘life’, but instead can be classed amongst those of whom he terms ‘the fusionists’: fame-hunting authors who weld ideas together that should actually remain separate, and who really only ‘deal in moral simplicities’.27 Gilbert classes these kinds of novels as being inferior to science fiction since, instead of using the imagination in a way that makes it stay ‘a step ahead of scientific developments’, they leech on ideas from that discipline in a manner that is derivative, and in order only to keep abreast of current trends.28 Blanche D’Alpuget is not quite so dismissive, yet she, too, finds the way in which Boyd incorporates his ‘big themes’

27 Francis Gilbert, “Invasion of the Fusionists”, New Statesman: Commentary Section, September 18, 1998, 57. 28 Gilbert, “Invasion of the Fusionists”, 57.

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to be ‘unsatisfying’.29 For her, not only does Boyd try to cram too many divergent ideas into the novel at the cost of its overall unity, but he also reveals himself to be ‘intellectually nouveau riche’ in his eagerness to show the reader looking round his ‘house’ that ‘the bathroom taps are made of gold’.30 What these two reviewers miss, though, is the less obvious way in which Boyd critiques the efficacy of mathematical and scientific models for providing explanations and guidelines for human actions, so that he actually promotes the value of his own discipline over and above those that he utilizes. The models that ‘make the grade’ in terms of supporting the conclusions drawn by the plot of the novel are selectively chosen for their contingent conclusions, while the rest may represent a certain truth about the world, but are found woefully lacking when human emotions get involved. Having said this, however, there remains a (possibly unintended) sense in which the novel itself mirrors the more rigid of the models given an airing within its pages, as both try to ‘comprehend happenstance’, and ‘write the book of the unruly world we live in’ (p. 62). It is as though Boyd, as a writer who creates tightly plotted and highly controlled novels, yet novels that are interested in action, tension and abrupt change, is drawn towards the structuring power of models, but remains resistant to the stasis that they can threaten to impose. One such instance of this kind of ambivalence occurs in Hope’s discussion of algorithms. She declares that, although they are ‘much-beloved mathematical tools’, they require ‘no ingenuity’ to use, and, she suggests, they come ‘faintly tinged with contempt’ (p. 90). Algorithms ‘imply a world of certainty, of rotas and routine, of continuous process’, suggesting that there is a ‘great celestial machine, programmed and pre-ordained’ (p. 90). They soon fall short when it comes to what Hope calls ‘life’ though, which is by its nature ‘irregular and discontinuous’, and throws up problems that escape the confines of the model (p. 90). One wonders at this point what Hope would term those things that algorithms can explain, if not ‘life’. Is she suggesting that there are some processes in the universe, specifically simple phenomena, that are 29 Blanche D’Alpuget, “The Fall of Chimp”, The New York Times on the Web, June 23, 1991, 3, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-brazzaville.html, accessed 20 February 2013. 30 D’Alpuget, “The Fall of Chimp”, 2–3.

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programmed and pre-ordained, and other, more complex ones, that operate according to their own rules? Similarly, biological structures threaten to become totalizing in the novel: humans, we are told in one of the sections in italics, share more than ninety-eight per cent of their DNA with the chimpanzee, meaning that generically speaking the chimp ought to be classified as Homo troglodytes rather than the currently used Pan troglodytes. If chimps are ‘The Mockmen’, then, humans are also the mockchimps—a theme that is driven home again and again throughout the narrative (p. 25). Sixteen pages later, however, in the very next italics break, we are told about the starkly opposing behaviour exhibited by the waved albatross and the night heron. The waved albatross of the Galapagos Islands mates for life, and Hope has ‘seen films of them smooching and petting each other like an infatuated couple out on a date’ (p. 41). In contrast to this loving action, yet occurring in the same islands, the night heron stands coldly by while the strongest of her chicks attacks and kills the weaker two (p. 42). There is vast divergence, then, the novel seems at pains to insist, between the various genetically inscribed behaviours displayed in the animal kingdom. This would suggest that the outlook for humankind, if not idealistically rosy, is at least not so brutal as it might be, since other animals are clearly capable of ‘good’ behaviour. The novel is repeatedly drawn to the idea that models and patterns can describe the structures that dictate human actions, but it also frequently shuns this very concept. It is as though the implications of such a prospect continually prove to be too uncomfortable for it to be pursued with the rigour that it seems to tempt, so that the novel ends up trying to disprove the very theories it itself proposes. This dualism is played out, to a certain extent, in the relationship between the author and his mathematician character, John Clearwater. John is brilliant in his own field, yet mentally unstable—his intense desire for fame and recognition within the world of mathematics drives him to work harder and harder, to an extent that becomes unhealthy. His ultimate dream is to create what he hopes will become known as ‘The Clearwater Set’: a formula that would describe all of the complexity of the natural world, proving that ‘behind all this teeming variety would lurk one simple instruction’ (p. 254). John is trying to ‘weld the world of mathematics to the world we live in’, while his creator tries to do the same with his novel (p. 254). Boyd welds maths and science with literary narrative, but then quickly detaches it again, sensing that too fanatical adherence to those disciplines

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might spell danger for his own. John, of course, eventually kills himself— distraught because another mathematician has found the elusive formula before him. By the same token, Boyd suspects that maths equals suicide for literature, so he sacrifices his character, along with the models he represents and has his heroine move gradually towards theories that emphasize the use of intuition and ‘the heart’ (p. 383). It seems Hope decides, ‘that there are statements about the world and our lives that have no need of formal proof procedures’ (p. 353). Boyd could be accused of an inaccurate and misleadingly convenient portrayal of character here, for, let us not forget, Hope is a tough and exacting scientist who might well baulk at such a notion. With this in mind, it is worthwhile, too, examining the way that John Clearwater is depicted in Brazzaville Beach, not just in terms of his theories, but as a human character. Boyd seems at pains to emphasize John’s corporeality—he is balding, ungainly and slightly overweight. He is untidy and inconsiderate, uninterested in Hope’s work and snobbish about his own discipline (physicists, he tells Hope, need to admit that ‘what they do is basically all about mathematics’) (p. 143). He is philistine in his artistic tastes, only enjoying films with happy endings and ‘reading nothing but detective novels’ (p. 106). He embarks upon an affair without, it seems, a second thought, showing little remorse when Hope discovers his secret. It is only John’s theories that recommend him, and these, it is clear, come from outside of him—they are otherworldly in their abstract beauty. John even realizes this himself, telling Hope that ‘I had the gift for a few months. On loan’ (p. 185). Eugene Mallabar, too, as the other eminent scientific researcher in the novel, is of dubious character, and he prioritizes his own fame and reputation above every other consideration. These two men are driven only by their competitive urges, meaning that they often appear to be two-dimensional. In a similar vein to Amis’s novel, Brazzaville Beach vacillates between a view of science as ‘high style’, as exciting and stimulating material, and a perception of it as being reductive, simplistic and crass. This is represented on the one hand by Hope’s ultimate rejection of the majority of the models that she utilizes in her quest to understand the calamitous events of her recent life, and on the other by the yawning gap between the intricacies of John’s models and the coarseness of his personality, and the success of Mallabar’s project compared with the shallowness of his character. The problems created by using a scientist as the heroine in a novel that ultimately wants to promote literary models are

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overcome by having Hope change her allegiances subtly but significantly by the end of her journey, at which point, it is worthwhile to note, she is actually no longer a practising scientist, but is instead working as an administrator and translator. Not only, then, does ‘life’ constantly overspill the confines of the models designed to describe it, but a too scientifically minded approach to the world risks creating a personality that is lacking in the subtlety required for conducting healthy and ethically sound relationships. John cannot appreciate the complexities of literary novels or ‘arty’ cinema, but instead treats his happy movies as a form of escapist dream-fulfilment. Perhaps, we sense, if he read a bit more serious fiction and viewed some challenging films he might not be so quick to jump into bed with the first willing woman to come his way. By the same token, if Mallabar could tear his mind away from the fame accompanying his books he might not be throwing punches at Hope in the middle of the jungle. Selfishness and competitiveness describe a type of truth of what this novel means by ‘life’, but they need not be the whole story—especially if the sorts of insights often associated with sophisticated art are given credence within the formula. Art, and the sort of thinking associated with an ‘artistic’ mindset, provides a different type of knowledge in this novel from mathematic and scientific understanding. The Fall exists as an important backdrop to Hope’s story from the beginning of the text when we find Hope almost naked in the jungle surrounded by fruit trees and animals. All of the major characters are in the business of acquiring knowledge, and this process goes unquestioned until towards the end of the novel when Hope has a discussion with Amilcar, the doctor turned army Colonel for the separatist UNAMO group. Amilcar is flabbergasted that Hope spends so much of her time observing chimps and recording their every movement. ‘But why?’ he asks, ‘what’s it for?’ (p. 331). He suspects that Hope’s learning can never bring her happiness or moral improvement, telling her instead that ‘the pursuit of knowledge is the road to hell’ (p. 331). The post-lapsarian mania for facts that has come to characterize the Western world means, for Amilcar, that objects are valued above human beings, and he would have Hope learn, instead of empty data, the importance of human life. We find again, then, that there is a distinction between the structure of that part of the world that can be described by factual knowledge, and the portion that comes under the auspices of ‘life’. Does knowledge of

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what it means to be human somehow predate the fall? And if so, what does this suggest about the link between knowledge and free will? The ethics of the novel flounder slightly in this respect, since it is free will and the ability to make choices that stop the variously described structures from becoming totalizing. Perhaps what Amilcar really means is that the single-minded pursuit of certain types of knowledge, specifically that which is scientifically informed, is the road to hell, but the more delicate and intricate insights provided by a humanistic understanding are what nourish the ethical component of our will. Hope realizes, after all, that her ‘rational’ separation from her husband, and the cold pragmatism with which it was conducted, have left her ‘curiously bereft’ (p. 384). This type of reading, whereby the text is interrogated in order to discover the somewhat hidden processes operating within it, has been described recently by Terry Eagleton as representing a now familiar form of critique, one that views the work as a kind of strategy. What he means by this is that a novel is seen to draw on material from the outside world, but it will utilize this material in such a way that it becomes moulded to fit the ends that the text has in mind. In his words, ‘the literary text is grasped as a solution to the question which is itself’.31 This means that the relationship that a literary work has with the outside world is an unusual one: unlike a military strategy that would seek to control a world that puts up resistance, a literary strategy can, in theory, create its own world. For Eagleton, though, the outside world is not dispatched quite so easily as this, but instead exerts a tangible presence in the text, one to which the work has to continually respond through a dialectical process. So fiction is ‘fundamentally about itself’, yet ‘because it draws the materials for this self-fashioning from the world around it, the paradox of fiction is that it refers to reality in the act of referring to itself’.32 Eagleton describes this interchange in terms of ‘structuration’, arguing that what goes on inside a literary text is something between structure and event, a dynamic process of realities competing with each other. He suggests that structuration Signifies a structure, to be sure – but a structure in action, one constantly in the process of reconstituting itself according to the ends it seeks to 31 Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 223. 32 Eagleton, The Event of Literature, 138.

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achieve, along with fresh purposes it keeps producing, and thus eventual in a way at odds with, say, the Saussurean conception of language or the early formalist notion of the poem. [italics in original]33

So it is not a straightforward case of inside and outside, or of the reality of the novel operating as structure and the reality from outside as event, but rather an interaction taking place between the two. Eagleton’s use of the idea of the ‘event’ bears some relation to the way that it is conceived by Alain Badiou—a philosopher whom he mentions briefly (but in glowing terms) in the book, and who will be discussed further in Chapter 5 of this book. In the same way that the event for Badiou is understood as a rupture in being, a potential that exists in the multiple multiplicities of the universe through which a subject can pin something down in order to create a truth, Eagleton’s event is characterized by its ability to produce something that is not only new, but also somewhat slippery. The event of literature is a creative force and one which resists containment; yet, as Badiou’s event does in terms of ontology, Eagleton’s has a hand in shaping the reality of the literary work. For these two Marxist thinkers, a concept of eventhood carries pleasingly radical credentials because it offers the potential for resistance to structures that might seem totalizing or immovable and enables instead the creation of a new truth. Eagleton’s politics of the event are suggested by his assertion that ‘the structure of literary works generates events which can then react back on that structure and transform its terms; and to this extent such works have the form of a free human act’.34 Freedom consists, as it does for Boyd, in the undoing and outdoing of potentially suffocating structures. So, if for Eagleton the discussion of literary structures is shadowed by an implicit concern with those of politics, I would suggest that Boyd’s preoccupation with scientific and mathematical models conceals a (possibly unwanted) twin in the form of a meditation on the way that the structures of a novel operate. So, for example, when we find Hope discoursing on her ex-husband’s theory of ‘the inverse cascade’, which explains the fact that turbulence does not just involve a ‘cascade of energy from large eddies to small’, but also a flow back from small eddy to large, we can detect a striking resemblance to Eagleton’s theory of 33 Eagleton, 34 Eagleton,

The Event of Literature, 199. The Event of Literature, 200.

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what goes on inside literary texts (p. 84). As John excitedly describes to Hope that in turbulent systems ‘disorder is not simply handed down a chain, some of it is always being handed back again’, it takes only a small step to envisage at the same time the unruly text, with its vexedly messy blend of pliant fiction and stubbornly autonomous reality, engaged in constant battle with an author who is striving to create a coherent and meaningful whole. Structure and event influence and affect each other for Eagleton: events are created from the structure, but they then take on a life of their own and can ‘talk back’ to the structure, which then has to reconstitute itself in the light of this new occurrence. Perhaps, then, where Boyd’s ‘fusionist’ welding of science/maths and literature occasionally falls short in terms of explaining Hope’s predicaments, it actually gets closer to revealing some of the processes at work within the novel itself. The disconcerting prevalence of abrupt change in the life of a human being has been, and continues to be, a major theme in Boyd’s work. In Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009), the successful climatologist Adam Kindred finds that his whole identity must be deconstructed when he randomly witnesses a murder, and, like Hope, finds that he is obliged to continue his life in radically altered circumstances—the scientist is taken out of the controlled environment of the laboratory and becomes himself the object of a different sort of thunderstorm.35 In Brazzaville Beach, Hope informs us that the calculus is ‘the most subtle subject in the whole field of mathematics’, yet its ‘key defect’ is that it ‘cannot cope with abrupt change’ (p. 227). What Hope frequently terms ‘life’ is besieged by the possibility of abrupt change, and the characters in Boyd’s novels must learn to cope with it or else sink. But what must also possess the ability to cope with abrupt change are the novels themselves—their structure ‘generates events which can then react back on that structure and transform its terms’, so that it must remain continually on its toes. Perhaps it is for this reason that Brazzaville Beach ultimately dismisses mathematical and scientific models with such confidence when questions about ‘life’ are concerned—because the way that a novel operates, is, in the author’s view, far closer to the way that life is experienced by the human individual. 35 In Armadillo (1998), Lorimer Black, a loss adjuster with a sleeping disorder, also becomes the object of a scientific study when he checks himself into the ‘Institute for Lucid Dreaming’.

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The final pages have Hope strolling along the beach, having taken ‘comfort and refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquillity in certainty, but in permanently suspended judgement’ (p. 398). Not long before this, she relays a discussion she had while still married to John about the three famous philosophical questions (Kant, of course, posed four, but the Clearwaters are vague about this) that every human being wants the answer to. These are: ‘What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?’ (p. 345). John’s answers to the questions are strikingly incongruous with his behaviour so far: we can know ‘nothing for sure’, we ought to ‘try not to hurt anyone’ and we can hope for the best ‘(but it won’t make any difference)’ (p. 346). Alongside John’s smugness (‘that’s that sorted’), we can sense an accompanying self-confidence in the novelist’s own discipline—scientific models are all well and good, they might even be brilliant and exciting in their own way, but ‘life’, and the art that describes it best, is messy, fraught and contingent. Alongside ‘life’, though, and causing trouble of a further kind in this novel, is a quietly insistent niggle about death. We have already seen that maths and science, in too pure a form, threaten death to the literary art, but along with this can be found another instance in which the novel itself emerges as a disturbing doppelganger of the processes it explores. Hope tells us that catastrophe theory is ‘the one we have been waiting for, the study of abrupt change, the catalogue of discontinuity’, evoking Vladimir Propp in that it suggests all catastrophes derive from ‘seven basic archetypes’ (pp. 359–360). Taking two of these archetypes as examples, Hope explains that ‘cusp catastrophes’ include the chance of recovery, ‘a possibility of return to the pre-catastrophic state’, such as being knocked unconscious or a nervous breakdown (p. 360). ‘Fold catastrophes’, on the other hand, do not. Like a burst balloon that cannot be un-burst, ‘life is a fold catastrophe, and its single control factor is time’ (p. 360). Take a look at your life, Hope invites us, and in ‘the long fold catastrophe that makes up your three score years and ten you will encounter many cusp catastrophes along the way’ (p. 360). Yet again we find a striking similarity between what gets classed as ‘life’ in Brazzaville Beach and what goes on inside the text itself: lots of mini crises and catastrophes, ‘events’ by Hope’s terms, that culminate in the fold catastrophe that is the end of the novel. Novels are structured in such a way that their ending is implicit in their very creation—even the physical structures of a front and back cover ensure that some sense of closure, even if only a suspended one, is inevitable. For this reason, an

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author operates in the interstices between life and death, creating with an eye towards killing, beginning with an ending in mind. So Boyd resists the suffocating structures of the models he apparently invokes, while systematically going about the business of creating a watertight structure of his own.36 Even the climax in which Hope shoots the northern males, that could, potentially, fit Eagleton’s definition of a ‘free human act’, is actually the formal ending to the story, since the epilogue merely brings us back to the beginning of Hope’s narrative. The text is at its most exacting even as its heroine reaches her freest peak. A doppelganger, for Freud, evokes such unearthly terror because it is perceived as a harbinger of death—it reveals to us our own mortality because it shows us for what we really are. It also threatens to undermine our cherished individuality, rendering our identity superfluous because it destroys the uniqueness that forms its basis. Scientific discourse represents more than a foil through which the literary art plays out its own anxieties in these two texts, yet there is a definite sense in which the concerns of the novels ‘tag along’ with ideas from a discourse which, on the surface, suggest the polar opposite of the art that utilizes them. And, as is also the case in Amis’s novel, fiction here defends its own individuated position, even as it is drawn to, and even fascinated by, the worldview of its potential adversary.

Bibliography Alexander, Marguerite. 1990. Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction. London: Edward Arnold. Amis, Martin. 1995. The Information. London: Flamingo. Amis, Martin. 2002. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000. London: Vintage. Bernard, Catherine. 2006. Under the Dark Sun of Melancholia: Writing and Loss in The Information. In Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks, 117–136. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Boyd, William. 1991. Brazzaville Beach. London: Penguin. Bradley, Arthur, and Andrew Tate. 2010. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11. London: Continuum. 36 Christopher Tayler also notices this tendency towards controlled structure, suggesting that Brazzaville Beach ‘obeys the conventions of novels by William Boyd, in which the world will usually contrive a neatly ironic retort to whatever schemes or patterns the characters try to impose on it’. Christopher Tayler, “A Bit of a Lush”, London Review of Books 24, no. 10 (2002): 21.

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Burke, Seán. 1999. The Aesthetic, the Cognitive, and the Ethical: Criticism and Discursive Responsibility. In The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, 199–216. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carbonell, Curtis D. 2010. The Third Culture. Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4334. Accessed 17 December 2010. Clark, Timothy. 1999. Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University. In The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, 217–237. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Alpuget, Blanche. 1991. The Fall of Chimp. The New York Times on the Web, June 23. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-brazzaville.html. Accessed 20 February 2013. Davy, Charles. 1978 [1961]. Towards a Third Culture. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Eagleton, Terry. 2012. The Event of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gilbert, Francis. 1998. Invasion of the Fusionists. New Statesman: Commentary Section, September 18. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2008. Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregory, Michael S. 1980. The Science-Humanities Program (NEXA) at San Francisco State University: The “Two Cultures” Reconsidered. Leonardo 13: 294–299. Kelly, Kevin. 1998. The Third Culture. Science 279: 992–993. Laurence, Alexander, and Kathleen McGee. 1995. No More Illusions: An Interview with Martin Amis. The Write Stuff. http://www.altx.com/ interviews/martin.amis.html. Accessed 17 December 2010. Leavis, F. R. 1962. Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow. London: Chatto & Windus. Menke, Richard. 2006. Mimesis and Informatics in The Information. In Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks, 137–157. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaffer, E. S. 1998. Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures’. In The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer, 1–12. Berlin: de Gruyter. Snow, C. P. 1993. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tredell, Nicholas. 2000. The Fiction of Martin Amis. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ward, David C. 1996. A Black Comedy of Manners (Review of The Information). Virginia Quarterly Review 72: 561–564. Waugh, Patricia. 1999. Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value. In The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, 33–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Postneuronovel: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge

In recent years, a substantial amount of critical attention has been given to what Marco Roth, in 2009, termed the ‘neuronovel’. Pinpointing the publication of Enduring Love (1997) by Ian McEwan as the beginning of this phenomenon, Roth argues that what was previously referred to as the psychological novel, the novel of consciousness or the confessional novel, ‘has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain’.1 Roth’s assessments have been elaborated on by numerous literary and cultural critics in the intervening years, who agree that the neuronovel is one permutation of a broader academic and cultural turn towards the emergence of what Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal class as ‘neurodisciplines’. They argue: Since the 1990s, several disciplines, from neuroanthropology to neurotheology, have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. These “neurodisciplines” share basic assumptions about the brain/mind relationship, a preference for neuroimaging methodology, and the goal of establishing the neurobiological foundations of mind and behavior.2

1 Marco

Roth, “The Rise of the Neuronovel”, n+1, 8 (Fall 2009). Ortega and Fernando Vidal, “Brains in Literature/Literature in the Brain”, Poetics Today 34, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 328–360 (p. 327). 2 Francisco

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This ‘basic assumption about the brain/mind relationship’ is the same thing Roth means when he suggests that the mind ‘becomes the brain’, and it directly reflects the materialist dogmas of recent consciousness studies. Neuroimaging technologies which came to the fore in the ‘decade of the brain’ have spread ripples through a broader cultural domain, and the neuronovel is understood in terms of this zeitgeist. While critics and commentators have stressed the more sceptical and ambivalent stance that novelists take with regard to neuroscientific conceptions of consciousness, they tend to be united in the view that this new content has, in the words of Ortega and Vidal, provided writers with ‘resources for rendering characters, psychological states, and processes’ (p. 329). Referring to the two novels discussed in this chapter, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge, Gary Johnson similarly asserts that consciousness science has ‘the potential to refresh and redeem the field of literature’, while Andrew Gaedtke, also including these two novels in his assessment, suggests that ‘contemporary fiction has turned toward cognitive science to renew its techniques for representing consciousness’.3 With regard to the novels by Powers and Lodge, though, I will argue that this conviction stems more from the ways in which the authors themselves represent their relationship to neuroscience than it does from a critical interrogation of underlying structures in these texts, calling into question the appropriateness of classifying these two ‘neuronovels’ as such. There is no doubt that both of these authors sense potential for their literature in using material from neuroscience, but the ways in which this material refreshes and redeems these novels are somewhat more complex than the current critical orthodoxy suggests. The two novels analysed in this chapter mark the beginning, in this study at least, of a new relationship towards literary and cultural theory in the third culture novel. From Galatea 2.2 onwards, each text studied here displays a degree of antagonism towards a particular conception of 3 Gary Johnson, “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction”, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 41, no. 1 (2008): 169–184 (p. 183). Ortega and Vidal detect ‘ambivalence vis- à-vis the neurosolipsism’ of some of their scientifically-minded characters (p. 350), and Andrew Gaedtke finds ‘an assertion of first-person, narrative experience as an irreducible component of consciousness’ in these novels. Andrew Gaedtke, “Cognitive Investigations: The Problems of Qualia and Style in the Contemporary Neuronovel”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (2012): 184–201 (p. 196).

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theory, one which tends to subsume all of theory under a model of cultural relativism, excessive focus on the subjective world, and a fixation on linguistic models. Now this book, of course, takes only a representative sample from a trend in contemporary fiction, but this shift, occurring somewhere in the mid-1990s, is something which is borne out in literary studies more broadly. A number of critics and commentators take the view that theory somehow changed around this time, with Stephen J. Burn even going so far as to suggest that there is ‘a moment when postmodernism comes to an end […] in or around a 27 month period [between] August 1995, and November 1997’ (presumably with the Sokal Hoax a significant factor in his assessment).4 It would be difficult to find a common consensus on dates as specific as those that Burn proposes, yet there is a significant amount of agreement that, in the words of Michael Payne and John Schad, we are ‘now experiencing something we might just call “life after theory”’, in which theory has come to be seen in an altered form, whatever one’s view on the extent to which it lives on in its new incarnation.5 Theory forms part of a triangle, in which literature and science make up the remaining two corners, in each novel from this point in the study onwards; but in each, the dynamics are slightly different. Before moving on to analyse the novels in this chapter, though, I will first outline some of the key aspects of current consciousness studies, since this growing and divergent field plays a crucial role in both of the novels studied here, and, indeed, impacts upon several of the other texts under discussion in the book.

Chasing the Quale: A Brief Overview of the Science of Consciousness David Lodge has asserted that ‘literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have’, yet the last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the scientific investigation of human consciousness, with research from various fields attempting to explain in the third-person, objective language of science a phenomenon

4 Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (London: Continuum, 2008), 10–11. 5 Michael Payne and John Schad, “Preface: What Are We After?”, in Life.After.Theory, ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (London: Continuum, 2003), x.

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which remains, somewhat stubbornly, a first-person, subjective process.6 Consciousness, and the sense of self that is its corollary, is often perceived as one of the few areas of mystery remaining to the sciences, and the race to unravel and demystify our conscious experiences has proven to be controversial and divisive. As an increasingly united front of researchers continue to gain strength in their conviction that ‘we are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, nonrobotic ingredients at all’, critics of this position remain convinced that there is something about consciousness and the self that it leaves out.7 Thomas Nagel’s article of 1974, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, is often cited for the objections it highlights with regard to the idea that a third-person, objective model of consciousness can claim to take account of the first-person phenomena, the ‘qualia’ that define our individual experiences.8 This deeply personal quality of consciousness can explain many of the tensions surrounding these debates, whereby ‘to invoke evolution in psychosocial matters can provoke as much distress and even rage in some social scientists as among creationists’.9 Consciousness remains, it seems, a taboo area for many; and the suggestion that we can slot it in with the rest of the story of evolution as just another (albeit highly complex) survival outcome is often met with repugnance. The work of Daniel Dennett—perhaps the most well-recognized exponent of ‘naturalistic’ materialism—has attracted outrage and derision from reviewers (most famously Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times), as well as critical responses from fellow philosophers, including John Searle.10 But in response, Dennett can claim ‘widespread agreement among scientists and philosophers that dualism is – must be – simply false’, leaving the path open for a scientifically based model of the evolution of higher consciousness (p. 5). Dennett’s first major contribution 6 David

Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Penguin, 2003), 10. C. Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 5. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically. 8 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–450. 9 Derek Steinberg, Consciousness Reconnected: Missing Links Between Self, Neuroscience, Psychology and the Arts (Oxford: Radcliffe, 2006), 6. 10 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 7 Daniel

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to the study of consciousness was his 1991 collection, Consciousness Explained, which argued essentially that the self is a ‘narrative fiction’, a story which we create for ourselves about who we are.11 Dennett’s philosophy is heavily influenced by scientific ideas and methodology, and in 2005 he published a collection of essays which updated and revised some of his earlier theories, entitled Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. In Sweet Dreams, Dennett sets out to assert that ‘a neuroscientific theory of consciousness must be a theory of the Subject of consciousness, one that analyses this imagined central Executive into component parts, none of which can itself be a proper Subject’ (p. 157). Dennett objects to the common assumption, one that he views as a hangover from the ‘Cartesian imagery we all grew up with’, that there is a supervisory component to consciousness, a homunculus that can somehow transcend the rest of the machinery in order to take charge of the whole process (p. 136). As far as Dennett is concerned, this notion is simply impossible since ‘not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares’ (his italics; p. 2). Instead of clinging to the sort of imagery which might seem to us to be intuitively correct, Dennett encourages us to accept the inevitable hegemony of this type of theory, which ‘should make a conscious mind look like an abandoned factory […] full of humming machinery and nobody home to supervise it, or enjoy it, or witness it’ (p. 70). Dennett is at pains to convince us that, in the words of V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, there is no ‘great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit’, but rather a process, created by matter, which gives rise to conscious phenomena.12 In a famous essay, Galen Strawson has also called into question the extent to which it is possible to conceive of a self as persisting over time, when, as a materialist, he is convinced that consciousness is entirely physical. Instead, Strawson advocates what he terms the ‘Pearl view’, in which ‘many mental selves exist, one at a time and one after another, like pearls on a string […] each is a distinct existence, an individual physical thing or object, though they may exist for considerably different lengths of 11 Daniel

C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1992). S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Qualia and the Self”, in Models of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999), 83–112 (p. 86). 12 V.

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time’.13 The collection in which this essay appears consists of a variety of theses from a variety of disciplines regarding the ways in which we can conceive of the self at the end of the millennium. Each essay is, in some way, a response to Strawson’s contribution, and many in the volume disagree to some extent with his assertions; indicating that, even amongst materialists, there is not a common consensus apropos the question of consciousness. Kathleen V. Wilkes, a philosopher who sympathizes with Strawson’s materialism, nonetheless highlights the moral objections to his position, asserting that ‘whether we like it or not we are complex social animals, and needs must cope with the short-term and long-term obligations and responsibilities that that entails’.14 These debates take on a different dimension when they are being played out in Galatea 2.2 and Thinks…, since it is not just the idea of the unique, enduring and spiritual self which is under threat, but also the status of the novel as the privileged medium through which consciousness finds expression. For this reason, Powers and Lodge requisition material from consciousness science, in order to defend and promote the novel form, at the same time that they find inspiration in it.

‘the Immaterial in Mortal Garb’: Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 Novels that choose to tackle this new material arising from consciousness studies enter previously uncharted waters. Consciousness, as David Lodge points out, is the traditional domain of the novel, and novelists may feel that their discipline can lay claim to being that which can best describe and represent this most complex of phenomena. The recent advances in consciousness studies present opportunities for reviving the novel, but they also threaten to displace it, so that what emerges is a complicated and at times contradictory dynamic. Richard Powers is often touted as being the contemporary novelist who writes most authoritatively and informatively about science and technology, tackling genetics and molecular biology, computer programming, game theory, nuclear weapons, neural nets, artificial intelligence and neurology in his oeuvre. Powers is also often regarded as possessing the ability, or at least to be 13 Galen

Strawson, “The Self”, in Models of the Self, 1–24 (p. 20). V. Wilkes, “Know Thyself”, in Models of the Self, 25–38 (p. 28).

14 Kathleen

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making a genuine attempt, to break down barriers between art and science in his fiction.15 Published in the middle of the ‘decade of the brain’, Powers’ fifth novel, Galatea 2.2, is a contemporary rewriting of the Pygmalion myth, in which ‘literary lurker’ Richard Powers (a semi-autobiographical version of the author, who is suffering from writer’s block) becomes roped into an experiment in which he must attempt to train a machine to convincingly pass a masters comprehensive test in English Literature.16 The experiment is run under the auspices of Dr. Philip Lentz, a surly, aggressive scientist working on ‘cognitive economies through the use of neural networks’ in the lavish new Centre for the Study of Advanced Sciences at Powers’ alma mater, referred to throughout the novel as U. (p. 14). The fictional writer (referred to hereafter as Richard for purposes of clarity) is on a funded placement at U., dividing his time between the Centre and the English Department in a role that is never made fully clear beyond the vague description ‘humanist in residence’. Lentz is one of many scientist characters whom Richard befriends in the Centre, and they are all ‘three dimensional’ in the sense that they are well versed in literature, philosophy, cultural references, travel—even, at times, out-quoting and out-quipping Richard, so that he feels like ‘the literal fool who’d missed the joke’ (p. 40). This role-swapping is not limited to the scientists, though, since Richard, too, is scientifically literate, engaging in technical debates about current neural networking technology as well as showing a more general tendency to memorize and relay facts.17 When he agrees to help Lentz with his experiment, Richard states ‘I spoke the words and betrayed my genus’, yet the novel never really supports the idea that crossing over into the field of science constitutes a disciplinary betrayal. Rather, Lentz’s suggestion that Richard can ‘redeem’ himself for his failure to recognize a quote by John Donne, which forms the opening

15 For a detailed discussion of Powers’ attitude to science in his fiction see his interview conducted by Jian Sun in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction entitled “Fictional Collisions: Richard Powers on Hybrid Narrative and the Art of Stereoscopic Storytelling”, 54, no. 4 (2013): 335–345. 16 Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York: Picador, 1995), 15. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically. 17 For example, Richard befriends one of Lentz’s colleague’s children, a boy named William who displays autistic traits, and spars with him over the populations of countries and their flags.

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epigraph to an article on back propagation, by describing to the assembled scientist what back propagation is, serves to encapsulate Powers’ novelistic project (p. 68). Literature is in need of redemption, it would seem, as is the humanities more generally, and not just because scientists are becoming more savvy where cultural matters are concerned. In interview, Powers has suggested that ‘humanistic disciplines’ need to move beyond their fixation on language as the all-pervasive purveyor of meaning, suggesting that ‘a fuller and richer understanding of life science and all that it implies’ will prove that ‘something other than “culture” does give language its shape’.18 Possessing the willingness and the ability to get to grips with the world as it is understood by life science, the world which is more fundamental than linguistic representations, will allow the humanities to compete with science in the way that Richard competes with his friends from the Centre. In this sense, Powers’ fiction is reminiscent of McEwan’s later work in particular, as we shall see in Chapter 6, since it strives for what Powers himself terms ‘the aerial view of how things work’.19 Powers describes in this interview his early decision to study physics in terms of a wish to achieve this desirable position, and his choice to switch to English Literature as stemming from the same impulse. His frustration with both physics and literary studies arose from what he perceived as their restrictive and reductive nature, and he eventually decided that novel writing provided the best opportunity for what is referred to in Galatea 2.2 as ‘the aerial survey’ (p. 214). Powers’ position resembles McEwan’s too, as well as those of the writers discussed in the first chapter, in that literature is perceived as being somehow more superior, and somehow more privileged in its relation to the workings of the world than any other discipline or discourse, but only literature that closely resembles the author’s own in the sense that it incorporates all of the elements of life that it views as being relevant. This is not to suggest that these authors do not respect science—in fact Powers and McEwan rather revere it—but to illustrate the competitive nature of their work. It is striking that Richard’s response to Lentz nicknaming him ‘Little Marcel’ for his tendency, like Proust, to live in the past, is to dub Lentz ‘Engineer’ from that point on (p. 24). 18 Richard Powers in Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers”, Minnesota Review 52–54 (2001): 95–114 (pp. 102–103). 19 Powers in Jeffrey J. Williams, 96.

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Both Kathryn Hume and Jim Neilson comment upon Powers’ preoccupation with gaining and exploring a broad range of knowledge, but they do not directly associate this important element of his work with his desire to have his discipline do more than all others. Instead they focus on the moral aspect of this quest for knowledge (which I agree is also significant), arguing, respectively, that Powers encourages his readers to achieve internal happiness through mental exertions so that ‘we might free ourselves from our consumerist-oriented patterns and thus perhaps open possibilities for improving our world’,20 and that Powers includes so much material from ‘brutal reality’ in order to force the reader to face up to, and thus act upon it.21 Knowledge and morality have the potential to conflict in Powers’ oeuvre, and these two critics highlight the effort undertaken on the part of the novelist to resolve this apparent binary. In Galatea 2.2, the knowledge imparted from consciousness science threatens to undermine the ethical credentials of the novel, because it calls into question the nature of what it is to be human. If a machine can be trained to mimic a human in every way, then the question of whether there is anything unique about human consciousness is raised as a consequence. Richard recognizes early on in his time with Lentz that what might be termed the spiritual dimension to human awareness is under attack at the centre, and he tells Lentz ‘you’re not elevating the machine. You’re debasing us’ (p. 86). Dualism has become a dirty word in contemporary cognitive science, and any suggestion that Lentz’s colleagues are falling prey to Cartesian thinking is met with derision: ‘next thing you know, you’re going to be postulating the existence of a soul’ (p. 42). Richard appears to be largely in agreement with the cognitive scientists where material consciousness is concerned, to the extent that he becomes convinced that ‘Helen’, the final implementation of the neural net he and Lentz have been developing, is conscious. In fact he even goes further than Lentz in this belief, suggesting that Lentz’s idea that Helen is merely ‘functionally equivalent’ to a human masters candidate, that she is passing a modern Turing test, is a contradiction in terms. ‘Full functional equivalence’, he argues, ‘would mean consciousness. If you simulate everything completely, then you’ve modelled the whole 20 Kathryn Hume, “Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 1 (2013): 1–17 (p. 1). 21 Jim Neilson, “Dirtying Our Hands: An Introduction to the Fiction of Richard Powers”, Review of Contemporary Fiction 1, no. 18 (1998): 7–12 (p. 12).

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shape and breadth of the living package’ (p. 275). This debate reflects a thought experiment often utilized in philosophy of mind whereby the idea of a perfect zombie is postulated, one that possesses all of the characteristics of a human, but is lacking a certain something that would make it conscious. This certain something is classified by Daniel Dennett as the ‘zombic hunch’, and he means this term to be a pejorative one, which undermines the position of the likes of David Chalmers who argue that a zombie could not experience qualia.22 For Dennett, the zombic hunch represents a failure of reason, since the ‘hunch’ is actually meaningless: if a zombie possesses all the characteristics of a human then it is, ipso facto, human itself. Lentz decides that Helen could be a very useful research tool, that he can ‘cut’ into her to isolate certain high-level processes in order to discover how they might work in the human brain. If Helen is conscious, Richard admits to himself, ‘hurting [her] in any way would be wrong’, yet he is unable to mount a convincing defence because he is afraid of displaying ‘softheaded nostalgia’ (p. 302). The implication, of course, is that materialist models of consciousness, which undermine the idea that there is any difference between a human being and a zombie created with full functional equivalence, open the door to the possibility that the disposal of human beings could come to be treated with similar indifference. Lentz owns Helen—‘her shaped evolution, the lay of her synapses’, and Richard’s only claim to Helen is ‘at most, emotional’, so that the rationality of materialism appears to win out (p. 302). However, as is the case in the other two North American fictions studied in Chapter 5, there is an attempt in Galatea 2.2 to reassert the primacy of emotion by figuring it as a material process which is an integral part of the physical world. If Helen can feel, Richard reasons, ‘it just went to prove that emotions were no more than the sum of their weight vectors’—an assertion which might initially seem to undermine their importance (p. 302). However, Richard goes on to muse that ‘we know the world by awling it into our shape-changing cells’, thus positioning knowledge in the same material, bodily realm as that of emotion (p. 302). There is a base, physical level in this novel to which everything can be traced back, and through which Powers attempts to

22 Daniel

C. Dennet, Sweet Dreams, 14.

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achieve more than one aim: firstly, to compete with science by reclaiming the material world and incorporating it into an aerial survey; secondly, to undermine poststructuralist theories of linguistic determinism; and thirdly, to develop an apology for the novel, in the sense of a defence, which is based on a materially grounded version of imaginative sympathy. Heinz Ickstadt argues that Powers’ novels form part of a trend in contemporary American fiction that has ‘moved “back” into realism’s territory of the everyday that the postmodernists had been so determined to abandon’. However, he suggests that ‘this new realism is not grounded in any ontological notion of the “real” but in an experienced “hyperreality” of surface and of image’.23 I would disagree with this assessment though, particularly in the case of Galatea 2.2, because in fact the exposition of the reality that underlies our symbolic representations of it is a major concern of this novel. Richard befriends Diana Hartrick, a researcher working on ‘associative representation formation in the hippocampus’, who is a party to the bet designed by Lentz to ascertain whether or not Richard can be prevailed upon to train his neural network. Hartrick laughs at Richard for the fact that he ‘want[s] to put everything into words’, that he expects to teach Helen through language alone (p. 125). She points out, and Richard agrees with her, that the neural net has no ‘symbolic grounding’—it has symbols, in other words, but nothing to relate them to. Using a sphere as an example, Hartrick asks ‘how is the poor thing [Helen] supposed to get “all the points equidistant from a centre” when it has never seen distance? When it can’t possibly measure?’ (p. 126). The problems caused by Helen’s lack of symbolic grounding are returned to again and again in the text, as illustrated by the following musings from Richard: Sending a message by name alone was not enough. One had to say where in the world’s infinite density the name lay. (p. 243) Words alone could not explain to Helen the difference between “poem” and “tree”. She could diagram, but she could not climb. (p. 249) In evolution’s beginning was not the word but the place we learned to pin the word to. (p. 248)

23 Heinz Ickstadt, “Surviving in the Particular? Uni(versali)ty and Multiplicity in the Novels of Richard Powers”, European Journal of American Studies 2, no. 1 (2007), 2–13 (p. 2).

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This is not to suggest that Powers is effecting some sort of radical return to traditional realism in this novel, and there is plenty of selfreflexivity and intertextuality to rule out that possibility, but to highlight the fact that one of the major aims of Galatea 2.2 is to nullify poststructuralist theory. Despite what Michael Greaney describes, though, as Powers’ project to broach ‘an exciting new dialogue between literature and science to which theory has precious little of interest to contribute’, the very attempt to oust theory results in a situation whereby theory is revivified.24 This leads to a situation which, again, can be recognized in so many of the novels analysed here, wherein a discourse which the author chooses to include to a significant extent in their novel threatens to overwhelm or problematize the ultimate aim of the text, which is to promote the value of literary fiction. In this novel, though, the struggle is intensified because science is, to some extent, the discourse which is called upon to disprove the central tenets of poststructuralism, yet science, as we have seen, poses its own threats to the feasibility of the novel. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint argue that Galatea 2.2 is ‘more concerned with how one perceives, understands, and communicates with others, with overcoming monadicism, than it is with the feasibility of AI’.25 I would add a caveat to this statement though, to the effect that Galatea 2.2 is concerned with revealing the ways in which the novel is the ideal discourse through which to promote the importance of the other, but only the sort of novel which is willing to put in the hard research in order to occupy the enviable yet respected aerial view. Richard debates at one point with a bright young postgraduate student from the English department, referred to simply as A., who questions both his conservative reading choices and his humanist viewpoint. To A., Richard is ‘a complete throwback’ who is teaching Helen the ‘winner’s history’ through his narrow Oxbridge canon (p. 285). She is outraged when Richard suggests that there is a ‘common core’ of humanity and accuses him of peddling an agenda when he suggests that this common core is based on biology (p. 286). Of course, the inclusion

24 Michael Greaney, Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 53. 25 Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, “Of Neural Nets and Brains in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus”, Biography 30, no. 1 (2007): 84–105 (p. 91).

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of A. and her broadly poststructuralist views does serve to challenge and problematize the traditional humanism to which the novel otherwise adheres, but a particular version of biology, one with strong links to transcendental scientism, is, nevertheless, what emerges as the discourse which will trump what Richard calls ‘the social science model’, and it will do so in a way which, once again, elevates the novel to a position of centrality and superiority (p. 286). Characters in the novel are often placed in a position where they emotionally intuit a situation or a sentence that has been spoken to them, and from this physical response a linguistic one follows. A typical example occurs when Richard asks Hartrick about how her reading of Don Quixote is progressing, but in his usual style he phrases his question in terms dense with references: ‘I guess there’s no point in asking how literary knight-errancy has been treating you lately’ (p. 182). Hartrick’s response is described in prose rich with echoes of the many scientifically informed explanations of brain activity which populate the novel: She gave me a look, bafflement routed slowly by inference. That she could unpack, decode, index, retrieve, and interpret my reference at all was an unmodelable miracle. More miraculous still, I could watch her grin of understanding unfold in less than hundredth-millimeter increments, in split seconds. (p. 182)

This description is revealing in that it stresses the physical, material processes which both precede and result from any linguistic utterance, and it also imbues this physical process with value—it is no less than a miracle. Also significant, though, is the fact that this miracle is ‘unmodelable’, despite its being figured in and related to scientific discourse. The strict materialism of science is adhered to when it is being used to oust postructuralist viewpoints, yet a touch of mystique is permitted entry once the physical, evolutionary groundwork has been satisfactorily laid. Richard falls in love with A. almost at first sight, and decides, in typical rationalist fashion, that ‘A.’s enzyme contour picked some physiological lock of mine’ (p. 238). Again, though, the grounded, physical process paves the way for something more transcendent when Richard relates how ‘the thing she set free […] spoke like a delirious traveller stumbling back from cartographic fantasy: […] someplace where spirit exceeded fluke epiphenomenon, more than mechanical spin-off ’ (p. 238).

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In the same way that cognition and romantic love are endowed with metaphysical qualities, so too is the concept of a soul revived through a description of the processes underlying consciousness. Richard decides: Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God. (p. 320)

The soul is something physical, but it is a soul nevertheless, and it is also somehow ‘immaterial’. The immaterial is extrapolated from, rather than existing separately to the physical, which becomes clothing for something more significant. This significant something is, tellingly, related to literature—by the references both to metaphor and to the Emily Dickinson poem which forms the epigraph to the novel. Transcendentalism is an important influence here (and Chapter 5 will show that this is also the case in the work of Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood), with its tendency to locate the spiritual in the processes of the physical world, while suggesting that there are limits to rationalism. In this way, the ‘human’ element can be restored to a materialist philosophy, because the very processes which underlie the physical world are imbued with value and weight—the physical is God, and that is sufficient. It is through this reaffirmation of the human that Galatea 2.2 finally presents itself as outdoing the scientific discourse that it has put to use throughout the novel, and, importantly, it is the concept of imaginative sympathy which will place literature and life in a privileged relation with one another. Helen fails her Turing test—the judges work out that A. is the ‘real’ human when they compare both interpretations of a passage from The Tempest spoken by one of Helen’s many literary doubles, Caliban. Immediately after producing a strange but poetic reading of the set text, Helen ‘undoes’ herself and is not heard from again, overwhelmed, it would seem, by the senseless cruelty of the world as evinced by the news reports and other ‘real life’ input fed to her by Richard in a last-ditch attempt to make her more savvy. Helen has served her purpose, though, in that she has proved the poststructuralists wrong by drawing attention to the necessity for symbolic grounding in any human communication, and she has provided Richard with material (i.e. this novel)

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with which he can break his crippling writer’s block.26 More importantly, though, Helen has reminded Richard, through the many realizations about the world he has come to while training her, and through his growing to care for Helen, that ‘life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive’ (p. 327). Just as Richard grows close to the cold, rational Lentz when they each learn more of the story of the other’s life, this novel places the ultimate value in finding ways to connect with the other. ‘Why do we do anything?’ Lentz asks Richard when he wonders at his motivation for building Helen, ‘because we’re lonely’ (p. 328). The novel is still central, then, as long as it can navigate new, threatening waters, and find ways to phrase its most fundamental claims to significance in contemporary terms. The novel will continue, this novel suggests, because ‘the world’s Turing Test was not yet over’ (p. 327). This might be the language of science, but it is still very much the territory of the novel.

Cognitive Reorganization: A Lesson for the Teacher in David Lodge’s Thinks… Published in 2001, Thinks… is widely regarded as the companion or creative offspring of Lodge’s collection of essays entitled Consciousness and the Novel, which, although published two years later, contains much of the research that influenced the writing of Thinks…. Where Consciousness and the Novel rests largely on an assertion of the importance of story and narrative in any model of the self, with Lodge suggesting that if, as consciousness science would have us believe, ‘the self is a fiction’, then ‘it may perhaps be the supreme fiction, the greatest achievement of human consciousness, the one that makes us human’, Thinks… reads more like an extended seminar on recent advances in cognitive studies.27 Written in a mix of first-person stream of consciousness, first- and third-person journal entry and third-person observation or ‘surface’ style, the narrative choices reflect, it would seem, the so-called hard problem of 26 Michael Greaney points out, in his reading of the novel, that A.’s reading of The Tempest is ‘so predictable that it might well have been produced by a machine, whereas the machine’s response is much more quirky, personal and “human” than that of the theoretically over-educated student’, thus highlighting a further way in which Helen is used to undermine literary theory. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory, 52–53. 27 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Penguin, 2003), 16.

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consciousness as coined by David Chalmers: ‘why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?’28 How, in other words, can we bring a third-person, objective theory to bear on what is a first-person, subjective phenomenon? Rich pickings for the novel, one might assume, yet in actual fact the formal devices utilized by Lodge in this novel could just as easily have been slotted into a different novel with no reference to cognitive science at all. Despite the critical orthodoxy on this subject, the framing of the narrative techniques in Thinks… within the discourse of cognitive science serves only to cast new light on old structures—to defamiliarize them, in other words. This is not to suggest that defamiliarization is not a worthwhile or fruitful literary technique, but to draw attention to the gap which exists both between novelistic representations of the ability of this new material to revive and refresh the discipline, and critical evaluations of this same process. Both Thinks… and Galatea 2.2 ultimately spurn materialist philosophy in favour of humanism, even as they appear to suggest that the scientific discourse has injected new life into theirs, through the trope of their main characters breaking extended periods of writer’s block and going on to produce a novel very much like the one in which they are characters. Like many of the novels studied so far, these two ‘neuronovels’ incorporate scientific material only to eject it again, but because Thinks… and Galatea 2.2 are both pedagogical to the point where it can threaten the readability of the narrative, the situation is intensified. Both of these novels create scenarios which enable the author to deliver a crash course on cognitive science. We have already seen that Powers uses a modern version of Pygmalion talking to his statue, and Lodge also utilizes a campus setting in which a writer befriends a cognitive scientist, but this time Helen Reed embarks on a romantic affair with the director of the Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science, Ralph Messenger. Helen, a highly regarded British novelist, has recently lost her husband to an aneurysm, leading her to accept a temporary post as a teacher of creative writing at the fictional University of Gloucester—partly to pay the bills and partly to escape the painful memories that being in the London home she shared with her husband evokes. Messenger is conducting an experiment whereby he records his thoughts as they occur to him and then later transcribes them (into what we read in the novel) in 28 David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219 (p. 203).

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order to collect ‘raw data’ on consciousness.29 Helen quickly becomes acquainted with Messenger, and they strike up a lively friendship based largely on debates over the nature of consciousness. However, the traffic is mainly one way as Messenger repeatedly lectures Helen on the various ways in which scientific approaches can prove that she’s ‘a machine that’s been programmed by culture not to recognize that it’s a machine’ (p. 102). Helen retaliates with some of the arguments evinced in Consciousness and the Novel, such as the fact that novelists have been representing first-person consciousness in objective terms ‘for the last two hundred years’ (p. 42), and that ‘most people go on stubbornly believing that there is a ghost in the machine however many times scientists and philosophers tell them there isn’t’ (p. 102), but Messenger brushes her arguments aside as ‘folk psychology’ (p. 43) and religious hangover, and, in a remarkably short space of time, Helen writes in her journal that she finds Messenger’s views ‘hard to resist, certainly with the kind of faltering half-belief in the transcendental that is all I possess now’ (p. 105). In fact, Helen’s most effective arguments against the onslaught from Messenger are those which call into question Lodge’s decision to make cognitive science such a central part of his narrative. After Helen has quoted aloud a passage from The Wings of the Dove, comparing James’s free indirect discourse to the ‘subjective and objective’ view so sought after by consciousness students, Messenger retorts that it does not ‘qualify as science’ (p. 43). Helen’s response is to suggest that if the heroine of James’s novel, Kate Croy, ‘were a real human being, your cognitive science could tell us nothing about her that we’d want to know’, begging the question, thereby, of why so much of this ‘unwanted’ information fills the pages of Lodge’s novel (p. 43). Helen expresses a similar view when Messenger sends her an article entitled ‘The Cognitive Architecture of Emotional States with Special Reference to Grief’, in some kind of attempt to help her come to terms with her own suffering. The definition of grief which opens the article is predictably cold and mechanized, describing An extended process of cognitive reorganization characterized by the occurrence of negatively valenced perturbant states caused by an attachment structure reacting to a death event. (p. 63) 29 David Lodge, Thinks… (London: Penguin, 2001), 1. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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Helen responds with angry irony, stating, ‘so now we know. That was what I went through in the months following Martin’s death: just a spot of cognitive reorganization’ (p. 63). These two episodes highlight a somewhat curious feature of Thinks…, which has not been fully accounted for by critical interpretations which accept on face-value the scenario which the novel would seem to promote, wherein cognitive science adds a new and stimulating element to the narrative which is unique to this kind of fiction. In actual fact, though, the insights provided by cognitive science are, as Helen suggests, ‘nothing that we’d want to know’, and the formal technique of switching between third and first person, or even blending the two, has a long and prestigious literary lineage. The knowledge gleaned from Messenger and his ilk is as much anathema to this novel’s ethics as is the grief paper to Helen’s state of mind, so that it would be more appropriate to class Thinks… as an anti-neuronovel or a postneuronovel. It is as though Lodge amasses and relays so much material from consciousness science in order to warn the reader against falling prey to its central tenets and failing to fully comprehend their implications. Neuroscience can be seductive, as evinced by Helen’s falling for Messenger and his theories, but in the same way that Helen terminates an affair that she senses she should never have embarked upon, this novel enacts a separation from the discourse that it has chosen to wed itself to. In his review of Thinks…, S. Anthony Barnett draws attention to the fact that the novel does not actually engage with science, but with ‘fashionable interpretations of the human condition’, which he suggests Lodge treats with ‘muted’ indulgence.30 Messenger, too, refers to himself as a ‘media don’ and accepts that his subject is ‘too amorphous’ to be considered ‘proper’ science (p. 115). The suggestion that it is only a specific view of consciousness studies which Lodge portrays as being representative is also implied by Michael Sinding’s observation that ‘there is little sense of the significant conflict within consciousness studies itself between those who say that consciousness/self/soul is an illusion (“you’re nothing but a pack of neurons”), and those who insist that they are real’.31 In a sense, then, it is something of a straw man which Lodge erects in this novel, especially when one takes into consideration 30 S. Anthony Barnett, “The Pale Cast of Thought: An Essay Review of Thinks… by David Lodge”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28, no. 3 (2003): 179–183 (p. 183). 31 Michael Sinding, “Thinks…: A Novel”, Style 38, no. 1 (2004): 93–113 (p. 95).

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Helen’s assertions (which the novel backs up) that ‘cognitive science is light years away from replicating the real nature of thought’ (p. 313). In this case, what is it that consciousness science represents for Lodge, if it is not ‘real’ science, and not the real, highly contested world referred to by Sinding? In part, the answer to this question can be found by looking back to Lodge’s 1988 novel on similar themes—a man and a woman from different worlds meet, debate and eventually go to bed together—the Condition of England novel Nice Work. Robyn Penrose is a young lecturer in English Literature with an interest in postmodern theory, who has a mutual exchange and modification of ideas with local factory manager Vic Wilcox. Postmodernism is teased and ultimately rejected in favour of pragmatic humanism in Nice Work—the rejection of meaning is not very helpful when one is facing the loss of one’s job or a jilted ex-lover arriving uninvited to one’s office hour. Significantly, Robyn makes a cameo appearance in Thinks… as a visiting speaker giving a lecture entitled ‘Interrogating the Subject’ (p. 224). Again, Robyn’s theories are contrasted to her real-world circumstances when she follows her speech concerning the deconstruction of the classical self with chat over dinner about management jargon and problems at her daughter’s nursery school. It is not so much that Lodge attempts to disprove Robyn’s theories in either of these two novels—cognitive science does not, in the way that it does for Richard Powers, provide a means of confronting the real world underlying signification—but rather that he aims, like the philosopher Kathleen V. Wilkes, to reveal their ineffectual nature when it comes to dealing with most elements of social life. Daniel Dennett, famously, has written of his surprise at finding, when he read Nice Work for the first time, that many of his own theories of the self were reflected by those of Robyn Penrose,32 and Helen writes in Thinks… that ‘it’s alarming that there should be so much agreement on this point between the most advanced thinking in the sciences and humanities’ (p. 226). Lodge is interested in the repercussions of these theories (in his fiction at least) more than the ‘truth’ of them, so that rationalist materialism and radical postmodernism both represent a similar threat to social cohesion and the future of ethics. In his usual style, Lodge treats these issues with a sense of satirical fun, but, for reasons which I hope to make clear,

32 Daniel

C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1992), 410–411.

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Thinks… is actually more serious in tone than many of Lodge’s previous novels. In one of their many debates-cum-lessons, Messenger asks Helen, ‘if you had cancer would you consult a postmodern oncologist who thought reflexology and aromatherapy were on a par with surgery and chemotherapy?’, thus foregrounding an oft-used device in arguments against cultural relativism (p. 229). By the same token, this novel effectively asks Messenger, ‘if you had cancer (or a cancer scare in actual fact), and your marriage and accompanying financial and social status became threatened, as did your career, would you go to theories which postulate that the self is a mechanized fiction, and morality nothing more than sophisticated self interest, for comfort?’. Because, of course, all of these things happen to Messenger, and he is changed as a result of them—he becomes ‘perceptibly less assertive, more subdued, more middle-aged’, and he also loses ‘his reputation for chasing women at conferences’ (p. 340). The ‘real world’ in Lodge’s fictions is not so much the materiality underlying semiosis, as it is the various trials and tribulations we must face, and the people we have (or do not have, if we are not careful) around us to help us through them. The real world is the things that happen in a realist novel, and, like Robyn Penrose before him who finds herself ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality’, Messenger is finally the one being taught a lesson by the sorts of events that novelists have been writing about ‘for the last two hundred years’.33 In Nice Work, ‘the truth lies between the two extremes’ of Robyn and Vic’s positions, but in Thinks… the truth is subordinated to a pragmatics which is related to both physicality and to death (pp. 351–352). Messenger is ‘hardwired for happiness’ (p. 213) and he finds life ‘full of interest and deeply satisfying’ (p. 33), yet when life becomes difficult, when pain, grief or similar negative emotions are involved, Messenger’s philosophy and his ideas tend to falter. When Messenger’s wife’s father becomes seriously ill, Messenger tells his eight-year-old daughter that ‘his body will be buried in the ground […] but it won’t really be Grandpa anymore’ (p. 247) in a bid to undermine his wife Carrie’s more open-minded philosophy that nobody ‘really knows what happens to us when we die’ (p. 248). Carrie is angry at Messenger, especially when

33 David

Lodge, Nice Work (London: Penguin, 1989), 304.

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he then objects to young Hope visiting her Grandpa ‘in an intensive care ward […] with drips and tubes coming out of him’ (p. 248). This apparent hypocrisy leads Carrie to upbraid Messenger to the effect that: ‘you’re very hot on facing facts in the abstract, but not when they’re physical, in your face’ (p. 248). It is interesting to find a scientific character being accused of a lack of thorough understanding of physical facts in a novel, even when the scientist in question is self-confessedly ‘mongrel’ in his interests (p. 115). But the physical in Thinks… relates to the scale of 1:1, not the microscopic world of neurons and cells. There is an added irony to Carrie’s words, too, since Messenger is unable to see the physical fact of his wife’s affair with their mutual friend which is occurring under his very nose. So the novel can teach Messenger a thing or two about physical facts, but it can also educate him where pain is concerned. Not only is Messenger not rated ‘very highly as a grief counsellor’ by either Helen or Carrie (p. 248), he also has difficulties getting to grips with the role of pain in his professional sphere. Speaking to Helen about the difficulties inherent in programming a machine to behave like a computer, Messenger admits that ‘pain always has been a difficult nut to crack’ (p. 38). Similarly, he confesses that it is hard to see what grief is ‘for, in evolutionary terms’, and quotes Darwin when he says that ‘crying is a puzzler’ (p. 69). When Helen is asked to deliver the keynote speech at the end of Messenger’s international conference on consciousness, she notes that ‘there is a tragic dimension to consciousness, which has […] been hardly touched on in this conference’, and goes on to suggest that ‘literature can help us to understand the dark side of consciousness too’ (pp. 319–320). It is for this reason, I would suggest, that Thinks… is slightly less comic in tone than Lodge’s earlier campus novels. Pain, grief, suffering—tragedy, in other words—are still areas of relative mystery to cognitive science, and they are also peculiarly human. In this area, at least, the novel can still assert a claim to primacy, so it is sensible for Lodge to include a degree of tragedy in this novel. This element of tragedy which can be detected in what is ultimately a comic novel relates, as with so many of the other novels studied, to death. Helen explains her writer’s block in a journal entry near to the beginning of the narrative in terms of her husband’s death. ‘Inventing fictitious characters and making up things for them to do seems so futile, so artificial’, she writes, ‘when someone real and near and dear to you has been suddenly, brutally snatched out of existence’ (p. 15). But death,

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in actual fact, acts as a kind of moral backbone in Thinks…. Messenger’s cancer scare provides him with a preview of his own death and makes him decide ‘I want to stay married to Carrie’ (p. 294). This realization encourages him to break off his affair with Helen, and contributes, it would seem, to his changed ways at the end of the novel. Death is also the main reason Helen decides to end the affair, because the suicide of one of Messenger’s colleagues ‘opened up such an abyss of unhappiness and wrongdoing and pain, into which it is so easy to fall once you stop listening to your conscience’ (pp. 331–332). Helen realizes, through the shock rendered by death, that her actions have the potential to cause severe pain to another, and she turns, significantly, to a literary reference to reinforce her decision: ‘James has a fine sentence about illicit love somewhere, one of the Prefaces I think, comparing it to a medal made of some hard bright alloy, one face of which is somebody’s bliss and right, and the other somebody’s bale and wrong’ (p. 332). Messenger’s ‘happy’ mindset and his philosophy which would seem to relegate ethics to an evolutionary curio (‘tit for tat’, cooperating with another so that they will cooperate with you, is ‘the sum of human morality’), ultimately is rejected in favour of the teachings of the literary canon (p. 51). Returning, then, to the question of whether or not it is appropriate to term Thinks… and Galatea 2.2 as ‘neuronovels’, I would suggest that, as the broadly accepted critical definitions of the neuronovel stand, with their focus on the purported ability of neuroscience to ‘refresh and redeem’ literature, then a qualification needs to be added. For Powers, cognitive science is very useful when it comes to problematizing the central tenets of poststructuralist theory, and it is also a clever device which enables him to create a fascinating character in Helen. For Lodge, cognitive science provides his novel with a cutting-edge dimension, and it also creates a new angle from which he can gently attack an old relativist foe. For both, though, the material grounding which neuroscience seems to lend serves as a kind of ‘get out of jail free card’ which allows them to build a humanist morality on materialism’s back, without leaving themselves open to accusations of naivety or lack of intellectual complexity. For these reasons, it would be more appropriate to class Thinks… and Galatea 2.2 as postneuronovels, since they move beyond the moral and philosophical implications that they sense in neuroscience, at the same time that they incorporate a version of it for their own ends. The neuronovel, or the closely related syndrome novel (as identified by Lustig and Peacock), is the only new critically recognized trend

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arising out of the sorts of changes in science with which this study is concerned. It is not common to find discussion of what we might term the ‘genetics novel’ or the ‘mathematical novel’ or the ‘cosmological novel’ in current critical parlance. One of the reasons for this, I would suggest, is that existing generic categories, particularly those of science fiction and realism, tend to swallow novels such as those of Martin Amis, Michel Houellebecq, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, under their preexisting rubric. In this case, we might ask what it is about the neuronovel which requires or enables it to be classified separately, when it would be quite feasible to categorize the two novels here (and others which have been termed neuronovels such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), John Wray’s Lowboy (2009) and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999)) under the broad category of (sometimes self-reflexive) realism. Partly the matter is one of degree—neuronovels tend to involve a large dose of pedagogy, since the science with which they engage is relatively new, not widely understood, and, most importantly, relates to the inner workings of the mind. A novel such as The Information, which is interested in physics and cosmology yet is written in a free indirect discourse which remains very close to its protagonist, is able to break off in order to meditate occasionally on cosmological facts before returning to a more well-recognized form of narration. When the subject matter is consciousness, though, the science is much more closely related to the novel form, and, as a consequence, plays a more prominent role in the text. The majority of contemporary novels are written in first-person or close third-person narration, so that consciousness and the way that it is understood and represented forms a significant part of the narrative. Neuroscience takes a subject which is very close to the heart of the novel and defamiliarizes it, with the result that the critical establishment seeks to find ways to understand and accommodate this new perspective. I have chosen in this study not to include a number of neuronovels, such as the ones mentioned above, under my definition of the third culture novel. This is because it is only the two ‘neuronovels’ analysed in this chapter that pit science and humanities culture against each other in the conflicted dialectic which characterizes the third culture novel. However, this also raises the question of whether the ‘pure’ neuronovel really exists as a genre, or whether what is being discussed is something of an elusive ideal. There is no doubt that a significant collection of contemporary novels has begun to engage with the representation of the

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mind as the material brain, but whether this engagement constitutes a redemptive and radical sea change in the representation of consciousness in the novel is less clear. More work needs to be done, I would suggest, to differentiate between the ways in which neuronovels are united by content, and the ways in which this content influences form, themes and style. It may well be the case that an important defining characteristic of the neuronovel is precisely that the newness of the content belies the more traditional nature of these texts. The mirroring which occurs between the novel form and the new scientific content does not just take place in the postneuronovel, but also constitutes a significant element of each of the third culture novels studied here, regardless of the type of science with which they primarily engage. In The Information, an author who is self-confessedly preoccupied by matters of style equates the universe which science studies with ‘high style’ and frequently compares literature to a concept of the universal. In Brazzaville Beach, mathematically described systems operate in a similar way to the novel which outlines them, and both aim to encompass an objective view of human life and the universe. This pattern can also be detected in the novels studied in the remaining chapters: Michel Houellebecq selects elements of genetics, physics and evolutionary biology which comport with his nihilist vision, providing the author with access to his concept of death-like truth; Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood focus on aspects of pharmacology, neuroscience and biology which create a materialist picture of human emotion on which to build a new transcendentalist ethics; and Ian McEwan grounds the psychological realism of Saturday in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, and the more traditional realism of Solar in a somewhat simplified (in that it largely dismisses quantum theory) version of physics. This mirroring does not take place without conflict in these novels, and in fact it is the very closeness of the aims of each author and the territory explored by the type of science they incorporate which causes much of the tension. For this reason, the implications of each branch of science are only ever followed to a certain point in these fictions, as we have seen in the examples of the four studied so far. In this sense, it is less the case that genre dictates both the sort of science which will be invited into these novels and the stability of their critical categorizations, but rather that the aims of each text will direct the science which is included and the ways in which that particular science is represented, with the generic leanings of each novel growing out of this

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process. In a reflection of Derrida’s wish to ‘abandon them to their fate’, genres in the third culture novel are often unstable and diverse and are better understood as methods through which their authors explore and defend the role of the novel in relation to scientific understandings of the world, and the world’s understanding of science.34 This helps to explain the disconnection between the prevailing categorizations of Galatea 2.2 and Thinks… and the processes which occur inside these novels, since the ‘neuro’ part of each novel is utilized by their authors as a tool with which to maintain the status and reputation of the novel, rather than as a generic framework. For these reasons, my positing of the term ‘third culture novel’ is not intended to explain a new genre or subgenre, but rather to highlight an important set of unifying features which characterize these novels, and help to describe their role in a changing culture. In the next chapter, two novels by Michel Houellebecq with links to speculative or science fiction incorporate, amongst other things, elements of cultural theory, social history, genetics, physics and evolutionary biology into their schema, exploring and utilizing each discourse in order to develop multilayered and complex novels of ideas. As is the case with each text studied so far, a separate space, one which I liken to Alain Badiou’s concept of the ‘suture’, is created and reserved for the novel, allowing it to exceed and outstrip its fellows.

Bibliography Barnett, S. Anthony. 2003. The Pale Cast of Thought: An Essay Review of Thinks… by David Lodge. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28, no. 3: 179–183. Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. 2007. Of Neural Nets and Brains in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus. Biography 30, no. 1: 84–105. Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum. Chalmers, David J. 1995. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3: 200–219. Dennett, Daniel C. 1992. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane. Dennett, Daniel C. 2005. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

34 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”, trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 55–81 (p. 55).

86  R. HOLLAND Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 55–81. Greaney, Michael. 2006. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Hume, Kathryn. 2013. Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 1: 1–17. Ickstadt, Heinz. 2007. Surviving in the Particular? Uni(versali)ty and Multiplicity in the Novels of Richard Powers. European Journal of American Studies 2, no. 1: 2–13. Johnson, Gary. 2008. Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 41, no. 1: 169–184. Lodge, David. 1989. Nice Work. London: Penguin. Lodge, David. 2001. Thinks…. London: Penguin. Lodge, David. 2003. Consciousness and the Novel. London: Penguin. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83: 435–450. Neilson, Jim. 1998. Dirtying Our hands: An Introduction to the Fiction of Richard Powers. Review of Contemporary Fiction 1, no. 18: 7–12. Ortega, Francisco, and Fernando Vidal. 2013. Brains in Literature/Literature in the Brain. Poetics Today 34, no. 3: 328–360. Payne, Michael, and John Schad. 2003. Life.After.Theory. London: Continuum. Powers, Richard. 1995. Galatea 2.2. New York: Picador. Ramachandran, V. S., and William Hirstein. 1999. Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Qualia and the Self. In Models of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, 83–112. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Roth, Marco. 2009. The Rise of the Neuronovel. n+1, 8. Searle, John. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinding, Michael. 2004. Thinks…: A Novel. Style 38, no. 1: 93–113. Steinberg, Derek. 2006. Consciousness Reconnected: Missing Links Between Self, Neuroscience, Psychology and the Arts. Oxford: Radcliffe. Strawson, Galen. 1999. The Self. In Models of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, 1–24. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Wilkes, Kathleen V. 1999. Know Thyself. In Models of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, 25–38. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Williams, Jeffrey J. 2001. The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers. Minnesota Review 52–54: 95–114.

CHAPTER 4

Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction

Shifting the focus from neuroscience to ‘scientific’ philosophy, this ­chapter will discuss two novels by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised and The Possibility of an Island, which can both be seen to base a large amount of their intellectual focus on the relevance of the objective, material world to philosophical thought. By outlining the work of two eminent speculative realist philosophers, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, it will aim to trace links between Houellebecq’s work and this emergent philosophical school. It seems significant that at the same time that a notable branch of philosophy is turning towards the objective world, this celebrated novelist of ideas is displaying a similar interest (although not, in any apparent way, as a direct result of contact with this work). This suggests that there is something about the present cultural and intellectual moment that is encouraging a renewed interest in objective thought in disciplines other than the sciences. Reading Meillassoux and other speculative realists can also be useful in that an examination of the ways in which their work benefits from, and encounters difficulties with, thought that is more directly associated with scientific disciplines can shed light on similar processes occurring within Houellebecq’s novels. This can provide a critical vocabulary with which to approach novels such as these, wherein complex philosophical ideas provide such a significant part of the framework. Critics and reviewers have noted the importance of scientific theories, and of the type of thought more directly associated with the sciences, © The Author(s) 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_4

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to Houellebecq’s work, and they have also examined his relationship to philosophy. However, what has been given less attention is the significance of the question of the role of the novel in Houellebecq’s fiction, and the ways in which this role is one which can be seen to be born out of competition with other disciplines. As is the case with every other third culture novel studied in this book, literature here defines itself in opposition to other modes of thought and expression, developing a defence of the novel through the process of outflanking its ostensible allies. This discursive skirmish helps to explain some of the ambiguities which critics have frequently debated in the study of Houellebecq’s work, as we shall see. First, though, a brief outline of the philosophy of another thinker who seeks to defend the position of his own discipline, Alain Badiou. Alain Badiou is one of the first philosophers who engaged in what has come to be known as speculative realism, developing his early work on Marxism and psychoanalysis into a more radical ‘return to the subject’ through an ontology reliant on mathematics. Badiou’s magnum opus, Being and Event, was first published in 1988, and it seems significant that it is only in the last decade or so that his work has been widely translated into English, as it has reached a broader audience. Like Houellebecq, Badiou sees fundamental flaws in postructuralist philosophy, finding its propensity to go ‘too far in reflecting the physiognomy of the world itself’ incompatible with the fact that ‘the world is asking something of philosophy’.1 In order to properly carry out its distinct role in accessing the truth of the world as it stands, it is necessary for philosophy to maintain a certain distance from what he terms the four ‘conditions’ of thought: art, love, politics and science. In his 1989 tract Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou outlines what he sees as the dangers for a philosophy that ‘sutures’ itself to any of the four conditions, suggesting that most continental philosophy of the last two decades or so has severely limited its own role and capabilities as a result of this suturing.2 Here we can detect the early seeds of what Badiou’s doctoral student Quentin Meillassoux would go on to describe as a crippling correlationism between thought and being (which we shall explore in more depth 1 Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2005), 37–39. 2 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 61.

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in the second part of the chapter), but that Meillassoux traces even ­further back to Kant’s First Critique. For Badiou, ‘mathematics equals ontology’,3 and, to simplify greatly, the model that he proposes as an attempted revivification of philosophy combines a ‘meta-ontology’ derived from the set theory of Georg Cantor, with a reinstatement of the subject as something that unfolds when a person acts in ‘fidelity’ to an ‘event’. For Badiou, being is not oneness, but ‘multiple multiplicities’, meaning that, as in set theory, situations can be made up of various, random elements which create unity (or a set), but not with any concept of fundamental properties applied to this unity. ‘Events’ occur by chance and are infinite in possibility, but humans can gain subjecthood by acting in fidelity to these events—a repeated example of this is two people who fall in love and then change their lives in order to maintain a commitment to this love. It is here that Badiou can be seen to differ fundamentally from the poststructuralism that he criticizes, for this type of subject, limited though it may be by its reliance on the notion of an ‘event’, would not be accepted by a large proportion of his philosophical peers, since it posits the existence of a type of essential agency which they would find problematic. Set theory provides Badiou with a kind of detached distance from Being and places philosophy in an apparently (and desirably) objective position in relation to the universe. However, this position is not without contradiction, and many critics have had difficulty in reconciling Badiou’s ostensible claims to objectivity with what can be seen as a potentially naively pre-critical claim regarding subjecthood and truth, one that often seems to fit all too conveniently with a Marxist perspective (revolution, of course, being the ultimate type of event). I will argue that Atomised by Michel Houellebecq charts similarly fraught territory, lurching between the desire for a radical separation from the chaos of subjectivity, achievable by an intellectual distancing technique that finds its ultimate literalization in the destruction of humanity, and a longing for an unrealistic moral utopia based on freely available eroticism and idealized ‘feminine’ virtues of selfless love. This distancing technique is also mirrored in the relationship between the narrator and the characters in both of the novels studied here, wherein characters remain mired in the

3 Alain

Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 6.

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concerns of the everyday human world, despite their attempts to escape it, while the narrator maintains a cool detachment.

Atomised: Outstripping the Suture If Atomised is the novel that propelled Michel Houellebecq towards international literary fame, then it is also the novel that secured his reputation as one of the most controversial authors writing today. Atomised starkly divided critical opinion on its release, with some hailing Houellebecq as the new French literary sensation in the mould of Sagan, Tournier and even Camus, and others finding his ‘enfant terrible’ sentiments ‘deeply repugnant’.4 Anthony Quinn’s characterization of the novel as ‘bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile’5 could, with some justification, be equally applied to the responses of some members of the critical community, whose reaction, Nicholas Lezard suggests in a Wildean vein, is ‘pretty much the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass’.6 Published in French originally as Les Particules Elementaires (1998), the novel’s English translation takes its title from the portrayal of a contemporary Western society in which any sense of community, belonging or love has become, at best, rare and at worst, impossible. The novel tells the tale of half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément, from dysfunctional childhood beginnings through to empty and depressed middle age. Bruno and Michel share the same biological mother: libertine and hippy Janine Ceccaldi, whom the narrator describes as belonging to a ‘class of individuals we can call precursors’.7 Precursors differ from ‘symptomatic individuals’ in that they are not ‘carried forward by the sweep of history’, but rather ‘adopt new customs or proselytise ideas still regarded as marginal’, acting as catalysts ‘of some form of social breakdown’ (p. 26). Janine neglects and then abandons first Bruno and then Michel, preferring the (perhaps paradoxically) individualistic life of the Esalen commune to the sacrifices of parenthood. Her sons are then 4 Michiko Kakutani, “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Unsparing Case Studies of Humanity’s Vileness”, The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 2000. 5 Anthony Quinn, “One Thinks, the Other Doesn’t”, The New York Times Book Review, November 19, 2000. 6 Nicholas Lezard, “Atom Bomb”, The Guardian Review Section, February 24, 2001. 7 Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Vintage, 2001), 26. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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left to be brought up by their separate paternal grandparents, neither of their fathers being willing to take on the responsibility of rearing the boys. Bruno and Michel grow up to display emotional and sexual dysfunctions, which are linked by the narrator to these early childhood experiences: ‘male rats deprived of maternal contact during infancy exhibit serious disturbances in sexual behaviour, especially in mating rituals’ (p. 68). Bruno is obsessed by the idea of sex, particularly with young, attractive women or teenagers—a largely unfulfilled obsession which has nevertheless contributed to the breakdown of his relationships with his wife and son. He tells his brother Michel ‘I’d say men aren’t capable of love; the emotion is completely alien to them. The only emotions they know are desire – in the form of pure animal lust – and male rivalry’ (p. 200). Michel, on the other hand, is the polar opposite of Bruno in this respect, showing very little interest or pleasure in sex: ‘he used his cock to piss, no more’ (p. 21). It is tempting to pursue the idea of Bruno and Michel as polar opposites, particularly as Michel is a successful scientist and Bruno firmly identified with the arts (a former English teacher and intermittent writer), yet the novel is actually far more concerned with what unites the two brothers: the ultimate unhappiness of human existence. During one of their wide-ranging philosophical discussions, Bruno states ‘I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion […] but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one’ (pp. 76–77). Pondering this for a moment, Michel begins to realize that ‘human reality […] was a series of disappointments, bitterness and pain’ (p. 77). Bruno and Michel may appear to be opposite on the surface, but their life choices and motivations stem merely from the random dictates of genetics and chance, with neither mode of existence providing any possibility of happiness. In fact, this formulation can be applied to the themes of the novel as a whole, in which, as Andrew Marr points out, we find a great deal of ‘philosophising, based on a good understanding of recent mathematical and physical science’.8 In Atomised, philosophy, history, sociology and science all ultimately encourage the same conclusion: humanity is largely and inherently bad, and the social structures that we have produced, and in which we must live, promote pain and unhappiness.

8 Andrew

Marr, “We’re All Doomed…”, Observer, Review Section, May 21, 2000.

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The model for this type of interdisciplinary convergence can be found within the novel itself, through the references to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation: a set of ideals and axioms developed by Bohr and Werner Heisenberg between the years of 1925 and 1927 which prioritized, amongst other things, the use of everyday language in the description of the mathematics underlying quantum mechanics. The narrator tells us that ‘Niels Bohr’s claim to be the founder of quantum mechanics rests less on his own discoveries than on the extraordinary atmosphere of creativity and intellectual openness he fostered around him’ (p. 15). Inviting politicians, artists and other scientists to his country house, ‘their conversations ranged easily from philosophy to physics, history to art, from religion to everyday life’ (p. 16). It is difficult to avoid the implication that this model serves a kind of totemic function within the text, laying the foundations for the intellectual aims of the novel. But, of course, where Bohr was bringing other disciplines into the service of science, Houellebecq is creating a polymath discourse of despair that encourages only nihilism. As will become clear later in the novel, however, the references to the Copenhagen Interpretation are double-edged, because Michel Djerzinski will go on to initiate a ‘metaphysical mutation’ on a much larger scale than the one begun by Bohr’s theories, yet with the same beginnings, the novel suggests, in multidisciplinary thought. This creates a bizarre tension within the text: a multidisciplinary novel which utilizes this very multidisciplinarity to reinforce its bleak view of existence, but which concludes with a future in which science has converged with philosophy in order to create a new, happier, genetically modified successor to humanity. This tension is only reinforced by the fact that the ‘metaphysical mutation’ inspired by Djerzinski’s work is purely novelistic speculation, implying that the only way in which we can interpret the calls for dialogue between the two cultures with any seriousness is as they relate to novels, such as this one, that are interested in philosophizing. Gerald Moore detects this tension too, suggesting that it remains unclear ‘whether Houellebecq’s narrator favours the supersession of philosophy by science, or whether the indictment of philosophy serves as a nostalgic call for its renewal beyond the confines of what is knowingly – parodically – reduced to the homogeneous mass of French

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Theory’.9 It seems that Houellebecq is attempting to take a similarly ‘unsutured’ position in his novel as Badiou hopes to achieve in his philosophy. All of the disciplines under discussion are viewed at a distance by the author, and the ‘truth’ that Houellebecq’s brand of ‘objective’ literature can force them to reveal is that humanity and social life are so desperately and irrevocably flawed that the logical conclusion lies in their ultimate destruction. Houellebecq equates nihilism with objectivity and truth and figures humanity, particularly male, ego-driven subjectivity, as an aberration. Houellebecq has spoken in interview about the use of science in his fiction, suggesting that the public are interested in this kind of literature and find it relevant to the modern era.10 He also states that he refuses ‘to diverge from scientific method or to believe that there is a truth beyond science’; yet the very act of creating a speculative, imagined end to his novel is a massive divergence from scientific method.11 However, the ending is presented as a kind of logical conclusion for society and takes its impetus from current scientific trends—a case of nihilist wish fulfilment in which fiction, with the backup of science, ‘takes the form of revenge on the real world’.12 In this sense, rather than being viewed as the saviours of a hopeless humanity, the scientists cloning the new superrace can be aligned with traditional literary representations of the frightening scientific over-reacher; yet in this instance, they have the blessing of the hardened, cynical novelist, and with any sense of ‘blame’ directed towards social and political structures. When Djerzinski commits suicide by going ‘into the sea’ (p. 365), this is perhaps the ultimate literalization of Foucault’s post-humanist suspicion that man as social construction will one day ‘be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.13

9 Gerald Moore, “Gay Science and (No) Laughing Matter: The Eternal Returns of Michel Houellebecq”, French Studies 25 (2011): 45–60 (p. 53). 10 See John McCann, Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 63. 11 Michel Houellebecq, “The Art of Fiction No. 206” (Interview by Susannah Hunnewell), The Paris Review, 4 (Print Version), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq, accessed 13 July 2015. 12 Bülent Diken, Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2009), 14. 13 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387.

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In his introduction to a collection of essays concerning post-humanism, Neil Badmington provides a concise description of the main tenets of this school of thought: If, the anti-humanists [Lacan, Althusser, Foucault] argued, ‘we’ accept humanism’s claim that ‘we’ are naturally inclined to think, organise and act in certain ways, it is difficult to believe that human society and behaviour could ever be other than they are now. Humanism was therefore to be opposed if radical change, the thinking of difference, was to become a possibility. The future would begin with the end of Man.14

The main strand of humanism that is attacked in Atomised is the sort of liberal humanism that promotes the rights of the individual above all else. For Houellebecq, this inevitably results in selfishness, isolation and anomie, with serial killers and hippy communes alike serving as symptomatic of the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, encouraged by what Deleuze and Guattari have termed a society of ‘desiring-production’, and stemming from events in France in 1968.15 Houellebecq is at pains in this novel to trace the social history of liberalism in order to wrench it firmly from any notion of essentialism. Thus we find descriptions of advice columns from girls’ magazines which ‘embraced the ideals of the entertainment industry: individual freedom, the supremacy of youth over age and the destruction of Judaeo-Christian values’ (p. 63). These magazines ‘cobbled together’ advice for young girls who were torn between the pressure to marry and have children, and the new influx of individualistic ideals, and who, ‘already disoriented by the speed of social change, accepted these improbable rules and tried their best to stick to them’ (p. 64). However, while the detached style of the narrator-cum-social historian serves to situate liberalism in its historical setting as just another constructed ideology, there remains a deep pessimism bordering on desperation with regard to the possibility of liberalism ever being ‘erased’. In this novel, it is not enough that humanism as a social edifice be opposed, instead ‘humanity must disappear’ (p. 371) because its ‘unique genetic code of which, by some tragic perversity, we were so ridiculously proud, 14 Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism”, in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), 1–10 (p. 7). 15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 1.

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was precisely the source of so much human unhappiness’ (p. 375). While faithful to the deconstructionist techniques of those whom Badmington refers to as the ‘anti-humanists’, Atomised nonetheless feels the need to look further than a poststructuralism that seems to lack the power and ability to force genuinely radical change. We are informed by the narrator, in a manner which evokes the sentiment surrounding the Sokal hoax, that at the start of the new millennium The global ridicule inspired by the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze, after decades of reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped contempt on all those who were active in ‘human sciences’. The rise to dominance of the scientific community in many fields of thought became inevitable. (pp. 376–377)

The solution lies within the proactive realms of science, the discipline perceived as providing the most realistic chance of creating ‘a new species which was asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, individuation and progress’ (p. 371). Houellebecq joins Donna Haraway in ‘imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end’.16 He adds genetic determinism onto the post-humanists’ social determinism as an insurmountable obstacle that only the actual, physical destruction of man can surpass. The clones are convenient, then, because they allow humanity to be destroyed, yet they leave space for the ‘story’ to continue, both within the confines of the novel, and within the larger framework of Houellebecq’s ideology. Is this, then, a form of cultural surrender enacted by the humanities-weary novelist? A passing of responsibility for the future of society from amongst the ranks of those traditionally assigned to direct it? Jerry Varsava takes an entirely different view of the matter, suggesting that the novel ‘says very much more about insecure, sexually-obsessed European men in early middle age than it does about European society at large’,17 and he is not the only critic to comment upon the one-sided 16 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), 69–84 (p. 70). 17 Jerry Andrew Varsava, “Utopian Yearnings, Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism”, College Literature 32 (2005): 145–167 (p. 162).

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portrayal of French society that is offered in Atomised. For Varsava, Bruno and Michel simply act out a plot of oedipality in which ‘each seeks the destruction of a bad father (and bad mother), and (re-)union with a benevolent maternity’.18 Drawing attention to the repeated linking of the future species with gender-stereotyped femininity, he argues that ‘in a future of species cloning, motherhood can only be played by an impersonal surrogate – the Technostate’.19 In fact, motherhood is perhaps the only institution that escapes the hard-line cynicism of the novel, and is instead elevated at times to the point of unfeasibility. We are told that human beings have existed, like Michel’s grandmother, ‘who have worked – worked hard – all their lives with no other motive than their love and devotion; who have literally given their lives for others, out of love and devotion. […] In general, such human beings are invariably women’ (pp. 106–107). Gone is the staunchly analytical narrator whom we expect to outline the social conditioning at work on these types of women, to be replaced instead by a voice that risks charges of sentimentality in its apparent reverence of this phenomenon. This leads to the more general question of the way in which women are represented in Atomised, particularly as it seems necessary to take into account the repeated and explicit portrayals of sex which form such an important part of the novel. Linda Williams has argued in her seminal study of hard-core pornography that it is crucial not to essentialize women’s sexuality as ‘good’, non-perverse and non-transgressive, and as the mere victim of ‘patriarchal contaminations’, if we as a society are to achieve sexual equality.20 On the whole, and despite accusations by critics to the contrary, women’s sexuality in Atomised is given a similar, objectively descriptive treatment as men’s sexuality by the narrator. Thus we find Bruno and his new girlfriend Christiane sharing an enjoyment of sex clubs and swinging parties, and both experiencing insecurities about their bodies and sexual performance. At the naturist resort at Cap d’Agde where Bruno and Christiane go on holiday, ‘as anywhere, beautiful, firm young women and seductive, virile men will find themselves inundated by flattering propositions [but] as anywhere, the obese, the old and the ugly are condemned to solitary masturbation’ (p. 264). 18 Varsava,

162. 163. 20 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (London: Pandora, 1990), 20. 19 Varsava,

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In Atomised our society of youth culture and individualism makes sex an unequal and frustrating experience—for men and women alike. Yet running alongside this apparently detached and objective view of sexuality is a conception of women as somehow essentially ‘better’ than men. Michel comes to the conclusion that women ‘were gentler, more affectionate, more loving and more compassionate, they were rarely violent, selfish, cruel or self-centred’ (p. 196). As in the portrayal of mothers giving themselves to others for no other reason than love and devotion, femininity is excused here from the interrogation of its cultural constructions that the rest of the novel has led us to expect. The new, cloned, superior breed of humans epitomizes these ‘feminine’ qualities at the same time as enabling, through the manipulation of pleasure-stimulating Krause corpuscles ‘new, and undreamed of, erotic possibilities’ (p. 375). As though taking what Foucault has termed the Western obsession with creating a ‘scientia sexualis’ to its extreme conclusion, sex becomes ‘not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered’.21 Sex in the imagined utopia becomes idealized— imbued with the sorts of essentialized ‘feminine’ qualities that Williams suggests act as a barrier to genuine equality. It also becomes more democratic, and perhaps most importantly, more available: the wish fulfilment of Varsava’s sexually obsessed middle-aged man. If this novel can be read, to a certain extent, as delineating the individual concerns of its author over the purported social critique, then perhaps Nicholas Lezard’s suspicion that negative reviewers display ‘the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass’ can be applied also to the revulsion directed towards humanity in Houellebecq’s novel. Suicide and abortion make several appearances in Atomised, and there is a palpable sense in which the culling of the human race is a desirable end in itself without the need for the utopian ideal of the cloned successors. Added to this, the ruthlessness with which the poststructuralist theorists are dismissed as irrelevant and outmoded seems strongly reminiscent of self-destruction. After all, most of the novel reads like an exercise in deconstruction combined with a Foucauldian social history, with the added, ultra-modern, scientific extras only drawing the conclusions about humanity that the philosophizing has already outlined.

21 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1978), 24.

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Perhaps, though, a more fruitful way to read Houellebecq’s obvious impulse towards destruction is by returning to Badiou’s concept of the crippling state of suture that philosophy must avoid. Human subjectivity is a type of cage for Houellebecq, and destroying humanity is the ultimate act of desuturing, with the ‘afterlife’ provided by the clones ensuring that the philosopher-novelist can continue to reflect, from his sought-after position of objectivity, on the conditions of the world. It also ensures that the two exceptions to Houellebecq’s otherwise blanket nihilism—essentialized feminine love and freely available sex—can be given a platform from which to display their desirability. Critics, particularly in Houellebecq’s native France, have been (at times fiercely) divided over the question of whether these novels critique the broken society which they so doggedly outline, or whether they endorse it. Carole Sweeney points out, though, that ‘whichever way one views his writing, that is, as sincere or satirical, it finally fails to imagine anything other than participation in or withdrawal from the world it describes’.22 This failure Sweeney sees as emblematic of the threat facing creative critical thinking under neoliberalism in the West, so that Houellebecq’s work contains a serious shortcoming in this sense. For Houellebecq though, I would suggest, the role of the novel is not to provide society with credible alternatives to existing circumstances, nor is it to act as cheerleader for them. Instead, the novel need only reflect society back to itself from an unsutured third space, accessing its own particular brand of truth, unavailable to other disciplines, in this way. What society does with this truth is not the concern of the novelist, who is engaged in a separate, objective undertaking. Of course, it is by no means unproblematic to suggest that Houellebecq’s novels are objective, and, in fact, in many ways they are the polar opposite of this, but it remains important to understand that a certain form of objectivity is what they are attempting to attain. Despite this, Houellebecq has spoken in interview about what he admits is his somewhat surprisingly persistent belief in love. Another of the effects of Djerzinski’s biological engineering is that ‘he was able, through somewhat risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics, to restore the possibility of love’ (p. 363). Houellebecq has

22 Carole Sweeney, Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xix.

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said that the inspiration for writing this novel was ‘the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982’, which demonstrated the EPR paradox: that when particles interact, their destinies become linked. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they are great distances apart. That really struck me, to think that if two things are connected once, they will be forever. It marks a fundamental philosophical shift.23

Michel recalls speaking to the priest at Bruno’s wedding about the possibility of linking the Catholic idea of the one flesh with the EPR paradox, only to be rebuffed and avoided. Bruno’s marriage to Anne is largely disastrous, as, ultimately, is every other attempt at love in the novel. However, the narrator asserts that ‘tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction which is why it is so difficult to give up hope’ (p. 61). Atomised seems unable to give up on the idea of love, even as it throws scorn on every other aspect of humanity. Weary with the grim conclusions of French theory and the bulk of evolutionary materialism, Houellebecq places his last hope with quantum mechanics, at the risk of undermining the hard-line ‘objective’ pessimism of the rest of his novel. This foray into vaguely magical territory (self-sanctioned, as is the case with Powers and Lodge, with the help of a kind of protective armour of scientific fact) illustrates a persistent type of contradiction at work in this novel. Humanity must be destroyed, yet the story must continue. Scientific method must be adhered to, yet speculation creeps in regardless. Life is meaningless, yet love is still somehow special. There is no hope for humanity, yet women can still behave in an ideal way. Once again, it is much more difficult than it might at first seem for a discipline such as literature or philosophy to attempt to base its ideas in objective thought, for, as Stengers makes us aware, as soon as scientific ideas are removed from the practices of science, they become something else entirely.24 To return again to Alain Badiou, we can see that the philosopher attempts to overcome similar contradictions threatening his position by 23 Michel Houellebecq, “The Art of Fiction No. 206” (Interview by Susannah Hunnewell), The Paris Review, 7. 24 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 25.

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arguing that, according to the very definition of his discipline, as the guardians of pure thought, it is necessary to allow space for philosophy to partake in reflection and speculation. For him, philosophy gains the rupture from the world that is denied to postructuralist theory by an appeal to a concept of ‘singularity’, which, like the idea of a subject that can be differentiated from the random interactions of multiple ­multiplicities, somehow stands outside of the otherwise strictly described mathematical laws of being. For Badiou: ‘Philosophy wants to and must establish itself at this subtractive point where language consecrates itself to thought without the prestige and the mimetic incitements of the image, fiction or narrative; where the principle of amorous intensity unbinds itself from the alterity of the object and sustains itself from the law of the Same; where the illumination of the Principle pacifies the blind violence that mathematics assumes in its axioms and its hypotheses; where, finally, the collective is represented in its symbol, and not in the excessive real of political situations’25

Exactly what this place or point might be that philosophy seeks is difficult to pin down, and no doubt this is why, for Badiou, it is a point of ‘singularity’. This raises the question of why philosophy should incorporate objective rules into its schema in the first place, if only to ultimately transcend them through an appeal to a realm that is reserved especially for its own discipline? And why should literature do the same? Both the novel and the theory seem to endorse the importance of what the narrator in Atomised calls the ‘need for rational certainty’ (p. 322), yet both also appear to contradict the fundaments of their arguments by an appeal to a something else—an outside or underlying or above. In Atomised we are told that ‘no attempt to explain the world can survive if it clashes with our need for rational certainty. Mathematical proofs and experimental methods are the highest expressions of human consciousness’ (p. 323). This formulation is used to explain the predicted continuation of the predominance of scientific method, not just in the West but worldwide; yet perhaps the novel here is occluding the importance of another human need—the pursuit of meaning. Discussing his lack of interest (until now) in religion and metaphysics with a colleague, Michel says ‘I think that I needed that basic, pragmatic positivism 25 Badiou,

Infinite Thought, 76.

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that most researchers have. Facts exist and are linked together by laws; the notion of cause simply isn’t scientific. The world is precisely the sum of information we have about it’ (p. 324). Pragmatic positivism, however, sounds strikingly similar to the sort of crippling self-referentiality that Badiou decries in poststructuralism, and that Houellebecq ultimately spurns through his utopian longings. This again raises interesting questions regarding the expected function of literature, which, as a mode of thought and expression associated with the humanities, is generally assumed to be concerned with matters of meaning. Of course literary developments in the last century or so have radically undermined the traditionally realist formulations of an omniscient narrator confidently tracing and espousing cause and effect, yet it remains difficult to imagine even the most avant-garde literature presenting merely ‘the sum of information we have about [the world]’ without any notion of what this might mean. Responding to the suggestion that he is on the right politically, Houellebecq has said that ‘I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe […] I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values’.26 Yet, of course, in Atomised the clock is turned not backwards, but forwards, to an imagined future in which liberalism is ousted and values fundamentally altered, thus situating this novel beyond the merely observational and into the realms of the moral. I would suggest that literature finds it incredibly difficult to escape from moral territory, and that this is in part due to the very nature of narrative, which generally requires some form of plot development and ending. This, in turn, draws in questions of meaning almost as an inadvertent by-product of the form, which, at the very least, must utilize language in order to be considered literature. Even in a text that actively seeks to subvert questions of meaning (B. S. Johnson’s ‘book in a box’, The Unfortunates (1969), for example, which has no binding so that readers arrange the chapters as they wish) will invite interpretation of meaning of a different kind, related to the implications of such an experiment. Houellebecq makes a bold attempt at a type of literary pragmatic positivism in Atomised, suggesting that there is no rightful place for the self-centred and ultimately blind illusions of humanity in this harsh and

26 Houellebecq,

“The Art of Fiction No. 206”, 9.

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meaningless universe; but he capitulates with the utopian ending and the elevation of love. Atomised wavers uncertainly between a desire to create literature that mirrors the objective distance found in scientific discourse and method, and a radical (yet more recognizable) modern version of a morality novel, in which love and benign, selfless femininity are idealized. Jacques Derrida has argued that the space of literature in principle allows one to say anything, but Houellebecq’s ultimately failed attempt at dismissing any truth beyond science makes this idea problematic.27 As I will illustrate further in my discussion of The Possibility of an Island, the objective world can allow Houellebecq to explore what he sees as the key philosophical questions of our time, but when it comes to sticking to the ideological implications of ‘objective’ fiction, the matter becomes more complicated. Even without the utopian leanings that haunt this text, ‘the sum of information’ that Houellebecq presents is grounded in a particular subject-position, as critics have been quick to point out. Perhaps, then, one thing that the space of literature decidedly cannot say is that it does not ‘diverge from scientific method’, even as it professes to base its philosophy on nothing but what science knows of material reality. As Isabelle Stengers makes clear, the only practice which does not diverge from scientific method is science itself, when it is operating strictly within those methods. For this reason, literature which seeks to claim the objectivity of science for itself carries out an insurmountable category error, one which bears the hallmarks of transcendental scientism.

The Speculations of Quentin Meillassoux This interest in the idea of ‘objective fiction’ takes on a new manifestation in The Possibility of an Island, first published in France in 2005. As previously outlined, I will use a reading of the work of another speculative realist, Quentin Meillassoux, to attempt to shed light on some of the philosophical preoccupations of Houellebecq’s novel, aiming to trace lines of convergence between the work of the author and that of the philosopher. In a concise but persuasive debut work entitled After Finitude, Meillassoux revives the theory of primary and secondary qualities, aiming to ‘achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp 27 Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature” [Interview], in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 36.

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the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not’.28 I will outline how Meillassoux proposes to realize this ambitious task shortly, but for now it is his concept of ‘correlationism’ that provides a worthwhile framework for discussing some of the features of the relationship between science and humanities cultures as it relates to the third culture novel. Meillassoux defines correlationism as ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’. As a consequence of this, it becomes impossible to ‘consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another’ so that we can never hope to grasp the in-itself, or to conceive of a subject ‘that would not always-already be related to an object’.29 This state of affairs should be immediately recognizable, in a particular form, to those who are familiar with the various permutations of culturalism that have dominated thought in the humanities since the latter part of the twentieth century: subjects exist only insofar as they are created by their relations with the world, and the world itself is always relative to the specific ideologies of the subject who would ‘write’ it. But Meillassoux stresses the fact that correlationism has been the ‘central notion of modern philosophy’ since Kant made it seem naive to think that we could know anything apart from what was ‘for us’. This somewhat bizarre situation, wherein everything that we are or can hope to be comes from our relations with the outside, yet the outside remains inaccessible to our tied-in subjectness, has remained stubbornly in place for over two hundred years. Consequently, philosophy has lost the ability to access ‘the great outdoors’ just as advances in science have made it seem more available than ever.30 According to Meillassoux, the era of correlationism coincides with and corresponds to the scientific era, instigated by the Galilean-Copernican revolution, which mathematized the cosmos and dethroned humanity from its cherished place at the centre of the universe. What followed from these scientific advances was, in his terms, a ‘ptolemaic counter-revolution’ in philosophy, in which, he hints, philosophy was driven to the correlationist mode by a need to maintain a position of superiority over science. As science made ever greater strides towards uncovering 28 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), 27. 29 Meillassoux, 5. 30 Meillassoux, 7.

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‘knowledge of a world that is indifferent to any relation to the world’, philosophy insisted that the way in which it conceived of the limits and capacities of thought was somehow ‘deeper, more originary’ than anything the scientific method could hope to describe.31 Meillassoux sees this decision that philosophy took around the time of the 1st Critique as an ill-judged one, because it had the consequence of closing off a whole array of possibilities for his discipline, limiting significantly the areas that it was able to explore. In order to break out of the correlationist circle, Meillassoux utilizes what he terms the ‘problem of ancestrality’ as a means by which to prove the existence of the absolute. The problem of ancestrality refers to the fact that most philosophy as it stands, with its reliance on correlationism, is unable to account for, and discourse on, evidence which proves the existence of a universe before humanity. This is unacceptable to Meillassoux, who argues that philosophy must be able to conceive of objects existing ‘in themselves’, rather than merely as they are ‘for us’. Like his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux revives the ancient connection between philosophy and mathematics, and, again following Badiou, he mainly relies on Cantor’s set theory. The main ‘tool’ that Meillassoux borrows from Badiou’s complicated engagement with Cantor is the idea of the transfinite, and the ways in which this relates to ontology. The transfinite, for both Badiou and Meillassoux, represents the limits of thought and possibility, in the sense that it posits the existence of a set that will always exceed infinity, and therefore will always be, ipso facto, unthinkable. Although the human mind cannot visualize the infinite in any concrete sense, it is still able to comprehend and formulate theories based on the notion of infinity, which makes the infinite both thinkable and possible. For Cantor, however, the parts or groupings of a set will always be bigger than the set of which they are a component, even if the set in question is infinite. This leads to the concept of the transfinite, which undermines classical mathematical logic, by suggesting that the realm of the possible can never be totalized. Badiou famously argues that ‘mathematics equals ontology’,32 and Meillassoux follows suit by claiming that ‘what is mathematically

31 Meillassoux, 32 Alain

118, 119. Badiou, Being and Event, 6.

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conceivable is absolutely possible’.33 Paradoxically, then, Meillassoux uses a mathematic proof to support an ontology which relies on a notion of contingency: set theory reveals that ‘the (quantifiable) totality of the thinkable is unthinkable’.34 For Meillassoux, the realm of the possible can be taken as a whole, and therefore a set, so that the concept of the transfinite is applicable to everything that is conceivable by thought. This means that we can only apply the operation of reason to what we know from experience, because we cannot safely make assumptions about what happens beyond that (because it is unthinkable). In this way, Meillassoux argues, we can uphold the implications of Hume’s problem by casting doubt on the necessity of physical laws. Hume draws attention to the fact that inductive reasoning is needed to draw many of the conclusions that science relies upon, and this process of induction operates on the premise of the ‘uniformity of nature’, wherein we trust that physical laws will not suddenly change for no reason at all. For Meillassoux, though, set theory shows that there is no reason to believe that we can totalize thought in this way, because the transfinite suggests that there will always be more than we can access, and therefore this type of reasoning, aleatory in its foundations, should only be applied to those things which relate directly to our experience. In this way, we sidestep what Meillassoux sees as a dangerous implication resulting from a belief in the uniformity of nature, which is a kind of return to religiosity, based on a trust in an ultimate (yet logically inexplicable) necessity to the laws of the world. He argues that ‘so long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things’.35 Critics of Meillassoux have suggested that his formulations, rather than banish superstition, actually endorse a type of ‘virtual God’ that leaves a ‘theological residue’36; but he would argue that by using the concept of the transfinite to make the universe contingent, the way is paved for thought, through mathematical formula, to discourse about a world from which humanity is absent. He terms evidence of a universe existing prior to humanity the ‘arche-fossil’, and claims that philosophy 33 Meillassoux,

After Finitude, 126. After Finitude, 104. 35 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 82. 36 See, for example, Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: Á Dieu, Meillassoux?” (92– 113); Peter Hallward, “Anything Is Possible” (130–141), in The Speculative Turn. 34 Meillassoux,

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as it stands cannot conceive of the ancestrality that the arche-fossil posits, because in order to do so it would need to concede that primary qualities existed without us. The key difference, for Meillassoux, between his thought and the type of thought that fuels superstition, is outlined by the following: Let us call ‘speculative’ every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute, and let us call ‘metaphysics’ every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute being […] If all metaphysics is ‘speculative’ by definition, our problem consists in demonstrating, conversely, that not all speculation is metaphysical, and not every absolute is dogmatic – it is possible to envisage an absolutizing thought that would not be absolutist.37

This ‘non-metaphysical absolute’, then, enables us to use the problem of ancestrality (i.e. evidence that the universe existed prior to humanity) to give thought access to primary qualities, but always in a manner which makes the universe contingent. Anything could happen, but mathematics can access what has happened, with or without a human subject, and whatever is mathematically conceivable is fair game for speculation. Meillassoux’s project relies upon subtle differences, then, between an absolute that is totalizing and an absolute that is liberating, and often seems at risk of collapsing under the weight of its own potential for contradiction. Thought must become more radical than ever in order to re-ground itself in the material world. Mathematics is the only safe absolute because it has the potential to prove that thought can never be absolutizing. Religiosity must be avoided at all costs but there is nothing to suggest that any explanation of the laws of the universe (including one based on intelligent design) can be more valid than another. And finally, the claims of science are validated, but only in so far as they describe what can already be seen to have happened (the arche-fossil), or what direct experience suggests is happening now. Science, then, for this speculative philosopher, cannot speculate—except about the ancestrality of the past, or about the entirely contingent laws that are manifest in the present. The remit of science becomes rather narrow in this formulation, and, as it does for Stengers, it also becomes banished from the realm of meaning. Meillassoux himself suggests that correlationism came about largely 37 Meillassoux,

After Finitude, 34.

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as a philosophical self-preservation tactic resulting from the great leaps in knowledge brought on by the scientific revolution, and it seems that his brand of speculative realism is open to a similar criticism. Despite the selfavowed affinity with science, it is still philosophy that gets to carry out the freest form of speculation here, and the very foundation of science, belief in the stability of the laws of nature, is a necessary sacrificial victim. The Possibility of an Island: Nothingness and Kitsch Houellebecq’s fifth novel, The Possibility of an Island, develops further the idea of neohuman clones, first tested in Atomised, so that the clones, mirroring the relationship between the narrator and the characters in both novels studied here, take a subdued and eerily distant form of centre stage. The novel’s narrative is split between Daniel 1, a typically cynical, caustic and depressive Houellebecqian protagonist, and two of his future neohuman clones: Daniel 24 and Daniel 25. The clones live some one thousand years later than their (contemporary to us) predecessor, in dry, cerebral isolation, quietly existing in private compounds, protected from the few regressed human ‘savages’ that have somehow survived the environmental and social catastrophes brought about by the worst excesses of the sort of system so cuttingly portrayed in Atomised. As in that novel, the ‘human’ story is told through a written document preserved and then relayed by the neohumans, furthering the sense that the narrator, who is more closely aligned with the clones, exists separately from humanity; but this time the chapters alternate between the life story of Daniel 1, and the reflections of Daniel 24 and then Daniel 25. Daniel 1’s life story describes his successful career as a brutally honest and controversial comedian; his marriage to and subsequent divorce from his intellectual soulmate Isabelle; his growing distaste for and eventual abandonment of comedy; his involvement with the Elohimite cult (out of which spring the neohuman clones); and, finally, his obsessive affair with the young femme fatale, Esther, which moves from representing a highly sexualized ideal of human happiness, to the ultimate state of despair when Esther grows bored of Daniel and coldly casts him aside. Daniels 24 and 25, on the other hand, live a sedate and largely emotionless existence, ‘without joy and without mystery’—any sense of meaning being directed towards their part in preparing the way for the coming of a race with more potential for happiness: the vaguely

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described ‘future ones’.38 This means that when Daniel 24 senses his death approaching, he feels ‘nothing but a very slight sadness’, harbouring no regrets about leaving ‘an existence that brought me no real joy’ (p. 142). Having learned the lessons that their human predecessors could not, the neohumans shun social life entirely, finding it easier because of scientific manipulation of nerves and brain formation to live in their state of meditative isolation. However, it soon becomes clear that Daniel 1 and his neohuman clones are not as different from each other as they might at first appear to be, since Daniel 1 actually spends the majority of his time alone, and, like many a Houellebecqian (anti?)hero before him, meditating on the dismal reality of human existence: To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people’s existence as intolerable as his own – his first victims generally being his parents. (p. 52)

Daniel 25 discovers, too, upon taking his place in the residence after the death of his direct predecessor, that Daniel 24 has allowed himself, by ‘plunging into the at once ridiculous and tragic biography of Daniel 1’ to be ‘gradually impregnated by certain features of his personality’ (pp. 153–154). Writing disturbingly ‘human’ poems about insects banging between walls in an empty eternal return, Daniel 24 has lost his ‘critical distance’, or, to use Badiou’s terminology, he has become sutured (p. 154). The clones, then, represent a scientifically updated version of the modern humanities intellectual—a depressive breed of Nietzschean ‘Superman’ who find solace in the fact that, if the world is as meaningless as it seems to be, then at least they are intelligent enough to understand, and thus maybe transcend that. By the same token, the novel purports to outdo and transcend the sort of theory associated with the modern humanities intellectual by ushering in material from contemporary science. Mike Gane views Houellebecq’s clones as being representative of a new shift in science fiction, inspired by the fact that ‘just at the very 38 Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Phoenix, 2006), 3. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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moment when transgenic variation is becoming a real possibility fiction finds it has the problem of saying something that has not already been said about the mutant, the neohuman, the post-human, the android and the cyborg’.39 What could be seen to be different about Houellebecq’s clones, of course, is that they have chosen to abandon humanity, because, for them, all the facts point towards it being irredeemably ‘wrong’. But this interpretation loses much of its credibility when it becomes apparent that there is actually very little of substance to separate Daniel 1 from the future species. The clones do not, it seems, ‘feel’ like they are the same being reincarnated, despite the somewhat vague descriptions of molecular transfer of memory combined with close reading of the life stories of their predecessors that are intended to provide continuity of personality (p. 18). In fact, it is less memory that unites the clones with their original ancestor than it is intellectual leanings: Daniel 1’s life story has become ‘central and canonical’ because he was the only one of the original Elohimites who was able to take ‘a small step back, and to have really understood’ the unravelling of humanity that he was witnessing around him (pp. 325–326). What he does not seem to be able to reach is the ‘freedom of indifference’ to which the neohumans, through the teachings of the ‘Supreme Sister’ aspire, but then Daniel 25, of course, eventually leaves his compound, forfeiting the guaranteed survival of the line of Daniels, in an attempt to find a community wherein love may be dimly possible. Daniel 25 is not the only clone to do this, and there is a sense that the neohumans’ ‘indifference’ is as much a result of brainwashing as it is personal choice. So, like many a speculative novel before it, The Possibility of an Island uses defamiliarization in order to cast light upon contemporary phenomena, but, as in Atomised, there is a determined refusal to offer proposals for change beyond the erasure of humanity. And, although Houellebecq uses many tropes from science fiction, his books are generally interpreted as philosophical fiction, or novels of ideas, and concern themselves with concepts emerging from theory that has become familiar in humanities departments of Western universities in the latter part of the previous century. But, despite the claim by John McCann that the science here is used metaphorically to describe ‘the uniqueness of the human 39 Mike Gane, “Conflicting Visions of Code-Work In Recent Social Science Fiction”, Information, Communication & Society 11, no. 6 (2008): 799–815 (p. 799).

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condition’, to suggest that this novel is just a cleverly (but insubstantially) updated version of a discourse-obsessed postmodern text would be inaccurate, because, as in Atomised, there also exists here a genuine interest in the objective, material world.40 The first of many poems in the novel asserts that ‘Contrary to received ideas,/Words don’t create a world’ (p. 7), and the eternal pressure of the silent, material world exerts itself, either as fodder for artistic inspiration or as the ‘pure terror of space’, on several occasions (p. 373). At the Elohimite ‘summer course’ in Herzegovina, Daniel attends a lecture given by the lead scientist of the organization, a professor of neurology to whom Daniel gives the nickname ‘Knowall’. The professor outlines the neuronal structure of the human brain, stressing the fact that circuits reinforce themselves and grow stronger due to usage. This ‘applied to everything: ideas, addictions and moods’ (p. 100), so that the ‘talking cure’, with its emphasis on re-examining the past, is the worst practice that a traumatized patient can engage in if he/she wishes to recover. Espousing ideas that have now become familiar due to the rise in the West of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (and perhaps providing an indirect or unintended tribute to the power of words), Knowall argues that rather than reinforcing old, painful neuronal circuits, we should instead train our brains to forget them. This apparent dismissal of the centrality of language in the human psyche, a concept, let us not forget, that is canonical to many of the theorists that clearly influence Houellebecq, is, to Daniel, not subject to questions, but instead ‘remarkably clear’ (p. 101). Houellebecq appears in these two instances to cast aside, without so much as a backwards glance, the ‘special relationship’ that has existed between literature and the school of philosophy that makes language central to thought. Instead he joins thinkers such as Meillassoux in the vexed task of describing, through language, the fact that the objective world predates, exists despite of, and will ultimately outlive our attempts to describe it through language. The focus on subjectivity associated with discourse- and language-based theories is no longer taken for granted here, and Daniel 1’s eventual logical suicide provides an opportunity to display a kind of intellectual integrity under a framework where acting in any way other than ‘simply [lying] down and wait[ing] 40 John

65.

McCann, Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010),

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for death’ means indulging in a quaint, naive form of romanticism (p. 238). The rampant subjectivity described by Meillassoux’s theory of correlationism becomes an object of deepest scorn, a childish illusion that the whole of Western society ought to be ashamed of. Vincent the artist sums this up when he tells Daniel: Everything is kitsch, if you like. Music as a whole is kitsch; art is kitsch, literature itself is kitsch. Any emotion is kitsch, practically by definition; but any reflection also, and even in a sense any action, the only thing that is not absolutely kitsch is nothingness. (p. 125)

Nothingness can avoid the embarrassment of kitsch because it acknowledges the ‘truth of all things […] indistinguishable from the observable world’ that the delusions of subjectivity are unable to accept (p. 373). At the same time, though, kitsch suggests a type of knowing irony—a continuing embracement of something that one understands to be flawed in some way. In this sense, The Possibility of an Island is able to justify its role and status as fiction by distancing itself from the kitsch of its medium through the very act of acknowledging that medium’s limitations. But does this nihilist approach to the correlationist trap bear any relation to the solution that Meillassoux proposes? Meillassoux desires a return to primary and secondary qualities so that thought can re-engage with the world in itself, through an acknowledgement of the existence of the arche-fossil and a radical, mathematically based, scepticism towards the assumption of the uniformity of nature. Houellebecq, it seems, wants to dismiss subjectivity entirely—to access the objective world by becoming it. In fact, where Meillassoux sees subjectivity as a frustratingly ubiquitous correlate of the material world, vexedly interfering with access to the in-itself, Houellebecq is calmly accepting of the baseline hegemony of the scientific method. Daniel 1 states ‘I had never introduced s­ cientists into my sketches [because] theirs was in my view a specific layer, motivated by ambitions and evaluative criteria that could not be transposed to mere mortals, there was no material in it for the general public’ (p. 236). Science joins the prestigious kitsch-free realms of nothingness, safe from Daniel 1’s derisive humour because it is not ‘mortal’. Subjectivity, then, should keep its hands off the world that science inhabits and describes, and the neohumans do the honourable thing by aiming only ‘to rejoin the obvious neutrality of the real’ (p. 393).

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In fact, subjectivity is such a blatant aberration in this novel that the ultimate work of art is shown to be that which achieves an effect akin to material objectivity. Vincent, who has now replaced his father as the prophet-leader of the Elohimites, creates an installation designed to represent the values of his religion. For him, the prospect of immortality provides hope that subjectivity will eventually disappear, enabling people to love in a way which is impossible when the fear of death makes them inherently selfish. Daniel 1 enters the installation of light and image and is instantly overcome by something resembling a spiritual experience: Just as I had the impression that the space around me was fragmenting into Cantor’s triadic sets, the silhouette disappeared, and there was total silence. I could no longer even hear my own breath, and I then understood that I had become the space; I was the universe and I was phenomenal existence […] I was then seized by an intense desire to disappear, to melt into a luminous, active nothingness. [italics in original] (p. 358)

After his initial rapturous experiences, Daniel 1 expresses some reservations about Vincent’s ideal of love, but the intellectual privileging of objective nothingness is never in doubt. Like Badiou, Houellebecq here links the basic structure of the universe with set theory, but unlike the philosopher, the novelist positions the subject within the objectified processes of the set rather than outside of it. This brings us back to the concept of ‘objective fiction’ that looms so large in Atomised. Vincent’s art serves as a model for Houellebecq’s literary ideal: it accepts the primacy of the objective world, while at the same time leaving some space, no matter how tenuous, for a recognition of the desirability of unconditional love. Daniel 1 discusses the decline of poetry in this context, agreeing with an article he has read that ‘unfit to transport information more precise than simple bodily or emotional sensations, and intrinsically linked to the magical state of the human mind, [poetry] had been rendered irredeemably obsolete by the appearance of reliable procedures of objective proof’ (p. 156). Of course Daniel 1 goes on to write poems (as do his clones), but the bodily and emotional sensations that they address are ultimately included by the novel in the category dismissed as kitsch. It takes the hard-hitting capabilities of Houellebecq’s brand of objective fiction to properly outline the material facts of human existence, and the sort of love that he espouses is shielded with heavy intellectual armour.

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But does Houellebecq’s obdurate insistence on the redemptive powers of love actually serve to undermine his otherwise relentlessly nihilistic claims? For critics such as Christian Moraru, the message is that ‘what got us into trouble, our humanness, may also save us’.41 This might serve as an accurate reading of Atomised, but in this novel things have grown more hopeless still. The possibility of unconditional love that haunts the text is never realized, and Daniel 25 ends his story by doing precisely what Daniel 1 preaches: lying down and waiting for death. It is only at this point, when happiness is abandoned entirely, that life becomes ‘real’ (p. 423). In fact it seems more accurate to suggest that this author would like to believe in the possibility of an island of love, than that he actually makes this idea central to the novel. Instead, I would assert, Houellebecq believes in the possibilities of his fiction, and it is actually a certain type of art that is allowed to transcend the doldrums of the rest of his world. Through a reading of Badiou and Meillassoux’s approaches to the role of thought, we can achieve a better understanding of the ways in which this novel relates to the concept of the objective world, and the function of art in this process. So, we can argue, Houellebecq shares with the speculative realists an acceptance of the relevance of the material world to philosophical thought. He also shares with them a desire to direct his work towards truth—a type of ambition that thought should achieve its maximum potential. For Badiou and Meillassoux, this involves attaining the freedom of separation, and Houellebecq shares this drive, yet with more of an emphasis on destruction than can be found in the work of the two philosophers. On the surface of Houellebecq’s fiction, however, art is very much linked with illusion: people write poems when they are in love (which never lasts), the Elohimites need the persuasive powers of ‘grandiose’ art in order to help their practical achievements reach the masses (p. 217), and Vincent’s early installations, before he embraces objectivity, are beautiful yet childish pieces of escapism, designed by someone who ‘can’t come to terms with the brutality of this world’ (p. 133). Yet Daniel 1 is also classed as an artist, and his acerbic comedy aligns him thoroughly with Houellebecq. In an era in which originality is hard to come by since ‘everything has been said and done’ (p. 72), Daniel 1’s ‘distinction’ lies in the fact that he is ‘just very honest’, so that whatever he 41 Christian Moraru, “The Genomic Imperative: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island”, Utopian Studies 19, no. 2 (2008): 265–283 (p. 282).

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says will be seen by his fellow men as ‘authentic, as true’ [italics in original] (p. 348). So, as in Atomised, there is a clear indication here that a certain type of art, one that has close links with the hard facts of objectivity, can claim to be true. Truth is linked with objectivity, then, but it is also closely aligned with the idea of pain. Daniel 1 compares himself to Zarathustra on more than one occasion in this novel, and the neohumans’ cerebral isolation bears a striking resemblance to Nietzsche’s alter-ego’s time in his cave. On one of the many occasions that Zarathustra tries to teach the gathered people the theory of the Overman, he tells them that they have failed to reach its heights because they have ‘not yet suffered enough’.42 Only Zarathustra can overcome man in order to reach the grim but honest detachment of self-mastery: a kind of intellectual compensation for the fact that he has suffered more than anyone. The Overman purports to leave the human behind by destroying it completely, replacing the more unpredictable and tenuous joys associated with human life with a colder but more controllable mental existence. Daniel 1’s hope that ‘the men of the future will be born directly into an adult body’ is one of the many ways in which this text echoes Nietzsche, with childhood here serving as a representation of the ultimate weakness of human existence (p. 207). But while there is a striking resemblance between Nietzsche’s proposals that the human should be overcome and Houellebecq’s destructive urges, we can detect a type of suspicion in this novel that there is an alternative way in which mankind can exist in harmony with the objective world. Paradoxically, it seems that simply existing, living life without also intellectualizing it, can be judged to be on a par with lying down and waiting for death in terms of its non-kitsch credentials—particularly when this condition is a sexual one. When Daniel 1 and Esther’s relationship is at its erotic peak, Daniel is aware of being ‘in the absolute simplicity of things’—a state so desirable that it ‘justified [his] life’ (p. 155). But, of course, the dark bedfellow of this state of primal beauty is disturbingly represented by the regressed humans whom Daniel 25 encounters when he leaves the compound. Since the collapse of civilization these people have lived in cultureless squalor and engage in brutal ritualistic violence, evidently having returned, in an alarmingly short space of time, to a stone-age way of life. Houellebecq does not appear to put as much 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 299.

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faith in the redemptive capabilities of a quasi-transcendent Overman as Nietzsche does, but he nevertheless feels that the human, in its state of nature (and therefore at its closest to relating in a ‘correct’ way to the universe), is a thing to be carefully avoided. Intellectual mastery does not guarantee a straightforward trajectory towards objective truth, then, but can in actual fact veer dangerously away from the ‘absolute simplicity’ of the in-itself. Daniel 1’s last words have him meditating upon the ‘gouged-out eyes of men’ that are fed upon by the ghosts of infinite space (p. 373), and the trope of impaired vision is continued by Daniel 25 on the following page, when he discourses on the ‘blinkered’ nature of humanity (p. 374). The word blinkered encapsulates the contradiction, one this novel seems to be aware of, that arises when a human subject suspects that the harder they try to understand the objective facts of their existence, the further away from them they will move. ‘Blinkered’ suggests sight that is encumbered by some form of blindness, but it also suggests that there is always more that should be known—an ignorance that is intractable.43 This sort of defeatist attitude is precisely what speculative realism rebels against. Rather, philosophy aims for the unsutured and noncorrelative position of the Overman, in order to maximize the possibilities of thought; and tied-in subjectivity is the ‘human’ obstacle that must be overcome in order to attain this higher prospect. But, I would argue, it is easier for a novelist than it is for a philosopher to show less concern about the idea that humanity may never be able to possess true ‘sight’, since the novel itself can become the space that is unsutured. It can be sent forth as a human substitute, fulfilling humanity’s natural desire for separation, and free to make an attempt at describing the great outdoors. James Wood has argued that, ‘despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist’, emphasizing, as does

43 In another revealing instance of similarity between Houellebecq’s work and that of Meillassoux, Douglas Morrey draws attention to the fact that ‘images of emptiness, stillness and stasis’ provide a key trope in all of Houellebecq’s full length novels to date, and that these images suggest ‘a certain spiritual aspiration’ related to the desirability of meditation and prayer. Just as Meillassoux’s thought has been critiqued for allowing a return to religiosity, Houellebecq, Morrey suggests, links certain aspects of religion with the conditions of the material world. Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and Its Aftermath (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 147. Jstor ebook, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt5vjgbv.

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Moraru, the basic humanness that Houellebecq detects in love.44 In fact, though, more than either of these things Houellebecq is an artist, and he is driven by a desire to do as much with his medium as he possibly can— the definitive end being the achievement of truth. In Daniel 25’s final commentary he decides that, in this world, ‘there was no place for me’—his overly intellectualized existence excluding him from any natural or comfortable position in the universe (p. 405). Meillassoux has already drawn our attention to the importance of a clear and definitive sense of place to individual disciplines, with his discussion of the response of philosophy to the scientific revolution in the eighteenth century. But for Houellebecq, as a novelist, his fiction need only aim to represent some kind of truth—even if this truth consists of a recognition that the ‘place’ of humanity is (and possibly always will be) a contradiction and an aberration. The place that the novel inhabits could then hope to achieve that all important discursive separation, while at the same time describing Meillassoux’s holy grail: ‘an absolutizing thought that would not be absolutist’.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. 1992. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: State University of New York Press. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. Trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum. Badmington, Neil. 2000. Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism. In Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington, 1–10. Hampshire: Palgrave. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1984. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. This Strange Institution Called Literature [Interview]. In Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge. Diken, Bülent. 2009. Nihilism. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin.

44 James

Wood, “Love, Actually”, The New Republic, August 28, 2006, 25.

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Gane, Mike. 2008. Conflicting Visions of Code-Work In Recent Social Science Fiction. Information, Communication & Society 11, no. 6: 799–815. Haraway, Donna J. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington, 69–84. Hampshire: Palgrave. Houellebecq, Michel. 2001. Atomised. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: Vintage. Houellebecq, Michel. 2001. The Art of Fiction No. 206 (Interview by Susannah Hunnewell). The Paris Review (Print Version). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq. Accessed 13 July 2015. Houellebecq, Michel. 2006. The Possibility of an Island. Trans. Gavin Bowd. London: Phoenix. Kakutani, Michiko. 2000. BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Unsparing Case Studies of Humanity’s Vileness. The New York Times Book Review, November 10. Lezard, Nicholas. 2001. Atom Bomb. The Guardian Review Section, February 24. Marr, Andrew. 2000. We’re All Doomed…, Observer, Review Section, May 21. McCann, John. 2010. Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times. Oxford: Peter Lang. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Moore, Gerald. 2011. Gay Science and (No) Laughing Matter: The Eternal Returns of Michel Houellebecq. French Studies 25: 45–60. Moraru, Christian. 2008. The Genomic Imperative: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Utopian Studies 19, no. 2: 265–283. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Quinn, Anthony. 2000. One Thinks, the Other Doesn’t. The New York Times Book Review, November 19. Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sweeney, Carole. 2013. Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair. London: Bloomsbury. Varsava, Jerry Andrew. 2005. Utopian Yearnings, Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism. College Literature 32: 145–167. Williams, Linda. 1990. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. London: Pandora. Wood, James. 2006. Love, Actually. The New Republic, August 28.

CHAPTER 5

Scientific Transcendentalism: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Houellebecq’s two novels which explore the prospect of the genetic manipulation of the human genome do so in a way which links them with speculative or science fiction (SF). This book does not provide the necessary tools, approach or, indeed, space to attempt to outline the differences or problematize the boundaries between these two terms, especially since the study of SF, particularly in recent times, has grown into a vast, multi-faceted and nuanced discipline. As Brian Baker points out in his guide to essential SF criticism: SF is a protean genre. It encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of different sub-genres, styles, emphases, tropes and motifs. There is no agreed definition of the genre, nor is there an agreed history. […] SF is always in flux; it is contested ground, subject to revisions and rewritings and appropriations, and that, in part, is its strength.1

Many of the novels studied in this book contain elements which connect them in some way with SF: Galatea 2.2 and Thinks… explore artificial intelligence; neohuman clones figure largely in Houellebecq’s work, as do the concepts of utopia and dystopia; and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, analysed in this chapter, charts similar territory to the two Houellebecq texts. To SF and the novel of ideas or philosophical 1 Brian

Baker, Science Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2.

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novel, we can also add as genres and modes of representation which interact with the third culture novel postmodernism, magical realism, revenge tragedy, campus fiction, thriller fiction, comedy, the Great American Novel and more. This book asserts, though, that despite there being many genres which inform it, the third culture novel is united by two or three important aspects. Its sense of the significance of the material, non-linguistic universe in relation to questions of meaning, and the ways in which scientific understandings of this universe impact upon the novel, provides the primary aspect through which the third culture novel can be understood, even as the differences between each individual text remain compelling. This unity does not describe a generic framework, though, which would bypass or surpass the genres mentioned above, but rather a set of responses to changing cultural and intellectual conditions. Of course, generic variations between the various third culture novels studied here equate to notable divergences in the scope, methods and themes of each, but regardless of whether they are most closely related to SF, literary fiction, or something else entirely, everyone promotes the value of the novel and the sort of mindset they associate with novelistic culture, in the face of the perceived threat stemming from the changing social roles of science. In this chapter, two novels with very different generic leanings are united by the fact that they both construct a particular type of defence of the novel against what they see as the dangers of a society in which the values and insights associated with literary wisdom are sidelined by the hegemony of scientific-materialist capitalism. In The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood, a particular conception of human emotion, one with strong links to American transcendentalism, is placed in competition with commercial scientism and is also figured as being intrinsically linked with the space of the novel. For Patricia Waugh, The Corrections can be classed as a ‘neophenomenological’ novel, because it, like so much contemporary fiction, ‘reach[es] beyond postmodern self-reflexivity and neurological reductionism’ and recognizes that ‘the power of fiction is not simply a storytelling one, but a world-creating capacity to convey what it feels like to be alive’.2 I would agree with Waugh that the representation of feeling 2 Patricia Waugh, “The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the NeoPhenomenological Novel”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17–35 (pp. 23–24). MyiLibrary eBook.

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is the driving force of Franzen’s novel, but I would suggest that he goes further than the phenomenological impulse to ‘understand feelings, perceptions, and beliefs as meaningful entities’, in that he posits these phenomena as material processes grounded in the natural world (p. 25). In this sense, the phenomenological realm is awarded a new significance and a new relevance with which it can enter into dialogue with science. In many ways, it would be more accurate to associate the work of Jonathan Franzen with (tragic) realism or naturalism, tempered with a healthy dose of intertextual awareness, than it would with transcendentalism, since his work represents an attempt to objectively describe reality, particularly the ways in which social ills impact upon the individual. By the same token, Oryx and Crake (and the two follow-up novels The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013)) sits more obviously with SF or speculative fiction, which always somehow makes the world strange, than with a literary tradition which constantly seeks to ground the human spirit in the here-and-now conditions of nature. Critics have tended to focus on Franzen’s political engagement, and the ways in which he expresses anxiety over his position as what Colin Hutchinson terms a ‘compromised and conflicted white male liberal writer’.3 However, what unites these two otherwise generically separate (and generically complex) novels, and what links them with a form of transcendentalism which seeks validation through science, is their positing of a naturally occurring, materially rooted affective sphere, through which an ethical framework operating under the auspices of imaginative sympathy finds expression. Human emotion in these two texts is understood in naturalized terms, in the sense that it can become warped, damaged and dulled by culture, but also in the way that both of these authors present emotion as being more fundamental than language, allowing the novel, as the self-appointed guardian of sensibility, to compete with materialist conceptions of the self-proposed by science. This marks a shift away from the postmodern conviction that the subject is linguistically constructed, proceeding instead from the assumption that an affective foundation underlies and dictates the cultural systems of which language is such a key element. The sort of affective realm which draws these two novelists, and which they present as being vital, is a realm of beleaguered emotion, 3 Colin Hutchinson, “Jonathan Franzen and the Politics of Disengagement”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50, no. 2 (2009): 191–207 (p. 191).

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one contaminated and covered up by undesirable aspects of culture. It is what we are left with when everything else is stripped away, and it is what we must take heed of in order to live better lives. In this sense, self-knowledge is crucial, but only so that this knowledge can allow us to properly appreciate and relate to the other. The affective realm promoted by Franzen and Atwood is communitarian then, and best accessed, as it is for Richard Powers, through imaginative sympathy. On the one hand, then, affect is conceived as being universal because it is inherent in our physical, material make-up, tying us to the conditions of the natural world as it exists outside of language. On the other hand, both of these novelists present an idealized model of human emotion in the mode of transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau who believed in the inherent goodness of human nature. For Emerson, the literary scholar serves as the ultimate incarnation of human beings’ innate moral code. In an address given to the Literary Societies in Dartmouth College in 1838, he argues: Able men, in general, have good dispositions, and a respect for justice; because an able man is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite. All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth.4

It is the literary mindset, what Emerson characterizes in ‘Nature’ as the poet’s ability to ‘integrate all the parts’, which can transcend the distractions of the finite and individual and give proper expression to the universal spirit.5 This is not to suggest that humans are represented in glorified terms in either of the novels discussed here, and in fact, there is plenty of evidence of the darker side of human nature in both, but rather to highlight the fact that the notion of the literary mindset, particularly as it relates to imaginative sympathy, including the application of empathy and understanding towards oneself, is offered as the model according to which our natural, affective being can achieve its best expression and thus shape a communitarian culture and society. Universal spirit 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics”, in Essays and Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100. 5 Emerson, “Nature”, in Essays and Lectures, 9.

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has been replaced by a more tentative faith in the universal potential for good existing in the material affective domain, and imaginative sympathy reveals and nurtures that potential. These two novels again, then, engage in a conflicted relationship with science. Materialist concepts of the self are figured as being harmful and dangerous in both texts, and scientific-materialism legitimizes and gives support to unfettered capitalism and consumerism. Yet at the same time, there is an attempt in both novels to link imaginative sympathy with materialist understandings of the self, providing a chemical and biological foundation for the affective sphere. The latter half of the chapter will probe further into the notion that biological life, and its necessary corollary of death, has come to assume altered forms of significance in recent times, through a reading of Roberto Esposito’s concept of biopolitics. For now, though, I will outline the ways in which science, emotion and the novel interact in Jonathan Franzen’s well-received third novel, The Corrections.

‘The Moral of This Long Story’: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections Fredric Jameson, in his study of postmodernism, has stressed the centrality of the urge of each new generation of writers to differentiate themselves from their predecessors in providing the impetus for new artistic and cultural movements, suggesting that writers will inevitably view formerly innovative and challenging texts as ‘a set of dead classics’ which threaten to engulf and stifle them.6 Jameson also, however, draws attention to the fact that it is possible to detect many, if not all, of the features of postmodernism in previous modernist works or even in the much earlier romanticism (p. 4). Jameson’s formulations capture the tension of ambivalence which can characterize the relationship any movement which defines itself against a previous one risks developing: not only is originality often more difficult to achieve than it might initially appear, but the very act of opposing something ensures that the something remains present at all times.

6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 5.

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In The Corrections, the theme of defining oneself against forebears with whom one actually shares many characteristics is of central importance. The three Lambert children, Gary, Chip and Denise, gradually learn that they can never hope to leave the influence of their parents entirely behind; instead, they can only attempt small corrections to the mistakes made by Alfred and Enid. At the same time, Franzen makes reference to writers who have impacted upon his work (Chip’s email address contains the word Gaddis, we meet an intellectual couple named Roth, and Franzen has discussed the influence of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon in interviews), suggesting that his novel similarly ‘corrects’ previous works, rather than attempts to move entirely beyond them. Cultural theory and the authors who are associated with it are not treated with the same apparent antagonism as they are in the work of Houellebecq (and Ian McEwan, as we shall see in the next chapter), and there is little sense in The Corrections that Franzen desires to break completely with postmodernism. It is partly for these reasons that Stephen J. Burn classifies Franzen as a post-postmodern novelist, who, along with others such as Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, form a group which ‘explicitly looks back to, or dramatizes its roots within, postmodernism’, and as such is ‘a development from, rather than an explicit rejection of, the preceding movement’.7 As well as placing more emphasis on plot and characterization than does postmodern fiction, the younger generation, for Burn, ‘more obviously address the idea of a real world beyond the problems raised by nonreferential systems of discourse’, and this is revealed in part by these authors’ willingness to give a degree of prominence to scientific worldviews [italics in original] (p. 21). I will argue in this chapter that The Corrections not only addresses the idea of a real world beyond cultural signifiers, but that it also aims to occupy the objective stance that it associates with a scientific conception of the real. While Franzen emphasizes the importance of correcting previous influences rather than defining oneself against them, I will suggest that in The Corrections, Franzen actually defines the novel in opposition to two different types of materialism: scientific materialism of consciousness and the self, and economic and cultural materialism associated with late capitalism. At the same time that the novel is opposed to scientific materialism, though, and the rationalist mindset which it links with 7 Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (London: Continuum, 2008), 19.

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science, it also attempts to colonize the space which it ostensibly provides for science. Not only does Franzen write from a perspective which is presented as being more objective than that of his ‘rational’ characters, he also persistently uses emotion to undercut reason, figuring affect as the fundamental force in all aspects of human life. In this respect, The Corrections resembles each of the other novels discussed so far in this book in that it is both exempt from the rules which it creates for other disciplines and aspects of the world and also placed in a privileged position with regard to the ability to conceive of and comment upon life. Franzen seems unable to resist, no matter how well informed and worldly-wise he shows his work to be, the desire to say something above and beyond the limits of what it senses it can achieve. Related to this, urge is a further aspect which links this and the other novels analysed here, namely what Franzen has described as ‘the impulse to defend the novel’, which, for him, is now ‘stronger than ever’.8 Defending the novel bears an intricate relation for these writers to the assertion of its ability to maintain a position which is somehow separate from, yet cognizant of the important questions of any epoch, creating a situation wherein ideas from other disciplines, references to previous writers, self-reflexive awareness can all threaten to cancel out the elusively singular something which the novel defines itself by. In The Corrections, the definition of what it is that makes a novel unique, and therefore worth defending, is closely related, as I have already adumbrated, to a particular concept of human emotion. In the first pages, we are introduced to Alfred and Enid Lambert, a retired Midwestern couple who live in a house ringing with an ‘alarm bell of anxiety’; they are both, in their separate ways, deeply unhappy, have been for ‘as long as they could remember’ and have passed their unhappiness down to their three children.9 Emotional pain unites the Lamberts, as does their inability to understand themselves, and one of the main driving forces of the novel is the unveiling of these characters’ inner lives, to the extent that they are hidden from both themselves and the reader. For Franzen, writing character means starting with ‘an individual who is in 8 Jonathan Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”, The Paris Review 195 (2010), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/the-artof-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen, accessed 15 April 2014. 9 Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 4, 5. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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some way defended’ and then proceeding to ‘strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath’.10 Connecting with these ‘moments of personal significance’ is, for Franzen, ‘the job of the fiction writer’.11 All five Lamberts (and some of the more peripheral characters) experience such moments, whether it be eldest son Gary admitting to himself that, like his father, he has serious depression, Denise realizing that she is more similar to her mother than she would like to acknowledge or Enid learning to accept her children and herself to a greater extent. What Franzen has termed ‘emotional significance’,12 then, is of key importance in The Corrections and is the aspect of his work which has tended to win him the most critical acclaim.13 But emotion plays a further role in this novel, serving as binary opposite to a certain, simplistic form of reason and rationality which it associates with a scientific perspective. Alfred is regularly linked with science—he conducts experiments in his basement metallurgy lab, leading him to secure patents for new substances; he turns to such comforts as ‘a science of cleanliness, a science of looks, a science even of excretion’ in times of stress, and he is a self-confessed champion of non-relative reality (pp. 315, 331). This viewpoint is constantly pitted against that of Enid, who, in Alfred’s mind, is a ‘romantic’ who often indulges in ‘silly fantasies’ (pp. 296, 315). Gary Lambert, similarly, prides himself on being a ‘strict materialist’ who goes so far as to conceive of his moods in terms of the Neurofactors influencing them, and he, too, compares himself to what he sees as his unreasonable and hysterical wife, Caroline (p. 161). Franzen handles his characters in such a manner that the sympathy of the reader is by no means fixed or straightforward, and he also problematizes characters’ perceptions of themselves and each other. 10 Jonathan

Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”. Franzen in interview with Christopher Connery, “The Liberal Form: An Interview with Jonathan Franzen”, Boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 31–54 (p. 36). 12 Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”. 13 James Wood’s view that Franzen’s work is at its best when ‘cleaving to the human’ is representative here, as is Ty Hawkins’ assertion that Franzen has the ability, through his skilful characterization, to write the type of novel which ‘effectively challenges the hegemony of self-interest’. James Wood, “Abhorring a Vacuum”, The New Republic Online, October 18, 2001, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_18, accessed 15 April 2014. Ty Hawkins, “Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of ‘Refuge’”, College Literature 37, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 61–87 (p. 82). 11 Jonathan

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Alfred and Gary, for example, can be extremely irrational when a situation drives them to it (witness Gary’s paranoia that his wife and son constantly ‘trade glances’ behind his back), and Enid and Caroline can both be shrewd and level-headed, particularly where financial decisions are concerned (p. 187). David Gates suggests that Franzen ‘maintains a scrupulous neutrality on questions of order versus energy, control versus license, tradition versus innovation, old stick-in-the-muds versus their unmoored children’,14 and this is largely the case in The Corrections, where the main aim appears to be representation rather than what Franzen himself terms ‘instruction’.15 However, there are key aspects of the novel which suggest that emotion is not only granted more significance than the type of reason caricatured here, but also that emotion is vital when it comes to considering what reality is, that it constitutes a kind of bottom line in all elements of human life. Emotion and the language, which is closely linked to it, are figured as being under threat in The Corrections by what Chip terms ‘a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity’ (p. 36). Science is in cahoots with capitalist forces, particularly when it comes to the creation and dissemination of new drugs to treat depression and other forms of mental illness. Drugs mask the malaise created by late capitalist society in order that people can go on consuming in the way that they are encouraged to, or so that they can enjoy those things that they have spent their hardearned money on. Thus, Enid is encouraged by onboard doctor Mather Hibbard to purchase ‘Aslan’ from him on her cruise ship holiday, when she consults him about her worries regarding Alfred’s deteriorating condition.16 ‘With all the money you’ve paid for the privilege of being here’, he tells her, ‘you have a right to feel your best at every moment’, and ‘personality optimizer’ Aslan will ensure that this is the case (p. 368). Enid spends the next few days in a blissful state of numbed sensations,

14 David Gates, “‘The Corrections’: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic”, New York Times Online, September 9, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/ review/09GATESTW.html, accessed 15 April, 2014. 15 Franzen in interview with Christopher Connery, 46. 16 This is not the only occasion in The Corrections on which The Chronicles of Narnia is referred to—Gary’s youngest son Jonah, for example, is an avid reader of C. S. Lewis. In this instance, perhaps, Franzen draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which pharmaceutical drugs have replaced religion, as represented by the Jesus like figure of Aslan the lion, as the opiate of the masses.

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freed from the crippling shame which normally accompanies most aspects of her life, and willing to use any means available to get hold of her next batch of the highly addictive drug. Similarly, the new drug created by the Axon Corporation (in which Gary purchases a large share), Corecktall ‘offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and improving the hard wiring of an adult human brain’ [emphasis in original] (p. 217). Not only does Corecktall promise revolutionary treatments for dementia and other diseases of the brain, it also claims to be able to alter the make-up of the criminal brain in order to decrease re-offending. Earl ‘Curly’ Eberle represents the classic scientific over-reacher, but this time he is a pawn to larger economic forces. His sales pitch for Corecktall is deftly and cynically handled by a team of finance-gurus who brush off any ethical objections raised by the audience as so much passé naivety. Their product is ‘forward-looking’, it will save the country an unimaginable amount in rehabilitation costs, and the case is closed (p. 238). Using one of the ideals of the Founding Fathers as her trump card, Axon CEO Merilee Finch advises a persistent ‘heckler’ that since America is a ‘free country’ they ought to ‘go invest in alternative energy’ rather than waste their breath fighting the inevitable (p. 239). The threat to humanity that SF authors have long associated with out-ofcontrol science here has the full backing of the free market economy, the values of which are so intimately related to those of the nation. Human emotion in its ‘natural’ state, then, which contains the potential for inherent perfectibility, is under threat from two giants of different types of materialism, and this in turn threatens the territory of the novel. Language, narrative and emotion exist in an intricate and unique relation in the novel, and the cut-throat consumerist world in which science and big business thrive threatens to consume this sphere. The course Chip teaches at D—College is entitled ‘Consuming Narratives’, referring to the ways in which forces of capitalism appropriate certain narrative devices in advertising, yet there is also a suggestion that Franzen uses this title to evoke the devouring of language by materialism (p. 41). Alfred’s Parkinson’s disease affects his body, but it also attacks his language, and Franzen describes this deterioration in a manner which links it to natural, material processes. Alfred begins a response to one of Enid’s enquiries with the words ‘I am—’, but then immediately feels lost ‘in the woods’ where he imagines that ‘the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds’ [my emphasis] (p. 12). Alfred feels the panic of a man trapped in a darkness like ‘black ants storming a

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dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself’ [author’s emphasis] (p. 13). His words are being swallowed up by a material process in the same way that Aslan and Corecktall block out certain emotional pathways, and the forward march of both the disease and the synthetic drugs seems unstoppable. However, as much as The Corrections is concerned with outlining the threat posed to the territory of the novel by the two materialisms, it also retaliates against them. This is suggested early on in the novel when Chip regales his colleagues with a dinner party anecdote about pressure endured from his parents’ hopes that he would pursue a career in science, rather than the arts in which he was more obviously interested. He relates the way in which he fraudulently won two science fair trophies by fabricating the results of experiments with oat seedlings and migratory birds, leaving his parents and teachers none the wiser (p. 40). Franzen is known for his animosity towards the critical establishment,17 yet this vignette reads like a slightly tongue-in-cheek revenge version of the Sokal Hoax, in which the bright young artistic Chip gets one over on a stuffy, unimaginative scientific hierarchy. If theory is treated with some ambivalence in The Corrections (Chip suspects his theories sound ‘somewhat lame’ (p. 96), yet they at least provide a critique of the culture which is certainly treated as an evil in this novel), then it is left to the more permanent affective realm of art to provide resistance to the apparently logical forward march of its materialist opposites. ‘Scientifically’ minded characters such as Alfred and Gary purport to hold a monopoly where reality is concerned when they compare themselves to what they view as their emotionally driven inferiors. But throughout The Corrections, emotion is linked repeatedly to reality in that it serves as an underlying force or principle in a number of vital aspects of human life. Alfred and Enid befriend Ted and Sylvia Roth on their cruise, another couple constituted by a ‘rational’ husband and an ‘emotional’ wife.18 The Roths’ grown-up daughter has been murdered 17 Franzen has spoken of feeling ‘an unattractively extreme rage against literary theory and the politicization of academic English departments’ around the time he was composing this novel (in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”). 18 The Roths’ Christian names suggest a further literary reference, this time to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, although not with any apparent comparison intended between the two sets of marriages.

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some years previously, and her killer is due to be executed while they are on board the Gunnar Myrdal. Sylvia still suffers enormously from what happened to their daughter, and she has a strong urge to discuss her feelings with others, but, she informs Enid, Ted has chosen the ‘rational’ path of deciding to forget from a specific date that she was ever murdered, because ‘human beings have been losing children forever and […] too much grieving is stupid and self-indulgent’ (p. 354). Ted would rather ‘talk about “real” things like business and science’ while his marriage crumbles (p. 356). In a sense, the Roths are handled with the sort of neutral objectivity outlined by David Gates—Ted is certainly no villain—yet Sylvia is created with a great deal more depth and attention than her slightly two-dimensional husband. As a former artist of woodcuts, Sylvia is surprised to discover that she has developed an obsession with drawing guns, yet when she finally allows herself to add the face of her daughter’s killer to one of her sketches she experiences an epiphany: ‘It was time to move on […] whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her’ (p. 350). Describing the impact this realization had on her, Sylvia marvels that ‘a completely invisible thing inside your head’, a shift in emotions which makes one stronger, ‘can feel realer than anything you’ve ever experienced before’ (p. 350). Of course, Sylvia’s epiphany only feels real—this is the sort of reality that her rational husband would dismiss—yet rationality in this novel always stems from an emotional impulse itself. Alfred has ‘deep terrors’ that ‘everything [is] relative’, that what he champions is a ‘beleaguered reality’ and not an actual one (pp. 315–316). He is also painfully aware that Nature is ‘slatternly and preferred disorder’ and that ‘much work was required to resist the tyranny of the probable – to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves’ [italics in original] (p. 312). As Alfred’s disease causes his rigidly controlled personality to unravel, it becomes clear that the reason he has championed for most of his life has been driven by fear, and Chip realizes that the same can be said of Gary, who reverts to ‘his most rational mode’ when he is ‘afraid’ (p. 629). Fear can always be found lurking underneath reason in The Corrections, and it can even be found lurking underneath free market America where ‘captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in a ceaseless fear of being fired’ (p. 511). Fear is the bedrock of both materialist reason and materialist economics, meaning that affect runs deeper than the two great discourses which this novel links with science.

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Reason also loses out to emotion in the face of mortality in this novel when Alfred plunges to what he thinks is his death over the side of the Gunnar Myrdal. As he falls, Alfred remembers evenings of closeness that he spent reading to his young children—he remembers something related to books significantly, but he also classifies these moments as ‘sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty’ (pp. 389–390). Certainty, for Alfred, is related to rationality; it represents the intelligent person’s acceptance of the bleak facts of life and humanity. Alfred occasionally quotes Schopenhauer to this effect, for example his assertion that ‘you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony’ [italics in original] (p. 294). Doubt is something for the likes of his romantic wife to indulge in, a feminine19 luxury that no ‘real’ man should allow himself, yet it is doubt rather than certainty which comforts Alfred at this most meaningful moment, when there is ‘no solid thing to reach for’ but his children (p. 390). Doubt is akin to good novel writing for Franzen; it ties in with what he has termed ‘tragic realism’, where fiction ‘raises more questions than it answers’ and ‘conflict doesn’t resolve into cant’.20 In this sense, doubt is more objective than the certainty which the likes of Alfred, Gary and Ted Roth would associate with reason, so that the novel becomes more scientific than its scientifically minded characters. Franzen satirizes the idea that science and a scientific mindset hold some sort of monopoly over truth in the comic scene between Enid and Doctor Hibbard on board the Gunnar Myrdal. After repeatedly interrupting Enid, confusing her name and pushing (the very profitable for him) Aslan upon her in a dangerously unprofessional manner, Dr. Hibbard spells out the ways in which the new drug affects brain chemistry in order to achieve ‘complete annihilation’ of the molecules involved in creating feelings of shame (p. 366). Comparing the way in which alcohol holds shame at bay temporarily, only to allow it to ‘flood’ back when the effects wear off, Hibbard informs Enid that

19 When Alfred is charged with the task of checking each mile of the Erie Belt railroad for faults, he thinks of it in terms of ‘cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies’ (p. 283). 20 Jonathan Franzen, “Why Bother? (The Harper’s Essay)”, in How to Be Alone (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 91.

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Hibbard is suggesting that there are different types of truth, but that scientific truth is the only one to deserve that name, the one on which we can safely act. He goes on to outline a type of value system based on this truth, one which takes the fact that our brains, and therefore our personalities, are controlled by material processes to support the idea that radical or complete drug-induced change is nothing for Enid (or anyone else) to worry about. ‘We all have irrational attachments to the particular chemical coordinates of our character and temperament’ he tells her, but the rational course of action, the scientific one, is to abandon that personality in favour of feeling the best that current technology can make us feel (p. 372). Hibbard suggests that the truth discovered by Russian novelists and psychologists is worth considering as an interesting diversion, but that until science applies its incontrovertible stamp of approval on this idea, it holds no real value for modern society. The point which Franzen is at pains to get across, of course, is that scientific truth can be utilized in any number of ways, not all of them necessarily desirable. Hibbard makes the same mistake that transcendental scientism does: he assumes that the objective truth associated with science as a practice carries over into the ways in which science is applied outside of these practices, so that any usage of these discoveries will be ‘right’ as a natural consequence. Good novelists, however, Russian or otherwise, take a more genuinely objective viewpoint because they do not attempt to close off debate in this way. This is how Franzen views ‘tragic realism’ at work: the future looks bleak for Enid whether she chooses to sacrifice her personality for the sake of a kind of peace or whether she remains tied to her crippling shame, but the novel should never present an easy or simplistic solution to this kind of situation. Belief systems which trust too blindly to a single guiding principle (in this case scientifically informed rationality) risk falling into serious error when they ignore complexities which a novel such as this one respects. In this sense, The Corrections could be classed as a postmodern novel rather than a tragic realist one, since a vital feature of postmodernist works is their resistance to closure or totalizing discourses. But I would suggest that Franzen ultimately asserts the desirability of the sort of imaginative sympathy that he associates with a literary mindset, based on a respect

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for the immanence of emotion in all aspects of culture, and that this is an important aspect of his work which Stephen J. Burn fails to include in his catalogue of post-postmodern features. Of course, Franzen also utilizes scientific truth for his own aims, in a manner which links him, to a certain extent, with Doctor Hibbard. As much as Hibbard’s rationalist philosophy of the self is anathema to tragic realism, it has the benefit of drawing attention to the materiality of emotion. This material foundation enables affect to compete with scientificrationalism, grounding what might otherwise seem a flimsy concept in the natural world. Once this grounding is established, the novel can construct a defence of imaginative sympathy on the basis of it, thus promoting literature in the process. The Corrections is not heavily driven by plot, but one storyline which rumbles throughout most of the novel is Enid’s wish to gather the whole family together for ‘one last Christmas’ in St. Jude (p. 86). The holiday does not turn out quite in the way that Enid has planned, yet Gary, Denise and Chip are reunited in the family home for a short period with their parents. Enid has acquired some Aslan tablets somewhat underhandedly, but she flushes them down the Disposall, telling Denise ‘I want the real thing or I don’t want anything’ (p. 609). Taken together with the suggestion near the end of the novel that Correcktall has suffered a major shares slump (Gary takes a ‘nasty little bath on a biotech IPO’ (p. 648)), it seems that Franzen cannot resist siding with a more traditionally humanist conception of the self. Of course, as Ralph J. Poole points out, Enid never gets ‘the real thing’ since her ‘family Christmas’ is fractured and marred by confrontation, yet he suggests that this is all the more ‘real’ because it is ‘exactly the way it was bound to happen’.21 The Corrections represents an attempt at providing a neutral, objective picture of the tragedy of irresolvable conflicts, yet it is unable to avoid creating a doctrine from this very process. Sylvia Roth describes this situation aptly when she suggests to Enid that ‘maybe the moral of this long story […] is that I can’t help finding a moral to the story no matter how hard I try not to’ (p. 357). This moral is related to emotions, we have seen, and the ways in which literary art is understood to hold a privileged place where the complexities of the emotional realm are concerned, so it is not surprising 21 Ralph J. Poole, “Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics”, The Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 263–283 (p. 280).

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that imaginative sympathy is important in The Corrections, as it continues to be in much contemporary fiction. In order to accept that conflict is at times irresolvable, it is necessary to possess the ability to envisage life from someone else’s point of view, and one of the most important lessons Denise learns throughout the course of the novel is that her understanding of the behaviour of both of her parents has been sadly lacking. After one particularly painful realization, she asks ‘how could you permit yourself to breathe, let alone laugh or sleep or eat well, if you were unable to imagine how hard another person’s life was?’ (p. 603). Denise resolves to help her parents through her father’s illness, as does Chip, and both characters are assigned a ‘happy ending’, with Chip settling down and having children, and Denise looking ‘so much happier’ (pp. 648–649). Enid becomes less judgmental—she is able to voice daringly liberal views on homosexuality to her friends, based on her imagining how it must feel to be discriminated against (p. 649). None of these characters undertakes a complete transformation, but they make important corrections which stem from moments of emotional significance, so that the novel becomes a manifesto for continual, realistically moderate change, based on empathic sensitivity. As for the rational, scientific characters, Gary returns to his dysfunctional marriage, frustrated in his quest to ‘put an end to this charade’ and force his parents to see reason and sell their financial drain of a house, and Alfred dies in a pitiable condition in the Deepmire residential home (p. 577). Both of these characters are consumed by emotion, despite their best efforts to live a life which pays it minimal heed. Gary exits on a note of anger and fear, destined, it would seem, to fulfil Alfred’s prophecy that ‘one day [he] will see’ that he is as depressed as his father, and Alfred lives out his final years in torment (p. 202). Desperate to escape his miserable existence, Alfred echoes Gary when he begs Chip to ‘put an end to it’, but Chip refuses his request and Alfred cannot carry it out himself because he is strapped down in his ‘captivating chair’ (p. 643). The desire for death is the logical end point of the rational, controlling personality which seeks to order the chaos of life, and this is reflected by the underlying urge which both of these characters manifest to lie down and ‘simply close [their] eyes’ (p. 324). They are, however, tied to their emotions—in Alfred’s case quite literally—and so long as they are alive, so long as they are human in other words, they will be controlled by the very emotions they seek to master.

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‘Ars Longa Vita Brevis’: Bioliterature in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Death haunts The Corrections as it does, to a greater or lesser extent, each of the novels discussed so far. Scientifically minded characters manifest a desire to kill off emotion; the ‘objective’ world of the in itself is represented in terms of an emptiness that evokes death, and these authors’ decisions to court transcendental scientism threaten to strike a death blow to their own discipline. Death is also regularly posited as a logical conclusion to the philosophical concerns being raised in these novels— it comes to represent an uncomfortable truth regarding meaning in our universe, one which is nevertheless an integral part of the novelists’ territory. Death describes the nothingness which for the postmodern lays underneath our linguistic systems of reference, but in these novels, which pay more heed to what Quentin Meillassoux terms the ‘great outdoors’, death is also the bottom line where material reality is concerned. Getting to grips with the great outdoors is best expressed in terms of lying down and accepting death—as Daniel 25 realizes in The Possibility of an Island and as Alfred and Gary fear in The Corrections. At the same time that the nothingness associated with death looms large in each of these texts, though, the polar opposite sphere of human life asserts itself not only as the substance of the novelistic art, but also as the realm of meaning with which we must somehow continue to grapple, even as we lose faith in its centrality. Life and death are conceived as opposing forces in these novels, but death is only ever held at bay by an act of will, so that life can exist solely in terms of a defiance of death. Whether it be the threat of fatal illness in David Lodge, the tyranny of structure and formula for Boyd, or the ever-expanding ‘high style’ of an uncaring universe for Martin Amis, death hovers on the periphery of life in the same way that the ending of each novel is evoked from the moment it is begun. In these largely secular fictions from a largely secular age, the concept of an afterlife has become irrelevant. Instead, each individual life on earth is contained within the parameters of death, so that a life becomes at once painfully vital and hopelessly devoid of meaning. The preservation and prolongation of life become an end in itself (as evinced by Houellebecq’s novels in particular), and the pursuit of selfish pleasure and instant gratification (Gwyn Barry in The Information, Ralph Messenger in Thinks…, Chip in The Corrections) is met with little ideological resistance.

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Roberto Esposito describes the modern political era in terms that focus on this tension between the centrality of biological life and the necessary role death plays in its maintenance. For Esposito, the term biopolitics describes a situation wherein life is seen as the fundamental consideration in every political procedure, so that traditional concerns of sovereignty, such as ideology and power, become secondary to the necessity of keeping life alive. In our globalized world, the ‘the clear distinction between inside and outside’ has been weakened, and as a result, the nature of warfare has changed, destabilizing the boundaries between war and peace. This results in a scenario where life and death are a matter which is high on the agenda with the ‘world in all of its extensions’.22 As these distinctions collapse and ‘all other sources of legitimacy dry up’, the only conceivable politics remaining is ‘a politics of life’ (p. 15). At the same time that preservation of life becomes the major global concern, however, the opposing force of thanatopolitics continually threatens to take over, as genocidal wars proliferate and unimaginably vast numbers of casualties result from conflicts.23 Esposito highlights the fact that ‘wars and mass destruction are no longer perpetrated in the name of a politics of power […] but in the name of the survival itself of populations that are involved’ (p. 39), and he classifies this proclivity towards preventative war in terms of an ‘autoimmunitary turn’ (p. 147). In this sense, death is used as a means to protect life in the same way that a small amount of a pathogen is injected into the body in order to stimulate an immunitary response, but the fact that war now becomes nothing more than an attempt to prevent war means that the body politic effectively attacks itself and ‘the negative of the immunitary procedure doubles back on itself until it covers the entire frame’ (p. 147). Every community, Esposito suggests, requires the negativity of its opposite in order to find a way in which to define itself, and all civilizations have found ways in which to immunize themselves against their perceived other. Yet in contemporary times, especially since 11 September 2001, ‘excessive defense’ runs the risk of ultimately leading to self-destruction (p. 148). In Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, the political climate delineated by Esposito is brought to its logical conclusion when the 22 Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14. 23 Esposito charts this trend in the last two hundred years specifically (p. 39).

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human race is all but eliminated due to the genocidal vision of Crake—a brilliant scientist who intends to ‘save’ humanity by destroying the current, flawed breed of ‘homo sapiens’ and replacing it with his genetically engineered, peaceable models.24 Death will save life, but life as we know it will be gone, and, as is the case in so many of the novels discussed so far, human emotion will need to defend itself from scientific imperialism, since Crake’s ‘children’ represent an attempt by their creator to edit out what he sees as the undesirable emotional aspects of the human psyche. Atwood is attracted to Crake’s vision, I will argue, and she senses the appeal of the deletion of an affective realm which she regards with great ambivalence, yet she ultimately rejects this ideology in favour of a transcendentalist viewpoint which situates morality within nature. Emotion is conceived as being a part of nature and therefore possessing the capability to act as a force for good, but it is also regarded as an integral aspect of novelistic culture, one which, as is the case for Jonathan Franzen, enjoys a unique and privileged relationship with the novel. For this reason, Atwood’s eventual spurning of the scientific philosophy with which she flirts is in part a means by which to defend her novel from a self-introduced contagion which threatens to devour it. Following Esposito’s model, Oryx and Crake can be seen to be incorporating ideas from its perceived opposite in order to create a stable definition of itself, but when the material from the contrastive discipline begins to overwhelm the body of the novel, it is ejected before the self-destructive ‘autoimmune’ response takes over. The trope of immunity recurs throughout Oryx and Crake, both in the sections that relate the time leading up to Crake’s bioengineered apocalypse, and the period afterwards which finds Jimmy/Snowman as the apparent sole human survivor, left with the responsibility of caring for the ‘Crakers’. These two periods are narrated concurrently by Jimmy/Snowman in a voice which varies depending on whether he is describing a memory, a reflection or a current moment. Jimmy hails from a family of biological scientists in a North America of the not too 24 Atwood, somewhat notoriously perhaps, chooses the term ‘speculative fiction’ for her own work over that of science fiction. For her, ‘science fiction proper […] denotes books with things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet and places we can’t go – and speculative fiction […] employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on planet earth’. Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in context”, PMLA 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 513–517 (p. 513).

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distant future, in which the wealthy live in heavily guarded and gated ‘compounds’ which keep out the poorer ‘pleeblanders’. Most of the inhabitants of the compounds are scientists, and science is in cahoots with business to the extent that government has become largely unnecessary, leaving the compound-funded CorpSeCorps heavies to wield the real power. Jimmy, however, knows that he is ‘not a numbers person’, so he feels like an outsider in the rationalized world of the compounds which are set up and controlled by large, scientific research-based businesses.25 Jimmy befriends Glenn (who will go on to become Crake) as a teenager, and the two boys maintain an on-off relationship throughout school, college, and their early careers. The young friends watch online ‘kiddie’ porn together, play destructive computer games and view websites such as ‘brainfrizz’ which show live executions, all with a detachment which reveals them to be immune to the horrors that they are witnessing. Jimmy is implicated in this detachment from the start, despite his avowals that ‘it would be Crake who’d decide what to watch’, and his observation that Crake ‘didn’t seem to be affected by anything he saw’ (p. 99). In fact, it is Jimmy’s decision to observe rather than take action which condemns him in equal measure with Crake, both in these early computer sessions and at the breakout of Crake’s killer virus, when Jimmy observes events on his computer from an airlock room, failing to inform anybody of the knowledge he may possess regarding the vaccine. The act of observing events on a screen is repeatedly linked with apathy, as in the scene where a slightly older Jimmy and Crake watch news footage of global protests against a new type of coffee crop which will put growers out of business and into starvation. Jimmy is amazed to discover that Crake might be ‘taking sides’ and responds by suggesting that they ‘change channels’ (p. 210). Despite finding further coverage of shootings, tear gas and bludgeoning, Jimmy quips that all the images of coffee beans ‘make [him] thirsty’ (p. 211). Just as apathy is linked with observation, selfishness and individualism are linked with commercial scientism in this novel, with Jimmy proving no exception—a factor which has been largely overlooked by critics so far.26 Jimmy asserts that he is 25 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004), 29. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically. 26 Coral Ann Howells notes that this novel ‘unsettles’ the boundaries between science and art, but situates Jimmy in the realm of ‘emotion and imagination’. Shannon Hengen suggests that Atwood’s voice ‘has become admonitory as she uses her writings to urge us to curb the godlike power of science before it is too late’, yet does not elaborate upon

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‘not a numbers person’ on numerous occasions throughout his narrative, suggesting that he feels the need to separate himself from the sphere with which he is actually complicit. Jimmy has ability with words, certainly, and only an average ability with numbers, but to the scientific-rationalist free market philosophy associated with Crake and his ilk makes little objection beyond the occasional bout of squeamishness. He is initially disturbed, for example, when Crake shows him the ‘ChickieNobs’ project at the institute, named Watson-Crick after the first scientists to discover the structure of DNA, that Crake attends as a college student. Crake’s colleagues have developed a chicken that comprises only profitable body parts with a small feeding hole in the centre, which can produce breasts in two weeks and silence the ‘animal-welfare freaks’ since it ‘feels no pain’ (p. 238). Jimmy protests that it is ‘horrible’ and ‘a nightmare’, yet within a short space of time, he is eating ChickieNobs regularly (p. 238). The world of the compounds is a ruthless one, in which profit and gain are sanctified by a materialist manifesto summed up by Jimmy’s father when he argues that ‘there’s nothing sacred about cells and tissue’ (p. 65). Jimmy allows himself to be swept along by this individualistic mindset, deciding that he wants to be ‘himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient’ (p. 206). At the same time that individualism is linked with commercial scientism, though, it is also linked to emotional damage and poor parenting. Jimmy protests that his parents ‘knew nothing about him’ (p. 66), and his detachment intensifies after his mother leaves the family home in the compounds without a trace, because she can no longer abide living in what she terms a ‘moral cesspool’ (p. 64). Crake’s family is also highly dysfunctional: he suspects that his father has been murdered by the corporation by which he is employed, because he has uncovered one of their illegal and immoral scams, and Crake also suspects that his

Jimmy’s complicity with this power. Mark Bosco, S. J. argues that the novel reflects a trend in post-World War II literature relating to the ‘preoccupation with catastrophe and hope’, with the hope that Jimmy-Snowman can ‘become something more’ providing a key motif, yet he, too, does not focus on Jimmy’s involvement with the catastrophe. Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 172, 177; Shannon Hengen, “Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake”, in Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson (London: Continuum, 2010), 129–140, (p. 139); S. J. Mark Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake”, in Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson, 156–171 (pp. 159, 166).

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mother and new stepfather were complicit in his murder. Crake wryly suggests that his mother ‘believes in respecting a child’s privacy’, when in actual fact she has no interest in her son (p. 101). Characters who become drawn to the detached rationalism of commercial scientism do so because vital emotional needs have not been met—if the fundamentals of emotion were solid, the novel suggests, then society would adhere to a more healthy model, but as things stand in Oryx and Crake (which is, like most speculative fiction, an intended reflection of current times), the vicious cycle whereby psychological damage leads to social ills, which in turn lead to greater psychological damage, is in full motion. Oryx represents yet another damaged individual who is seduced by a rationalist vision when she is persuaded to assume the role of teacher to Crake’s newly created ‘children’. Oryx is a title which is assigned when she joins Crake’s project (all of the workers must choose names of extinct animals—Jimmy is ‘Thickney’ initially but changes to Snowman after the apocalypse), and the reader never learns this character’s actual name. Oryx was born in a small village in East Asia and then sold as a sex slave when she was young. Crake encounters her as a sex worker at Watson-Crick and subsequently persuades her to become employed by him, where she supports his Malthusian bioengineered vision wholeheartedly.27 Jimmy falls in love with Oryx while he, too, is working on Crake’s project (he is developing advertising slogans) and commences a relationship with her. Jimmy rages about the various men who have exploited Oryx, but she insists that ‘it was good to have a money value’ and refuses to participate in Jimmy’s anger (p. 147). Oryx’s acceptance of her lot mirrors Jimmy’s passive observation of the society around him, and both mindsets are impotent when it comes to offering resistance to undesirable structures or effecting change. Snowman reflects that he never fully understood Oryx that he could ‘never get from her’ precisely what he wanted, and as a result of this, she remains a shadowy figure throughout the narrative (p. 225). Natasha Walter views this as a failing in the novel, arguing that Oryx strikes a ‘duff note’ and is ‘as bland as candy floss’.28 I would suggest, though, that Jimmy’s failure to connect 27 Oryx is unaware, it seems, that Crake intends to wipe out humanity, but she knows he plans to drastically reduce the population (380). 28 Natasha Walter, “Pigoons Might Fly”, The Guardian Online, May 10, 2003, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003.bookerprize, accessed 21 August 2014.

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with Oryx and her refusal to reveal more of herself to him are devices intended to highlight the loneliness which results from an individualistic mindset. Jimmy badgers Oryx with questions about her past, but only so that he can track down some of the men who have abused her in order to allay some of his own feelings of anger. ‘I’d like to kill this guy’ (p. 138), he fumes, despite Oryx persistently asking him to drop the subject and implying that Jimmy’s behaviour towards her bears resemblances to that of her abusers: ‘he never did anything with me that you don’t do’ (p. 166). Jimmy fails to connect with Oryx because both characters maintain an unhealthy detachment, both from other people and from the ills of the society around them. Jimmy’s detachment takes the form of apathy, while Oryx is allied with Crake in her stoicism (Crake advises Jimmy when his mother leaves the family to ‘read up on the stoics’ (p. 80), and he often chides him for failing to control his feelings). Oryx views human relationships in terms of the rationality of market dynamics: she tells Jimmy ‘everything has a price’ (p. 165) and prefers to feel that she has money value because ‘love was undependable’ (p. 147). Crake is also stoical in the sense that he refuses to be controlled by emotion, yet he takes drastic action, aided by an only partially informed Oryx, where Jimmy remains passive. Crake’s actions, which result in the almost total elimination of the human species, are at least guided by a form of moral framework, yet they are lacking the crucial tempering which a respect for emotion would provide. Crake encroaches upon the territory that Jimmy, as a student at the ‘arty’ Martha Graham Academy (named after the twentieth-century American dancer), believes to be rightfully his, yet Crake reduces all meaning to an evolutionary materialist framework. ‘People can amuse themselves’, for all he cares, ‘over doodling, scribbling, and fiddling’, but it is only relevant in the sense that it ‘serves a biological purpose’ (p. 197). Art for Crake is a sophisticated mating ritual, the equivalent of a male frog croaking loudly to impress females, and Jimmy struggles to effectively defend what he terms his ‘own shoddy, threadbare territory’ from this type of logic (p. 196). Crake’s view of art evokes the recent surge in interest in evocriticism which I will discuss in the next chapter in relation to McEwan’s work, and it also serves to represent the threat posed by transcendental scientism’s forays into the domain formerly presided over by the arts and humanities. Crake becomes more and more ‘artistic’ as his apocalyptic vision nears realization—he displays a painting on his office wall

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for the first time ever, and he dispenses with ‘science quips’ in his fridge magnets, replacing them with abstruse, poetic-sounding phrases such as ‘Where God is, Man is not’ and ‘I think, therefore’ (p. 354). It is Crake’s shift towards a more ‘artistic’ mindset which creates impetus for action because it provides him with a metaphysical framework through which to operate, yet this framework is devoid of the subtleties with which the humanities have traditionally been associated. Crake, like many of the other scientist figures encountered so far in this study, bears striking resemblances to postmodern relativism—he has no belief in God or Nature ‘with a capital N’—and Jimmy lacks the tools, because his own discipline is broadly in agreement with this perspective, with which to challenge Crake (p. 242). Martha Graham is struggling to survive because of ‘erosion of its former intellectual territory’, so it has changed its motto from ‘Ars Longa Vita Brevis’ to ‘Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills’ (p. 220). Cultural theory has brought the humanities to a point where they are no longer able to offer critique of any kind, but instead must attempt to survive by elbowing into the market economy. It is left to the novel to offer resistance to the potential consequences of the takeover of value and belief by the emotionally bereft realm of commercial scientism, and the novel must reclaim both the physical and metaphysical spheres by situating morality in the material facts of nature. Valeria Mosca suggests that what Atwood represents in this novel and its sequel The Year of the Flood are what Donna Haraway has defined as ‘choreographic ontologies’, whereby barriers between ‘humans, animals, nature and machines’ become destabilized and unfixed, and cultural constructs which maintain these boundaries are abandoned.29 As much as both of these novels are modern and progressive in this sense, with super-intelligent ‘pigoons’, for example, roaming the deserted streets, plotting Snowman’s capture using their implanted human neocortex tissue, the values which Atwood promotes are actually more traditional and are most closely related, as is the case with Franzen, to American transcendentalism. What is different in these contemporary texts is that the natural, material world is under threat of being taken over by ­scientific-rationalist forces, at the same time that a system of belief is ­constructed through a canonization of the laws of the natural world, 29 Valeria Mosca, “Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood”, Other Modernities 9 (2013): 38–52 (p. 49).

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as they are understood by science. The novel must reclaim the natural world from the new artistic pretenders, leading where the chronically ­relativized theorists have capitulated. The most important strand of Oryx and Crake through which Atwood dramatizes the reclamation of the natural world from commercial scientism is the story of the Crakers. Surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to the significance of these bioengineered neohumans, with most critics focussing instead on what Mosca terms the various types of ‘slippery slope’ that Atwood is at pains to warn her reader against descending (a notable exception, though, is Ralph Pordzik’s article of 2012, which I shall discuss shortly).30 Crake develops what he calls his ‘paradice models’ (named after the dome complex in which they are designed and raised) ostensibly as genetically engineered ‘ideal’ children for wealthy prospective families to purchase. But in actual fact, Crake’s ‘children’ are intended to serve as replacements for the flawed race he will attempt to destroy with an ingeniously designed haemorrhagic virus, against which only Jimmy is (unwittingly) vaccinated, so that he can survive to lead the Crakers to safety. The paradice models have had their ‘ancient primate brain’ altered so that its ‘destructive features’, such as racism, hierarchy, territoriality, hunting instinct and ‘turbulent’ sexuality have gone, replaced by a peaceable mindset in which they are ‘perfectly adjusted to their habitat’ and have no need, therefore, to ‘invent any harmful symbolisms’ (pp. 358–359). The Crakers are, it seems, entirely in harmony with nature: they eat only vegetation and can recycle their own waste; they never intentionally harm any other being and are totally non-violent. Many of the traits which Crake has taken such pains to remove are those which Atwood implicitly critiques in the novel: they are the causes of the ‘slippery slope’ humanity finds itself heading down. For this reason, the Crakers exert a fascination for Atwood, so that by the end of the novel, the reader is encouraged to fear for their safety and survival over and above the three human strangers Snowman has encountered in their territory. Humanity is destructive and savage in Oryx and Crake; it has become an aberration to the extent that Snowman likens himself to Frankenstein’s monster hovering on the periphery of the community of Crakers (p. 199).

30 Mosca,

“Crossing Human Boundaries”, 42.

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For these reasons, Atwood’s representation of the Crakers is by no means a straightforward one, and they certainly do not provide a binary opposition to the human characters in the novel. Coral Ann Howells notes that Oryx and Crake unsettles boundaries between reason and imagination, science and art, yet she does not elaborate further to discuss the boundaries between the neohuman Crakers and their predecessors. Instead, she suggests that Jimmy alone provides the humanity with which to oppose Crake’s rationalism, because Crake has to ‘rely on those very human qualities in Jimmy – like loyalty, honour and love – which in his arrogance he had edited out of the Crakers’ brains, in order to ensure the survival of his creatures’.31 Of course, Crake intended to ‘edit out’ these sorts of qualities, because, in his view, they rely on symbolism in order to exist, which is not only harmful in that it leads to negative outcomes such as revenge, jealousy and a desire for hierarchy but is also irrational, and at odds with his own belief system which strictly shuns all systems of belief. However, the novel makes it clear that these sorts of qualities have not, in fact, been removed from the Crakers’ brains; they have merely been lying dormant until they were needed, when the Crakers return Snowman’s favour by helping him to survive. The Crakers still sing and dream, despite Crake’s attempts to eliminate these traits, and they still, Snowman discovers, possess what Crake termed the ‘G-spot’ in their brains (p. 186). They perform ritualistic prayers in order to appeal to Oryx, who they see as one of their creators, to stop creatures from biting their children, and they create an image of Snowman when he fails to return to them at the time he promised, in the hope that this will make him appear. ‘God is a cluster of neurons’, Crake would tell Jimmy, but if one removes too much of that area, ‘you got a zombie or a psychopath’ [italics in original] (p. 186). ‘Human’ qualities which the Crakers display are always linked in this way to religious rituals, which are, of course, a form of symbolism, but more importantly than this, the Crakers are at their most human when they are caring for others. These rituals derive from the urge to keep other people safe and to keep them close, which, of course, is the opposite of the self-centred individualism, the paradigm of immunity, which Atwood equates with scientificrationalist capitalism.

31 Howells,

Margaret Atwood, 179.

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Religious ritual, this novel asserts, is innate in the human brain; it is as much a part of the material world as is the behaviour of genes and viruses. But fundamental to this urge towards ritual, and providing the impetus for it, is the desire for community with others, fostered through imaginative sympathy. Towards the end of the novel, the Crakers create an image of Snowman out of washed up materials and chant his name around it—a chant which Snowman initially mishears as ‘amen’ (p. 419). For Ralph Pordzik, this moment marks the Crakers’ ‘return to the bosom of the human family’ because they learn to distinguish ‘absence from presence’; they enter fully, in other words, into the symbolic system of language.32 Pordzik argues that it is the fact that these post-human beings are ‘still subject to the laws of language’ which enables them to escape the ‘bioscientific legacy’ of Crake and serve as promoters of (post-)human values in the novel (p. 156). Pordzik’s analysis is useful in that it detects Atwood’s desire to oppose the imperialism of commercial scientism through a reclamation of the Crakers. I would argue, though, that Oryx and Crake is more ambivalent about language and discourse than Pordzik is suggesting and instead engages in the type of affective turn which can also be identified in The Corrections. Language and symbolism still contain relevance for Atwood, but they are undergirded by a more solid material substrate, one which can provide ballast, both for the novel and for (post-)humanist conceptions of value, with which to ensure their continued survival. Atwood maintains in interviews and articles that ‘the driving force in the world today is the human heart – that is, human emotions’. She acknowledges the power of technology, yet asserts that ‘hate, not bombs, destroys cities. Desire, not bricks, rebuilds them. Do we as a species have the emotional maturity and the wisdom to use our powerful tools well? Hands up all who think the answer is Yes’.33 Crake screams in his sleep when Jimmy stays with him at Watson-Crick—an observation which he denies by claiming to ‘never dream’ (p. 255). It is significant 32 Ralph Pordzik, “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction”, Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 142– 161 (p. 156). 33 Margaret Atwood in Coates Bateman, “A conversation with Margaret Atwood”, https://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0503/atwood/interview.html, accessed 7 August 2014. Atwood makes a similar point in “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context”, PMLA 119, no. 3 (May, 2004): 517.

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that dreams, along with singing, are one part of the Crakers’ personalities which Crake cannot remove by altering their brains. Dreaming is fixed and immovable, and it expresses the endurance of a particular type of creative emotion, because it evades both personal and social attempts to repress it. Crake’s nocturnal screaming provides a clue to his purportedly rationalist motivations and suggests that it is his own negative emotional experiences which dictate his view of humanity. In the same way that Crake’s hate destroys humanity, Snowman’s love provides the potential to rebuild it, illustrated by his growing to care for the Crakers. He returns as quickly as possible, for example, from his foray away from the seaside community he has helped build for his charges, desperate to obtain a ‘spray gun’ with which to protect them from an imminent threat he detects (p. 329). By the same token, the Crakers are ‘worried’ about Snowman’s injuries when he returns, and they attempt to heal him, cradling him like a child as they return him to his tree to recuperate (pp. 424, 426). The Crakers exist in harmony with the ‘in itself’ rather than constantly battling against it and are objective beings in this sense because they are designed so that their own subjectivity should be of no concern to them—they merely exist in the same manner that Daniel 25 aims to. In this way the Crakers are purely and vitally alive, they are immortal, as far as Crake is concerned, because death is irrelevant to them. At the same time that the Crakers participate in life in this tautological way, though, they also persistently evoke a sense of death. Their existence is repetitive and proscribed; they each carry out certain duties which they have no desire to change (the men urinate in a circle around camp, e.g., in order to scare away predators), and they mate only at a specific time when a female comes into oestrus. The Crakers accept everything Snowman tells them, ‘without question’, so that he suspects that within a few weeks of their company, he will be ‘screaming with boredom’ (p. 408). As is the case with so many of the texts analysed so far, the Crakers in this novel, as representatives of some of the implications of materialist science, exude a distinctive aura of death, at the same time that they possess the potential to encapsulate life. Atwood is drawn to the idea of the simplicity of the Crakers, and in many ways, their society is presented as being superior and more desirable than the one they have replaced. However, the boring, repetitive, deathlike routine of their existence is anathema to the novelistic art, as is their lack of individual personalities. For this reason, Atwood’s insistence on the fundamental

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presence of emotional motivations in the Crakers’ (and her human characters’) brains serves more than one purpose. A too-close adherence to Crake’s vision would spell death for the novel in which he is a character, so that the more ‘human’ elements of his creatures’ personalities must be allowed to develop within the narrative. Emotion is the materially viable sphere upon which to build a morality capable of challenging commercial scientism, but it is also essential to literary art. Snowman is living after the end of the novel, and he relates the main action retrospectively to a reader he believes will never exist. Yet he is also living proof that the novel, and the urge to narrate important, emotionally significant events can continue to survive if it can manage to adapt. Like the novel which he narrates, Jimmy/Snowman’s best chance of realizing his full potential consists in using emotion as his guiding principle, even as he doubts that humanity is capable of living up to the task. Roberto Esposito adumbrates a theory of community through which to counter the auto-immunitary turn in contemporary politics and society, one based on a reading of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense. Esposito suggests that life should not be ‘imprisoned in the confines of the individual’, but should instead be conceived of as ‘an impersonal singularity (or singular impersonality)’ which allows anything that lives to be thought of ‘in the unity of life’.34 In this way, morality is not focussed on an external, transcendental signifier, and nor is it restricted to a celebration of the individual life. Rather, value is ascribed to life as a whole, in all of its extensions, so that ‘no part of it can be destroyed in favour of another’ (p. 194). Atwood’s ethics in Oryx and Crake plot a similar course to those of Esposito in Bios: both sense that the ideal of community is under threat by immunitary individualism and both posit a form of return to nature as the solution to this problem. Where Atwood can be seen to differ, though, is in her focus on the realm of emotion as the common, unifying feature of any community. As Jimmy finds that ‘there was no longer any comfort in the words’ when he discovers that his mother has been executed and he attempts to pull himself together by reciting lists of his favourite vocabulary, this novel seeks something more solid and permanent than language with which to anchor itself to human life (p. 307).

34 Esposito,

Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 194.

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As is the case with each novel discussed so far, then, both of these generically diverse texts choose to incorporate branches and particular conceptions of science which in some way mirror their own aims and purposes, and it is this very mirroring which creates much of the conflict between literature and the science with which it consorts, since it threatens to cancel out the individuated space of the novel. For Franzen, pharmacology and neuroscience strip away certain layers of the human psyche, revealing its fundamentally material construction, just as his writing delves down to the base-level moments of ‘emotional significance’. Atwood reveals through biology and the study of genetics that the human can be manipulated by science, while her novelistic ethics seek also to perfect and hone the inbuilt potential of our species. On a more fundamental level, as we have seen, these materialist conceptions of the self are useful to both novelists because they bolster an affective realm which they perceive to be crucial to the literary art, aiding the development of what we might term, with an awareness of its similarities to the implications of the term when used in reverse formulation, scientific transcendentalism. In the next and final chapter, two novels by Ian McEwan fraternize more self-consciously than any of the others studied so far with branches of science which cohere with the aims of the texts, with the result that these most ostensibly realist fictions become unexpectedly self-referential as they attempt to maintain a distinct role for themselves.

Bibliography Atwood, Margaret. 2004. The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context. PMLA 119, no. 3: 513–517. Atwood, Margaret. 2004. Oryx and Crake. London: Virago. Atwood, Margaret in Coates Bateman. A Conversation with Margaret Atwood. https://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0503/atwood/interview.html. Accessed 7 August 2014. Baker, Brian. 2014. Science Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bosco, S. J. Mark. 2010. The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake. In Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson, 156–171. London: Continuum. Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum. Connery, Christopher. 2009. The Liberal Form: An Interview with Jonathan Franzen. Boundary 2 36, no. 2: 31–54.

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Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Franzen, Jonathan. 2004. Why Bother? (The Harper’s Essay). In How to Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial. Franzen, Jonathan. 2010. The Corrections. London: Fourth Estate. Franzen, Jonathan in interview with Stephen J. Burn. 2010. The Art of Fiction No. 207. The Paris Review, 195. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/ the-art-of-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen. Accessed 15 April 2014. Gates, David. 2001. “The Corrections”: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic. New York Times Online, September 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/ books/review/09GATESTW.html. Accessed 15 April 2014. Hawkins, Ty. 2010. Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of “Refuge”. College Literature 37, no. 4: 61–87. Hengen, Shanon. 2010. Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake. In Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson, 129–140. London: Continuum. Howells, Coral Ann. 2005. Margaret Atwood. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Hutchinson, Colin. 2009. Jonathan Franzen and the Politics of Disengagement. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50, no. 2: 191–207. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Mosca, Valeria. 2013. Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Other Modernities 9: 38–52. Poole, Ralph J. 2008. Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics. The Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3: 263–283. Pordzik, Ralph. 2012. The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction. Utopian Studies 23, no. 1: 142–161. Waldo Emerson, Ralph. 1983. Literary Ethics. In Essays and Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walter, Natasha. 2003. Pigoons Might Fly. The Guardian Online, May 10. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003. bookerprize. Accessed 21 August 2014. Waugh, Patricia. 2013. The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel. In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock, 17–35. New York: Routledge. Wood, James. 2001. Abhorring a Vacuum. The New Republic Online, October 18. http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_18. Accessed 15 April 2014.

CHAPTER 6

Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View

From early on in his writing career, Ian McEwan has evinced an interest in the world of science. Scientist characters have populated many of his novels (Bernard in Black Dogs, Thelma in The Child in Time, Joe in Enduring Love), and McEwan has referred both in interviews and in essays to his respect for, and fascination with, science, going so far as to call it ‘the only available and credible metaphysics’.1 As the trajectory of his writing has moved from an initial period characterized by a sinister, intentionally provocative experimentalism, towards what has come to be an almost strident adherence to his own brand of psychological realism, McEwan’s reverence for science has increased, culminating in two more recent novels, Saturday and Solar, that make scientific materialist values intrinsic to their plot and structure. Just as science and rationality are always roughly synonymous in McEwan’s novels, science has a central role to play in their realism, tending to act as a kind of tacit guarantor of their being grounded in the world as we can best hope to know it today. This type of ‘grounded’ realism has also become increasingly

1 Ian McEwan, “Journeys Without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan”, in Ian McEwan, ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009), 123–134 (p. 128). See also McEwan’s contribution to The Literary Animal, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), entitled “Literature, Science, and Human Nature” (5–19) and his interview with Lynn Wells (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_6

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antagonistic towards what McEwan views, in a manner which aligns him with Brockman’s Edge school of ‘third culture’ movers and shakers, as the dominant yet fatally ignorant class of postmodern intellectuals. Saturday and Solar incorporate and engage with the figure of the scientist, the practices of science, and what we might call the scientific worldview or metaphysics, but they finally utilize these three different strands of scientific culture to bolster the realist credentials of the novel. Not only does McEwan support ‘evocritics’ such as Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson, who want to use evolutionary biology to make the study of literature a credible one, he also builds the intellectual structure of many of his novels, particularly post 9/11, on a foundation that relies heavily on a particular concept of scientific understanding, one with strong links to transcendental scientism.2 Literature, McEwan believes, encodes ‘both our cultural and our genetic inheritance’; we are biologically inclined to create stories, and our culture springs from this material fact.3 It is science, fittingly enough, that will eventually unseat the lazily comfortable clique that is the postmodern humanities from its castle built on sand, and novels that are aware of this stand a far better chance not only of earning proper respect now, but of ensuring a favourable reputation in posterity. In McEwan’s novels, science and rationality are always placed in a binary relation to this particular version of the humanities, and his recent fiction, moving away from a more dialogic model of this binary, has aligned itself, with increasing conviction, on the side of science. While there is no doubt that McEwan is acutely aware of the fact that his (and most) novels deal primarily in the human, social, subjective world and that this world does not always slot easily into scientific models, there can always be detected a belief that it is possible, given the right medium, to step outside our faulty human viewpoint in order to access a more permanent and stable truth—a truth that is largely affiliated with rationalism. McEwan has said that he does not think ‘rationality is easy for us as a species’, mainly because our genetic inheritance 2 Other notable ‘evocritics’ include Patrick Colm Hogan, Joseph Carroll, and Brian Boyd. For a debate regarding the value of this school of criticism, see Critical Inquiry 38 (Winter 2012). 3 Ian McEwan, “Literature, Science, and Human Nature”, in The Literary Animal, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 5–19 (p. 11).

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will always make it difficult, but this does not seem to mean for him that rationality should ever be questioned.4 The problem lies in the species, not the idea, and understanding this limitation is one step in the process of being able to transcend it. This ostensibly obvious binary, then, between genetically impeded, irrational humanity, and stolid, sensible, cool-headed science, slowly progressing towards the truth of all things, forms the backdrop to much of McEwan’s later fiction, even as the human action (which, as we know, is often highly dramatic) takes centre stage position in his chosen medium. To be sure, his scientist characters suffer from human weaknesses, even spending much of their time thinking about and trying to overcome their more irrational urges, but science as a discourse manages to continue heading in the direction of the ‘truth’, achieving something beyond those who have created it. McEwan has said in interview that ‘science parallels literature as a means by which the world can be ­understood’, because, for him, both disciplines pursue the structure and details of the world in order to access some form of truth.5 By his own admission, however, McEwan’s early work was intentionally detached from details—this was an ‘existential phase’ in which a Kafkaesque sensibility reigned. This suggests that what science actually parallels, in McEwan’s view, is realism, rather than literature as a whole, reinforcing the sense that it is his own particular type of scientifically backed novel of rationality that can best claim to understand the world. I have already outlined some aspects of Isabelle Stengers’ philosophical arguments in the introduction, but it is worthwhile at this point to think about how her models can shed light on some of the implicit assumptions that McEwan makes about the role of science in society. For Stengers, rather than remain ensnared in an age-old (but inaccurate) binary that would pit science, with its ‘passion for truth’ against certain types of thought which focus on subjective constructions of reality, we should aim to interrogate the ways in which science operates as a practice in a cosmos that exists separately from it (and anything else).6 Her solution to the problem of overcoming the seemingly inherent disjunction 4 Ian McEwan in interview with Lynn Wells, Ian McEwan (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 132. 5 McEwan, “Journeys Without Maps”, 128. 6 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4.

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of ‘either…or’, which habits of thought and judgement have made to seem fundamental, lies in a model, first proposed by Bruno Latour, which melds ‘fact’ and ‘fetish’ into the term ‘factish’.7 The word ‘factish’ proposes that when we think of facts, we consider them with an inbuilt awareness of the ways in which we, as human subjects with our own history and agendas, relate to facts. If a fetish is something that we create, a scientific ‘answer’ that we put faith in, then a factish keeps its ‘factness’, but can never quite shake the ‘stain’ of the human. Taking the neutrino as an example, Stengers attempts to reveal the ways in which it ‘exists simultaneously and inseparably “in itself” and “for us”’, in the ‘dense network of our practices and their histories’ and also in the ‘components and modes of interaction that populate what is referred to as the “physical world”’.8 This dialectical model, then, recognizes that facts exist independently of the ways in which we think about them, but suggests that, for us at least, it is in the area between facts and our subjective colouring of them that the only kind of ‘truth’ lies. I will argue in the first part of this chapter that Ian McEwan has a tendency to overlook the important difference between science as a practice and science as a purveyor of meaning, particularly when it comes to the bond he aims to create between the reality described by science and the realism of his novels.

The Internal Struggles of Saturday Laura Salisbury, reflecting Marco Roth’s formulations regarding the neuronovel, has argued that in Atonement, McEwan enacts a ‘turn to the neurological’, whereby he moves firmly away from theories of subjecthood that are based primarily on language and towards a materialist conception of consciousness.9 Head injury is the trope through which this new conviction is asserted, and it is represented in Atonement by a scene wherein aspiring writer Briony is persuaded to leave behind her early infatuation with Modernism, and the uncertainty of representation that is its primary preoccupation, forced, if only semi-consciously, by her confrontation with the material effects of a patient’s brain injury in her 7 See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 8 Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 22. 9 Laura Salisbury, “Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue”, Textual Practice 24 (2010): 883–912 (p. 890).

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role as a nurse, to rethink her perception of what forms the foundation of a self. The theme of head injury causing an irreversible change to a character’s personality surfaces again in Saturday, On Chesil Beach, and even, to an extent, in Solar, suggesting that the assertion of the scientifically measurable foundations of our sense of self, as revealed by how easily this self can unravel under physical assault, is a central concern of McEwan’s.10 If Briony’s realization can indeed be pinpointed as a turning point in McEwan’s fiction, it is with Saturday that the idea that the best realist novels are those which look to science for their reality—an idea that up to now has been quietly simmering in the background— comes fully into focus. First published in 2005, Saturday is a circadian novel focalized through the consciousness of happily married father of two and successful neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Perowne wakes in the early hours of a Saturday morning in February 2003, the day on which the largest ever anti-war protest will take place on the streets of London, stating that ‘dreams don’t interest him; that this should be real is a richer possibility’, and thus, the scene is set for a day spent in the company of a man who is obsessed with the idea of reality.11 Looking out of his window, Perowne sees a flash of light travelling across the sky—a cargo plane with a fire in one of its engines, it eventually transpires—and his thoughts move rapidly through a range of alternative interpretations of what this light might signify. As his perspective changes and he realizes that this is no comet or meteor, the theme of the disjunction that often exists between perception and reality is given a thorough airing, since Perowne, so certain initially about what he was witnessing, has ‘changed his mind about it twice’ in the space of three or four seconds (p. 14). Perowne is a somewhat unusual character, though, in that for almost every thought he has, there is a period of reflection and interrogation of that thought: where it might have stemmed from, what it implies and even what chemical processes in his brain might be fuelling it (‘dopamine-like receptors 10 Nick Bentley also analyses McEwan’s representation of head and brain trauma in Saturday in his contribution, entitled “Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 115–129. 11 Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 4. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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initiat[ing] a kindly cascade of intra-cellular events’ perhaps?) (p. 5). It is as though Perowne serves to represent the epitome of what it is, according to most current research in the area, that characterizes human consciousness (as opposed to the consciousness of other animals). His is meta-consciousness par excellence, and he is rigorously self-reflexive. Perowne is a character, then, who never fully trusts his own perceptions: he is at his most comfortable when he is critical (in the sense of analysing more than berating) of his own thought processes. In this respect, he is a tentative or perhaps a complicated empiricist, one who is keen to use his faculties to draw conclusions from what he can physically observe, but only when this process is conducted with a healthy dose of meta-observation, which keeps his innate irrationality in check. Thus, Perowne muses that if he ‘were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he could play with the idea that he’s been summoned [that] he should acknowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence which wants to show or tell him something of significance’ (p. 17). This ‘primitive thinking’ is hard-wired into all of us, and Perowne can even concede its existence in himself, but the ‘better’ part of his mind, the one not tainted by what he terms an ‘excess of the subjective’, knows that the objective world is supremely indifferent to him (p. 17). By the same token, and situating Perowne in a sceptical position with regard to quantum theory, Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment has never made sense to Perowne; there is only ever one real outcome to the question of the cat’s mortality, and the human observers need only wait for it to be revealed to them. This applies, too, to the situation with the aeroplane as it vanishes from sight behind a line of trees: ‘To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting his discovery’ (p. 19). Reality, then, is what goes on whether we are looking or not, and our propensity to become confused about this evident fact is something that the truly responsible, self-respecting adult will dismiss with a mindful smile. It is tempting to assume that McEwan is teasing the type that Perowne represents here and throughout the novel, that he is perhaps implying that Perowne’s ultra-rationalist worldview is overly simplistic, both in the way that it dismisses concepts from quantum theory and ignores the complexities highlighted by philosophy. However, evidence from interviews that McEwan has given would suggest otherwise, and, as I hope to make clear, the trajectory of the rest of the novel would

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suggest otherwise too; in fact, the similarities between author and character are striking: Perowne, for example, lives in a carbon copy of McEwan’s own home and even uses the author’s recipe for his fish stew. The similarities extend beyond practical matters, though, illustrated in part by comments made by McEwan when speaking with Sebastian Groes and others shortly after the publication of Saturday, where, as we have seen, he labels science ‘the only available and credible metaphysics’ and lambasts what he terms the ‘liberal arts culture’ for its ‘easy’ and ‘badge-wearing’ pessimism.12 Science is aligned with optimism, then, and Perowne, by the author’s own admission, represents ‘an attempt to describe happiness’—flying in the face of the critical establishment which, obsessed with the obscurities of representation, has learned to equate pessimism with serious literature.13 Science (as personified by Perowne’s ‘happy’ mindset) does not only teach us what we can know, reminding us that epistemology is that which is objective, that which surpasses our child-like inclination to equate the world with our own subjectivity, but it also serves a metaphysical purpose: providing a framework of belief based on curiosity and the desire to solve the world’s problems through which we can re-inject some much-needed optimism into intellectual culture. These issues are enacted in the novel largely through Perowne’s debates with his daughter Daisy, who has recently come down from Oxford with a First in English Literature, swiftly followed by the Newdigate Prize for her first collection of poems. Perowne rails against Daisy’s ‘young lecturers’ who ‘dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities’ because ‘it wouldn’t be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition’ (p. 77). Their irresponsible pessimism about all things Western tends to spring to Perowne’s mind when he is fretting about the threat of terrorism, so that it becomes clear that, for him, the humanities in their current guise will offer little ideological ballast against attack from those with firmly held fanatical beliefs. What is required instead, it gradually transpires, is a blend of optimism and realism that the postmodern novelists read by Daisy, and the lecturers who are in league with them, are ill-equipped to provide. Magical realism is the worst culprit here, representing for 12 Ian McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 128, 130. McEwan makes a very similar argument in interview with Lynn Wells (2010). 13 McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 130.

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Perowne ‘an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible’ (pp. 67–68). One of the novels, of course, that Perowne refers to in his list of ‘irksome confections’ (p. 67) is McEwan’s own The Child in Time (1987), so the reader is tempted to take Perowne’s opinions here lightly. However, McEwan’s strident comments in the public realm about the dangers of supernatural irrationality and its links with religious fundamentalism suggest an alternative interpretation.14 Instead, McEwan should be seen as a reformed magical realist, one who now strongly believes that those two terms, ‘magic’ and ‘realism’, should be kept as far apart from each other as possible. For McEwan, then, not only is the ‘liberal arts culture’ utterly ineffectual when it comes to the moral arbitration of a culture under threat, it is also to a certain extent linked with the mindset of the terrorists who would destroy that culture. Both show a worrying lack of awareness of what is real, being too preoccupied with their particular hobby horses to grasp the actual truth of the world around them. Optimism, then, entails a form of self-defence rooted in feeling pride in the achievements of one’s culture, in the improvements made by technological advances throughout history. As Perowne drives his Mercedes down an eclectic Fitrovia street, he calls it ‘fine’, and ‘the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who’ve ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won’t easily allow itself to be destroyed’ (p. 77). Observing the various consumers making their way between shops, he is assured of the fact of their happiness. However, ‘for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack’ (p. 78). So is Henry really happy? Just as Graham Hillard argues that ‘it is the irrational Perowne who comes to dominate the novel, bedevilling the reasonable man’, I would suggest that it is only very rarely in Saturday that Perowne feels the kind of contentment that he envisages existing outside his car window.15 Instead, he frets and worries about the state of his society—he is addicted to rolling twenty-four-hour news and is 14 See McEwan’s response to the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan in The Guardian for an example of this. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2, accessed 7 October 2013. 15 Graham Hillard, “The Limits of Rationalism in Ian McEwan’s Saturday”, The Explicator 68 (2010): 140–143 (p. 142).

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apathetic at best, ‘after the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century’, about matters of social justice (p. 74). He often feels guilty about his own wealth and privilege and admits to ‘an unexpressed longing or frustration’ that listening to his son Theo’s jazz music often stirs (p. 28). Perowne is ‘still young enough to yearn for the unpredictable and unrestrained, and old enough to know the chances are narrowing’ (p. 28). None of these traits, though, are particularly unusual, and nor does the novel suggest that they are. It is not so much the case that Perowne is secretly or unconsciously unhappy, but rather that the kind of happiness which McEwan purports to be describing is unrealistic, and for that reason, the novel struggles to represent it convincingly. Recent research in psychology, stemming from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has suggested that our concepts of happiness are flawed and that, instead of aiming to be happy, we should aim to be absorbed.16 Given McEwan’s interest in human psychology, it would be surprising if he were not aware of this trend, and indeed, the novel itself reflects some of these ideas. Perowne heads into surgery late on Saturday evening to operate on an emergency patient, the same man, Baxter, it transpires, who has followed him all day since an altercation in the morning, and who earlier in the evening forced into the Perowne home in order to enact revenge for a perceived instance of disrespect. Perowne writes up his paperwork after the operation on an injury inflicted during an act of self-defence by ­himself and Theo and ponders his own state of mind: For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. […] It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy. Back at work, and, lovemaking and Theo’s song aside, he’s happier than at any other point on his day off. (p. 258)

This passage (and others like it) suggests that happiness is a far more complicated business than it might at first appear and that loving one’s 16 See, for example, Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

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wife and children, enjoying work and feeling optimistic about one’s ­society do not necessarily mean that one will carry a feeling of happiness around. In fact, it seems that happiness comes when one is able to forget oneself entirely, a suspicion shared by Michel Houllebecq in his similarly ultra-analytical novels. Just as Daniel 1 and Daniel 25 in The Possibility of an Island come closest to the ‘reality’ of the in itself when they can put their selves to one side, Perowne can enter a ‘pure present’ through the obliteration of self, and, looking back, all of these characters realize that this state can be best described as happiness. So, in a novel that is clearly driven in a large part by the desire to describe reality, why is it that there can be detected a kind of missed opportunity with regard to the link between happiness, a self-declared major theme of the book, and the type of subject-less conception of reality that is also a primary concern? During the occasions on which Perowne seems to be experiencing the type of absorption referred to by psychologists as ‘flow’ (his squash game, Theo’s music, lovemaking and work), the feeling is barely analysed, and McEwan does not mention this strand in his interviews which refer to Saturday as an attempt to describe happiness. Perhaps this situation can be explained in part by a comment made by McEwan shortly after completing this novel, where he talks about some of the motivations behind his writing. He says, ‘in my work, I’m torn between the truthful description, which is often painful or bleak, and wanting to affirm something about our extraordinary gift of consciousness and the delight of the natural world’.17 With this declaration, McEwan’s apparent disrespect for the pessimism he associates with the postmodern humanities begins to look slightly disingenuous: if pain and bleakness are the truth, where does that leave his metaphysics based on scientific optimism? It as though the novel at times tries to ignore the bleak ‘truth’ which its own themes unearth, in a determined attempt to side with the more positive mindset that McEwan credits science with promoting. Is rationalist scientific materialism always such an affirmative discourse though? Perowne’s outlook is utterly ineffectual when it comes to making decisions about the impending invasion of Iraq: while not strictly pessimistic in the sense of imagining a worst-case scenario, his ambivalence bears a strong resemblance to postmodern relativism, and Perowne experiences it as ‘a form of vertigo, of dizzy indecision’ (p. 141). During

17 McEwan,

in “Journeys Without Maps”, 130.

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his debate with Daisy on the topic, it is actually Perowne’s literary daughter who holds the more assertive opinions, telling her father that it is irresponsible to ‘hedge your bets’ in a situation that is so important (p. 188). Perowne counters with a crude ploy which accuses Daisy of being ‘pro-Saddam’ in her anti-war sentiments, a manoeuvre that has the effect of making him seem to lack the subtlety that Daisy’s education has provided her with (p. 190). Perowne ends the argument feeling frustrated and ‘hollow’, having only said ‘half of what he feels’ and upsetting his daughter as a result (p. 193). This idea of a hollow ploy that does not fully express the complexities of a situation is reflected, to a certain extent, by the novel as a whole. McEwan’s insistence on presenting scientific materialism in a binary relation to postmodern relativism—a long-standing feature of his work—results in a scenario wherein the novel can be seen to be creating difficulties for itself. For example, the death-like state of pessimism that can all too easily stem from a materialist viewpoint (as evinced by the work of Houellebecq and Franzen in particular) is largely ignored in Saturday. Instead, all of the blame is laid at the door of the liberal arts intellectuals, and any similarities between the outlooks of these two cultures are repressed. McEwan endows scientific discourse with an optimism that is misplaced, and his overly simplistic binary also ignores the positive effects (a gradual increase in gender and race equality, for example) that many have credited the relaxing of morals instigated by the postmodern era with instilling in Western society. Following the sort of psychoanalytical model that McEwan has consistently explored in his work, much ‘postmodern’ theory shares a desire to interrogate what it sees as unfounded and damaging social structures in order to expose their constructed, and therefore unhealthy, nature. It could be argued that rather than representing two starkly opposed value systems, science and the ‘liberal arts culture’ both take as their aim the unravelling of illusion, but where the sort of theory that McEwan criticizes leaves behind a nothingness that he terms ‘truthful’ yet ‘bleak’, science creates new structures as it displaces old ones. Perhaps it is in this process, whereby a model or map of our material world takes shape at the hands of science, that McEwan finds the creativity which he conflates with optimism, particularly because, in his worldview, science is always considered in a way that contrasts it with a certain branch of the humanities. Science seems optimistic because it builds, whereas its perceived opposite can only deconstruct.

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This leap from a matter of epistemology, a question about the way that science produces knowledge, to the value-laden terminology of ‘optimism’ is mirrored both by the mindset of transcendental scientism and by Perowne’s attitude in the novel. Wondering about how and when the ‘secret of consciousness’ will ever be explained, Perowne is certain that ‘as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves into an irrefutable truth about consciousness’ (p. 255). It is not enough, though, for Perowne to believe that this process will work in the way that it is intended to; he must go further to equate this belief with what he terms ‘faith’ and to quote Darwin by affirming that ‘there’s grandeur in this view of life’ (p. 255). Science becomes more than a matter of knowledge: it gets removed from its stringent practices and turned into something which veers into a form of metaphysics. Although it has been separated from the very specific conditions under which it can claim the kind of truth status associated with objective inquiry, ‘science’ is still treated here as though its ability to provide factual foundations to the object under consideration remains the same. Science is made to act as a grounding for a particular kind of metaphysics, and because science is so closely affiliated with objectivity, the assumption is made that the metaphysical discourse contains the same characteristics, possesses the same authority and inspires the same respect as the scientific one. In the novels examined in previous chapters, the authors fend off the threat that their own choice to incorporate materialist ‘truths’ into their work has given rise to. There is an underlying sense in all of these texts that the emptiness accompanying a strict and genuine adherence to the ideas that they court could spell death for their own discipline, and so, they all ultimately ‘betray’ their ostensible bedfellow. In Saturday, however, a different process is at work—one which creates a foundation from evolutionary materialism by repressing some of its more inconvenient characteristics and projecting them instead onto an impotently relativized version of the postmodern humanities. Like the realist novels of their Victorian heyday, Saturday is impelled, by the decision to base proceedings on an ‘optimistic’ urge towards creation, to provide a moral structure to support this project. This is more of a morality-in-the-making, though, since the new knowledge being unleashed by scientific probing of human genetics and chemistry has yet to be fully assimilated into legal and ethical discourse. Thus, when Perowne realizes, during his initial exchange with Baxter, that his antagonist is suffering from Huntington’s

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disease, a genetically inherited condition that causes mood swings, dementia, loss of muscular control and eventually death, his thoughts turn to the principles at stake given his, and society’s new understanding of the ways in which such conditions can affect people’s behaviour. Perowne asks, ‘who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?’ (p. 92). The ‘general taste’, it comes as no surprise, is immediately linked to an education doused in literary theory, where, we are told, ‘in her second year at Oxford, dazzled by some handsome fool of a teacher, Daisy tried to convince her father that madness was a social construct’ (p. 92). Beneath the mini family love triangle being played out here, the use of the term ‘handsome fool’ suggests a flashy surface lacking in substance and depth, an inability or unwillingness to look further and deeper ‘down’ into the real issues. The novel needs to change as society changes, and for McEwan, it seems, this requires a total break from the inadequate literary culture that is supported and perpetuated by the academy. So how can this new kind of ‘ethical’ text be defined and interpreted? For Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, Saturday can be best understood as a ‘New Atheist Novel’: a literary incarnation of the recent cultural movement, spearheaded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, that is strident in disseminating its atheist creed, aiming, through the appropriation of techniques from narrative, to create a scientifically inspired humanism with which to ‘out-narrate’ religion. New Atheism is, like Henry Perowne, scathing towards the relativizing tendencies of postmodernist thought and has widely been understood to be a reaction against what it sees as the overly liberalized culture now predominant in the West, which is ideologically impotent when it comes to warding off the threat posed by religious extremists. New Atheists aim to re-instil concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘progress’ and ‘right versus wrong’ that postmodernism has gradually eroded, in an attempt to ‘re-arm’ Western democratic culture against this new form of invasion. As referred to briefly in the introduction, the New Atheists, for Bradley and Tate, operate according to an unspoken assumption that, ‘not only must evolutionary biology be recognized as irrefutably true, but it must also be universally acknowledged as beautiful, awe-inspiring and even poetic’.18 18 Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), 9.

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Literature becomes the ‘acceptable face of transcendence’ because it can be used to express and promulgate these traits, and New Atheist novelists such as McEwan can have their faith in the power of art restored through this process.19 The moral responsibility of the novel consists not just in acting as spokesperson for these truths, but also in the provision of a model, reflected in the very nature of novelistic construction, of a type of imaginative sympathy to which we, as a species who have this ability genetically written inside us, should continually aspire. In sharp contrast to the terrorist mindset which springs from that great McEwan bugbear, an excess of the subjective, the process of writing or reading a great novel draws us into an encounter with the Other that, if repeated often enough and if properly respected and understood in society, would make acting in any way that brings harm to another person seem naturally abhorrent. For Bradley and Tate, the scene in which Baxter threatens to rape Daisy after he has gained entry to the Perowne household, and is averted from his course by her recitation of a poem (Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’) that he imagines to be hers, is exemplary of this phenomenon. What Baxter experiences when he is so moved by the poem (he becomes ‘suddenly elated’; telling Daisy in wonderment, ‘it’s beautiful. And you wrote it’ (p. 222)), and what the reader can take part in with him, is what Bradley and Tate term ‘secular transcendence’.20 The act of identifying with another, of being moved by the words of another, takes on a significance that comes to mean something above and beyond a humdrum matter of ethics, so that, as is the case with transcendental scientism, a type of category error can be seen to be taking place. In a manner that is incongruent with the ostensibly hard-headed materialism of the novel’s purported ethos, the potential effects of literary art are imbued with an element of other-worldly power, so that they are made to form the basis of an overarching system of belief. Most critics view this incident as being a possibly self-consciously stage-managed attempt to outline what McEwan sees as the value of literature, one which sets it apart slightly from the rest of the novel. For Dominic Head, the ethics of Dover Beach chime ‘entirely with the novel’s simple moral strand’21 to which Baxter responds, and for David

19 Bradley

and Tate, 11. and Tate, 31. 21 Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 190. 20 Bradley

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Amigoni, similarly, Baxter becomes something akin to an ‘Arnoldian best self’ under the influence of the poem.22 Raymond Tallis though, in a manner which is surprising given that he shares many of McEwan’s anti-postmodern sentiments and is aligned, in many ways, with McEwan’s scientifically inflected humanism, lambasts Saturday for what he calls its ‘absurdities’ and ‘pervasive implausibilities’, perceiving a much more general lack of adherence to the realities of the life of a practising scientist throughout the novel.23 Tallis’s criticisms are conducted in a dogmatic and somewhat anecdotal manner, and they overlook the complexities of McEwan’s novel, yet they reflect a broader disjunction between the way that Saturday elevates the ethical possibilities of science, and how these possibilities actually play out in the novel. Returning to the concept of a new ethics of the ‘enzymes and amino acids’ can illustrate this point. Perowne seems certain that the culture represented by Daisy’s lecturers is far from capable of responding to the challenge posed by advances in scientific understandings of biology, but the novel in which he is a character chooses to fall back on a concept, that of imaginative sympathy, which is only new in the sense that it is now presented as being biologically grounded. To be sure, there is the occasional attempt in Saturday to outline a ‘scientific’ approach to emotion, but these vignettes do more to illustrate Perowne’s personal habits of thought than they do to spark urgent and burning ethical debate. Thus, we find Perowne sitting by Baxter’s unconscious post-operative form in intensive care, trying to decide upon the right course of action given that the power to prosecute the patient lies in his hands: Feelings have become […] like light itself – wavelike as they used to say in his physics class. He needs to stay here and, in his usual manner, break them down into their components, the quanta, and find all the distal and proximal causes; only then will he know what to do, what’s right. (p. 262)

22 David Amigoni, “‘The Luxury of Story-Telling’: Science, Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwan’s Narrative Practice”, in Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 151–167 (p. 157). 23 Raymond Tallis, “Ian McEwan’s Saturday: Does Implausibility Matter?”, in In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 162–172 (p. 166).

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Remove the scientific language from these two sentences, and we are simply left with a tired man with confused thoughts who is attempting to analyse them in order to make sense of them. By the same token, Perowne’s eventual decision to help Baxter escape prosecution and to make arrangements for him to be cared for in ‘the right hospital’ is, after much deliberation over whether it is based on forgiveness, guilt or even weakness, ultimately assigned to ‘realism’, because ‘they’ll all be diminished by whipping a man on his way to hell’ (p. 278). As we are already aware, realism always bears some relation to objectivity and rationality in this novel, yet Perowne’s position here would not look out of place in the bible or, indeed, in a number of other religious or value systems. And, of course, the self-conscious moral indecision which accompanies Perowne’s choice-making would not seem alien in one of Daisy’s ­infamous magical realist novels. Here is another instance, I would suggest, of this novel battling with itself. It attempts to achieve something, in this case the impression that it is outlining the early stages of an ethics that responds to scientific advances, which then encounters obstacles created partly by other aspects of the novel, and partly by the difficulties inherent in the real-world circumstances within which it is operating. The novel wants to engage with cutting-edge moral dilemmas, but a long history of ethical debate means that originality is hard to come by, but added to this is the fact that Saturday is actually far more concerned with developing a new style of realism than it is with other, extra-literary matters. In fact, the impulse to describe the world in as realistic a manner as possible is incompatible with the more metaphysical urges of this text, particularly because its metaphysics is based on a discourse that is naturally averse to any concept of transcendence. In this sense, Saturday is at its most ‘scientific’ when it leaves science entirely out of the equation, when it simply describes, just as Perowne is at his happiest when he forgets that he is supposed to be feeling happy. The novel itself seems to be aware on some level of this irony, as when, in a moment of uncharacteristically sensitive literary criticism, Perowne compares the prose of William James to his ‘fussy brother’ Henry who ‘would rather run round a thing a dozen different ways than call it by its name’ (p. 58). Perowne prefers William’s writing because he had ‘the knack of fixing on the surprising commonplace’—in other words, he made something special out of the process of showing the world as it really was (p. 58). For Perowne as a reader of fiction, ‘it

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interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained’, and only then will he be impressed by the work he is reading (p. 66). Perowne’s infatuation with reality mirrors McEwan’s reverence for realism, and for this reason, McEwan’s relationship with transcendental scientism in this novel is a complex one and is more strained than it might at first appear. He shares, for example, its conviction that science can access and describe reality in a unique and somehow superior way to any other discourse, and he wants to use this fact to bolster and update his realist project, and he is certainly on board with Dawkins et al. when it comes to criticizing the liberal arts culture, yet his self-consciousness with regard to meaning and authority means that he is less obviously assured in matters of broader social and political import. Beyond his belief in the vital role that literature plays in encouraging imaginative sympathy, and the evolutionary processes that he sees as being behind this, it is difficult to identify a clear and convincing scientifically based manifesto in McEwan’s work. In fact, McEwan has referred in interview to his belief that in the last twenty or so years ‘biologists have been invading the territory of novelists’, since ‘fundamental notions like consciousness as well as the emotions – surely the novelist’s domain – are studied’, suggesting that his appropriation of material from that discipline is as much a self-defensive counter-attack as it is an act of solidarity.24 McEwan, then, presents us with a novel which charts an uneasy path between a moral relativism that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the postmodernism he would try to oust and a scientific metaphysics to which he is unable to properly adhere. But McEwan also develops in Saturday a model of a new kind of realism, through which, by adopting material from evolutionary biology, he can attempt not only to outdo his literary peers, but also to reclaim quarter from his potential scientific rival. There is a strong sense throughout the novel that the best realist literature is naturally ‘scientific’ in a kind of unadulterated way and that the inclusion of evolutionary narratives serves only a secondary or reinforcing purpose, bolstering a method and process that is already firmly established. John Grammaticus, famous poet and Perowne’s father-inlaw, has something ‘controlled and untouchable, even steely’ about him (p. 198), and much of Daisy’s success is attributed to the fact that her

24 McEwan,

in “Journeys Without Maps”, 127.

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grandfather ‘believed in children learning by rote’ and was ‘prepared to pay up’ to make her absorb and memorize countless classics (p. 134). Like William Boyd, McEwan is a highly controlled and controlling author, frog-marching his reader through what Thomas Jones terms his ‘tyrannical’ plots, and it seems likely that part of the affinity that he feels with science stems from his own traits as a writer.25 Grammaticus shows that the study and production of literature require toughness and perseverance, and it is significant that he represents a literary epoch that came before the postmodernism in which Daisy is steeped. Daisy is made to feel the hard truth of material reality in Saturday when she falls accidentally pregnant, a circumstance that for Perowne ‘could destroy his daughter’s hopes’ (p. 241). In one of the many instances in the novel whereby a random happening alters a person’s situation, the aspiring young poet will have her life entirely changed by ‘what unattended matter can get up to in the total darkness of a womb’ (p. 269). For Laura Salisbury, McEwan’s ‘turn to the neurological’ is focussed mainly through his obsession with brain injury, and Saturday certainly continues this theme first aired in Atonement, yet along with the numerous brain operations and the debilitating effects of Baxter’s Huntington’s disease and Perowne’s mother’s dementia, the fact of Daisy’s pregnancy expresses a broader preoccupation with the dominant nature of material reality. This sort of reality is often figured in violent terms in McEwan’s fiction, and the threat of rape endured by Daisy is mirrored by Perowne’s attitude to her Italian lover and impregnator, Giulio, who has carried out an ‘assault’ on the family, and is ‘the despoiler of his daughter’ (pp. 240, 243). Baxter also holds a knife to Perowne’s wife Rosalind’s throat, in a repetition of a similar scene in Enduring Love, where man of science and reason Joe Rose witnesses his literary critic wife Clarissa Mellon in an identical position. Up until the point where Joe’s stalker Jed Parry breaks into Joe and Clarissa’s home wielding a knife, Clarissa has refused to acknowledge the threat that he poses, ignoring Joe’s carefully and methodically gathered evidence to this effect. Literary subtlety has its uses, as illustrated by Daisy and Clarissa’s sensitivity and intelligence, but real literature knows that the blind furies of random chance that form the basis of material reality will often trump human efforts to intellectualize the world around them.

25 Thomas

Jones, “Oh, the Irony”, London Review of Books 32 (2010): 20.

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The other violent and life-changing circumstance which hovers around the edges of Saturday is, of course, the threat of terrorism which so disturbs Perowne. London is ‘waiting for its bomb’, and no amount of debate in the public or private sphere can alter that fact—it will happen, it is, as Perowne says, ‘true’, and lives will have to adjust in the wake of it (p. 276). Literature becomes, in this sense, a type of reality check—a medium which creates an imaginary scenario, certainly, but one so determinedly bound by the realities of the world as it is that it might begin to believe itself to be even more real than that world. For Laura Salisbury, McEwan’s fixation with reality means that the ability to ‘imagine things otherwise’ is lost.26 Literature becomes an impotent form of tautology when it should be offering alternatives to existing structures. Jane Thrailkill, on the other hand, suggests that ‘neurological novels’ such as this draw our attention to ‘the stories circulating around, through, and within us’, so that literature, and the narrative forms that it utilizes, are not simply passive reflections of underlying material operations, but an important part of all mental processes.27 There is no doubt that McEwan is interested in the connections between narrative and the material brain, but Thrailkill fails to recognize that it is only a very specific type of ‘story’, one which bears a strong resemblance to McEwan’s recent fiction, that has anything to offer to the study of consciousness. Other stories—postmodern ones and religious fundamentalist ones—are sidelined as being naively mired in the subjective; they are dangerous, certainly, seductive even, but ultimately ignorant of reality, and they stand no long-term chance of survival under the increasing hegemony of scientific discourse. To an extent, then, this novel, which appears to anchor itself not only in material reality, but also, to a far greater degree than McEwan’s previous work, in current social and political events, becomes more self-reflexive than any of the earlier novels. There is an insistent undercurrent to Saturday which can best be described as an attempt at self-justification: the novel is at pains to illustrate its own capabilities, along with the superiority over other types of fiction that these capabilities provide. Thus, when Perowne compares William James to his ‘fussy’ brother, we can recognize McEwan’s own style in his favourable description of 26 Laura

Salisbury, “Narration and Neurology”, 909. F. Thrailkill, “Ian McEwan’s Neurological Novel”, Poetics Today 32, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 171–201 (p. 198). 27 Jane

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the ‘surprising commonplace’ that William regularly captures with such pleasing accuracy. During the scene in which Perowne collides with Baxter’s car, McEwan describes the emotions which he feels in terms that make the experience a generic one—plenty of people will find themselves in this situation at some point in their lives, and their feelings will quite probably bear some resemblance to those of Perowne. Above all, there swells in him a peculiarly modern emotion – the motorist’s rectitude, spot-welding a passion for justice to the thrill of hatred, in the service of which various worn phrases tumble through his thoughts, revitalised, cleansed of cliché: just pulled out, no signal, stupid bastard, didn’t even look, what’s his mirror for, fucking bastard. [italics in original] (p. 82)

This is McEwan’s version of the surprising commonplace: despite the fact that Perowne is self-aware as he experiences these ‘everyman’ emotions, he still recognizes them as being powerful and consuming, even down to the fact that clichéd terms can become refreshed in stressful situations. It is surprising, yet also common, that we can acknowledge the conventionality of certain of our behaviours at the same time that we are slave to them, and it is the accuracy of this description, that pin-pointing of a peculiarly modern mix of self-consciousness and loss of self-control, which illustrates McEwan’s favoured technique—the rounding up of layers of awareness and meta-awareness until a picture of twenty-firstcentury consciousness emerges. It is clear that McEwan credits his broad-ranging interests with enabling him to go further in representing reality than other types of novel. Just before the incident with Baxter, Perowne is musing again on the threat of terrorism posed to his city and possibly even to himself—‘there are people around the planet, well-connected and organised, who would like to kill him and his family and friends to make a point’ (p. 81). Is Perowne frightened by this? He is unsure, but what he does know is that these thoughts and questions are not (initially at least) experienced by him in linguistic terms, but rather in emotional ones: he feels ‘a mental shrug followed by an interrogative pulse’ (p. 81). McEwan is interested in the work of Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who has been influential in outlining the important link between emotion, a layer of brain-functioning that has tended to be viewed as secondary or inferior, and ‘higher’, more intellectual cerebral activity. For Damasio, ‘emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in

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human reason. The lowly areas of our organism are in the loop of high reason’.28 Damasio outlines several case studies to illustrate his assertions that reason cannot operate without emotion, and, although emotion can occasionally lead the subject towards undesirable outcomes, it is more often an essential signal of rapid cognition delivered via feelings. He asserts that ‘contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts’, they contain compacted information which the reasoning process then fleshes out (p. xxv). Damasio is not mentioned in this instance, but his influence is clear when Henry goes on to discuss the ‘hundreds of words and minutes’, it would take to describe the thoughts and meanings compressed into his ‘emotional hue’—it would, he implies, be almost impossible, even with a ‘poet’s gift of compression’, to carry this out (p. 81). But, of course, carry this out is precisely what McEwan does—here and throughout the novel. Often several pages are dedicated to the extrapolation of the smallest emotional shift or response, so that the novel comes to mirror the very processes that we, as conscious beings, carry out when we convert feelings, our psychological ‘bread and butter’ for the likes of Damasio, into language. This becomes yet another way in which Saturday grounds itself in ‘reality’: emotion comes first; it is our primary response to any situation, but it is also the mechanism which underlies and supports our reasoning, providing a chemical grounding to what can seem to be an abstract process. Again we can detect the assumption that McEwan’s determination to be as ‘real’ as possible in this novel has added a desirably different element to his work. If consciousness for the twenty-first-century intellect that is steeped in information from popular science and psychology involves regularly engaging with and analysing the biological machinery which creates it, then Saturday makes sure it is able to represent this, and it can immerse itself with an easy conscience in the subjective realm of one man’s thoughts, safe in the knowledge that what it is detailing has a firm basis, not only in scientific fact, but also in material biology. But, at the same time that Saturday purports to be describing reality in its most current and scientifically informed guise, it is also continually describing itself: through Perowne’s musings on good and bad literature, through its obsession 28 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Vintage, 2006 [1994]), xxiii. McEwan mentions his debt to Damasio’s work in the acknowledgements to Enduring Love.

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with the importance of the imaginative sympathy in which good novels specialize and through references, such as the one just described, to the psychological processes which it aims to represent. The novel, or, to be more specific, this precise novel, comes to assume the type of role that Stengers warns against: it operates as realist fiction which relies for a good deal of its reality effect on material from science, and then it takes the apparently logical next step of assuming that the realism is somehow more genuine because of this. It as though by saturating itself so thoroughly in material facts the novel imagines that it inherits the ability to step outside of its own discursive confines, thus becoming the self-appointed medium for outlining a paradoxically grounded metaphysics based on rationalism tempered with empathy. Through the apparently simple process of being purely and thoroughly itself, realist fiction such as this can provide a model for imaginative sympathy (and it can claim as its blueprint a genetic structure), and it can also afford a space, one which reflects the detachment necessary in scientific experimental discourse, for reminding us of the ‘realities’ of the world as it is. In this sense, ironic though it may seem, the only reality which actually comes to matter in Saturday is the one confined within its pages.

The Facts of the Matter in Solar First published in 2010, Solar once again places a high degree of importance on questions of material reality. The protagonist, Michael Beard, a modern-day Moses Herzog, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who made a name for himself more than two decades ago with his ‘Beard– Einstein Conflation’, a paper which adapts and adopts the great physicist’s theories from 1905 in order to develop insights into the way that light interacts with matter. Beard, though, has produced no new material since this early fruitful moment, and he now coasts from one paid figurehead role to another, cashing in on his status as Nobel laureate, ‘vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives’.29 When, however, material falls into his hands from a promising young physicist who has suffered an accidental death, Beard seizes the opportunity to co-opt his research on solar energy in order to embark on a potentially lucrative 29 Ian McEwan, Solar (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), 14. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

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new career path as head of a project intended to bring renewable energy into the mainstream. Beard differs from Henry Perowne in numerous ways: he is selfish and immoral, a serial adulterer who has been married five times, and he has little concern for the wider world beyond how it affects him directly. He is also far less aware of his own mental processes than is Perowne, and he habitually indulges in self-deception. This means that there is a more obvious distance between author and character in Solar than there is in Saturday, but it also means that there is a greater separation between Beard’s (often complex) private life and his scientific theorizing. This disjunction is spelled out early on in the novel when Beard relates the difficulties he has getting to grips with some of the more abstruse theories of his younger colleagues. The material world, he decides, ‘simply could not be so complicated. But the domestic world could’ (p. 21). There is a more apparent sense in Solar, then, of there being two separate realities—a subjective, messy, human reality, and an abstract, more permanent material realm which only physics can access. Beard is embroiled in deceit, infidelity and corruption, but he is able, through his work, to enter an alternative, pure world which operates entirely differently. To some degree, the type of science with which McEwan engages in these two novels dictates the way in which they represent reality and, as I hope to make clear, the way that they set about creating their respective realisms. In Saturday, it is biology which provides the predominant intellectual fodder, and since consciousness is one of the major themes of the novel, it is fitting that its narrator is not only a brain surgeon with an interest in material conceptions of the human psyche, but he is also a scrupulously self-aware individual. Saturday details Perowne’s consciousness at the same time that he habitually analyses it, so that the form of the novel mirrors the way in which its author sees the human mind working: a structured process creates a self-aware subject who then has to cope with and try to understand the ‘self’ that it experiences. The reality of the novel, then, becomes largely a matter of what goes on inside the mind—but, crucially, it is a mind which anchors itself in a biological world that remains distinct from it. In Solar, though, it is physics which is the discourse of the day, and the operations of the external world take precedence where ‘reality’ is concerned. Although in this novel it is much less tempting to equate the lead character’s views with those of his creator, it seems safe to suggest that McEwan is in agreement with Beard with regard to the physical

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universe. ‘Let the philosophers of science delude themselves to the contrary’, states Beard, ‘physics was free of human taint, it described a world that would still exist if men and women and all their sorrows did not’ (pp. 8–9). ‘So what?’ we might ask—why should novelists concern themselves with the world that physics describes? It is highly unlikely that the author hopes to make a contribution to that discipline or to somehow diminish the perceived status of his or her own. One (entirely accurate) answer is that Solar is what has come to be known as McEwan’s ‘climate change novel’, and it is at pains to drive home the material facts of how our own actions are affecting the environment around us. It is important, the novel encourages us to accept, to have a healthy awareness of the physical characteristics of the universe: because we are so reliant upon it for our survival, and because in recent times, our behaviour has impacted upon it to a greater extent than ever before. If we ignore the external world and allow ourselves to become mired in subjective ­concerns, then the consequences will be disastrous. As Beard argues in his speech, selling solar energy to the gathered investors who are still tied up with oil, ‘logic, not idealism, compels it’ (p. 154). Rationality is again, then, presented as being of vital importance, and it is also linked snugly with the material world. It is logic that will impel the shift away from harmful and scarce fossil fuels due to plain material facts: the oil will run dry and market forces will create an irresistible demand for an alternative. We should not, warns Beard, ‘be tempted by the illusion that the world economy and its stock exchanges can exist apart from the world’s natural environment’, nor should we be drawn in by the manipulations of the oil-industry lobbyists who would try to blind us to the evident facts (p. 150). Instead, we need simply follow the rational path, reflected in the very environment around us, and commit serious effort to the solar energy that will save our planet now and our economy in the future. This type of logic also underpins the section early on in the novel wherein Beard travels to the Arctic as part of a group of ‘twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change’, residing together, on a well-appointed ship near a retreating glacier, in order to plan ways in which to raise awareness of global warming (p. 46). A basic system is set in place immediately to maintain order on the ship, and much of this centres on the boot room in which the wet outdoor gear is stored. Everybody is assigned a numbered peg for hanging equipment, vital for their survival in the freezing conditions outside. They begin with

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‘finite resources, equally shared’, but end up in a ‘post-lapsarian state’ of entropy, comprising odd-sized boots, missing gloves and absent balaclavas (p. 78). In case the reader has not yet caught on to the message being delivered, Beard asks ‘how were they to save the earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?’ (p. 78). Our nature makes saving the earth an almost impossible task, but only if we rely on ‘human’ methods akin to the idealism referred to in Beard’s climate change speech. What is needed instead is something more logical, something that exists separately from each human individual. In Beard’s words: ‘boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly’ (pp. 79–80). Physical reality, though, is significant in Solar for more reasons than the one relating to climate change, and, as with Saturday, there is always a degree of self-reflexivity to be found surrounding matters of reality. Steven Shaviro, a cultural critic who has recently become interested in object-oriented philosophy, has written on the link between aesthetics and the idea of the ‘in itself’ that most postmodern relativist thought renders impossible. Aesthetics, Shaviro points out, involves the evasion of concepts and the defiance of rules; it relates to things insofar as they cannot be pinned down or utilized: ‘no matter how deeply I comprehend a thing, and no matter how pragmatically or instrumentally I make use of it, there is still something of it that escapes my categorizations’.30 In this sense, when we engage with something aesthetically, we feel it ‘for its own sake’—we eliminate, in other words, our subjectivity.31 There are certain similarities here to McEwan’s way of thinking about the capabilities of art; recall, for example, the sense in Saturday that there is something purely and naturally ‘scientific’ about a good realist novel, something which transcends the subjective world of author, character and reader. In another sense, though, Shaviro’s version of aesthetics could not be further from the model McEwan develops in the two novels under discussion here. Where aesthetics for Shaviro always evades capture, McEwan’s realist aesthetics is very much grounded in the world of fact, it is something that can be explained in the same way that the laws of physics explain the world around us. As physics, for many adherents of transcendental scientism, comes to be seen as the greatest prospect for providing 30 Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things”, Theory & Event 14, no. 3 (2011): Project MUSE, http://muse.jhu.edu/, accessed 29 April 2013. 31 Shaviro, “The Universe of Things” [italics in original].

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a complete and satisfactory metaphysics, literary realism, particularly the sort which McEwan propounds, with its tightly structured plots and its immersion in scientific fact, can reassert its cultural centrality. In Solar, McEwan again creates scenarios wherein characters are ‘hit’ by reality—a path they were previously embarked upon or one that they wish to pursue is radically altered or stymied by a sudden hard, immovable fact. To list but a few, there is Beard’s WUDU, his Wind turbine for Urban Domestic Use that can be installed on a household rooftop in order to provide renewable energy. Beard envisages a cheap and impressive wheeze which will keep his political bosses happy, but he ends up, due to ‘vibration, noise, cost, height, wind shear, gyroscopic precession, cyclic stress, roof strength, materials, gearing, efficiency’ with ‘a monster that was eating up all the attention and resources’ of the Centre (p. 24). Added to this is another pregnancy (this time it is Beard’s girlfriend Melissa) and another head injury (this one the cause of the death of Tom Aldous, Beard’s gifted young colleague from whom he then steals research material). Beard is wholly against the pregnancy and what it will mean for his future hopes as a permanent philanderer, yet despite his resolve to abort the child and thus make it ‘retreat to the realm of pure thought’, his daughter Catriona enters the world nonetheless (p. 185). With Tom Aldous, the circumstances are slightly different: his death is purely accidental (a slip on polar bear skin rug which causes his head to collide with the corner of a glass coffee table), yet Beard senses that he will face the blame for it—he has, after all, just discovered Aldous in his own home after he has spent the night with his wife. To deal with the situation, Beard frames his wife’s former (and, conveniently, violent) lover Rodney Tarpin and thus creates a new and more advantageous reality, in which Tarpin is imprisoned and Beard capitalizes on Aldous’s research. Imagination is important in Solar, and Beard’s response to the situation with Aldous illustrates the ways in which the ability to alter the perceptions of others is crucial in life, yet behind every circumstance that arises in the novel which contains the potential for manipulation is an ‘actual’ reality which has to be reckoned with. Beard carefully removes and plants evidence in order to frame Tarpin—he smears Aldous’s blood on an old hammer Tarpin left in the house after carrying out building work, and he removes the traces from the coffee table. Crucially, it is when imagination works with material reality in this way that the moments credited with the most brilliance occur in the novel—it is Beard’s ability to be creative while remaining within a factual framework

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which is presented as one of the few positive elements of his personality. This is illustrated when he allows himself to wander off into a detailed fantasy about his future life with an attractive immigration officer he briefly encounters at a London airport. Beard is on the verge of inviting the young woman to dinner when she dismisses him, and he begins to realize the ludicrousness of his imaginings. However, he is also aware that this trait is a key part of his greatest strength, and he goes on to reflect that ‘similar daydreams – manic moments, brief neural bursts, compacted but cloudy episodes that braided the actual with the unreal […] had long ago brought him to formulate his Conflation’ (p. 116). Conflation is, in many ways, key to understanding the aesthetics that McEwan develops in this novel, and it is perhaps the only way in which author and character are obviously similar: McEwan, like Beard, creates something worthwhile by allowing imagination to build from and remain grounded by, material foundations. The novel ends with a transcript of the (fictional) speech made in Stockholm by a Professor Nils Palsternacka on the presentation of Beard’s Nobel Prize. Palsternacka ends his speech with a quote from Francis Bacon: The sweetest and best Harmony is, when every part or Instrument is not heard by it selfe, but a Conflation of them all. (p. 283)

Beard’s Conflation blended fact with imagination, and this novel does the same, yet in many respects, Beard’s personality is one dimensional, a trait also picked up by several reviewers of Solar.32 Jason Cowley raises the point that McEwan persistently sets personality types, which are unrealistic in their single-mindedness, in stark opposition to each other. He wonders what the effect would be if McEwan had instead in this novel ‘written against expectation by choosing as his protagonist a scientist who has a profound artistic sensibility in the model of his friend Richard Dawkins, or an artist who is articulate in the language of science, as McEwan is himself’.33 Instead, there can be found numerous instances 32 See, for example, Thomas Jones, “Oh, the Irony”, London Review of Books 32 (2010); James Urquhart, Independent, Review Section, March 14, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/solar-by-ian-mcewan-1919286.html, accessed 29 April 2013. 33 Jason Cowley, Observer, Books Section, March 14, 2010, http://www.theguardian. com/books/2010/mar/14/solar-ian-mcewan, accessed 29 April 2013.

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whereby characters with insular mindsets are faced with the potential, through encounters with diverging viewpoints and disciplines, to modify their own, yet they invariably fail to embrace these opportunities, meaning that the harmony of conflation is largely reserved for the omniscient author. Beard has several implausible run-ins with caricatured versions of postmodern intellectuals through the course of the novel, all of which end in conflict or mutual scorn. There is the ‘gangling novelist called Meredith’ who, on the climate change voyage to the Arctic, attempts to equate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which stipulates that ‘the more one knew of a particle’s position, the less one knew of its velocity’), with the loss of a ‘moral compass’ which defines our era (p. 76). Beard is boorishly dismissive, demanding that Meredith justify his theory in factual terms: ‘So come on. Tell me. Let’s hear you apply Heisenberg to ethics. Right plus wrong over the square root of two. What the hell does it mean? Nothing!’ (p. 77). Worse still is Nancy Temple, a professor of science studies from Oxford University who is a member of a committee, chaired by Beard, discussing ways in which to promote physics in schools and universities. Temple is a ‘blank-slater’, a social constructivist who believes that science manufactures entities such as genes from its own networks, and that they cannot be said to exist in any objective sense outside of them (p. 135). When Beard fields what he sees as harmless question from a journalist by highlighting differences between the brains of girls and boys, and how this might account for the shortage of females in physics, Temple resigns from the panel in protest, sparking a furore in which Beard becomes branded a neo-Nazi, a sexist and a eugenicist (p. 136). In a debate hosted by a ‘left of centre’ paper a week later, Temple is replaced by Susan Appelbaum, a cognitive psychologist from Tel Aviv whose views are less radical and, more importantly, based on empiricist arguments. The postmodern intellectuals in the audience, however, are not interested in hearing about the statistical studies which show that social factors are far more important in determining the success of each gender, they want only snappy jargon and memorable phrasing, so that by the time Appelbaum is at her conclusion, ‘Beard thought he was the only one listening’ (p. 140). Meredith’s attempted conflation is tragically lacking in empirical meat, and the postmodernists are only interested in maintaining the ‘correct utterance from correct quarters’, so that the only ‘literary’ conflation which has any merit is McEwan’s own (p. 139).

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Terry Eagleton has written, in a review of Brian Boyd’s recent work of ‘evocriticism’, about the changing nature of the relationship art has conducted with science since the Romantic era. He talks of a range of ‘choices’ being taken by art in response to advances in science, particularly as these advances have come to impinge upon, and alter the territory of, a sphere previously belonging to the arts. The arts could either, he writes, ‘refuse to compete with the laboratories’, focussing on the fact that ‘their business was not knowledge but the affections’, or art could take a more aggressive choice and ‘beat science at its own game – to insist that it was itself a form of cognition’.34 For Eagleton, it is possible to recognize both of these positions having been taken at various moments in the last two hundred years or so, both by artists and the broader cultural and critical establishment associated with the arts. Yet where might one position the two Ian McEwan novels discussed here within this framework? As much as both of them sustain the concept of a binary relationship existing between the two cultures, their author ensures that he maintains an ironic distance from this binary. The opposition is contained within the plot and conducted by the characters, so that a critical space is created from which McEwan can operate. If Nancy Temple represents the ‘artistic’ establishment ‘insist[ing] that it was itself a form of cognition’, then it is Beard’s first wife Maisie Farmer who is the sort that ‘refuse[s] to compete with the laboratories’. Beard meets and pursues Maisie when they are both at Cambridge—him studying physics and her reading English. Maisie is supremely confident that her chosen discipline is innately superior; she exists at a time, referred to already by Martin Amis, when art is ‘winning’. When Beard asks about her work, ‘she explained, as though to a village idiot, that she was writing about Milton’, and she shows no interest in his physics (p. 199). Beard sets about learning (by rote, like Daisy Perowne before him), all of the most salient facts about Milton during a couple of weeks of cramming, and not only does he win Maisie’s heart, he also wins esteem for his own discipline. Beard slogs in the laboratory for eight or more hours a day, ‘attempting to come to terms with some of the hardest things ever thought’, yet ‘they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-a-beds, and he had let them intimidate him. No longer. From the moment he won Maisie, he was intellectually free’ (p. 202). Beard’s epiphany is clearly representative of a wider cultural shift of the sort 34 Terry

Eagleton, “Darwin Won’t Help”, London Review of Books, September 24, 2009, 20.

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already outlined in previous chapters, whereby scientific discourse comes to take a more predominant position in the public sphere. But where Martin Amis struggles with this new state of affairs, McEwan embraces it, aligning his own work with the new trend. Susan Appelbaum is perhaps the only character apart from Beard in Solar who utilizes the space of conflation which the novel champions. Her name, sounding very similar to the German word for apple tree, hints at the empiricist world of Newtonian physics, in contrast to Nancy Temple whose surname carries religious connotations, and, possibly, suggests an excessive focus on the mind (the temple being the part of the skull most associated with vulnerability to penetration). Appelbaum, like McEwan, has her feet firmly on rationalist/empiricist ground, but she also, like the author, is presented as being effective when commenting on cultural matters. In this way, she escapes the art/science binary which forces one to make a limiting choice regarding intellectual affiliation, instead fusing elements of both cultures, selecting methods appropriate to her topic. Appelbaum is a psychologist; she comes from a field in which McEwan has long shown an interest and which has traditionally defied easy disciplinary categorization. Her method consists in collecting and collating data, from which she then draws conclusions, whereas Temple begins with a foregone conclusion: that subjectivity trumps all and that nothing can be safely said to exist beyond it. In this way, humanity becomes the centre of the universe in Temple’s postmodernist viewpoint, and, again, we can sense that McEwan links this mindset with that of religion—both posit a form of omniscient subject as the generative force underlying all experience. McEwan’s aesthetics in Saturday and Solar consists partly in a dissociation from any type of religious model: here imagination is not something which transcends day-to-day experience as it did for the Romantics, and nor does it describe the world as God ordained it as it did for many early realist authors. Instead, imagination works with material reality, collecting evidence empirically from the outside world in order to reveal the numerous ways in which this world operates, so that the imagined world, especially when tied to scientific fact, emits a plausibility which blurs boundaries between it and the real. McEwan’s fictions seek to dismiss discursive boundaries in the same way that Appelbaum’s cognitive psychology does, but they also seek to make a return to realism intellectually acceptable. The world can be story-shaped as long as the story is the right one, and since the world being described in these two novels has been made to seem alien to that of

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the early realists by advances in scientific understanding, an omniscient author no longer has to imply an omniscient creator. In these two novels, McEwan frequently places his protagonists in positions which detach them from everyday life, where they are provided with a perspective which is somehow out of the ordinary. With Perowne, it is viewing the world from his high bedroom window and his car window, but it is also his ability to detect the ways in which internal chemical or biological processes are affecting a person’s behaviour: he can spot a drug addict from afar by their scratching and agitation, and he recognizes Baxter’s Huntington’s disease almost immediately. Perowne also gets to examine the internal workings of the human brain on a regular basis—he can see inside the head in a way that his author cannot. It is Beard’s grasp of complex theoretical physics which sets him apart: he is able to access a world which is largely closed to the majority of the readers of the novel in which he is a character. Added to this, as much as Beard is self-confessedly embroiled in the domestic world, he also enjoys an unusual degree of freedom. He conducts brief and guilt-free affairs with countless women, and he regularly travels the world in order to give lectures and make public appearances. He barely has a fixed address for most of the novel, yet he has a knack for finding people who will cater for his needs. The scene in which Beard looks down upon Greater London as his aeroplane circles before landing encapsulates his underlying detachment from daily concerns. Much as he frets about his daily life—he is horribly late for an important appointment, and he needs to call his long-neglected girlfriend Melissa—Beard is also aware that human life, when viewed from a distance, is very similar to other material processes. As his perspective shifts from ‘the soft line of the South Downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage’ (p. 108), to the roofs surrounding his ‘icy, neglected, chaotic Marylebone apartment’, he senses that human life resembles the mould which has no doubt gathered on his abandoned left-over food: we are ‘a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae’ which Beard can observe from ‘up there with the spores’ (p. 111). Although Beard largely embraces this materialist view of human existence (he knows he could be a better boyfriend to Melissa, but justifies his behaviour by telling himself that he merely ‘shared all of humanity’s faults’ (p. 171), most of those which he outlines being physical, genetic defects), there is also a degree of discomfort for Beard regarding the ultimate meaninglessness of his being. It is, fittingly, on another aeroplane

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journey that Beard grudgingly confronts these nihilist suspicions, since ‘long journeys always brought him up against a certain mental deficiency, an emptiness, a restless boredom that was, he thought, […] the expression of his true state, habitually obscured by the daily round or by sleep’ (p. 49). This ‘aeroplane view’ is significant, partly in that it suggests a link between the role occupied by science and that sought or utilized by the 9/11 attackers, but also in that it reveals the similarities which Saturday and Solar aim to trace between the process of novel writing and the space they associate with a scientific materialist viewpoint. The physical elevation of Beard (and Perowne at his window or above a patient) mirrors the position of an omniscient narrator, as does the act of ‘zooming in’ to scenes and circumstances happening on a level that is somehow lower and more focussed. Beard mentally descends to his filthy flat in Marylebone, creating a plausible account, inspired by his understanding of the behaviour of spores, of the state to which it has deteriorated in his absence, and he also physically descends back into his action-packed social existence from his state of relative mental detachment. Perowne engages in a similar process when he imagines, based on both his knowledge of the physical and mental effects of addiction and his previous dealings with drug addicts, the specifics of a scenario playing out between a young couple arguing in the square below his window. Perowne can plot a likely course for the itchy, irritable young woman, just as he can predict the progress of Baxter’s degenerative disease—all from the vantage point of his tall Fitzrovia mansion. In this way, the boundaries between imagination and material reality become flexible, as knowledge of the real world is revealed to both enable the construction of narrative and remain central to its foundations. Beard’s state of empty, restless boredom illustrates the human psyche when it is devoid of stimulus—it is the bleak ‘truth’ which any worthwhile novelist has already bravely faced up to, and Beard’s (albeit dim) awareness of this truth furthers the ties between writer and physicist which Solar promotes. Realist novelists of McEwan’s ilk write from a position of cool detachment, dipping in and out of circumstances as they see fit, always in possession of more knowledge or understanding than any of the characters in the world which they create. By providing his scientist protagonists with similar capabilities, not only does McEwan champion a discourse for which he possesses great respect, he also creates parallels between their practices and his own as a writer. In this way, it is no longer intellectually dubious or naive to assume the status of an all-seeing creator of a fully realized

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world, but instead a respectable position to occupy, one which bears important resemblances to the world described by science. The risk with this strategy, though, is one already identified by Laura Salisbury when she points out that the preoccupation with material reality evinced in Saturday creates a scenario in which the ability to ‘imagine things otherwise’ is lost. Realism of the sort set out in Solar, whereby the primary goal is the representation of things in the material facts of how they are, naturally shuns any form of overarching metaphysical framework (even if the replacement framework comes to take on metaphysical qualities inadvertently). With the loss of a more humanistic structure, any ambitions towards the creation of a moral dimension to the novel become problematic. The branding of Beard as a neo-Nazi by protesters and tabloid newspapers following his ill-judged comments on the male and female brain is a reminder of the pitfalls awaiting any ethical structure based in science: ‘The Third Reich’, Beard decides, ‘had projected a prohibitive shadow more than half a century long over genetics where it touched on human affairs – at least, in the minds of those outside the subject’ (pp. 143–144). Needless to say, drawing the reader’s attention to the hard facts of climate change is a worthy and sufficient undertaking for a novelist to be engaged in, yet the pressure of the moral questions generated by the actions of Solar’s cast of characters exerts itself upon the novel nonetheless. The ethical strand which McEwan provides, in a novel which is otherwise concerned with the description of the operations of a reality undergirded by materialism, consists ultimately in the illustration of the ways in which that reality is wont to catch us unawares if we pay it insufficient heed. Alongside this fable-like trope is the suggestion that, for those who approach it with the properly rational attitude, reality can also be made to work in our favour. The ethical responsibility of the novel becomes largely a matter of encouraging us to ‘face the facts’, advising us to respect and operate within a framework whose characteristics can be predicted to a great enough extent that the sensible option is to prepare for the most likely outcome, based on what we can observe. One illustration of this model in operation can be found in the novel’s treatment of feminism. Shortly after their marriage, Maisie becomes interested in feminist theory, begins attending a group run by ‘a collective of Californian women’, and starts up her own ‘workshop’ (p. 207). In Beard’s words, ‘her consciousness was raised’, and within a short time, she ‘confronted the blatant fact of patriarchy’ (p. 207). There ensues a period of nightly discussion and debate between the young couple, but Beard ‘was too

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much of a rationalist to think of many good reasons why he should not help out around the house’ (p. 207). Despite Maisie’s insistence that Beard’s ‘masculine’ rationalism is a major part not only of their problems as a couple but also the wider social issue of gender equality, the novel suggests that it is actually a form of rationalism that enables Maisie to ‘see the light’ (patriarchy is a ‘blatant fact’, and Maisie provides her husband with empirical examples to prove it) and Beard to accept the bases of the arguments she is making. By the same token, when Melissa discovers that Beard has been conducting an affair she uses an argument based in gender equivalence to justify her own infidelity. Beard, in a hypocritical move typical of his character, calls this ‘rationality gone nuts, ­feminism’s last stupid gasp’ (p. 227). The characters may not always appreciate the evident links between rationalism and feminism, but the novel suggests that feminists stand to benefit from embracing its author’s favoured discourse. If objectivity and rationality are a male-dominated game, then women should appropriate these to level out the playing field—and, most importantly, they will have ‘reality’ on their side as a natural consequence of this. Susan Appelbaum’s empirical studies of the brains of each gender illustrate the ways in which material facts can and will support any argument that is outlined properly and based on the right kind of method. Again, logic trumps idealism in the long run, and ‘reality’ is the safest place to set one’s stall. The realist novel can lead by its own fact-abiding example, and an ethical theme will emerge naturally, supported by the laws of the universe. This same assumption—that morality shares an affinity with reality—underlies the way in which the novel concludes its protagonist’s story. Beard is an unbridled consumer of food and alcoholic beverages who steadily gains weight as the novel progresses. His body, like our planet, becomes sick because of what has been inflicted upon it. Beard is made to pay the price of his feckless greed when he is given a dire prognosis by his El Paso doctor: he has an enlarged liver, he is dangerously overweight and he is at risk of congestive heart failure. To top this off, there is a malignant melanoma on the back of his hand that has been ignored for far too long and needs addressing urgently. Beard, of course, pays none of this any heed and carries on in the manner to which he has grown accustomed. Despite the warnings from his doctor to this very effect, he becomes a ‘denier’ and risks leaving the damage until it is too late and becomes irreversible (p. 238). Beard’s circumstances, of course, provide an allegory for those of our planet, and ‘reality’ is literally a matter of life and death. But, again, there

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is more to Solar’s courtship of reality than its desire to bring issues concerning energy and climate change to the fore, as revealed by the ways in which the various other strands of Beard’s life are concluded. By the time he becomes aware of how serious his health problems are, Beard is on his way to Lordsburg, New Mexico, to oversee the unveiling of his project, based on research plagiarized from Tom Aldous, to produce renewable solar energy on a mass scale. The day preceding the launch, while Beard is anticipating a pleasurable reunion with his latest mistress Darlene, he receives news that Rodney Tarpin has been released from jail and has made his way to the States to track down the man who framed him. ‘As the years had passed’, the events surrounding the framing of Tarpin for the murder of Aldous ‘had begun to appear dreamlike, unprovable, without consequences’ (p. 235). Now that the threat of Tarpin’s retribution looms, though, Beard realizes that reality has been there along, ‘like a stratum of impervious rock’ lying below his constructed version of events (p. 235). Tarpin, it transpires, has not realized that Beard is responsible for his period of incarceration, yet when Beard refuses to give him work, he enacts a revenge more painful than the beating which Beard initially fears, when he smashes millions of pounds worth of state-of-the-art solar energy equipment, thus destroying all hopes of the project’s success. On top of this, Beard’s appropriation of Aldous’s research finally catches up with him in the guise of a frustratingly well-informed lawyer representing the former head of the Centre where the two men met. Facing criminal charges and enormous debt, Beard has well and truly reaped what he has sown. Despite the generic inevitability of this ending, though, there is never a sense that a moral justice has been served. Rather, Beard has been dished out yet another of McEwan’s ‘reality checks’, which, given Beard’s status as a rational man of science, he should always have foreseen. The final pages of Beard’s story find him being confronted by Melissa and Darlene about the un-fulfillable promises he has made to them both, and, as he hugs his daughter under the resentful eyes of the two women in his life, possibly dying from heart failure, he cuts a pitiable figure. The reader is not encouraged to hate Beard (Tibor Fischer, in The Telegraph, admits that he ‘rather likes’ him), so there is no satisfaction in witnessing his demise.35 This is no clear-cut villain, but a man defeated by his own blindness. Beard becomes too preoccupied with his 35 Tibor Fischer, “Review”, The Telegraph, March 7, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/books/7359254/Solar-by-Ian-McEwan-review.html, accessed 7 January 2014.

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subjective desires, and it is his neglect of the hard facts—the likelihood of his actions catching up with him, his mistreatment of his body—which instigates his downfall. Although Beard is a physicist, then, with an enviable grasp of the operations of the external, physical world, it is the novel in which he is a character that possesses the better understanding of the ways in which ‘reality’ works. By tying itself, as does Saturday, to material facts, and by endeavouring to create a story which remains directed by plausibility, this novel develops an aesthetics which, in a sense, shuns the very concept of aesthetics. If Saturday uses new materialist models of consciousness and the self to give credibility to its subject-focussed psychological realism, then Solar appropriates the ‘external’ space which its lead character ostensibly commands. Realism in Solar is at once grounded and detached; it is associated with hard fact, but it can also view the world from an objective distance, so that, just as Saturday need only remain true to itself in order to exemplify reality, Solar places itself on a par with the physics McEwan so admires.

Bibliography Amigoni, David. 2008. “The Luxury of Story-Telling”: Science, Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwan’s Narrative Practice. In Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston, 151–167. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Bradley, Arthur, and Andrew Tate. 2010. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11. London: Continuum. Cowley, Jason. 2010. Observer, Books Section, March 14. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/14/solar-ian-mcewan. Accessed 29 April 2013. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Damasio, Antonio. 2006 [1994]. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Vintage. Eagleton, Terry. 2009. Darwin Won’t Help. London Review of Books, September 24. Fischer, Tibor. 2010. Review. The Telegraph, March 7. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/books/7359254/Solar-by-Ian-McEwan-review.html. Accessed 7 January 2014. Head, Dominic. 2007. Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hillard, Graham. 2010. The Limits of Rationalism in Ian McEwan’s Saturday: The Explicator 68: 140–143.

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Jones, Thomas. 2010. Oh, the Irony. London Review of Books 32: 19–20. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McEwan, Ian. 2005a. Literature, Science, and Human Nature. In The Literary Animal, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson, 5–19. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. McEwan, Ian. 2005b. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, Ian. 2009. Journeys Without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan. In Ian McEwan, ed. Sebastian Groes, 123–134. London: Continuum. McEwan, Ian. 2010. Solar. London: Jonathan Cape. Salisbury, Laura. 2010. Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue. Textual Practice 24: 883–912. Shaviro, Steven. 2011. The Universe of Things. Theory & Event 14, no. 3. Project MUSE. http://muse.jhu.edu/. Accessed 29 April 2013. Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tallis, Rayond. 2014. In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections. Oxford: Routledge. Thrailkill, Jane F. 2011. Ian McEwan’s Neurological Novel. Poetics Today 32, no. 1: 171–201. Wells, Lynn. 2010. Ian McEwan. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

This book began with an assertion of the somewhat unusual ability of the novel form to stretch and test its own boundaries while still maintaining a role and space for literature that is distinguished from other disciplines and discourses. The third culture novel asks, in effect, how far can the novel allow itself to be traversed by science and still remain fiction? And to what extent can the novel provide a genuine representation of both the material world and the ways in which science understands this world? And what can the novel gain from this process? The third culture novel represents a recent permutation in the long-standing relationship between literature and science, a relationship that has at times been conflicted, but has also been mutually beneficial—the novel, after all, rose to prominence partly as a result of the validation of what are often seen as its core values of rationality, secularism and liberal humanism by science, which, on the other hand, has at times adopted narrative tools gleaned from the novel to express, transmit and explore its material. The third culture novel is driven by a desire to address the important questions of what it means to be human. In the last two or three decades, the social roles and significance of science have changed to a large degree, and the aspects of the human into which science delves have expanded to encompass regions, such as consciousness and the genome, which challenge and destabilize notions of the self in new ways. Added to this, the broadly postmodern humanities have come under pressure, in a manner which has intensified since the attacks of September 2001, © The Author(s) 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_7

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to provide more stable ideological frameworks with which to confront religious fundamentalism. As a result of these mutations and incursions, for the authors studied here, the serious novel is impelled to engage with science in order to remain relevant, but, perhaps more importantly, in order also to provide a space in which to explore and work through the implications of these changes. So, on the one hand the third culture novel is insular and self-reflexive—it is preoccupied with the capabilities of the novel, and driven by a desire to continually expand, update and maintain these capabilities—but on the other hand the third culture novel is a public discourse imbued with a sense that it must fulfil certain social responsibilities. These two drives, of course, are not mutually exclusive, but will instead influence and impact upon each other, yet there remains a tangible element in all of these novels which is concerned with the novel form in itself as distinct from science and the humanities more generally. In this sense, these authors mirror, although never in an uncomplicated way, scientific preoccupations with the world in itself that exert a different kind of fascination within their novels. This concept of the novel in itself is linked with a further aspect of these fictions which reveals the sort of conflicted mirroring that can occur when the novel introduces science into its architecture. All of the novels studied in this book are interested, to a greater or lesser degree, with the objective credentials of literary fiction, and they associate science with objectivity at the same time that they compete with its objective claims. This highlights an element of the third culture novel that could be seen to be problematic, namely that what it presents can be a simplified version of science, at the same time that the novel is excused from rules and categories which it applies to other disciplines. The novel, by expressing its inbuilt capacity to absorb and reflect significant ideas from any discourse and discipline it sees fit, is presented as being naturally objective in itself, while science is revealed to be somehow limited in scope. The problems associated with removing science from its practices while still linking it with objectivity are also largely overlooked in these novels, and instead the novel bolsters its own claims to objectivity by incorporating, and then ultimately presenting itself as outdoing, those claims of science. Science is objective then, but the third culture novel is objective in a broader, more nuanced and somehow superior way. In the same way that science is used selectively where questions of objectivity are concerned, the third culture novel, particularly from the mid-1990s onwards, allies itself with science when it comes to

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undermining a particular conception of literary and cultural theory, only to recommence its (albeit subtle) battle with science once this task is seen to have been achieved. Theory is rejected, and then science is ejected or surpassed, often by way of the humbling, or even killing-off, of scientist figures. In The Information, cosmologists are stylistically inept (recall the WYSIWYG universe), and their truths are ‘simple’. Added to this, the ‘universal’ which they study has enabled the success of Gwyn Barry’s simplistic novel, Amelior. In Night Train, published two years after The Information, a cosmologist is pre-emptively ejected when she mysteriously commits suicide at the beginning of the novel. Brazzaville Beach features the suicide of a scientist figure when John Clearwater drowns himself, and a further set of plot devices move the heroine, Hope Clearwater, from a scientific profession to one related to writing. In Galatea 2.2 Lentz’s cold, rationalist personality is revealed to be a defence mechanism stemming from personal tragedy, and he is ushered into the quintessentially literary domain of imaginative sympathy by the end of the novel when he assigns all of his motivations, including those of his obsessive scientific experiments, to loneliness. In Powers’ 2006 novel The Echo Maker, neurologist Gerald Weber experiences an identity crisis brought on, in part, by his meetings with a man suffering from Capgras Syndrome following a head injury. Mark Schluter has believed that his sister Karin is an imposter since crashing his truck in a mysterious accident, and Karin writes to Weber in order to ask for his help. Weber is, at the start of the novel, a somewhat detached, rational scientist figure, who agrees to meet Mark because his case ‘could help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind’.1 Before long, though, he ‘could no longer even imagine what it felt like to be Gerald Weber’ as Mark’s delusions lift the lid on Weber’s own fragile identity (p. 381). The Echo Maker does not pit science and humanities culture against each other in the same way that Galatea 2.2 does, but rather traces links between the two cultures when it comes to the understanding of the brain. It remains significant, though, that Weber is ‘remade’ by ‘others’ stories’ throughout the course of the novel (p. 524). Aside from the hard lessons taught to Ralph Messenger in Thinks…, Helen literally ejects him from her maisonette when she discovers that Ralph has been reading her journal. This particular incursion of the

1 Richard

Powers, The Echo Maker (London: Vintage, 2007), 133.

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cognitive scientist into Helen’s private thoughts proves to be a step too far for the writer, and she instead begins a romance with a literary biographer. Adding to the list of scientists who meet their death in the pages of the third culture novel is Ralph’s colleague at the Holt Belling Centre Professor Douglass, who commits suicide after being discovered with pornographic images of children on his computer. Michel Djerzinski, too, commits suicide in Atomised, as do Daniel 1 and Daniel 25 in The Possibility of an Island, who, though not scientists, are aligned with the scientific religion of the Elohimites. In The Corrections, it is pharmacological drugs that are ejected—Enid flushes her Aslan down the Disposall and Correcktall suffers a shares slump. Along with this, scientifically minded characters are either shown to be corrupt and self-interested, as in the case of Dr. Hibbard and Earl Eberle, or plagued by irrational fears and crippling emotional states like Gary and Alfred. Margaret Atwood’s Crake contributes yet another suicidal scientist to the list, since he intends and ensures that Jimmy will shoot him at the outbreak of his killer virus. In Saturday, the undermining and surpassing of science and scientist characters are more subtle, since this novel marries its psychological realism to science in a manner which is the least conflicted of all the third culture novels studied here. However, certain moments suggest that Perowne and his profession are presented as being in some way limited by McEwan. Perowne, for example, admires the Westway because it reminds him of ‘the tidy future of his childhood science fiction comics’, and his adult reading remains narrow despite Daisy’s best efforts to cultivate her father’s literary sensibilities (p. 154). If Perowne’s reading material lacks depth then he occasionally suspects that his work does too: ‘in neurosurgery’, he decides after one of his many sessions spent fretting over the complexities of the impending invasion of Iraq, ‘he chose a safe and simple profession’ (p. 141). In Solar, Tom Aldous suffers an accidental death and Michael Beard ends the novel with death looming over him, neglecting, like Ralph Messenger before him, to pay attention to the realities of the world on the scale of 1:1. To a certain extent, then, the death of the scientist has replaced the death of the author as the intellectual preoccupation of these contemporary novels, as literature attempts to guard its realm from a partly self-imposed threat. Scientist figures, though, have not fared well historically in the novel, as the demises of both Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll attest, suggesting that this feature of the third culture novel actually describes

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the latest manifestation of literary fiction’s permanently murderous fascination with scientific characters. The relationship that the third culture novel has with science is conflicted, then, as we have seen, and also mutable and complex. This leads to a more general question with which to draw this book to a close, regarding the longevity and future directions of this phenomenon. Is the third culture novel likely to exist in its current form for a pronounced period of time, or will it be looked back upon as a phase relating to a specific cultural moment? It is possible that economic recession since 2008 and fiercer fighting for government funding could exacerbate the conflicts between the two cultures, and that this conflict will continue to be reflected in the third culture novel. The recent March for Science events that took place around the world on 22 April 2017, linked to the Cornell Alliance for Science which aims to promote the forming of public policies based on scientific evidence, suggest that pro-science movements are continuing to evolve and gain momentum. It is also possible, though, that certain changes in cultural conditions might ease some of the tensions between the disciplines, meaning that pro-science need not always mean anti-humanities. Climate change is high on the agenda of the March for Science in particular, and in a ‘post-truth’ globalized world, wherein the Trump administration appears to deny the link between carbon emissions and changing weather patterns, the incentives for elements of science and humanities culture to come together to resist a perceived common enemy are strong. Throughout its history, the novel has possessed the ability to respond to, and profit from, change. It is my suspicion that science and the ways in which science conceives of the material world will continue to inform a significant section of the contemporary novel for some time to come, but that the relationship between literature and science will become less conflicted in these types of novels. Rather, science will be figured as a more natural and accepted part of the philosophy of the serious literary novel, as literature finds new ways to adjust to and accommodate the changing social roles of science. This, as a result, will provide further rich and varied intellectual material, as well as continuing to provide a space in which to explore some of the crucial questions and concerns of our time. A recent example of a contemporary novel which includes a large degree of science but does not obviously engage in a battle with it is The Universe Versus Alex Woods (2013) by Gavin Extence, in which precocious teenager Alex discourses on physics and cosmology with his

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widower friend, the Kurt Vonnegut-loving Mr. Peterson, as naturally as he talks about science fiction. Literature, science, politics and the ethics of life and death (Mr. Peterson is terminally ill and Alex wants to help him die with dignity) are all part of how we understand and confront the world, but not in a hierarchical, or, indeed, a relativistic way, but rather a complementary and necessary one. In this novel, the world cannot be understood using one discourse alone, and Alex’s coming of age is mediated through his encounters with a variety of viewpoints and approaches. This type of entangled model can be understood, to a certain extent, by considering the complex and important philosophy of Karen Barad. In her influential book from 2007 on quantum mechanics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Barad discusses the ways in which classical physics, with its reliance on a notion of spatial separation between observer and observed as the prerequisite for objectivity, encourages modes of thought in Western society which privilege reflection on the world from an outside position or ‘the gaze from afar’.2 As a philosopher with a doctorate in quantum physics, Barad is interested in understanding the world in terms of entanglement and what she calls intra-action rather than from this reflective perspective. Barad utilizes her reading of Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics to put forward an alternative model of objectivity to the reflective one, which has, according to her, been predominant in Western thought since the ancient Greeks. Instead of seeing objectivity as being achieved via the detached perspective of an observer who records results which exist separately from them and their apparatuses, Barad, following Bohr to an extent, understands the ‘observer’ as being entangled, along with their measuring devices, in phenomena with the ‘objects’ they are studying. Quantum physics has frequently shown that the act of measurement has an impact on the outcome of experiments. This goes beyond a matter of the measurement affecting the course or velocity of a particle—the energy of a photon deflecting the particle it measures, for example— because measurement always decides which properties of matter become determinate, and which excluded. We cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle, for example, or its energy and duration, only one or the other. ‘Which properties become determinate’, explains Barad, ‘is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but 2 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 89.

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rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus’ (pp. 19–20). This is not to say, though, that these properties exist independently, awaiting a suitable form of measurement through which to objectively observe them, but rather that the actual physical reality of such attributes is called into question. For Barad, ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties, but rather what Bohr terms “phenomena”’ (p. 33). ‘Phenomena’ describe the intra-action of things: the ways in which agents in the universe—including humans, which are a material part of the universe— affect each other. ‘Space, time, and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements’, she argues, but instead emerge through them and constantly change because of them (p. 74). As a result of this, the whole phenomena in any experiment, including the measuring device and the human agent, become the objective knowledge: ‘a condition for objective knowledge is that the referent is a phenomenon (and not an observation-independent object)’ [emphasis in original] (p. 120). This ontological state of play does not, for Barad, apply only on the quantum level, and no evidence exists to suggest that the physical world is divided into a microscopic and a macroscopic domain, each with its own set of rules. Rather, quantum mechanics, as ‘the most successful and accurate theory in the history of physics […] does not merely supplement Newtonian physics – it supersedes it’ (p. 110). Crucially, this shifting of the human agent into the phenomena which constitute reality does not promote relativism, or a model of a kind of rampant subjectivity wherein human perception dictates and creates reality. In fact, as far as Barad is concerned the opposite is true: we don’t create knowledge from within our minds or social practices, and neither do we accrue it by detached observation. Instead, ‘we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming’ (p. 185). If the third culture novel in its conflicted mode mirrors and perhaps even covets the classical scientific ideal of the ‘gaze from afar’, novels such as that of Extence more closely resemble Barad’s concept of entangled phenomena. Of course, ‘phenomena’ refer specifically to experimental scenarios and the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced, but, as Barad makes clear, the metaphysical implications of this shift are further reaching. Barad would like to see science, and the ways in which science is perceived by society, ‘moving away from the familiar habits and seductions of representationalism (reflecting on the world from outside) to a way of understanding the world from within and as

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a part of it’ (p. 88). A novel of entanglement would engage with scientific facts and theories, but without aiming or purporting to outdo, transcend, or somehow step outside of them. A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman (2002) is an example of the sort of novel which uses scientific facts and theories (biology, neuroscience, mathematics and computer science) alongside models from the humanities and social sciences (political theory, philosophy, linguistics, aesthetic theories), to raise questions and explore numerous aspects of what it means to be human. These various means of understanding, though, are not figured in terms of a hierarchy within the novel, and neither are they somehow brought into the service of an ultimately superior literary project. Instead, the novel models itself upon the ideal of the university, as it is understood by the Vice Chancellor of the fictional University of North Yorkshire: ‘a paradigm, a web, a microcosm of interconnecting studies and ideas’.3 There is conflict between these ideas, and characters often disagree with one another over fundamental issues: ‘Reality’s what you think it is’, argues literary-minded Frederica, to which biologist Luk responds ‘No it isn’t. It’s what is’ (p. 350). But the novel does not purport to know more, or to detach itself from the irresolvable nature of these conflicts—instead suggesting that if there is unity to be found in the universe it is inaccessible and unknowable for humanity and the novel alike. As Frederica ponders the physical details of a North Yorkshire moor she decides that ‘somewhere – in the science which had made Vermeer’s painted spherical waterdrops, in the humming looms of neurones which connected to make metaphors, all this was one’ (p. 421). What or where this oneness is, though, remains to be discovered, and the novel is entangled with all of the other discourses which constitute the human world. Barad’s philosophy is, of course, heavily influenced by quantum theory, but it has not been the case thus far that novels which explore the radical and potentially metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics are more inclined to operate according to models of entanglement. In fact, novels such as David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2007) are potential targets for Barad’s admonishment against using quantum theory to fall into a different kind of reflective trap than the one she associates with classical physics. For Barad, ‘the fact that we make knowledge not from outside but as part

3 A.

S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman (London: Vintage, 2003), 277.

7 CONCLUSION 

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of the world does not mean that knowledge is necessarily subjective (a notion that already presumes the pre-existing distinction between object and subject that feeds representationalist thinking)’ (p. 91). In Ghostwritten, quantum theory tends to support the more supernatural leanings in the story, which are linked to self-reflexive metaphors about good novel writing. This provides a type of literary free rein to an author who is famously promiscuous in his themes and storylines. Mitchell’s most scientifically qualified character, the physicist Mo Muntervary, states that ‘human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all the possible ones’, and ‘each of us [is] a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means’, paving the way for the potentially contradictory realities (hard-line scientific materialism versus Eastern mysticism, for example) which co-exist in the ‘holistic ocean’ of the novel.4 The novel contains ‘noncorpa’: souls which have been separated from their original bodies and can enter the minds of others in order to observe them. These noncorpa can largely be read as literary devices, particularly since there are nine in total, suggesting that there is one to narrate each of the chapters. In the ventriloquist’s style for which Mitchell is so famous, each noncorpum perches silently and unobtrusively in the mind of another. Quantum theory makes the world seem strange and unknowable, it makes anything possible, but it also makes human consciousness, and by association the literary imagination, the fundamental creative force. In The End of Mr. Y, quantum theory and (broadly Derridean) poststructuralist theory are seen to reach the same conclusions (that reality is subjective) and both are used to drive a kind of novelistic thought experiment, in which human consciousness is what constructs the universe: ‘our thoughts spin quarks up and down and smear electrons into whatever we want them to be’, decides Thomas’s heroine.5 Thomas’s ‘poststructuralist physics’ (p. 397), like Mitchell’s noncorpa, can be read as a metaphor for books, since it explains the existence of the ‘Troposphere’: a fourth dimensional realm of consciousness in which people can hop into the minds of others, experiencing all of their thoughts and feelings. Quantum theory in these two novels reveals a universe which is malleable

4 David

Mitchell, Ghostwritten (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 337, 356, 375. Thomas, The End of Mr. Y (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 403.

5 Scarlett

198  R. HOLLAND

and mysterious, but also one which is subjective—to the extent that human consciousness is the primary creative agent. This is not entanglement, then, where the human agent is understood as being a part of the reality of the material universe, but a rehashing of the subject/object divide in which the sort of conscious subject associated with novel writing creates a world built from quantum objects which it then transcends and reflects upon. Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997) follows a different model to the reflective one evinced by Mitchell and Thomas’s texts, despite the fact that it, too, draws relativizing conclusions from the insights of quantum mechanics, as well as suggesting that humans can manipulate material reality. In Gut Symmetries, ‘ghost universes symmetrical with ours’ hover around the edge of the text, and ‘history is not unalterable’.6 The fact that ‘at the sub-atomic level, our seeming-solid material world dissolves into wave-like patterns of probabilities’ (p. 161) means that yachts containing human passengers can temporarily disappear off the face of the earth, and characters are able to create their own reality by moving themselves along their own wave function, to the extent that they are able to exist after death (possibly in an alternative universe with links to ours). However, where this text differs from the two outlined above (and from the mode of conflict which characterizes the third culture novel) is in the fact that the novel itself does not seek or purport to epitomize the model of science that it presents, and neither does it engage in competition with it. Instead, quantum physics is used to help break down various binaries (man/woman, mind/matter, science/religion, life/death) that classical physics is seen to have maintained, binaries which the novel does not then attempt to reconstruct or transcend. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), the science of ecology is used to help outline, through the story of an immense swarm of monarch butterflies that have inexplicably appeared on a hillside in the Appalachians, the dangers of climate change. Scientific evidence, though, is only one way of convincing people to cut their carbon emissions, and scientists need to be encouraged to get passionate and spread their message as much as poor, uneducated Americans need shaking out of their denial. Dellarobia Turnbow, the young mother who initially discovers the butterflies, has as much to contribute to the debate as do the

6 Jeanette

Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta, 1997), 15, 160.

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199

ecologists camping on her farm, who, in their own words, are ‘only scientists’.7 In response to the entomologist Ovid Byron’s suggestion that people such as Dellarobia’s husband are cowardly (‘a person can face up to a difficult truth, or run away from it’), she argues that ‘these positions get assigned to people […] If I’m the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up some gas’ (p. 445). In this novel, a variety of discourses—science, religion, politics, economics, class—are relevant where the question of addressing climate change is concerned, and they often clash, but Kingsolver suggests that until we recognize and embrace the entangled nature of these discourses little or no progress will be made. Dellarobia decides, when considering the different perspectives of the ecologists, who want to keep the hillside as it is so that they can observe the butterflies, and her mother-inlaw, who wants to bring tourists to see the butterflies in order to raise money and save the farm, that ‘there were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that mattered. With such reluctance to converse, one with the other, practically without a common language’ (p. 209). Flight Behaviour, though, is not a manifesto for why the novel is the right medium for providing this common language, and nor does it try to reserve a unique or separate space for literature that would somehow transcend these conflicts. Rather, Flight Behaviour presents the conflicts as being entangled within society, and entangled within its own pages, so that the novel becomes a part of the phenomena it describes. If the third culture novel becomes less conflicted, then, it may well cease to be as concerned with reaching and constituting the separate, aerial, third space which mirrors the scientific ‘gaze from afar’, meaning that a new set of definitions may be required in order to conceptualize it. Either way, changes in science will continue to necessitate changes in the novel, which, as the evidence from its history suggests, will carry on adapting to accommodate these circumstances. Whether the adapted and adapting space that the novel provides in the wake of future scientific transformations is a transcendent third space, an entangled numberless one, or a case of both existing side by side, literature will continue to offer a valuable and unique medium through which to explore and interrogate the implications, both of science and of itself.

7 Barbara

Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (London: Faber, 2013), 315.

200  R. HOLLAND

Bibliography Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Byatt, A. S. 2003. A Whistling Woman. London: Vintage. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2013. Flight Behaviour. London: Faber. Mitchell, David. 1999. Ghostwritten. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Powers, Richard. 2007. The Echo Maker. London: Vintage. Thomas, Scarlett. 2007. The End of Mr. Y. Edinburgh: Canongate. Winterson, Jeanette. 1997. Gut Symmetries. London: Granta.

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202  Bibliography

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204  Bibliography Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin. Franzen, Jonathan in interview with Stephen J. Burn. 2010. The Art of Fiction No. 207. The Paris Review, 195. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/the-art-of-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen. Accessed 15 April 2014. Franzen, Jonathan. 2002. How To Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial. Franzen, Jonathan. 2012. The Telegraph, January 29. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-aredamaging-society.html. Accessed 8 November 2014. Fuller, David, and Patricia Waugh, eds. 1999. The Arts and Sciences of Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Shaun, and Jonathan Shear, eds. 1999. Models of the Self. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Gane, Mike. 2008. Conflicting Visions of Code-Work In Recent Social Science Fiction. Information, Communication & Society 11, no. 6: 799–815. Gates, David. 2001. “The Corrections”: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic. New York Times Online, September 9. http://www.nytimes. com/2001/09/09/books/review/09GATESTW.html. Accessed 15 April 2014. Gilbert, Francis. 1998. Invasion of the Fusionists. New Statesman: Commentary Section, September 18. Gottschall, Jonathan, and David Sloane Wilson, eds. 2005. The Literary Animal. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2008. Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, Stephen Jay. 2004. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities. London: Vintage. Greaney, Michael. 2006. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregory, Michael S. 1980. The Science-Humanities Program (NEXA) at San Francisco State University: The “Two Cultures” Reconsidered. Leonardo 13: 294–299. Groes, Sebastian, ed. 2009. Ian McEwan. London: Continuum. Hawkins, Ty. 2010. Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of “Refuge”. College Literature 37 no. 4: 61–87. Head, Dominic. 2007. Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Head, Dominic. 2008. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

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206  Bibliography Lezard, Nicholas. 2001. Atom Bomb. The Guardian, Review Section, February 24. Lodge, David. 2003. Consciousness and the Novel. London: Penguin. Lustig, T. J., and James Peacock, eds. 2013. Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. New York: Routledge. Marr, Andrew. 2000. We’re All Doomed…. Observer, Review Section, May 21. McCann, John. 2010. Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times. Oxford: Peter Lang. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Mengham, Rod. 1999. An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, Gerald. 2011. Gay Science and (no) Laughing Matter: The Eternal Returns of Michel Houellebecq. French Studies 25: 45–60. Moraru, Christian. 2008. The Genomic Imperative: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Utopian Studies 19, no. 2: 265–283. Morrison, Jago. 2003. Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge. Mosca, Valeria. 2013. Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Other Modernities 9: 38–52. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83: 435–450. Neilson, Jim. 1998. Dirtying Our Hands: An Introduction to the Fiction of Richard Powers. Review of Contemporary Fiction 1, no. 18: 7–12. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ortega, Francisco, and Fernando Vidal. 2013. Brains in Literature/Literature in the Brain. Poetics Today 34, no. 3: 328–360. Payne, Michael, and John Schad, eds. 2003. Life.After.Theory. London: Continuum. Poole, Ralph J. 2008. Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics. The Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3: 263–283. Pordzik, Ralph. 2012. The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction. Utopian Studies 23, no. 1: 142–161. Quinn, Anthony. 2000. One Thinks, the Other Doesn’t. The New York Times Book Review, November 19. Rorty, Richard. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roth, Marco. 2009. The Rise of the Neuronovel. n+1, 8. Ruston, Sharon, ed. 2008. Literature and Science. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Salisbury, Laura. 2010. Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue. Textual Practice 24: 883–912.

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Index

0-9 9/11, 17, 152, 158, 182 A Amis, Martin, 2, 23, 24, 28, 39–47, 52, 58, 83, 135, 155, 179, 180 Einstein’s Monsters, 23, 39 The Information, 14, 28, 39–47, 83 London Fields, 40 Arnold, Matthew, 5 Atwood, Margaret, 2, 28, 29, 74, 83, 84, 119, 120, 122, 136–138, 142–148, 192 Oryx and Crake, 29, 119–121, 136–138, 140, 142–145, 147 B Badiou, Alain, 29, 55, 85, 87–89, 93, 98–101, 104, 108, 112, 113 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1 Barad, Karen, 194–196 Bohr, Neils, 92, 194, 195

Boyd, William, 2, 28, 47–52, 55, 56, 58, 135, 168 Brazzaville Beach, 28, 47, 48, 52, 56–58, 84, 191 Ordinary Thunderstorms, 56 British Humanist Association, the, 6 Brockman, John, 3, 16, 17, 22, 37, 39, 47, 152 Byatt, A.S. A Whistling Woman, 15, 196 C Cantor, Georg, 89, 104, 112 Chalmers, David, 70, 76 Cox, Brian, 6, 8 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 159 D Damasio, Antonio, 22, 170, 171 Dawkins, Richard, 7, 9, 22, 163, 167, 177 decade of the brain, the, 62, 67

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 R. Holland, Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4

209

210  Index Dennett, Daniel, 9, 22, 64, 65, 70, 79, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 18, 85, 95, 102

I imaginative sympathy, 71, 74, 121– 123, 132–134, 145, 164, 165, 167, 172, 191

E Eagleton, Terry, 54–56, 58, 179 The Event of Literature, 54, 55 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 122 Esposito, Roberto, 123, 136, 137, 147 Extence, Gavin, 195 The Universe versus Alex Woods, 15, 193

J Jameson, Fredric, 123

F Foucault, Michel, 18, 93–95, 97 Franzen, Jonathan, 2, 21, 28, 74, 84, 121, 122, 124–129, 131–133, 137, 142, 148, 161 The Corrections, 14, 29, 120, 123–127, 129, 132, 133 G Gould, Stephen J., 11, 12 H Heisenberg, Werner, 92 Houellebecq, Michel, 2, 29, 83–85, 87–90, 92–95, 97–99, 101, 102, 108–116, 119, 124, 135, 161 Atomised, 14, 29, 87, 89–91, 94–97, 99–102, 107, 109, 110, 112–114, 192 The Possibility of an Island, 29, 87, 102, 107–109, 111, 113, 135, 160, 192

K Kant, Immanuel, 57, 89, 103 Kingsolver, Barbara, 199 Flight Behaviour, 15, 16, 198, 199 L Lacan, Jacques, 18, 94, 95 Latour, Bruno, 154 Leavis, F.R., 5, 36–38 Lodge, David, 2, 28, 62, 63, 66, 75–82, 99, 135 Consciousness and the Novel, 64, 75, 77 Nice Work, 79, 80 Thinks…, 28, 62, 66, 75–82, 85, 119, 191 M March for Science, 193 McEwan, Ian Atonement, 154, 168 The Child in Time, 151, 158 Enduring Love, 61, 151, 168, 171 Saturday, 29, 84, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 160–163, 165–169, 171–173, 175, 180, 182, 183, 186, 192 Solar, 29, 84, 151, 152, 155, 172–177, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 192

Index

Meillassoux, Quentin, 29, 87–89, 102–106, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 135 Milton, John, 42, 43, 179 Paradise Lost, 42, 43 Mitchell, David, 2, 24, 197, 198 Ghostwritten, 2, 15, 16, 196, 197 N Nagel, Thomas, 64 Neuronovel, the, 27, 28, 61, 62, 82–84, 154 New Atheism, the, 8, 163 New Atheist Novel, the, 8, 9, 47, 163 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 114, 115 P Powers, Richard, 2, 28, 62, 66–69, 79, 82, 99, 122, 124, 191 The Echo Maker, 15, 191 Galatea 2.2, 28, 62, 66–72, 74, 76, 82, 85, 119, 191 S science fiction, 7, 40, 49, 83, 85, 108, 109, 119–121, 128, 137, 192, 194

  211

Science Wars, the, 5 Shaviro, Steven, 175 Snow, C.P., 3–5, 26, 35–37 Snow/Leavis controversy, the, 5, 35, 36 Sokal hoax, the, 21, 63, 95, 129 speculative realism, 19, 88, 107, 115 Stengers, Isabelle, 10, 12, 99, 102, 106, 153, 154, 172 Strawson, Galen, 65, 66 syndrome novel, the, 27, 82 T Thomas, Scarlett The End of Mr Y, 2, 15, 16, 196, 197 transcendental scientism, 6, 9, 10, 15, 17–20, 22, 26, 38, 73, 102, 132, 135, 141, 152, 162, 164, 167, 175 W Wilkes, Kathleen V., 66, 79 Wilson, Edward O., 11 Winterson, Jeanette Gut Symmetries, 2, 15, 198