Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s : Converging Realms [1 ed.] 9781443876056, 9781443812733

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Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s: Converging Realms Edited by

Márcia Lemos and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s: Converging Realms Edited by Márcia Lemos and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Márcia Lemos, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1273-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1273-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction .............................................................................................. viii Márcia Lemos and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes PART I: COLLECTING, HISTORICISING AND IMAGINING: APPROACHING SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The Collector at Home ................................................................................ 2 Alda Rodrigues “The wild breath of the forest, fragrant with bark and berry”: Signs of Nature’s History in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours ....... 15 Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves Science and Imagination in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry ............................. 31 Joana Espain PART II: SCIENCE AS A PROBLEM: KNOWLEDGE AND SUSPICION Through the Ironic Eye: Science and Scientific Experiments in Marcin Wolski’s Satirical Dystopia Laboratory No. 8 .......................... 46 Andrzej Sáawomir Kowalczyk “No man can put all the world in a book”: On the Concept of Scientific Representation in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian ....... 62 Pedro Almeida and Inês Evangelista Marques Scientific Expression in Thomas Pynchon’s Work ................................... 75 Ana Rull Suárez

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PART III: CONSILIENCE AND “THE TWO CULTURES” The Presence of Science in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Cosmic Vision: An Ephemeral Creation of Order out of Chaos ......................................... 90 Mª Luz González-Rodríguez Science Imparted by Literature: A Meeting of “the Two Cultures” in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction ............................................................................ 104 Alexandra Cheira The Idea is the Thing: Science Plays after Copenhagen.......................... 116 Teresa Botelho PART IV: “MEDICAL LITERATURE”: EXCHANGES AND CONVERGENCE The Fantasy of Ectogenesis in Interwar Britain: Texts and Contexts ...... 136 Aline Ferreira Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Dr Lewis R. Yealland: The Literary Representation of Scientific Discourse in the Deployment of Power ...... 155 David Griffiths Speaking with Angels: Hell and Madness in António Lobo Antunes’ Conhecimento do Inferno (A Health Humanities Perspective) ................ 173 Ricardo Rúben Rato Rodrigues The Paradox of Reading Autistic Fiction ................................................ 188 Makai Péter Kristóf Contributors ............................................................................................. 205 Index ........................................................................................................ 210

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the following institutions: CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation, and AngloPortuguese Studies); the Portuguese research agency FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; the Department of Anglo-American Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Universidade do Porto. This volume was carried out within the research line Relational Forms: Intertextual and Inter-Arts Dynamics in the Cultures of Ireland and Britain, in the framework of project PEst-OE/ELT/UI4097/2011, hosted by CETAPS and funded by FCT. We would like to warmly thank the contributors to this volume for their stimulating essays, as well as for their patience and unceasing willingness to respond to our queries and requests. We also wish to express our gratitude to the editors of CSP for their advice and support. Finally, we would like to thank Rui Carvalho Homem and Jorge Bastos da Silva not only for their assistance in the initial editorial process, but also for their generous encouragement and advice, as well as unfailing support.

INTRODUCTION MÁRCIA LEMOS AND MIGUEL RAMALHETE GOMES

The relations between literature and the sciences in Europe and North America, during the period ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, have been a complex and fraught process. These exchanges have proved to be multiple, contradictory, and notoriously marked by enthusiasm, scepticism, gradual or forceful separations, and attempted convergences, in an understandable manifestation of discomfort at the perceived rift between competing claims for representing reality. The extreme specialisation characteristic of scientific discourse and practice has also meant that well-intentioned though almost inevitably amateur or semi-professional attempts at bridging this gap have often been met with derision and hostility, since these unwittingly tend to break disciplinary conventions, while, in many cases, relying on popularisations and oversimplifications of the knowledge produced by other fields. Indeed, to attempt a narrative of the successive positions which have been adopted from within literature and the sciences in relation to one another risks vast simplifications, not least because it may suggest a consensus where there is none. For every call for convergence, there will be a lament for the scientific rigour lost in the process or for the perceived cluttering of scientific facts in imaginative works. When looking at the more or less recent history of these exchanges, one should perhaps also admit that, for the most part, it has been a oneway street. Moments of recognition by scientists of the epistemological role of works of the imagination are sporadic and underdeveloped.1 That these engagements are felt to be lacking, and that they seem to be expected from the part of the producers of scientific knowledge, is ironically attested by the abundant circulation of (often counterfeit) inspirational quotations attributed to famous scientists. Such second careers as

 1

There are exceptions, of course. In this volume alone, Joana Espain’s contribution stands out as the work of a physicist who makes use of her scientific background for her analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

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involuntary repositories of self-help wisdom strongly suggest that statements like these, or perhaps their more elevated equivalents, would be expected from scientific authorities—so much that they are eagerly received, when emitted or redistributed, and casually invented, when they are felt to be missing. Literary authors, on the other hand, have never stopped engaging with scientific topics and representations, be it for utopian, didactic, emulative, critical, satirical, or other purposes. The objects of engagement have also been various, from the impenetrability of scientific jargon and the psychological idiosyncrasies of scientists to the perceived dangers of scientific discoveries and the potentially liberating application of technology to social life. This collection of essays thus aims to respond to the strong interest that the relations between the discourses of literature and the discourses of science have obtained in areas of study defined by interdisciplinary concerns.2 The work collected here, while acknowledging the implications of the arts and the humanistic disciplines for scientific research, is firmly focused on the cultural significance of scientific discoveries and methods, and especially on the manifold representations of science and scientists in literature and the arts, either as a central device of the artistic object or as a significant contextual element. This collection chiefly concerns the twentieth century—although it includes forays into the nineteenth century and explorations of continuities into the twenty-first century. Indeed, there is a strong rationale for beginning this collection in the mid-nineteenth century. The last century and a half has been a period rife with successive scientific revolutions,

 2

For a general introduction to an increasingly vibrant field, see Bruce Clarke, Manuela Rossini, eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Sharon Ruston, ed., Literature and Science (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008); Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave, 2014). For more historically specific studies see, among many others: Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); John Holmes, ed., Science and Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Martin Willis, ed., Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2016).

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from the work of Darwin and, later on, Einstein, to the lasting impact of developments in the social sciences, from Marx, Freud, and Durkheim to Claude Lévi-Strauss and beyond. Bearing in mind the widespread cultural import of such developments, one can perceive a noticeable paradigm shift in how science came to be understood and artistically represented from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. A noteworthy example of such a shift can be found in the history of literary criticism itself, as it alternated between periods of enthusiastic adoption of scientific methods in the study of literature and the arts, often with varying results, and periods of backlash and extensive scepticism as to the usefulness of scientific methods in the humanities. The impact of such moments in the history of literary criticism has been considerable and we are nowadays still the heirs of movements such as positivism, dialectic materialism, and structuralism, not forgetting the currently popular interest in the uses of neuroscience and eco-criticism for the study of literature and the arts, which some of the contributions in this collection explore. These convergences and the academic as well as popular interest in them are offset against a nonetheless rather marked divide between the sciences and the humanities. The divide between “two cultures,” to use the influential expression put forward by C. P. Snow in 1959,3 is not only disciplinary and methodological, but it also affects the material aspects of the production of research. Nevertheless, in a discussion of rifts and gaps, it is useful to draw a distinction in terms of what exactly is being said to diverge from or converge with the sciences in these essays. Indeed, although the sharp partition between the humanities and the sciences is a disciplinary fact, and an occasionally lamented one, it is not the primary focus of this collection. The majority of texts discussed in this volume are literary texts, from prose fiction to drama and poetry, which are normally placed alongside contextual documents that stem from the humanities while including attempts to popularise science or conceptualise its relations with both literature and the humanities. The chief object of these essays is therefore the relation between literature (and other cultural practices) and the sciences, yet the relation between the academic humanities and science is often mostly a backdrop to these analyses. This constitutes an unequal pairing, in that, within the bounds of this volume, literary scholars discuss the exchanges between their object of study, not a discipline but the object of a discipline, and the disciplinary field of the

 3

See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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sciences. It is a pairing, however, that has obviously merited and continues to merit attention. The essays in this collection wish, therefore, not only to contribute towards bridging this gap, but also to add to the burgeoning field of the study of exchanges between literature and science, starting with the midnineteenth century and then traversing twentieth-century and twenty-firstcentury fiction, poetry and drama in an endeavour to track the different and shifting ways in which literature has approached the topic of scientific discoveries, practices, and methods. The collection is thus divided into four parts which trace different aspects of an on-going process. The first three chapters focus on practices and tendencies taking place throughout the second half of the nineteenth century which either preserve more traditional arrangements of scientific knowledge—the cabinet of curiosities, the genre of nature writing—or produce intimations of the later and more wide-ranging conceptual revolutions characteristic of some twentieth-century science, as one of the chapters argues is the case with Emily Dickinson’s poetry. This part is hence marked by a sense of liminality, of standing historically halfway between tendencies which take residual, dominant and emergent forms, to use Raymond Williams’ terminology.4 All three essays therefore track a moment of dwindling indefiniteness of borders between the sciences and literature (as well as other cultural practices), a set of borders which would rapidly become more distinct and rigid as one enters the twentieth century. In the first chapter, Alda Rodrigues focuses on the role of collecting in the context of human lives. She argues against the traditional distinctions either between objects in a collection and objects used every day, or between collectors and people who do not own formal collections. With the help of the concepts of house museum and cabinet of curiosities, Rodrigues interestingly contends that a life can be described as a collection and concludes by setting the connection between collection and life against the connection between collection and the awareness of mortality. Isabel Alves turns to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850, abridged 1887), the first book of nature writing published by an American woman. A student of natural history, influenced by the work of Alexander von Humboldt, and a persistent walker in the environs of Otsego Lake in New York, Cooper’s book is structured in journal-like entries and according to a seasonal basis, including detailed descriptions and

 4

See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-127.

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perceptive notes on local plant geography, on meteorological phenomena and on ornithology, pioneering a road that writers such as Celia Thaxter, Mary Austin, and Sarah Orne Jewett would follow. Alves’ stimulating proposal is that, in a time of global conversation about environmental issues and the disappearance of species, it is inspiring to return to Rural Hours and see a territory in which Susan Cooper understands the genre of natural history as a means of conveying passion for a specific place, and a way of affecting readers’ environmental sensibilities. Joana Espain, on the other hand, shows how, in the second half of the nineteenth century—a century marked by a strategy founded in logic and reason, with a strong appetite for the possession of more certainty, but also by the frequent coexistence of articles on science and poems in popular magazines and periodicals—, Emily Dickinson’s poetry frequently expresses a yearning for the unobtainable, asking not only “what do we know” but “how do we know.” Yet, as Espain shrewdly argues, while having this continuous inquiry in common with the science of her time, Dickinson seemed also to share the logic and imagination of the abstract in modern science. Indeed, Espain’s claim is that the raw material of some of Dickinson’s poems, and the logical rigor with which they are moulded, may be linked to some of the scientific knowledge of the twentieth century, which in a broad conceptual revolution forced a rethinking of the abstract concept that spread to all areas of knowledge. The rethinking of theoretical physics, for example, accompanied by a humble observation of the collapse of the previous solid formal structures, with its full awareness of the failure of the scientific language formerly used, can be brought into proximity with Dickinson’s awareness of the failure of language. It seems therefore important to ask whether it is possible to observe in Dickinson’s poetry a methodology and imagery that is close to the conceptual problems posed by modern science. Espain’s underlying proposition is that, on the border of conceptual structures, closer to human imagination, and fully aware of the failure of their own languages, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and modern science may have dialogued through a gap of one century. The second part of the volume turns to literary representations of science and scientists in different contexts. These range from a subversive satire produced in a totalitarian Eastern-European regime (the irony of which goes on to produce further meanings after that regime’s demise) to the profound conceptual revisions characteristic of North-American postmodernism epitomised by authors such as Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. The representations of science discussed in this part are marked by a problematisation both of science and of its representation,

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often taking the form of suspicion directed at the dangers of a dehumanising knowledge at the service of power. In the first chapter of this section, Andrzej Kowalczyk perceptively examines the use of irony with regard to the theme of science and scientific experiment in Laboratory No. 8 (1977/1980), a satirical dystopia by Polish writer and journalist Marcin Wolski. Although irony functions as a major structural device in the novel, its role exceeds purely satirical or entertaining aims. In fact, as Kowalczyk argues, the historical context of communism is not the only background against which Wolski’s message can be read. On the contrary, when analysed several decades after the demise of the totalitarian system in Eastern Europe, Laboratory No. 8 draws attention to more universal ontological and epistemological questions, so that scientific research becomes a prism through which to see the status of homo sapiens in the world. Kowalczyk concludes by suggesting that the novel’s final part, where the narrator deconstructs the fictional reality, encourages the reader to ponder upon his/her own world in a manner evocative of Romantic irony, understood as a mode of existence rather than a literary device. Pedro Almeida and Inês Evangelista Marques fascinatingly chart and discuss some of the major trends regarding the role of representation and of discursive models in science through an approach that emphasizes the use of key-concepts derived from literary theory. They ground their reflection on Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian. In the novel, Judge Holden, the grand character of this Western narrative, is the prototype of the positivist man who, according to Auguste Comte, endeavours to discover the laws of nature by the “combined use of reasoning and observation.” If it is true that the Judge’s enterprise is motivated by a creative energy and the need to use “knowledge as a tool of power” (Nietzsche), Marques and Almeida maintain that we cannot overlook the fact that the act of representing—and, therefore, creating— implies a necessary destruction of the original, so that one is forced to ask what then the true relation between representation and reality itself is. Ana Rull Suárez concludes this section by showing how Thomas Pynchon also explores the scientific world of the nineteenth century from an ironic postmodern point of view in his novel Against the Day (2006), reflecting the hope of those people who lived through great scientific discoveries (those associated with electromagnetism or the search for the means to produce energy). As Rull thoroughly explains, Pynchon explores the threats these discoveries pose for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the form of weapons and machines for mass destruction, revealing the marvellous effects of science that precede modern means of

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communication but also a sense of disappointment towards science in a world that is falling apart. Rull’s chapter offers a comprehensive example of how Pynchon uses various scientific, technical and mathematical elements to create a plot with profound implications, though not resolved in a tragic way, thanks to the postmodern irony he employs throughout the novel. Concentrating on the means used to heal or, at least, lessen the rift between some scientific practices and literary culture, as presented and addressed in the previous section, the chapters of the third part of the book direct their attention to attempts to bring about some form of convergence or, as Edward N. Wilson has put it, consilience between the two cultures famously separated by C. P. Snow. These attempts include the production of an ephemeral cosmological order in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poetry, but they are also brought into the terms of a more formal discussion of how both cultures may be, if not united, at least more closely integrated, namely in analyses of A. S. Byatt’s fiction and of the recent interest in “science plays,” as introduced by Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, in which the scientific idea in question is made to shape the dramatic experience. Introducing the third part of the volume, Mª Luz González Rodríguez discusses the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987) and explains that a recurrent motif in her poetry is the confrontation between the rational and the imaginative. In MacEwen’s work, the world is depicted as a universe in continuous rearrangement; myth and reality are linked to history and human ambivalence, the microcosm to the macrocosm, and the local to the universal. As González opportunely points out, while mostly studied within the mythical and mystical traditions, MacEwen’s use of scientific themes has been overlooked. Cosmology and theoretical physics often fuse in her poems together with her insistence that uncontrolled consumerism and technology should be bounded by ethics. González thus elucidates the links between MacEwen’s humanist and scientific interests, and explains how, through the image of dance, as a symbol of synthesis, the author attempts to make concrete a personal cosmic view. Alexandra Cheira, in turn, focuses on A. S. Byatt’s lifelong interest in science, which is embedded in Byatt’s work and spans both her critical work and fiction. In her critical capacity, Byatt wrote the article “Fiction informed by Science” for Nature in 2005. On the one hand, Byatt has explained that the reason why some of her fiction is informed by science is that, as a reader, her favourite writers were the ones who were actually interested in the scientific work of their time. On the other hand, Byatt has

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methodically explained the way by which such diverse scientific interests like mathematics, the nature of perception, theories of language and learning, evolutionary biology, genetics and neuroscience have shaped her Frederica quartet in the sense they are embodied in these novels’ scientists. Focusing mainly on the last volume of the quartet, A Whistling Woman, Cheira’s thought-provoking chapter attempts a synthesis by discussing not only Byatt’s views but also the views of Byatt’s literary and scientific critics. Teresa Botelho concludes this part of the discussion by recognising that the last two decades have witnessed a renewed dialogue on the possibilities of consilience, or unity of knowledge, between the sciences and the humanities. Her chapter brilliantly discusses the difficulties and promises of these interactions and identifies in contemporary drama a fertile field where interdependence and mutual stimulation have been particularly visible. Botelho concentrates on a relatively recent trend in “science plays,” introduced by Michael Frayn’s ground-breaking Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in the last decade of the twentieth century, where the dramatic experience is shaped so as to enact the scientific idea itself. She therefore discusses two postCopenhagen/Arcadia texts—Crispin Whittell’s 2003 Darwin in Malibu and Caryl Churchill’s 2002 A Number—, analysing how, by using metatheatrical structures, they involve audiences in experiences that simulate the scientific enterprise, and considers the role of the “play of the scientific idea” in contemporary artistic dialogues between science and the humanities. Finally, the fourth part of the volume targets a specific scientific discipline which has traditionally shown itself to be highly porous in relation to literature and the humanities, namely the medical sciences. Operating as they do with the human body and the human mind, the medical sciences have been a long-established object of disturbing transgressions, ethical reflections and fantastic speculations, as the first chapter of this final part, dedicated to fantasies of extra-uterine gestation, amply proves. These preoccupations are then redirected, for the remainder of the section, to representations of neural disorders, as well as of several methods, many of them misguided, used to treat or minimise their symptoms, as they appear in the fictional work of Patricia Barker, António Lobo Antunes, and, finally, in novels with autistic protagonists. The inevitable reliance of both symptoms and treatments on various forms of language use (including its opposite, mutism) brings to light a special link with the creative strategies and cognitive procedures employed in poetic and fictional language, in what can be seen as an actual instance of

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consilience at work. The span covered by these final chapters—from neurasthenia and autism to psychiatric and psychoanalytic practices— should serve to convincingly argue that consilience is not something to be measured in absolutes but in degrees; it is a view of the sciences and the humanities that can already be found partially in place in specific areas. This part aims, therefore, to contribute towards critically extending that integration through the discussion of key literary representations of science, its promises, and its problems. Opening this final section, Aline Ferreira thoroughly investigates the concept of ectogenesis or extracorporeal gestation and the debate that accrued around it in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, especially as it was discussed in the “Today and Tomorrow” series of books and the circle of intellectuals associated with it. She begins by paying particular attention to British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), which launched the series. She then turns to some contemporary fictional depictions of ectogenesis, clearly influenced by the collection mentioned above, and which directly intervened in the debate around the development of foetuses in artificial wombs. Although Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was the most famous fictional rendition of the notion of extra-uterine gestation, there were many other, lesser known texts. Victorian Journalist Fred T. Jane’s “The Incubated Girl” (1896) is an earlier example as is Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926), a novel that also discusses the concept of ectogenesis. Rebecca West’s “Man and Religion” (1932), in turn, ends with a version of a sex-role reversal society, brought about by a number of scientific discoveries that have provided women with great physical vigour, a longer life span and allowed gestation to take place outside the womb. All of these texts can be seen as centrally engaged in a critical dialogue with some of the books of the “Today and Tomorrow” series. Ferreira thus examines some of the vexed issues surrounding the fantasy of extra-uterine gestation. David Griffiths, on the other hand, explores the portrayal of the two main historically-inspired medico-scientific figures in Patricia Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Dr W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) and Dr Lewis R. Yealland (1884-1954). Pat Barker, anchoring her depiction on an artful mixture of carefully documented research and poetic intuition, presents these two neurologists as vehicles through which normalising power is deployed by the reigning authorities against the backdrop of a particularly delicate moment of the Great War (1914-18). Griffiths convincingly demonstrates how the contrasting approaches adopted by Dr Rivers and Dr Yealland towards the clinical treatment of neurasthenic soldiers in their charge embody, in Foucauldian terms, differing but not incompatible

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manifestations of the way in which disciplinary power is deployed within society. Medico-scientific discourse, albeit at the time largely experimental in the field of mental illness and war-related neuroses, was fully endorsed by the State at this juncture of WWI, and its application became an efficient means of normalising individuals who manifested resistance to or non-alignment with the prevailing patriarchal value system. Adopting a health humanities perspective, Ricardo Rúben Rato Rodrigues also focuses on the fraught issue of psychiatry, by describing how António Lobo Antunes’ novel Conhecimento do Inferno brings insights of a discontented psychiatrist, criticising psychiatric institutions and highlighting inherent problems and limitations to this medical profession. Through an exploration of memory and surreal images with the roles of doctors and patients intertwined, Lobo Antunes is shown to investigate concepts of self, identity and madness. This is achieved by recurring themes in his oeuvre, which appear again here—uncertainty of memory, construction of a complex referential diegetic system and formation of a traumatic/traumatised self. Rodrigues’ enlightening chapter aims to analyse the novel in terms of its significance as “counternarrative,” emphasising the importance of literature for the study of mental illness. Lobo Antunes presents a dispersed “self,” a conscious construction of the “diseased-subject,” bringing into question the role of psychiatry as the “master-narrative” and justifying current research on the necessity of humanising medical professionals and services, by highlighting the vital role literature can have in mapping out difficulties and forcing an evolution in medical ethos. Concluding the volume, Makai Péter Kristóf begins by arguing that the fellow-feeling generated by literary characters is without a doubt one of literature’s most engaging features. Reading fiction exercises our innate capacity for empathy and mentalisation. In cognitive aesthetics, the “paradox of fiction” was constructed to denaturalise and investigate our empathetic responses to fiction in the context of the “problem of other minds,” discussing so-called theory-theory and simulation theory to explain how we navigate the social world. In this chapter, Makai explores narrative empathy by focusing on novels with autistic protagonists. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that the mirror neuron systems and neural networks for simulation are excited when responding emotionally to fiction, and they are also affected in autism. As Makai interestingly argues, if we simulate the feelings of other characters via the enactive imagination, then reading fictional accounts of autism highlights the complexity of neurological difference and social cognition by representing

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people who have difficulty processing sociobiological cues for empathy. His chapter therefore sketches out the implications of this in the reading of autism fiction. In short, this collection of essays aims to expand our understanding of two different but converging realms across diverse historical periods, critical frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. While scholars from the literary field will find much to appreciate in the thirteen chapters that make up the volume, we believe that the variety of topics and approaches put forward by the contributors to the volume will certainly make it useful and engaging to a wider, transdisciplinary readership.

Works Cited Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Holmes, John, ed., Science and Modern Poetry: New Directions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Ruston, Sharon, ed. Literature and Science. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Sleigh, Charlotte. Literature and Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Whitworth, Michael H.. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Willis, Martin. Literature and Science, London: Palgrave, 2014. —. ed. Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2016. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

PART I COLLECTING, HISTORICISING, AND IMAGINING: APPROACHING SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE COLLECTOR AT HOME ALDA RODRIGUES UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA

In the study of collecting, there is a long tradition of defining what a collection is by trying to displace it from everyday life. From this perspective, a collection should be described as a group of things which, because their normal use is suspended, stand apart from other objects.1 In this context, collectors acquire a status which clearly separates them from non-collectors. They are seen as engaged in activities that are uncommon to the vast majority of people. In this essay, my aim is to try to reunite the several dimensions of human life that this kind of discourse artificially separates. I will argue not only that collections are part of everyday life, but also that we need to dissolve the above-mentioned distinctions in order to reach a proper understanding not only of people, but also of collecting activities. The concepts of house museum and cabinet of curiosities will be used in order to demonstrate that a life can be compared to a collection in the sense that both a life and a collection need a unified description with reference to a person in order to be correctly described. The concept of house museum has a key role in my argumentation for two main reasons. First, because it is a museum which started out as a house, and, consequently, as a space in which its owner actually lived every day. Second, because every house museum preserves a collection, even in the cases in which the owner did not own a group of objects formally described as such. These two reasons will show that the concept of collection we should be taking into account is simply a group of things which are part of somebody’s life, and also that nobody can live without making collections, whether these are formal or merely conceptual. Around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, several American tycoons invested a part of the fortunes they had acquired from professional activities in building houses in order to display their wealth. In some cases, they also became famous collectors



1 See Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

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and those buildings were organized in order to display their collections, which then became a symbol of their wealth and power. Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), who built and lived in the house in which we can now visit the Frick collection, is a good example. The model for these collectors seems to have been the houses of the European aristocracy, in which every object (paintings, family heirlooms, jewellery, crockery, cutlery, decorative pieces, furniture, etc.) was preserved as a feature of family identity passed on to the descendants. The objects these Americans collected had the same diversity, as if they were paradoxically trying to impress an aristocratic aura on the wealth they had acquired professionally (i.e., in a non-aristocratic way). The Wallace Collection, which can be visited in London, was regarded by many of these American collectors as an example to emulate. Some of them, including Frick, even managed to buy objects from this collection.2 Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) can be included in this group of rich American collectors, even though her financial capacity cannot be compared to that of Henry Frick, J.P. Morgan or William Randolph Hearst, other famous collectors. The money she had was inherited both from her father and her husband. The formal beginning of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection was in 1896—when she bought a self-portrait by Rembrandt. In 1898, when she had freer access to the money of her inheritance, she started working on the project of the building that was to become her house museum. The collector worked closely with the architect, and together they came to a unique result. The house has often been described as a building turned inside out because, when seen from the inside courtyard, the building looks like the Venetian palazzo Stewart Gardner used to stay in when she travelled to Venice. Furthermore, whereas other museum buildings of the time remind us of temples or courthouses, from the outside Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum looks like a box of yellow bricks. The collector moved into the house which we now know as her museum in 1903 and she lived there during her last 21 years, while still buying objects for her collection—she died when she was 84. During these 21 years, the building could be visited by the general public—it was open around 20 days a year, even though a few rooms were closed off. The house, therefore, was a museum when Isabella Stewart Gardner was still living there and she used the museum’s rooms for everyday activities

 2

Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 75.

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(writing, praying, listening to music, meeting friends, etc.). Her life took place in the museum, among the objects of her collection. The objects on display in the museum have very different natures, and some of them, strictly speaking, are not works of art. The collector travelled considerably all her life before the formal beginning of her collection; she kept journals in which she wrote comments and saved travel souvenirs (such as photographs, tickets, dry leaves, etc.). In the house, these personal objects are exhibited alongside the most valuable art, like works by Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer (one of her most valuable paintings was The Concert, by Vermeer, which was stolen in 1990 with other important works in a famous heist). Other objects on display are tiles, mosaics, sculptures, fragments of historical buildings, a sarcophagus, letters, rare books, autographs, newspaper clippings, fabrics, lace, jewellery, writing materials: more than 2,500 objects, from Ancient Egypt to Matisse. Simply put, in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum collection we find the things she used and gathered during her life. Art, personal objects or souvenirs are exhibited on the same level; there are no clear distinctions between them because there were no such distinctions for Stewart Gardner. The building is divided in different rooms which are identified by colours (Blue Room, Yellow Room), artists’ names (Veronese Room, Titian Room), artistic movements (Gothic Room), countries (Dutch Room), or types of object (Tapestry Room). The collector arranged her objects based on personal associations, or on thematic, formal, or anecdotal connections: colour patterns, connections between artists or subjects, interesting and sometimes obscure stories about the production of the artwork. For example, in the Titian Room, where the most important work is Europa by Titian, in which Jupiter appears as a white bull on the seashore and soars away with Europa over the sea, the pearly tone of Europa’s flesh and the rosy twilight in the painting are echoed by the red walls and the tones of the Persian rug. The small angel riding a scaly fish and the splash of water on the bottom left of the painting are replicated respectively, on the one hand, by a putto in a position which echoes that of the angel, on the other, by the design on an enamel platter. These two objects are placed on two eighteenth-century Venetian end tables underneath the painting. There’s also an adjacent small watercolour possibly by Van Dyck, who may have used a copy made by Rubens of Titian’s painting in order to complete it. On the wall above the end tables, Stewart Gardner placed a

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piece of silk taken from a gown designed for her, its colour and pattern complementing that of the tables.3 As opposed to what happens in more traditional museums (such as the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the British Museum, or even the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, close to this house museum), in which the organization of the objects is determined by historical periods or artistic movements, and in which there is an explicit interest in showing the results of fields of knowledge, like the History of Art, in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum the works are not organized historically. The collector’s main concern was not to educate the public. “C’est mon plaisir,” the motto inscribed above one of the doors of the museum, shows that what she wanted above all was that the public felt the same pleasure as she did when visiting her house. She wanted to share a subjective and sensory experience. About the Louvre, she commented: “[I]f I could only take hold! Some things are so wonderful—and yet badly presented […] strength of mind they do need—and taste.”4 This comment clarifies her intentions regarding the display of objects in her collection. She saw the collector’s or curator’s personal understanding of the collection as decisive in the value and meaning of its display. A part of this value would also depend on the capacity of the display to elicit the interpretative personal investment of the visitor, thereby transforming the museum visit into an important experience in the visitor’s life. Contrary to what happens in museums more closely associated with nineteenth-century taxonomies, in Stewart Gardner’s there are no clearly defined borders either between the arts or between art and life. In her museum, art and everyday life, collections and life, are inseparable. In this context, the Kantian distinction between aesthetic judgment, practical reasoning, and scientific understanding seems to lose its validity. All human capacities are summoned at the same time. The model of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities seems more appropriate to describe this type of museum not only on account of the diversity of the objects represented, but also because the organization of cabinets of curiosities was defined by their collectors’ perspective of the universe and their own place in it. Spanning approximately a century and a half, from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, the cabinet of curiosities was an interdisciplinary mixture of the natural and the

 3 For more detailed information about this collection, see Hilliard T. Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995). 4 Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 236.

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artifactual. It could hold objects like teeth, horns, seashells, feathers, precious gems or metals, but also like musical instruments, automata, optical or navigational instruments, tools, maps, paintings, ancient manuscripts, and religious relics: the wonder caused by the collection of curiosities could be scientific, aesthetic and emotional—thus without boundaries between Nature, science, art or practical knowledge. By means of cabinets of curiosities, the collector started out by trying to represent the juxtapositions found in nature, which were seen as mirroring the conjunctions decreed by God’s will. Since human production was understood as one among Nature’s features and, therefore, as part of God, one of the pieces of cabinets of curiosities was actually their own collector. The confusion of the subject and object of the gaze is a feature of cabinets of curiosities: their visitors would direct their wonder at the displayed marvels towards their proprietor—the proprietor’s labour and investment, the proprietor’s mind on the basis of the organization of the cabinet. The wonder caused by the collection became the wonder caused by the collector. Collector and collection became undistinguishable.5 When the collector was not an aristocrat, owning a cabinet of curiosities was also seen as a token of the collector’s active participation in the shaping of his own life, as opposed to a passive acceptance of a predestined place in the social structure. Therefore, the collectors defined themselves as agents and creators (of themselves, of their lives, and of their destinies) through their cabinets of curiosities. In Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum, as in other house museums, there seems to be the same place for the definition of a subject, of a subjective experience and of a life among the objects of a collection. The fact that these American collections at the turn of the nineteenth century were used by their collectors as a means to acquire and consolidate social status and importance, especially when the collectors donated their collections or built public museums in order to display them, can also be related to the social dimension of cabinets of curiosities. Carol Duncan described house museums like Isabella Stewart Gardner’s or Frick’s as the collectors’ “surrogate selves […]—which they ardently wished to keep intact and identifiable as having once belonged to them.”6 The fact that Stewart Gardner explicitly forbade any alteration in

 5 See Amy Johnson, Janelle A. Schwartz and Nhora Lucía Serrano, “On the Virtues of Cabinets and Curiosities,” in Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Intersdisciplinary Study, ed. Janelle A. Schwartz and Nhora Lucía Serrano (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 1-11. 6 Duncan, 83.

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her museum and collection shows us that she saw them as an extension of herself.7 She wanted to preserve both her vision and her presence among the objects of her collection. Stewart Gardner’s portraits—two by John Singer Sargent (1888, 1922), one by Anders Zorn (1894), and a pastel by Whistler (1886)—seem to objectively place her right among the other museum objects, as a physical thing, among the others which were part of her life. In her last portrait—a John Singer Sargent watercolour, completed two years before her death— not only does the background seem almost immaterial, but her body also appears to be dissolving into what is around her—into her house, into her collections—, as if there were really no boundaries between the subject and her objects. This reminds us that in Ancient Egypt people were buried with their personal objects and sometimes even animals and other people (servants, wives or relatives) because it was believed that these would identify them in the world of the dead. In common between ancient Egyptians and collectors there is the notion that the objects we use and the spaces we inhabit are part of us because we act and live with them; we would not be who we are without them. In sum, a collection seems to be a ramification of the collector’s embodied physical presence in the world. In this sense, since every physical being is subject to decay, it must also be related to the collector’s awareness of his/her own mortality. These collections and the museums built to house them may be described as an attempt to connect the collectors to something of lasting value, as a way of sidestepping death. (And by this I mean something as simple as leaving something behind that allows them to be remembered as having lived.) From this perspective, a collection can be described as a personal memorial. John Soane’s Museum in London is a case of a house museum in which this connection between collection and awareness of mortality is extraordinarily clear. Among other objects connected to death and tomb architecture, the house includes a sepulchral chamber with an empty

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The connection between objects, biography and identity in cases of hoarding may help us to describe this type of perception. Many hoarders claim that getting rid of the stuff that clutters their house would be like throwing out or destroying a part of their lives or of themselves. For instance, book hoarders argue that throwing out some of the books they will never be able to read would be like destroying their cultivated facet or that throwing out the cookbooks they never use would prevent them from becoming great chefs. See Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

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Egyptian sarcophagus as a centrepiece. It also has a section known as the Monk’s Parlour, with a ruined cloister and a tomb, which was added with satirical intent against the fashion for Gothic antiquarianism, but also works as a memento mori. The architect John Soane (1753-1837) showed an interest in funerary monuments all his life.8 The Dulwich Picture Gallery, both one of the most important of Soane’s projects and a fundamental piece for understanding the architecture and the display of Soane’s collections in his own house, is a museum in London which was built around the tombs of its founders (Francis Bourgeois and Noël Desenfans). In this sense, it objectively materializes a contiguous relation between collectors and collection which cannot be forgotten by any visitor to the gallery. Even though Soane was not buried in the grounds of his house museum, the empty sarcophagus in the centre of the house evokes his absence while establishing an internal rhyme with the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Moreover, the overwhelming presence in Soane’s museum of representations of ruins (sometimes of Soane’s own work as an architect, before the building was actually in ruins),9 as well as of fragments from several buildings and artworks, suggests that the architect was interested not only in the effects of the passage of time, but also in trying to come up with a strategy to subvert these effects. The representations of ruins and the presence of fragments in Soane’s museum allow for a panoramic mode of seeing that replaces a more linear understanding of time while simultaneously showing past, present and future. Depicting a building in ruins may also be a device to expose the ingenuity of both its plan and construction, by displaying its interior and exterior, its substructure and superstructure,10 thus dissolving the limitations of human vision. As parts of destroyed wholes, fragments not only evoke the past but, when used as a starting point for ideas for new buildings, also announce the future. In his house, Soane displayed the fragments he collected from his own or other architects’ buildings like a catalogue of forms or a theatre of memory that he and the architects he worked with could draw on when in search of inspiration. Through the panoramic mode of vision established both by ruins and by fragments, Soane confronted and, in a way, sabotaged the effects of time and

 8

See John Summerson, “Sir John Soane and The Furniture of Death,” Architectural Review (March 1978): 147-158. 9 As in the case of Joseph Gandy’s watercolour depicting the Bank of England in ruins, which was displayed in 1830 at the Royal Academy, while the building itself survived until the 1920s, when most of it was demolished. 10 See Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2002), 164.

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mortality. His house museum seems to have been built with the same intention. Even though John Soane died in 1837, he is still present today in this museum and in the unique collection displayed there. Soane’s bust on the Dome’s balustrade stages the taking up of a point of view from which the fragments of the collection fall into their proper perspective. Standing next to the bust, it is possible to visualize a progression from the sarcophagus in the basement to the skylight above—a vertical progression which corresponds to a passage from death to rebirth and enlightenment and which can be associated to the Masonic idea of museums.11 A similar awareness of mortality but with opposite consequences seems to be at stake in the interesting case of the artist Edgar Degas (18341917), who worked on the project of a house museum that never came to be. Degas is known mainly for his paintings but he was a collector too, and the distinctive trait of his collection was that, even though Degas also collected other artists’ works (Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier stand out among his favourites),12 he was “the most complete collector of his own work.”13 Mainly between 1895 and 1900, Degas worked on the project of building a museum in which he could display his own work alongside his collection of other artists’ work. This project, however, never materialized. Among the several possible explanations for this failure is Degas’s reaction to Gustave Moreau’s house museum. After a visit to this museum and its collection, Degas commented: “How truly sinister. You would think you were in a mausoleum […]. All those paintings jammed together made me think of a Thesaurus […].”14 The association of this house museum with death in Degas’s mind, in connection with Gustave Moreau’s absence, seems to have contributed to the rejection of the project for his own museum. One can only speculate that Degas started out with a project that was supposed to preserve his identity as an artist and collector after his death, but, unfortunately, he had second thoughts after the visit to Moreau’s museum, when he understood that there was no guaranty that

 11

See Donald Preziosi, “Art History and Museology: Rendering the Visible Legible,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 50-63. 12 For more specific information about this collection, see The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, ed. Ann Dumas (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997). 13 Gary Tinterow, “Degas’s Degases,” in The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, ed. Ann Dumas (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), 79. 14 Ann Dumas, “Degas and His Collection,” in The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, ed. Ann Dumas (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), 25.

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this would happen. The fact that Degas changed his mind consolidates the articulation between collection, house museum, and the wish for a connection to something of everlasting value and meaningfulness. After Degas’s death, his collection was auctioned and dispersed. If the artist had been able to understand and participate in the dynamics of house museums, perhaps today we could visit a museum which, by placing the artist’s work in connection with the works of the artists he most admired and collected, would greatly contribute to the understanding of his own art. Stories about destroyed or dispersed collections are not uncommon in the history of collections. Especially when the collected pieces have no immediate monetary value, the collectors’ descendants are frequently unable to understand the meaning of the collection and simply get rid of it. These cases show us that being a collection is not a feature of a group of objects per se, because it depends on a meaningful description which connects these objects among themselves and to a collector. In order to correctly understand and describe a collection we need to take into account the collector’s intentions in the context of his/her life, a connection Degas himself failed to establish when he visited Gustave Moreau’s house museum. Furthermore, reactions of disgust after visiting house museums are quite frequent. The topic of disappointment is a leitmotif in books dedicated to this subject.15 We can say with some confidence that this usually happens on account of a misguided insistence on detaching art from life. It may be related to the Kantian distinction between the human capacity for aesthetic judgment and the other faculties of the mind (such as practical reasoning and scientific understanding), which is traditionally used to establish a separation between art and everyday life. When visiting house museums, people often start out by imagining that they will have contact with the most transcendent dimension of life, that they will be able to see the mechanisms of artistic creation of the artist or writer who lived in that house, or the reasons why somebody became an important person in history, and they end up simply finding the objects the owner of the house used every day, and, if he or she was a collector, his/her formal collection. Artistic creation, however, is grounded in objects of everyday life. It would not be possible without them. Only through an integrated understanding of these two complementary dimensions can house museum



15 One good example is Anne Trubek, A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

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visitors make sense of both their visit and the homeowner’s experiences in the space where she/he lived. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum itself has often been compared to a junkshop or an attic by visitors who were unable to reconstruct the connections intended by Stewart Gardner. The fact that these visitors are unable to understand the objects as a collection goes to show that the notion of collection is not intelligible without recourse to the notion of life. The same importance of a unified description is true as far as both collections and life are concerned. In After Virtue,16 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that life can be seen as more than a sequence of individual actions and episodes if we notice that particular actions derive their character as parts of larger wholes. Only when we understand particular actions in the context of other actions and events in somebody’s life can we correctly describe them. In this sense, the concept of collection can be compared to that of life: in both cases we have a group of seemingly autonomous objects, in the case of a collection, or actions/events, in the case of a life, which acquire connections and a broader and more coherent meaning when they are related to each other— when they are placed into a mutual relationship in a unified description. MacIntyre argues for a concept of selfhood based on the unity of a narrative which links birth to life and to death. He points out that it is because we are able to make connections between the several episodes and options in our lives that we are able to make them intelligible to ourselves and, therefore, decide what we are going to do next: When someone complains—as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide—that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or a telos. Hence the point of doing any one thing rather than another at crucial junctures in their lives seems to such person to have been lost.17

In this sense, both a life and a collection need a subject or agent with the ability to make connections and to provide for a unified intelligible description of their elements. A life without connections can be compared with a collection which is discarded because its meaning was not understood.

 16

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1981), 204-225. 17 MacIntyre, 217.

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In the concept of house museum, the notions of collection and life seem to find their natural unity. The study of collections in house museums helps us to understand that who people are is defined when they make connections between the several elements in their lives: episodes, options, an objective space, several contexts or settings, other people, some objects, and other living beings. Without this, people would be abstractions. Self-conceptualization and the conceptualization of spaces and objects are interdependent elements. In order to have a sense of oneself, one needs the notion of embodied activity within particular spaces and with respect to particular objects and persons.18 In the same line of thought, Susan M. Pearce describes collections as “material autobiographies”19 of their collectors, in the sense that they are both a product of the collectors’ personal lives, and a means of structuring life, giving tangible form to the flow of time, and creating a sense of life history through the collected objects that become souvenirs of the experience of acquiring them. In this essay, I have tried to integrate collections and collectors in everyday life. I compared the diversity of objects that are part of a collection to the diversity of objects used in everyday life and I argued that, in life, distinctions between them are usually blurrier than in theory. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum was described as an example in which objects of everyday use are displayed and were used on the same level as objects intentionally acquired as part of a formal collection. I claimed that house museums help us to understand a collection as a group of objects which are integrated in a life and not merely as a group of objects with suspended practical use. In this sense, house museums also help us to describe people’s lives in a unified way, without unnecessary boundaries between complementary dimensions, such as art and life, objects and people, collections and everyday life. Making meaningful connections either between objects in a collection, or between episodes or elements in life, thus emerges as a decisive ability not only for collectors but also for people in general. Without this ability, as MacIntyre suggests, people would not be able to make options in order to go on living. Since a group of objects can only be considered a collection in articulation with a description establishing meaningful connections, every collection expresses a subjective perspective. Cabinets of curiosities help

 18

See Jeff Malpas, A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 19 Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 279.

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us to understand how a collector can be an essential element in his collection not only on account of the decisive role of his/her understanding of the connections between the pieces, but also because the collector is present in his/her own collection in such a way that he/she becomes indistinguishable from it. Collection and life are connected because both depend on an understanding of the space we share with other people, with other living beings, and with other objects. Making choices, using objects, making connections are activities people are involved with both when living and when collecting. It is through these activities that people define their identity and biography. The link between collection and life gains a new dimension when a collection is seen as a personal monument or as a memorial, i.e. as an attempt to circumvent death and transcend the linearity of time. John Soane’s Museum and Degas’s aborted project for his own house museum suggest that, as there is a strong link between collection and human life, there is also an inescapable link between collection and mortality. In conclusion, who we are is defined when we interact with what is outside us: an objective space, other people, some objects, our pets, our plants. Because they give concrete expression to thoughts, goals or wishes, our objects help us to live like responsible agents and subjects in an intersubjective space. The objects and spaces in house museums help us to understand intentions, actions and options because they were part of them. It is through our things, through the people around us, through our journeys in particular spaces—through our collections—that we are who we are. When we are gone, it is what is left of us. When we are alive, it is through these things that we both express ourselves and interact with others.

Works Cited Dumas, Ann. “Degas and His Collection.” In The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, edited by Ann Dumas, 3-73. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Frost, Randy, and Gail Steketee. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Goldfarb, Hilliard T. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995.

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Johnson, Amy and others. “On the Virtues of Cabinets and Curiosities.” In Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Intersdisciplinary Study, edited by Janelle A. Schwartz and Nhora Lucía Serrano, 1-11. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1981. Malpas, Jeff. A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pearce, Susan. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 15001800. Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Preziosi, Donald. “Art History and Museology: Rendering the Visible Legible.” In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, 50-63. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Shand-Tucci, Douglass. The Art of Scandal: Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Summerson, John. “Sir John Soane and The Furniture of Death.” Architectural Review (March 1978): 147-158. Tinterow, Gary. “Degas’s Degases.” In The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, edited by Ann Dumas, 75-107. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997. Trubek, Anne. A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. London: Vintage, 2002.

“THE WILD BREATH OF THE FOREST, FRAGRANT WITH BARK AND BERRY”: SIGNS OF NATURE’S HISTORY IN SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER’S RURAL HOURS ISABEL MARIA FERNANDES ALVES UNIVERSIDADE DE TRÁS-OS-MONTES E ALTO DOURO

Wonder is not precisely knowing And not precisely knowing not— A beautiful but bleak condition He has not lived who has not felt1

In Passions for Nature, Rochelle Johnson affirms that Rural Hours is valuable today not only because it gives us an insight into a specific place—Cooperstown, New York—, “but also as an endeavor to live a life in pursuit of […] the ‘real’—the phenomena and forms comprising the natural world.”2 Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours, the first seasonal nature journal written by an American woman, is structured as journal-like entries and according to seasonal basis, including detailed description and perceptive notes on local plant geography, on meteorological phenomena and on ornithology. Published for the first time in 1850, Rural Hours went through seven American editions and one British edition within five years of its initial publication.3

 1

Emily Dickinson #1331. Rochelle Johnson, Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2009), 25. 3 The seventh US edition of Rural Hours was changed to Journal of a Naturalist in order to capitalize on Cooper’s success as the editor of John Leonard Knapp’s Country Rambles in England (1853). A new edition of Rural Hours, with a new preface and added chapter, “Later Hours,” appeared in 1868. A final, radically abridged version of the text was published in 1887. For a thorough discussion of the publishing history of Rural Hours, see Rochelle Johnson, and Daniel Patterson, 2

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“The wild breath of the forest, fragrant with bark and berry”

Although Cooper published many other works in her lifetime, Rural Hours epitomizes her desire to blend aesthetics with education in her writing about nature.4 A student of natural history influenced by the work of Gilbert White, John Leonard Knapp and Alexander von Humboldt, and a persistent walker in the environs of Otsego Lake in New York, Susan Fenimore Cooper, using the languages of science, religion, sentimentalism and aesthetics, aims at teaching readers about her experience in nature. One hundred years before Aldo Leopold’s proposal of a “land ethic” and the cultivation of an intense consciousness of land,5 Cooper believes that education was the key to preserving the natural environment. For Cooper, Americans should develop a passion for nature dependent on three essential elements: “a solid knowledge of natural history, a frequent and detailed observation of natural life forms, and an approach to one’s physical surroundings based in humility.”6 Thus, in her ramblings around Cooperstown, New York, Cooper, through good observation of the natural environment, plants and animal communities, “undertook the work of educating a readership about the value and the necessity of a human culture that was sustainable in the natural world.”7 Her legacy is captured in John Elder’s words: “Such a call for vividly seeing what is actually around us both connects Cooper with the emphasis on vision by our contemporary Annie Dillard and anticipates the way in which Barry Lopez sees an informed sensitivity to our own home landscapes as the beginning of a truly ‘American geography.’”8 If, back in the nineteenth century, getting closer to nature allowed Cooper to educate her readers about the value of the natural world, in the twenty-first century, getting closer to her work allows contemporary

 “Introduction,” in Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998). 4 Other major works by Cooper: Elinor Wyllys, 1846; The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life, 1855; she also edited John Knapp’s Country Rambles in England, 1853. From the late 1850s onward, Cooper dedicated herself to preserving and enhancing her father’s reputation. 5 Aldo Leopold, A Sandy County Almanac (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 261. 6 Johnson, Passions for Nature, 28. 7 Johnson and Patterson, xxi. On this topic, see also Vera Norwood’s Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). In this text, Cooper appears side by side with other women who have contributed to nature study. 8 John Elder, “Foreword,” in Essays on Nature and Landscape, Susan Fenimore Cooper, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2002), viii.

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readers to revaluate the path America, but also the Western world, have been pursuing since then, a way that has been dangerously separating humans from the natural world. Additionally, as stated by Timothy Sweet, “Cooper’s book has gained critical acclaim for its incipient ecological consciousness and has become firmly established in the canon of American environmental literature.”9 According to Thomas Lyon, the fundamental goal of nature writing “is to turn our attention outward to the activity of nature,”10 and Rural Hours fits into the type of nature writing he designates as “ramble,” a writing form defined by “the author’s experience in nature, usually on a short excursion near home, recording the walk as observer-participant.”11 If Cooper’s Rural Hours is an example of the ramble-type nature writing, it also fits into the natural history essay, for the main aim of Cooper’s work is also “to convey pointed instruction in the facts of nature.”12 Importantly, Lyon adds, “in the ramble […] natural history and the author’s presence are more or less perfectly balanced.”13 In this sense, using Tina Gianquitto’s expression, our aim is to present Susan Fenimore Cooper as a good observer of nature, and Rural Hours as a narrative which gives a general sense of the role that the natural world occupied in the minds and lives of the US citizens at the time.14 Also relevant to our argument is the fact that, in nineteenth-century America, many women writers used the natural world as a vehicle for discussing issues of domesticity, education, morality and national themes, sharing the conviction that an accurate perception and representation of nature taught women important lessons. In this sense, and though it may convey “ambiguous or complicated”15

 9 Timothy Sweet, “Global Cooperstown: Taxonomy, Biogeography, and Sense of Place in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours,” ISLE 17, no. 3 (2010): 541-566 (541). 10 Thomas Lyon, This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2001), 25. 11 Ibid. 21. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 We are referring to Tina Gianquitto’s “Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885 (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2007). 15 Karen Kilcup, “‘I like these plants that you call weeds’: Historicizing American Women’s Nature Writing,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58, no. 1 (2003): 42-74 (44).

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attitudes toward nature, Rural Hours is an example of the intellectual and aesthetic experience of nature for women.16 Following natural theology principles women pictured nature as a moral space, but it was also the object of intense scientific investigation, and thus nineteenth-century women writers found themselves drawn to the new languages being used to describe nature. In nineteenth-century America “botanical education was seen to serve several valuable ends: it led girls outside, exercising in the fresh air; it trained them to look for scientific connections among objects in the natural world; and it showed them how to translate those connections into pious lessons for home.”17 It is relevant that natural theology provided a significant framework for nature investigation because it imbued it with a valuable morality. Natural theology presupposes that by observing relationships between objects in the natural world, one can obtain knowledge of God; thus, women scientists used botany and natural theology to define the connections between science, morality, and home.18 In this sense, Rural Hours “records Cooper’s struggle to find a mode of representation that will allow her to produce an accurate, morally viable record of her observations and experiences of the natural world.”19 Throughout the book, Copper not only uses the tools of science (careful observation and precise description), but she also creates a “holistic picture of the landscape.”20 One should bear in mind that Susan Fenimore Cooper wrote in a time that testified to changing literary representations of the natural world produced by women and the developments in science from the Enlightenment to the advent of evolutionary biology. Cooper, together with other women writers and amateur scientists of the time—Almira

 16

Karen Kilcup affirms that one “such complication may be the writers’ employment of Christian rhetoric, which for many readers today may appear hostile to an ecofeminist perspective” (44). 17 Gianquitto, 5. 18 The basic premise of natural theology, first articulated by John Ray in Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) and later revived by William Paley in Natural Theology (1802), is the “argument from design.” Paley argued by analogy that, just as a watch found in a field must, of necessity, imply a watchmaker, so must “the contrivances of nature [, which] surpass the contrivances of art in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism,” imply the “existence of an intelligent Creator” (qt Gianquitto, 4). 19 Gianquitto, 103. 20 Ibid. Unlike, for instance, her Canadian contemporary Catharine Parr Traill, who displayed her talents as a naturalist and rendered the combat of human spirit exposed to trials by nature and climate, Cooper’s narrative is far more rooted in the local, in the domesticated landscape.

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Phelps, Margaret Fuller, and Mary Treat—, read scientific texts and used that information to compose their understandings of the natural world, becoming ideal observers because “they had trained both the eye and the mind to read the scientific and moral geography of nature.”21 As the excerpt from Dickinson’s poem used as an epigraph attests, women were successfully tying together the scientific facts and their intuition, fully assuming their creative understanding of nature’s relationships. They also acknowledge the influence, for instance, of Goethe and Humboldt’s thought on physical and biological sciences that, together with the prevalence of nature as a web of interrelated parts, made it possible for women—scientists and amateurs—to incorporate both reason and imagination in the process of perception of nature.22 In this sense, we have to consider that forces other than scientific curiosity converged in the shaping of the idea of nature and, consequently, those women who saw nature as a way to free themselves from social constrictions were also discovering that the observation of nature was a field for expressing subjective perspectives. In a time of struggle between cultural principles that linked women to home and feeling, and science to the rational male, their attention to the natural world is relevant because it exemplified the mingling of history and subjectivity.23 These women often rambled near established family homes to find the plants and animals they wrote about, contributing to the perception of nature as home, and imbuing “the concept of home with new meaning by expanding it to encompass the wider world.”24 Although these women writers confined themselves to a place near home, they conveyed an experience based on closer and detailed observation, valuing the natural by

 21

Ibid. 3. Gianquitto contends that Almira Phelps based the method of botanical science on the work of Carl Linnaeus, Margaret Fuller used Goethe’s optical theory as the basis for her perceptual strategies, and Mary Treat corresponded with scientists such as Asa Gray and Charles Darwin. According to Gianquitto, Susan Fenimore Cooper read Alexander von Humboldt and learned from him how to see the world as a web of interrelated phenomena (3). 23 However, as Karen Kilcup has shown, one should be aware that the relationship between women and nature was more complex than one may think; she underlines the particular cases of Native American and women of colour, for these cases allow “us to see the potential problems with idealizing connections between, for example, women and nature or Native Americans and nature” (73). 24 Lorraine Anderson, “Introduction: The Great Chorus of Woman and Nature,” in At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s nature Writing, ed. Lorraine Anderson and Thomas Edwards (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2002), 5. 22

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incorporating it into a vision of the human community, exploring at the same time “the claims of self-realization against those of social constraint.”25 As a result, one can agree with Vera Norwood when she states that “the most basic thread running from Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours in 1850 to Ann Zwinger’s Beyond the Aspen Grove in 1970 is the act of homing in one spot, living with it through the seasons until the rocks, flowers, trees, insects, birds, deer, panthers, and coyotes are familiar.”26 In the preface to Rural Hours, Cooper states that wandering about the fields resulted in a work in which she made the “simple record of those little events which make up the course of the seasons in rural life.” Moreover, she affirms that her writings “make no claim whatever to scientific knowledge, but it is hoped that they will be found free from great inaccuracies.”27 But, if the preface pledges that simplicity and modesty will define Rural Hours, Gianquitto comments that the text offers, instead, “an intricate, expansive investigation into the shifting portrait of the landscape surrounding the author’s home,”28 or in Timothy Sweet’s words, “a point of intersection, and often a point of contention between cosmopolitan science and rustic knowledge.”29 According to Gianquitto “the changing of the seasons, the passage of time, and the effects of human habitation on the landscape—in other words, the natural and national histories chronicled in Rural Hours—are not trifling occurrences.”30 In addition, Cooper shows herself to be familiar with and critical of scientific terminology. Lawrence Buell, for example, designates Rural Hours as “the first major work of American literary bioregionalism,”31 and identifies Susan Fenimore Cooper’s most distinctive trait as being “environmental proficiency.” According to Buell, this is not to be understood as “the professional scientist’s command of data and theory but the working knowledge of someone more knowledgeable than we.”32 Rochelle Johnson also states that Susan

 25

Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 49. 26 Qt Anderson, 5. 27 Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (Athens and London: the University of Georgia Press, 1998), 3. 28 Gianquitto, 102. 29 Sweet, 543. 30 Cooper, Rural Hours, 102. 31 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 406. 32 Ibid. 97.

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Fenimore Cooper’s natural-historical work is scientific in orientation but certainly amateurish.33 According to this critic, Cooper follows the natural history format, and thus “often begins with her observation of a local natural phenomenon; moves on to a discussion of similar phenomena; proceeds to a discussion of related but different phenomena; and concludes with an overview and critique of representations of the phenomenon in other literature.”34 But, above all, Cooper, like all American natural historians, is also participating “in the rich activity of the American Renaissance, sharing with writers such as Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson a desire to craft a truly American literature that took advantage of the sometimes problematic yet uniquely American wildness embodied in the nation’s landscape and people.”35 By studying her region—natural phenomena and people—she hopes to heighten her reader’s power of observation, and though committed to a particular place, “Rural Hours comprehends the local by developing a globalized sense of placeconsciousness.”36 Susan Fenimore Cooper felt she had a responsibility to be an educated observer of the scientific as well as the moral and sentimental particulars of nature and that her writings should encourage a female audience to question their way of seeing and interacting with the world around them: “Let an idle woman honestly watch over her own flower-beds, and she will naturally become more active.”37 Among the genres available for writing about nature—plant catalogues, botanical textbooks, sentimental flower poems and books, travel narratives, scientific essays—Cooper chose the seasonal journal, a form which allowed her to record natural and cultural history observations, aiming to depict women’s relationship to the natural world, and their response to it. Thus, parallel to the recording of botany, zoology, and ornithology of Otsego County, Cooper depicted sketches of country housekeeping, maple sugaring, the annual cattle show, and the general store. In Rural Hours, Cooper proves herself a “skilled naturalist”38 while also acknowledging her sources—John James Audubon, Charles Lyell, Alexander Wilson, and Alexander von

 33

Johnson, Passions for Nature, 44. Ibid. 46. 35 Gianquitto, 102-3. 36 Sweet, 541. 37 Cooper, Rural Hours, 81. 38 Gianquitto, 103. 34

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Humboldt.39 If on the one hand she believes that scientific knowledge helped uncover the moral codes of the natural world, on the other, Cooper exhibits a developed environmental wisdom, able as she is to differentiate at least four stages of cultivation, from the freshly chopped to the longtilled. As Gianquitto states, Cooper is caught in her historical moment: “she values the specificity that scientific observation and language offer but worries that the specialized terms of science threaten to remove both the local and the divine from the picture produced.”40 Though she aspires to represent a holistic picture of the landscape, she is already incorporating the fragmenting tendencies of scientific investigation; though she relates nature and God repeatedly, she uses an unadorned and straightforward style: Very pleasant day; quite spring-like. The snow is melting fast. Spring is in the air, in the light, and in the sky. […] A little downy woodpecker and a blue-jay were running about the apple-trees hunting for insects; we watched them awhile with interest, for few birds are seen here during the winter.41

The first entry, dated March 4 (1848) states that the author “drove several miles down the valley […] in the teeth of a sharp wind, and flurries of snow, but […] bringing home a sort of virtuous glow which is not to be picked up by cowering over the fireside.”42 In the March 7 entry, a short account of the annual return of migratory waterfowl takes on a global dimension as it leads to a few details on loons and then to the habits of other diving birds which could not be observed in Cooperstown or in eastern North America. She is using a revised version of Alexander Wilson’s American ornithology (1825-33), a work that provides the key to the understanding of local birds in its comparison of Old and New World species. Thus, Cooper departs from local observation to invoke the cosmopolitan project of natural history.43 Throughout Rural Hours,



39 Cooper’s two most important models for the seasonal book of natural history observation for a general readership are Gilbert’s White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789) and John Leonard Knapp’s Journal of a Naturalist (1829). 40 Gianquitto, 103. 41 Cooper, Rural Hours, 5. 42 Ibid. 4. 43 “Although Cooper’s associations tend to run toward Europe or, to a lesser extent, the Middle-Eastern historical ground of numerous biblical references, points of comparison are also found in East Asia, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa” (Sweet, 545).

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Cooper is asking readers to watch the white-breasted nut-hatch,44 to feast “[their] eyes upon a rose”45 to closely observe the cedar-birds,46 to examine carefully a meadow.47 As she observes, “a meadow is a delicate embroidery […]. One must bend over the grass to find the blue violet in May, the red strawberry in June; one should be close at hand to mark the first appearance of the simple field-blossoms, clover, red and white, buttercup and daisy, with the later lily and primrose, and meadow-tuft.”48 Since the beginning, her depiction of natural phenomena is based on direct experience and the emphasis is on the relationships between the Cooperstown community and the nonhuman world. Although her fascination with ornithology and botany dominates her observations, Cooper also informs readers of the lifestyle of Cooperstown’s inhabitants, namely of “the agricultural history of the neighborhood.”49 Closely observing her surroundings, Cooper contributed to a broader understanding of the local history: “With us, [the pine stumps] take the place of rocks, which are not common; they keep possession of the ground a long while—some of those about us are known to have stood more than sixty years, or from the first settlement of the country.”50 But her knowledge about pine stumps goes beyond mere observation: “In the first years of cultivation, they are a very great blemish, but after a while, when most of them have been burnt or uprooted, a gray stump here and there, among the grass of a smooth field, does not look so very amiss, reminding one, as it does, of the brief history of the country.”51 This proves, in Tina Gianquitto’s words, that “Cooper not only strives to apprehend the natural events of Cooperstown but also struggles to interpret those events as part of a larger narrative of home, nation, history, and divinity.”52 Importantly, Cooper approaches her region’s landscape with attentiveness, modesty and exactness, and therefore she manages to depict its uniqueness; in so doing she imbues it with respect, anticipating the conclusion reached by twentieth-century thinkers who affirm that the ecological crisis is amplified by the degree to which Americans are removed from knowledge of the natural world. As the daughter of James

 44

Cooper, Rural Hours, 19. Ibid. 58. 46 Ibid. 59. 47 Ibid. 76. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 90. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Gianquitto, 102. 45

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Fenimore Cooper, who many have seen as the nation’s first novelist of a distinctively American landscape, she knew her culture’s desire to proclaim a specifically American identity, distinct from that of Europe. Thus, for instance, she aims to distinguish European and American robins,53 and European and American swallows: The chimney-swallow is also wholly American. The European bird, which builds in chimneys, is very different in many respects, placing its nest frequently in other situations, while our own is never known, under any circumstances, to build elsewhere. […] Our chimney swift has no beauty to boast of; it is altogether plain, and almost bat-like in appearance, but, in its own way, it is remarkably clever and skilful.54

If she seeks to establish differences between American and European natural phenomena, she does so with the intention of alerting readers to the unique features of the American landscape and its indigenous flora. It is the case of the scarlet honeysuckle,55 of the varieties of grass, namely the “buffalo clover found in the western part of this State,”56 and of the old forest trees. Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us that America once held out the promise of a land on which to base a new ethos, or a new mode of dwelling upon the earth.57 This critic also alludes to the fact that Thoreau goes to Walden to learn to live deliberately, but, most of all, to “reopen the ethos of America to the nature of its promise, or to the promise of its nature.”58 However, America “will forever be what it did not become,”59 and in this sense both Walden and Rural Hours represent an admonition towards a lost way, and a lost possibility for America to become the fulfilment of its promise. The difference, as Buell points out, is Cooper’s “sociable posture,”60 her insistence on using the “we” instead of the “I,” including, thus, the whole community in her narrative. But Cooper, as Thoreau, appeals for preservation of the “wild” in American cultural memory. She does so particularly in a passage on local forests. On July 28, she comments: “Passed the afternoon in the woods.” Then, she states:

 53

Cooper, Rural Hours, 12. Ibid. 35. 55 Ibid. 42. 56 Ibid. 77. 57 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 225. 58 Ibid. 227. 59 Ibid. 232. 60 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 266. 54

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“what a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe for their utility and their beauty.”61 She continues to expand her thought to explain that, though forests are important, they are also disappearing from the American landscape, and because they stand as a testimony to its history, if they all disappear, a relevant part of American historical memory will disappear as well. But this passage first stresses the many possibilities of the forest: The winds of heaven seem to linger amid these balmy branches, and the sunshine falls like a blessing upon the green leaves; the wild breath of the forest, fragrant with bark and berry, fans the brow with grateful freshness; and the beautiful wood-light, neither garish nor gloomy, full of calm and peaceful influences, sheds repose over the spirit. The view is limited, and the objects about us are uniform in character; yet within the bosom of the woods the mind readily lays aside its daily littleness, and opens to higher thoughts, in silent consciousness that it stands alone with the works of God.62

There is beauty, and there is the presence of the divine, but above all there is the sense of the immense design of things: “These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unnumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods.”63 Her impression is that many Americans are unaware of the full value and importance of the trees, and most importantly, that trees “are connected in many ways with the civilization of a country.”64 If the above passage illustrates Cooper’s awareness of the social and economic history of her country, Cooper was also aware of the relevance of indigenous plants and of their disappearance; these are “biogeographical observations” that, as Timothy Sweet states, “anticipate a Darwinian sense of nature as a dynamic process.”65 On June 6, she expands her thoughts on the plants the white men brought from the Old World: a very large proportion of the most common weeds in our fields and gardens, and about our buildings are strangers to the soil. It will be easy to name a number of these:—such, for instance, as the dock and the burdock,

 61

Cooper, Rural Hours, 125. Ibid. 63 Ibid. 127. 64 Ibid. 133. 65 Sweet, 543. 62

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“The wild breath of the forest, fragrant with bark and berry” found about every barn and out-building; the common plantains and mallows—regular path-weeds; the groundsel, purslane, pigweed, goosefoot, shepherd’s-purse, and lamb’s-quarters, so troublesome in gardens; the chickweed growing everywhere; the pimpernel, celandine, and knawel, the lady’s thumb and May-weed; the common nettles and teasel; wild flax, stickseed, burweed, doorweed; all the mulleins […].66

This long passage, like some others throughout the narrative, aims to show that foreign plants are “driving away the prettier natives.”67 This vision, together with the paintings of Thomas Cole, and Frederick Edwin Church, were providing America with images that attested to the belief in a chosen national destiny. Cooper is, therefore, contributing to a view of the natural world as meaningful and symbolic and a central preoccupation in the definition of what was uniquely American. But Cooper also tells about landscapes of loss, listing plants and animals that have been “diminished and exterminated” by human action: quail, pine, passenger pigeon, martin, rattlesnake, mountain lion, laddyslipper, bison, fox. This connection between landscape and the idea of loss results in Cooper’s approach to nature based on attention and respect: “every object has a deeper merit than our wonder can fathom; each has a beauty beyond our full perception,”68 a perspective that presupposes a view of the natural world conceived beyond economic gain and progress. Susan Cooper’s power of observation and description have been her two most praised traits,69 and in her own time her wok was thought to provide a record of country life with historical value, to help readers recognize the pleasures one can experience through nature observation and to point out a more humble approach to the American environment. Today, as Rochelle Johnson comments, several of Cooperstown’s residents keep a copy of Rural Hours, and biologists turn to her work as a record of environmental history.70 Moreover, as much of Alexander von Humboldt’s thought is being recovered, his influence on Rural Hours is being recognized, for Cooper’s understanding of nature is also based on interrelated phenomena, a cosmos of interacting organisms, expressing, nonetheless, the aesthetic and moral values she sees displayed there. As Laura Dassow Walls demonstrates, Cooper, like Humboldt, traces links

 66

Cooper, Rural Hours, 64. Ibid. 49. 68 Ibid. 125-6. 69 See Rochelle Johnson for a synthesis on the reviews on Rural Hours (Passions for Nature, 53-57). 70 Ibid. 62. 67

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and connections between lands and races, reminding us that the earth is the common home of all: The mandrakes, or May-apples, are in flower. They are certainly a handsome plant, as their showy white flower is not unlike the water-lily. Some people ate their fruit—boys specially—but most persons find it insipid. The common showy plant growing along our fences, and in many meadows, is said also to be found under a different variety in the hilly countries of Central Asia. One likes to trace these links, connecting lands and races, so far apart, reminding us, as they do, that the earth is the common home of all.71

Thus, Cooper, like Humboldt, insists on the relation between “the character and intellect of a people with their natural environment. To scar the face of nature is to scar the people it nourishes.”72 In order to promote respect for nature, Cooper emphasizes the value of education and knowledge, of a scientifically accurate knowledge of nature, for people should know more about the flora, fauna and geology of their land. According to her, love and passion for nature come from a close attention to the natural environment. As Johnson shows, “through her example as witness to the history of her place, Cooper urges readers to observe the signs of nature’s history that are present in the landscape.”73 Most interestingly, Cooper tries to put into words a landscape that was being transformed rapidly, and to fix meanings to natural objects during a historical moment when “the fundamental beliefs about the origin of the earth and man’s place in it were shattered beyond repair.”74 Despite profound shifts in the vision of nature in the post-Darwinian landscape, Cooper remains an example of an amateur scientist who in the nineteenth century drew attention towards the natural world, proposing a view which links “local natural history with the larger global-historical record,”75 and helping to expand the idea of nature as home, privileging images of community and connection.76 If Charles Darwin noticed her book,

 71

Cooper, Rural Hours, 56. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 286. 73 Johnson, Passions for Nature, 48. 74 Gianquitto, 134. 75 Johnson, Passions for Nature, 32. 76 On the topic, Gianquitto comments: “nature in the post-Darwinian scheme has an order quite distinct from the moral one that holds together Cooper […]’s world: natural and sexual selection, adaptation and chance (the apparatus of evolution), 72

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registering that Cooper “seems a very clever woman & gives a capital account of the battle between our and your weeds,”77 contemporary scientists, ecologists, and writers follow her example and have persistently been trying to record both abuses and elegies to the land. To conclude, in Rural Hours two different kinds of visions merge: one lyric, the other more scientific. However, both perspectives assert the idea that the natural world is an organic whole, endowing it with value and contributing to a better understanding of the human attitude towards nature. Moreover, Susan Fenimore Cooper clearly advocates a view of nature rooted in the experience and in observation—of the seasons, species of birds and the varieties of plants. Although in nineteenth-century America the natural environment was invested with “metaphysical significance,”78 in her writings, Cooper highlights the importance of a real knowledge of the physical environment, thus attesting to the quintessential characteristic of American art: “a consistent pragmatic relation to nature and the object.”79 As in Fitz Lane’s paintings, Cooper’s words are “firmly grounded in a specific place with a specific economy”;80 however, Cooper’s aim is to allocate her observations about nature within “a historical continuum of organic processes and representations of language.”81 So, the proposal of this reflection is that in a time of global conversation about environmental issues and the disappearance of species, it remains stimulating to read Rural Hours as a territory in which Susan Cooper sees the genre of natural history as a means of conveying passion for a specific place, and a way of affecting readers’ environmental sensibilities.

Works Cited Anderson, Lorraine. “Introduction: The Great Chorus of Woman and Nature.” In At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s

 not special creation, stasis, and divine order (the mechanisms of natural theology), become the tools by which nature is maintained” (162). 77 Qt Gianquitto, 118. 78 Leo Marx, “The Pandering Landscape: On American Nature as Illusion,” in “Nature’s Nation” Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis, ed. Walter Hölbling and Hans Bak (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2003), 41. 79 Barbara Novak, Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27. 80 Ibid. 27. 81 Johnson, Passions for Nature, 32.

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nature Writing, edited by Lorraine Anderson and Thomas Edwards, 19. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2002. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998. —. Essays on Nature and Landscape, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2002. Elder, John. “Foreword.” In Essays on Nature and Landscape, Susan Fenimore Cooper, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, vii-ix. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2002. Gianquitto, Tina. “Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2007. Harrison, Robert Pogues. Gardens: An Essay on the Human condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Johnson, Rochelle. Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2009. Johnson, Rochelle, and Daniel Patterson. “Introduction.” In Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, ix-xxiv. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998. Kilcup, Karen. “‘I like these plants that you call weeds’: Historicizing American Women’s Nature Writing.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58, no. 1 (2003): 42-74. Leopold, Aldo. A Sandy County Almanac. London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Lyon, Thomas. This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2001. Marx, Leo. “The Pandering Landscape: On American Nature as Illusion.” In “Nature’s Nation” Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis, edited by Walter Hölbling and Hans Bak, 30-42. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2003. Novak, Barbara. Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Norwood, Vera. Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

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Sweet, Timothy. “Global Cooperstown: Taxonomy, Biogeography, and Sense of Place in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours.” ISLE 17, no. 3 (2010): 541-566. Walls, Laura Dassow. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION IN EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY JOANA ESPAIN UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO

The nineteenth century favoured a strategy founded on logic and reason, with a strong appetite for the possession of more certainty.1 In practice, this appetite, closely shared by different areas of knowledge, was translated into articles on science appearing alongside poems in popular magazines and periodicals. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, written in the second half of the nineteenth century, frequently expresses a similar yearning for the unobtainable, asking not only what we know but how we know. Yet, while both have this continuous inquiry in common, Dickinson seems to share the logic and imagination of the abstract in modern science. My contention is that the raw material of some of Dickinson’s poems, and the logical rigor with which they are moulded, may be curiously linked to some of the scientific knowledge of the twentieth century, which in a broad conceptual revolution forced a rethinking of the abstract concept that spread to all areas of knowledge. The rethinking of theoretical physics, for example, accompanied by a humble observation of the collapse of the previous solid formal structures, with its full awareness of the failure of the scientific language previously used, can be compared with Dickinson’s awareness of the failure of language. It seems therefore important to ask whether it is possible to observe in Dickinson’s poetry a methodology and imagery close to the conceptual problems posed by modern science. On the border of conceptual structures, closer to human imagination, and fully aware of the failure of their own languages, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and modern science may have dialogued through a gap of one century.

 1

This article was developed within the Integrated Strategic Program UID/ELT/00500/2013 | POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007339.

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Science and Imagination in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

The house of possibility where Emily Dickinson (ED) indwells puts her under the influence of numerous winds, among which scientific thought cannot be ignored. Recently, Robin Peel analysed thoroughly the possible angles of relation between ED’s text and the scientific knowledge of that era, in the book Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science (2010).2 Peel struggles with a duality that seems to emerge from ED’s text; on the one hand, a scepticism towards the scientific knowledge that ED had access to and all the power it inherited from the enlightened century that came before it; on the other hand, an undeniable tendency towards logic, in a formal and conceptual perspective of her text. The concept of plank of reason that appears in several poems by ED is not embedded without this plank getting covered with a slippery scepticism. Notwithstanding, the logical planks that ED uses to create her poetry cannot and should not be ignored. Fred D. White, in his essay “Sweet skepticism of the heart: Science in the poetry of Emily Dickinson” (1992)3 highlights that more than two hundred poems by ED are (with or without scepticism) about the scientific concepts of her time. In the essay “‘One and One are One’… and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical Signs,” Michael Theune (2001)4 makes an analysis of the algebraic signs that surround the syntax of ED from a formal point of view, stating that ED had access to knowledge of Algebra when she studied in the Mount Holyoke school, this fact being proved by Jack Lee Capps in Emily Dickinson’s Reading 18361886 (1966).5 In Emily Dickinson, Perception and the Poet’s Quest (1985),6 Greg Johnson analyses ED’s mathematical vocabulary, comparing it with a transcendent perspective also present in her text; and Stephen Cushman, in Fictions of Form in American Poetry (1993)7 studies the mathematical figures in ED’s poetry and their relation with the deconstruction of the poetic form. More recently, in “Dickinson and

 2

Robin Peel, Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). 3 Fred D. White, “Sweet Skepticism of the Heart: Science in the poetry of Emily Dickinson,” College Literature 19, no. 1 (1992): 121-128. 4 Michael Theune, “‘One and One are One’... and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical Signs,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10, no. 1 (2001): 99-116. 5 Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson Reading, 1836-1886 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). 6 Greg Johnson, Emily Dickinson, Perception and the Poet’s Quest (University AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985). 7 Stephen Cushman, Fictions of Form in American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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Mathematics” (2006),8 See-Young Chu explores some of the geometrical and algebraic concepts that cross ED’s poetry, like her famous circumference or the particular idea of ratio that appears sequentially in the text. But it was maybe with Gary Lee Stonum in The Dickinson Sublime (1990)9 or more specifically in the essay “Emily Dickinson’s Calculated Sublime” (1986)10 that the specificity of the relation between ED’s text and Science that I would like to highlight here begins to be outlined. Stating that “[r]oughly two hundred of Emily Dickinson’s poems include some reference to mathematical terms and ideas,”11 Stonum develops the idea that ED’s poetry relates with the romantic sublime, through what he calls “the heading of power of the poetical subject.”12 Not paying much attention to the question of the sublime in ED, I am interested in the way Stonum says this power is put into practice. Challenge is always present in ED’s text and resides in her appetence towards the transcendent, as Stonum says. In one of the letters written to Thomas Higginson in the spring of 1886, ED addresses Jacob (right before dying) as a Pugilist and a Poet: “Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel ‘I will not let thee go except I bless thee’—Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct—.”13 But the scepticism and collapse in Dickinson extend from faith to the Science that surrounded her, as can be seen in perhaps the most famous poem that compares both: “Faith is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see—/ But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency.”14 In this poem, it is important to note the implied irony in the two ways of “seeing,” the

 8

Seo-Young J. Chu, “Dickinson and Mathematics,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 15, no. 1 (2006): 35-55. 9 Gary Lee Stonum, The Dickinson Sublime (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 10 Gary Lee Stonum, “Emily Dickinson’s Calculated Sublime,” in The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). 11 Ibid. 101. 12 Ibid. 13 L1042. The initial L will be used from now on to refer to Emily Dickinson’s letters. See Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). 14 J185, F202. The initials J and F followed by numbers refer to the numbering attributed respectively by Johnson and Franklin, the two editors of Emily Dickinson’s poems. See Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958); Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

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broader one from faith and the one from the microscope, only used in case of an emergency. Collapse is also present in Dickinson’s language, as Ana Luísa Amaral states in Emily Dickinson: uma poética de excesso (Emily Dickinson: A Poetics of Excess): “[ED’s language], rich in senses, radiant and fiery, seems to hide absence and unsatisfied desire, in an identical dystopian background.”15 The question about the origin of the power with which the poetical subject challenges the several collapses that surround him/her emerges here. Despite not wanting to imprint on this text a predominantly biographical tone, the geniality of a woman who, from a table in the corner of a room in the small town of Amherst, in a still Puritan social and cultural patriarchal context, is capable of expanding the limits of the northAmerican poetry of the nineteenth century (through a kind of surgery of control) cannot be ignored. This controlled latency in ED’s text does not go unnoticed in different analytical points of view about her work, the “Volcano” being one of the most studied images of latency in her poetry. From it, we essentially know the suspension, the containment to the limit, the control, the submission that surrounds it and, finally, the sublime of the eminent destruction. As described by Adrienne Rich in “Vesuvius at Home, the Power of Emily Dickinson,” “Dickinson is the American Poet whose work consisted in exploring states of psychic extremity.”16 ED used the image of the volcano to reflect a plurality of meanings, inside the ambiguity that characterizes her poetry, but, by representing the volcano, the excess of feeling, the poetic language or her trapped geniality, the power the poetical subject has over it is undeniable. It can be seen, for example, in the poem “On my volcano grows the Grass,”17 the terrific image that opens itself from a space of choice into a flying being, the only power capable of escaping a volcano, despite the ignorance and the beautiful grass where it lays: “On my volcano grows the grass—/ A meditative spot / An area for a bird to choose / Would be the general thought / How red the fire rocks below / How insecure the sod—/ Did I disclose, would populate / With awe my solitude.” And this peace that appears inside an illusory option contrasts with a dormant red fire “below” (if we read “rocks” as a verb) or red-hot rocks (if we read it as a noun). In that same essay, Adrienne Rich makes a mental analysis of ED through a

 15

Ana Luísa Amaral, Emily Dickinson: uma poética de excesso, PhD thesis (Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 1995), 407, my translation. 16 Adrienne Rich, “‘Vesuvius at Home’: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose By Adrienne Rich (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 157. 17 J1677; F1743.

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biographical and self-biographical drawing. Dickinson is portrayed as a genius to whom the liberation of creativity is made in a self-controlled way. Ana Luisa Amaral stresses the importance of discipline for control in ED: “Discipline is crucial to contain the extreme states of terror or desire. Moreover, discipline is necessary to control pain and transform the essence of pain into poetic power.”18 This self-control had to be confronted with the “calculated power” that Stonum refers. The question about where this calculated and restrained power of ED’s poetical subject comes from still remains. To Stonum, this power will somehow be connected to the power of mathematical abstraction in ED’s poetry: “Power is a word Dickinson rarely fails to capitalize; it belongs with presence, circumference, and a few others as one of the central animating abstractions in her poetry. [...] Mathematics can serve as one form of the defensive discipline invoked [...]. Algebra, for example, defends against the agonies [...]. Her use of mathematics as a native counterpower, furthermore, is nearly unique among American poets.”19 What I intend to suggest here is that this power is also associated with a power of physical abstraction, a haughtiness that aims to put at stake physical conceptions of description of the world that surrounds her; a challenge that Science only profits from, in the following century, with the birth of Modern Physics and the great conceptual change that accompanied it. ED could not identify herself with the Science of her time and despite finding logic and scientific language relevant, her scepticism towards technology and the reason that reigned in her time was evident. Divided between a pure Science prior to the war and a culture of Arts that dominated colleges, immersed in small challenging sparkles of new literary and scientific essays, the knowledge of the nineteenth century was one where Darwin quoted Milton and Wordsworth. In the beginning of that century, the word literature meant belles lettres. Those were the beautiful letters filled with beautiful letters that deflected the knowledge of a single cohesive crystal. It is only in the middle of the nineteenth century, in ED’s lifetime, that the first centres of scientific investigation appear and the figure of the professional scientist emerges in Europe and the US. The technological advances that in the eighteenth century made trains cross the planet, telescopes, microscopes, telegraphs and photographs multiply or made space observation, anatomy and optics advance were splendorous in

 18

“A disciplina afirma-se crucial para conter os estados extremos, quer do terror quer do desejo. Mais ainda: a disciplina é necessária para controlar a dor e a transformar em poder poético, a essência da dor.” Amaral, 177, my translation. 19 Stonum, “Emily Dickinson’s Calculated Sublime,” 108.

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the way they ruled the world, but, to ED, it seemed that they could not bring anything new to the philosophical relation between the human being and Nature. The most innovative Physics theory of her time appears in 1865, 21 years after the death of ED, when physicist James Clerk Maxwell was able to unify the theories used until then to describe the forces of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s equations foresaw that there might be wave perturbations of the electromagnetic field and that light could spread like small waves of water in a tank. The emergence of the ondulatory theory of light presented itself and opened some doors to the knowledge that came after, but it could not be compared to the eruption of the “volcano” that would shake the foundations of human thought in the twentieth century. The background of nineteenth century thought was still that of the existence of a stage, Nature, where the play of life unfolded. ED did not believe in any form of faith that she could not challenge. She believed and inhabited possibility, as we can see in one of her most famous poems, which starts with “I dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer House than Prose—/ More numerous of Windows—/ Superior-for Doors.”20 This possibility led her constantly to a more abstract vision, towards the Eternity that she so many times created in her poems. This is the natural habitat of poetry, but ED moulds this possibility with Physics’ abstract matter, covering logical concepts with the same level of abstraction that Modern Physics sets out in the twentieth century. ED gets separated from her time. This can be noticed through different themes in her work and I think that the same thing happens in the relation between her poetry and Science. If ED could have talked in the beginning of the seventeenth century with Galileo Galilei, maybe she would hesitate to agree that [p]hilosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.21

Notwithstanding, if ED could have exchanged some ideas with some of the precursors of Modern Physics like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr or Erwin Schrödinger, maybe that dialogue would become deeper.

 20

J657; F466. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1957) [Il Saggiatore (1623)], 237-8. 21

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One of the conceptual revolutions in Modern Physics is the abandonment of Determinism. Newton’s Law of Physics, published at the end of the seventeenth century, branded all of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Science with the condition of Determinism. Determinism, known as the Laplace Demon, is interpreted in an excerpt from Pierre Simon Laplace’s introduction to the essay “Philosophical Essay on Probabilities” in the following manner: Given for an instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.22

It is important to understand that the idea of Determinism in Science is not opposed to the mathematical notion of probability. The Classic Mechanics’ idea of Determinism narrows itself to the notion that, to a given initial condition, independently of the difficulty or complexity of the prevision of the final state of a system, that same final state is well defined, thus destroying any surprise that challenges the evolution of a physical state. In The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), Roger Penrose, one of the most important Physicists nowadays, struggles with the characterization of the conceptual paradigms of twentieth-century science and their possible contribution to the explanation of how the human mind works. About Determinism in Classical Physics, he highlights: In Classical Physics there is, in accordance with common sense, an objective world “out there.” That world evolves in a clear and deterministic way, being governed by precisely formulated mathematical equations. [...] Physical reality is taken to exist independently of ourselves; and exactly how the classical world “is” is not affected by how we might choose to look at it.23

By contradicting the spirit of determinism, the possible interference between the state of the human mind and a physical state of the world that

 22 Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probablities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Chapman & Hall, 1902) [Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814-25)]. 1-6. 23 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 291.

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Science and Imagination in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

surrounds it, as well as the collapse of mathematics in the forecast of both, is present in the texts of ED. Stonum quotes the following poem in order to argue that for Dickinson “Language would thus be like mathematics in being a mental construct rather than a faithful representation of what is given in and by nature.”24 If I could tell how glad I was I should not be so glad— But when I cannot make the Force Nor mould it into Word I know it is a sign That new Dilemma be From mathematics further off Than for Eternity.25

In the beginning of the twentieth century, Quantum Mechanics changes the paradigm of Determinism, admitting that possibility of mutual interference between the observer and the phenomena. According to Quantum Mechanics, the act of observation, of measuring Nature, can influence it. Quoting Penrose again: [If] we are to gain something of the philosophical insights we desire, we must comprehend the picture of the world according to existing quantum theory. [...] Unfortunately, different theorists tend to have very different viewpoints about the actuality of this picture. [...] I shall follow the more positive line which attributes objective physical reality to the quantum description: the quantum state. There is a very precise equation [...] which provides a completely deterministic time-evolution for this state. But there is something very odd about the relation between the time-evolved quantum state and the actual behavior of the physical world. [...] From time to time - whenever we consider that a “measurement” has occurred—we must discard the quantum state [...] and use it only to compute various probabilities that the state will “jump” to one or another of a set of new possible sates. Now [...] is the presence of a conscious being necessary for a “measurement” actually take place? [...] Presumably human observers are themselves also built from minute quantum constituents!26

The precise equation Penrose mentions is the one proposed by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1925, which describes the temporal evolution of the quantum state of a physical system. This

 24

Stonum, “Emily Dickinson’s Calculated Sublime,” 115. J1624, F1668. 26 Penrose, 291. 25

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equation describes the time evolution of a wave, the amplitude of probability of a particle’s quantum state, called wave function. The possibility of describing the quantum state of a particle with a probability wave function led physicists and philosophers to the asymptotic analysis of the possible description of the entire universe with only a single wave function, which can be the superposition of all the quantum states of all the particles. Another interesting concept, that comes from the fact that it is possible to describe the position of a particle in a given place with a probability wave amplitude, is related with the fact that the probability amplitude of the particle, being somewhere across the universe, is never null, only smaller. And finally inherent to the quantum description of the world that surrounds us is the idea that the act of observation, the “measure” that Penrose mentions, forces the collapse of the wave function that describes the quantum state of the system, influencing the observed result. This fact implicates that when the reception of a message recorded in a physical quantum system occurs, we can identify if it was observed or not, by verifying if there was a collapse of its wave function or not. This result is used, for example, in quantum encryption, to guarantee that a given encoded message that should be undecipherable can be transmitted with the certainty that it has never been observed. ED’s field of ambiguity allows her to use as raw materials physic phenomena whose degrees of abstraction intercross with these scientific conceptions, as in this poem: We send the Wave to find the Wave— An Errand so divine, The Messenger enamored too, Forgetting to return, We make the wise distinction still, Soever made in vain, The sagest time to dam the sea is when the sea is gone—27

Quantum Mechanics emerges to grant the human being an increased level of commitment to the stage on which Nature performs. Taking into consideration the propagation of light, quantum mechanics changes its description in an important way. The “quanta” hypothesis is presented in 1900 by Max Planck, associated with the idea that electromagnetic waves, such as light, could not be emitted at an arbitrary rate, but only in small quantities labelled “quanta” by Planck. Despite the fact that light is composed by waves, Planck’s quantum hypothesis tells us that light has a particle behaviour; it can only be emitted or absorbed in small quantities

 27

J1604; F1603.

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Science and Imagination in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

or “quanta.” We know today that, according to the Particle Standard Model, the particles responsible for the transportation of light are the photons. About a century before the discovery of the “division of light,” and with a tone of challenge, inserted in the position of power of the poetic subject, ED begins a poem in the following way: Banish Air from Air— Divide Light if you dare— They’ll meet While Cubes in a Drop Or Pellets of Shape Fit Films cannot annul Odors return whole Force Flame And with a Blonde push Over your impotence Flits Steam28

Note that the reference to the division of light blends with the geometrical impossibilities and the verb “fit,” suggesting the collapse of the moulding, of the experimental adjustment. As Penrose mentions in The Emperor’s New Mind, in the attempt to answer the question, “What, indeed, is mathematical truth?”: “The notion of mathematical truth goes beyond the whole concept of formalism. There is something absolute and ‘God-given’ about mathematical truth. This is what mathematical Platonism [...] is about. Any particular formal system has a provisional and ‘man-made’ quality about it. Such systems indeed have very valuable roles to play in mathematical discussions, but can supply only a partial (or approximate) guide too truth.”29 Or, as ED would say, “In broken mathematics / We estimate our prize / Vast—in its fading ratio / To our penurious eyes!”30 The other major conceptual revolution of the twentieth century is related to the concept of space and time. Time is perhaps one of the most revisited themes in Literature, particularly in Poetry. ED, once again, approaches this theme, through logical routes of abstraction close to the ones of Physics of the following century. Until 1915 it was thought that time and space were fixed stages where events occurred but did not affect them. The emergence of special relativity, published by Albert Einstein in 1905 did not change this fact. The movement of the bodies was then explained by the existence of forces of attraction and repulsion, leaving

 28

J854; F963. Penrose, 146. 30 J1859; F59. 29

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space and time unaffected. It was presumed that space and time would continue that way forever, and that would be considered eternity. In general relativity that does not happen. Space and time are dynamic: when a body moves because of a force, the space-time curvature is changed and the curvature structure of space-time affects the movement of the bodies. As Stephen Hawking (also one of the most important physicists nowadays, along with Roger Penrose) says, “Just as one cannot talk about events in the universe without the notions of space and time, so in general relativity it became meaningless to talk about space and time outside the limits of the universe.”31 In ED, the notion of time could be the object of a long discussion, exceeding the scope of what is possible in the present context. However, I must mention some of her texts, like the one below, where light, space and time intercross over the theme of concave and convex curvature: The Admirations—and Contempts—of time— Show justest—through an Open Tomb— The Dying—as it were a Height Reorganizes Estimate And what We saw not We distinguish clear— And mostly—see not What We saw before— ’Tis Compound Vision— Light—enabling Light— The Finite—furnished With the Infinite— Convex—and Concave Witness— Back—toward Time— And forward— Toward the God of Him—32

About the contraposition finite/infinite that this text of ED brings us, it is important to mention that general relativity and the new comprehension of space and time came to also change our conception of the Universe. From an unchangeable Universe that could have existed and continued to exist forever, we have achieved the idea of a dynamic and always expanding Universe that apparently had a beginning and could have an end. According to Stephen Hawking, the discovery of the expansion of the

 31 32

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press, 1988), 192. J906; F830.

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universe was one of the biggest intellectual findings of the twentieth century, he and Roger Penrose being the main contributors to its consolidation. ED frequently intercrosses the idea of a cyclic time, associated with its “circumference,” with a finite diameter and subject to comparison, as in the following poem: Time feels so vast that were it not For an Eternity— I fear me this Circumference Engross my Finity— To His exclusion, who prepare By Processes of Size For the Stupendous Vision Of his diameters—33

The notion of absolute time is abandoned; in General Relativity all the observers must necessarily agree relatively to the speed of light. For this to happen, each observer must have his own clock and each clock has its different time. The idea of circular time in ED is common in several texts, but even more common is the concept of possibility in her poetry, which also overlaps with the concept of absolute time, as in this text, where Eternity is the supposition of a plurality of periodical times metaphorically expressed by wave movements, or periods of tides yet to be revisited: As if the Sea should part And show a further Sea— And that—a further—and the Three But a presumption be— Of Periods of Seas— Unvisited of Shores— Themselves the Verge of Seas to be— Eternity—is Those—34

To Dickinson, eternity is this multiplicity of periodical times that open themselves up to others never visited. Maybe this is the way her poetry visits a time that was not yet hers and comes to us nowadays, waving towards a dynamic and relative eternity.

 33 34

J802; F858. J695; F720.

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Works Cited Amaral, Ana Luísa. Emily Dickinson: uma poética de excesso. PhD thesis. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 1995. Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson Reading, 1836-1886. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Chu, Seo-Young J. “Dickinson and Mathematics.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 15, no. 1 (2006): 35-55. Cushman, Stephen. Fictions of Form in American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, 1961. —. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958. —. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Galilei, Galileo. The Assayer. In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Translated by Stillman Drake. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1957. [Il Saggiatore (1623)]. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. London: Bantam Press, 1988. Johnson, Greg. Emily Dickinson, Perception and the Poet’s Quest. University AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Laplace, Pierre Simon. A Philosophical Essay on Probablities. Translated by Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Chapman & Hall, 1902. [Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814-25)]. Peel, Robin. Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Rich, Adrienne. “‘Vesuvius at Home’: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose By Adrienne Rich, 15783. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Stonum, Gary Lee. “Emily Dickinson’s Calculated Sublime.” In The American Sublime, edited by Mary Arensberg, 101-29. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. —. The Dickinson Sublime. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

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Theune, Michael. “‘One and One are One’... and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical Signs.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10, no. 1 (2001): 99-116. White, Fred D. “Sweet Skepticism of the Heart: Science in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.” College Literature 19, no. 1 (1992): 121-128.

PART II SCIENCE AS A PROBLEM: KNOWLEDGE AND SUSPICION

THROUGH THE IRONIC EYE: SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS IN MARCIN WOLSKI’S SATIRICAL DYSTOPIA LABORATORY NO.8 ANDRZEJ SàAWOMIR KOWALCZYK MARIA CURIE-SKàODOWSKA UNIVERSITY, LUBLIN

1. The author of over thirty novels, numerous short stories, and radio features, Marcin Wolski (1947-) belongs to the generation of those Polish writers whose formative years coincided with the relative stability of the communist regime, as well as with its subsequent demise. A holder of a Master’s Degree in History, working as a radio satirist and journalist, Wolski became a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), which governed the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) from 1948 to 1989. Like a number of his peers, he grew disenchanted with and became critical of the official political course. In 1981, after the enforcement of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Party’s first secretary and the commander-in-chief of the Polish People’s Army (LWP), Wolski was expelled from the radio with no right to return. Yet, the democratic breakthrough initiated in 1989 by Solidarity (NSZZ SolidarnoĞü) allowed him to come back to the media and become active in the public life of new Poland. For several years, Wolski has been associated with the conservative part of Polish political scene, the edge of his satire being targeted at the liberal Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), which governed Poland in the years 2007-2015.1

 1

In recent years, Wolski has been associated with Telewizja Republika, an independent TV channel, as well as with some conservative periodicals.

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Written in 1977/78, Laboratory No. 82 was first a drama serial broadcast in Polish Radio Three within the satirical weekly SzeĞüdziesiąt minut na godzinĊ [Sixty Minutes per Hour]. The text was published in book form in 1980, in a volume entitled Rok 3987 [Year 3978], together with a radio feature by another well-known satirist. Importantly, the volume was to contain two more radio texts (by two more authors), but they were blocked by state censorship, still potent in the 1980s. Reflecting upon the book’s publication history in its 2002 edition—well after the fall of communism in Poland—Wolski contends that Laboratory No. 8 was more of entertainment than satire, “at least as a whole”; apparently, it was for that reason that the text managed to dupe the censor.3 However, Wolski himself admits that from the perspective of several decades, the novel’s references to the totalitarian (communist) reality are even more conspicuous, while the story itself can be read as a “call for tolerance and solidarity, not entirely realized at the time of writing.”4 The novel’s political undertones cannot (and should not) be ignored, but when read almost four decades after it was penned, Laboratory No. 8 attracts the reader’s attention also to more universal issues, one of them being the rank and purpose of science in the world. Accordingly, the present study examines the ironic representation of science and scientific experiments in Wolski’s novel, which, following Lyman Tower Sargent’s taxonomy, could also be classified as a satirical dystopia.5 I will argue that the philosophical dimension of the work shines through the label of “satirical SF,” usually attached to Wolski’s fiction, and that the themes of science and scientific experiments serve as the author’s commentary upon the human condition in general.

 2

Although, to the best of my knowledge, the novel has not been translated into English, for the sake of clarity in this study I will use the English equivalent of the Polish original title, Laboratorium Nr 8. 3 Marcin Wolski, THE BESTiarium: [capital letters in the original] Laboratorium Nr 8, Matriarchat, ĝwinka, Numer (Olsztyn: Solaris, 2002), 194. My translation [A. S. K.]. 4 Ibid. 194. 5 Sargent defines dystopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived.” He further associates the adjective “satirical” with the author’s “criticism of contemporary society.” Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 9.

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Through the Ironic Eye

2. Prior to discussing the use of irony in Laboratory No. 8, it is worthwhile to recall some common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon. Literature textbooks and dictionaries of literary terms usually define irony as a case of saying something while actually meaning something else,6 “a contrast with appearance and reality,”7 and “a mode of discourse for conveying meanings different from, and usually opposite to, the professed or ostensible ones.”8 Irony, though, is a complex phenomenon which, in Claire Colebrook’s words, “by the very simplicity of its definition becomes curiously indefinable.”9 Likewise, in a collection of essays devoted to irony, Polish scholar Michaá GáowiĔski contends that it is a truly multifaceted and polymorphic concept which can manifest itself in various forms.10 He further observes that the three major categories of irony which are discussed in critical works usually bear the name of Socratic, rhetorical,11 and Romantic irony,12 the division more or less coinciding with the diachronic evolution of the concept. Scholars generally agree that the term eironeia was first recorded in Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC), where it has both a pejorative and a more neutral meaning.13 As D. C. Muecke explains, as used in Republic, the word refers to “a smooth, low-down way of taking people in” but also to Plato’s descriptions of Socrates’s teaching strategy of “self-depreciative

 6

See Denis Delaney et al., Fields of Vision: Literature in the English Language (Edinburgh Gate, Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003/2009), A32; Edward Quinn, ed., A Glossary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition, (New York: Facts On File Inc., 2006), 222. 7 Kelley Griffith, Writing Essays about Literature: A Guide and Stylesheet, Fifth Edition (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998), 75. 8 Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, ed., The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxon: Routledge, 1987/2006), 123. 9 Claire Colebrook, Irony (New Critical Idiom) (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 10 Michaá GáowiĔski, “Ironia jako akt komunikacyjny,” in Ironia, ed. Michaá GáowiĔski (GdaĔsk: sáowo/obraz terytoria, 2002), 6. 11 Apparently, the term “rhetorical irony” is less popular in English language criticism, where it is most frequently regarded as identical with “verbal irony.” Cf. Lars Elleström, Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 50. 12 GáowiĔski, 6. 13 Cf. D. C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London and New York: Methuen, 1970/1982), 15; J. A. Cuddon, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1976/1999), 427; Colebrook, 6.

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dissimulation” (i.e. regarding himself as lower or ignorant in order to expose the intellectual shortcomings of a supposedly wiser opponent).14 It should be borne in mind that Socrates’s final aim was to lead his adversary to the discovery of truth, and therefore Socratic irony could be understood, following GáowiĔski, as a “certain cognitive practice.”15 In turn, the rhetorical nature of irony was underscored by Cicero (10643 BC), whose term ironia, as Muecke elucidates, is devoid of the offensive meanings of the Greek eironeia; accordingly, Cicero understood irony either as a rhetorical figure or as a “wholly admirable […] pervasive habit of discourse.”16 Next, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (c. 35-c. 100 AD) regarded irony as “the elaboration of a figure of speech into an entire argument.”17 Colebrook notices that throughout the epoch “irony was theorised within rhetoric.”18 In the Renaissance, she explains, the understanding of irony was broadened from a mere figure of speech to one “that could characterise an entire personality.”19 It was, however, in the nineteenth century that irony took some new connotations and started to be understood, as Muecke puts it, in terms of “something that could […] be unintentional, something observable and hence representable in art, something that happened or that one became or could be made aware of.”20 German Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), and Karl Solger (17801819) developed an understanding of irony as a style of existence, or “the only true mode of life.”21 Generally speaking, the human condition itself began to be regarded as ironic.22 Romantic irony also pertained to a certain method of writing, namely to an author’s “build[ing] up the illusion of representing reality, only to shatter the illusion by revealing that the author, as artist, is the creator and arbitrary manipulator of the characters and their actions.”23 This will be of particular import for the subsequent

 14 Muecke, 15-16. Interestingly enough, the idea is explored in the classical comedy, where the eiron—a stock character “distinguishing himself as a low-born or mentally incompetent figure”—proves superior to the alazon, “the pompous braggart.” Quinn, 222-223. 15 GáowiĔski, 6, emphasis added. 16 Muecke, 16. 17 Ibid. 18 Colebrook, 6. 19 Ibid. 7. 20 Muecke, 19. 21 Colebrook, 51. 22 Muecke, 19. 23 M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, ed., A Glossary of Literary Terms, Ninth Edition (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2005/2009), 168.

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textual analysis, but for the time being let us look at representative synchronic approaches to the phenomenon of irony. Typically, irony is divided into verbal and situational irony.24 The former involves the case in which one thing is said and a sharply different thing or the opposite is meant, while the latter, in Lars Elleström’s words, applies to “a situation where the outcome is incongruous with what was expected.”25 There are also subcategories of situational irony, namely cosmic irony (also called irony of fate), attitudinal irony, and dramatic irony—although they may be treated as independent types. Thus, cosmic irony pertains to the concept of some supernatural force—be it God or destiny—playing with the fates of characters.26 Attitudinal irony, in turn, is defined by Kelley Griffith in opposition to situational irony: “situational irony results from what most people expect, whereas attitudinal irony results from what one person expects.”27 Attitudinal irony, Griffith explains, originates from the conflict between how one, usually naive, character perceives or (mis)construes the world and what it really is, Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Voltaire’s Candide serving as well-known literary examples.28 Finally, dramatic irony, sometimes called tragic irony—though even here there are critics who distinguish between the two—pertains to the case where, in Elleström’s words, “the reader or audience knows more about a character’s situation than the character himself or herself.”29 The audience, then, interprets the character’s actions and utterances in a totally different manner than s/he does. Yet another common division is one between verbal and structural irony, the latter being understood, as Elleström puts it, as “situational irony given shape or acted out in a text.”30 More specifically, this type of irony is associated with “the use of a naive or deluded hero or unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers,”31 which at some point makes it closer to attitudinal irony and/or dramatic irony. According to Elleström, a typical example of structural irony is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), where the narrator’s suggestion to produce,

 24

Cuddon, 430; Elleström, 51. Elleström, 51. 26 Abrams and Harpham, 167; Elleström, 51. 27 Griffith, 74, italics in the original. 28 Ibid. 74. 29 Elleström, 52, emphasis added. 30 Ibid. 51. 31 Chris Baldick, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990/2001), 130. 25

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kill, and eat Irish children “contrasts sharply with the norms of most readers.”32 In light of the different theoretical approaches delineated above, it is evident that the categories of irony are fluid; they overlap and, in some cases, might be used interchangeably. With no claims to determine the essence of the phenomenon—the very possibility of such a task being dubious33—I intend to apply some of the (sub)categories to the subsequent analysis of how irony operates in Wolski’s novel/satirical dystopia.

3. While the novel’s title, Laboratory No. 8, underlines the significance of the theme of science in the text, the opening scene betokens irony as a mode permeating the entire work. A new technician, called Inspec [inspector], is directed by “Parliam [parliament] and the relevant Mistry [ministry]” to join the research conducted by Prof [professor] and Assis [assistant], shown rather stereotypically as “two figures in white lab coats” standing “by a table full of burners and bubbling retorts”.34 Inspec introduces himself as “SB 666,” which, together with the permanent use of other abbreviations,35 immediately brings to mind associations of political nature. In communist Poland, the acronym “SB” denoted the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (SáuĪba BezpieczeĔstwa); the number 666 evokes the biblical Antichrist and/or Satan. (As a matter of fact, later on Inspec turns out to be a secret agent engaged in an antidemocratic putsch.) During the initial conversation between Inspec and the researchers, the reader learns about Inspec’s scientific experience: he has not worked with the quadruped yet, but he is a specialist on insects, including Hemiptera and termites. Inspec is to cooperate with Assis, who conducts research on intelligence in minor species. Importantly, what at

 32

Elleström, 51. Ibid. 53-57. 34 Wolski, 196. This and all further passages from Wolski’s Laboratory No. 8 are given in my translation [A. S. K.]. The corresponding page numbers from the Polish 2002 edition are given in the footnotes. 35 Consider Peter Kenez’s remarks on the propagandist function of language in the USSR: “It is not a mere figure of speech to say that the Soviet people came to speak a new language. […] The new bureaucracy created a bewildering variety of abbreviations and neologisms.” Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 255-256. 33

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first sight looks like a conversation of professionals suddenly changes to verge on the ridiculous: “Intelligence in arthropods?” Inspec bridled at the suggestion when they were passing by the cage with a termite ten times the size of rats. “All scientific legacy proves that dealing with these morons is a waste of time.” “Maybe, but my predecessor managed to domesticate a gigantic praying mantis.” “Did he? And—“ “The experiment surpassed all expectations. The female fell for him. And to prove her feelings, like a typical mantis, she ate him at the end of sexual intercourse.”36

The situation may strike the reader as incongruous in a truly Swiftian manner, but it occurs that, in light of some facts revealed afterwards, it is not at all improbable within the story world. Actually, the real cognitive surprise is yet to come. As Prof and Assis demonstrate the results of their experiments to Inspec, the narrator reveals that under the laboratory’s floor there is “the whole labyrinth of pens and terrariums,” housing creatures whose behaviour can be modified by means of light impulses. Unexpectedly, the relatively detailed description of the experiments ends with the following comment: “The three large rats in white coats leaned over the vivaria in whose corridors the laboratory humankind kept toddling around.”37 The situation, then, is the polar opposite of what may have been expected, the representatives of the homo sapiens being an inferior race subject to the scientific experiments of intelligent rats. As a result of this change of perspective, all events described in the text are likely to be construed ironically, signalling to the reader a sense of distance between what is and what should be/what is expected to be—one of the most fundamental principles of irony.38 Step by step, the reader is given to understand that the events take place on Earth at the end of the third millennium—a piece of information which may be an indicator of SF conventions. The past has to be reconstructed from fragments of a manuscript; its author, one John of Aberdeen, managed to survive the apocalypse of the twenty-first century. The manuscript, penned in 2051, reveals that, prior to the cataclysm, human population reached twenty billion, with certain agglomerations exceeding one hundred million inhabitants. The catastrophe occurred in 2039, known as the Year of Great Failure. The global shortage of energy

 36

Wolski, 197. Ibid. 198, emphasis added. 38 Cf. Griffith, 73. 37

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was followed by the emergence of a mysterious virus, which spread in an alarmingly short time and destroyed ninety per cent of the world’s crops. The ensuing famine, migrations of peoples, and escalating military conflicts were coupled with some cases of atomic terrorism. As a result, the World Epidemiology Centre was destroyed and all vaccines were damaged, triggering the reappearance of Black Death, smallpox, cholera, and Ebola virus. Meanwhile, “incredible numbers of insects” appeared, whereas “rats, more and more audacious, kept taking over deserted [city] districts and multiplied.”39 All communication satellites gradually went silent, and the last television tower was blown up in 2043. John of Aberdeen left for the Orkney Islands and then for Scotland, where, after the decease of his loved ones, he cultivated a patch of land and, encouraged by a solitary pilgrim, recorded his memories “for those who will come after” him, using an old typewriter.40 Characteristic of dystopian fiction, the vision may look grievous, but its style, frequently too solemn and too archaic in terms of syntax and vocabulary—and thus reminiscent of a medieval chronicle rather than a twenty-first century document—underscores a sense of ironic distance. The effect is augmented by the manuscript’s lofty invocation (“In the name of everlasting Reason and imperishable Humanism”)41 juxtaposed with images of half-mad human savages, whose existence was reduced to fighting for survival on desolate, contaminated, and rubbish-covered Earth. Assuming that John of Aberdeen, the last representative of the humane humankind, embodies a naive standpoint, one may classify the irony involved as attitudinal. Yet, the “extant” text proves ironic in other ways. For instance, the author of the manuscript admits that “prophecies of […] preachers and hysterical scientists” were heard, but no one listened to them. The reader realizes that what had been regarded as frantic (i.e. the warnings) turned out to be even worse, for homo sapiens was ultimately supplanted by other species. This discrepancy between expectations and “reality” is a case of situational irony, which could even be called historical, since the ironic meaning is evident only from a temporal perspective. Additionally, taking into account the fact that due to man’s scientific development the human race was (virtually) obliterated, one may also think of cosmic irony—as if an awe-inspiring force were playing with history, with a somewhat perverse feeling of self-satisfaction. Last but not least, Wolski’s novel ends with the nearly total extinction of rat and insect

 39

Wolski, 209. Ibid. 211. 41 Ibid. 207. 40

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civilizations, apparently replacing the fallible humans, which makes the overall ironic message even more universal. But to return to the summary of major events in Laboratory No. 8, when the main narrator takes over after John, it is revealed that rat scientists had trouble accounting for the observed dwarfing of the human race; nonetheless, they managed to establish a plausible version. The rats’ pseudo-scientific explanation stands in apparent contrast with the solemnity of the apocalypse, again generating an ironic effect. Thus, the reader learns, a group of human scientists invented a dietary supplement called “Biominimal,” recommended to pregnant women so as to diminish the growth of future generations—a truly peculiar remedy for food and material supply problems, perhaps evocative of Soviet pseudo-scientists’ absurd achievements.42 It occurred that the miniature offspring developed adaptation capabilities to an astonishing degree and finally managed to supplant the “original” homo sapiens. Meanwhile, there was a dramatic increase in the rat population, and giant mutant rats began to emerge. To the reader’s astonishment, their history was parallel to human history, with equivalent empires, discoveries, and military conflicts, “as if someone above had decided to create the second, revised edition of Earth’s Civilization”43—the narrator’s comment itself being an indicator of cosmic irony. The intelligent rats revived the human alphabet and used man’s language from the twenty-first century, at the same time making the “homos” (homy in Polish)—as the miniature people were called—their staple food.44 The physical modification of the two races (large into small and vice versa) has evident ironic connotations, for it can be interpreted figuratively, in terms of the dwarfing of the essence of the human and the simultaneous augmentation of animal intelligence. The fact that it is rat scientists who reconstructed this rather pathetic “future” history of homo sapiens45 brings to mind

 42 Suffice it to recall the experiments of Trofim Lysenko, one of Joseph Stalin’s favourite scientists, who, apart from publicizing a number of ludicrous ideas, believed in the possibility of transforming one organism into another, like wheat into rye. See Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), esp. 46-50. 43 Wolski, 214. 44 Here, again, one cannot resist evoking Swift’s A Modest Proposal. 45 The reader, who will recognize in the novel numerous equivalents of his/her empirical reality, is likely—more or less consciously—to treat Wolski’s vision of civilization as a future one, notwithstanding its fantastic or incongruous features. In contrast, when considered from the perspective of the novel’s present, the depiction of the occurrences is clearly “historical.”

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human scientific research in the reader’s empirical world, making him/her aware that what is known of other species is always a man-made history. To put it differently, Wolski seems to make his reader aware that man’s knowledge of the world is unavoidably anthropocentric and therefore frequently tainted with a false sense of superiority. The present events in Laboratory No. 8 take place against the “historical” background delineated above, the themes of science and scientific experiments permeating, more or less overtly, the entire text. However, it can be argued that Wolski’s intention exceeds the use of irony for satirical (i.e. corrective) or comic (i.e. entertaining) aims, for he seems to empathize with those fictional individuals who are independent enough to transgress the stiff boundaries between the species. On the one hand, the needs of the laboratory people (the homos) amount to “warmth, feed, peace” and, first of all, to sex.46 And yet, on the other hand, there is some hope, since the degenerated miniature humans become objects of rat scientists’ illegal experiments aiming at reviving the species of homo domesticus, an intelligent creature which could become a partner rather than mere fodder for the rodents. To attain this, Prof and Assis are to crossbreed a laboratory male known as Six with a female, Ea, caught in the wild. Ea turns out to have been reared and educated by the legendary founder of Laboratory No. 8 and friend of homos, Habil, whose name in Polish is an allusion to the highest post-PhD academic qualification a scholar can achieve (habilitacja).47 Whereas Ea becomes a new Eve, cultivating knowledge and good manners among laboratory people, it is not entirely evident who could perform the role of new Adam. Her learnyour-lesson-and-I-let-you-touch-my-tits educational strategy,48 apart from being amusing, is also bitterly ironic, for it might be construed as Wolski’s statement upon the condition of man, intrinsically rooted in the animal kingdom and governed by primal instincts. Another problem raised in the novel is the relationship between science and politics. Apparently, even in the superior (?) era of intelligent rats there are serious tensions, undercover plots, the practice of informing on one’s colleagues, and the like. Inspec, it will be remembered, proves to be a secret service officer; Prof becomes detained and accused of “rat-izing” humans; the chief police officer, Comis [commissioner], strives for

 46

Wolski, 213. The word’s Latin origin, habilitas, indicates “ability” and “aptitude.” Latdict, s.v. “habilitas, habilitatis,” Latdict: Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resources, http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/21812/habilitas-habilitatis (accessed May 05, 2016). 48 Wolski, 221, 224. 47

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dictatorship. His followers are to incite street riots and arouse public outrage aimed, not surprisingly, at laboratories and “philo-homos,” as little people’s friends are called. In other words, science is treated purely instrumentally. Such events look familiar to the reader conversant with the status of non-politicised science in the times of communism;49 simultaneously, though, they point out the ever-present danger of scientific research being expected to serve a particular political purpose. Prof’s official research, after all, is supervised by Sci-Council (Naurada in Polish); he is supposed to grow little people to work for rats,50 or, as the narrator puts it elsewhere, “to produce ‘living tools’”.51 At one point, the pressure of the Mistry [ministry] is communicated to Prof directly: “Five million ears [the rat “monetary” unit] have been spent on your ExpSearch [experimental research] and no profit for our economy or society has been seen. Meanwhile, Labory [laboratory] No. 4 has managed to breed a new species of pack homo, its load capacity equalling a quarter of a ton. You’ve been promising magnificent working homos to us, verily genuine living machines. Where are they? Has at least a single one been reared?”52

As a result of such insistence, the rat scientists, Prof and Assis, are forced to quicken the pace of their research, both legal and secret, which nonetheless fails to bear the expected fruit. Needless to say, Wolski employs this motif to make an ironic statement upon the nature of man: “In vivarium K-22,” Assis reports, “hardly had we taught the little men how to use sticks when they beat the red-haired one to death. Interestingly, it is easier to teach them how to press buttons than how to be tolerant towards others”.53 This bitter remark comes true also in the reader’s world, be it at the time of Wolski’s writing the novel (as a radio serial or a book) or at the beginning of the twenty-first century, almost forty years later. Another aspect foregrounded in Laboratory No. 8 in an ironic manner is the unpredictability of scientific experiments. Scientists, Wolski seems to suggest, believe they do control their research, but in reality its outcome might become the complete opposite of the intended one, either by

 49

See, for instance, the notorious case of the persecution of Soviet geneticists: Jan Witkowski, “Stalin’s war on genetic science,” review of The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle, Nature 454, no. 7204 (2008): 577-579. 50 Wolski, 198. 51 Ibid. 215. 52 Ibid. 216. 53 Ibid. 217.

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negligence, short-sightedness, or by mere accident. The role of chance, indicative of irony of fate, is exemplified in the novel by a group of twenty-first century mercenaries. The ruthless band breaks into a human cryonics centre and empties its containers, throwing away the bodies of a Nobel Prize winner (sic!), a president, and a famous star (“Pity. She was a great piece of arse! But we’ve no other choice”).54 The intruders force the centre’s personnel to freeze them in glass coffins, after which the commander shoots the scientists dead and deep-freezes himself using a remote control. However, instead of the intended thirty years, the gang members are defrosted only in 3978 (and by rat scientists), which seriously affects the course of the novel’s present events. It is exactly these “giant” (i.e. ordinary) men who help laboratory homos to escape and join their free companions, hiding on the Islet of Survival. And yet, rather than leading a relatively happy life there, the little people are manipulated into waging a total war on rats and becoming the mercenaries’ slaves, living in a truly dystopian community.55 The lack of control over scientific experiments is also conspicuous in the case of Exp [expert] and Inspec, two mischievous rats given a free hand to carry out research on insects in the “big” (i.e. mercenary) mancontrolled society. The two rodents work in one of the laboratories formerly used by rat scientists to experiment upon miniature people. Officially, Exp and Inspec attempt to breed high-calorie foods, an edible colossal aphid being their major achievement. Clandestinely, though, they keep experimenting with insect intelligence—a branch of research so despised by Inspec at the outset of the novel.56 The conspirators breed a termite army which multiplies at an enormous pace and is to be controlled by rat officials in their quest to regain power. Here, in one or two episodes taking place in the lab, Wolski employs dramatic irony, making the reader aware of what the rat scientists fail to realize: “Inspec, we’ve achieved our goal! Intelligent insects! Just take a look at this one: what a clever gaze!” “It’s an enormous beast for an insect. Can it be dangerous?” “Only to our enemies. After all, the rat is still six times as intelligent as this creepy-crawly. We shall maintain the termites on an intellectual level low enough to thwart their ambitions yet high enough to make them fight and die for us.”

 54

Ibid. 226. Ibid. 260-261. 56 Ibid. 196-197. 55

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58

The whirring of the generator and the sound of the machinery make [the rats] unable to hear the soft whispering in the cages: “Alright, alright, alright, alright…”57

In what follows, the termites’ “alright-alright-alright” turns into a sui generis war slogan,58 exposing the short-sightedness and harmful arrogance of the rat scientists. Again, Wolski’s philosophical message shows here: just as human beings ignored rats, and, later on, just as rats underestimated homos, now the rat experimenters take insects too lightly. This doubling of motifs/episodes is redolent of cosmic irony. A commonplace situation known from the reader’s empirical world, where human scientists experiment on rats, is reversed in the book, with rats carrying out research on homos and looking for signs of intelligence in these instinct-driven, pitiable little creatures. Apparently, the intelligent rodents are likely to last forever, but their scientists rashly defrost the “big” men, who, in turn, gain power over rats, utilizing homos either as cannon fodder or as subsidiary officials in the new socio-political (dystopian) system. Yet another military conflict breaks out when combat insects grow independent of their creators, too arrogant and too selfcentred to notice the imminent danger. The war involves laboratory-bred termites as well as their insect allies, which, rather unexpectedly, seem to exceed the practical intelligence of both rats and humans. As a result, total chaos reigns again (cf. the manuscript of John of Aberdeen), Earth being ripped with a number of thermonuclear reactions. Laboratory No. 8, however, does not end on an ominous, dystopian note; nor is Wolski a prophet of doom, who would encourage too straightforward, one-sided interpretations. Apparently, whenever he finds himself on the edge of pathos associated with the gravity of fictional events, he resorts to irony and complicates actions in a deus-ex-machina manner. In the novel’s final episode, a group of refugees including Ea, Prof, and the sly rat called—ominously enough—Thirteen encounter a high mountain meadow in which they see a “light green ball of matter of unknown origin and indeterminable structure, soaking five of its ten legs in water.”59 The creature’s incongruity contrasts sharply with the previous tone of gloom, but it is not the end of the surprises. Soon, the reader learns that, hidden under the rat-like Assis, this cosmic being has been conducting its own galactic mission—a scientific experiment involving the

 57

Ibid. 263. Ibid. 272-273. 59 Ibid. 303. 58

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observation of three races: human beings, rats, and termites. In a truly climactic scene, the cosmic visitor reports: Unfortunately, laboratory number eight proved a fruitless investment. The intelligent protein organisms have no great future ahead of them. Owing to a specific structure of amino acids in them, there is death encoded in every creature, doom in each species. […] I am passing by Mars, laboratory number seven; by the Planetoids, the remnants of laboratory number six; Jupiter—number five; Saturn—number four; Uranus—number three; Neptune—two; Pluto—one. […] As for laboratory number eight, we should let matters take their own course and definitively put them ad acta.60

Taking into account this meta-perspective, one could interpret Wolski’s satirical dystopia in terms of serious ontological and epistemological questions: Who, in fact, are we, human beings? Who/what governs our universe (if at all)? Is there any sense in the course of events we experience? What do we really know about other species? Needless to say, such a reading does not exclude the possibility of construing Laboratory No. 8 historically, as a veiled satire on the position of science and scientific research under communism and/or as a bitterly humorous allegory of the Cold War and the arms race. And yet, paradoxically, Wolski’s use of structural irony—in the sense of irony built in a text— encourages the reader to transgress textual boundaries. Namely, in the final paragraph of the novel, the radio-like narrator takes over, closing the frame, as it were, but simultaneously leaving it open through a series of rhetorical, all too patent questions: “What next? Will Prof and Ea play the role of the Adam and Eve of new humankind? Will the improved human civilization survive? Who may know it? Perhaps, God and our favourite ‘to be continued,’ which continues and continues and continues…”61 Thus, this narrator/voice, or the supreme ironist, deconstructs the fictional world he has created, reveals his own role in the process, distances himself from the requirements of the dystopian genre, and leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness. The reader is reminded that the “reality” s/he has temporarily agreed to accept (cf. Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief”) is an artefact, always subject to a number of interpretations. The overall strategy employed by Wolski is therefore evocative of Romantic irony, which is to lead one beyond the boundaries

 60 61

Ibid. 305. Ibid. 304.

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of the text and literary device, towards a “style of existence” or “the only true mode of life.”62

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, ed. A Glossary of Literary Terms, Ninth Edition. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2005/2009. Baldick, Chris, ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990/2001. Birstein, Vadim J. The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler, ed. The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxon: Routledge, 1987/2006. Colebrook, Claire. Irony (New Critical Idiom). London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Cuddon, J. A., ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1976/1999. Delaney, Denis and others. Fields of Vision: Literature in the English Language. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003/2009. Elleström, Lars. Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. GáowiĔski, Michaá. “Ironia jako akt komunikacyjny.” In Ironia, edited by Michaá GáowiĔski, 5-16. GdaĔsk: sáowo/obraz terytoria, 2002. Griffith, Kelley. Writing Essays about Literature: A Guide and Stylesheet, Fifth Edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998. Latdict: Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resources. S.v. “habilitas, habilitatis.” Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Muecke, D. C. Irony and the Ironic. London and New York: Methuen, 1970/1982. Quinn, Edward, ed. A Glossary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File Inc., 2006. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1-37.

 62

Colebrook, 51.

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Witkowski, Jan. “Stalin’s war on genetic science.” Review of The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle. Nature 454, no. 7204 (2008): 577-579. Wolski, Marcin. THE BESTiarium: Laboratorium Nr 8, Matriarchat, ĝwinka, Numer. Olsztyn: Solaris, 2002.

“NO MAN CAN PUT ALL THE WORLD IN A BOOK”: ON THE CONCEPT OF SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN PEDRO ALMEIDA BROWN UNIVERSITY

AND MARIA INÊS MARQUES YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA

“Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. Blood Meridian, or the evening representation in the West Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian was once described as “the authentic American apocalyptic novel,”1 depicting a nihilistic world where the grand narratives of Western culture have failed. While following John Joel Glanton and his gang during their terribly violent westward enterprise, the novel presents a serious and comprehensive reflection on the value and reliability of scientific representation. The world of Blood Meridian is one where, according to Jean-François Lyotard, the “progress in the science” brought about “incredulity toward metanarratives,”2 the epitome of which was the existence of an almighty and omnipresent God that conferred eternal and absolute meaning to

 1 Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009), 1. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An anthology, ed. Lawrence E. Cahoone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1979), 482.

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everything. Throughout McCarthy’s novel different “grand narratives” and value systems, ranging from religion and traditional morality to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny,3 are constantly evoked only to be deconstructed. According to Sarah L. Spurgeon, “At its deepest structural and rhetorical levels, Blood Meridian utilizes myth and religious imagery both Christian and non-Christian in order to strip away the layers of blind belief myths compel.”4 Based on Samuel Chamberlain’s personal narrative of his western experience—My Confession—Blood Meridian follows Glanton and his gang in their quest for Indian scalps, which is mainly motivated by money, although the group enjoys the sickening doses of violence and bloodshed lived on a daily basis. These men appear to us as “remote and without substance,”5 embarking on an empty and meaningless enterprise during which they are either left behind, waiting alone for death to come, or brutally murdered. These are men who do not believe in any creed or stand for a cause. They live for the daily massacres they perpetrate in Southwestern villages, waiting to be “the disciples of a new faith.”6 However, there is one character in the group that stands out for being the only one who has a historic consciousness and the ability to create a grand narrative that justifies Man’s presence on Earth. That is Judge Holden. Harold Bloom asks: “What is the reader to make of the judge? He is immortal as principle, as War Everlasting, but is he a person, or something other?”7 In fact, throughout the novel the Judge presents himself as a powerful and almost supernatural entity, with devilish traits and a physical majesty that was already described in Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: “he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women.”8 Bearing in mind the novel’s reflection upon the issue of representation, its linguistic style is quite significant. Blood Meridian is an epic narrative

 3

The only character that believes and acts in compliance with the doctrine of the Manifest Destiny is Captain White, who suffers a rather undignified death early in the novel. 4 Sarah L. Spurgeon, “Foundations of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” in Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009), 88. 5 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (London: Picador, 2010), 159. 6 Ibid. 137. 7 Bloom, Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, 3. 8 Kenneth Lincoln, Cormac McCarthy. American Canticles (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 84.

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that undergoes a process of decomposition, a grandiloquent discourse describing supposedly notable actions but, nevertheless, presenting a disruptive resonance: it is repetitive, flawed, worn out, mumbling. Whilst it imitates the biblical prosody and recalls biblical archetypes, the novel’s narrative keeps distorting them, suggesting that the quest for the original writing is a project impossible to achieve. This disruptive aspect is far from being merely formal: the exhaustive abundance in the novel’s writing points towards an essential failure against which Blood Meridian is written, an absence caused by saturation that only excess (of blood, violence, filth) or lack (of words, women, water) can redeem. If the concern with representation is felt in the voice of the novel’s narrator, it also impregnates Judge Holden’s actions. He is the prototype of the scientific man who looks for an explanation of natural phenomena that does not rely on the intervention of a divine entity. He is the typical positivist man who, according to Auguste Comte, should find the laws of nature through the “combined use of reasoning and observation.”9 In fact, Holden is quite often described observing and collecting rocks, insects and plants that he, as a methodical researcher, catalogues and classifies in his notebooks. Moreover, he has a compulsion for rigorously copying objects into his sketchpads: The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book to take away with him [...] Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to the camp.10

2. From representation to annihilation: language, power and death Holden’s desire to represent derives from his belief that his representations are able to sustain life. Contrary to other elements of Glanton’s gang, Holden seems to unconditionally trust his power to retain the true essence of objects through his drawings and textual descriptions. His acknowledgement and representation (in his notebooks) of the objects, animals and plants he finds along the way are his means to achieve a creative power that seems out of reach for most men. Everything he draws

 9

Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive (Paris: Hachette, 1943), 8 (our translation). 10 McCarthy, 182.

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or jots down is not only acknowledged, but also created by him, becoming as real as the originals. For Holden, his notebooks are the books of Creation and, when Webster teases his demiurgic ambitions by saying that “no man can put all the world in a book,”11 he delivers a sermon on the power and veracity of the representation in relation to the original object, stating that “What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ.”12 The judge continues his indoctrination by telling the other men about the portrait he drew of an old Hueco man and which, similarly to Dorian Gray’s portrait, was so alike the man that “he would not suffer it creased nor anything to touch it.”13 Holden overcomes the tension between model and reality, dismissing the complex debate about the very possibility of correspondence. His models do not have to match the real thing—they aim at replacing it in the order of things and beings, erasing the original once and for all. In the Judge’s purview this means emancipating man from the tyranny of doubt: “to be the suzerain.” Since his system is grounded on the primacy of representation over reality, it assumes that knowledge is driven by the representation, and not by the thing itself. Holden deeply believes that only through his personal acknowledgment, representation and recreation of the original objects, will this world—and everything contained in it— really exist for him. When questioned by a very sceptical Toadvine, he answers in his grandiloquent style: “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” A few lines down he replies once again: “In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”14 For Holden, his enactment of the act of Creation is perfectly accomplished, as we watch him sitting “with his hands cupped in his lap and [...] much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.”15 The Judge’s way of making science is obviously not objective nor disinterested. It is much more, as Nietzsche wrote, “an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to ourselves! if I may say so) and not an explanation of the world.”16 His knowledge of the world gives him a feeling of empowerment and total dominion over nature, which he accommodates to his own will. However, with Holden’s will for a

 11

Ibid. 148. Ibid. 148. 13 Ibid. 149. 14 Ibid. 209. 15 Ibid. 148. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Judith Norman, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 15. 12

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totalizing knowledge comes a destructive impulse that attempts to reduce or accommodate the original objects to the frame of mind of the subject that is studying and representing them. As Steven Shaviro wrote, “the making of images and words is not a tranquil process of recollection and perpetuation, but a continual movement of accretion that implies the cruelty of triage and selection.”17 In chapters XI and XIII, the Judge appears selecting the objects he wants to copy and, after the drawings are complete, destroying the originals: When he had done he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the notebook.18

By doing so, the Judge skips the stage of the observation of the other (“to witness”) and chooses to appropriate the other, since, for him, knowing something means possessing it and deciding upon its fate. Face to face with the excessiveness of reality, Holden decides on appropriation, which takes the form of an exercise of retention: the stuffed animals, the still portraits and the children he violently kills like a powerful Herod are attempts to stop the flowing of the living, to freeze the becoming of things. By refusing or ignoring the chance to know and understand nature without annihilating it, Holden produces an instrumental justification for his presence in the world. If Iago is, according to Harold Bloom, a proto-modernist, who destroys in order to create—his “passion for destruction is the only creative passion in the play”19—Holden could very well be his descendant. His destructive drive towards the natural objects he finds along the way is triggered by his ambitious and megalomaniac character, his desire to be a creator of the universe, a demiurge in competition with God. As Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, when God created Man, He “has created for himself a rival; science makes one like God,—it is all over with priests and gods once man becomes scientific!”20 In fact, Holden’s ultimate goal seems to be more than dominating the world; he wants to repeat the act of its Creation.

 17

Steven Shaviro, “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” in Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views (New York: Infobase, 2009), 18. 18 McCarthy, 147. 19 Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 442. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist, trans. by Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), 152.

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According to Holden’s self-centred narrative, his own representations of reality are much more important than reality itself and in order for them to become the demiurgic creations he wants them to be, the original object must always be destroyed. However, representation never tells what something is, but rather how it is, and the reason for it being so is that representation is language-based, and language itself is a descriptive device. The Judge is not really interested in understanding what things are—he eliminates them without the slightest hesitation. His only purpose is to apprehend an external and visual image of them in order to replace the originals for his own replicas. He is fully aware of the consequences: in fact, his concept of “scientific knowledge” arises from the conscience of the absolute and unredeemable externality of “knowing something”: Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.21

Somehow, the Judge realizes that this is the premise of every scientific discourse: in order to achieve a status of certitude, one must give up any ambition of an understanding of the inner origins, and trust entirely on the ability of models to get us in touch with the real (for instance, is the DNA structure really as we see it, with its “double helix” spiral depicted by modern software?). We are condemned to this uncertain form of knowledge, shifting perpetually between our powers of observation (made possible by technique) and our ability to express (constrained by the structure of language). But Holden does not conform to this duality and even pushes it to the limit, in a Promethean way, by allowing the model to absorb and replace reality, thus turning reality into a model of itself—the artificial world he openly desires is nothing but a world of representation without referents: The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals in here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things.22

 21 22

McCarthy, 266. Ibid. 197.

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And the Judge is, himself, such a model of a pure (abstract) representation: timeless, without beginning and presumably without an end, A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.23

Holden impersonates the condition he argues for his representations, and, in this sense, he becomes the prototype of the scientific man: with no traces left behind, he can devote himself entirely to the logos of his practice. Hence the methodical rationale of his murderous course. The bond that attaches most men to the contingency of the real, reminding each one of the weaknesses of knowledge (i.e., of representations), has been cut out and Holden, just like Faust, is able to describe his trajectory guided only by the unrestrained desire of an exhaustive and tantalizing possession. Like in Faust, there is no turning back. Neither for him nor for what he considers to be a “representation”: that desire leaves no room for the world itself, since the observer (“witness”) becomes the only condition of existence for anything, being or event.

3. Mirrors, metaphors, replacements In more than one way, the Judge reminds us of the inner paradoxes of representation as the backbone of scientific knowledge. It is because representation is, to a large extent, an observer-oriented technical device that it empowers whoever possesses the abilities and conditions to manage it. Perhaps nothing accounts for this as the famous thought-experiment known as “Schrödinger’s cat.” Quantum mechanics holds that a physical system exists partly in many of its possible states—a particle, such as an electron, can show more than one value for the same operator or function, a principle known as “quantum superposition.” As we try to represent this principle on a larger scale, with objects familiar to all of us, things start getting complicated, and the Schrödinger’s cat experiment tests the very

 23

Ibid. 326.

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possibility of such a representation. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The cat is thought of as locked in a box with a capsule of cyanide, which will break if a Geiger counter triggers. This will happen if an atom in a radioactive substance in the box decays, and there is a chance of 50% of such an event within an hour. Otherwise the cat is alive. The problem is that the system is in an indeterminate state. The wave function of the entire system is a “superposition” of states, fully described by the probabilities of events occurring when it is eventually measured, and therefore “contains equal parts of the living and dead cat.”24

When we try to apply the quantum superposition principle to a cat, it does not take long to understand the limits of representation. The classical explanation holds that it is the observation that produces the sudden change in the system, forcing it to actualize into one of the possibilities: When we look and see we will find either an alive cat or a dead cat, but if it is only as we look that the wave packet collapses, quantum mechanics forces us to say that before we looked it was not true that the cat was dead and also not true that it was alive.25

The Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment sets us before the limits of representation itself. Ultimately, our curiosity kills the cat… But it also warns us of the dangers and aporias of taking our reliance upon the powers of representation too far—as Holden does. There is a true peril, in both cases, of subsuming reality to the seductive temptations of modellization. As Lewontin puts it in Biology as Ideology. The doctrine of DNA, We have become so used to the atomistic machine view of the world that originated with Descartes that we have forgotten that it is a metaphor. We no longer think, as Descartes did, that the world is like a clock. We think it is a clock. We cannot imagine an alternative view unless it be one that goes back to a prescientific era.26

If knowledge is solely driven by representation, we come to a dead-end, close to Wittgenstein’s well-known stance, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” At first sight, the Judge seems to support

 24

“Schrödinger’s cat” (s.v.), in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Simon Blackburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, online version). 25 Ibid. 26 R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology. The doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 14.

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this thesis. However, his character also undermines its premises, and perhaps literature allows us to understand how. Literature being one of the fields of representation par excellence, it has taught us quite a lot about how to deal with the process of figuration. Since Homer’s eloquent similes, we came to understand that language, with all its resources, contains a set of limits that can only be realized, and perhaps overcome, through language itself. This basic principle of the Homeric simile will be found in the elementary process of the metaphoric use of language. The incertitude or indeterminacy inherent to human language allows us to make a creative use of language every time we come across a new situation, and are asked to answer it with an already known set of symbols and meanings. In a way, we are capable of reinventing language, due exactly to the indeterminacy it conveys. Literature is probably the most perfect expression of this. That is why, since Aristotle, mimesis is known to be inseparable from poiesis—and that is to say: representation, in literature, is always a way of inquiry. Holden’s obsession with representation is not merely an incident, nor is it simply another of the character’s features. It takes the reader right to the story’s core. The very narrative of Blood Meridian is the completion of Judge Holden’s task—destroying something, while trying to account for it. Questioning a certain way of understanding man’s relationship with nature, Blood Meridian, in all its frailty, is the last word of an order of things. One could argue that Cormac McCarthy’s purpose was to establish a thread of continuity between the founding violence of the frontier culture and modern scientific logic, based on the use of purely instrumental reason. However tempting, this would still prove a narrow insight, for the Judge’s symbolic significance transcends that of a simple condemnation. No metaphor can encompass reality as a whole, as no drawing can replace the original. Yet, metaphor questions the very conditions of possibility of reference in general. But the Judge seems to create a shortcircuit in this relationship, in such a way that his explanatory models, i.e., his narrative of the world, become the reality itself: there is no room for the ambiguity of language, no more than for the indeterminacy of reality. His statements on the nature of war as a game of absolute victory or absolute loss seem to validate this view. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all […] This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.27

 27

McCarthy, 262-263.

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In this sense, violence and power are the unifying narrative that embraces all mankind, and to be able to manage it means to own one’s existence. Since it is violence—mainly through the exercise of war—that defines the course of History, the Judge acknowledges violence and death as the instruments by which History can be written: Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views.28

It goes without saying that for Holden “knowledge works as a tool of power”;29 it is the only way for a human being to become master and “properly suzerain of the earth”30 and to be the man who by “singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”31 Each of Holden’s words carries an underlying reflection upon the meaning of violence, and how the abstraction of reality plays a part in it. Representation is the condition per quam of violence, but this violence is already present in the narrative of the facts that occurred, as the narrative of History—the replacement of things and beings by a construction (model) of traces (identities). It is this violence, constraining all in a structure of predefined meanings, which guides Holden’s course: In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if the plan there be.32

And: We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which

 28

Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 266. 30 McCarthy, 209. 31 Ibid. 209-210. 32 Ibid. 346-347. 29

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“No man can put all the world in a book” bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not?33

Representation—in literature as well as in science—is a special kind of fiction, even if sometimes a dangerous one. But it is up to us to reflect upon the process of crystallization of images into models, evaluating the effects (and perhaps mainly the side-effects) of this crossing. Literature and particularly interpretation teaches us how to deal with this process of figuration, as the basis of every metaphor. In Nous n’avons jamais été modernes Bruno Latour reminds us that the ideal of a knowledge independent from belief—probably the grand narrative upon which the modern scientific discourse was modelled—should not be taken for granted, and that, actually, today’s proliferation of hybrid discourses is nothing but a clear symptom of an anti-modern frame of work (it is enough to think about the mixture of scientific language and advertising strategies in academic writing). The use of models, even if unavoidable, is perhaps the best example of the indivisibility of scientific discourse and creative imagination. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Judge Holden seems precisely to enact the consequences of this metaphoric discourse that is, however, devoid of reference. There is a vast field of study between scientific representations and literary theory or criticism waiting to be explored, and this is the stage where the link between reality and discourse takes place. In Blood Meridian, The Judge is a warning against the ambition of a scientific mind detached from its linguistic, metaphorical, social and fictional roots. Latour opens his ground-breaking Pandora’s Hope by quoting a question that a highly respected psychologist asked him at the end of an international conference in Brazil: “I have a question for you— he said—Do you believe in reality?” Latour tells us his answer was quick and positive: When I noticed that he was relieved by my quick and laughing answer, I was even more baffled, since his relief proved clearly enough that he had anticipated a negative reply, something like “Of course not! Do you think I am that naïve?” This was not a joke, then: he really was concerned, and his query had been in earnest.34

 33

Ibid. 347. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1. 34

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As Latour recognizes, “to ask such a question one has to become so distant from reality that the fear of losing it entirely becomes plausible.”35 But he adds: “this fear itself has an intellectual history.” And that is the history of science, with its ambition of creating a second language. Latour concludes that the only way through which we can bring science closer to the people is by a greater investment in its representational value: and this means accepting its metaphorical status, but also encouraging a reflexive and critical point of view towards it. Conversely, this seems to be the point of Blood Meridian’s “Epilogue,” where we witness a mysterious unnamed figure digging holes in the ground, and filling them with stakes in a straight line: maybe the time of Judge Holden has come to an end, maybe not, but something seems to be changing. Maybe that figure is nobody but Holden himself, raising a fence on the plains where the open frontier used to be, and thus suggesting the dawn of “the two cultures.” Or maybe that figure marks the end of the superposition of representation and reality conveyed by the Judge, signalling the beginning of a time when the boundaries between them are clear enough to allow a self-conscious inquiry on the limits and strengths of the scientific narrative. Above all, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian reflects on some of the deepest concerns of our time, a time, as Hans-Georg Gadamer stated in “Praise of Theory,” when we do not know “whether the life-threatening disproportion between the strength of our weapons and the frail wisdom that characterizes the culture of the human race today will plunge humanity into catastrophe and self-destruction.”36

Works Cited Bloom, Harold, ed. Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views. New York: Infobase, 2009. —. “Introduction.” In Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2009. —. The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Comte, Auguste. Cours de Philosophie Positive. Paris: Hachette, 1943. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, translated by Chris Dawson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.

 35

Ibid. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. by Chris Dawson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 28. 36

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Lewontin, R. C. Biology as Ideology. The doctrine of DNA. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy. American Canticles. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. In From Modernism to Postmodernism: An anthology, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1979. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. London: Picador, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. —. Ecce Homo, The Antichrist, translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora Publishing, 2000. —. The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” In Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2009. Spurgeon, Sarah L. “Foundations of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” In Cormac McCarthy. Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2009. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Simon Blackburn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, online version. 

SCIENTIFIC EXPRESSION IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S WORK ANA RULL SUÁREZ UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA

Although many literary authors (like Borges) have applied mathematics or science to their writings it is worth mentioning that it is difficult to find a writer who has dealt with science in the same way as Thomas Pynchon has done. Most of his works use scientific metaphors as the main motif so that his novels become a paradigm of mathematical, scientific and technological relations. His fields of interest are usually the universe from the point of view of quantum mechanics: that is to say, referring to such things as the laws of entropy and relativity. According to Thomas Moore, Pynchon means to propose that science, no less than other metaphorical systems, is a dynamic subjectivity interrelating the images, myths, and synthetic methods of human experience. Accordingly, when synthetic consciousness is self-aware in Pynchon, it is usually self-ironic and scuffling, and yet at the same time possessed fantastically by some dream of erectable order.1

It is in Against the Day that Pynchon seems to synthesize that scientific field of interest in order to create a science fiction novel based on mathematical theories, geophysics, magnetism, musical form, the universe as the expression of movement in celestial orbits, light and the effects of light in the world. Before discussing Against the Day I will mention how Pynchon referred to science in a number of earlier works. In his early works Pynchon already experimented with metaphors from modern physics in fictional writings. The boundary between mathematics and literature is a similar one in the sense that mathematics is born from the need to describe the world around us. Pynchon deals with science in



1 Thomas Moore, The Style of Connectedness. Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 151.

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his work as a novelist in a playful way.2 As in many other works of his, Thomas Pynchon plays with science as an important part of his stories’ plots. We see this technique in his short story “Entropy” where he compares the disintegration of human society and the intellectual world to the “heat death” of the physical universe, according to the second law of thermodynamics:3 The key metaphor of “Entropy,” an early short story, is explicit: the disintegration of human society and the intellectual world is like the “heat death” of the physical universe predicted by thermodynamics. Nature, according to the second law of thermodynamics, must reach a state of maximum entropy (disorder) and minimum available energy. All change will cease.4

He uses the same idea in The Crying of Lot 49 by making references to the physicist James Clerk Maxwell—and Maxwell’s Demon—and by means of an extended metaphor in which the heat death of the universe takes place. In Gravity’s Rainbow, “Pynchon makes considerable use of probabilistic imagery to personify this debate using a Pavlovian psychologist, Ned Pointsman, and a statistician, Roger Mexico.”5 He explores mathematical metaphors based on calculus of differentiation and integration and playing with modern science, physics and technology to create a novel that is basically a metaphorical narrative on science (physics, technology, analytical geometry and calculus) through the use of equations, imagery from films and cross-reference signs that go beyond scientific phenomena (forms that are inaccessible to the

 2

According to John Starck, “by drawing nonmathematical conclusions from mathematics and by incorporating them into his literary works, he (Pynchon) points out a feature that its technological applications might easily obscure: mathematics is metaphoric because it describes universals.” John O. Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 69. 3 The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible. 4 Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz, “Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 15, no. 3 (1974): 345. 5 D. O. Koehler, “Mathematics in Literature,” Mathematics Magazine 55, no. 2 (1982): 83.

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senses and thus to our understanding).6 In Mason and Dixon he dealt with astronomy and he presented the labour of these astronomers who were hired by the Royal Society of London in order to observe the phenomenon known as the “Transit of Venus.” In Against the Day, which I will discuss here, Pynchon focuses on mathematics, particularly on mathematics related to electromagnetism, mechanics and optical experiments, from electric light to mass destruction weapons by the end of the book. To begin with, Pynchon makes the science of that time a part of the structure of his novel. So Against the Day is structured according to a framework that resembles the properties of a mineral known as “Iceland spar” or “Iceland crystal” which was used in demonstrating the polarization of light, a very important theme in the novel. Pynchon applies the same property of this mineral to his narrative, so that the whole text has a binary structure which corresponds to Iceland spar, with the capacity of double refraction (as this crystal doubles the image of an object when we look through it). The organization of the novel has a double plot as well. On the one hand, it is a story of murder and revenge, and, on the other hand (as a metaphorical double refraction), it is the story of sons whose father is killed and who decide to move from place to place in search of revenge, in what becomes a science fiction adventure. Moreover, most characters either have a double of themselves or work as complementary pairs to each other. There are some passages in the novel which illustrate this process of doubling and allusions to science. In the following quotation we are told about the Michelson-Morley experiment,7 when Merle got the idea in his head that the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt were connected. That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no Aether. Not that one would cause the other, exactly, but that both would be different utterances of the same principle.8

 6

According to Thomas Moore, “the metaphorical language of science often seems largely opaque to literati, perhaps the majority of us who […] are guilty of a shameful ignorance of the culture of science.” Moore, 149. 7 Albert A. Michelson invented an interferometer (consisting of two polished mirrors) and did important experimental work on the spectrum. Together with Morley he used this interferometer (in the Michelson-Morley experiment) in an attempt to demonstrate the effect of the aether wind on the speed of light. But this failed attempt left those theories based on the existence of luminiferous aether without any kind of experimental support. In 1907 Michelson became the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize for his optical instruments. 8 Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 61.

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This is one of the earliest examples of the phenomenon known as bilocation in the book: […] suppose when they split that light beam, that one half of it is Michelson’s and the other is his partner Morley’s, which turns out to be the half that comes back with the phases perfectly matched up—but under slightly different conditions, alternative axioms, there could be another pair that don’t match up, see, in fact millions of pairs, that sometimes you could blame it on the Aether, sure, but other cases maybe the light goes someplace else.9

The relation between Iceland spar and the Michelson-Morley experiment is analysed later in the book, when the character simply known as The Cohen explains to Lew Basnight that his intention is to be able to pass through Iceland spar, “which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Aether, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction [...]”10 The results of the Michelson and Morley experiment were negative, as they could not prove any movement of the earth relative to aether (but they did help to establish the speed of light as a universal constant and thereby provide Einstein with a key element of his theory of relativity). After these experiments, scientists proposed various explanations for the negative result and some of them are mentioned in Against the Day by means of analogies with some of the stories taking place in the novel. So one of Pynchon’s characters says: In Venice we have a couple thousand words for fog—nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, sfumato—and the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each. In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing that sight, are actually modulated by fog.11

According to Taveira,12 this is the same phenomenon that happened in the Michelson-Morley experiment (if the luminiferous aether had existed) with light instead of sound.13

 9

Ibid. 62. Ibid. 688. 11 Ibid. 587. 12 Rodney Taveira, “Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse,” in Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives, ed. Sascha Pöhlmann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 153. 13 According to Taveira: “The Earth was supposed to be moving through the aether, and so a kind of wind should have been detectable by variations in the speed of light, depending on the different rates at which the Earth moved and spun. 10

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Pynchon mentions the experiment continuously throughout the novel. For example, worshippers, “a sort of Aetherist community, maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church,”14 show up for the MichelsonMorley experiment and interest is shown in the science of aether weather, where the Chums of Chance are involved in a project to monitor aether.15 Another example of the way Pynchon uses complex scientific theories to develop his plot can be seen when Professor Vanderjuice says: Mr. Rideout, we wander at the present moment through a sort of vorticalist twilight, holding up the lantern of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way. Michelson’s done this experiment before, in Berlin, but never so carefully. This new one could be the giant arc-lamp we need to light our way into the coming century.16

According to Rodney Taveira, the title of Pynchon’s novel, which in French is “contre-jour,” refers to the photographic technique whereby the camera is pointed directly at a source of light, At the corner of our eye is that point of contrast between the light and the dark, that forever collapsible, unresolved limit where opposites exist in apposition. The photographic technique of contre-jour exploits this undecidability between two ostensibly opposite states: the camera is pointed directly at a source of light, the intervening figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, and it concentrates the image on the play of borders, focusing on shape and line.17

This effect of contre jour in photography usually hides details, causes a stronger contrast between light and dark, creates silhouettes and emphasizes lines and shapes. The term contre jour also refers to a seventeenth-century painting technique that consists in the illumination from behind of forms that appear in front, or against the light. The expressive trace of the linear forms identifies the paper field or ground as a spatially infinite field so that, through their contextual relationships, the works that are painted using this technique posit the effect of impermanence. This process is suggested in Against the Day when the author provides many counter narratives, ideas of opposites, mirror

 No variations were observed. Of course, this does not stop Pynchon from utilizing the rhetorical possibilities of the aether.” Ibid. 153. 14 Pynchon, 60. 15 Ibid. 60. 16 Ibid. 58-9. 17 Taveira, 134.

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imagery as well as backwards time travel that, mixed with the main plot, create an atmosphere of impermanence in the novel, an effect which resembles that of contre jour both on photography and painting. There are references to these photographic techniques in the novel when Pynchon refers to the Japanese tourists in Telluride: All at once, magnesium flash-lights were exploding everywhere, each producing a column of thick white smoke whose orderly cylindrical ascent was immediately disarranged by attempts of customers, in some panic, to seek exit, the unexpected combination of brightness and opacity thus quickly spreading to fill every part of the saloon […] Solid objects were soon moving through the fulgurescence invisibly and at high speed, with profanity being uttered at every hand, much of it in Japanese […]. The loss of clarity and scale in the room was producing, for many, strange optical illusions, common among them that of a vast landscape swept by an unyielding fog. It became possible to believe one had been spirited, in the swift cascade of light flashes, to some distant geography where creatures as yet unknown thrashed about, howling affrightedly, in the dark.18

This seems a parody of the contre jour technique where the essence of something is not created by its representation but through contrast, illuminating its internal contradictions. In Against the Day Pynchon creates a world that goes from Chicago’s Exhibition in 1893 to the years after the First World War. He takes some events which have not been highlighted in history and are considered apocryphal due to the lack of references to more orthodox history. Although Against the Day is not a novel about mathematics, it deals with mathematics and numerology. Also, readers come across many references not only to science, but, frequently, extended digressions on scientific issues such as Hamilton’s Quaternions, Gibbsian vector analysis, Riemann spheres, Prandtl’s boundary layer, the Hilbert Pólya Conjecture, and the Minkowskian space-time track. Critics such as Terry Reilly point at the fact that many mentions or characterizations of actual scientists and inventors establish a relationship between science and paranormal thought, so that Pynchon’s novels include references to history but also contain references to what Hayden White calls metahistory.19 Furthermore, science in Pynchon’s novels consists not simply of references to scientists, data, or scientific explanation, but it can be seen as a pastiche of dialogic and subjective narratives that the author shapes into

 18

Pynchon, 293. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1987).

19

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a multiplicity of texts and genres such as medieval romance, folk tale, detective story, science fiction, and others. He also mixes science and technology with alchemy and religious and occult rituals, but in this novel Pynchon departs from purely scientific theory to offer an imaginative travel narrative where the Chums of Chance move from the air into a subterranean world where there is a war between gnomes and other fantastic creatures: They descended over a battlefield swarming with diminutive combatants wearing pointed hats and carrying what proved to be electric crossbows, from which they periodically discharged bolts of intense greenish light, intermittently revealing the scene with a morbidity like that of a guttering star. [For] a detailed account of their subsequent narrow escapes from the increasingly deranged attentions of the Legion of Gnomes, the unconscionable conniving of a certain international mining cartel, the sensual wickedness pervading the royal court of Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia, and all-but-irresistible fascination that subterranean monarch would come to exert, Circe-like, upon the minds of the crew of Inconvenience.20

While there is much parody of science in the novel, there are also references to “serious” scientific issues, when Pynchon mentions Kepler and his theory of the Hollow Earth, something which evolves into a fantasy narrative which then turns into what Terry Rilley has called “metascience” or a series of competing narratives about scientific theory that finally get deconstructed and turn into banal complaints.21 I shall now go on to discuss other references to scientific historical figures such as Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Mason (although this does not exhaust all his references to scientists). Firstly, there is an interplay between scientific rationalism and the inexplicable, and Pynchon emphasizes Nikola Tesla’s importance in his novel: Tesla is considered the modern Leonardo de Vinci and one of the greatest inventors of the nineteenth century. Here Pynchon reflects the antagonism between Tesla and Edison (incarnated possibly by Vanderjuice in this novel), something I discuss below. With Nikola Tesla, Pynchon creates a characterization of both his life and work (science, research in weapon systems, corporate conspiracy,

 20

Pynchon, 117. Terry Reilley, “Narrating Tesla in Against the Day,” in Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christoper Leise (Maryland: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 139-67. 21

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secret experiments, paranormal phenomena, etc.)22 in such a way that this historical figure resembles more a science fiction character than a real one in the novel. Pynchon ironizes the discourse of science and mixes real science with pseudo-science and science fiction, as well as historical names with parodied, invented names so that, in his narrative, to read it according to Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern condition, the goal is no longer “truth” but “performativity.”23 So, the plot of this novel can be summarized as a double trip on earth and air which can be interpreted as a mirror of the cosmos where ideas alternate with material substances. The travellers as modern heroes come across different evidence and they show a special interest in light and everything related to it: minerals, explosives, magnetism and electricity. Also, the city called Telluride (“city of silver or light”) makes an allusion to light. The detective Lew Basnight works for the detective agency Pinkerton (in a parody of the detective novel), represented by the emblem of a big eye, which is capable of seeing everything, while allowing for a reference to optics. Lew’s mission is to protect the life of the archduke of Austria. Lew therefore goes on board the ship together with the Chums of Chance, as does Professor Vanderjuice. Vanderjuice is Tesla’s enemy and regarding the way in which Pynchon describes him he could be making an allusion to Edison, the enemy or rival of Tesla in real life: The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla’s name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit. The audacity and scope of the inventor’s dreams had always sent Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it.24

The Chums of Chance spy on the experiments of Nikola Tesla in a volcano and eventually they themselves make incursions into volcanoes like Etna. It is interesting to mention how Kircher had studied the interior of the Earth in 1665 in his work Mundus Subterraneus. Kircher’s hypothesis is based on “Geocosm” where he proposes his theory about the Hollow Earth which significantly influenced the natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the foundation of the Royal Society of London in 1662 Athanasius Kircher published his work

 22

Tesla’s notion of wireless electricity has been important to all kinds of modern technologies from industrial processes, ship navigation and other forms of transportation to communications. 23 David Walton, Doing Cultural Theory (London: SAGE, 2012), 196. 24 Pynchon, 33.

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Mundus Subterraneus in the first scientific journal in the world, the “Philosophical Transactions,” in 1665. Kircher made a journey where he visited the islands of Malta and Sicily and he climbed into the Etna volcano in order to observe it in detail, like The Chums of Chance do in Against the Day. Isaac Newton studied physics at the same time he did research on other less “serious” disciplines such as alchemy (which would develop into chemistry) or astrology (into astronomy), owing to the fact that there was still no clear distinction between what is now understood as science and those forms of knowledge associated with the scholastic tradition. In Against the Day Thomas Pynchon uses the same strategy of mixing elements from what are considered to be nowadays pseudoscientific disciplines like alchemy with modern science such as quantum mechanics. Pynchon explores Tesla’s experiments in detail in a narrative where the historic and the imaginative elements get mixed together. In a completely fictitious passage of the novel we get to know about Plutonia, “the new Circe.” With this allusion Pynchon seems to pay tribute to another important real historical figure, the geologist and first Russian science fiction writer Vladimir Obruchet (1863-1956) who wrote Plutonia, published in 1915. There he tells us the story of a group of scientists who go to the Arctic in an expedition, where they find the entrance to another world, prior to human existence. The first chapter of Against the Day is full of references to light, which appears in multiple forms: experiments with electromagnetism, strange luminous processes, the search for new sources of energy, the aether storm, and others. As mentioned earlier, this obsession with light appears in experiments with photography as well as in the process of developing negatives. Together with this we have the process of alchemy. In Pynchon’s Against the Day both photography and alchemy have a common purpose: to redeem light from the inertia of precious metals. Continuing with this motif of light, Pynchon, following the idea of Kepler, who talked about the theory that the Earth is a Hollow Earth, justified its existence by presenting the access to it through an interplanetary shortcut, highlighting not only the absence of real frontiers in the universe but also the relevance of light, which, according to the Platonic universe, is the divine essence. In the chapter entitled “Iceland Spar” the travellers observe the daily skirmishes to get information about electromagnetism so they can measure the “mysterious mathematical lattice-work which was by then known to surround the Earth.”25 The new

 25

Ibid. 121.

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gold from the past is light in the novel and searchers go to the edge of the atmosphere to a frontier which was not identified yet. Pynchon parodies those fights and rivalries taking place in the atmosphere: Maneuvering in vessels camouflaged in naval-style “dazzle painting,” whereby areas of the structure could actually disappear and reappear in clouds of chromatic twinkling, scientist-skyfarers industriously gathered their data, all of the deepest interest to the enterprisers convened leagues below, at intelligence centers on the surface such as the Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational clearing house in Northern Alaska, which these days was looking more like Lloyd’s of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting anxiously for the next fateful Lutine announcement.26

Among other ships there is one called Etienne which is said to be exploring the Iceland spar. The name makes reference to the French Napoleonic engineer who discovered “polarized light” through a piece of Iceland spar; and that ship, the Étienne-Louis Malus, has a strange quality coming from the music within it: As she sailed north on her long voyage to the coasts of “Iceland,” to the inhabited cliffs of ice, those not actually on watch or asleep sat out on the fantail, watching the lower latitudes drop away from them, and played mandolins and little mahogany concertinas, and sang […].27

In fact, the music played in the ship is not just music, but also a way of communicating with another world, parallel to this one. Strange phenomena such as iced green walls that start to melt take place in this chapter and there are also a number of scientific issues narrated here, like Hamilton’s experiments, mathematical formulas, quaternion’s theory and luminal aether. There is additionally a story about a Time Machine that can transport the Chums of Chance to the future discovered by Dr. Zoot, but, ironically, in the end the vision of the future they catch leaves them all very sad. The novel includes trips inside the Earth where they find mountains, caves, and mysterious artistic creations. Also, among many other countries, Pynchon describes what life in England is like. In the English atmosphere of Against the Day everything is regulated by a secret society

 26 27

Ibid. 122. Ibid. 126.

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called T.W.I.T (“True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys”)28 with its headquarters in London and led by The Cohen, a character who appears dressed up in mystical clothes adorned with astrological and alchemical symbols. It is defined as a theosophical society in search of the pythagorical secret of numbers, highlighting once more the obsession about mathematical issues. The place in which they meet happens to be a sanctuary inside a park where they can hear melodies from a duet of lyre and syrinx and where different animals, which are the reincarnation of human beings, wander or lie on the grass in relaxed attitudes. Such a place happens to be a meeting point for astrologists, alchemists and mathematicians. In this English atmosphere where everything is related to light (and where every object seems to have a double meaning), the narrator uses all elements of British culture to transform them into transcendental forms of light—even explosions—by means of irony. Merle Rideout, another scientist in the book, is also an alchemist and the owner of Hellkite Mine where he spends most of his time observing the relationship between images in movement and time, to reach the conclusion that both aim at deceiving human optical perception. He proceeds to learn as much as he can about everything related to light by doing all kinds of experiments:29 Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. And maybe his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity, from all the silver he’d been developing into the pictures he’d been taking over these years—as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice, and he’d been working for it as much as it for him.30

 28

The Tetracrys is an equilateral triangle formed from the sequence of the first ten numbers aligned in four rows. It is both a mathematical and metaphysical symbol that means harmony of the cosmos, ascent to the divine, and it symbolizes the mysteries of the divine realm. 29 One of these experiments is described in detail in the following manner: “Through a highly secret technical process, developed in Japan at around the same time Dr. Mikimoto was producing his first cultured pearls, portions of the original aragonite—which made up the nacreous layers of the pearl—had, through ‘induced paramorphism,’ as it was known to the artful sons of Nippon, been selectively changed here and there to a different form of calcium carbonate—namely, to microscopic crystals of the doubly-refracting calcite known as Iceland spar.” Pynchon, 114. 30 Ibid. 80.

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Merle gets obsessed with photography and silver, with time and light, and he compares every physical phenomenon with photographic processes. He dedicates most of his time to what he calls “the Mysteries of Time,” which lead to ideas such as the eternal return or the laws of karma, but, most of all, it is in electromagnetism that he tries to find answers to his questions. Merle attends a conference by the German mathematician, of Jewish origin, and teacher of Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), who developed a theory about space and time and laid the mathematical foundation of the theory of relativity. This conference influences Merle and Roswell in their conception of a vacuum alive with virtual particles, which challenges the old theory that light was carried on parcels of aether. There are innumerable examples in which scientific concepts like this and famous historical scientists are used, explored and mixed with fictional characters within Against the Day. Pynchon’s extensive use of obscure technical metaphors and analogies to maths and physics in Against the Day look as if they, the metaphors, come to the author’s mind immediately, probably as a result of his education as an engineer, and his writings resemble those of the poet John Donne in the seventeenth century, showing how the development in the sciences and mathematics are a very significant part of our culture. In conclusion, Pynchon’s interest in science in Against the Day is reflected in the structure of his novel. The constitution of his literary universe is conditioned by its scientific conception. Bearing this in mind he has taken into account not only scientific theories developed at the end of the nineteenth century (when the novel is set) but he has also moved backwards into ancient times in order to recuperate orphic and Pythagorean doctrines which tried to explain the world and the constitution of the universe from mathematical relations which were discussed in secret societies like that of the Great Cohen, which were founded in universities in London. The literary journey of the protagonists starts in America and then leads to other continents. The story actually starts from Chicago’s Universal Exhibition and Pynchon develops two complementary scenarios, which are justified by the importance of light in the novel, something seen in terms of the refraction of the mineral Iceland spar, and the symbolic value of mirrors. Both The Chums of Chance in the aircraft called Inconvenience and the sons of Web Traverse, the miner who is killed, start this trip in search of new ideals. The air travellers not only observe everything from the heights but they can also see every strange coincidence between mysterious events which take place in different places. Among these is the Tunguska Event in Siberia, a historical fact which, in the novel, is the

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object of some speculations pointing to Tesla’s relationship with the enigmatic explosion there. Moreover, their ship allows them to go into volcanoes and inside the Earth, reminding us of historical figures like Kepler, Halley or Euler who had already speculated about the existence of interplanetary shortcuts which would enable them to reach any part of the world very quickly. The Chums of Chance can perceive music and strange noises instead of human voices in the Arctic coming from inside the Earth. That makes them explore the interior of the planet to discover the surprising fact that there is light on the inside. Pynchon’s novel progresses at the same time by opposite extremes, by earth and air, but always in search of the same element which is the light and the electromagnetism that cover our planet; the search for light becoming the most important adventure for the scientists in the nineteenth century. Through places like the mythical city of Shambhalá or Venice, as symbols of the continuum between space and time, Pynchon’s characters enter a world of imagination and dream as if it were reality. At the same time, the multiple references to Ancient Times (orphism or pythagorism), formulations about light from painters in the seventeenth century, and the scientific density of Against the Day reveal not only an obscure metaphorical discourse about the sciences, but also an ironic turning point by Pynchon whereby all human effort in history is reduced to nothingness, as is illustrated by the famous Tunguska Event or the First World War at the end of the book.

Works Cited Friedman, Alan J. and Manfred Puetz. “Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 15, no. 3 (1974): 345-359. Koehler, D. O. “Mathematics in Literature.” Mathematics Magazine 55, no. 2 (1982): 81-95. Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness. Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Reilley, Terry. “Narrating Tesla in Against the Day.” In Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christoper Leise, 139-67. Maryland: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Stark, John O. Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.

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Taveira, Rodney. “Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse.” In Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Walton, David. Doing Cultural Theory. London: SAGE, 2012. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1987.

PART III CONSILIENCE AND “THE TWO CULTURES”

THE PRESENCE OF SCIENCE IN GWENDOLYN MACEWEN’S COSMIC VISION: AN EPHEMERAL CREATION OF ORDER OUT OF CHAOS Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ UNIVERSITY OF LA LAGUNA

A lot of poets have an anti-science bias, a vision of themselves as romantics in a tower […]. I believe that science and nature are one, that science is a perceptual tool which allows us to define nature more specifically. Science has to incorporate and mythologize as it happens. All poetry deals with information, finally.1

Scientific themes have appeared in Canadian poetry in writers as varied as E. J. Pratt, Alice Major, A. M. Klein, Margaret Avison, Christopher Dewdney, Paulette Jiles, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, to name just a few.2 The Canadian writer Gwendolyn MacEwen, in particular, confronts the clash between the poetic and the factual, the rational and the imaginative, two modes that have often appeared as distinct in prevailing Western thought, but which present themselves as simultaneous in her work. A recurrent motif throughout the course of her career is her insistence in reconciling the opposites and inconsistencies of reality. Probably, one of her most valuable legacies is precisely, as Tom Marshall points out, this

 1

McClelland and Stewart, “Christopher Dewdney: Biography,” Canadian Poetry Online, https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/dewdney/index.htm (accessed February 16, 2013). 2 Science Poetry (2011) offers an extensive collection of the presence of science in contemporary poetry, not only published by Canadian writers, but also from India, the USA, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Lebanon, South Africa and Austria. Neil Harding McAlister, ed., Science Poetry (Port Perry, Ontario: McAlister, 2011).

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sense of global consciousness.3 The world is for Gwendolyn MacEwen a universe in continuous rearrangement, in which, according to the author, “all times and places are one.”4 Myth and reality appear intimately related to history and human conflict, the finite to the infinite, the domestic to the universal. Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987) was a poet prodigy in the early 1960s when Canadian literature was starting to have a proper voice and when “artist” just meant “male painter,” as Margaret Atwood sustains.5 For MacEwen, the balance between light and dark, life and death, good and evil was fundamental to understand reality. Her interest in different sources of inspiration such as mythology, alchemy, the Gnostics, the Cabbala, Ancient Egypt, and magic itself, together with a gifted mind and talent for literature make her work unique. She never belonged to any literary school or group of poets. Her voice was individual, her language complex, and her poetry never immediate. MacEwen was constantly aware of the binary systems of opposites present in the real world: self/other, subject/object, male/female, nature/human beings. She felt the imperious need to accept them in life and deal with them. As a matter of fact, it is precisely the combination between the mythological and the factual that has been specially emphasized by critics: “for Canadian writers, the most salutary union of opposites MacEwen has achieved is one in which the mythological and the experimental become inseparable faces of one living reality.”6 Mostly studied within the mythical and mystical traditions, MacEwen’s use of scientific themes in her work has been overlooked, but what role does science play in her never-ending mystical quest? The misapplication of nuclear physics and radioactivity, neutrons, protons, atoms, cosmic space, “magnetic seas,” or even the mystery enclosed in the universe, recurrently appear in her work. Cosmology and theoretical physics often fuse in her poems together with her insistence that uncontrolled consumerism and technology should be bounded by some measure of ethics. The aim of this essay is to elucidate the links between

 3

Tom Marshall, “Several Takes on Gwendolyn MacEwen,” Quarry 38, no. 1 (1989): 82. 4 Ibid. 81-82. 5 Margaret Atwood, “Introduction,” in The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. The Early Years, ed. Margaret Atwood & Barry Callaghan (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993), vii. 6 Frank Davey, “Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Secret of Alchemy,” Open Letter, Second Series, 4 (Spring 1973): 19.

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her humanist and scientific interests, and to explain how, through the image of dance, as a symbol of synthesis, the author attempts to construct a myth. Other symbols such as time, consumerism and appetite, and the pattern of the inward-outward (or spatial) journey will also be studied. This article will be focused on the three poetry collections in which science assumes a more relevant role; though MacEwen was a writer much concerned with contemporary life and science was, in a major or minor degree, ever present till the end of her career. These are The Rising Fire (1963),7 A Breakfast for Barbarians (1966)8 and The Armies of the Moon (1972).9 From the beginning of her career, in the early 1960s, MacEwen, a highly gifted writer in her early twenties, affirmed that she wished to construct a myth. As Ellen D. Warwick explains, a myth may basically be defined as “an attempt to make concrete and particular a cosmic view.”10 MacEwen’s primary aim as a poet and myth maker is found in language. She combines the scientific jargon of quantum physics and cosmology with domestic language, interspersed with words reminiscent of a more mythical time such as “arcane,” “magic” or “dreamlike.” Sometimes, particularly during the sixties, she conveys magical outpourings in which the flow and energy of her language seem to be more imperative than her actual objective message. On such occasions, neither rhyme nor punctuation aids contain this motion. However, in spite of this apparent lack of control, most of the poems included in the first collection under analysis, The Rising Fire, tend toward synthesis. Published in 1963, The Rising Fire was considered by scholars as her first major poetry collection. In it she combines her interest for mysticism with continuous references to physics. In the poem “The Breakfast,” for instance, MacEwen expresses the imperious need to grasp the world and create a self-contained space: “‘eat only apples,’ we read, / to improvise an eden. [...] by eating the world you may enclose it. / seek simplicities; the fingerprints of the sun only / and the moon duplicating you in your body, / the cosmos fits your measures; has no ending.”11 The modern world, as Rosemary Sullivan writes, “takes too

 7

Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Rising Fire (Toronto: Contact Press, 1963). Gwendolyn MacEwen, A Breakfast for Barbarians (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1966). 9 Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Armies of the Moon (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972). 10 Ellen D. Warwick, “To Seek a Single Symmetry,” Canadian Literature 71 (2011): 21. 11 Atwood and Callaghan, 39. 8

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many casualties.”12 MacEwen was born during the darkest days of World War II and grew up in the atomic age of the sixties with the Vietnam War as backdrop. These two important historical events, together with a quite difficult life, made her believe that humankind had to reinvent itself. In her opinion, the search for synthesis seemed to be a good starting point in that modern, fragmented age. MacEwen, therefore, as many people of the 1960s in Canada, showed an interest in the new scientific discoveries of the time, but simultaneously feared the consequences and erroneous actions derived from those same advances. Life was often too intense for her to bear. In her poem “The Red Curtains,” belonging to her last collection Afterworlds (1987), she almost laments such fervour of life: Nothing is boring. If only something could be boring For once; if only everything weren’t so keen All the time. (The dream is a nice place to visit But who wants to live there In those dark blue fields of midnight)13

The poet needs to be liberated from the intensity of life or, to put it in a better way, from her vision of the intensity of life, but she is also conscious that to escape to the oneiric world is not the solution. All the banal images from daily experience become charged with significance in the poem. MacEwen’s recurrent insistence on synthesis amid disintegration is often illustrated by a recurrent symbol: “the circle.” According to Juan Eduardo Cirlot, the circle is a symbol that holds the opposites together, directly related to the concept of synthesis MacEwen pursues in her work. “It also bears,” Cirlot states, “a certain relationship to the number ten (symbolizing the return to unity from multiplicity).”14 Circles appear in her poetry under different guises, such as the sun, the moon, the Ferris wheel, the earth, orbits, eyes or the movement of neutrons and protons around an atom. Chinese philosophers have studied deeply the symbolism of the circle, especially in relation to its inherent bipolarity. What follows

 12 Rosemary Sullivan, “Introduction,” in The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. The Later Years, eds. Margaret Atwood & Barry Callaghan (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1994), viii. 13 Gwendolyn MacEwen, Afterworlds (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 33. 14 Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002), 46.

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is a summary, offered again by Cirlot, of a series of principles comprised in this symbol: 1. The quantity of energy distributed throughout the universe is invariable. 2. It consists of the sum of two equal amounts of energy, one positive and active in kind and the other negative and passive. 3. The nature of cosmic phenomena is characterized by the varying proportions of the two modes of energy involved in their creation.15

Therefore, in using the circle as one of her most recurrent symbols, MacEwen is also alluding to the energy of which the universe is composed. As Brent Wood points out, the circle in MacEwen’s work “is a way of unifying opposites; specifically, a way of synthesizing the finite and the infinite.”16 In the three-poem sequence entitled “Nikolayev and Popovich: The Cosmic Brothers,” about space exploration, the author again alludes to the relation of congruence present in the universe. She parallels the smallest bit of molecular matter with the movement of planets, the dimensions of the ordinary with the extraterrestrial: all orbits complement the logic we derive from eggshell symmetry of satellite or sweet concentric circles of crumbs and insects on cosmic tablecloths; we have no dimensions and the burden of thinking in terms of size is lifted from us17

This “principle of correspondence,” defended by Hermes Trismegistus and other hermetic philosophers, is included in the 1908 book, The Kybalion: Hermetic Philosophy, as one of the seven principles of Hermeticism. Its authorship is attributed to a group of anonymous writers who call themselves “The Three Initiates.” The Kybalion is based on the idea that there exists harmony and correspondence between the physical, the mental and the spiritual planes. In other words, it embodies the concept originally found in The Vedas and later attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that “as

 15

Ibid. 48. Brent Wood, “From The Rising Fire to Afterworlds: the Visionary Circle in the Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen,” Canadian Poetry 47 (2000): 44. 17 MacEwen, The Rising Fire, 11. 16

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above so below,”18 but it is an idea also present in Isaac Newton’s theory of the correspondence and coincidence between the motion of objects on the Earth and that of the celestial bodies.19 It is known today that Newton was not only a good mathematician and advanced scientist but also a passionately practicing alchemist; a discipline belonging to the Hermetic tradition. In the poem “Nikolayev and Popovich: The Cosmic Brothers,” orbiting the earth acts as a metaphor for the inward journey to enclose, integrate, and find meaning, that is, it expresses the macrocosm-microcosm theory, present in Neo-Platonism, alchemy and Taoism, but already known at the time of Plato. The patterns belonging to the largest scale of existence, the macrocosmic universe, are equally reproduced in the smallest scale of reality, the microcosmic atomic world. The relationship of this idea with the mathematical concept of the golden ratio is evident, and its interest and influence not only confined to mathematicians. Biologists, architects, painters, musicians, mystics, historians and philosophers have also felt inspired by the golden irrational number.20 Returning to the poem under analysis, the cosmonaut, attaining the edges of the universe, discovers no barriers, “but mirrors / reflecting the question mark / of his own face back.”21 What is MacEwen implying with this statement? Are final answers never to be found in her poetry? It seems, in analysing her work, that integration can never be fully achieved, though any attempt is worth the effort or, in other words, that the process is more important than the outcome. Certainly, MacEwen “values the doing of poetry, the living of life.”22 In poems such as “You Can Study It if You Want”23 or “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear,”24 the author points

 18

See Silvia Rinaldi. El Kybalion y la ciencia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Kier, 2003). 19 For further information see Gale E. Christianson, Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: HarperPerennial, 2004). 20 For further information see Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the Extraordinary Number of Nature, Art and Beauty (London: Headline Review, 2002) and Roger Herz-Fischler’s A Mathematical History of the Golden Number (New York: Dover Publications, 1998). 21 MacEwen, The Rising Fire, 12. 22 Richard Almonte, “Posthumous Praise: Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature” (M.A Thesis, McMaster University, 2003), 163, http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2255&context=op endissertations (accessed February 16, 2013). 23 MacEwen, Afterworlds, 35. 24 Ibid. 36.

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out that what really counts is not the final result, but “what is out there in the large dark / And in the long light, / Breathing.”25 In addition to the figure of the enclosing circle, MacEwen uses dancing as a symbol of synthesis. In fact, the two symbols are particularly related. Dance can allude to a primitive, ritualistic ceremony in her work. More often, however, it symbolically represents the eternal cyclical evolution of all existence. Like dance’s intrinsic nature, MacEwen’s own work presents a progressive atmosphere, that is, it is subject to a continuous evolution. From her first poetry collection, The Rising Fire (1963), to her last, Afterworlds (1987), there is a clear progression of her poetic cosmic vision, not only evident in these two titles, but also in the rest of her work. A collection, a novel, a short story, or play by her is not an end in itself. Rather, it continues in a deeper and improved form in subsequent publications. The writer, therefore, offers the reader a series of evidences, either through linguistic and symbolic repetitions in different contexts, or through the slow development of images which were in an embryonic form in previous works. These images mix and mingle between one poem and another, one collection and a later one. The reader of MacEwen’s work is then given the clues to understand the message the author wants to convey. In this sense, her approach to literature is similar to that of William Blake’s; both mythmakers pursuing a cosmic vision from the beginning of their careers. MacEwen’s biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, affirms that “Gwen had been in control of her vision at the age of twentythree.”26 Her work therefore presents a circular structure that allows her to construct a persistent cosmic vision throughout time. Poetry for her is more than an aesthetic end in itself. It is rather a tool of self-exploration. In addition, and like W. B. Yeats, the author seeks to keep this sort of mythological dance in constant movement. And in applying the mythological to daily life, she transforms myth into something real. In Margaret Atwood’s words, “MacEwen is a poet who is not interested in turning her life into myth; rather, she is concerned with translating her myth into life, and into the poetry which it is a part of.”27 In relation to dance, the author frequently makes reference to Hindu philosophy, especially to the god Shiva as Nataraja, that is, Lord of Dance. Shiva performing the dance called tandara represents the continuous cyclical evolution of life in a never-ending process of creation and

 25

Ibid. Rosemary Sullivan, Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995), 371. 27 Margaret Atwood, “MacEwen’s Muse,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 72. 26

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destruction, death and rebirth. That is the reason why such a manifestation of Shiva is often related to the archetype of fire. The cosmic dance is then the representation of the eternal movement of energy through time. The dancer expresses the wish and will to change. However, though the ultimate goal in her poetry is apparently to achieve perfection or, in Jungian terms, “the true self,” a cycle of new beginnings will prevent her from achieving that end.28 Thus MacEwen constantly uses the circular structure in her poems as a means of expressing that her quest is always in movement and never ends. Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, the writer’s final aim is to create order out of chaos. In such an alchemical quest, dance also becomes a way to synthesis, a way of joining the finite to the infinite, the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, as she expresses in the poem “The Absolute Dance”: “something sustains us / between the crib and crypt... the dance which is the synthesis.” By being willing to try, each of us can “move towards the total power of the dance / to seek a single symmetry, an hour of totality.”29 The notion of the “wheel of life” is directly related to the concept of “eternal return” or “eternal recurrence.” It claims that the universe has been returning and will continue to do so in a similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. As Stephen W. Hawking sustains, “Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis. […] No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.”30 The concept of eternal recurrence is also found in Indian philosophy and in Ancient Egypt and it has had, throughout history, its defenders and detractors.31 It is based on the belief that time is not linear but cyclical, and therefore the universe also passes through the same stages once and again. The conception of “eternal return” is also central to Nietzsche’s theory. As Spinks explains: If time had a beginning, Nietzsche argues, there would necessarily be some point before time. This makes no sense. But if time has no beginning, then



28 For further information about Jungian analytical psychology see C. G. Jung’s Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1991). 29 MacEwen, The Rising Fire, 43 30 Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas, Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 117. 31 Worth mentioning within this context is also Giambattista Vico’s theory of recurring cycles, in his Scienza Nuova (1725; third, revised edition from 1744). See Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, 2001).

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The Presence of Science in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Cosmic Vision life is eternal […]. If time has no boundary there is no beginning or end, no point before or after time… Eternal recurrence therefore becomes the fundamental principle of being […]. However, there can be no ultimate goal of life if all events return eternally […]. Nietzsche conceives eternal recurrence in part as a critique of “mechanism,” which identifies the origins of life in the “attraction and repulsion” of impersonal material forces.32

The concept of eternal return intrinsically comprises, according to the German philosopher, “an inner will” that allows us to choose “which returning moments we wish to affirm […]. Historical events only acquire their meaning when they are shaped into coherence by a strong will.”33 Similarly, MacEwen intensely chooses those aspects of life that she really wants to affirm, as is evident in her poems. Despite a lack of cohesion in individual poems, and despite the fact that it is a work published at the beginning of her career, Rising Fire shows MacEwen, as previously stated, working toward the cosmic view she wishes to create. In a dissociated world struggling toward reintegration, her circle and dance imagery emphasise synthesis. In subsequent collections, MacEwen still insists on the assumption that at least in the realm of art an instant of perfection is possible, but she seems to be even more concerned with the horrors of modern civilization that have cut human beings off from themselves, leaving them exiled and alienated. This turn to a more immediate reality is also present in her diction. In the introduction to her second collection, A Breakfast for Barbarians (1966), MacEwen presents herself as a down-to-earth poet and sustains: “enclose, absorb, have done. The intake... I believe there is more room inside than outside. And all the diversities which get absorbed can later work their way out into fantastic things […]. It is the intake, the refusal to starve.”34 The world is holy for her, but also chaotic. Such a “refusal to starve” is palpably related to Nietzsche’s “inner and strong will.” The writer, through her art, constructs a frame, a perception of the world that “digests” heterogeneity giving it meaning within an overall pattern. In the collection A Breakfast for Barbarians she works with the image of “appetite,” as its title implies. In her celebration of life and experience the act of “eating” becomes for the poet the perfect analogue

 32

Lee Spinks, Friedrich Nietzsche (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), 129130. 33 Ibid. 130. 34 MacEwen, A Breakfast for Barbarians, 3.

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for the need to contain the universe. In it the enclosing circle, be it orbit or microcosm, continues to express the synthesis it symbolized in the previous collection: let us make an anthology of recipes, let us edit for breakfast our most unspeakable appetites— let us pool spoons, knives and all cutlery in a cosmic cuisine, let us answer hunger with boiled chimera and apocalyptic tea, an arcane salad of spiced bibles, tossed dictionaries— (O my barbarians we will consume our mysteries)35

By consuming the poet regains that which has been fragmented, divided, and hence lost. “Eat,” she would say, “How can you comprehend anything without a tremendous desire, a tremendous appetite?”36 In a society damned as materialistic and overly consumer-oriented, the metaphor of appetite, as Warwick points out, is not related to cannibalism, but rather to the “Eucharistic act wherein all creation unites in a feast of holy communion.”37 However, in this age of modern technology, the consumer is never fully satisfied. Now “we eat and we eat and we know and we know / that machines work faster than the machines of our mouths,” she writes in “Strange Breakfasts.”38 Having too many possessions we are left with none. So, with so many “dishes,” “the food refuses to be sanctified,” as she writes in another poem entitled “The Last Breakfast.”39 A Breakfast for Barbarians communicates above all the wish to give form to the overwhelming diversity of contemporary society. Images of the circle, appetite, transformation and the dance suggest that experience must be contained, ingested, and turned into a new shape. Modernity struggles under an ever-growing body of past history and unstoppable scientific and technological advances and faces the possibility of new worlds and new

 35

Ibid. Sullivan, The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen, x. 37 Warwick, 24. 38 MacEwen, A Breakfast for Barbarians, 6. 39 Ibid. 35. 36

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time systems being discovered; therefore, only by “absorbing all, can the poet hope to transform reality into some significant whole.”40 In her fourth collection, The Armies of the Moon, imagery is even more related to astronaut and spaceship trips, as its title indicates. However, these poems do not communicate the frantic mood existing in earlier books and neither is the frequent ornamental language of previous works so present as before. The impelling force to encircle, contain, apprehend the universe has now been transformed into a more microcosmic approach. The search for integration has become less cosmic and more personal. The author’s new message is that, instead of trying to comprehend the universe, one should first comprehend the self. The traveller of The Armies of the Moon then chooses the inward journey, as MacEwen reveals in the following poem: Goodbye, goodbye the planets have resigned and left me all alone; you have collapsed to a microcosm where your brilliant secrets no more masquerade as stars, there are no more galaxies there is no more moon.41

Similarly, the spaceman of “Apollo Twelve” turns into “the satellite of his own dream” and reaches “the white world of his youth.”42 However, at the end, all the protagonist’s quests fail, as in previous collections. The process itself, rather than the final goal, achieves cosmic significance. Thus, both poetry and life exist not as completion, but as progression. In addition, MacEwen, following Mircea Eliade’s concept of time,43 perceives history as neither linear nor teleological, but as Mary Reid points out, as a “constellation or totality in which all moments and events are implicit in each other”;44 that is, the universal in the personal, the scientific and the factual in the mythological and the imaginary.

 40

Warwick, 28. MacEwen, “The Telescope Turned Inward,” The Armies of the Moon, 47. 42 MacEwen, The Armies of the Moon, 75. 43 For further information see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971). 44 Mary Reid, “‘This is the World as We Have Made it’: Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Poetics of History,” Canadian Poetry 58 (Spring/Summer, 2006), 40, http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol58/reid.html (accessed February 16, 2013). 41

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Science, as Val Plumwood points out, is “monological, instrumental, a servant of power.”45 In other words, the result of the misapplication of nuclear physics has developed into an understanding that the physics that made possible death on a scale beyond normal human comprehension, like in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, is the same physics that informs us about of the greatest secrets of the universe.46 MacEwen thought that humans had to reinvent themselves, to start again, that our dreams of power were going too far: there is “too much to handle / and the green seams of the world start fraying,” the writer sadly wrote in her poem ‘Meditations of a Seamstress (1).”47 At the end of her poem “The Left Hand of Hiroshima,” the poetic voice shows herself as a victim of the aberration committed by Western civilization in 1945. In her right “Jekyll” hand she is wearing a worn-out glove, with which she will start to take care of the “barbed garden of Hiroshima”: you have the jekyll hand you have the hyde hand my people, and you are abominable; but now I am in proud and uttering love I occur four-fingered and garbed in a broken gardener’s glove over the barbed garden of Hiroshima.48

MacEwen’s spirituality contrasted with Western materialism and consumerism as well as with uncontrolled scientific and technological developments. She was much concerned with the fact that humans were living more and more in “the exile from their own inventions.”49 As a woman of her time, however, she could not divorce herself from the cataclysmic age she was living in, nor from the incongruities of twentiethcentury society. Obviously, her poetry did not offer a solution for the problems of fragmentation, but at least, as Jan Bartley explains, they offered direction: “the optimism of individual affirmation which comes from absorption rather than negation of what is real.”50 The poems of The Rising Fire, A Breakfast for Barbarians and The Armies of the Moon

 45

Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture. The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), 3. 46 See Wood, 45 47 MacEwen, “Meditations of a Seamstress (1),” Armies of the Moon, 8. 48 MacEwen, A Breakfast for Barbarians, 26. 49 Ibid. 4. 50 Jan Bartley, Invocations. The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 12.

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extend a collective invitation through outer space, but little by little lead the reader to an exploration of inner space. Alchemy, history and myth appear combined with scientific concerns, predominantly of a physical, mathematical and cosmological type. These are the tools used by MacEwen to explore her cosmos.

Works Cited Almonte, Richard. “Posthumous Praise: Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature.” M.A Thesis, McMaster University, 2003. Atwood, Margaret. “MacEwen’s Muse.” In Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 67-78. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. Atwood, Margaret and Barry Callaghan. “Introduction.” In The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. The Early Years, edited by Margaret Atwood and Barry Callaghan, viii-xii. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. Bartley, Jan. Invocations. The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Christianson, Gale E. Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002. Davey, Frank. “Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Secret of Alchemy.” Open Letter, Second Series, 4 (Spring 1973): 19. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971. Giberson, Karl and Mariano Artigas. Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: HarperPerennial, 2004. Herz-Fischler, Roger. A Mathematical History of the Golden Number. New York: Dover Publications, 1998. Jung, C. G. Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1991. Livio, Mario. The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the Extraordinary Number of Nature, Art and Beauty. London: Headline Review, 2002. McAlister, Neil Harding, ed. Science Poetry. Port Perry, Ontario: McAlister, 2011. MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

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—. The Armies of the Moon. Toronto: Macmillan, 1972. —. A Breakfast for Barbarians. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1966. —. The Rising Fire. Toronto: Contact Press, 1963. McClelland and Stewart. “Christopher Dewdney: Biography.” Canadian Poetry Online. Marshall, Tom. “Several Takes on Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Quarry 38, no. 1 (1989): 76-83. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture. The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Reid, Mary. “‘This is the World as We Have Made it’: Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Poetics of History.” Canadian Poetry 58 (2006): 36-54. Rinaldi, Silvia. El Kybalion y la ciencia. Buenos Aires: Editorial Kier, 2003. Spinks, Lee. Friedrich Nietzsche. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Sullivan, Rosemary. Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995. —. “Introduction.” In The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. The Later Years, edited by Margaret Atwood and Barry Callaghan, vii-xi. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1994. Vico, Giambattista. New Science, translated by David Marsh. London: Penguin, 2001. Warwick. “Ellen D. To Seek a Single Symmetry.” Canadian Literature 71 (2011): 21-34. Wood, Brent. “From The Rising Fire to Afterworlds: the Visionary Circle in the Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Canadian Poetry 47 (2000): 40-69.

SCIENCE IMPARTED BY LITERATURE: A MEETING OF “THE TWO CULTURES” IN A. S. BYATT’S FICTION ALEXANDRA CHEIRA UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA

A. S. Byatt’s lifelong interest in science is embedded in her work and spans both her critical work and fiction. To provide but two examples, in her critical capacity she wrote the article “Fiction informed by Science” for the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2005. On the one hand, she explains that the reason some of her fiction is informed by science is that, as a reader, her favourite writers were the ones who were actually interested in the scientific work of their time, like George Eliot. On the other hand, she thoroughly explains the way such diverse scientific interests like mathematics, the nature of perception, theories of language and learning, evolutionary biology, genetics and neuroscience have shaped her Frederica quartet in the sense that they are embodied in the scientists who have a leading role in these novels. In this article, I will discuss Byatt’s thoughts on the interface of literature and science, as well as Byatt’s literary and scientific critics’ views on her perceptions on this subject, by focusing precisely on the last volume of the quartet, A Whistling Woman. Byatt’s reference to George Eliot in her article for Nature is not a coincidence. In fact, she has written extensively about the female novelist who—unusually for a nineteenth-century woman writer—discussed contemporary scientific theories in her fiction: “George Eliot’s Middlemarch not only makes reference to Andreas Vesalius, to Bichat’s theory of primary tissues like webs, to optics: it weaves them into the structure of the story, the thought and the metaphorical form of the novel.”1 Byatt is also quite eloquent on her appraisal of, and admiration for, George Eliot’s massive intellectual curiosity on a comprehensive range of subjects. As Byatt puts it, this is an attribute of typical male

 1

A. S. Byatt, “Fiction informed by science,” Nature 434 (17 March 2005), 294.

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Victorian sages such as John Ruskin, who did not compartmentalize and would eagerly learn geology, then archaeology, then the history of painting and finally mythology—quite unlike most contemporary experts on any given subject who, for Byatt, are largely unacquainted with other areas: George Eliot has been accused, or was accused—it may be past—by women, about never writing about a woman as clever as herself or as free as she made herself. In fact her own presence is enough to say that this is possible. She can read and understand anything, she does not ever feel daunted. If she does not understand a scientific fact she will go on until she does […] I think that is why I love [Eliot], and because [she] write[s] about many people and not just one […] [E]verything that George Eliot was able to say about what she wanted to say, I can read. It’s only a question of my intelligence how far I can understand it. I do know her.2

Actually, Byatt’s words on George Eliot’s informed-by-science fiction and on her all-encompassing intellectual inquisitiveness could well be applied to herself as well. In fact, as Olga Kenyon points out in a chapter on Byatt in her Contemporary British Women Writers, Byatt shares Eliot’s wide-ranging interests, and like her, comments on contemporary critics, scientists, theologians and artists, to represent the moral and intellectual climate of their time. They are both interested in areas of knowledge which have traditionally been defined as the province of men.3

Kenyon focuses precisely on the intellectual affinities between these two writers. Like Eliot before her, so does Byatt have an interest in the origins of knowledge, the workings of the human brain, mental imagery and perception. Like Eliot, who incorporated in her fiction ideas she discussed with G. H. Lewes after attending scientific and philosophical lectures, so does Byatt feel free to blend Darwin, Einstein or Foucault’s theories in her fiction whenever they clarify her own thoughts.4 Because of that, both writers have been accused of being “too intelligent”—for a woman, that is—an affliction which should thus

 2

Christien Franken, “An Interview with A. S. Byatt” (Utrecht: Department of Women’s Studies, 1 March 1991) [unpublished]. Professor Franken has kindly sent me her interview to A. S. Byatt with permission to quote from it in my work. 3 Olga Kenyon, “A. S. Byatt: Fusing Tradition with Twentieth-Century Experimentation,” in Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the Seventies and Eighties (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1988), 52. 4 Kenyon, 53.

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preclude them from writing a passionate scene. Alas, the fact that it does not, as perhaps Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Byatt’s Possession exemplify the best, does not conceal the fact that this is a gendered rebuke. Hence, as George Eliot would declare in an 1856 review for The Westminster: “Women have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; everyone believes that already. They have to prove that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continuous self-command.”5 Byatt shares Eliot’s perception that being a woman and being able to think critically are not polar oppositions. Moreover, both writers have soared above this indictment by integrating emotion and intellect, fiction and science in their narratives: The accusation of being too intelligent is one that is usually levelled at women and very rarely levelled at men. I do not know of any essay which says that Marcel Proust was too intelligent. What happens to intelligent women—and it still happens—is that, if you are known to be serious, if you are known to have done a lot of hard thinking, it is not supposed that you could have a sense of humour, that you could rumbustiously go off and write a passionate scene, because if you are intelligent you will not be passionate.6

Interestingly enough—or, should I say, sadly enough—this accusation can be thrown by other women as well. In a rather vitriolic 2003 review of Byatt’s Frederica’s Quartet and Possession, American journalist and novelist Lorraine Adams successively charges Byatt with “melodramatic pedantry,” “unimaginative morality” and “good girlism.”7 She quotes extensively from Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” to demolish both Byatt’s fiction as “silly novels” and Byatt herself as the lady novelist—which is, incidentally, Adams’s title—who writes them. Thus, for Adams, Byatt is a writer who struggles mightily to be the undertaker of her own silliness. She buries what George Eliot called “feminine fatuity” under a mountain of bibliographic cavil. Byatt is credited with being a novelist of

 5

The Westminster Review Old Series 66 (October 1856), 311-319 (312). In this issue of The Westminster, Eliot authored all of the reviews in the section “Belles Lettres.” 6 A. S. Byatt, The Late Show, quoted by Christien Franken, A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 26. Franken does not mention the date in which this programme was broadcast. 7 Lorraine Adams, “Lady Novelist,” The New Republic Online, November 13, 2003, http://www.powells.com/review/2003_11_13.html (accessed October, 28 2012).

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ideas, but really she is a melodramatic pedant. She sees herself as the granddaughter of Eliot, who taught her, she has written, that characters can “worry an idea; they are, within their limits, responsive to politics and art and philosophy and history.” She seems not to have noticed that Eliot’s greatness has something to do with her patient tapping out of the individual keys of moral slippage, her intelligent and humane and believable descriptions of complexity, which is never confused with aesthetic and historical filigree. Byatt prefers wiggly surfaces to sure depths. She depends on her readers’ exhaustion, or insecurity, to claim Eliot’s mantle. Who, after all, could be left standing, in a mood for close reading—let alone considered thinking—after ingesting the learnedness with which Byatt lards the four novels of her quartet? Once the ethnomethodology, the chiromancy, the snails, and the Latin become (as best as they can become) understandable, Byatt turns out to be precisely what she dreads most: a lady novelist writing silly novels.8

That, as Kenyon claims, her fiction is sometimes “overladen with cultural allusions that readers may not always find as ‘culturally relevant’ as she does,”9 is a balanced assessment. In fact, since not all readers share her own unusually wide reading, some may feel alienated while they plod through a potential minefield of literary, scientific and philosophical allusions they do not grasp. However, as Kenyon also points out, “if the novel represents our view of the world more than any other genre now […] then it is acceptable that Byatt includes scientific and cultural ideas which have transformed our thought.”10 Granted, Byatt’s language is not always easy to read, but then neither are some of the scientific theories and terminology she enmeshes in her fiction easy to understand for a lay person. Does it mean that, since these theories are sometimes quite complex, they should not be incorporated in a work of fiction? Should scientific theories then just be written by scientists for other scientists in their commonly shared scientific jargon? Byatt does not think so. In fact, as Kenyon argues, both Eliot and Byatt “attempt to rise above the distinctions between the sexes, even the division between our two cultures, of scientists and non-scientists. To transcend divisions demands familiarity with the vocabulary of science as well as that of sensibility.”11 Or, as Virginia Woolf put it in her defence of androgyny as creative artistic principle,

 8

Ibid. Kenyon, 54. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 53-54. 9

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Science Imparted by Literature The normal and comfortable state of being is when the two [powers which preside in every person, one male, one female] live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating […] Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.12

Perhaps, as Byatt has observed, “connections [that] proliferate apparently at random, that is to say, with equal verisimilitude”13 are what is needed to create, no matter if you are a woman or a man, a scientist or a writer: I work off a feeling that life and thought are a series of endless connections and I think of things to write when two things that seem quite separate suddenly seem to connect in my mind. The reviewing I see as hack-work that I do to earn money, but in fact books that I have reviewed have produced ideas for fiction. If I have an idea for fiction I will do a lot of research in a library out of sheer pleasure of reading in order to think around whatever it is I’m choosing to work on. I feel that everything I do all winds in and out of each other […]. Things are not separate. 14

Byatt’s words implicitly hint at what Kenyon has explicitly argued—the attempt to rise above the division between the two cultures C. P. Snow famously defined in his eponymous 1959 lecture, “literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists.”15 C. P. Snow regretted the chasm opened between the two cultures by mutual incomprehension, mistrust and dislike: They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground…The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on.16

Frederica Potter, the academically gifted woman who in Byatt’s novel A Whistling Woman will move from the culture of the literary intellectual as an English Literature teacher to an intersection between the two cultures by becoming a TV hostess, on a series of programmes which combine

 12

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 1945), 97. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage, 1990), 421. 14 Franken, “Interview.” 15 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4. 16 Ibid. 4-5. 13

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literature and science, as well as politics and art, voices C. P. Snow’s position in even stronger words: [Frederica] had grown up in the narrow British educational system which divides like a branching tree, and predestines all thirteen-year-olds to be either illiterate or innumerate (if not both). She had grown up with the assumption that to be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also—in the nuclear age—quite possibly dangerous and destructive. She thought of F. R. Leavis’s Education and the University, which […] had said that the English Department was at the centre of any educational endeavour. This suddenly seemed […] to be nothing more than a Darwinian jockeying for advantage, a territorial snarl and dash.17

In 1959, C. P. Snow believed that education could bridge and even close the gap between the two cultures. In 2005, in her article for Nature, Byatt acknowledged the huge influence scientific thought has had on her own fiction as a way to bridge this gap by writing, My world has been changed by all the scientific writers who have made their understanding approximately available to me, in plain English and working metaphors. Sometimes I talk at sci-art gatherings at which Lewis Wolpert is present. He always argues that we non-scientists do not know what we are talking about. I do not dispute this—it is true, and it is important to know it. For my part, I wish scientists were less starry-eyed about what they call “originality” and—even more dubious—“creativity” in the arts. But that is another essay.18

Although Byatt is not particularly enthusiastic about C. P. Snow’s opposition, the bridging of the two cultures in her fiction has lent itself to criticism from both scientists and literary critics, like Lorraine Adams, whose corrosive tone does indeed bring to mind one of the major opponents of C. P. Snow’s thesis—the renowned but controversial Cambridge professor and literary critic, Byatt’s former teacher F. R. Leavis. Likewise, although in a more guarded tone, clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis—who is also a poet and a prose writer—warns against what he deems Byatt’s adoption of a neurophysiological approach in the reading of Donne’s poetry as reductionist and critically dangerous: Not long ago A. S. Byatt published a TLS Commentary (“Observe the Neurones,” September 22, 2006) in which she purported to explain why,

 17 18

A. S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), 363-364. Byatt, “Fiction informed by science,” 297.

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Science Imparted by Literature since she discovered John Donne’s poetry as a schoolgirl in the 1950s, she had found him “so very exciting.” She discussed some of his most compelling love poems and in places showed the kind of sensitive attention to the writer’s language and intention that we look for in a good, that is to say helpful, critic. This made it puzzling, indeed exasperating, that the primary concern of her piece was to explain the poems and their effect on her by appealing to contemporary neurophysiology. She took up this theme again in a shorter piece, on the novel, last year (November 30). The literary critic as neuroscience groupie is part of a growing trend.19

An authority in both the scientific and the literary fields, Tallis does not accuse Byatt of reading only popular versions of neuroscience. Moreover, at a later part of his response to Byatt’s article, an edited version of the chapter “Feeling Thought: Donne and the embodied mind” she wrote for The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, Tallis admits that, In fairness to Byatt, it should be said that hers is no mere hand-waving to a discipline that sounds impressive. She has read the theories of a very distinguished neuroscientist, Pierre Changeux [who made his professional reputation with some exquisite studies of the stereochemistry of nicotinic receptors in the brain], with care and attention.20

Nevertheless, Tallis argues that Byatt pays the price for overstanding (his word) by sometimes misconstruing and misusing concepts from neuroscience to interpret John Donne’s poetry. Therefore, his main objection to Byatt’s approach is that it reduces the reading of literature to a neurophysiological phenomenon by undermining “the calling of a humanist intellectual, for whom literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state.”21 Being a literary scholar with no scientific training, my very limited knowledge of neuroscience does not allow me to comment on Tallis’s refutation of Byatt’s use of neuroscience concepts in her reading of Donne. However, I do not endorse Tallis’s view that Byatt is interpreting Donne’s poetry based on brain functions. As I see it, in the essay for The Cambridge Companion to John Donne she never claims she is analysing Donne’s poetry from the point of view of specific neuronal activity. What

 19

Raymond Tallis, “The neuroscience delusion,” The Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 2008, http://tomraworth.com/talls.pdfhttp://tomraworth.com/talls.pdf (accessed October 15, 2012). 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

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she does instead is account for the pleasure she feels, as a reader, in making connections between such different reading materials as Donne’s poetry and Changeux’s work. Granted, lacking both the scientific training and the knowledge of what the specific terminology entails which is mastered by Tallis, I do not presume to dispute that Byatt may misuse the concepts she uses. Nevertheless, in this essay she is not so much a literary critic as she is both an expert reader of Donne and a lay reader—albeit a very informed one—of Changeux and of Elaine Scarry on describing “a kind of grammar or algebra of the instructions by which a writer causes a mental image to be reconstructed in the mind of a reader.”22 The fact that Byatt does not have any scientific training does not preclude her from having a serious interest, as a reader, on scientific texts written by, and to, scientists, but she never pretends she is an expert reader in this field. Moreover, she states quite explicitly that she does not imagine “we are yet in reach of a neuroscientific approach to poetic intricacy.”23 That, along with the fact that she does not dispute the truth of a scientist’s verdict that non-scientists like herself do not know what they are talking about, lends credence to her not presuming to analyse a work of art in terms of neuronal processes—not to mention her reputation as a serious literary critic who shares her former teacher F. R. Leavis’s belief that a truly great writer (and, by extension, a literary critic) is someone whose moral seriousness is undisputed. This is precisely the stance literary scholar Alastair Brown takes when he analyses Byatt’s final novel in the Frederica quartet, as the opening words of his aptly named article “Uniting the Two Cultures of Body and Mind in A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman” convey: “A. S. Byatt’s novels are mirrors within which disciplinary and generic opposites such as humanism and religion, art and science, or critical and creative writing reflect each other.”24 Brown furthers Olga Kenyon’s argument that Byatt’s fiction attempts to transcend the gap between the two cultures: she claims that Byatt has united the two cultures of body and mind in the last volume of the quartet by showing that “science and literature are two ways of looking at the same natural order, as encapsulated in their common use of metaphor and analogy.”25 His main premise being that “over the two decades of the quartet’s conception, science has provided a central

 22

Byatt, “Feeling Thought: Donne and the embodied mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2006), 251. 23 Ibid. 250. 24 Alastair Brown, “Uniting the Two Cultures of Body and Mind in A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman,” Journal of Literature and Science 1, no. 1 (2007), 55. 25 Ibid. 65.

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inspiration,”26 Brown qualifies his point by summing up the key scientific theories and motifs weaved into the structure of the Frederica quartet which Byatt has elaborated on her article for Nature: “the synaesthetic solving of mathematical problems through visualising landscapes in The Virgin in the Garden (1978); the nature of perception in Still Life (1985); the Fibonacci spiral in Babel Tower (1986); and synaptic and biological connections and patterns in A Whistling Woman (2002).”27 Just as Byatt does in her Nature article, Brown discusses at length the Body and Mind Conference that is a pivotal part of the novel by arguing that, In A Whistling Woman, Byatt’s exploration of the shared and alternative ways of knowing the disciplines is governed by her representation of consciousness and the connections and patterns, metaphorical or synaptic, between mind or soul (traditionally the preserve of the arts and religion) and the body or the material brain (subject for scientific scrutiny).28

Organised by a university vice-chancellor who combined scientific training and literary expertise (incidentally, like C. P. Snow and Raymond Tallis) as he “had been in his time both a distinguished mathematician and an innovatory grammarian”29 (like Noam Chomsky and Stephen Pinker), the conference aims at reconciling body and mind by breaking down the boundaries between them. Byatt first signals this conciliation in the names she chooses for the two key speakers, one of whom will present a paper on Gestalt and schemata, while the other is an expert on instinct and learning in wild and domesticated animals. As Byatt explains, the names Hodder Pinsky and Theobald Eichenbaum have indeed the dual resonance of mythology and science: Hodder Pinsky and Theobald Eichenbaum […] are named, following the Norse mythological pattern of the novel, after Hodur, the blind god, and Balder, the “dying god” whom Hodur kills accidentally with a mistletoe spear. In the scientific structure Pinsky was a cross between Pinker and Chomsky (although his work is more related to Ulrich Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology), and Eichenbaum is part of the ethologist world of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.30

 26

Ibid. 56. Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Byatt, A Whistling Woman, 26. 30 Byatt, “Fiction informed by science,” 296. 27

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This interdisciplinary conference offers a myriad of disciplines within the two cultures represented in the delegates who attend it. Thus, Lyon Bowman discusses the neurochemistry of memory; Jacob Strope speculates whether machines think; Griselda Bragge questions the naturalness of musical intervals; Edmund Wilkie discourses on Vermeer, Picasso, and the representation of the act of perception; Canon Adelbert Holly proposes changing interpretations of the Incarnation; Brendan Cleaver discusses consciousness in the “persistent vegetative state”; Gerard Wijnnobel addresses the topics of deep structure, surface fluency, and ideas of a universal language; Luk Lysgaard-Peacock argues the biological disadvantage of sexual reproduction using slugs as an example. Interestingly, as Byatt acknowledges in her article for Nature, this latter scientist presents a paper on a topic which interested a real evolutionary biologist and geneticist, John Maynard Smith, at the time Byatt’s fictional conference took place: “the profligacy of nature in constructing the male of any species. Surely, it was argued, either parthenogenesis or budding would be a more certain and economical way of passing on genes.”31 Byatt also explains how, after having come with what she terms a solid metaphor which she embodied in the language and narrative of her novel—the snail—she met evolutionary biologist Steve Jones on a scientific radio programme in which they discussed Proust and the concept of time in Physics, who turned out to be the world expert on the two particular species of snails she was interested in fitting into her projected paradise garden imagery and her realist scientific tale. Because Byatt wanted to know whether there was any connection between snails and work on neurons in the brain and on memory, as she wanted to move a particular woman scientist from the field of snail genetics into neuroscience, she asked Steve Jones about it—and was told that there might be. For Byatt, “Curiosity is a profound drive in both novelists and scientists. I took great pleasure in learning about snails.”32 Bridging the gap between the two cultures does not take place exclusively within academia. Frederica, the main character in the quartet, hosts a television series on art, science and politics (which, incidentally, might well have been modelled on the kind of radio programmes that Byatt has often been invited to), watched by several of the academics. Thus, the first programme in the series—which bears the significant name “Through the Looking-Glass”—sets the scene by discussing “Charles Dodgson [Lewis Carroll’s real name], Nonsense and an antique mirror.

 31 32

Ibid. Ibid. 295.

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The second discussed Doris Lessing’s idea of Free Women in The Golden Notebook, George Eliot and a Tupperware bowl. The third was about ‘creativity’ and discussed Sigmund Freud and a Picasso ceramic.”33 Frederica attends the Body and Mind Conference and, after hearing Pinsky speak on metaphors for the mind striking an increasingly technical language, muses that though she had understood what he had said, which was lucid and interesting, she was profoundly ignorant, blackly, thickly ignorant, of what he was talking about. She knew the words, euron, synapse, dendrite, and she liked them because she could do their etymology. But the human world—including maybe some of her own forebears—had invented microscopes and telescopes, had dissected tissues and identified cells, and if it all vanished tomorrow she would not know where to start, though she might be able to write down quite a lot of Paradise Lost by heart (whatever her heart was, and however it worked).34

A woman who defines herself as someone who wants to learn and to think (a trait common to several other female characters in Byatt’s fiction), Frederica comes to realise that the path of literary culture is too narrow for her to do just that: after she hears Pinsky and Lysgaard-Peacock speaking at the conference, she has seen the world is bigger when science comes into the equation as well. It is thus that Byatt’s scientific-minded fiction has ultimately transcended the gap between the two cultures, since she has proved most effectively that it is possible for literature to meet science to meet literature as two different ways of looking at the same natural order. Scientific discourse is mingled with literary references in a plot dominated by the fruitful articulation of the two new cultures of body and mind. Like George Eliot before her, Byatt has also mastered scientific and literary discourses whose interdisciplinary dialogue is exemplified in A Whistling Woman by her re-enactment of the two cultures of science and literature, body and mind.

Works Cited Adams, Lorraine. “Lady Novelist.” The New Republic Online, November 13, 2003.

 33 34

Byatt, A Whistling Woman, 135. Ibid.

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Brown, Alastair. “Uniting the Two Cultures of Body and Mind in A. S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman.” Journal of Literature and Science 1, no. 1 (2007): 55-72. Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage, 1990. —. A Whistling Woman. London: Chatto & Windus, 2002. —. “Fiction informed by science.” Nature 434 (17 March 2005): 294-297. Byatt, A. S. “Feeling Thought: Donne and the embodied mind.” The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, edited by Achsah Guibbory, 247-258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Eliot, George. “Review.” The Westminster Review Old Series 66 (October 1856): 311-319. Franken, Christien. “An Interview with A. S. Byatt.” Utrecht: Department of Women’s Studies. 1 March 1991 (unpublished). —. A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Kenyon, Olga. “A. S. Byatt: Fusing Tradition with Twentieth-Century Experimentation.” In Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the Seventies and Eighties, 51-84. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1988. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tallis, Raymond. “The neuroscience delusion.” The Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 9, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 1945.

THE IDEA IS THE THING: SCIENCE PLAYS AFTER COPENHAGEN TERESA BOTELHO FCSH/CETAPS

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Albert Einstein

As the twentieth century was drawing to a close, all branches of knowledge were challenged by a controversial proposition articulated by the influential American biologist Edward N. Wilson; it was time, he argued, to bridge the gap between the two cultures that C.P. Snow had seen as separated by an insurmountable gulf by engaging in a process of finding consilience between all modes of enquiry and to renew the concept of unity of knowledge. Fifteen years after his cogent appeal to a new interface between the sciences and the humanities, a tentative conversation on the possibilities, difficulties and terms of engagements between the two cultures has found its way into once reluctant academic, artistic and public discourses, if not necessarily in the terms originally envisioned. Wilson1 uses the concept of consilience to denote the likely coherence not only between all the sciences but between them and the humanities, brought about “by the linking of facts and fact-based theory to create a common groundwork of explanation.”2 Slingerland and Collard3 elaborate on the

 1

Edward O. Wilson is a socio-biologist, a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, a well-known environmental advocate and a recipient of the Kistler Prize (2000), the Nierenberg Prize (2001) and the Crafoord Prize (1990), awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for branches of science not covered by the Nobel Prize (in this case Biosciences/Ecology). He has also received the Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science (1994), and two Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction. 2 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Human Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998), 6.

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term to read it as “an attempt to develop a new shared framework for the sciences and the humanities” that goes beyond the interdisciplinary engagement already generally practised to require “interdisciplinarity across the science/humanities divide.”4 In broad terms, Wilson’s proposition claims that there is nothing natural, inevitable or permanent in the “ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy,” which “are not reflections of the real world but artefacts of scholarship.” The assumptions of the Enlightenment, he adds, of an “intrinsic unity of knowledge” are in step with the “greatest enterprise of the mind” which “has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities.”5 The grounds for this assertion stem from the understanding that all search for knowledge derives from the same sense of awe invoked by Einstein and from the basic need to answer questions that mobilize different disciplinary paradigms, namely the urgency “to have a story to tell about where we come from and why we are here.”6 The belief that “we can know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose wisely”7 underlies, for Wilson, the “intellectual adventure” in which all branches of learning are engaged. The greatest challenge to this “minority metaphysical world view” lies precisely in the “transit from science to the arts” (including literature, the visual arts, drama and dance); nevertheless, Wilson insists that “neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths,” as “science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science.”8 Wilson’s vision was immediately challenged by various fields of academic enquiry, as he clearly anticipated, taking into account the acrimonious historical precedent of the two cultures debate which

 3

Slingerland and Collard co-chaired a workshop in 2008 entitled “Integrating Science and the Humanities” at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia with the participation of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, anthropology, literary studies, zoology, biology, linguistics and social and cognitive sciences. The results of that debate emerged in a volume recently published. 4 Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4. 5 Ibid. 6. 6 Ibid. 5. 7 Ibid. 331-332. 8 Ibid. 234.

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stretched back, as Luckhurst9 points out, to the nineteenth-century clash between T.H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold on the “rival claims of literature and science,” and the acrid response to C.P. Snow’s Rede Lecture by F. R. Leavis10 in 1962. In fact, Wilson’s confrontational criticism of the “post-modernist hypothesis,” “blissfully free of existing information on how the mind works,” attached to a concept of truth that “is relative and personal” and driven by a search for “contradiction and ambiguities”11 was hardly conducive to a fruitful dialogue between the two cultures which were still coming to terms with the effects of the infamous Sokal hoax.12

How to think together: Approaches to collaborative conversations The difficulties facing the grand project for the reunification of knowledge proposed by Wilson are vast, ranging from the ontological to the systemic and psychological. One of the fundamental obstacles is the “belief that the physical sciences and the humanities occupy irreducibly distinct ontological territories,” the former being “subject to quantitative formulation and reductive causal analysis” and the latter consisting of “unique and irreducible qualitative moments of subjectivity.”13 If this polarity no longer holds within the disciplinary domains, as

 9

Roger Luckhurst, “The Two Cultures, or the End of the World as we know it” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007): 56. 10 Leavis, F. R., “The Significance of C. P. Snow” Spectator (March 9, 1962): 297303. 11 Wilson, 237-238. 12 This notorious academic scandal of the mid 1990s was precipitated by the publication, in the cultural studies journal Social Text, of an essay with the title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” by Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist. The text was intended as a parody of postmodernism and critical theory paradigms and was scientifically incoherent, but was accepted as a serious academic paper. The deception was exposed in Lingua Franca by Sokal and described as an experiment to access how a respected journal would respond to a scientifically nonsensical article that seemed to comply with the theoretical presuppositions of the editors. See Alan Sokal “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring/Summer 1996): 217-252; Alan Sokal “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996): 62-63. 13 Joseph Carroll, “Wilson’s Consilience and Literary Study,” Philosophy and Literature 23, no. 2 (1999): 402.

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Chandrasekhar argues in his defence of the quest of beauty in science, demonstrating how “science, like the arts, admits aesthetic criteria,”14 it still has an apparent capacity to distort the views of how the other fields work. Among these are the beliefs that science is not only reductionist but also detached and objective, interested in the real world, while art, including literature, is relational, emotional, intensely subjective and interested in imaginary worlds. Reporting on workshop discussions that brought together academics from the sciences and the humanities, Sligerland and Collard identify the persistence of this inaccurate view of the objectives and protocols of the two discourses of knowledge, adding that “many of the dichotomies that coordinate with the sciences/ humanities divide—explanation/interpretation, biology/culture, nature/nurture, determination/freedom—can be boiled down to the intuition that human minds belong to a different order of reality than human bodies.”15 There are, nevertheless, areas where collaboration has been particularly fruitful. Steven Pinker highlights how the humanities and cognitive sciences are finding common ground; philosophy of mind, for example, integrates knowledge advanced by neurobiology and other sciences of cognition in its approach to consciousness, imagery, language and epistemology, “incorporating what we know about the incantation of all these processes in living brains.”16 Visual art and cognitive sciences have also collaborated in research projects under the field of neuroaesthetics, combining neurological research with the study of artistic creation in an attempt “to enlarge our understanding of the creative process,”17 while literary criticism has for some time incorporated minority trends which openly reject the abandonment of “canons of empirical inquiry,” see science as “approaching ever closer to a commanding and detailed knowledge of the subjects most germane to literary culture: human

 14

S. Chandrasekhar, “Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science,” Physics Today 32, no. 7 (July 1979): 25. 15 Ibid. 5. 16 Steven Pinker, “The Humanities and Human Nature,” in Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55. 17 Amy Ione, “Editorial: Art and the Brain: What does the Evidence Tell us,” Leonardo. 45, no. 3 (2012): 204; see also Elizabeth Weissenstein and Christian Freksa, “Wolkenkuckucksheim: Art as a Metaphor of the Brain,” Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 414-422, and Thomas D. Albright, “The Veiled Christ of Capella Sansevero: On Art, Vision and Reality,” Leonardo 46, no. 1 (2013): 19-23.

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motives, human feelings and the operations of the human mind”18 and propose embodied analytical methodologies to the study of literature.19 These examples of practical consilience notwithstanding, apprehension (or even derision) of what the polemicist Raymond Tallis designates as “biologism”20 (the belief that human behaviour can be understood in biological terms) is prevalent in much of the humanities, and McCarthy’s description of scientists and humanists moving “along opposed trajectories, the one towards a singular law-like understanding of nature, the other towards an expanding multiplicity of possible worlds”21 corresponds to the predominant views both scholarly universes have of their own objectives and research parameters. This entrenchment also reflects the weight of the paradigms that shape the investigative models of the two discourses and the pressures that they generate. Jay Clayton, for example, highlights that one of the weaknesses of Wilson’s project, which he describes as utopian, is its lack of subtlety, ignoring the fact that a search for communality of purpose cannot ignore the conventions and practices that shape disciplinary practices.22 A tone of triumphalism, more akin to a “winner takes all” competition, occasionally shapes the conversation about collaborative efforts where both sides argue for the relative superiority of their critical gaze. If those of us engaged in the study of literature, culture and the arts resist, as Clayton points out, the assertion that “science has achieved a virtual hegemony over all other forms of discourse” and “literature and other humanities have lost their claim to produce valid perspectives on the world,”23 it has to be recognized that scientists also resent the view that

 18

Joseph Carroll and others, “Palaeolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century,” in Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 387. 19 Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); David Barash and Nanelle Barash, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005) and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 20 Raymond Tallis, Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (London: Acumen, 2011). 21 Willard McCarthy, “Editorial,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, no. 4 (2008): 263. 22 Jay Clayton, “Convergence of the two cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature,” American Literature 74, no. 2 (December 2002): 823. 23 Ibid.

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they have nothing relevant to say about the imaginative and creative experiences of human life. A more pragmatic view of this relationship would not necessarily require a convergence but rather recognition of networks of interdependence and mutual stimulation. Without minimizing the gap in our discourses and keeping in mind that the level of fluency in each other’s methodological languages is often insufficient, it seems possible, nevertheless, to work from what visual artist Robert Pepperell identifies as “the reach towards the unknown” that “unites art, philosophy and science,” the sense that something holistically binds “the investigations in these fields.”24 Contemporary literature has been receptive to this stimulation, interpreting imaginatively the challenges of the new visions and possibilities provided by developments in science and technology. Drama in particular has been an especially fertile medium for these intersections; initiatives such as the American L.A. Theatre Works, which has put together an ongoing series of audio science-themed plays (the Relativity Series), available free online,25 on topics as varied as astronomy, physics and cosmology, and ranging from the mathematics of code-breaking to the ethics of scientific research, are testimony to the longevity and wide scope of the relationship between science and the stage.

Science in the theatrical space The science play genre, which Kristen Shepherd-Barr defines as including dramatic texts that attempt “to investigate human problems by reference to scientific ideas,”26 has long been part of drama and theatre’s engagement with the contemporary debates in the public sphere, dating back, at least, to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Considering the wide scope and variety of approaches that the staging of science has embraced, critics like Kupperman have identified some persistent general trends in the more contemporary corpus—plays which focus on the social implications of science, plays that concentrate on scientists, especially on dilemmas and

 24

Robert Pepperell, “Editorial: An Information Sublime: Knowledge After the Post-Modern Condition,” Leonardo 42, no. 5 (2009): 38. 25 The series, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, currently offers about twenty audio plays ranging from classics such as Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma and Brecht’s The Life of Galileo to recent examples such as Copenhagen, Arcadia, Breaking the Code, Moving Bodies, Proof, etc. See in http://latw.nfshost.com/wp2. 26 Kristen Shepherd-Barr, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006), 4.

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ethical challenges they may face, and plays which centre on science itself.27 This more recent trend dates back to a cluster of ground-breaking dramatic texts that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, especially Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, and Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. These plays demonstrate that drama can be an effective mediator between two different discourses and fields of knowledge in that they present scientists as characters and their dialogues are peppered with references to quantum physics, prime number theory and chaos theory, bridging the disconnection between modern science and its public understanding, helping in what Malina calls the process of “cultural appropriation of scientific knowledge.”28 But they do more than didactically translate complex concepts to lay audiences as a good popularizing lecture might do: they do what only great literature and especially great dramatic literature can do—they use the principles, rules or models of the science in question as organizing structures of the plots, withholding the realist mimetic conventions and concentrating attention on the form of the play which metaphorically represents the scientific concept itself. On this metatheatrical level, as Stephenson suggests, it is also possible to reach “through the boundary between the stage and the world to comment self-reflexively on the lived, performative experience of audiences”29 and specifically on the interactions between the performance on stage and the spectator who is involved in a search similar to that of the scientific enterprise—reading bits of information, striving for coherence, refuting or validating their temporary interpretation of the fictional experience on stage through confirmation of facts. The remainder of this chapter discusses how these innovative dramatic strategies introduced in the late twentieth century have influenced new plays written in the post Copenhagen/Arcadia era—specifically Crispin Whittell’s 2003 Darwin in Malibu and Caryl Churchill’s 2002 A Number—concentrating on the role of the scientific idea in the construction of the provisional reality of their theatrical worlds and the role they attribute to the spectator.

 27

Judy Kupperman, “Science in Theatre,” PhysicaPlus: Online Magazine of the Israeli Physical Society 1 (2005), http://physicaplus.org.il/zope/home/1/cult_judy_en/?skin=print (accessed February 20, 2013). 28 Roger F. Malina, “Editorial: Intimate Science and Hard Humanities,” Leonardo 42, no. 3 (2009): 184. 29 Jenn Stephenson, “Metatheatre and Authentication through Metonymic Compression in John Mighton’s Possible Worlds,” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 74.

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On knowing and believing: Darwin in Malibu Darwin in Malibu is one of a plethora of recent plays on Darwinism that include Darwin’s Flood (Snoo Wilson), Trumpery (Peter Parnell) and After Darwin (Timberlake Wertenbaker) as well as performances like RE: Design and the innovativecollage of songs, text and multimedia elements that goes by the name The Rap Guide to Evolution.30Like Darwin’s Flood it is a comedy and formally the most conventional of the plays under discussion. The comedic premise of the text is similar to that of Snoo Wilson’s Darwin’s Flood in that it plays with the idea of a repositioning of Darwin in an unlikely circumstance—sunbathing in Malibu, drinking milkshakes and reading horoscopes. This unlikely premise disallows any realistic interpretation of the stage performance and the spectator will soon construct the hypothesis of a possible world scenario. Although death is never explicitly mentioned, what is being enacted appears to be a rather pleasant afterlife that seems to fit Darwin’s need for quiet and simplicity. The play soon substantiates this conclusion by bringing into Darwin’s presence two contemporaries who are coming from their own pleasurable afterlives. Huxley arrives first, fresh from Oxford where he has settled after his death and who seems happy with the beauty of its surroundings, its “excellent libraries,” “clever people” and convenience as far as distance from London and availability of pubs is concerned.31 In amicable companionship, the two chat about the extraordinary hundred years of scientific advancement and its high point, the discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson, which strikes Darwin by its aesthetic narrative elegance: The thing that I liked about Crick and Watson was its beauty. The idea that each of us carries our own unique story written into every cell of our body, in its own special alphabet, four letters long. In the conception of a child one’s own story becomes an idea for another story. An idea of someone. And this idea meets another idea of someone. The idea of the dearest someone to you in the world. And these two ideas meet and merge, and become a new idea, A new story written in the same alphabet, composed of excerpts from you and excerpts from her. Yet utterly unique.32

 30

See Teresa Botelho “Staging Darwin: Evolution and the Dramatic Language of Science Plays and Performances,” in (Dis)entangling Darwin: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on the Man and his Legacy, ed. Sara Graça da Silva and others (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 209-224. 31 Crispin Whittell, Darwin in Malibu (London: Methuen, 2003), 16. 32 Ibid. 17.

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The two men further discuss the confrontation between Huxley and Wilberforce, which was missed by Darwin who, as Huxley resentfully points out, after coming up “with a new theory on the beginnings of life on Earth […] promptly disappeared off the face of it,” “leaving me to do your dirty work,”33 describing an overcrowded room where “gentlemen in top hats, academics in their gowns, hordes of raucous students at the back, a surprising number of women and a congregation of clergymen” “smelled blood” when Huxley stood up to respond to Wilberforce’s infamous inquiry about his ape ancestors with a reply that history has shortened to its bare bones: that he would rather “be an ape than a bishop.”34 This friendly chat, which establishes a common ground between the performance and the audience, translating the debates of a hundred years ago into a contemporary sensibility, is interrupted by the arrival of the uninvited Wilberforce. His afterlife had so far been equally agreeable in a solidly Christian university in Alabama enjoying the comfort, as he puts it, of “being surrounded by people who agree with me, for a change.”35 His enjoyment had been interrupted by the puzzling news that Darwin and Huxley coexisted with him on the same plane of reality, a fact that he cannot reconcile with his sense of the proper afterlife status each of them deserved. The logical interpretation of being on a plane of reality where there are solidly Christian Alabama campuses and soul mates is that this is his heavenly reward after a life of strife i.e. paradise; but if Huxley and Darwin are sharing the same world, that hypothesis has to be cancelled and replaced with a more coherent interpretation. The comforting niche which he had misguidedly taken for Paradise must be Purgatory (a conclusion he arrives at rationally as he is quite determined that neither Huxley nor Darwin are adequate candidates for the top kind of afterlife). His worthiness being so obvious “what with being a bishop and everything,” a rank which “if it doesn’t exactly give you a passport, then it should at least give you the status of, I don’t know, a preferred bidder,”36 he can only assume that the denial of his just reward can have only one explanation: he is in Purgatory because that is where Darwin and Huxley are (although he admits he expected them to be in the Other Place) and will remain there until his last duty is fulfilled, i.e. to dissuade the scientist and his defender from the error of their ways.

 33

Ibid. 18. Ibid. 20. 35 Ibid. 26. 36 Ibid. 28. 34

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The play is organized from this point onwards through a series of confrontations between the three characters, not only pitting Darwin and Huxley against Wilberforce but, very significantly, opposing Darwin and Huxley. The wittiest moments of the dialogue occur when the contradictions of Wilberforce’s literalism clash with the factual mind of Huxley or the sarcastic logic of Darwin. The arithmetic and logistics of the Biblical Flood and the Noah’s Ark narrative are reviewed—according to Wilberforce only 16,000 animals could fit inside the vehicle, cared for by 8 people, amounting to “seven point two seconds per animal per caretaker per day” and complicating the explanation of the genetic complexity of animal species, suggesting, as Huxley points out, that “you seem to be accepting that evolution took place after this whole soggy business with the ark, just not before.”37 Darwin, on the other hand, questions Wilberforce on the ethics of paradise where he is assured by the bishop he will be able to pursue his favourite pastime of hunting partridges. “So,” says Darwin, “I am in heaven where, as a reward for being good, I get the chance to shoot good partridges. The good partridges go to heaven where, as a reward for being good they get shot at by me,” to which Wilberforce replies with the suggestion that either Darwin’s heaven is in fact the partridge hell, and “those are really bad partridges,” or that there will be “other things to do, Badminton, for instance.”38 However, the most thought-provoking interchange occurs between Huxley and Darwin and involves the nature of knowledge. Huxley, exasperated with Darwin’s interest in reading everybody’s horoscope, asks him if he believes in “any of that star stuff” and Darwin cannot give a conclusive answer. He does not say he does but, as Huxley points out, he does not say he does not either. After much insistence, Darwin tries to end the debate by saying that he does not know and specifying before the shocked Huxley: “When I say that I don’t know whether or not I believe in something, I am sort of saying that I don’t know whether or not I believe in it.”39 Indeed, if believing, unlike knowing, is not the result of the validation of evidence, how can one rationally say that one knows that one believes except by summoning evidence of one’s beliefs, and how does one separate that evidence from the self doing the believing? Darwin’s refusal to position himself on the axis that links knowing and believing is key to the dramatic texture of the relationship between the three men on stage as the play presents the audience with three approaches to what one

 37

Ibid. 57-58. Ibid. 46. 39 Ibid. 38. 38

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might loosely call states of knowledge, each embodied by one of the three main characters—believing that one knows, contrary to all logical evidence, that something is the case, as is the case of Wilberforce; knowing absolutely that something is the case with no need to gather corroborative evidence, like Huxley; and the state that drives scientific inquiry, which is not knowing if one believes that something is the case until there is convincing evidence that transforms belief into knowledge, as shown by the speculative mind of Darwin, the character who actually does science rather than merely argue in favour of or against its merits. As the play ends, the three men finally find something they both believe in and know though the anguish of loss of loved ones—Darwin’s and Huxley’s daughters Annie and Mady and Wilberforce’s wife Emily— the consciousness of death. Holding two books (the Bible and The Origin of the Species) in his hands, Darwin muses with Wilberforce on the two deep mysteries that move both science and religion to look for answers: Two books. And two overwhelming questions. What happened in the beginning? And what happens at the end? Where do we come from? And where do we go when we die? The second question is a particularly hard nut to crack for the excellent reason that we only find out what happens when we’re dead. Which leaves man with one big question to answer. The Mystery of Mysteries. The first words in the Bible: “In the beginning ...” This is the question I had a go at.40

And yet it is the unanswerable question that torments the three men— death “all over our lives, stalking us, stealing away our nearest and dearest before our very eyes, our Madys, our Emilys, our Annies,”41 and leaving us with the impossible scientific problem for which no data can ever be collected and where, as Darwin had said, one cannot know what one believes because no knowledge is possible. If Darwin in Malibu is concerned with epistemology, the beauty of science and its possibilities as well as its impossibilities, Caryl Churchill’s A Number is concerned with ontology, more specifically with being and with being through a distinct consciousness, shadowed by duplication and genetic manipulation.

 40 41

Ibid. 58-59. Ibid. 64.

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On Being: A Number A Number is an intensely spare play, structured by four encounters—one man, Salter, and three of his sons, Bernard 1, Bernard 2 and Michael, all played by the same actor. The dialogue is everything in this play, constructed in language which is, as in most of Caryl Churchill’s work, terse, clipped and overlapping. The spectator is introduced in medias res to a conversation between father and Bernard 2 where the younger man is introduced to the fact that he is not the only son he thinks he is but one of a number that his father claims are copies of him (20, we are told) made illegally by some hospital that they should both sue together. That information is soon replaced by a counter claim. Bernard 2 is not in fact the original but a copy himself, therefore a “thing,” a copy made by his father after the death of the original son, Bernard 1. Except that he is not. In the second scene Bernard 1, who is alive but was abandoned by his father when he was a small child for being a nuisance (he was in fact neglected and emotionally abused by his recently widowed father), learns from his father that a copy of him, a new Bernard, was created and has become the son his father really wants and loves. To say that this is a play about the science of cloning would be to short-change what it proposes—it does not engage in scientific exposition, it does not concern itself with debates over the ethics of genetic manipulation or its manipulation, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s poignant Never Let Me Go. As Shepherd-Barr42 remarks, it rather assumes that the spectator has enough fluency in the protocols of cloning and the contours of the debates surrounding it and is able, as it were, to fill in the gaps. What Churchill does is to create, on the virtually empty stage, a double process of inquiry; the first is purely diagetic and revolves around the attempts of the sons to find the truth of who they are through the maze of lies and deception of their father. This enquiry, where the spectator is positioned mainly as a witness, explores a theme that Gobert identifies as a longstanding preoccupation in Churchill’s drama—that of subject formation, authenticity and selfhood, already present in the 1998 radio play Identical Twins, where the “characters find their process of subject formation impeded, because of lack of difference”43 and represented by a shared text delivered in tandem

 42

Shepherd-Barr, 125. R. Darren Gobert, “On Performance and Selfhood in Caryl Churchill,” in The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, ed. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 106. 43

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dialogues with both characters being played by the same actor. In fact individualization is only achieved after one of the twins commits suicide, thus leaving the surviving twin finally able to “claim the I that will anchor his subjectivity and his identity.”44 In A Number the sense of self both Bernards possessed is devastated by the knowledge that they were not unique, just one of a number. At first, Bernard 2 takes some comfort in his father’s deceptive assertion that he is, in fact, the original, because otherwise he is left wondering not only who but also what he is: B2 what if someone else is the one, the first one, the real one and I’m Salter no because B2 not that I’m not real which is why I’m saying they are not things, don’t call them […] B2 I just, because of course I want them to be things, I do think they’re things. I don’t think they are of course. I do think they are them as much as I’m me but I. I don’t know what I think45

If Bernard 2’s sense of being unique is the only way of understanding being, differentiated from the others in that indeterminate number, the only way he can survive the shock of realizing that he is in fact a copy (a thing?) is to cling to Salter’s further lie that the original is dead and that now he is the only one. Bernard 1, the abandoned original who surfaces in scene two and is also left with the realization that his father had made a copy that he loved better than him, sees no other recourse to re-establishing his sense of uniqueness than the elimination of his planned clone (the only one that really matters because it is the only one that is known, loved and hence has a reality that the shadowy others lack). The failure of his attempt to recover the status of the real one after the murder of the copy and his subsequent suicide suggests how relational his sense of self was—it was not so much the existence of the copy that tormented him but the knowledge that, even when gone, that favoured clone was the one his father wanted. Not being unique, not being a son, even a rejected one, erases his subjectivity and he can no longer claim any recognizable “I.” This inquiry which involves the two Bernards’ search for knowledge about who they are, once all certainties of what they are have been discarded and revised, is complemented by a second kind of investigation which is extra-diagetic in its essence, constructed by the play itself and its

 44 45

Ibid. 107. Caryl Churchill, A Number (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 11-12.

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relation with the spectator; in this inquiry the spectator “becomes” the researcher, not only piecing together the bits of contradictory information into a coherent and validated configuration but taking part in a kind of experiment that emulates the conditions of a scientific test that can never be organized in the non-fictionalised world. The familiar debate over what determines the sense of self and shapes an individual (genetics or social environment) can finally be enacted on stage, in quasi ideal scientific conditions, as the hypothesis of cloning generates specimens of absolute genetic similarity. The play’s exploration of the nature versus nurture debate, innovative and challenging as it is, carries enough ambiguity to allow doubt or, as Whittell’s Darwin would say, to leave the spectators/researchers not knowing what they believe. If a temporary inclination in favour of predominance of the nurture hypothesis seems validated by the comparison between the loved Bernard 2, who appears balanced and successful, and the rejected, ill-treated Bernard 1, who is nothing of the kind, doubts creep in in scene five, which enacts the encounter between Salter and Michael, one of his non-programmed “illegal” sons. Michael sounds successful, balanced, untroubled by the disclosure of his origins. But when his father demands to know something about him that is really specific about him, something really important, he is unable to satisfy the request, listing instead a list of things that he is interested in, that he likes—he loves his wife’s ears and lying in bed, dislikes war, is partial to banana ice cream, blue socks, dogs—all “things that anyone could feel,” none of which, as Salter complains, is “something personal, something from deep inside his life.”46 The search for the essence of Michael is what his father is looking for and without it Salter cannot be persuaded either of his alterity (as a non-Bernard) or of his own imprint in the stranger who is genetically his son. Rather than an essence, all Michael knows of about himself is a random combination of traits and it is that combination that grounds the claim to a unique I, very much like an individual DNA signature. As he explains, making the case for his own non-uniqueness: “We’ve got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We’ve got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We’ve got thirty per cent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.”47 Challenging the concept of a knowable, describable human uniqueness, reducible to intelligible propositions, the play/experiment casts doubt not

 46 47

Ibid. 58. Ibid. 62.

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only on the grounds of the inquiry the two Bernards pursued, suggesting they asked the wrong questions, but calls into question the assumed knowledge gathered about their subjectivity. Like scientists, spectators have to revise their tentative hypotheses, recognize that the terms of the questions they had asked should be reconsidered and that they have gathered no validation for any conclusions. This brief discussion of the impact of the scientific idea-centred drama demonstrates that science plays that use a self-referential dramatic language where the very concept under discussion determines the structure of the play so that it is demonstrated and enacted are particularly successful in translating science and its dilemmas for general audiences. This is not to say that plays centred on episodes of the history of science or centred on the life of scientists are not equally capable of bridging gaps— one might consider, for example, plays authored by scientists like Carl Djerassi on Newton (Calculus)48 or on the retrospective awarding of a Novel Prize for the discovery of oxygen (Oxygen),49 to confirm their communicative power. An equally noteworthy development is the emergence of science themes in post-dramatic theatre (where performance is less dependent on text than on the experience of spectatorship they generate),50 namely in those that place spectators directly before dilemmas of scientific pursuit. A good example is Biblioetica, described by Campos and Shepherd-Barr as “a living dictionary of ethical problems related to biomedical research, clinical problems and case studies,”51 where spectators are invited to attend several of a menu of scenes related to a specific challenge identified by an entry such as “Euthanasia” or “Organ and Tissue Donation.” All these recent examples show the potentiality of exploring the unique possibilities of theatre to create partnerships that involve the spectators in intellectually stimulating adventures of speculating, reading evidence, testing hypotheses and reaching for coherence, modes of pursuing knowledge that are in tune with what constitutes the act of scientific inquiry, bringing it to the domain of public artistic discourse, and

 48

Carl Djerassi, Calculus in Newton’s Darkness: Two Dramatic Views (London: Imperial College Press, 2003). 49 Carl Djerassi and Roal Hoffmann, Oxygen (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 2001). 50 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen JürsMunby (London: Routledge, 2006). 51 Lilliane Campos and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, “Science and Theatre in Open Dialogue: Biblioetica, Les Cas de Sophie K. and the Postdramatic Play,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 31, no. 3 (2006): 245.

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reflecting it back to science makers, thereby effectively bridging the two modes of knowing. By creating performative spaces for thinking together, these plays enrich the textures of the discourses of both the sciences and the arts, fomenting a type of consilience that is stimulating and beneficial to both.

Works Cited Albright, Thomas D. “The Veiled Christ of Capella Sansevero: On Art, Vision and Reality.” Leonardo 46, no. 1 (2013): 19-23. Barash, David and Nanelle Barash. Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press, 2005. Botelho, Teresa. “Staging Darwin: Evolution and the Dramatic Language of Science Plays and Performances.” In (Dis)entangling Darwin: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on the Man and his Legacy, edited by Sara Graça da Silva and others, 209-224. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Campos, Lilliane, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. “Science and Theatre in Open Dialogue: Biblioetica, Les Cas de Sophie K. and the Postdramatic Play.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 31, no. 3 (2006): 245-253. Carroll, Joseph. “Wilson’s Consilience and Literary Study.” Philosophy and Literature 23, no. 2 (1999): 393-413. —. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge 2004). Carroll, Joseph and others. “Palaeolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century.” In Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, 385-408. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Chandrasekhar, S. “Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science.” Physics Today 32, no. 7 (July 1979): 25-30. Churchill, Caryl. A Number. London: Nick Hern Books, 2002. Clayton, Jay. “Convergence of the two cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature.” American Literature 74, no. 2 (December 2002): 807-831. Djerassi, Carl. Calculus in Newton’s Darkness: Two Dramatic Views. London: Imperial College Press, 2003. Djerassi, Carl, and Roal Hoffmann. Oxygen. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 2001.

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Gobert, R. Darren. “On Performance and Selfhood in Caryl Churchill.” In The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, edited by Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond, 105-124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ione, Amy. “Editorial: Art and the Brain: What does the Evidence Tell Us.” Leonardo 45, no. 3 (2012): 204. Kupperman, Judy. “Science in Theatre.” PhysicaPlus: Online Magazine of the Israeli Physical Society 1 (2005). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen JürsMunby. London: Routledge, 2006. Leavis, F. R. “The Significance of C. P. Snow.” Spectator (March 9, 1962): 297-303. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Two Cultures, or the End of the World as we Know it.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007): 55-64. Malina, Roger F. “Editorial: Intimate Science and Hard Humanities.” Leonardo 42, no. 3 (2009): 184. McCarthy, Willard. “Editorial.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, no. 4 (2008): 263-264. Pepperell, Robert. “Editorial: An Information Sublime: Knowledge After the Post-Modern Condition.” Leonardo 42, no. 5 (2009): 38. Pinker, Steven. “The Humanities and Human Nature.” Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, 45-55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Shepherd-Barr, Kristen. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Slingerland, Edward, and Mark Collard. Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sokal, Alan. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text 46/47 (Spring/ Summer 1996): 217-252. —. “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies” Lingua Franca 6, no. 4 (May/June 1996): 62-63. Stephenson, Jenn. “Metatheatre and Authentication through Metonymic Compression in John Mighton’s Possible Worlds.” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 73-93. Tallis, Raymond. Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. London: Acumen, 2011. Weissenstein, Elizabeth and Christian Freksa. “Wolkenkuckucksheim: Art as a Metaphor of the Brain.” Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 414-422.

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Whittell, Crispin. Darwin in Malibu. London: Methuen, 2003. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Human Knowledge. London: Abacus, 1998.

PART IV “MEDICAL LITERATURE”: EXCHANGES AND CONVERGENCE

THE FANTASY OF ECTOGENESIS IN INTERWAR BRITAIN: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS ALINE FERREIRA UNIVERSIDADE DE AVEIRO

This essay considers the fantasy of ectogenesis in some of its earliest fictional manifestations. Ectogenesis, as its name indicates, means creation outside the body and has come to be mainly associated with the concept of an artificial womb. When the fantasy of an artificial uterus is mentioned the first example that immediately comes to mind is Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), whose description of the Central London Hatchery where the cloned embryos are mass-produced and grown in glass jars moving in conveyer belts probably remains the most memorable. Huxley was responding to a cultural and scientific environment where such biotechnological fantasies had started to circulate and indeed had already been articulated by his friend J. B. S. Haldane in a small book called Daedalus, or, Science and the future (1924), which, amongst many other forecasts, envisaged a future society where ectogenesis and human cloning would become the norm. Indeed, the concept of ectogenesis first came into public awareness when Haldane, a British geneticist, a pioneer of population genetics and a prolific science populariser, mentioned it in a paper read to the Heretics Society in Cambridge on 4 February 1923. This paper, widely discussed and extremely influential, was later published as Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924). Crucially, the growing interest in new reproductive technologies and the resulting new family configurations at the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century was fuelled not only by First Wave Feminism, scientific advances in genetics and tissue culture, as well as by debates around eugenics and genetics often promoted by the British and American Eugenics Societies, but also by a series of short books published in the 1920s and 1930s by Kegan Paul in London as part of the “To-day and To-morrow” series. The main aim of the series, whose small volumes were written by eminent scientists and other specialists in their

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respective areas, and which ran to over one hundred titles, was to predict the most likely and often far-fetched developments in the scientific and social arenas of the day, assessing the repercussions those future advances in knowledge and their applications would have on many different levels, as well as their impact on the progress of countries and societies. Indeed, the whole series can be described as an exercise in futurology, whose speculations, however, are extrapolated from and firmly grounded in contemporary scientific developments. The first book in the series was precisely J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, or, Science and the Future (1924), which sparked a vigorous debate about extrauterine gestation. Other books in the series that took up the discussion over extracorporeal gestation include Anthony Ludovici’s Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman (1924), Dora Russell’s Hypatia: Or Woman and Knowledge (1925), Vera Brittain’s Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), while that fantasy also found fictional representation in such early novels as Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Of all the speculative predictions in the series ectogenesis in particular appears to have kindled both the scientific and popular imagination. As Max Saunders and Brian Hurwitz observe, it was Haldane’s vision of ectogenesis, “not just the fertilization but incubation of embryos in vitro— that proved the most provocative idea of the series” and “which also interacted most productively with science ction.”1 According to Haldane’s predictions, articulated through the voice of a student writing 150 years in the future and looking back at the main landmarks in reproductive technology in the twentieth century, the first ectogenetic child was produced in 1951 by Dupont and Schwarz.2 Due to the alarmingly low birth-rate at that time in the majority of civilised countries, the experiment was received with enthusiasm. France became the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and “by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method.”3 According to Haldane, by 2073 ectogenesis would have become the norm, with less than 30 per cent of children born of woman in the UK,4 a forecast dramatised by his friend .

 1

Max Saunders and Brian Hurwitz, “The To-Day and To-Morrow series and the Popularization of Science: An Introduction,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34, no. 1 (2009): 6. 2 J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), 63. 3 Ibid. 64-65. 4 Ibid. 65.

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Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), taking into account its radical consequences. As Duncan Wilson observes, Haldane made sure that Daedalus, or, Science and the Future was “rooted in contemporary thought by introducing the theme of scientifically manufactured infants in an era obsessed with reproductive health and control, when popular consciousness was all too aware of technical advances in artificial birth management, and increasingly preoccupied with the post-war population decline.”5 Significantly, Cambridge, where Haldane lived and taught, was the site of the Strangeways Research Laboratory where some of the earliest experiments in tissue culture and with animal embryos in vitro were first performed. Indeed, pathologist and pioneer of experimental work in cell tissue culture in vitro and in vivo Thomas Strangeways had cultured whole chick embryos which carried on developing for several days. In a lecture in 1926 Strangeways elucidates how the “tissue of the embryo may be readily grown in vitro”, going on to state: “It will thus be seen that the idea of a ‘test tube baby’ is not inherently impossible,”6 a vision that fired the public imagination, with the press actively pandering to this thrilling but also disturbing scenario, coupled with the possibility of life extension promised by the seemingly eternal prolongation of cells alive outside the body. As Duncan Wilson observes, in the context of the extrapolations about “test-tube babies” made by a number of publications reporting on the experiments being carried out at the Strangeways Research Laboratory on tissue culture, “public images often arise thanks to scientific practices and claims, and can interact with and shape science itself,”7 with ectogenesis being a case in point. The fears and concerns over the putative implementation of ectogenesis, coupled with the potential consequences of women’s emancipation and the divorce between sex and reproduction, led to a frenzied anti-feminism on the part of some readers of Haldane’s Daedalus. Indeed, not all the responses to Daedalus were positive and enthusiastic, with Nietzschean philosopher Anthony M. Ludovici writing a particularly acerbic invective in his book Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman (1924) which condensed those and other apprehensions in highly caustic rhetoric. Ludovici’s Lysistrata, in turn, attracted all manner of criticism, with Dora Russell writing one of the most thoroughgoing

 5

Duncan Wilson, “The Early History of Tissue Culture in Britain: The Interwar Years,” Social History of Medicine 18, no. 2 (2005): 235. 6 T. S. P. Strangeways, “Tissue Culture”: Lecture 1: “Introduction,” CMAC: SA/SRL A.27 (1926). 7 Wilson, 53.

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diatribes against it in her book Hypatia: Or Woman and Knowledge (1925), also published in the “To-day and To-morrow” series. Vera Brittain, a feminist and pacifist writer, for her part, conducted a critical discussion with J. B. S. Haldane, amongst others, in her book Halcyon: or The Future of Monogamy (1929), another book in the “ToDay and To-Morrow” series. Brittain explains that in the imaginary future she envisions, attempts to separate sex from procreation started in the 1950s and included support for ectogenesis, which first occurred, in Brittain’s prophetic vision, in 1971.8 Brittain, however, was not in favour of ectogenesis, fearing the detrimental effects it might have on the family.

“The Amazing Mechanized Mom” As far as literary representations of ectogenesis are concerned, Fred T. Jane (1865-1916), a Victorian novelist, journalist, illustrator and naval author, provides what is probably one of the earliest visions of an artificial womb in a story called “The Incubated Girl” (1896), where a girl, Stella, is brought to term in the laboratory. In this fantasy an Egyptian papyrus found in a temple by two scientists touring in Egypt provides the details for the manufacture and upbringing of a “chemically constructed”9 baby, reminiscent of alchemical recipes for the creation of the homunculus and of Frankenstein’s own experiments. In Professor Zadara’s laboratory there was a “mysterious engine in the form of an immense incubator,” an “extraordinary contrivance”10 placed next to a “row of gauges and thermometers [...] a large vessel of quaint workmanship, rudely eggshaped in form, [...] in a continual state of slight oscillation [...] while through its semi-transparent sides, dimly visible, were faint white forms moving aimlessly to and fro like the tentacles of a sea-anemone at the set of the tide.”11 One of the scientists proceeds to hit the Egg with a mallet, cracking the shell open, uncovering inside it a perfect female child, not a “Frankenstein monster”12 as the other scientist confessed he was expecting. The story is interwoven with intertextual echoes of alchemical experiments and Frankensteinian hubris, as well as with the repressed male desire for autonomous procreation and, as with most of the stories in

 8

Vera Brittain, Halcyon: Or The Future of Monogamy (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), 76. 9 Fred. T. Jane, “The Incubated Girl” [1896], in The Frankenstein Omnibus, ed. Peter Haining (London: Orion, 1994), 205. 10 Ibid. 198. 11 Ibid. 199. 12 Ibid.

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this Frankensteinian vein, this alternative version of Pygmalion ends in disaster when Stella is killed by her creator. Another early example of a story that features an external incubator is Ellis Parker Butler’s The Incubator Baby (1906), which deals with the question of “scientific motherhood”13 and implicitly engages with the several incubator sideshows around the US and elsewhere promoted by the German doctor Martin Couney (1860-1950), who became known as the “Incubator Doctor,” displaying incubators in prominent fairs and exhibitions in order to procure the money to further develop the incubators and install them in hospital maternity wards. The first baby incubator was invented by the famous French obstetrician Etienne Stéphane Tarnier in 1880, a “couveuse” or “brooding hen,” an idea Tarnier had come up with in 1878 in the course of a visit to the poultry incubator area of the Paris zoo, having asked the zoo-keeper if he could build a similar warming chamber big enough to hold a premature baby. The first baby incubators appeared in the Paris Maternity Hospital in 1880 and then started being exhibited at fairs, firing the public imagination and constituting wildly popular attractions in the fairs where they were displayed. Pierre Budin (1846-1907), Tarnier’s pupil and colleague, established the first special unit for the care of premature infants at the Paris Maternity Hospital in 1893. In order to spread the incubator technology abroad, Budin asked Martin Couney to take six baby incubators to the 1896 Berlin Exposition, to Great Britain’s 1897 Victorian Era Exhibition and later to Coney Island. Couney described the shows as a “Kinderbrutanstalt,” or “child hatchery” and they were huge crowdpullers. As Gary R. Brown elucidates, for “forty years millions of revelers visiting Coney Island were drawn away from the clamor of roller coasters and shooting galleries to see these ‘temporary visitors’—tiny premature babies struggling to survive in prototypical incubators.”14 According to Brown, these “Infant Incubators” were Coney Island’s “oddest and, at times, most popular attraction, and its admission fees subsidized the development and application of groundbreaking medical technology.”15 As Brown further states, the premature infants “on display were being treated with equipment and techniques far more sophisticated than those available

 13

Ellis Parker Butler, The Incubator Baby (New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906), 61. 14 Gary R. Brown, “The Coney Island Baby Laboratory,” Invention and Technology Magazine 10, no. 2 (1994), http://203.197.81.56/dev-it/content/coneyisland-baby-laboratory-1 (accessed June 16, 2013). 15 Ibid.

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at most hospitals; they had a survival rate unsurpassed at any medical facility in the world.”16 In a commentary on the baby incubators’ exhibit at Earl’s Court in London, the editors of The Lancet, May 29, 1897, greeted with approval the arrival of these life-saving devices: The main feature of this new incubator is the fact that it requires no constant and skilled care. It works automatically; both ventilation and heat are maintained without any fluctuations whatsoever, not only for hours, but even for days. The incubator need not be touched for these purposes, and the only attendance necessary is that needed for feeding and washing the infant.17

However, not everyone was comfortable with the idea of displaying babies in incubators as sideshows. In response to a letter to the editors of The Lancet by Samuel Schenken and Martin Coney on 5 February 1898, expressing their misgivings about the Earl’s Court incubator show, the former asserted in an editorial that although the Victorian Era Exhibition was looked upon as a mere pleasure resort by many it was also a serious exhibition where objects of art of great value were collected side by side with scientific inventions bearing on medical and public health questions. Thus surrounded there was nothing derogatory to the dignity of the healing art in the exhibition of incubators at Earl’s-court. Also a healthy site was chosen in the broadest part of the gardens where there was plenty of fresh air.18

However, as they further observe, the exhibition also “attracted the attention and cupidity of public showmen, and all sorts of persons, who had no knowledge of the intricate scientific problem involved, started to organise baby incubator shows just as they might have exhibited marionettes, fat women, or any sort of catch-penny monstrosity.”19 Indeed, as the angry Lancet editors wrote: “Is it in keeping with the dignity of science that incubators and living babies should be exhibited amidst the aunt-sallies, the merry-go-rounds, the five-legged mule, the wild animals,

 16

Ibid. “The Use of Incubators for Infants,” The Lancet (29 May 1897): 1490-1491, http://www.neonatology.org/classics/lancet.incubators.html (accessed June 15, 2013). 18 “The Danger of Making a Public Show of Incubators for Babies,” The Lancet (5 February 1898): 390-391. 19 Ibid. 17

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the clowns, penny peep-shows, and amidst the glare and noise of a vulgar fair?” They then go on to warn of the danger that people with no scientific training may be tempted to include such baby incubator sideshows in their own exhibition halls in the search for easy profit, which would be a terrible mistake and a danger to those infants. They conclude by stating that these incubator shows “should be energetically dealt with and rigorously suppressed as the experience acquired on the continent, and notably at the Paris maternity, clearly indicates that incubators when managed by properly qualified persons are instrumental in saving many lives.”20 In the 1920s it was believed that sophisticated baby incubators would be developed in the near future. Incubators, after all, can be thought of as an intermediate stage between full-blown ectogenesis and normal pregnancy, both a human interference in the birth process and a chance for the survival of very premature babies and in that sense they inevitably fuelled the fantasy of artificial wombs. However, as J. P. Baker observes, “as the incubator became more complex mechanically, it acquired a threatening aspect. The metaphors of the artificial uterus, nurse, and environment symbolized the effect of science to imitate and improve upon nature.”21 Hence, following this order of ideas, the incubator “came to embody a challenge to the traditional notion that the key to raising a weak or premature infant lay in entrusting it to the mother and a healthy home environment,”22 becoming a symbol of persistent social anxieties regarding the respective roles of the doctor and the mother in looking after premature babies. However, it is conceivable, after all, that, despite the contemporary almost radical opposition to artificial wombs, when these are implemented people will similarly queue to contemplate the babies in their artificial uteruses, as so many did to see the sideshows of the baby incubators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is after all what happens in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), where embryos gestate in huge state incubators vaguely reminiscent of aquaria where they can be observed by onlookers, a scenario that also appears in Aldous Huxley’s early novel Crome Yellow (1921), which even before Haldane’s Daedalus in 1924 had already brought attention to bear on the notion of ectogenesis. In Crome Yellow a character named Scogan, strongly inspired by Bertrand Russell, foresees a future where an “impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In

 20

Ibid. J. P. Baker The Machine in the Nursery: Incubator Technology and the Origins of Newborn Intensive Care (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 85. 22 Ibid. 21

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vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires.”23 As a result, the family system will cease to exist and society, “sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations,”24 an earlier version of the vision that was later further developed in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the novel that was to provide the most striking and fully developed vision of “gravid bottles” mass produced in conveyor belts. Charlotte Haldane, the wife of J. B. S. Haldane and author of, amongst other books, Man’s World (1926), also engages with the prospect of determining the sex of one’s children and the advent of ectogenesis. The dystopian novel Man’s World, which can be seen to a great extent as a fictionalised answer to J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, provides a staunch defence of vocational motherhood, even if with critical nuances that leave some room for questioning, and strongly disapproves of ectogenesis, even though it concedes that this technology will inevitably be developed. In Motherhood and Its Enemies (1927) Charlotte Haldane again offers an unequivocal and vigorous defence of vocational motherhood, claiming that the maternal instinct is present in all women who, in order to find fulfilment in life, need to act on that instinct and become mothers. Man’s World is, after Crome Yellow, amongst the earliest fictional texts to offer a vision of artificial wombs and discuss ectogenesis, before Aldous Huxley’s iconic, influential and vivid description of babies raised in incubators in Brave New World (1932). Haldane Man’s World may, in addition, have influenced Huxley’s writing of Brave New World, a novel that shares many similarities with Haldane’s.

“Immunized women, and babies in bottles”25 Another novel where the fantasy of babies in bottles is mentioned before Brave New World is D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It was not only Aldous Huxley but also other members of the Bloomsbury group like D. H. Lawrence, who often met at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s home at Garsington, who would be cognisant of the latest scientific advances and the possibilities they opened up, including the growth of tissue culture and animal embryos and organs in vitro at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge. D. H. Lawrence, indeed, addresses the

 23 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, intro. by Michael Dirda (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 22 (emphasis added). 24 Ibid. 25 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 75.

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fantasy of ectogenesis in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), engaging not only with Haldane’s vision of extracorporeal gestation in Daedalus and Huxley’s description of gravid bottles in Crome Yellow but also with Strangeways’s research, by naming one of the characters Jack Strangeways, a possible reference to the scientist. In addition, shortly before writing the third version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover D. H. Lawrence was reading Aldous Huxley’s Proper Studies (1927), which includes an essay called “A Note on Eugenics” (1927) that reflects on potential eugenic reforms including ectogenesis and sterilisation. In it Huxley muses that it is “quite possible, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane has suggested, that biological technique will soon have advanced to such a pitch that scientists will succeed in doing what Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, tried, it is said, and failed to do: they will learn to breed babies in bottles.”26 In the context of the pursuit of eugenic goals of human excellence, Huxley exclaims that were the creation of babies in bottles to become feasible, “then every genius will be able, like David in the poem, to ‘scatter his Maker’s image through the land’.”27 In the context of a dialogue at Wragby, Clifford and Constance Chatterleys’s house, the equivalent of Garsington, Jack Strangeways’s wife Olive was reading a book “about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be ‘immunized’,” a development she considered very positive since then “a woman can live her own life” and “needn’t be dragged down by her functions.”28 In a philosophical discussion about the future, which might bring about the breeding of babies in bottles, Clifford even goes so far as to express a desire for civilisation’s complete elimination of the physical. In a proclamation that is keenly telling of his emotional state, he says: “I do think sufficient civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities [...] All the love business, for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would, if we could breed babies in bottles.”29 As Olive urges: “Only hurry up with the breeding-bottle, and let us poor women off.”30

 26

Aldous Huxley, “A Note on Eugenics,” in Complete Essays Vol. II, 1926-1929, ed. with commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 283. 27 Ibid. 28 Lawrence, 74 (emphasis in original). 29 Ibid. 74. 30 Ibid. 75.

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Bottled Babies and Baby Farms Besides “A Note on Eugenics,” in “Babies—State Property,” published in the Evening Standard on 21 May 1930, Huxley again rehearses some of the themes related to reproduction he would elaborate on in Brave New World. Observing that the family is in decline, Huxley envisages a future where the family system will be abolished, with professional educators, paid by the State, teaching and indoctrinating children from “earliest infancy.”31 Since individualism can pose a threat to the State, Huxley argues that “human standardisation will become a political necessity.”32 That standardisation is by a logical step applied not only to babies but, in a radical move presaging the ectogenetic babies and foetuses growing in incubators in Brave New World, Huxley muses that it might start to be carried out even before birth: “Psychologists having shown the enormous importance in every human existence of the first years of childhood, the state will obviously try to get hold of its victims as soon as possible. The process of standardization will begin at the very moment of birth—that is to say, if it does not begin before birth!”33 In “Science and Civilisation,” broadcast on the BBC two weeks prior to the publication of Brave New World, in turn, Huxley extends these views further by envisaging a government that will institute a “comprehensive system of State crèches and baby farms,”34 where the infants will be systematically conditioned, thus in principle ensuring their future loyalty, in effect “bottled,” pursuing the metaphor employed in Brave New World. As mentioned earlier, Huxley’s Brave New World provides what is unquestionably the most thorough and detailed description of not only artificial wombs but also the whole in vitro fertilising process in fiction. The novel opens with the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre showing students around the Fertilizing Room, starting with the incubators and the week’s supply of ova. Only selected women are chosen or volunteer, “for the good of society,”35 after a thorough screening, to provide the eggs used in the fertilisation process.36

 31

Aldous Huxley, “Babies—State Property,” in The Hidden Huxley, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 49. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid 109. 35 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932] (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998). 36 A similar plot device occurs in Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World and also, although in a more radical fashion, in Solution Three (1975), by Naomi Mitchison, J. B. S. Haldane’s sister.

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In this thoroughly mechanised and eugenic system, only the Alphas and Betas are not cloned, while the fertilised eggs that will provide the starting point for “standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas and uniform Epsilons”37 will undergo Bokanovsky’s process, giving origin to between eight to ninety-six embryos. The process of moving from traditional reproduction, where the offspring develops in the maternal womb, to a radically different form where babies are created and grow outside the uterus was slow and difficult, hindered by conventional, deeply ingrained beliefs, grounded in biology and religion. As is elucidated in the novel, “Take ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.”38 There followed a period of “intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction”39 and hypnopaedic conditioning which finally led to a generalised revulsion against the old reproductive methods and to a thorough rejection of viviparous birth. The description of incubators in a mechanised procession in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre is one of the most thoroughly detailed depictions of artificial wombs in fiction to date, specifying features that seem to look forward to future instances of these devices. One of the employees, Mr Foster, explains how the embryo grows in a “bed of peritoneum,” fed by “blood surrogate” and stimulated with “placentin and thyroxin.”40 He further describes the “artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; [...] the reservoir of blood-surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter” going on to refer to the “embryo’s troublesome tendency to anaemia” and to the “massive doses of hog’s stomach and foetal foal’s liver with which, in consequence, it had to be supplied.”41 The incubators are placed in the building’s basement, where, “in the crimson darkness, stewing warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood.”42 As an integral part of the mechanised production of babies, “with a faint hum and rattle the moving racks crawled

 37

Ibid. Ibid. 46. 39 Ibid. 51. 40 Ibid. 12. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 146. 38

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imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.”43 It is meaningful that the Decanting Room is never described in any detail, even though we are tantalisingly promised by the Director to be taken there. However, despite Mr Foster’s pleading to be granted “[a]t least one glance at the Decanting Room,”44 the Director decides there is no time for it before the children wake up from their afternoon nap. Mr Foster, indeed, during the tour of the Hatcheries, had already hinted at the “gravity of the so-called ‘trauma of decanting,’ and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize, by a suitable training of the bottled embryo, that dangerous shock.”45 This thoroughly technologised society, then, was unable to eliminate the trauma of birth, so fully theorised by Freud, Otto Rank, Wilfred Bion and others. Even though still very controversial nowadays, the existence of psychological scars as a result of the physical act of being born appears to be receiving increased attention. The notion that emerging from an incubator might be less traumatic than the normal form of birth through the birth canal or even through a caesarean section is worth some reflection. The lack of a description of the Decanting Room points to a remarkable void in the novel, as if the very idea does not bear describing, a telling absence in a book that after all makes a point of almost indistinguishably referring to Ford as Freud, as the reigning entities in Brave New World. Significantly, a favourite song in this future society is called “There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear Bottle of mine,”46 carrying through the theme of the bottle-as-incubator as a safe place, while containing, meaningfully, the implicit wish for a return to the bottle standing in for the womb. As the lyrics of the song further read: “Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted! Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?”47 This refrain from a song popular amongst the Brave New World inhabitants suggests a number of interpretations, from the wish to go back to the womb, theorised by Freud and others, potentially unconsciously still at work despite all the conditioning against the motherly womb, to a veiled reference to the trauma of birth, in this case decanting. According to the song, “skies are blue inside of you, / The

 43

Ibid. 146-147. Ibid. 18. 45 Ibid. 13. 46 Ibid. 76. 47 Ibid. 44

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weather’s always fine”48 inside the bottle, an idea that gets transposed to the feeling of safety experienced by the people inside a fashionable night club where, with the help of a generous dose of soma, everything and everyone appears to be delightful and amusing, including Lenina and Henry: “They were inside, here and now—safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky [...] they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of bloodsurrogate.”49 The people in Brave New World clearly come to associate the temperature, colours, and general experience inside the bottle, before being decanted, a feeling that is deliberately replicated, reemphasised and repeatedly reproduced, with wellbeing and protection, the bottle standing in for a desirable place that could never be replaced in their minds by such an objectionable, abject, obscene and dangerous experience as being in a woman’s womb. The “bottle” continues to be a central symbol throughout the novel, coming to stand for the pervasive nature of social conditioning. After leaving the night club, and having taken some more soma, Lenina and Henry are described as inhabiting a space where there is a “quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds,” the bottle being used as a metaphor for their inability to reason for themselves or pursue their own thoughts in solitude due to the social and emotional engineering imposed on them: “Bottled, they crossed the street bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was [...] Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations.”50 Later in the novel, the World Controller, Mustapha Mond, tells John the Savage, describing the conditioning of an Epsilon, that “even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle—an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.”51 Moreover, the Controller further muses, everyone “goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous.”52 It is then the bottle, replacing the maternal womb and the family, that congregates the traumas and complexes formerly associated with the uterus and the nuclear family.

 48

Ibid. Ibid. 77. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 222. 52 Ibid. 223. 49

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Rebecca West, The Future of the Sexes In a review of Brave New World that appeared shortly after its publication, Rebecca West laments the fact that Huxley does not explain to his readers “how much justification he has for his horrid visions.”53 West believes that it would increase the readers’ interest if they knew that “when Mr Huxley depicts the human race as propagating by means of germ cells removed from the body and fertilised in laboratories, so that the embryo develops in a bottle and is decanted instead of born, he is writing of a possibility that biologists are seeing not more remotely, let us say, than Leonardo da Vinci saw the aeroplane.”54 Biochemist Joseph Needham provides the answer to West’s doubts in a review of Brave New World, when he asserts that the biology in the novel is “perfectly right” and there is nothing in it “but what might be regarded as legitimate extrapolations from knowledge and power that we already have.”55 As he further observes, “successful experiments are even now being made in the cultivation of embryos of small mammals in vitro.”56 Brave New World can thus be seen as an example of what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction,” which according to Atwood describes technological and scientific developments that can be extrapolated with a great degree of certainty from advances already starting to take shape in contemporary society. Rebecca West, who was asked to write a book for the “Today and Tomorrow” series, The Future of the Sexes, which was advertised but unfortunately never published, also envisaged the repercussions of ectogenetic technology in a short piece entitled “Man and Religion,” which she contributed to a collection of satirical essays edited by Mabel Ulrich, Man, Proud Man (1932). This sex-role reversal story, cast in the form of an “address written automatically by a medium whose revelations seem to refer not to the past, but to the future,”57 reminiscent of the narratorial strategy used by J. B. S. Haldane in his Daedalus, describes a future world dominated by women, “whose superiority is now admitted by

 53

Rebecca West, “Aldous Huxley on Man’s Appalling Future. Modern Tendencies which Might Make his Vision Come True,” review of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Daily Telegraph (5 February 1932), 7. 54 Ibid. 55 Joseph Needham, “Biology and Mr. Huxley,” Scrutiny (May 1932, 78) (emphasis in the original). 56 Ibid. 57 Rebecca West, “Man and Religion,” in Man, Proud Man. A Commentary, ed. Mabel Ulrich (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), 249.

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all.”58 The medium then goes on to explain the events that led to the situation in the future, to “that blessed day when the star of female dominance dawned:”59 Male dominance was mercifully brought to an end by three simultaneous discoveries on the part of science: the stimulant to the female hormones which enabled any woman to do as much work in an hour as a man can do in three; the stimulant to the female hormones which extends the average span of a woman’s life to one hundred and fifty years; and the operation by which the human embryo is now removed from the mother at three months and immersed in a bath of nutrient fluid to attain a size and vigour impossible to infants gestated by the old-fashioned method.60

In addition, we learn that the “business of childbearing now took no more than a fortnight, nearly all of which was spent in refreshing repose.”61 These developments were responsible for the rise of women to power and the consequent subordination of men, who occupied the places formerly attributed to women. The earlier male dominance is considered “unnatural”62 while the present female supremacy is regarded as the “natural”63 order of things, even though it was “produced by artificial means.”64 Like the women before them, the men under this new regime insistently demand more freedom, as well as asking the “female bacteriologists” to conduct further research which “would enable discoveries to be made which might act on the male hormones and put them on an equality with women so far as efficiency and longevity are concerned,” an aspiration described as “chimerical.”65

Conclusion This cluster of works published mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, envisaging the creation of life in the laboratory and the development of embryos and foetuses in artificial wombs, addresses in fictional and essayistic form the deep-seated social concerns about the potential of new reproductive technologies that appeared to suggest the possibilities of ectogenesis and

 58

Ibid. 261. Ibid. 268. 60 Ibid. 280. 61 Ibid. 281. 62 Ibid. 282. 63 Ibid. 281 (emphasis in the original). 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 283. 59

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cloning in the not too distant future, as a result of experimental lab work with tissue culture and animal organs. Most of these tales, as pointed out, are clearly inspired by scientific experiments and innovations that were being carried out at the time, providing fictional representations of the potentially nefarious consequences of those experiments. Indeed, the shadow of the Frankenstein myth inescapably hovers over most of these stories, which can be seen as cautionary tales against the misuse of science and the hubristic ambitions of so-called “mad” scientists. Indeed, in almost all of them artificial wombs appear to serve mainly or almost exclusively as a means to grow the foetuses generated by the mostly male scientists. These and other texts dealing with ectogenesis also clearly tap into widespread anxieties connected with the position of women following the challenges and achievements of First Wave Feminism and the First World War, the endurance of the nuclear family and men’s position in a changed world. They often underline women’s fears about childbirth and the hope that the whole process might be safer, without so many dangers for the mother and the child. Indeed, as Duncan Wilson maintains, test-tube babies “remained a regular public presence” in the interwar years, “with newspapers generally referring to them as ‘ectogenetic children’ or ‘chemical babies’.”66 The influence of Haldane’s vision of ectogenesis, in Daedalus in particular, can be seen to have extended far and wide and percolated into a large number of fictional examples. The interfertilisation between scientific narratives and fictional ones is particularly conspicuous and fruitful in the novels and short stories written in the 1920s and 30s which offered a critical response to contemporary biological experiments. Extrapolating from those scientific advances, entering into dialogue with them and as a result also often with the books in the “To-day and ToMorrow” series, they dramatise those speculative scenarios and their many ramifications, alerting us to the potentially negative aspects of the ectogenetic imaginary but in addition suggesting putative advantages artificial wombs would also undoubtedly provide.

Works Cited Anson, August. When Woman Reigns. Oxford: Pen-in-Hand Publishing, 1938.

 66

Duncan Wilson, Tissue Culture in Science and Society: The Public Life of a Biological Technique in Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 38.

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Atwood, Margaret. “The road to Ustopia.” The Guardian, October 14, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwoodroad-to-ustopia (accessed 15/6/2013). Baker, J. P. The Machine in the Nursery: Incubator Technology and the Origins of Newborn Intensive Care. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996. Bell, Neil. The Seventh Bowl. London: Collins, 1934. Bion, Wilfred R. Two papers: The Grid and Caesura. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1977; reprint, London: Karnac, 1989. Brittain, Vera. Halcyon: Or The Future of Monogamy. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929. Brown, Gary R. “The Coney Island Baby Laboratory.” Invention and Technology Magazine 10, no. 2 (1994). Buchanan, Brad. “Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Journal of Modern Literature 25, no. 3-4 (2002): 75-89. Butler, Ellis Parker. The Incubator Baby. New York, London, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906. Caxe, Stina. “The Baby Sideshow: A History of the Incubator.” http://stinacaxe.hubpages.com/hub/caxe21incubator (accessed November 19, 2012). Charles, Enid. The Twilight of Parenthood: A Biological Study of the Decline of Population Growth. London: Watts and Company, 1934. “Editorial: The danger of making a public show of incubators for babies.” The Lancet (February 5, 1898): 390-1. Ferreira, Aline. “‘The Malediction of the Clones’?: Huxley, Mitchison, Haldane.” In Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction, edited by Domna Pastourmatzi, 186-207. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2002. —. I Am the Other: Literary Negotiations of Human Cloning. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2005. —. “The Sexual Politics of Ectogenesis in the To-day and To-morrow Series.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34, no. 1 (2009): 32-55. Firchow. Peter. “Science and Conscience in Huxley’s Brave New World.” Contemporary Literature 16, no. 3 (1975): 301-316. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; The Penguin Freud Library Vol. IV), translated from the German by James Strachey, edited by James Strachey and Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. New York and London: Century Co., 1923; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.

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Gosden, Roger. Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology. New York: Freeman, W. H. & Company, 2000. Haldane, Charlotte. Man’s World. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927. —. Motherhood and Its Enemies. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927. —. “Dr Huxley and Mr Arnold.” Nature 129 (April 23, 1932): 597-98. Haldane, J. B. S. Daedalus, or Science and the Future. London: Kegan Paul, 1924. Holtby, Winifred. Eutychus: Or the Future of the Pulpit. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1928. Huxley, Aldous. Crome Yellow, introduction by Michael Dirda. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. —. Proper Studies. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927. —. Brave New World [1932]. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. —. “A Note on Eugenics.” In Complete Essays Vol. II, 1926-1929, edited with commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, 279-285. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. —. “Babies—State Property.” In The Hidden Huxley, edited by David Bradshaw, 47-50. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. —. The Hidden Huxley, ed. by David Bradshaw. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. —. “Science and Civilisation.” In The Hidden Huxley, edited by David Bradshaw, 105-114. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Jane, Fred. T. “The Incubated Girl” [1896]. In The Frankenstein Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining, 197-212. London: Orion, 1994. Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. —. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. VI 1927-1928, edited by James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ludovici, Anthony M. Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co, 1924. McCarty, Wendy Anne. Welcoming Consciousness: Supporting Babies’ Wholeness from the Beginning of Life—An Integrated Model of Early Development. Santa Barbara, California: Wondrous Beginnings Publishing, 2012. Mitchison, Naomi. Solution Three, afterword by Susan M. Squier. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995. Needham, Joseph. “Biology and Mr. Huxley.” Scrutiny (May 1932): 76-9. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

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Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth [1924]. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929. Russell, Dora. Hypatia or Woman and Knowledge. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925. Saunders, Max and Brian Hurwitz, “The To-Day and To-Morrow series and the Popularization of Science: An Introduction.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34, no. 1 (2009), 3-8. Schenken, Samuel and Martin Coney [sic]. “Infant Incubators.” The Lancet 2 (1897): 744. Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methusela: A Metabiological Pentateuch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Silverman, William A. “Incubator-Baby Side Shows.” Pediatrics 64, no. 2 (August 1979): 127-41, http://www.neonatology.org/classics/silverman/silverman1.html (accessed June 15, 2013). Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible. New York: European Publishing Company, 1898. Strangeways, T. S. P. “Tissue Culture”: Lecture 1: “Introduction.” CMAC: SA/SRL A.27 (1926). “The Use of Incubators for Infants.” The Lancet (May 29, 1897): 14901491. “The Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court.” The Lancet (July 17, 1897): 161-162. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. West, Rebecca. “Aldous Huxley on Man’s Appalling Future. Modern Tendencies which Might Make his Vision Come True,” review of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Daily Telegraph, February 5, 1932: 7. —. “Man and Religion.” In Man, Proud Man. A Commentary, edited by Mabel Ulrich, 249-285. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932. Wilson, Duncan. “The Early History of Tissue Culture in Britain: The Interwar Years.” Social History of Medicine 18, no. 2 (August 2005): 225-243. —. Tissue Culture in Science and Society: The Public Life of a Biological Technique in Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas, with a new introduction by Hermione Lee. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.

DR W. H. R. RIVERS AND DR LEWIS R. YEALLAND: THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE IN THE DEPLOYMENT OF POWER DAVID GRIFFITHS UNIVERSIDAD DE CANTABRIA

1. Introduction The Regeneration Trilogy, written by the contemporary English novelist Patricia Barker, was published between 1991 and 1995. It is a series of historical novels (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road) whose narrative action unfolds during the last sixteen months of the Great War (1914-18). More precisely, it ranges from the publication of Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war statement, A Soldier’s Declaration, in June 1917 to the day before Armistice was declared in November 1918. This is a tumultuous period of the War given the increasing philosophical questioning of the motives for the continued pursuance of the war campaign since Germany appeared to have no choice other than to accept peace negotiations—if offered by Britain and the Allied Forces—due to its “battered economic state.”1 This disturbing scenario is further compounded by the perceived senseless large-scale loss of life as a result of a series of chaotic blunders made by the British military authorities at the Front,2 typified by The Spring Offensive of 1917, in which Sassoon had been taken casualty. The objectives of this article are two-fold. Firstly, I shall provide some historical background to the two main non-fictional medico-scientific characters featured in The Regeneration Trilogy, namely Dr W. H. R.

 1

W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London: Routledge, 1923). Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

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Rivers (1864-1922) and Dr Lewis Ralph Yealland (1884-1954), so as to explore the way in which Pat Barker fictionalises the contrasting approaches that these two real-life figures followed in their clinical treatment of war-related hysterical neuroses. Secondly, I shall demonstrate how these contrasting approaches—as portrayed by Pat Barker in Regeneration (1991)—embody, in Foucauldian terms, differing but not incompatible manifestations of the way in which normalising power, both of a disciplinary and analytical nature, is deployed through the reigning authorities’ endorsement and application of largely experimental medicoscientific discourse.

2. Medico-scientific Characters and Sources Regeneration, the first instalment of the trilogy, essentially explores the real-life encounter of two non-fictional characters, namely Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), the famous WWI poet and writer, and Dr Rivers, the prestigious neurologist, anthropologist and psychotherapist, appointed Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) for the duration of the Great War. Barker openly draws on a myriad of well-documented sources, both biographical and autobiographical, to frame her fictionalised depiction of their historical—not to say historic—meeting at Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, Edinburgh, in which Dr Rivers is called on explicitly to treat Sassoon for what is to be troped by the reigning authorities as the hysterical condition that has led to his untimely public questioning of the War’s pursuance. These sources, some of which Barker recognises in her Author’s Note at the end of Regeneration, include: -

-

Richard Slobodin’s definitive biography of Dr Rivers: W. H. R. Rivers (1978); Dr Rivers’s paper presented to the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) on 4 December 1917, entitled “The Repression of War Experience” (later published in the Lancet on 2 February 1918), as well as his posthumously published book Conflict and Dream (1923); Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (1979); Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (1987); Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston’s Progress (1936), the last instalment of the largely autobiographical The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston.

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Dr Yealland, who is to become Dr Rivers’s ethical antithesis in the narrative, makes a brief, albeit unforgettable appearance in Regeneration in his real-life role of Resident Medical Officer at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, in London. In this episode,3 Barker portrays the way Dr Yealland treats a soldier of private rank who is suffering from an ongoing 9-month bout of persistent neurasthenic mutism following repeated tours of active service at the Front. This portrayal is likewise the fruit of research, making use of Dr Yealland’s highly detailed—and now much maligned—first-hand account of his clinical treatment in the following publications: Dr Yealland and Dr Adrian’s article entitled “The Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses” (Lancet, June 9, 1917) and Dr Yealland’s book entitled Hysterical Disorders of Warfare (March 1918).

3. War Neuroses and Treatment Within the prevailing warring scenario, the task entrusted to both medical practitioners by the reigning authorities was explicit: the return of hysterical/shell-shocked/neurasthenic soldiers and officers back to the Front as soon as possible so they could continue doing their duty for King and Country. Shell-shock cases are documented4 as having appeared as early as late 1914, but the number of soldiers affected continued to rise, and by 1916 it was believed that this disorder accounted for 40 per cent of all casualties in combat zones. A chilling statistic reveals the magnitude of the problem: 16,000 cases of nervous disorder were recorded during the Battle of the Somme (July to December 1916) in the British Armed Forces alone. During the early stages of the War, most soldiers who exhibited hysterical symptoms involving physical manifestations were punished or even shot by commanding officers in an effort to raise morale and foment the desired concept of manliness and duty.5 Symptoms gradually came to be sorted into two groups, interestingly differentiated by rank/social class. In enlisted soldiers, of working-class origin, symptoms were largely physical, taking the form of paralyses, limps, mutism, deafness, muscle contractions, twitching, and so on. In contrast, officers presented symptoms generally of an emotional nature, including anxiety attacks,

 3

Patricia Barker, Regeneration (London: Penguin, 1992), 223-233. H. Merskey, The Analysis of Hysteria (London: Gaskell, 1979). 5 Ruth Rae, “An historical account of shell shock during the First World War and reforms in mental health in Australia 1914-1939,” International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 16, no. 4 (2007): 266-273. 4

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nightmares, insomnia, dissociation and phobias. According to findings published by The War Work Committee of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (1917), the rate of war neuroses was four times higher among officers than enlisted men6 and, by June 1918, there were twenty special hospitals in the British Isles catering for disorders related to war neuroses, six for officers and fourteen for other ranks. Casualty Clearing Stations (CCS) were also set up near the front lines, but they referred soldiers to hospitals at the home front only in the event of symptoms persisting longer than two weeks.7 Dr Rivers receives a generally sympathetic depiction by Pat Barker— in keeping with a number of gentle men figures in her works. He is portrayed as a sensitive man, growingly troubled and, ironically, traumatically stressed himself by the realisation of his own implication in the psychological normalisation of officers whose disagreement with the War manifests itself through the apparition of neurasthenic symptoms. Barker’s brief portrayal of Dr Yealland’s more brutal, physical, punishment-based approach to the treatment of shell-shocked enlisted soldiers is altogether less sympathetic. The latter’s disciplinary approach is related in such cold, disturbingly realistic detail that readers—forearmed with a present-day understanding of therapeutic approaches in mental care—are encouraged to feel outraged by Dr Yealland’s apparently barbaric techniques.

4. Foucaldian Overtones In this article, I posit—in Foucauldian fashion—that both doctors in their treatment of neurasthenic soldiers are equally powerful vehicles of normalising power through the successful application of medico-scientific discourse. Dr Yealland represents what Foucault would term sovereign disciplinary power, uncompromising in its application, while Dr Rivers’s modus operandi embodies the apparently less invasive—although potentially more far-reaching—disciplinary mechanisms or strategies inherent in more democratic scenarios. In Regeneration, Pat Barker first portrays Dr Rivers’s comparatively gentle neutralisation of Sassoon and then presents Dr Yealland’s implacable re-education of Private Callan. The latter episode gains further narrative resonance as Barker chooses to

 6

Elaine Showalter, “Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties,” Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). 7 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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filter it through the consciousness of Dr Rivers, who is depicted as having reluctantly accepted Dr Yealland’s invitation to witness this clinical session while suffering a severe crise de conscience. It is worthy of note that no documentary evidence seems to exist to support the occurrence of such a shared experience in real life and this would appear to be an entirely fictionalised encounter, probably suggested to Barker by Dr Yealland’s reference to “practical demonstrations” of clinical sessions in his Author’s Preface to Hysterical Disorders of Warfare.8 I shall inform the description of the coercive normalising strategies apparent in the therapeutic approaches of these two medical practitioners with references to the following works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984): Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975); and The History of Sexuality: Volume I. An Introduction (1976). Given the limited extension of this article, I shall work in keeping with the spirit of Foucault’s suggestion, made during an interview with Roger-Pol Droit in 1975, that his books “are little toolboxes [...]. If people are willing to open them and make use of such or such a sentence or idea, of one analysis or another, as they would a screwdriver or monkey wrench, in order to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, [...] all the better.”9 For Foucault, psychiatry enacts a quasi-academic compartmentalisation of certain states of mental experience into formally reduced types of illness that can be observed, studied and treated with a view to curing them. For Foucault, this process of curing invariably has as its aim the return to or attainment of a workable conformity vis-à-vis the prevailing societal norms. Medicine, especially psychiatry and psychotherapy, pervades The Regeneration Trilogy. Medical discourse is revealed as being an efficient vehicle of power deployment through objectification and normalisation, thus facilitating effective control of the populace, whether at the Front or at home. Pat Barker’s interest in the deployment of power is centred on this very Foucauldian domain: the process and effect of medical categorisation of illness; its manipulation so as to support state-prescribed doctrines through the creation or cementing of binary oppositions within society (sane/insane, normal/deviant, feminine/masculine, brave/cowardly, patriotic/subversive); and the elevation of the medical personage and his magical modus operandi to a quasi-mystical status.

 8

Lewis Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1918), ix. Michel Foucault, interview in Le Monde, February 21 1975; cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 237.

9

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Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Dr Lewis R. Yealland

5. Treatment of Siegfried Sassoon 5.1 Bio-power Intervention by Reigning Authorities Sassoon’s declaration, in his own words “an act of wilful defiance of military authority,”10 clearly warranted trial by court-martial. However, the British authorities’ reaction took the form of an intervention made on medical grounds in an artful attempt to defuse a potentially politically awkward scenario by denying Sassoon the political debating forum he and other notable pacifists who had encouraged his declaration (Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell among others) sought. The army Medical Board’s findings, which relieved Sassoon of all responsibility and thus all reason, cast him into the Foucauldian camp of déraison, where “it is all too true that those who have lost the use of reason must be hidden from society.”11 Sassoon is thus spared a court-martial and is benevolently referred to Craiglockhart War Hospital for his own good: “A breach of discipline has been committed, but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the Medical Board as not being responsible for his actions, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown.”12 This approach clearly falls within the domain of Foucault’s concept of bio-power, as presented in The History of Sexuality, which he identifies as that aspect of modern power which is aimed at sustaining life through society, thereby organising society with the aim of increasing productivity and, importantly, caring for and controlling the social body ostensibly in the interest of health. Bio-power’s strategies are identified by Foucault as often being less visible than those of disciplinary power, but potentially far more effective, as illustrated by the State’s timely intervention in the case of Sassoon. Likewise, Foucault asserts that “[w]here there is power, there is resistance”13 and posits that a certain level of resistance—tension between the governed and the governors—is necessary if power is to be deployed efficiently. The key is to manage manifestations of resistance—such as Sassoon’s public dissent—in the most productive way possible: “One must calculate a penalty in terms not of the crime, but of its possible repetition. One must take into account not the past offence, but

 10 Siegfried Sassoon, “Public Statement: A Soldier’s Declaration,” The Times, July 31, 1917: n. p. 11 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1997), 227. 12 Barker, Regeneration, 69. 13 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 95.

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the future disorder. Things must be so arranged that the malefactor can have neither any desire to repeat his offence, nor any possibility of having imitators.”14 Sassoon is understandably racked with fear about his destiny and we are afforded a first-hand account of the options awarded to the transgressor by the State channelled through the strategic mediations of Sassoon’s great friend, Robert Graves (1895-1985), who is to become an unwilling aligned agent of the prevailing power system. Graves assures Sassoon that the State will never concede a court-martial as it would attract too much publicity, but would simply incarcerate him in an asylum via medical certification should he refuse a Medical Board. Sassoon is prey to fear, a key element in power relations, which effectively encourages correct behaviour: “It is by force that the furies of a maniac are overcome; it is by opposing fear to anger that anger may be mastered.”15 Graves apprises Sassoon of the realities of life while Sassoon’s desperate and somewhat naive appellations to democracy and fair-play are met with chilling pragmatism as the incestuous relationship between political expediency and the application of medical discourse becomes patent: SASSOON “You can’t put people in lunatic asylums just like that. You have to have reasons.” GRAVES “They’ve got reasons.”16

The diagnosis of “nervous breakdown” at the Medical Board is promptly followed by confinement, albeit on a quasi-voluntary in-mate basis in Sassoon’s case, in Craiglockhart War Hospital, which further discredits and demoralises the sufferer given that “[c]onfinement causes alienation.”17

5.2 Dr Rivers’s Therapeutic Approach Dr Rivers essentially operates within a psychotherapeutic approach which considers soldiers’ neuroses a sign of unconscious conflict deriving from continued exposure to traumatic events of warfare, especially those of enforced immobility or passivity. Dr Rivers’s therapy—“treatment that

 14 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Penguin, 1991), 93. 15 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 180. 16 Barker, Regeneration, 7. 17 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 227.

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Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Dr Lewis R. Yealland

he knew to be still largely experimental”18—was based on the application of the so-called “talking cure,” a term initially coined in 1895 by Bertha Pappenheim, a patient whose case history appears in Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria) by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. Dr Rivers encourages the recovery of suppressed traumatic memory through relatively time-consuming collaborative psychoanalytical techniques, such as cathartic abreaction and hypnosis, and subsequently provides apposite interpretation of the traumatic content of the patients’ dreams, nightmares, apparitions or hallucinations. This is followed by a phase of verbal persuasion or reasoning aimed at arriving at a workable, dialogised understanding of the trauma. Within the scenario of the Great War, the final outcome of the approach that Dr Rivers employs necessarily takes the form of a cure whereby the patient is re-educated into acceptance, resignation or conformity to state-endorsed norms, and thus if possible returned to the Front. Convinced that it is ultimately in Sassoon’s own interest, Dr Rivers sets about his duty of persuading Sassoon to abandon his defiant ideological stand against the continuance of what the latter now views as an increasingly unjustifiable “war of aggression and conquest.”19 Perhaps Dr Rivers’s acts are all the more reprehensible given that he applies his apparently softer version of medico-scientific discourse despite being privately convinced of Sassoon’s sanity and reasoning. This assertion is corroborated by Dr Rivers when he makes reference to Sassoon in his posthumously published book Conflict and Dream: “Patient B was not suffering from any form of psycho-neurosis, but was in the hospital on account of his adoption of a pacifist attitude while on leave from active service.”20 The clinical observations made and conclusions arrived at during Dr Rivers’s consultations with Sassoon over an 11-week period are integrated into a corpus of information which is embodied in the file. It is this painstaking, rigorous, unrelenting collation of data, whose interpretation produces knowledge, which becomes another important element in the overall structure of power relations as a mode of discipline, thus clearly echoing Foucault: “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”21 Rivers transfers observations to Sassoon’s file, keeping it constantly updated. It is

 18

Barker, Regeneration, 47. Sassoon, “Public Statement,” n. p. 20 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 166. 21 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27. 19

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a source of theoretically impartial, empirical clinical knowledge and thus a powerful tool by which the patient’s progress is charted and his destiny determined. Foucault locates the onset of this objective information-based gaze towards madness or déraison just after the French Revolution when records of each inmate started to be kept on a regular basis and patients were placed under constant surveillance in the name of attendance. The mad became the object of individual attention—in the process Foucault denominates “individuation”—as part of an effort to structure their lives and, more importantly, to develop scientific discourse as truth. The importance of data collection is omnipresent in The Trilogy, as is the exposure of the ease with which data can be manipulated, included or omitted at will to create or support deliberately false or misleading ideas. Dr Rivers has received Sassoon’s file in advance, from which he highlights a number of potentially relevant aspects or pursuable threads in order to “try to get a history together”22 through the interpretation of the facts therein. His job is therefore not entirely dissimilar to that of a historian, who seeks to impose an order on a series of past, inherently chaotic events from the inescapable referential framework of the present. The difficulty involved in achieving impartiality of interpretation and representation is likewise illustrated in that Dr Rivers’s case history of Sassoon is marked by significantly favourable troping owing to personal and ideological sympathies. Dr Rivers starts with low-intensity intimidation through reference to potentially damning information received from Graves. This is followed by the deliberate appearance of “the file”23 in Sassoon’s presence and the unnerving request for details of Sassoon’s physical health for the Admission Report. Dr Rivers then postulates a position of complicity and alliance with the patient as he deliberately suppresses the inclusion of details regarding Sassoon’s alleged threat to Prime Minister Lloyd George’s life in Graves’s presence, as well as tacitly agreeing not to divulge “intimate details”24 of Sassoon’s homosexual persuasion—the latter being a piece of information of potentially priceless value for the State in terms of encouraging co-operation: RIVERS “There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views. But it’s very frequently done, even by people in my profession. People you might think wouldn’t resort to such tactics. I wouldn’t like to see it happen to you.”

 22

Barker, Regeneration, 42. Ibid. 33. 24 Ibid. 70. 23

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The doctor-patient bond is obviously an important power-charged relationship and is generally conceived by the patients, at least initially, to be a tour de force, an intellectual battle of wills and wits, clearly echoing Foucault: “It is a very important object to win the confidence of these sufferers, and to arouse in them feelings of respect and obedience, which can only be the fruit of superior discernment, distinguished education, and dignity of tone and manner.”26 Dr Rivers reveals to Sassoon he is “fussy about the methods”27 he employs, although he concedes that his ultimate aim is indeed that of discrediting Sassoon’s views and returning him and soldiers like him to the Front. He is depicted as being desperate to believe that he is different from many of the other doctors who treat shell-shocked victims and—in terms of the degree of physical pain he inflicts during treatment—he undoubtedly is. Alternative less humane but more widespread treatments included electric shocks and subcutaneous injections of ether, techniques to which he was not willing to resort. Despite the absence of these methods in Dr Rivers’s approach, there still exists initial antagonism between the doctor and patient, although the antagonism shown by Sassoon is somewhat diluted in that he rightly believes Dr Rivers to be more of an accomplice than an ideological enemy, notwithstanding the latter’s clearly state-endorsed objectives. Sassoon quickly falls under Dr Rivers’s spell in that an apparently central part of the psychological process of healing involves the adoption of the medical personage “as a father figure”28 and involves the doctor’s unavoidable investment with power by the patient: “The juridical minority assigned to the madman [...] delivered him entirely, as a psychological subject, to the authority and prestige of the man of reason, who assumed for him the concrete figure of an adult, in other words, both domination and destination.”29 It was Freud who first placed emphasis on the importance of the doctor-patient relationship in the solving of psychological problems. Only with Freud does the patient-doctor couple itself become the object of therapeutic interest, mainly through the concepts of transference and counter-transference, by which the doctor-patient relationship repeats, or

 25

Ibid. 55. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 272. 27 Barker, Regeneration, 55. 28 Ibid. 34. 29 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 253. 26

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re-enacts, a version of the events that caused the patient’s trauma. However, it is Foucault who stresses that this is a relationship in which dominant-subordinate power relations are clearly at work and which necessarily creates a potentially unhealthy level of dependence, whether consciously or unconsciously. In addition, the pioneering therapeutic approach favoured by Dr Rivers further encourages his patients to instil him with the magical power of interpretation through the recovery of suppressed traumatic memory followed by collaborative psychoanalysis: “It was enough that the Thaumaturge observed and spoke, to cause secret faults to appear, insane presumptions to vanish, and madness at last to yield to reason.”30 In Regeneration, Barker sympathetically portrays Dr Rivers as being ideologically troubled as he sets about preparing his real-life address to the Royal Society of Medicine of 4 December 1917 entitled “The Repression of War Experience,” which is later published in the Lancet on February 2, 1918. Notwithstanding, Barker consciously chooses to omit from her fictionalised portrayal any reference to Dr Rivers’s rather unsympathetic conclusion to his address: We must show them how to overcome the difficulties which are put in their way by enfeebled volition and by the distortion of experience when it has long been seen exclusively from one point of view. It is often only by a process of prolonged re-education that it becomes possible for the patient to give up the practice of repressing war experience.31

Readers of The Trilogy, seduced by Barker into holding Dr Rivers in high regard, would undoubtedly have found these real-life comments uncharacteristic and most disconcerting. Indeed, the tenor of these words—as we shall see in the following section—is altogether more reminiscent of Dr Yealland’s disciplinary rhetoric.

6. Dr Yealland’s Clinical Modus Operandi Dr Yealland was a Canadian-born medical practitioner, graduate in Medicine from the University of Western Ontario. He had previously worked in a prestigious mental health facility in Canada before deciding to contribute to the allied war effort by moving to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, in Queen Square, London, in 1915. There he

 30

Ibid. 273. W. H. R. Rivers, “An Address on the Repression of War Experience,” Lancet 1 (February 2, 1918): 177. 31

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developed the use of counter-suggestion supported by faradism or faradisation—the application of electrical currents—to neutralise hysterical or functional manifestations of psychosomatic trauma. Unlike Dr Rivers, Dr Yealland remained a civilian physician throughout the war and treated a reduced number of soldiers who had been referred to the National Hospital for special attention due to the persistence of their symptoms and the unsuccessful application of other forms of treatment. Dr Stefanie Linden, researcher at King’s Centre for Military Health Research, attached to the Institute of Psychiatry of King’s College London, confirms that Dr Yealland formed part of a medical team in which “all the physicians at the National Hospital used the same treatment methods [...]. Moreover, the treatment of war neuroses with faradism was practised at Queen Square and indeed internationally [...] before Yealland arrived on the scene.”32 With Captain Edgar Adrian (1889-1977), a medical colleague at the National Hospital and future Nobel Laureate, he co-authored the paper entitled “The Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses,” published in the Lancet in 1917. This paper, which appeared six months before Dr Rivers published his article in the same journal, claims a 100 per cent success rate for patients exposed to faradism and in record time. The preface to Dr Yealland’s later book, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, is written by a prominent and highly respected English military doctor, Lt Colonel E. Farquhar Buzzard, subsequently knighted for his contributions to the medical war effort. In his preface, Buzzard gives a representative if rather zealous summary of Dr Yealland’s method: His principle has been a straightforward one, and is based on the belief that a physical disorder originating in suggestion should yield to countersuggestion [...] and that the treatment must be varied according to the mental attitude of the patient. His success has proved that in skilful and determined hands the time-honoured employment of a faradic battery as an implement of suggestion is at least as efficacious as hypnosis or ether anaesthesia, and that resort to the latter alternatives, with their obvious disadvantages, is rarely, if ever, necessary.33

Barker bases her portrayal of Dr Yealland in Regeneration on the latter’s real-life account of a clinical session involving the treatment of patient “Ai,” a 24-year-old soldier of private rank who presents persistent symptoms of traumatic hysterical mutism. This session—chilling when read from the perspective of present-day sensibilities—is graphically

 32

Stefanie C. Linden and others, “Shell shock at Queen Square: Lewis Yealland 100 years on,” Brain Journal of Neurology (4 February 2013): 12. 33 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, Preface.

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related in Dr Yealland’s book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare. This interlude34 is obviously a crucial episode as it affords Barker the opportunity to describe Dr Yealland’s techniques in minute detail whilst also making not only the reader but also a fellow neurologist, Dr Rivers, the outraged onlooker. By filtering the entire account through Dr Rivers’s consciousness, Barker gives the reader privileged access to the latter’s empathetic reactions towards the patient’s suffering, which he is depicted as being unable to exteriorise due the weight of societal pressures. The Yealland-Rivers encounter is perceived as nothing less than a “confrontation”35 by Dr Rivers, who Barker portrays as being increasingly tormented by this experience. Dr Yealland’s application of disciplinary power is the epitome of the Foucauldian sovereign, punishment-based approach applied to dissenting or deviant bodies within society. As Foucault explains in the early sections of Discipline and Punish, sovereign power is possessed by a presence at the top or centre of society and radiates outwards or downwards. Under sovereignty, legitimate power is a possession often ostentatiously displayed in quasi-theatrical spectacles: “Its aim is not so much to reestablish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.”36 Patient “Ai,” alias Private Callan in Regeneration, is firstly judged by scientifically validated indicators to be suffering from a clearly identified “non-organic” affliction. This legitimises Dr Yealland’s categorisation of the patient and the ensuing treatment of his body, which will become, in Foucauldian terms, “(t)he anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces.”37 Dr Yealland—as an authoritative figure of absolute power—bases this power on his comprehensive knowledge of the patient, made patent in his initial address to Private Callan before any physical treatment starts: “It has been my experience with these cases to find two kinds of patients, those who want to recover and those who do not want to recover. I understand your condition thoroughly and it makes no difference to me which group you belong to. You must recover your speech at once.”38 Dr Yealland admits no sympathy, recognises no extenuating individual circumstances, and rejects any possible dialogue or collaborative

 34

Barker, Regeneration, 229-233. Ibid. 234. 36 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49. 37 Ibid. 55. 38 Barker, Regeneration, 227. 35

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intervention on the part of the patient: “Suggestions are not wanted from you; they are not needed. When the time comes for more electricity, you will be given it whether you want it or not. He paused. Then added with great emphasis: “‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say’.”39 The application of power is deliberately all-embracing and implacable as the patient’s role is consciously reduced to that of an object whose responses are in turn limited to the repetition of the desired paradigm. Psychological persuasion is based on the arousal of fear and anxiety, instilled by the application of a battery of intimidating atmospheric and spatial elements together with carefully orchestrated ideological onslaughts. Gradually, increasingly painful levels of faradic application are combined with continuous, reiterated autosuggestion involving appeals to live up to received codes of conduct and patriarchal expectations of manliness: ‘“Remember you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be [...] A man who has been through so many battles should have a better control of himself. [...] Remember you must talk before you leave me’.”40 This unrelenting four-hour assault eventually bears fruit as we are witness to an act that is tantamount to the ideological assassination—or normalisation—of Private Callan. The initially unintelligible sounds Callan emits are eventually channelled into politically correct utterances, just as Dr Yealland had predicted so arrogantly at the beginning of the session: “I do not care what the nature of the sound is. [...] I shall be able to train any sound into the production of vowel sounds, then into letter sounds, and finally into words and sentences.”41 The cure is eventually pronounced “complete,”42 but while the process has successfully empowered the patient to regain his capacity for speech, it has paradoxically silenced his unconscious protest and has thus further subjected him: “Rivers felt that he was witnessing the silencing of a human being.”43 Private Callan becomes, in Foucauldian terminology, a docile, socialised body, where Foucault understands that “[a] body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved”44 so as to become socially productive.

 39

Ibid. 231. Ibid. 230. 41 Ibid. 232. 42 Ibid. 233. 43 Ibid. 238. 44 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136. 40

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7. Conclusion For the purposes of this article, we should be wary about labelling the dominant/subordinate power axis, so clearly visible within the Yealland/Callan and Rivers/Sassoon pairings, as being the two opposing ends of a static binary power relationship within society. On careful reading of Dr Rivers’s anguished reflexions, the reader is made privy to an even more disturbing scenario: He’d found himself wondering once or twice recently what possible meaning the restoration of mental health could have in relation to his work [...]. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal. But then in a war nobody is a free agent. He and Yealland were both locked in, every bit as much as their patients were.45

Indeed, echoing Foucault, Pat Barker succeeds in revealing to great effect that the more empowered vehicles of implementation like Dr Rivers— potentially more enlightened to and aware of the true worth of the value system being downloaded and thus potentially far more threatening to the system’s stability or survival—are themselves paradoxically more tightly “locked in” and restricted, and enjoy fewer possibilities of ideological mobility or dissent than some of those at a more grass roots level. Dr Rivers and Dr Yealland are thus revealed as being equally entrapped in the system by the role they play. They are at once instigators of pain and persuasion and, consciously or unconsciously, victims themselves of an ongoing, inherently uncontrollable structure of spiralling power relations within society. In Foucauldian terms, the Yealland/Rivers opposition is thus highly revealing. If Dr Yealland is the sovereign power, Rivers largely represents the subtler, analytical approach of more contemporary power, which controls the individual in society—perhaps even more effectively—within the illusionary framework of greater freedom and wider opportunities for dialogue. Dr Yealland embodies the all-or-nothing reaction of an ostentatiously uncompromising controlling body, while Dr Rivers employs a more low-key, dialogising approach. Dennis Duffy, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, has published two recent, thought-provoking articles about Dr Yealland, namely “The Shock Doc” (2010) and “The Strange, Second Death of Lewis Yealland” (2011). These articles advocate serious questioning of the historical basis for the more contemporary stereotyping

 45

Barker, Regeneration, 238.

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Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Dr Lewis R. Yealland

of Dr Yealland as an inhumane beast. Indeed, Duffy charts how “beginning in 1985, Yealland’s reputation began its posthumous disintegration”46 thanks to growing literary interest in the area of shell shock. Duffy produces well-documented evidence to support that Dr Yealland really did believe in the effectiveness of the clinical approach adopted by the National Hospital, that this approach did produce the shortterm results the reigning authorities desired, and that it was widely supported by the greater part of the reigning medical establishment. Indeed, Duffy highlights that treatments involving electrotherapy were still widely used in psychiatric facilities well into the 1930s and beyond. From the standpoint of present-day epistemic sensibilities nearly a century later, Barker’s fictionalised—albeit conscientiously documented— literary revisiting of what was regarded at the time as successful cutting edge technology, has contributed to fuelling the widespread maligning of Dr Yealland’s reputation in favour of perhaps excessively eulogising Dr Rivers’s position. Pat Barker overtly encourages the general reader, thanks to her comparatively favourable portrayal of Dr Rivers’s approach, to take for granted that the worthier of the two doctors in the complicated context of the war setting is Dr Rivers. However, on re-visiting the historicomedical context and re-reading Barker’s fictionalised account of it in the light of both Dennis Duffy’s revisionist research and Stefanie Linden’s scientifically well-documented study, perhaps we should think twice before arriving at such an apparently foregone conclusion. Foucault highlights that meaning is produced through the juxtaposing of binary oppositions and Barker seems to have fallen foul of establishing too simple a binary opposition in her presentation of the Yealland/Rivers pairing. In her Author’s Note to Regeneration, Barker cites Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as a valuable source for her discussions of shell shock and it would appear that Barker might have been unduly influenced by the conclusion arrived at by Showalter therein: “If Yealland was the worst of the military psychiatrists, Sassoon’s therapist, Rivers, was unquestionably the best.”47 Undeniably, Dr Yealland’s approach now appears brutal and unjustifiable, but perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether the more honest of the two doctors portrayed is the medical practitioner who carries out treatment in line with accepted practices and who holds the firm conviction he is making a positive contribution to the war effort (i.e. Dr Yealland), or the medical practitioner

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Dennis Duffy, “The Strange, Second Death of Lewis Yealland,” Ontario History 103, no. 2 (2011) (Ontario: Friesens Corporation): 2. 47 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987), 181.

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who conducts treatment that essentially produces the same results, albeit in a less physically invasive fashion, but who is revealed as continuing his treatment despite being consciously aware of its significant contribution to a clearly unjust, normalising system (i.e. Dr Rivers).

Works Cited Barker, Patricia. The Ghost Road. London: Viking, 1995. —. The Eye in the Door. London: Viking, 1993. —. Regeneration. London: Penguin, 1992. Duffy, Dennis. “The Shock Doc.” Canada’s History 90, no. 3 (2010): 27. —. “The Strange, Second Death of Lewis Yealland.” Ontario History 103, no. 2 (2011): 2-23. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. London: Routledge, 1997. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Penguin, 1991. —. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol.1, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Freud, Sigmund, and J. Breuer. Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1895. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Leed, Eric. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Linden, Stefanie C., and others. “Shell shock at Queen Square: Lewis Yealland 100 years on.” Brain Journal of Neurology 136, no. 6 (4 February 2013): 1-13. Merskey, H. The Analysis of Hysteria. London: Gaskell, 1979. Rae, Ruth. “An historical account of shell shock during the First World War and reforms in mental health in Australia 1914-1939.” International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 16, no. 4 (2007): 266273. Rivers, W. H. R. “An Address on the Repression of War Experience.” Lancet 1 (February 2, 1918): 173-177. —. Conflict and Dream. London: Routledge, 1923. Sassoon, Siegfried. “Public Statement: A Soldier’s Declaration.” The Times, July 31, 1917. —. Sherston’s Progress. London: Faber & Faber, 1936.

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Dr W. H. R. Rivers and Dr Lewis R. Yealland

Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. Showalter, Elaine. “Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties.” Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. —. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 18301980. London: Virago, 1987. Slobodin, Richard. W. H. R. Rivers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Yealland, Lewis, and E.D. Adrian. “The Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses.” Lancet 189 (June 9, 1917): 867-872. —. Hysterical Disorders of Warfare. London: Macmillan, 1918.

SPEAKING WITH ANGELS: HELL AND MADNESS IN ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES’ CONHECIMENTO DO INFERNO (A HEALTH HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVE) RICARDO RÚBEN RATO RODRIGUES UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

The difficulty in marrying literature (or for that matter any other art) with the natural sciences has its origin in the nineteenth-century division between the natural and human sciences: “The human sciences […] are based on the ‘understanding’ of the ‘meaningful connections’ between historical events, whereas the natural sciences find causal explanations between postulated natural entities […].”1 This division entails a difference in method as “[…] natural sciences generally proceed from larger, often nebulous wholes, seeking out explanatory relationships between ever-smaller, strictly defined parts of these wholes. […] Conversely, the historical-human sciences generally move ‘upwards’ from partial views to ever-larger contexts for understanding the matter at hand.”2 The presupposed opposing directions of method burden with problems any attempt to unify the two, problems such as the effort to make the contextual understanding of subjective experience somehow objective and clear in the same terms as the natural scientific explanations. Nevertheless, this paper will attempt to overcome such difficulties and try to bring together human and natural sciences, under their forms of

 1

Aaron L Mishara, “Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyperreflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 5, no. 13 (2010): 2, http://www.peh-med.com/content/5/1/13 (accessed November 2, 2015). 2 Ibid.

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literature and medicine, respectively, by analysing António Lobo Antunes’ Conhecimento do Inferno.

Master narratives vs. Counter-narratives Medical texts (i.e. psychiatric writings) undoubtedly contribute to set up a clearer language in the diagnosis and framing of illnesses. The nomenclature of psychiatry helps symptoms practitioners and the entire medical system to categorize types of illnesses and patients alike. This is no doubt useful for the functioning of the medical structures but, on the other hand, by getting to those “relationships between ever-smaller, strictly defined parts,” the tendency is to generalize and in fact “medicalise” language, thus impeding access to those more obscure nuances that normally any narrative has to offer: “Medical language and presuppositions function to rob alternative framings of rhetorical vitality and even intelligibility.”3 Medical texts are what some authors identify as “master narratives.” These narratives are perceived as having set common norms that exert authority over moral imagination, expressing the power of a dominant group (medical community), relegating the subjugated group (those bearing psychiatric diagnoses) to a non-recognition of the validity of their discourse. This is of course due, in part, to the lack of resistance of the latter group, seeing that their discourse (their language) is more diversified, less homogeneous, but also because they were forced into a state of “epistemological exclusion,” as their semantics are not recognized. The excessively “medicalised” language of these “master narratives” inevitably dictates that “Mental aberration is pathology, or dysfunction, and psychiatric symptoms are the meaningless causal products of a disordered brain, best expunged by medical science.”4 It is a question of justice. In the book From Redistribution to Recognition?,5 Nancy Fraser identifies one paradigm of justice as “recognition” paradigm. It requires that cultural injustices based on common cultural patterns of representations are obliterated. These

 3

Jennifer H. Radden, “Recognition rights, mental health consumers and reconstructive cultural semantics,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7, no. 6 (2012): 7, http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/17475341-7-6.pdf (accessed October 1, 2015). 4 Ibid. 2-3. 5 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. From Redistribution to Recognition? A Political-philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Verso, 2003).

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representations are, however, not based in a failure of recognition per se, but almost the opposite, since […] they have been too conspicuous. What they have suffered has been a notably systematic and damaging mis-recognition. Mental disorder has been allied with otherness, with irrationality, lack of competence, deficient agency, identity and even humanity. Its sufferers have also been victims of what has been described as epistemic injustice—deprived of semantic authority and credibility.6

As a response to this injustice provoked mainly by the reductionism of the “master narratives,” there is a resistance represented by “counternarratives.” Although Radden considers them chiefly as first person accounts (or memoirs) of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health care, I argue that any narrative, autobiographical or not, that displays a language that both acknowledges and challenges the structures represented by “master-narratives” can be considered as agent for that resistance, and, consequently, as “counter-narrative.” This argument is also extended to the fact that narratives unconcerned with these matters (that is, literature that does not dwell on the subject of psychiatric matters) has been produced by people who did suffer from mental disorders. This is relevant because the “[…] mad have been excluded from the epistemic as well as the social community, their voices disregarded and dismissed as meaningless. Their struggle must include being believed as credible knowers, as well as merely being heard.”7 Integration can then be achieved via literature, proving that as “credible knowers,” psychiatric diagnosis bearers are capable of achieving through art the validity they seek.

The definition of Mental Disorder Preoccupations with language, nomenclature and definitions also affect the very core of psychiatry as a discipline. There have been many calls for the reframing of the definition of mental disorder, a process not at all strange in the field. Since the creation of the first version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), mental disorders have been evolving in terms of their definition, forcing the manual to a constant renewal and revision. Its importance is paramount for the definition of what constitutes

 6 7

Radden, 3. Ibid. 5.

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a mental disorder, for it serves as the diagnostic basis accepted by most psychiatrists throughout the world. Let us consider the second version of the DSM, the DSM-II, published in 1968. It fixed homosexuality (for example) as a mental disorder. It was not until the seventh printing of this version of the manual, presented with new scientific data from researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, that this notion was abandoned. At the time, this definition of homosexuality was a controversial matter and in 1970 specific protests by gay rights activists against the APA began. The organization held its convention in San Francisco and the activists disrupted the conference by interrupting speakers and shouting down and ridiculing psychiatrists who viewed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1971, gay rights activist Frank Kameny worked with the Gay Liberation Front collective to demonstrate against the APA’s convention. At the 1971 conference, Kameny grabbed the microphone and yelled, “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you.”8 These acts of “counter-narrative” appeared in the context of a broader antipsychiatry movement that had come to the fore in the 1960s and was challenging the legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis: “[…] Sceptics like Szasz were arguing that psychiatry, rather than being a genuine branch of medicine, is a masked form in which social power is exercised.”9 All things considered, all narratives which clearly try to frame a fixed definition of mental disorder earn the status of “master-narratives.” As pointed out by Varga: “The idea is that if mental disorder could be defined relying solely on ‘pure’ facts free of value judgements then psychiatry would no longer be vulnerable to anti-psychiatry attacks.”10 Against this setting, literary works can and often do enlighten difficulties but also insights inherent to “mental disorders” or, in other words, “madness.”

 8

Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 105. 9 Somogy Varga, “Defining mental disorder. Exploring the ‘natural function’ approach,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6, no. 1 (2011), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3031189/ (accessed November 1, 2015). 10 Ibid.

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Conhecimento do Inferno Very much aligned with the anti-psychiatry movement, we have to consider Antonio Lobo Antunes’ novel Conhecimento do Inferno (Knowledge of Hell) in particular. In the book we are presented with a narrative about the world of psychiatry and mental institutions as perceived by a discontented psychiatrist, recently returned from a combat experience, the Portuguese colonial war. Significantly, the narrator announces: In 1973 I came back from the war and I knew about the wounded, about the barking of moans in the narrow paths in the woods, about explosions, shots, landmines, the guts exposed by the explosion of traps, I knew about prisoners and murdered babies, I knew about the spilt blood of longing, but I was spared the knowledge of hell.11

The fact that he considers himself spared from that “knowledge of hell” that provides the novel with its title informs the perception of madness and of the confinement in mental institutions and its top positioning in a kind of a traumatic scale. Note that this quote hints at the fact that not even all the violence and horrors he experienced in the war can be compared to that “hell” he associates with madness, the madness of disconnection from the world that the subject feels once returned. Hell is perpetuated in an inner locus, thus informing subsequent experiences that might resemble the war experience or that might prompt the recalling of the horrors witnessed. This is supported by Maria Alzira Seixo: “Hell is then a specific place, experienced within the individual: Africa in war, the Miguel Bombarda Hospital which resembles it, doubling its horror, thus experienced twice and multiplied through the memory of writing.”12

 11

António Lobo Antunes, Conhecimento do Inferno (Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2010), 26, my translation (“Em 1973 eu regressara da Guerra e sabia de feridos, do latir de gemidos na picada, de explosões, de tiros, de minas, de ventres esquartejados pela explosão das armadilhas, sabia de prisioneiros e de bebés assassinados, sabia do sangue derramado da saudade, mas fora-me poupado o conhecimento do inferno”). 12 Maria Alzira Seixo, As Flores do Inferno e Jardins Suspensos (Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2009), 19, my translation (“O inferno é, pois, um lugar específico, vivenciado no interior do indivíduo: África em guerra, o Hospital Miguel Bombarda que a ela se assimila, redobrando o seu horror, que assim se vive duas vezes e vai multiplicar-se pela memória da escrita”).

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The narrator describes his arrival at the Hospital Miguel Bombarda as the starting point of a long passage through hell.13 Although he colludes with that “shredding machine of a medicine that persecutes fantasy and dream,”14 he nevertheless criticises the feeling of authority displayed by some of his medical colleagues. Challenging the concept of madness, he goes as far as proposing the reversal of the roles of doctor and patient, the patients being those “who treated the psychiatrists with the gentleness learnt from the knowledge of pain, patients that pretended to be patients in order to help the psychiatrists.”15 Aware of the difficulty to make the coexistence of his literary sensibility and the objectivity and ultimately futility of his psychiatric practice, the narrator wonders about the “the practical dimension of life, which lies at the bottom of the automatism of uselessness,”16 struggling to accept the “bridal clothes of a useless science”17 constituted only by “pills, vials, concepts and interpretations.”18 The whole structure of the novel is set around a car journey from the Algarve, in the south of Portugal, to Lisbon. Returning from what seems to be a short holiday, the psychiatrist returns to his job, which he describes as that of a prison guard (“carcereiro”). Notwithstanding the actual physical journey, there seems to be a sense of imprisonment within the narrator himself, as he announces: “I have never left the hospital […] and despite that I have never understood the patients […]. And now he returned to Lisbon without ever having left the hospital.”19 The mental institution is the place that absorbs the narrator’s self, not permitting any kind of escape even if physically the doctor is not within its walls. It is an overreaching and absolute place, the institutional embodiment of Orwellian totalitarianism, shaping the narrator’s perception of his world relentlessly. It creates a parallel between patient and doctor, although without any therapeutic contours, as we have been

 13

Lobo Antunes, Conhecimento do Inferno, 26. Ibid. 58, my translation (“máquina trituradora de uma medicina persecutória da fantasia e do sonho”). 15 Ibid. 55, my translation (“quem tratavam os psiquiatras com a delicadeza que a aprendizagem da dor lhes traz, que os doentes fingiam ser doentes para ajudar os psiquiatras”). 16 Ibid. 56, my translation (“sentido prático da vida, que fica no fundo do automatismo da inutilidade”). 17 Ibid. my translation (“enxoval de uma ciência inútil”). 18 Ibid. my translation (“pastilhas, ampolas, conceitos e interpretações”). 19 Ibid. 115-116, my translation (“Nunca saí do hospital […] e apesar disso nunca entendi os internados […]. E agora regressava a Lisboa sem nunca ter saído do hospital”). 14

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informed by the narrator of his lack of understanding for the patients. Rather, the parallelism comes from the relation of both doctor and patient regarding the hospital—they are both imprisoned, they are both part of the same community and both cannot (mentally) escape its authoritarian grasp: “Never having left the hospital is equivalent not only to the imprisonment of the doctor and patient in the defective mechanism of psychiatry, but it insinuates the inclusion of the doctor in the community of the patients […].20 The impossibility of escape from the reality of the hospital (or at least the mental dimension of it) is present in the novel as a traumatic recalling, very much in the manner in which the war appears as a traumatic event in the author’s previous novel Os Cus de Judas (Land at the End of Nowhere), recalled over and over again through images, memories and episodes that populate the novel and form its main narrative core. As a doctor, and also as a soldier, Lobo Antunes is definitely aware of the traumas and stresses inflicted by war that manifest themselves as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Ironically, or maybe not, “hell” is a word that is normally used by veterans to describe not only the combat experience they have been involved in, but also the misadjusting they are confronted with when back in their normal, civil lives. This maladjustment to a previous mundane, straightforward reality is hinted at by the narrator, who confesses that he almost misses the simplicity and black-and-white reality of the war: “I almost miss the war because in the war, at least, things are simpler: it’s a matter of trying not to die, trying to endure.”21 Reflecting on the Falklands war and its aftermath, medical officer for the Argentine Navy, Eduardo C. Gerding, gives us another perspective, one that is aware of the ambiguous, but not at all positive, results of war experience: The desirable notion that a military force deployed on operations might avoid taking somatic casualties is a totally utopian one. This is also the case with psychiatric casualties. War provides an exaggerated, perhaps extreme, version of the entire range of human experience—not just fear, hate and guilt, but also excitement, love, friendship and achievement.

 20

Maria Alzira Seixo, Os Romances de António Lobo Antunes (Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2002), 82, my translation (“Nunca ter saído do hospital equivale não apenas ao aprisionamento do médico, tanto como do doente, à engrenagem da psiquiatria defeituosamente concebida, como insinua ainda a inclusividade do médico na comunidade dos doentes”). 21 Lobo Antunes, Conhecimento do Inferno, 96, my translation (“tenho quase saudades da guerra porque na guerra, ao menos, as coisas são simples: trata-se de tentar não morrer, de tentar durar”).

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It is this extreme contact with the range of human experience that seems to permeate the narrator’s discourse, this diabolical attachment of someone who cannot adjust to a life away from that experience. However, the carefully placed word “almost” (quase), in Lobo Antunes’ book, undermines a straightforward reading of this passage as simply a confession of an unadjusted individual missing the war. “Almost” (quase) denotes a resistance, an inner struggle to overcome his predicament. This is crucial. As seen before, the hell that is lived twice (trauma) and multiplied through writing is a specific place—an internal locus. Writing about such a locus is then forcing an immediate encounter with it, controlling it in the very place it stems from: In studies of trauma, PTSD, and coping with extreme stress, the personality variable, internal locus of control, has been associated with effective adaptation to stress […]. Persons with an internal locus of control tend to exhibit less PTSD and psychopathology and have better overall adjustment than persons with an external locus of control.23

Thus, the impossibility of escaping from hell is given a coping mechanism, a resilience that comes from controlling, in an internal locus, that same hell. Escape is then replaced by catharsis, the latter becoming a possibility, not only to those who internalise the locus of control, resisting the maddening force of trauma, but also to those who (having experienced it or not) write about it and read about it. Ultimately, this catharsis can, by affecting individual perceptions and enlightening the dark recesses of collective identities, be responsible for paradigmatic changes within disciplines and societies in general. Conhecimento do inferno brings us vivid images of doctors that shoo patients away like annoying birds, allegories in which the same doctors are presented with a cannibalistic meal made of their own patient, whom they devour with no trace of acknowledgement or understanding or even

 22

Eduardo C. Gerding, “The Anglo-Argentine Post-Conflict Common Ground: the Combat Veterans’ Aftermath,” in Hors de Combat, The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect, ed. by Diego F. García Quiroga and Mike Seear (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2007), 65. 23 Christine E. Agaibi and John P. Wilson, “Trauma, PTSD, and Resilience: A Review of the Literature,” Trauma Violence Abuse 6, no.3 (2005): 202.

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kindness. For the psychiatrist that has dedicated himself to literature (Lobo Antunes), these images have special significance, denouncing the profound dissatisfaction he feels and the limitations of his medical profession, literature being his only escape. For him, “psychoanalysts stubbornly continue to hold on to that ancient Freudian microscope, which permits them to observe one centimetre square of epidermis while the rest of the body, away from them, breathes, palpitates, pulses, shakes, protests and moves itself.”24 Returning to the concept of “counter-narrative,” one can read the novel as precisely that—an attempt to undermine and elucidate the “masternarrative” of the whole psychiatric discipline. The following excerpt is an apt representation of the undertaking: The girl, still, rigid, squeezing against her chest her plastic bag, allowed the angels to land on her shoulders, on her hair, arms, just like birds do on statues in the park, perched up on bronze heroes like clothes in hangers. If I didn’t act quickly, the asylum would be transformed into a celestial aviary, full of tunics brushing against each other and of buzzes from outer space, and dozens of winged men would invade A&E […]. - Why don’t you give her an injection against angels?—insisted the nurse—there has to be one, just as there is rat and cockroach poison, remedy against vine bugs. Angels are easier to kill than vine bugs […].25

The woman who speaks with angels is found sitting down in the centre of a square in an unnamed town and at first is regarded with a certain wonder by the passers-by. It is not until a crowd is formed around her that they decide to call the town doctor. It is after his opinion that they decide that she is mad and she is then brought to the psychiatric hospital, where she is apparently followed by the angels themselves. The narrator (the psychiatrist) seems to acknowledge the presence of the angels and is

 24

Lobo Antunes, Conhecimento do Inferno, 25, my translation (“os psicanalistas continuam teimosamente agarrados ao antiquíssimo microscópio de Freud, que lhes permite observar um centímetro quadrado de epiderme enquanto o resto do corpo, longe deles, respira, palpita, pulsa, se sacode, protesta e movimenta”). 25 Ibid. 74, my translation (“A rapariga, imóvel, muito direita, a apertar contra o peito o seu saco de plástico, consentia que os anjos lhe pousassem nos ombros, nos cabelos, nos braços, tal os pássaros nas estátuas dos parques, empoleirados em heróis de bronze como a roupa nos cabides. Se não agisse depressa o asilo transformar-se-ia num aviário celeste, repleto de roçar de túnicas e de zumbidos siderais, e dezenas de homens alados invadiriam a Urgência [...]. - Porque não lhe dá uma injecção contra os anjos?—insistia a enfermeira.—Tem de haver uma injecção contra os anjos como há raticida, pó das baratas, remédio para o bicho das vinhas. Os anjos são mais fáceis de matar do que o bicho das vinhas”).

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prompt to decide that they need to be repressed; otherwise they would spread around the emergency ward. A solution is suggested by the nurse— to give the woman an injection against angels. She is certain that there must be such an injection, as there is rat poison. The positivistic attitude of psychiatry is metaphorically represented by this nurse, who urges the repression (and suppression) of the angelic creatures by scientific means (an injection), at the same time acknowledging that the angels are easy to kill, a knowledge given to her by the psychiatric institution she works for, always ready to restrain patients from their creative, even if hallucinatory, free expression. This whole narrative image is strikingly important as it seems to represent the presence of a “counter-narrative”’ within the text. The image of the angels seems to function as a counter-element, as a symbol that everyone sees (even doctors and nurses), which those in the medical profession choose to ignore, objectifying it under objective scientific language. The act of repression perpetrated by the psychiatrist and the nurse constitute a representation of the medical discourse in its form of a “master-narrative” which, logically, has to repress the “counter-narrative.” Angels are the products of the subjectivity of the soon-to-be patient and, instead of looking for deeper meanings, the doctor needs to conform it to his own scientific objectivity, ignoring it and repressing it. Hallucinatory visions have, like dreams, a socio-cultural basis and, considering this, the symbol of the angel also works on a deeper level, due to the nearly hegemonic Catholicism of Portuguese society. The image of the angel is then juxtaposed to that of hell, in a play of images that works in the psyche of the society in which Lobo Antunes is inserted; additionally, although the novel was published in 1980, its diegetic time frame is 1973, one year before the fall of the dictatorial regime, when repressive state power was still very much in place. Descriptions of various symptoms common to many mental disorders in Lobo Antunes’ oeuvre are not exclusively literary artifices or a stylistic choice meant to emphasise the subject matter, “meaningless byproducts of a disordered brain”; it is rather the case that “psychiatric symptoms are […] depicted as meaningful elements of experience and identity.”26 It is by using the “language of madness” that Lobo Antunes achieves the rebellious act that permits escape from hell. It is, let us say, an act towards freedom. As Foucault aptly puts it,

 26

Radden, 7.

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In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other hand, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.27

This freedom permits the breaking off with the “master-narrative,” encouraging the “counter-narrative” by destroying any common language that could possibly exist between psychiatry and madness. That common language would be nothing less than another mechanism of confinement to the rules dictated by the “master-narrative.” As Foucault again observes, As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness […] affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made.28

The role of literature/disease-subject The problem of the subject is also paramount, as it brings to the fore many questions about the nature of the subject itself and how it is affected and ultimately transformed by disease (here including mental disorders). It is necessary to highlight that, for the investigation at hand, person is not the same as patient, patient is not the same as subject, and subject is not the same as disease-subject. As Andrea and Michael Kottow point out: […] the subject not only experiences disease, it may also be profoundly modified when confronted with its altered body [and mind29]. As physicians become familiar with the subjective aspects of disease, they might enhance their skills in understanding a subject that is now a diseased-subject as it tries to cope with the diseased body [and mind30].31

 27

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (Routledge: New York and London, 2009), xii. 28 Ibid. 29 My addition. 30 My addition.

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Before introducing the concept of “disease-subject,” let us reflect on the role of literature in informing those in the medical profession and how it can be relevant for their practices. In academic establishments it is now quite common for medical and nursing students to become “acquainted with literature’s capacity to create characters, modify narratives and depict life-stories in crisis”32 as it “might sharpen physicians’ hermeneutic acumen and make them more receptive to the quandaries of disease-subjects facing major medical and existential decisions in the wake of disruptive disease.”33 This view permits regarding patients not just as affected, or ill, organisms but as possessing essential components of existence and disease, thus avoiding the fact that medicine neglects these crucial aspects. The patient’s self is then formed by the coalescence of his/her own preillness subjecthood and his/her new affected existence. This brings us to the concept of “disease-subject” and its narrative: “The patient’s rendering of his condition is not that of a subjectivity describing its body cum disease, but the groping search for life coordinates with a body [and mind] modified by disease and its possible sequelae.”34 This notion is constructed in parallel with that of the actual act of narration of a disease, taken in by that evolving medical gaze that Foucault describes in his book The Birth of the Clinic. Despite the major revolutions in the act of taking into account the narration gathered from the patients’ observation in their very beds—a move that meant that disease could now be empirically observed rather than morally assumed—it was not until the twentieth century that the patient was expected to contribute to his diagnosis, by narrating his/her experience of the disease. However, there are still improvements to be made in the very practice of doctors, as pointed out by the Kottows: “Their discipline being fallible, physicians tend to improve their practical skills by asking the patient what he feels, still a far cry from inquiring how he feels about his derangement.”35 We can see, then, that what is being questioned is the very core of any diagnosis—the narrative. Disease-subjects are not devoid of a history, a story, a particular narrative that obeys the rules of subjectivity rather than the outright objectivity of scientific narratives. Subjectivity is thus the

 31 Andrea R Kottow and Michael H Kottow, “The disease-subject as a subject of literature,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2, no. 10 (2007). http://www.peh-med.com/content/2/1/10 (accessed January 10, 2015). 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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tricky element of this matter as the “patient’s narrative is no longer only about disease of the living body, as the physician will have it, but about a limit-situation unleashed by disease and requiring a change in perspectives.”36 In the case of mental illness, subjectivity is even more relevant and even more delicate. Consider for instance “subjectivity when attacked by such a disease as depression, which both gnaws at the fabric of the lived body and issues paralysing orders to the living body. Mental diseases, at least in their initial phases, cause a profound sensation of menace to the subjective world and disquieting signs of disintegration of the self.”37 It is my view that literature (and not only first person testimonial narratives, as argued by authors such as Radden) is fundamental to the avoidance of the total or partial, always irreversible disintegration of the self, insofar as it brings together the subjectivity of a disease-subject and the medical sciences represented by doctors and nurses: Literature and art create symbolic spaces where disease and health, notions of being ill or feeling healthy, suffering and the intents of healing, are all represented and related to other cultural notions. In order to understand the patient in the objective and subjective dimensions of his diseased being, philosophy and literature have been called upon to shape sympathy, develop empathy, and understand meaning, as well to enrich insight and vocabulary.38

Taking into consideration the issue of the disintegration of the self, it is very curious to note that literature can indeed be an exercise on this very aspect. In Lobo Antunes, the previously mentioned conscious mixing of identities between doctor and patient, the constant apparitions of intertwining surreal images, the constant shift of characters’ point of view, are all signs of a continually disintegrating self—not the self of the author, but that “self” present in the narrative and constructed both by it and by the reader’s perception. This narrative of a continual act of disintegration, encompassing various perspectives of illness and its manifestations and aftermath, of the role of the psychiatrist and medical institutions and of a traumatic failure of a society in general, offers the reader the possibility of widening the scope of meanings, insights, vocabulary and perceptions about mental illness and trauma, thus permitting a move towards a possibility of healing, catharsis or simply broader understanding.

 36

Ibid. Ibid. 38 Ibid. 37

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The contribution of literature is now easier to grasp, as literature is in itself […] proficient in creating characters and narrating the vagaries and crises they undergo, offering a hermeneutical blueprint that might help the physician understand that the subjectivity of his patients is not a solid constant, but rather a fragile construct that is remodeled by major life events, of which disease is one of the most probable to occur.39

Literature (with its angels like those in Conhecimento do Inferno pervading everything) is the counter movement that enables not just a dialogue, but the subjectivity of a disease-subject to emerge and shape new notions that, when integrated in the hellish mechanisms of the psychiatric machine, force revolutions. The creative angelic forces of literature can ultimately destroy the walls not just of asylums, mental institutions, prisons and disciplines; it can break those metaphorical walls that impede human beings from living a fuller and more integrated life: […] the only thing to do was to destroy the hospital, physically destroy the hospital, the leprous walls, the cloisters, […] the sinister concentrationary organization of madness, the heavy and ugly bureaucratization of distress, and start all over again, in another place, in another way, to combat suffering, anxiety, depression, mania.40

Works Cited Agaibi, Christine E. and Wilson, John P. “Trauma, PTSD, and Resilience: A Review of the Literature.” Trauma Violence Abuse 6, no. 3 (2005): 195-216. Bayer, Ronald. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York and London: Routledge, 2009.

 39

Ibid. Lobo Antunes, Conhecimento do Inferno, 185, my translation (“[…] a única coisa a fazer era destruir o hospital, destruir fisicamente o hospital, os muros leprosos, os claustros, […] a sinistra organização concentracionária da loucura, a pesada e hedionda burocratização da angústia, e começar do princípio, noutro local, de uma outra forma, a combater o sofrimento, a ansiedade, a depressão, a mania”). 40

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Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. From Redistribution to Recognition? A Political-philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Verso, 2003. Gerding, Eduardo C. “The Anglo-Argentine Post-Conflict Common Ground: the Combat Veterans’ Aftermath.” In Hors de Combat, The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect, edited by Diego F. García Quiroga and Mike Seear, 62-70. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2007. Kottow, Andrea R. and Kottow, Michael H. “The disease-subject as a subject of literature.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2, no. 10 (2007). Lobo Antunes, António. Conhecimento do Inferno. Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 1980. Mishara, Aaron L. “Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 5, no. 13 (2010). Radden, Jennifer H., “Recognition rights, mental health consumers and reconstructive cultural semantics.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7, no. 6 (2012). Seixo, Maria Alzira. As Flores do Inferno e Jardins Suspensos. Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2009. —. Os Romances de António Lobo Antunes. Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2002. Varga, Somogy. “Defining mental disorder. Exploring the ‘natural function’ approach.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6, no. 1 (2011).

THE PARADOX OF READING AUTISTIC FICTION MAKAI PÉTER KRISTÓF UNIVERSITY OF SZEGED

You know you have made it as a serious academic when you can point to a phenomenon by coining a term with the prefix “post-.” With regard to the present state of autism fiction, I can happily announce that we live in a post-Rain Man age. Even though people might not be able to list the “triad of impairments” off the top of their heads, or might only have a hazy notion of the autistic spectrum, they are bound to know Dustin Hoffman’s iconic performance, right as rain (man). The wake of the success following the movie’s release, and changes in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders allowed the recognition and inclusion of higherfunctioning people without impaired language development under the autism umbrella. Most notably, the writings of Hans Asperger have been reintroduced to the English-speaking world by Lorna Wing (1981),1 and Asperger’s Syndrome was accepted by professionals as a valid diagnosis for a smaller subsection of people living with autism. The combined effect of the medical community’s reinterpretation of what autism could be, how it affected the people involved, and the public’s fascination with the condition proved to be synergistic. It ushered in a veritable boom of autism-related films, memoirs and books at the tailend of the last century, culminating in what I would call the advent of the autism novel in the new millennium. Novels like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time (2003),2 Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark (2002),3 Claire Morrall’s The Language of Others (2008),4 or Jodi Picoult’s House Rules (2010),5 have popped up to introduce us to

 1 Lorna Wing, “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account,” Psychological Medicine 11 (1981): 115-129. 2 Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time (London: Johanthan Cape, 2003). 3 Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark (London: Orbit Books, 2002). 4 Claire Morrall, The Language of Others (London: Sceptre, 2008). 5 Jodi Picoult, House Rules (New York: Atria, 2010).

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this group of people, verbal and high-functioning autists, people with Asperger’s, their joys and travails of making it in the world. The publication of these books is prompted by popular curiosity that translates into market demand for fictional accounts of autism. The novels above, and other works in autism fiction, usually feature adolescents (13-19) and young adults (early 20s onwards) as they go through the turbulent time of their late socialization, facing a world puzzled by their idiosyncrasies and oddities. To non-autists, people on the spectrum are curious, inappropriate, socially awkward, literal-minded, humourless, stuck in their routines, but admirable for their courage, their imperviousness to peer pressure, the occasional savant skill or two, or their perceived “child-like” simplicity.6 Similarly, and perhaps more importantly, we gain an inside view of how neurotypical culture (i.e. the actions and customs of those unfortunate enough not to be on the spectrum) appears to the autistic mind, too: unpredictable, unreliable, unfathomable, but at times remarkably flexible, full of intriguing skills to be learned, people to reckon with, patterns to be revealed. One underlying pattern in these books is that the characters are presented as benefiting from the mutual exchange of viewpoints over the course of the novel, a rather reassuring “moral,” if one might call it that. Still, despite the positive portrayal of neurotypicals who finally “get it,” the far more interesting journey is the one that the autist character takes to gain agency and acceptance within the neurotypical world via a dialogue with it. This dialogue between the two communities is particularly fostered by the medium of the novel, since it allows for the most seamless immersion into the thought processes of another person, even if only a fictional one. Unlike memoirs and life-writing, other popular genres for expressing an autistic identity, novels are able to present the complexities of the social mind in action by featuring multiple point-of-view characters, and the fictional settings created by the author heighten the conflict of the two clashing views of the world. As Lisa Zunshine shows in her pioneering work, Why We Read Fiction,7 the novel is one of the most fertile grounds for exercising our cognitive faculty of empathy, the imaginative roletaking of another person. The mental tool that we use to evaluate the content of another human mind, people’s hopes and desires, goals and purposes for social action is called theory of mind (ToM) in the language

 6

For a more detailed view of the impairments in autism, see Laura Schreibman, The Science and Fiction of Autism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Colombus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006).

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of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This is also one of the core deficits within autism, whereby an autistic person would have problems understanding just what it is that makes people act the way they do, especially when pragmatic social interactions are concerned, which are not truth-governed, e. g. irony or sarcasm, flirtation, threats or negotiation. Therefore it appears that autism fiction, and the autism novel in particular, stands at an intriguing crossroads as a ToM-rich medium tackles a ToM-poor condition. The present paper intends to set up shop at this crossroads: one of my goals will be to tap into cognitive literary studies and the contemporary philosophy of mind to sketch out how literary reading is intertwined with mind-reading. I will introduce the “paradox of fiction” as a curious aesthetic problem with regard to our emotional responses to fiction, and how different camps try to resolve our ostensibly paradoxical imaginative capabilities. I shall also indicate where autism intersects with this vision of the joys of literature, providing a partial account of the condition, focusing on Simon Baron-Cohen’s idea of mindblindness as a springboard. Finally, I hope to show that autism fiction further elaborates on this trope of the paradox by its very design, and I attempt to move towards a reconciliatory “solution” of this problem with the help of this peculiar genre. First of all, let me clarify how our scientific culture currently conceives of the Theory of Mind mechanism. As is quite common in studies on the evolution of cognition, it all started with chimps. In 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff asked the question whether the chimpanzee has a “theory of mind.” Their published paper describes how play-acting human beings bumbled through simple challenges in front of chimpanzees, who were allowed to “help” them by choosing among photographs, some of which showed objects that would enable the actor to complete the tasks. In Premack and Woodruff’s definition, [a]n individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory because such states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others. As to the mental states the chimpanzee may infer, consider those inferred by our own species, for example, purpose or intention, as well as knowledge, belief, thinking, doubt, guessing, pretending, liking, and so forth.8

 8

David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioural Brain Sciences 4 (1978): 515.

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Their research indicated that chimpanzees do indeed have some notion of what the goals of the actors were in these small scenes, and the animals aided the actors through the choice of correct tools for the job at hand. Some time afterwards, Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith asked a similar question in the title of their paper,9 substituting chimpanzees for autistic children: do they have ToM? Although it includes several problems with sensory integration and a difficulty in managing life skills, autism is primarily seen as a socio-cognitive disorder; what investigators of autistic children noticed is that, for their subjects, human intentions are often hard to calculate, since they are second-order representations (Luana believes that Nani will give her a birthday gift; Nani hopes that Luana will be pleased with the new computer she intends to give her). Crucially, they are beliefs that force people to put themselves into the shoes of another human being, including their limited point of view. Social cognition implies partial knowledge and evanescent perceptions of other people in a mutable social web of relations. I, for example, may mistakenly think that magicians actually make coins disappear, whereas, in actual fact, they are hidden in the palm of their hands during a sleight-of-hand performance. Typical autists, upon having the situation described to them, including the nature of the deception, would be very likely to claim that the audience knows full well how the coin is within the fold of the index and the ring finger, contrary to conventional wisdom, which would tell us that, for the captivated audience, the coin is as good as vanished. In other words, they do not make recourse to ToM-related heuristics when making guesses about the mental content of others, or fail to correctly estimate said mental content in a consistent manner if they do develop some notion of what makes other people tick. This condition has been termed mindblindness by Simon Baron-Cohen.10 Imagine how stupefying the human world would look from the outside with no recourse to mentalistic language and cognition that encoded and explained why we do what we do, even on very basic social tasks, such as asking for help or expressing the vital needs for nourishment (it is often observed in strongly autistic children that they use the limbs of their adult caregivers to draw them to a fridge or a high shelf, using them literally as tools to acquire food or toys). That world would be a bewildering onslaught of nonsensical sense-data that would puzzle the will, and biological movement would lose the name of action, because actions

 9

Simon Baron-Cohen, A. M. Leslie and Uta Frith, “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” Cognition 21 (1985): 37-46. 10 Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).

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presuppose some mind wanting to achieve a particular effect. In fact, storytelling is a mind-building machine designed to exercise our faculties for reading social situations and people, as Zunshine asserts,11 and the aesthetics of the written tale is intertwined with our cognitive abilities. It is important to emphasise, though, that different readers read novels differently, which is only to be expected, given the imaginative and experiential history of individual readers. We can delight ourselves, especially in the case of “high” literary fiction, with the poetic qualities of the texts, the ingenuity of its linguistic expression, the striking, erudite vocabulary, which are no doubt aesthetically pleasing and worthy of appreciation. Yet, for the most part, we read fiction because there is a story worth telling, a storyworld constructed, populated by intriguing characters whose motivation we enjoy figuring out, and we give ourselves over to the unfolding of a conflict which pits fictional agents against one another. Ink becomes emotionally charged and characters are moved to action as readers construct the whys and wherefores of their wanderings, and, in doing so, they put their ToM mechanism to work. When we read novels not for the sake of poetic language, but as a story happening with and to human beings, it does not matter that these people are reality-challenged. Contemporary scholars of aesthetics have been especially curious about this fact: how is it that we respond emotionally to words on the printed page as if it were constitutive of a person, replete with cunning, suffering, desire, aspirations and the like? The paradox of fiction, as first formulated by Colin Radford,12 consists of three related claims. First, we have a strange, at first blush, inconceivable ability to “have an emotional reaction to the fate of Anna Karenina, the plight of Madame Bovary or the death of Mercutio. Yet we do. We weep, we pity Anna Karenina, we blink hard when Mercutio is dying and absurdly wish that he had not been so impetuous.”13 Secondly, our emotions are prompted by a reality condition of sorts, with Radford stating that “I can only be moved by someone’s plight if I believe that something terrible has happened to him. If I do not believe that he has not and is not suffering or whatever, I cannot grieve or be moved to tears.”14 Still, readers know that fictional characters do not exist: “What is worrying is that we are moved by the death of Mercutio and we weep while knowing that no one has really died, that no young man has been cut off in the flower of his

 11

Zunshine, 123-128. Colin Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental 49 (1975): 67-80. 13 Ibid. 69. 14 Ibid. 68. 12

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youth.”15 This arrangement of the paradox, and whether it constitutes a paradox at all, has been the subject of much speculation within aesthetics, and, in doing so, it has invigorated cognitive literary criticism, too.16 For our present purposes, I consider it enough to account for homologies in our processing of the fictional and the real world, which would enable us to economically preserve one model for our affective response. There is little doubt that mentally healthy human beings, including children at a relatively early age17 are able to distinguish between representational worlds, on the one hand, and real life, on the other, so we can exclude any model which would explain our responses as a fault in our perception of reality.18 Empathy, the tool of the soul for putting ourselves into another’s shoes is used in real life situations to act quickly upon other people’s mental states and actions. The reward for doing so is obvious: managing the distribution of collective effort without losing face, strengthening or maintaining social bonds, are considerably easier if there is a mechanism in place to tune into another person’s inner realm. Within psychology, there are two competing conceptions on why we are able to make mostly accurate guesses about other people’s minds. For a long time, our cognitive development was metaphorically understood as that of a “child scientist,” a toddler-scholar who comes to know the world roughly the way grown-up scientists do: they create a mental model of our psychological tendencies, then test and falsify hypotheses of what goes on between the ears of others, and which one of the child-scientists’ actions would produce which changes in the social world.19 This method of folk psychology is dubbed theory-theory (T-T). What is noteworthy is that, under T-T, the hypotheses could be distilled into rules that anybody can learn who is able to make sense of propositions. Initially, T-T offered much to psychologists studying social cognition, not only because it

 15

Ibid. 71. For an even-handed survey, see Part I in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, eds., Emotion and the Arts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37-94. 17 Tanya Sharon and Jacqueline D. Woolley, “Do Monsters Dream? Young Children’s Understanding of the Fantasy/Reality Distinction,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 22, no. 2 (2004): 293-310. 18 But note young children’s occasional blurring of the two: Alison Bourchier and Alyson Davis, “Children’s Understanding of the Pretence-Reality Distinction: A Review of Current Theory and Evidence,” Developmental Science 5 (2002): 397-426. 19 John D. Greenwood, “Introduction: Folk Psychology and Scientific Psychology,” in The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, ed. by John D. Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-21; Alison Gopnik and Andrew N. Meltzoff, Words, Thoughts, and Theories (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997). 16

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mirrored the epistemological working methods of practicing scientists, but also because it was the most parsimonious explanation of the available evidence at the time. Since then, objections to the case for T-T have been raised and logical problems highlighted by philosophers of the mind.20 Additionally, evidence from neuroimaging studies of a newfound group of mirror neurons has suggested that there are mechanisms in the brain for facilitating social cognition. The detection of the mirror neuron system (MNS) has provided a huge boost for research and speculation on mind-reading and what happens when it goes wrong, including the sociocognitive disabilities within autism. To give readers the short version, mirror neurons are the neurons that fire within the brain when animals either move parts of their bodies or when they see other animals perform movements.21 By unconsciously imitating our conspecifics, we get a head start on figuring out what they might do next. Imitation is not restricted to getting the actual action pat down in our minds; we can also make largely accurate guesses about the emotions involved, effectively empathising with others on the neural level.22 Going back to T-T for a minute, it is at its weakest when it tries to come up with an answer as to why autists perform remarkably worse on ToM tasks than neurotypicals or people with other developmental disorders. Mirror neurons allow for a different interpretation, one that offers a stronger support to the opposing camp in the ToM-debate, simulation theory. Adherents to this latter theory of mindreading have

 20

Michael A. Bishop and Stephen M. Downes, “The Theory Theory Thrice Over: The Child as Scientist, Superscientist or Social Institution?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 121-136; Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 2006). 21 Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119 (1996): 593-609; Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169-92, 10.1146/ annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230. 22 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “Mirror Neuron: A Neurological Approach to Empathy,” in Neurobiology of Human Values, ed. by Jean-Pierre P. Changeux, Antonio Damasio and Wolf Singer (Berlin and Heiderberg: Springer Verlag, 2005), 107-124; Pier Franceso Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror Neurons and Intersubjectivity,” in On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, ed. by Stein Bråten (Amsterdam, NL and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins B.V., 2007), 73-88; Corrado Sinigaglia and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Through the Looking Glass: Self and Others,” Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011): 64-74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.11.012.

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posited that instead of coming to conclusions about other agents’ feelings based on ratiocination, hypothesis testing and elaborate theories, humans actually empathise with others because they immediately map the outward expressions of inward states of mind in their neural systems.23 The MNS has been explicitly linked with autism by a number or cognitive scientists, but the hypothesis found its most forceful expression in Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Dapretto’s paper,24 where they state that data reviewed in the article “strongly support the proposal that mirror neuron dysfunction is a core deficit in autism” (emphasis added). Inquiries along subsequent years have cast doubts upon the search for core deficits25 and a very recent review article on the connection between mirror neurons and autism (there called the “broken mirror” theory) has questioned the existence of any global dysfunction in the mirror neuron system of autists.26 As is readily apparent from the diversity or ambiguity of some of these experiments, I would not claim that mirror neuron dysfunction is the final word on the subject of what goes on in autism; we should see what further studies have to say, but the question of whether bottom-up or topdown control of perception plays a greater part in autism does not invalidate either their problems processing emotions of themselves and others, nor their peculiarities in expressing empathy. Besides their contested role in autism, we are on firmer ground when investigating mental simulation in typically developing children and adults, and how they relate to the aesthetic effect of reading. Fortunately enough for lovers of literature, language is capable of substituting natural stimuli to generate cognitive processes, including social cognition and empathy, and a growing body of research is unearthing how the brain uses sensorimotor integration of corporeal action to create thought/language, and vice versa.27 This means that when we read or hear sentences, we

 23 Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert Gordon, “Folk Psychology as Simulation,” in Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate, ed. by Martin Davies and Tony Stone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 60-73. 24 Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Dapretto, “The Mirror Neuron System and the Consequences of its Dysfunction,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (2006): 942-951. 25 A helpful summary is given in Schreibman’s The Science and Fiction of Autism, 109-131. 26 Antonia F. de C. Hamilton, “Reflecting on the Mirror Neuron System in Autism: A Systematic Review of Current Theories,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (January 2013): 91-105, 10.1016/j.dcn.2012.09.008. 27 Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Simulation, Situated Conceptualization, and Prediction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London:

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simulate what happens and what properties the objects have, replaying the movements and sensations in our heads, activating some of the same pathways we would use if they were present, with the difference that we use a reality-check by running these process “off-line,” so we can inhibit the immediate action-generating potential of emotions and safely experience the thrill of vicarious love, fear, despair or excitement which the characters undergo. This, however, does not mean that the emotions experienced are not real emotions, nor that reading literature in the right circumstances cannot generate fellow-feeling that spurs readers onto prosocial action. In fact, I find simulation theory to be of invaluable help in forming a coherent theory of the emotional powers of fiction that are awakened within us, based on our neurological processes designed by evolution to strengthen social bonds.28 Motor and higher-level mental simulation during the reading of texts is of profound importance to understand literature as an aesthetic experience. If our emotional responses to fiction sound paradoxical, it is only because we perceive the real and the fictional to be much further apart than they really are to our psyche when it comes to working through situations in the two modes. We do not really believe that characters in novels exist for real, but we can still adequately simulate the emotional rollercoaster of a romance or the thrilling game of master spies and detectives outwitting evildoers in mystery novels since we understand them to be fictional minds. As Alan Palmer notes in his seminal book of the same title, this approach:

 Biological Sciences 364 (2009): 1281-1289; Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror Neurons and the Social Nature of Language: The Neural Exploitation Hypothesis,” Social Neuroscience 3 (2008): 317-333; Scott T. Grafton, “Embodied Cognition and the Simulation of Action to Understand Ourselves,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1156 (2009): 97-117, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04425.x; Rolf A. Zwaan, and Diane Pecher, “Revisiting Mental Simulation in Language Comprehension: Six Replication Attempts,” PLoS ONE 7 (2012), e51382, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051382. 28 Germund Hesslow, “Current Status of the Simulation Theory of Cognition,” Brain Research 1428 (2012): 71-79, doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2011.06.026, although some reservations are expressed in surveys of ST and mindreading such as Martin Michlmayr, “Simulation Theory versus Theory Theory: Theories Concerning the Ability to Read Minds,” MA Thesis (Innsbruck: Leopold-Franzens-Universität, 2002), http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-tom.pdf (accessed February 22, 2013), and Goldman’s version of simulation is critiqued by Peter Carruthers, “Simulation and the First-Person,” Philosophical Studies 144, no. 3 (2009): 467475.

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considers the whole of a particular fictional mind [...]; views characters’ minds [...] in terms of the narrator’s positive linking role in presenting characters’ social engaged mental functioning [...]; analyzes in functional and teleological terms the purposive nature of characters’ thought: their motives, intentions, and the resulting behavior and action; highlights the role of the reader in constructing characters’ embedded narratives by [referring to] their mental functioning; and shows how readers read plots as the interaction of those embedded narratives.29

If we see that we instinctively treat our beloved heroines and villains as almost-people due to our skills in conceiving of the social world as produced by minds, it becomes much easier to explain why some fictions produce greater emotional involvement, while others bore or infuriate us. Insofar as novelists can convincingly present believable fictional mental functioning, their novels will be more likely to garner empathic investment on the part of the reader. Again, the entire project of modern, critical literary theory is an argument that engagement with the aesthetic experience is strongly affected by the social circumstances of the writer and the reader, including class, gender, race, sexuality, age, etc., but when the connection is made, despite these differences, fiction humanises characters, showing them their standpoint in the world, establishing some common ground which is rooted in our strong capacity for empathy and mental simulation. One way to imagine literature as beneficial is that it broadens our circle of empathic responses to others.30 This notion I find remarkably helpful when dealing with the autism novel. Take the blurb of Morall’s The Language of Others as an example: “Jessica doesn’t consider herself odd. She just sees the world from a slightly different angle. For Jessica, the world is a puzzling, sometimes frightening place. [... T]his absorbing story of a woman negotiating life’s ups and downs without quite grasping the rules of the game gives a fresh, illuminating insight into what it means to be ‘normal’.” Here, the whole novel is positioned as a tale of shifting perspective, and it appeals to the genre’s forte of decentring our perception of the world and its governing norms, nudging us towards accepting alternative lived experiences, incorporating diametrically different but intersecting trajectories of characters, and, as a result, the novel compels its readers to take autism as a subjectively valid mode of existence in the social world. Such paratexts evidently indicate that autism novels appear

 29

Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 16. 30 On the objections to the benefits of empathy, see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 145-168.

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on the market as satisfying neurotypicals’ desire to know “what it’s like” to be inside the person’s mind who lives with autism, which is one of David Herman’s basic elements of narrative.31 The autism novels, then, implicitly demand something remarkable from their readers: using their imagination (technically, their neurological mechanisms for simulation) to empathise with characters whose systems processing social information have been impaired and have a hard time dealing with emotions. And therein lies the greatest irony of an autism novel as read by a neurotypical (I assume that, with the exception of some interested autists, predictably those on the higher-functioning end of the spectrum, the novels’ readership will largely be neurotypical). With their more acute sense and greater repertoire of social scripts in their head during the reading, NTs are more likely to anticipate gauche turns of phrases and faux pas than the autist point-of-view character. On numerous occasions, gaps in interpretation are made explicit in the narration. The surplus knowledge is contrasted with what is perceived by NTs as naiveté or, in a positive light, the kind-hearted nature of autists. To demonstrate this, in Speed of Dark, the main protagonist, Lou, is offered the option to go to a fencing tournament, a sport in which he excels because he can spot the patterns in his enemies’ attacks. However, he is unwilling to go because Don, one of his partners at the gym where he trains, got angry at his sparring partner, Tom, for defeating him and hurt his pride in doing so. Lou’s other fencing partner, Marjory, tries to reason with him: “But—Lou—people get mad at other people for no reason, too. Don was angry with Tom. Other people may have been angry with Simon; I know people have been angry with me. That just happens. As long as people aren’t doing anything wrong, they can’t stop and think all the time if it is making someone else angry.” “Maybe it does not bother you as much,” I say. She gives me a look that I can tell is supposed to mean something, but I cannot tell what. Would I know if I were normal? How do normal people learn what these looks mean?32

In this passage, readers would easily guess that the look inexplicable to the autist character is one of reproach and frustration at Marjory’s inability to convince Lou to ignore his capability to make others angry because of his good fencing. Scenes like these are ubiquitous in the autism novels, as authors put their characters in situations where the neurological difference can be pressed home. When they learn to see the world from the autist’s

 31 32

David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Moon, 264.

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perspective, readers are made aware of the problems a mindblind person has in navigating the social world, and how they deal with the consequences of having partial knowledge of the effects they have on others. I would go even further and say that autists who are interested and willing to read this sort of fiction (after all, the novels are about “themselves”) are provided insights into the interaction of NTs and autists from the other side of the fence, they learn about how they are seen from the NT mind (several of the novels cited shift focalisation between the autistic and the NT characters). In my inclusion of autist readers, I want to move away from the dime-museum conception of autism novels which would present a singular, facile subject-verb-object relationship of “neurotypicals read autists.” This way we can see that the writings in question can be read in a more progressive manner; they foster a dialogue between two partially overlapping views of social life that are usually reconciled by the end of the novels in some fashion. In discussions of cognitive studies of theory of mind and the novel as well as investigations of emotional responses to fiction, autism always appears on the scene to serve as a counterpoint to our “normal,” “natural” enthusiasm for the delights of reading textual minds.33 Zunshine dedicates a short introductory chapter in Why We Read Fiction to the relationship between ToM, autism and literature. After recounting Temple Grandin’s suspicions of fictional characters, Zunshine states: “Fiction presents a challenge to people with autism because in many ways it calls for the same kind of mind-reading, that is, the inference of the mental state from the behavior—that is a necessary in regular human communication.”34 In more recent times, Jennifer Barnes has brought autism to the attention of those studying literary expression and storytelling, conducting a sociology of reading experiment with undergraduate students and people living with autism. Summarising her results, she states that while autists did not avoid them as such: they showed no preference for social stories, but demonstrated a significant preference for nonfiction over fiction. From the perspective of autism

 33 For the significance of autism in pretence/simulation theories, see David Liggins, “The Autism Objection to Pretence Theories,” Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010): 764-782; for its role in the discourse of writing and empathy and a critique of Baron-Cohen’s “mindblindness” metaphor, see Ann Jurecic, “Mindblindness: Autism, Writing, and the Problem of Empathy,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (2006): 1-23. 34 Zunshine, 9.

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The Paradox of Reading Autistic Fiction research [...] the fact that individuals with ASC preferred true texts [...] suggests that theories of fiction that focus solely on theory of mind and the social content of stories may be incomplete. Our ability to suspend reality and enter into imaginary or pretend worlds may also play a key role in the appeal of fictional stories [...], allowing fiction and nonfiction to battle it out based on content on relatively even grounds.35

The picture emerging from studies that link fiction and autism together is noteworthy because they shed light on what makes counterfactual narratives of nonexistent/enacted people so intriguing for humankind. Regrettably, they echo a long-prevailing sentiment in research on the subject that autism can be envisioned as a portent or omen for neurotypical people, showing them what life would be like without an intact theory of mind or imaginative willingness to engage themselves with pretend worlds. The ensuing discourse all too often veers into discussing what autists lack that NTs have, rather than how the differences between the two populations can be bridged.36 I would propose that autism fiction gives us a counternarrative. The principal narrative strategy of autism fiction is the showcasing and dialogic melding of different point-of-view characters, some autists, some neurotypicals. Rather than presenting autists as finally being able to “overcome” their disability, implying that neurological difference has to go before individuals can fit into the fabric of society, autism novels work, like autobiographic writing, as laboratories of the autistic self, as crucibles for the lived experience for autism, including coping strategies. Picoult’s House Rules closes upon precisely such a note of reconciliation without giving up autistic identity: To all of those experts who said that because I have Asperger’s I can’t empathize: So there. People who can’t empathize surely don’t try to protect the people they love, even if it means having to go to court. Suddenly Theo pulls one of the earbuds out and offers it to me. “Listen,” he says, and I do. Jess’s music is a piano concerto that swirls behind my eyes. I bend my head toward my brother so that the wires reach, so that, for the rest of the journey, we stay connected.37

 35

Jennifer Barnes, “Fiction, Imagination, and Social Cognition: Insights from Autism,” Poetics, 40 (2012): 299-316 (312). 36 Hillary Haldane and David Crawford, 2010, “What Lula Lacks: Grappling with the Discourse of Autism at Home and in the Field,” Anthropology Today 26, no. 3 (2010): 24-26, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8322.2010.00738.x 37 Picoult, 554.

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Connecting autists and neurotypicals in fiction is not just a moralistic message about how we can all get along together if we recognise our differences and treat each other equally. It is also about the autist characters’ search for agency within a social world on their own terms, sometimes altering their behaviour to fit in, but, more often than not, to seek an outlet for asserting their unique view of the world and to alter the playing field. Lou in Speed of Dark ends his story by saying: “Out there is the dark: the dark we don’t know about yet. It is always there waiting; it is, in that sense, always ahead of the light. [...] Now I am glad of it, because it means I will never come to the end, chasing the light. Now I get to ask the questions,”38 and with it, he embraces the alterity of the neurotypical world while at the same time he intends to incorporate his own interests into the discourse of autism. If fictional autists have touched the lives of neurotypicals and prompted autists to seek their own voice, it is due to a mutual recognition of the humanity, the (inter)subjectivity in one another, not regardless, but with special regard to the makeup of our minds. It also entails an adaptation on the part of both communities to alter their practices, and thereby create a social world in which autism is understood less as a profound disability in need of fixing and more like an occasion to appreciate the processes of evolution shaping the human mind.

Works Cited Barnes, Jennifer. “Fiction, Imagination, and Social Cognition: Insights from Autism.” Poetics 40 (2012): 299-316. Baron-Cohen, Simon, A. M. Leslie and Uta Frith. “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” Cognition 21 (1985): 37-46. Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. Barsalou, Lawrence W. “Simulation, Situated Conceptualization, and Prediction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 364 (2009): 1281-1289. Bishop, Michael A. and Stephen M. Downes. “The Theory Theory Thrice Over: The Child as Scientist, Superscientist or Social Institution?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 121-136. Bourchier, Alison and Alyson Davis. “Children’s Understanding of the Pretence-Reality Distinction: A Review of Current Theory and Evidence.” Developmental Science 5 (2002): 397-426.

 38

Moon, 369.

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Carruthers, Peter. “Simulation and the First-Person.” Philosophical Studies 144, no. 3 (2009): 467-475. Ferrari, Pier Francesco and Vittorio Gallese. “Mirror Neurons and Intersubjectivity.” In On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, edited by Stein Bråten, 73-88. Amsterdam, NL and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins B.V., 2007. Gallese, Vittorio. “Mirror Neurons and the Social Nature of Language: The Neural Exploitation Hypothesis.” Social Neuroscience 3 (2008): 317-333. Gallese, Vittorio, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Giacomo Rizzolatti. “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex.” Brain 119 (1996): 593-609. Goldman, Alvin I. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gopnik, Alison and Andrew N. Meltzoff. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997. Gordon, Robert. “Folk Psychology as Simulation.” In Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate, edited by Martin Davies and Tony Stone, 60-73. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Grafton, Scott T. “Embodied Cognition and the Simulation of Action to Understand Ourselves.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1156 (2009): 97-117. Greenwood, John D. “Introduction: Folk Psychology and Scientific Psychology.” In The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, edited by John D. Greenwood, 1-21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Haldane, Hillary and David Crawford. “What Lula Lacks: Grappling with the Discourse of Autism at Home and in the Field.” Anthropology Today 26, no. 3 (2010): 24-26. Hamilton, Antonia F. de C. “Reflecting on the Mirror Neuron System in Autism: A Systematic Review of Current Theories.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (January 2013): 91-105. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Hesslow, Germund. “Current Status of the Simulation Theory of Cognition.” Brain Research 1428 (2012): 71-79. Hjort, Mette and Sue Laver, eds. Emotion and the Arts. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1997.

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Iacoboni, Marco and Mirella Dapretto. “The Mirror Neuron System and the Consequences of its Dysfunction.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (2006): 942-951. Jurecic, Ann. “Mindblindness: Autism, Writing, and the Problem of Empathy.” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (2006): 1-23. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Liggins, David. “The Autism Objection to Pretence Theories.” Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010): 764-782. Moon, Elizabeth. Speed of Dark. London: Orbit Books, 2002. Morrall, Claire. The Language of Others. London: Sceptre, 2008. Michlmayr, Martin. “Simulation Theory versus Theory Theory: Theories Concerning the Ability to Read Minds.” MA Thesis. Innsbruck: Leopold-Franzens-Universität, 2002. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Picoult, Jodi. House Rules. New York: Atria, 2010. Premack David and Guy Woodruff. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioural Brain Sciences 4 (1978): 515-526. Radford, Colin, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental 49 (1975): 6780. Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Laila Craighero. “Mirror Neuron: A Neurological Approach to Empathy.” In Neurobiology of Human Values, ed. by Jean-Pierre P. Changeux, Antonio Damasio and Wolf Singer, 107-124. Berlin and Heiderberg: Springer Verlag, 2005. —. “The Mirror Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169-92. Schreibman, Laura. The Science and Fiction of Autism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Sharon, Tanya and Jacqueline D. Woolley. “Do Monsters Dream? Young Children’s Understanding of the Fantasy/Reality Distinction.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 22, no. 2 (2004): 293-310. Sinigaglia, Corrado and Giacomo Rizzolatti. “Through the Looking Glass: Self and Others.” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 64-74. Stueber, Karsten R. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 2006. Wing, Lorna. “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account.” Psychological Medicine 11 (1981): 115-129.

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Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Colombus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Zwaan, Rolf A. and Diane Pecher. “Revisiting Mental Simulation in Language Comprehension: Six Replication Attempts.” PLoS ONE 7 (2012): e51382.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alda Rodrigues has a Ph.D and an MA in Literary Theory. The title of her Ph.D. dissertation is A Theory of Collecting (University of Lisbon, 2015). Her MA dissertation (Two or Three Things about Film, University of Lisbon, 2009) is about Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock. She usually writes about film, meaning, memory, and museums, at the intersection between theory, philosophy and art history. She now works in publishing. Alexandra Cheira is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal). She has published articles and book chapters on A. S. Byatt’s fiction, The One Thousand and One Nights, seventeenth-century French conteuses and Victorian women wonder tale writers. She is the editor of (Re)Presenting Magic, (Un)Doing Evil: Of Human Inner Light and Darkness (Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012). She has recently translated A. S. Byatt’s “Cold” and has written an introduction to the tale, included in a publication of the “Storytelling” project in her research centre. Aline Ferreira is an Associate Professor at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, where she teaches English Literature. Her main interests include the intersections between literature and science, literature and the visual arts, feminist utopias and women’s studies. Her book I Am the Other: Literary Negotiations of Human Cloning was published by Greenwood Press in 2005. Recent publications comprise articles on the posthuman, biotechnological dystopias and bio art. She is now working on a book provisionally entitled The Sexual Politics of the Artificial Womb: Fictional and Visual Representations. Ana Rull Suárez is a Doctor in English Philology. She has worked as teacher of Spanish Language for foreigners, as teacher of North American and English literature in the U.N.E.D. (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), and nowadays she is a member of the researcher group of the Department of English Philology in the U.N.E.D. She has published about Edgar Allan Poe and both Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo; she has also worked on Pynchon and Cervantes, and she has

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Contributors

collaborated in radio programmes about other English and North American authors. Andrzej Sáawomir Kowalczyk, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Skáodowska University, Lublin, Poland. His current research areas include the supernatural in British fiction, the Gothic, utopia/dystopia in literature and film, as well as cognitive poetics. He authored articles and book chapters on all areas of his interest, and a book-length study of religious discourse in late medieval drama, The Voice of God, the Voice of Man (2007). His post-doctoral monograph, Forms and Shadows: A Cognitive-Poetic Reading of Charles Williams’s Fiction, is to be published in 2016. David Griffiths currently works at the University of Cantabria (in Santander, on the north coast of Spain). He is a Senior Lecturer in English for Specific Purposes at the Faculty of Tourism Management and wrote his doctoral thesis on Pat Barker’s “Regeneration Trilogy.” Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves is Assistant Professor of Anglo-American Studies at the Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal. For the past few years has been studying the relationship between literature and environment and has published articles on authors such as Willa Cather, Sarah O. Jewett, Henry D. Thoreau, Ruth Suckow, Barbara Kingsolver, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mary Oliver, among others. Her research is also focused on comparative literature and she has published articles on Portuguese authors. Joana Espain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Physics, at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, with a PhD in Physics from Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto (2007), and a Master in Condensed Matter Physics from Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (2000). She has about 30 scientific papers published in international peer-reviewed journals and 40 papers presented at national and international scientific conferences; she participated in 14 scientific projects funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology. Her scientific research activity in physics has been developed in cosmology and materials science. In 2011 she completed the curriculum of the Master in Literary, Cultural and Interart Studies at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto and started a PhD in Studies in Romance Literatures and Cultures at the same faculty, under

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s 207

which she develops research activity on the scientific imagination in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Makai Péter Kristóf is a newly-minted PhD, having received his title in the Doctoral School for Literary Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. He has published articles on science fiction and fantasy in Tolkien Studies and Blackwell’s A Companion to Tolkien and on cognitive literary studies. His doctoral research is on the cognitive narratological aspects of autism in literary theory and fiction. Márcia Lemos is a member of CETAPS, based at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto. She holds an MA in Anglo-American Studies with a dissertation on Finnegans Wake. In 2014, she finished her Ph.D. project, a comparative study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, on a state-funded merit scholarship granted by the Foundation for Science and Technology. She has published in different magazines and scholarly journals (Papers On Joyce, Cadernos de Literatura Comparada, E-topia, E-fabulations, Via Panorâmica, Revista Atlântida) and in international collective volumes: Weaving New Perspectives Together: Some Reflections on Literary Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) and Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts: Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen (Rodopi, 2012). She is primarily interested in English Literature and Utopian Studies. Maria Inês Marques is currently pursuing her MFA/DFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama. She holds a BA degree in Languages, Literature and Culture (Portuguese/English), and an MA in English and American Studies (Faculty of Arts, University of Porto). In 2011, she worked as an assistant researcher for the project TETRA—Theatre and Translation (Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon), under the supervision of Manuela Carvalho and Daniela DiPasquale. She has presented papers at several conferences in Portugal, Brazil and the United Kingdom, and has recently published in Theater (John W. Gassner Memorial Award for best critical essay). She collaborated with Teatro Experimental do Porto from 2011 to 2013. Selected dramaturgy credits include La Scène, by Valère Novarina (TECA), The Moors, by Jen Silverman (Yale Rep), Altogether Reckless (YSD), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Cloud Tectonics (Yale Cabaret). She was the translator and dramaturg for the English language premiere of Mickaël de Oliveira’s Boris Yeltsin, at Yale Cabaret. She is the associate translator and dramaturg for the NYC-based theatre company Saudade.

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Contributors

Mª Luz González-Rodríguez is a PhD. Assistant Professor at the University of La Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain. Her research interests lie in the area of Anglo-Canadian literature, Women Studies, Cultural Studies, South Asian Canadian Literature, and painting. Ecocriticism is one of her latest theoretical interests, especially from a postcolonial and archetypal perspective. Among her latest publications are “Mental Exile and ‘Permanent Transience’ in Indian Women Writing in Canada,” in India in Canada, Canada in India (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013) and “Bharati Mukherjee’s Struggle Against Cultural Balkanization: the Forging of a New American Immigrant Writing” (with J. I. Oliva), Indialog 2 (2015) 72-92. Miguel Ramalhete Gomes is a post-doctoral research fellow working on the theme of Shakespeare and presentism. He is based at CETAPS, at Universidade do Porto, in Portugal, and teaches at Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico do Porto (ESE-IPP). He recently published Texts Waiting for History: William Shakespeare Re-Imagined by Heiner Müller (Rodopi, 2014). His research has focused on early modern drama, especially Shakespeare, Irish studies, and Utopian studies. At present he is also translating Henry VI, Part 3 into Portuguese. Pedro Almeida is a PhD candidate in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, at Brown University. He graduated from the University of Porto (Portugal) in 2009, and earned an M.A. degree in Literary Theory from the same institution in 2012. From 2013 to 2015 he worked as a Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, teaching courses and seminars on Portuguese Literature, Lusophone Cultures and Identities, Grammar and Composition, and Portuguese and Brazilian Cinema. His research interests include intellectual history, literary theory and the circulation of literary texts, travel literature, and Atlantic cultural history. Ricardo Rúben Rato Rodrigues is Camões Instructor at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film of Queen Mary University of London. He holds a Ph.D in Lusophone Studies from the University of Nottingham, with a thesis entitled “A Silent Scream: Trauma and Madness in António Lobo Antunes’ Early Works.” He has a Post-Graduate Certificate in Applied Drama from the University of Exeter, and BA in Portuguese and English Studies from Universidade do Minho. Recent publications include “Torno, Retorno e Transtorno: Trauma e Stress Pós-Traumático nos romances de

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s 209

António Lobo Antunes” in As Humanidades e as Ciências, Disjunções e Confluências, Org. Ana Gabriela Macedo et al (V.N Famalicão: Edições Húmus, 2014), 197-208. He is member of the International Health Humanites Network. His research interests include: Lusophone Literature, Anglophone Literature, Trauma Studies, Madness and Emotions, History of Emotions, Film Studies, Applied Drama, Hypermasculinity and Gender Studies. Teresa Botelho has a PH.D. from Cambridge University and is Associate Professor at The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Nova University of Lisbon, where she teaches American Studies. She has published extensively on African American, and Asian American culture and literature, theater and drama. Her current interests include technological utopias/dystopias and the post-human, post-black literature, identity theory in its intersections with utopia, visual culture and cinema, the collaboration between sciences and literature, especially in drama, and literary and visual representations of 9/11.

INDEX

A Adams, Lorraine, 106, 109, 114 Asperger, Hans, 188-200, 203 Atwood, Margaret, 91-93, 96, 102, 149 Avison, Margaret, 90 B Barker, Patricia, 155-172 Blake, William, 96 Bloom, Harold, 62, 63, 66, 73 Bohr, Niels, 36 Borges, Jorge Luis, 75 Breuer, J., 162, 171 Brittain, Vera, 137, 139, 152 Butler, Ellis Parker, 140, 152 Byatt, A. S., xiv-xv, 104-115 C Carroll, Lewis, 113 Cervantes, Miguel de, 50 Chomsky, Noam, 112 Churchill, Caryl, xv, 122, 126, 127131 Comte, Auguste, xiii, 64 Cooper, James Fenimore, 23-24 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, xi-xii, 1530 D Darwin, Charles, 25, 27, 35, 105, 109, 120, 122, 123-126 Degas, Edgar, 9-10 Dewdney, Christopher, 90, 103 Dickinson, Emily, 15, 19, 21, 31-44 Djerassi, Carl, 130, 131 Donne, John, 86, 109-111, 115

E Einstein, Albert, ix, x, 36, 40, 78, 86, 105, 116, 117 Eliot, George ix, 104-107, 114, 115 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21 F Foucault, Michel, 105, 155-172, 182-184, 186 Frayn, Michael, xiv, xv, 122 Freud, Sigmund, x, 114, 147, 152, 162, 164, 171, 181 Frick, Henry Clay, 3, 6 Fuller, Margaret, 19, 21 G Galilei, Galileo, 36, 43 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 2-14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19 H Haddon, Mark, 188, 202 Haldane, Charlotte, xvi, 136-154 Haldane, J. B. S., 136-154 Hawking, Stephen, 41, 43, 97 Humboldt, Alexander von, xi, 16, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30 Huxley, Aldous, 136-138, 142-154 Huxley, T. H., 118, 123-126 I Ishiguro, Kazuo, 127 J Jane, Fred T., xvi, 139 Jiles, Paulette, 90 Jones, Steve, 113 Jung, C. G., 97, 102

Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s 211 K Kant, Immanuel, 5, 10 Klein, A. M., 90 Knapp, John Leonard, 15, 16, 22 L Lawrence, D. H., 143, 144, 152, 153 Leavis, F. R., 109, 111, 118, 132 Lessing, Doris, 114 Lobo Antunes, António, xv, xvii, 173-187 Lyotard, Jean-François, 62, 74, 82 Ludovici, Anthony, 137,138, 153 M MacEwen, Gwendolyn, xiv, 90-103 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 11, 12, 14 Major, Alice, 90 Maxwell, James Clerk, 36, 76, 79 McCarthy, Cormac, xii, xiii, 62-88 Moon, Elizabeth, 188, 198, 201, 203 Moreau, Gustave, 9-10 Morrall, Claire, 188, 203 N Newton, Isaac, 37, 83, 95, 102, 130, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 66, 71, 74, 97-98 P Parnell, Peter, 123 Penrose, Roger, 37-43 Phelps, Almira, 19 Picasso, Pablo, 113, 114 Picoult, Jodi, 188, 200, 203 Piercy, Marge, 142, 153 Pinker, Stephen, 112, 119, 132 Planck, Max, 39 Plato, 40, 48, 83, 95 Pynchon, Thomas, xii, xiv, 75-88 Pratt, E. J., 90 Proust, Marcel, 106, 113

R Rich, Adrienne, 34, 43 Rivers, W. H. R., xvi, 155-172 Russell, Bertrand, 142, 160 Russell, Dora, 137, 138, 154 S Sargent, Lyman Tower, 47, 60 Schlegel, Friedrich, 49 Schrödinger, Erwin, 36, 38, 68, 69 Showalter, Elaine, 156,158, 170, 172 Smith, John Maynard, 113 Snow, C. P., x, xiv, xviii, 108, 109, 112, 115-118, 132 Soane, John, 7-9, 13, 14 Solger, Karl, 49 Stoppard, Tom, xiv, xv, 122 Swift, Jonathan, 50, 52, 54 T Tallis, Raymond, 109-112, 115 Thoreau, Henry David, 20, 21, 24, 29 Tieck, Ludwig, 49 Treat, Mary, 19 Trismegistus, Hermes, 94

V Voltaire, 50 W Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 123 White, Gilbert, 16, 22 Whitman, Walt, 21 Whittel, Crispin, 122, 123, 129, 133 Wilson, Edward, xiv, 116-118, 131 Wilson, Snoo, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62, 69 Wolski, Marcin, xiii, 46-61 Woolf, Virginia, 107, 108, 115, 154 Y Yeats, W. B., 96 Yealland, Lewis Ralph, 155-172