Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities 3030194906, 9783030194901

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Representations of Science in Twenty-FirstCentury Fiction Human and Temporal Connectivities

Edited by Nina Engelhardt · Julia Hoydis

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

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

Nina Engelhardt  •  Julia Hoydis Editors

Representations of Science in Twenty-­ First-­Century Fiction Human and Temporal Connectivities

Editors Nina Engelhardt University of Stuttgart Stuttgart, Germany

Julia Hoydis University of Cologne Cologne, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-19489-5    ISBN 978-3-030-19490-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Federico Caputo / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century  1 Nina Engelhardt and Julia Hoydis 2 The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction 19 Natalie Roxburgh 3 Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle 37 Julius Greve 4 New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction 55 Kanta Dihal 5 Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body 75 Paola Carbone 6 Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation 93 Pia Balsmeier v

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7 Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman113 Paul Hamann 8 The Lures and Limitations of the Natural Sciences: Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree133 Elizabeth E. J. Gilbert 9 “It’s for Fellows Only!”: On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity153 Norbert Schaffeld 10 Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Technologies of Modernism173 Simon de Bourcier 11 Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone193 Ellen Moll Index213

Notes on Contributors

Pia Balsmeier  is a PhD student at the University of Cologne, where she graduated in English studies, Italian/Romance studies, and Protestant theology in October 2014. Since then she has been working as a research assistant and lecturer in the English department. Her research interests include posthumanism, ethical theory, and twentieth- and twenty-­first-­ century English fiction. In her dissertation she deals with the depictions of (post)human identities in twenty-first-century novels by Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Ruth Ozeki, and others, concentrating on the aspects of food production and consumption as markers of an ethical negotiation of posthumanist epistemologies. Paola  Carbone  is Professor of English Literature at Università IULM, Milan. Her fields of research include electronic literature and culture, the contemporary English novel, Indian literature in English, law and literature, and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Several of her works on postmodern, postcolonial, and digital literature have been published (http://www.paolacarbone.com/). Simon  de  Bourcier  holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University, and the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels, and has contributed chapters to several other volumes of Pynchon scholarship. He has also written critical essays about the work of Neal Stephenson and David Foster Wallace. From 2011 to 2018 he was

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one of the editors of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature. He has contributed entries to the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland and The Literary Encyclopedia. Kanta  Dihal is a postdoctoral researcher and the Research Project Coordinator of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. As the project leader of Global AI Narratives she explores how fictional and non-fictional stories shape the development and public understanding of artificial intelligence. Dihal’s work intersects the fields of science communication, literature and science, and science fiction. She obtained her DPhil in science communication at the University of Oxford in 2018, investigating the communication of conflicting interpretations of quantum physics to adults and children. She is co-author of the forthcoming monograph AI: A Mythology. Nina  Engelhardt is author of Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics (2018). She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and has since held research and teaching positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh) and the University of Cologne before joining the department of English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart. Elizabeth E. J. Gilbert  is a lecturer in the department for English teacher training at the University of Cologne. She specialises in British literature, spanning the range from Jane Austen via (neo-)Victorian to Kate Tempest, as well as children’s and young adult fiction and film studies. Her publications include a monograph on Italian Renaissance poetry and several articles on mock-epics, the Harry Potter series, and child protagonists in contemporary adult fiction. Julius  Greve is a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He has published articles on Cormac McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, critical theory, and speculative realism, and he is the co-­ editor of America and the Musical Unconscious (2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (2017), and “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (2017), a special issue of European Journal of American Studies. His book Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature is forthcoming from Dartmouth College Press.

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Paul  Hamann is a research associate at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He completed his BA in English literature and his MA in British and American cultures at the University of Hamburg and the University of London Institute in Paris. While pursuing an ongoing research focus on the history of literary engagements with genetics and proto-genetics, he is finalising his doctoral dissertation project on the genetic renegotiation of human life in the contemporary novel. Julia Hoydis  is assistant professor at the University of Cologne, Germany. She is the author of Tackling the Morality of History: Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh (2011). Co-edited volumes and special issues include “21st Century Studies” (2015), “Doing Science: Texts, Patterns, Practices” (2017), and Teaching the Posthuman (2019). Her second monograph, Risk and the English Novel From Defoe to McEwan, is in preparation for print. Ellen Moll, PhD  specialises in the intersections of gender, race, science, and technology, with emphases on feminist technoscience, contemporary drama, and social media analysis. She has additional interests in digital humanities, curriculum and faculty development, and interdisciplinary research and pedagogy. She is a faculty member at the Center for Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, and her work has recently been published in the journals Rhizomes and Comparative Drama. Natalie  Roxburgh is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of Siegen, where she is writing her second book (Habilitationsschrift) on rethinking aesthetic disinterestedness in nineteenth-century literature. Roxburgh’s work focuses on science and economics in literature, and she is co-editing a volume on psychopharmacology in nineteenth-century literature. Her first book is titled Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject (2016), and her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Mosaic, and other journals. Norbert Schaffeld  holds the chair of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bremen. He previously taught at the universities of Wuppertal, Essen, Leipzig, and Jena. Schaffeld also conducted research at Australian and Canadian universities, including the University of Sydney, the University of Toronto, and the University of Guelph. His main fields of interest are the science novel, maths films, the historical novel, and Shakespeare adaptations. He is one of the directors of the interdisciplinary research project Fiction Meets Science.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century Nina Engelhardt and Julia Hoydis

Science and technology more than ever govern human lives. While it has become a commonplace observation that the twenty-first century is marked by scientific and technological change on an unprecedented scale, it remains a challenge to map the implications for contemporary fictional representations. The present volume tackles a specific part of this challenge, addressing scientific and literary innovations as well as continuities and returns. Twenty-first-century writing in the field of literature and science obviously stands in a long tradition of writers and scholars that “have reflected on, reimagined, and challenged the sciences for over two millennia” (Sielke 2015, 12), and the topic of science and/in fiction shows no signs of decline as the third millennium progresses, neither in terms of artistic production nor as an area of critical enquiry. In contemporary N. Engelhardt (*) University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany J. Hoydis University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_1

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drama, for example, science has been seen to become “the hottest topic in theatre today, so much so that it’s identifiable as a millennial phenomenon on the English-speaking stage” (Rocamora 2000, 50). Likewise, there has been a wave of popular films about scientists over the last years, including screen works such as A Beautiful Mind (2001), Proof (2005), Ramanujan (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), A Theory of Everything (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), and Hidden Figures (2016). In prose fiction, the “science novel” (see Schaffeld 2016) has attracted significant attention and branched out into a variety of topical interests and genres, running the gamut from popular science, speculative fiction, and apocalyptic disaster narratives to new realist and historical novels, including ‘brain memoirs’ (see Tougaw 2017, 2018) and ‘neuronovels’ (see Roth 2009), ‘cli-fi’ (see Johns-Putra 2016; Trexler 2015; Schneider-Mayerson 2017), and the field of ‘posthuman’ fiction, including, most recently, ‘AI narratives.’1 In addition, the impact of digitalisation across all media and genres and on twenty-first-century culture in general affects modes of artistic and knowledge production and reception. If the representation of science in novels, films, plays, and poetry does not show any signs of decline, neither does the field of literature and science studies. Recent scholarly publications predominantly focus on a single genre and a single scientific discipline, as a look at books published in the first half of the year 2018 reveals: Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, John Fitch’s The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures,’ Lianne Habinek’s The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience, Jenni Halpin’s Contemporary Physics Plays: Making Time to Know Responsibility, Andrea K.  Henderson’s Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture, and Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Unlike these books, this volume does not focus on any one particular genre or branch of science (e.g. physics, biology, or mathematics), yet, it shares with various publications a special concern with Victorian and modernist cultures and a focus on a specific time period—in our case, the ‘now.’ Thus, the volume breaks new ground with its focus on twenty-first-­century representations of science, as well as by offering a comparatively rare combination of contributions covering diverse scientific disciplines and different genres. Addressing novelistic fiction, poetry, film, and drama, and engaging with topics such as genetics, chemical weapons research, quantum physics, psychopharmacology, biotechnology, and digital technolo-

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gies, this volume avoids delimiting the complexity of the field or the vagueness that investigations into the contemporary necessarily entail (see Boxall 2013, 3; Hoydis 2015, 5; Lea 2017, 2). The organisation of ten case studies in two sections, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities’ and ‘Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,’ reflects that the contributions in this volume approach representations of science from two main angles: in view of the place of the human in a web of relations (human connectivities) and regarding links between the twenty-first century and historical periods (temporal connectivities). We introduce the term ‘connectivity’ specifically to liberate thinking about literature and science from the rather tired metaphor of ‘two cultures,’ the only slightly less tired derivatives ‘three cultures’ or ‘one culture,’ as well as from the increasingly popular all-embracing concept of ‘networks.’ Connectivity, as we understand it, does not emphasise boundaries, disciplinary cultures, or institutional settings but is relational and encompasses realities as well as potentialities: as in popular and technical usage, we take ‘connectivity’ to mean both the quality and state of being connected and the capability of “being connective or connected” (“connectivity,” Merriam-Webster). Referring to an actual state as well as to possibility, the use of ‘connectivities’ pays tribute to the both real and speculative aspects of representations of science in twenty-first-century fiction. As we develop below, the term evokes globality and technology as the central means of experiencing connections in the present day and age, yet equally allows for the incorporation of historical and ethical dimensions. First, however, we examine how using the concept of ‘connectivities’ to grasp the relationship between science and literature offers a way to bracket questions of linear influence and direct connections, as well as to break open (for lack of a better term) the ‘network’ paradigm which often seems to suggest a systemic view. In the twenty-first century, the term ‘network’ and its derivatives are seemingly everywhere, from talk about the Internet, social networks such as Facebook, and Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ as a society relying on the fundamental unit of networks that are based on flow of information in electronic forms and function on a global scale (see 2000, 60–1). Next to organisational networks and digital networking technologies, the term has undergone influential reconfiguration in Actor—Network Theory (ANT), most closely related to the name Bruno Latour. Latour acknowledges the infelicity of the term in ANT, not least because what is meant to designate a method is frequently confused with a thing, for example a technical network. “Network is a concept, not a

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thing out there,” Latour explains, and admits, “The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago” (Latour 2005, 131; 130). As a more fitting term to describe the work, movement, and change that the method entails, he offers ‘worknet’ but deems a change in terminology impractical (see 143; 132). This collection avoids the “terribly confusing” and “pretty horrible” (142) word ‘network’ with its competing meanings in common usage and ANT, and instead proposes to focus on ‘connectivity,’ which includes real and potential connections, local as well as global ones, and can involve merely two entities or an entire system. If Latour has failed to eradicate confusions between ‘network’ as a method and the World Wide Web (Latour 2005, 143), the field of literature and science has not completely shaken off the influence and repercussions of the “two cultures debate”—and it is perhaps unlikely that it will ever fully transcend the binary divisions it stipulates. However, ever since C.P. Snow first introduced the idea of the humanities and the sciences as two separate spheres or cultures in 1959, scholars have attempted to reconceptualise the relationship and highlight communalities, cross-overs, and cross-fertilisation between disciplines. And some of these attempts have gone a long way to inspiring fruitful interdisciplinary debates. Jerome Kagan, for example, examines the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities as “three cultures” and explores their interrelated struggles to “impose distinct meaning networks on their important concepts and […] compete with each other for dominance” (Kagan 2009, 6). Meanwhile, prominent proponents of the ‘one culture’ model, such as George Levine, do not negate important differences between the disciplines but rather “attempt to consider ways in which literature and science might indeed be embraced in the same discourse, ways in which they have been so embraced” (Levine 1987, 3). As Levine emphasises: “The ‘one culture’ is not a unified science and literature” (4; original emphasis). Rather, as he goes on to explain, it is one culture in the following two senses: first, any developments and events in science affect everything else, including literature, and, second, both participate in a similar manner in “the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them” (5–6). His is thus not an argument for collapsing the distinctiveness of science and literature into one indiscriminate ‘culture,’ but for identifying points of discursive convergence. And in this respect, Levine points out, “it is important to consider precisely how they do, why

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they do, whether the convergence is fortuitous, whether it can lead to important illuminations, to something like real dialogue, to genuine ‘influence’” (4). This collection of essays is less concerned with dialogic ‘influence’—all texts explicitly represent and thus are obviously ‘influenced’ by scientific topics and practices—and we are similarly cautious about presupposing a ‘convergence’ of science and literature. Instead, the notion of ‘connectivity’ brackets the debate of however many culture(s) we should use as theoretical frames of investigation and allows for a looser, and thus more permissible, idea of actual and possible connections of science and literature. The idea of connectivities is particularly important in the area of globalisation: “Most frequently, in the twenty-first century, discussions of globalization emerge from the perception of an unprecedented critical mass of interconnectedness across the world. Equally, seminal descriptions of globalization suggest that many of the key terms hinge on the belief in a growing escalation of this interconnectedness” (Childs and Green 2013, 1; original emphasis). The immense critical interest in globalisation and research into contemporary culture has found expression in a renewed focus on cosmopolitanism (Leggett and Venezia 2015; Schoene 2009; Shaw 2017) and theoretical concepts such as the planetary (Heise 2008) and cosmodernism (Moraru 2011, 2016). These are all linked by an inherent concern with the globe and a sense of connectedness through shared ethical responsibility. This understanding of ethical connectivity differs from the technical-spatial connectivities offered by forms of (data or human) travel and communication. Accordingly, in a recent study of contemporary fiction, Daniel Lea contrasts “the Internet’s architecture of connectivity” which reveals “its limitations as a tool of connection” (Lea 2017, 21) with another kind, namely “the duty of care that comes with humanness” (20). Christian Moraru’s notion of cosmodernism similarly proposes the period after 1989 to be characterised by relationality, or what he calls “being-in-relation, with another” (Moraru 2011, 2). Such relationality is manifested in fictional narratives as an identity that is always created in relation to a wider context, surpassing the geopolitical and cultural limits of the USA, Moraru’s area of focus. Cosmodernism’s inherent ethical investment marks its disparity, or rather its onwards progression, from postmodernism—implicitly understood as a more socially disengaged, merely aesthetic practice—and offers a “rationale and vehicle for a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious and other boundaries” (5).

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The concept of connectivity is also commonly evoked to refer to a technological environment that can now be taken for granted as a, more or less, global phenomenon: the Internet, which offers greater than ever access to scientific ‘knowledge,’ connections, and circulation. Not least, and importantly for ethical considerations, significant parts of interactions between humans take place in the digital world and some may even turn out to involve human as well as non-human interlocutors. Literary texts probe how such new connectivities shape twenty-first-century narrations of the human and humanity and their relations to reality. In his introduction to twenty-first-century fiction, Peter Boxall stresses the role of technology in questioning who we are: “The destabilisation of the category of the human is also fuelled over this time by developments in technology— in biotechnology as well as in computing and information technology— developments which of course fed into the philosophical and theoretical environment” (Boxall 2013, 88). Considering literary engagements with new technological forms and global relations, Boxall notes that texts contrast these with specific, material environments: “There is, in the fiction of the new century […] a strikingly new attention to the nature of our reality—its materiality, its relation to touch, to narrative and to visuality” (10). Daniel Lea similarly identifies materiality as one of the recurrent concerns in the twenty-first century: Interpreted in the broadest sense of the relationships between the physical stuff of the world and the individuals with whom it comes into contact, materiality is a strikingly recurrent concern of these novelists. This is perhaps most evidently articulated in response to the liquefaction and virtualisation of social relations that has rendered the physical dimension so abstract in the digital age. On what levels of communication does the physical heft of touch operate in a world where interaction is increasingly mediated by technology? (Lea 2017, 18)

The craving for materiality and reality that scholars detect in twenty-first-­ century fiction is also discernible in a shift from postmodernist playfulness to a new seriousness and realism, a currently widely discussed change in narratology and related fields. In 1998, Charles Altieri noted: “all the instruments agree that ‘postmodernism’ is no longer a vital concept for the arts” (Altieri 1998, 1). Similarly, four years later Linda Hutcheon challenged theorists to find new descriptive terms for twenty-first-century writing, after firmly declaring postmodernism to be “over” (Hutcheon

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2002, 166), even though, she admitted, “its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism” (181). And this observation still holds true over a decade later, as the readings in this volume demonstrate. The pressures of the twenty-first century induce a turn away from playful experimentation with style and form, the proliferation of possibilities and worlds, and the questioning of objective truth, reason, and morality: many writers and other artists in the new millennium feel a need to move away from postmodernism and towards regaining sincerity and authenticity (see Hoydis 2019; Lea 2017; Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 2011). Where David Shields asks to respond to this “reality hunger” (2010), in his commonly evoked ‘manifesto’ of the same title, with ‘more authentic’ literary forms such as life writing or the essay, Boxall summarises for fiction more broadly: “one can see the emergence of new kinds of realism, a new set of formal mechanisms with which to capture the real, as it offers itself as the material substrate of our being in the world” (Boxall 2013, 10). This newly realist writing engages with the factual, the material, and the immediacy of things without merely returning to the style of classic nineteenth-century realism.2 Rather, as Ulka Anjaria argues, realist fiction contains an “inbuilt paradox”—claiming allegiance to reality as well as to the ‘unreal,’ imaginative nature of fiction—that ensures that “21st-century realism is not a finished mode, but one perennially in progress” (Anjaria 2017) and thus constitutes an apt approach to explore the unfolding millennium. Anjaria also helpfully examines the interrelations of notions of realism and connectivity. Twenty-first-century realism sheds new light, so she claims, on the question: “What is the relationship of literature to a world defined both by connectivity and fragmentation?” (Anjaria 2017). That is, a world characterised by the constant possibility of connecting with each other online and the disconnection of actual, physical lives. Meanwhile literary critic James Wood deplores a proliferation of relations and connectivities in literature that, so he argues, do not realistically represent reality and result in unconvincing stories abounding with seemingly coincidental but connected events: “what above all makes these stories unconvincing is precisely their very profusion, their relatedness. […] Yet it is the relatedness of these stories that their writers seem most to cherish, and to propose as an absolute value. An endless web is all they need for meaning” (Wood 2000). Wood contrasts connectedness with reality, humanity, and life, arguing that connectivity plasters over a lack of humanity and realism: “since the characters in these novels are not really alive, not fully human,

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their connectedness can only be insisted on,” rather than convincingly be shown (Wood 2000). Critical of Wood’s view and his celebration of nineteenth-­century representations of character, Anjaria proposes twenty-­ first-­century realism to be not postmodernist, because it is receptive to the real conditions of the world it tries to represent, nor is it naively or nostalgically realist, because rather than hold a stable set of values as a response to the world, it refuses the formal closure characteristic of 19th-century realism in order to represent a reality constantly in flux. (Anjaria 2017)

The concept of connectivity can help us grasp this state of taking account of connections to the real and, on the other hand, exploring possibilities and likelihoods, which means staying open to and cultivating the capacity for connectivity; both aspects are of particular relevance for representations of science in contemporary narratives. The discussion of a possible return to or the reworking of realism leads to another key concept in this collection, temporal connectivities, particularly between the twenty-first century and the Victorian period or literary modernism of the early twentieth century. While Anglophone literature on both sides of the Atlantic has a strong long-standing tradition of historical fiction, Britain has seen a particular boom of the genre over the past two decades: successful examples, to name but a few, include the works of Hilary Mantel and a general upsurge of Neo-Victorian and Neo-Edwardian novels and TV series such as Sherlock Holmes, Penny Dreadful, Ripper Street, Downton Abbey, and Mr. Selfridge. Neo-Victorian scholar Marie-­ Louise Kohlke suggests that the popularity of the genre is based “less on its historical accuracy than in its receptivity to ‘reverse projections’ of contemporary consciousness” (2015, 12), echoing a general function of historical fiction as a dual means of escape from and response to the contemporary (see also Miller 2011). Once more it appears that it is primarily the resurging concern with the ethical that reasserts itself in new fictions set in the past. Identifying temporality and “a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history” as one of the main topical and aesthetic concerns in twenty-first-century literature, Peter Boxall notes how this trend is explicitly linked to “a new sense of a responsibility to material historical forces that constrain or shape the fictional imagination” (2013, 41–2; original emphasis).

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While there is consensus on these emerging topics and discussions across recent studies, a focus on how they relate to science in fiction is still missing. This volume addresses this gap. It ties in with studies of ­twenty-­first-­century fiction, but resolves one of the typically lamented issues, the obvious problem of dealing with a very wide, heterogeneous and yet hard to categorise field, by narrowing it down to fictions engaging with a topic included in all recent collections: science. Considering the above, we might ask how the current engagement with the Victorian and modernist periods relates to fictional representations of science and is juxtaposed with the typically speculative view of science fiction, the genre that carries the connection between science and literature in its very name. Damien Walter identifies an emerging genre that is “not science fiction [… or] realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between” (Walter 2014) and proposes to use the term “transrealism,” as established by Rudy Rucker in the early 1980s. Transrealist texts, so Walter explains, are firmly rooted in reality while introducing a single fantastic idea: this does not allow for the comforts of confirming a stable reality or offering escapism but creates the disconcerting sense that “reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent” (Walter 2014). Where Walter maintains that science fiction and mainstream literature “are increasingly hard to separate” (Walter 2014), science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes the related argument that wild speculations about scientific and technological inventions that characterised his genre in the early twentieth century are no longer possible today, as our lives are so saturated by science and technology that any speculation turns out to be reality already: I think I do science fiction because I feel like if you’re going to write realism about our time, science fiction is simply the best genre to do it in. This is because we’re living in a big science fiction novel now that we all co-write together. […] You write science fiction and you’re actually writing about the reality that we’re truly in, and that’s what novels ought to do. (Robinson 2015)

These being perspicuous observations, Robinson also reflects on the relation of science fiction to the ethical: “‘Science’ implies the world of fact and what we all agree on seems to be true in the natural world. ‘Fiction’ implies values and meanings, the stories we tell to make sense of things.” Robinson points out that it can seem impossible to simultaneously describe the facts of the world as it is and to imagine how it ought to be. Yet, as

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Robinson continues, “here is a genre that claims to be a kind of ‘fact-­ values’ reconciliation, a bridge between the two. Can it be? Well, no, not really—but it can try” (Robinson 2015). A number of contributions in this volume examine how literary representations of science identify connectivities between facts and values and try to balance ethical responsibilities to the real and to the imaginary. More generally speaking, the ten chapters in this collection ask how, why, and to what effects fictional writing about science returns to realist modes and to the past, and examine how twenty-first-century novels, poetry, film, and drama engage with tensions between facts and values, realism and speculation, views of the past and visions of the future. In Part I, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities,’ five chapters engage with the place of the human in a web of relations and a reorientation of fiction’s allegiances to reality and speculation. The authors examine the role of science and technology in questioning and redefining the human from various angles, including consequences of the biomedical sciences, genetic modifications, and new technologies that redefine reading practices. The first two chapters note a shift from focusing on immaterial mental states to exploring effects of science and technology on the material brain, and analyse literary explorations of ways in which science and technology shape human subjectivity, what has been considered its corporeal ‘seat’ in the brain, and our understanding of relations between them. Natalie Roxburgh’s “The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction” studies representations of drugs and medications during and after ‘the decade of the brain’ when attention shifted from the subjective experience of the mind to the physical structure of the brain. Roxburgh compares postmodernist novels with those written in a style of new realism, thus engaging on the level of form with a shift in focus from subjective experience to objective materiality, concluding that recent psychopharmacological novels employ and reflect a move towards more realist modes of representation. Roxburgh further uses these texts to explore the idea that science and technology in the twenty-first-century “risk society” (Ulrich Beck) can be grasped with the logic of the pharmakon that is both remedy and poison. Chapter 3 by Julius Greve, “Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle,” asks about the place of cognition and technology in contemporary fiction and argues for “a conceptual shift from psycho- to neuropathology.” A main reason he identifies for such a shift is the “convergence of today’s technologies of cognition and the network paradigm”: the sense that ‘everything is

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connected’ that is intricately interwoven with the use of technology. Examining two popular fictional explorations of cognition and technology, Greve’s chapter engages with the threats and opportunities of connectivities in the twenty-first century. The next two contributions turn to the role of scientific theories and new technologies on narrative design and reading practices. Both interrogate the potential role of new media to frame new narratives. Chapter 4, “New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction” by Kanta Dihal, focuses on how texts use theories in quantum physics to challenge the concept of identity and open new possibilities of narration, focalisation, plot, and structure. Comparing printed texts with the iOS app Arcadia (2015) by Iain Pears, Dihal speculates that the new media provide opportunities for further narrative innovations. Where this chapter concludes that the potential of new media, for example for interactive narratives, has not been fully explored in narratives engaging with quantum physics, the following contribution examines the close connections of technology and changing reading practices in digital poetry. In Chapter 5, “Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body,” Paola Carbone discusses digital poems that reconfigure the main features of concrete poetry and draw attention to reading as an active, sensual process. Identifying a new focus on the physicality of text and on the inclusion of the human body in digital poetry, Carbone’s contribution shows not only that technology disconnects us from material reality when it “recede[s] behind the computer screen” (Lea 2017, 19) but that it can also create new connectivities between body and text. The final chapter in this section, Pia Balsmeier’s “Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation,” refocuses human connectivities explicitly onto the notion of the ‘human’ and its ontological and ethical limits by exploring the role of biotechnology in the conceptualisation of collective identity as a (post)human(ist) society. Following a careful mapping of different currents in thinking about the posthuman, Balsmeier focuses on fictional texts from North America that explore how the most widespread form of biotechnology, namely genetically modified food, affects human identities. Analysing novels by Atwood and Ozeki, Balsmeier examines how anthropocentric and essentialist views on identity, race, gender, and family can be overcome by more valuable connectivities based on elective affiliations.

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Part II, “Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,” continues the concern with ethical issues and scientific progress, yet the examples discussed here share a strong link to history rather than to speculative futures. Chapters 7 and 8 both engage with the pervasive, ongoing fascination with the Victorian age, with the lives and discoveries of nineteenth-century scientists, and the impact of the era’s gendered and racialised politics on the contemporary imagination. First, Paul Hamann traces genealogies of genetics in two British science novels, Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, employing these examples to identify the historicising of scientific knowledge and practice as a new trend in the history of the novel. He argues that the foregrounding of scientific historical difference in Mawer’s and Byatt’s texts reflects the central tenet of twentieth-century philosophy of science that scientific epistemology is historically specific. At the same time, Hamann uncovers the novels’ engagements with past genetic practice as a critique of genetics in the twenty-first century. Exploring the literary forms through which the two novels historicise genetic science, this chapter adds an original perspective to the question of how the aesthetics of texts informs and is informed by their investigation of scientific epistemology. This is followed by Elizabeth Gilbert’s analysis of British writer Frances Hardinge’s genre-poaching young adult novel The Lie Tree, a fusion of Gothic, Neo-Victorian, fantasy, and detective fiction. Set just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the narrative details the female protagonist’s struggle for scientific knowledge and truth against the confines of gender stereotypes and popular pseudo- or anti-­scientific beliefs. While these two contributions testify to lasting legacies of the Victorian era in current representations of science, modernism and the violent ruptures of the early twentieth century up to the Second World War provide a rival source of imagination and raise, if anything, even more haunting ethical questions. Moving from prose fiction to film, in Chapter 9, Norbert Schaffeld analyses Matthew Brown’s 2015 The Man Who Knew Infinity from a postcolonial vantage point. This maths film, indicative of the current popularity of biopics and other forms of life writing, explores a commonly fictionalised phase in the history of mathematics, focusing on the encounter of two scientific ‘geniuses,’ Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the latter’s tragically short life. The film’s postcolonial stance, Schaffeld argues, makes use of temporal connectivities by reinvesting the spatio-temporal frame of early twentieth-century academic culture with today’s problems of racism and institutional exclusion. It furthermore poses questions about the genre and truth claims of contemporary historical fiction.

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Similarly set in the early twentieth century is Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the example under scrutiny in Chapter 10. Simon de Bourcier’s analysis of Pynchon’s complex text focuses on its entangled relationship with both modernism and postmodernism, presenting a twenty-first-­ century aesthetic fusion that is as yet hard to fully grasp. De Bourcier suggests that the novel’s narrative aesthetics conforms, in fact, to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of metamodernism. In his reading of central scenes and the author’s engagement with the technological and ideological contexts of modernism, Futurism, and Fascism, de Bourcier employs Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and the ‘obscene object’ of postmodernity, as well as theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler. The final chapter, “Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone,” tackles the realm of contemporary stagings of the history and ethics of science. Ellen Moll applies theories by feminist technoscience philosophers Karen Barad, Katie King, and Donna Haraway to the 2012 play The Forbidden Zone by Duncan Macmillan and Katie Mitchell. Her reading shows how the play employs experimental theatrical techniques, including live cinema, to explore the ethical-political ramifications of chemical weapons research and its relationship to sexism and other forms of oppression. Focusing on the lives of historical figures Clara Immerwahr and her granddaughter Claire Haber, the play presents science as firmly tied to the notion of a modernity defined by apocalypse, forcing the audience, as Moll suggests, into an awareness of what Katie King termed “pastpresents,” an examination of the mutually constructing nature of past and present. The ongoing representations of science, scientists, and scientific practice with which the ten chapters in this volume engage are indicative of the fact that new developments in science and technology continue to change our life-world, the way humans interact with each other, and how they understand themselves and their place among other beings and in the world. This collection investigates what concepts, forms, and topical issues have emerged in the past few decades—not claiming to offer a complete survey, but discussing examples which suggest narrative modes and themes that we believe are of wider significance and likely to shape engagement with literature and science and the field of twenty-first-century fiction in the future. Thus, this volume is a starting point; each of the areas addressed here calls for further study: the impact of technology, digitalisation, and new media on prose, poetry, and drama, posthumanism, genetics, ­pharmacology, neuropathology, and, as always, the relation

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of science (histories) to intersectional identity politics. While not aiming for comprehensiveness—not in text selection, choice of authors, kinds of science, or in regard to aesthetic developments—it bears testimony to the unquestionable “centrality of science as knowledge, as practice and as a strong symbol of modernity” (James and Bud 2018, 386). Examining the new forms that this central interest in science takes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the volume investigates what we could call the ‘connective value’ or the value of connectivities between different aspects of twenty-first-century experience, imagination, and writing. Not least, the case studies in this collection demonstrate what Michelle Antoinette describes as “the connective medium of art itself as a vital key in forging connection” (Antoinette 2014, 23)—they reveal how fiction can forge connections between ideas, human beings, and their realities and potentialities in times past, in the present, and in times to come.

Notes 1. See, for example, the ‘Global AI Narratives’ Project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK, led by Stephen Cave and Sarah Dillon (2018–). 2. While this ‘reality hunger’ is associated with a re-emerging desire for authenticity as a rejection of falsity and ‘fake news,’ Frederic Jameson rightly reminds us of the problem of defining what is actually meant by a ‘return’ to realism, that is, to what realism is supposed to be opposed here, for example, romance, modernism, idealism, or fantasy (see Jameson 2015, 2). See also Birke and Butter (2013) on the renewed critical interest in realism in contemporary art and culture and debates on what is perceived as realist work.

Works Cited Altieri, Charles (1998). Postmodernisms Now. Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Anjaria, Ulka (2017). “Twenty-First-Century Realism.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. July 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.194. 10 Nov. 2018. Antoinette, Michelle (2014). “Introduction Part 2.” Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making. Eds. Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner. Canberra: Australian National University Press. 23–46. Birke, Dorothee and Stella Butter (2013). “Introduction.” Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations. Eds. Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. 1–12.

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Boxall, Peter (2013). Twenty-First Century Fiction. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, Manuel (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. New  York: Blackwell. Childs, Peter and James Green (2013). Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels. London: Bloomsbury Academic. “connectivity.” (2018). Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster. Web. 26 Nov. 2018. Crossland, Rachel (2018). Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D.  H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engelhardt, Nina (2018). Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fitch, John G. (2018). The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures’. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Habinek, Lianne (2018). The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Halpin, Jenni G. (2018). Contemporary Physics Plays Making Time to Know Responsibility. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot. Heise, Ursula K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henderson, Andrea K. (2018). Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoydis, Julia (2015). “Introduction to 21st Century Studies.” (Special issue) Anglistik 26.2: 5–14. ———. (2019). “Realism for the Post-Truth Era: Politics and Storytelling in Recent Fiction and Autobiography of Salman Rushdie.” Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Anglophone Narratives. Eds. Jan Alber and Alice Bell. EJES 23.2: (forthcoming). Hutcheon, Linda (2002). The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. James, Frank A.J.L. and Robert Bud (2018). “Epilogue: Science after Modernity.” Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century. Eds. Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach. London: UCL Press. 386–393. Jameson, Fredric (2015). The Antinomies of Realism. London and New York: Verso. Johns-Putra, Adeline (2016). “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WIREs Climate Change 7: 266–282. . 10 Nov. 2018. Kagan, Jerome (2009). The Three Cultures; Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kohlke, Marie-Louise (2015). Twenty-First-Century British Fiction. Eds. Bianca Leggett and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi. Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lea, Daniel (2017). Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leggett, Bianca and Tony Venezia, eds. (2015). Twenty-First-Century British Fiction. Canterbury: Gylphi. Levine, George (1987). “Introduction. One Culture: Science and Literature.” One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature. Ed. George Levine, with help from Alan Rauch. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 3–33. Miller, Laura (2011). “How Novels Came to Terms with the Internet.” The Guardian. 15 Jan. . 10 Nov. 2018. Moraru, Christian (2011). Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ———. (2016). “Postmodernism, Cosmodernism, Planetarism.” The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature. Eds. Brian McHale and Len Platt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 480–496. Robinson, Kim Stanley (2015). Interview with Richard Lea. “Science Fiction: the Realism of the 21st Century”. The Guardian. 7 Aug. . 10 Nov. 2018. Rocamora, Carol (2000). “Scientific Dramaturgy.” The Nation. 5 June. 49–51. Roth, Marco (2009). “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” N+1 Magazine. 8. . 10 Nov. 2018. Schaffeld, Norbert, ed. (2016). “Aspects of the Science Novel.” (Special Issue) Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ZAA 64.2. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew (2017). “Climate Change Fiction.” American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010. Ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 309–321. Schoene, Berthold (2009). The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shields, David (2010). Reality Hunger. A Manifesto. London: Penguin. Shaw, Kristian (2017). Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Sielke, Sabine (2015). “Science Studies and Literature.” Anglia 133.1: 9–21. . 10 Nov. 2018. Tougaw, Jason (2017). Electric Lit. 9 Oct. 10 Nov. 2018. ———. (2018). The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Tondre, Michael (2018). The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Trexler, Adam (2015). Anthropocene Fiction. The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press. Vermeulen, Timotheus and van den Akker, Robin (2010). “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2.1: 1–14. . 10 Nov. 2018. ———. (2011). “Metamodernism, History, and the Story of Lampe.” After Postmodernism. Eds. Rachel MagShamhráin and Sabine Strümper-Krobb. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre. 25–40. Walter, Damien (2014). “Transrealism: the First Major literary Movement of the 21st Century.” The Guardian. 24 Oct. . 10 Nov. 2018. Wood, James (2000). “Human, All too Inhuman. On the Formation of a New Genre: Hysterical Realism.” The New Republic. 24 July. . 10 Nov. 2018.

CHAPTER 2

The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction Natalie Roxburgh

This chapter surveys narrative fiction published since the 1980s that incorporates discourses from psychopharmacology, and it explores the way drugs and medications are represented, usually within the context of biomedicine, often through field-specific concepts. While fiction has explored drugs and drug effects since the nineteenth century in a dedicated way (Vice et al. 1994) and even much earlier if one accounts for more casual representations, recent works take seriously the science of how drugs work on the brain—the drug action—in unprecedented ways. These works of fiction draw on culturally authoritative research that became salient during the 1980s and 1990s, a period referred to as ‘the decade of the brain,’ which increasingly emphasized the physical structure of the brain rather than the subjective experience of the mind. This turn to thinking about the material brain is also part of what has been called ‘the cognitive turn,’ which has as much to do with developments in the sciences of mind as it does with the new cultural authority afforded to them. The pharmacological sciences offer particularly interesting fodder for contemporary fiction because the object of inquiry—the drug—is somewhere between science and technology, a medicinal substance and a product of manufacture. This opens up

N. Roxburgh (*) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_2

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questions about the mind versus the brain, medical treatment versus optimization, the risk of addiction, and the question of what it means to be a natural human. These questions are taken up in fiction whose style ranges from postmodern to post-postmodern to realist, and in each case these works raise important issues about the role of science in society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anglophone literature might be said to have always reflected on the effects of ingesting drugs, which can  be defined as material entities, or products of manufacture, that have the capacity to transform the way the user thinks or feels. One might look at the function of mead in Beowulf or at the various plants and apothecary’s concoctions in Shakespeare’s works. This topic seems to pick up literary momentum in the eighteenth century, when early globalization allows for the wider distribution of products such as coffee, tobacco, and opium, as represented in works such as Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1736) or a century later in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). In the nineteenth century, drugs and their effects can be found throughout poetry, drama, and fiction. For example, in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), opium and its effects are integral to the plot. In the oeuvre of George Eliot, the effects of opium and alcohol are represented throughout. In the twentieth century, drugs are even more prevalent in literature, and are often associated with control of subjects in the dystopian futures of science fiction and speculative fiction, what John Hickman has called the “drug dystopia” (Hickman 2009, 141). This includes works such as Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World (1932), Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day (1992), and Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird (1980). In the twentieth century, drugs are also associated with the hedonistic experimentations of the counter-­culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1980s, however, a different interest in drugs has found its way into fiction, which mirrors a general public focus on the natural sciences. What interests me is the way recent novels—works from all over the literary marketplace—take seriously the sciences of mind when they refer to drugs. During and after the ‘decade of the brain’ and  the ‘cognitive turn,’ understanding human experience through the mind gave way to examining the material structures of the brain. This newer form of cultural authority, I would like to propose, is explored in the way recent novels handle the drug experience. What seems to go along with the rise of more realistic or plausible depictions of scientist characters in contemporary fiction in the past few decades (cf. Kirchhofer and Roxburgh 2016) is an

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even sharper focus on pharmacology,  which is explicitly tied to medical discourses but also transcends them. Recent works of fiction spell out in greater detail the way  various chemical substances  work on the human brain and the particular uses to which such substances can be put. While one might also turn to contemporary drama and poetry to examine this trend (e.g. Lucy Prebble’s 2012 play The Effect), many novels published since the 1980s incorporate discourses of psychopharmacology, exploring drugs/medications as material entities that have a material (or chemical) effect on the brain. In this way, these works emphasize society at large less so than the drug dystopia and instead focus on the ways in which drugs transform human consciousness. Because of the modern novel’s tendency to represent particular perspectives as well as qualities of mind or subjective experience (Armstrong 1987, 4), the shift in cultural authority accompanying the cognitive turn has allowed for formal innovation as well as a new emphasis at the level of content. Indeed, these works have much in common with what critics have called the contemporary “neuronovel,” or fiction that has concerned itself with the material brain (Johnson 2008, 169). Further, this newer emphasis on the sciences of mind allows for a philosophical and also pragmatic assessment of the role played by psychopharmacological substances (and the science behind them) in contemporary culture. It also carries forth a tendency since the nineteenth century of pondering the cultural impact of neurological discoveries (cf. Stiles 2007, 6), focusing on the relationship between the brain and the body as an explanation for psychic maladies next to individual perspectives oriented around what human minds are like (cf. Zunshine 2006, 4). Owing to the attention to both drug action and drug effect, I propose calling these works examples of ‘pharmacological fiction.’ Included in this category are novels such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984–5), Arthur Hailey’s Strong Medicine (1984), Walter Kirn’s Thumbsucker (1999), Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields (2001), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Gerard Donovan’s Doctor Salt (2005), Dirk Wittenborn’s Pharmakon (2008), Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011), Christopher Herz’s Pharmacology (2011), and Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion (2012). For the purposes of this chapter, I have selected five examples— White Noise, The Corrections, Doctor Salt, Pharmakon, and State of Wonder—to demonstrate that despite very different styles and positions on the literary marketplace, what these works have in common is an

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interest in psychopharmacology that goes beyond what previous works of fiction have achieved by more emphatically exploring the scientific aspects of drugs. In so doing, they register what is at stake in a “risk society” (cf. Beck et al. 1994), particularly by honing the logic of the pharmakon.

Psychopharmacology and the Pharmakon Assessing fiction that has reflected on biopolitics in recent decades, Arne de Boever’s monograph Narrative Care has proposed a pharmacological theory of the novel (de Boever 2013, 4). In his corpus, ranging from the works of J.M.  Coetzee to Kazuo Ishiguro, de Boever examines the way contemporary fiction engages a Derridean concept of the pharmakon. In Jacques Derrida’s reading of Plato, published in English in 1981 with the title “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the pharmakon is linked to both writing and the drug substance. Derrida discusses the way Plato responds to the notion that writing (like a drug) is simultaneously a remedy and a poison. Indeed, this dual function and definition is encapsulated in the Greek word pharmakon. He writes: “Plato is suspicious of the pharmakon in general, even in the case of drugs used exclusively for therapeutic ends, even when they are wielded with good intentions, and even when they are as such effective. There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial” (Derrida 1981, 99). The pharmakon is both a solution for a particular problem and the instigator of other problems. Like many critics in the poststructuralist tradition following the work of both Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, de Boever uses the concept of the pharmakon figuratively: He focuses on the definition of the term that has to do with writing and then uses this logic to consider the self-reflective meaning of biological care in literary fiction. In what follows, I will take the concept of the pharmakon more literally: as the chemical substance—the drug—discovered or produced by scientific procedures whose particular use corrects a particular problem but then produces other problems in need of correction. It is in this way that the philosophical notion of the pharmakon can be used to specify the risk inherent in drugs, as this risk can be defined in relation to questions such as tolerance, withdrawal, and side effects. The types of novels I am describing will thus share certain similarities with the logic de Boever outlines even while their style and content may differ. The concept of the pharmakon helps one to register the nature of risk in modern society. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash have characterized the modern world as a “risk society,” which they argue is

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tied to a need to reassess progress at every step. The benefits of science and technology have shaped the modern world, they say, but they have also produced new risks. Modernity is forced to assume a reflexive posture, having to respond constantly to the “unforeseeable and irresponsible consequences” of technological processes (Beck et al. 1994, 11). Following literary critics such as Ursula Heise (2004), who has looked at chemical substances in fiction within the context of a risk society, I examine drugs as material entities that work on the material brain, which creates a potential for both the production of risk and the alleviation of problems. Owing to this structural ambivalence, it would seem that a materialist understanding of drugs complements the poststructuralist notion of the pharmakon: the remedy that is also always already a poison (definite and indefinite articles matter here). Furthermore, the pharmakon serves as a microcosm for the concept of the risk society and the way scientific discoveries and technological developments are embedded within it. While some novels I am examining feature fictional substances, others represent actual drugs on the market that are already approved by regulatory authorities. What all of the novels have in common is a reference to the science of the way drugs interact with the brain (albeit to varying degrees). Many feature the representation of scientific drug trials (or refer to ones that have already taken place). And all attempt to explain the pharmacodynamics (the initial effect of the drug on the brain) and even sometimes the pharmacokinetics (the movement of chemicals within a body) of the substances in question.

Dylar: Representing the Pharmakon Don DeLillo’s White Noise (WN) (published in 1984–5) features a fictional substance called Dylar, which is developed to treat the user’s symptom of fearing death, from which protagonist Jack Gladney and his wife Babette both suffer. Babette has been taking Dylar secretly, as a sort of informal trial subject for an institution called Gray Research. When Jack discovers Dylar in his household and confronts Babette about her secret use of the substance, she tells him that the people at Gray Research “isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain” and that “Dylar speeds relief to that sector” (WN 200). Here, the novel engages with a discourse that would have been new in the 1980s through the advent of the New Psychiatry, which had abandoned psychodynamic models of treatment for what it perceived to be a more scientific form of medicine. The New

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Psychiatry can be seen as part of the cognitive turn, as it sought to treat a chemically imbalanced brain with the right drugs rather than attending to a troubled mind. White Noise is written as if it wanted to fictionalize “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and it responds to the poststructuralist approach to the pharmakon first and foremost. The initial impulse to ingest Dylar, the drug in question, is the fear of death, which has become medicalized in the novel. Derrida writes, “The fear of death is what gives all witchcraft, all occult medicine, a hold. The pharmakeus is banking on that fear” (Derrida 1981, 120). A  page after the previous quotation, Derrida writes, “The counterspell, the exorcism, the antidote, is dialectics” (121). White Noise’s posing of science-and-society questions through the representation of the drug action and drug effects of Dylar at first mirrors the poststructuralist abandonment of a ground—or a viable grand narrative—for establishing objective knowledge: In the end, the drug’s effects are unknown, as the novel forecloses on the possibility of scientific truth. The novel’s inherently heteroglossic structure (Bakhtin 1981, 273), its weaving together of various discourses on technology, culture, history, and psychopharmacology, nonetheless takes seriously the drug as a poison that is also the remedy. That is to say, through a dialectical strategy, the novel concerns itself with the problem of the pharmakon by turning  the question of how and whether the drug works into a discourse, following the Derridean logic through to its end. The supposed technological precision of the medication compels psychopharmacologist Winnie Richards to say it makes her “proud to be an American” because America “lead[s] the world in stimuli” (WN 189). This cynical quotation conflates the stimulus that is medicinal with others, such as entertainment, signaling the novel’s postmodern style and stance. Following Mr. Gray’s advice, Babette becomes convinced that the drug will treat her fear of death because she has come to believe that “[w]e’re the sum of our chemical impulses” (WN 200), and a chemical brain mechanism has been posited as the source of her symptoms. What allows Dylar to be considered medically legitimate is a scientific theory that emotions such as fear can be reduced fundamentally to their materiality in order to be treated. Chemical problems have chemical cures, these discourses suggest. These notions are complicated later in the novel, especially in the section called “Dylarama.” As Heise points out, White Noise presents an all-­ pervasive technological apparatus that governs its plot (Heise 2004, 748),

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such as  an “airborne toxic event,” and it  also  draws attention to other drugs like “[b]lood pressure pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin,” all of which Jack describes as “[r]un of the mill” (WN 62). The fear of death is shown to be not only a simple chemical imbalance but also a produced symptom of contemporary American life. That is to say, the initial medical problem is shown to be a result of technological developments writ large, drugs being merely one example. And yet, the pharmacological discourses in the novel suggest that there is a single material—or chemical—cause: a brain problem. This tension—two explanations for the fear of death, and two interpretations of the function of Dylar in treating it—is key to understanding how pharmacological substances relate to a risk society, in which problems and solutions come from the same source. This tension is explored through the problematic way Dylar works. Dylar’s drug effects transform the user in ways that are difficult to ascertain; the reader is left wondering whether Babette’s symptoms preceded her taking the medication or if they result from it. The fictional drug’s intended effects, its withdrawal effects, and its side effects are difficult to demarcate, not least because the novel points to many other possible factors, mostly having to do with new technologies. The causes of both symptoms and side effects are presented as over-determined, even while the materiality of Dylar—and the materiality of the brain—is taken seriously by the novel: The drug produces some kind of effect on the user’s brain, and some side effects (including memory loss and, in Mr. Gray’s case when he overdoses, the conflation of words and things) are experienced. But it is never clear whether the drug cures the user’s fear of death. While it might seem that this stance on pharmacological knowledge is fundamentally anti-science, a similar view was expressed in Irving Kirsch’s systematic analysis of drug trials, published in 2009. Anti-depressants, to sum up Kirsch’s work, work largely because of the placebo effect. And yet, “[a]ccording to drug companies, more than 80 percent of depressed patients can be treated successfully by antidepressants. Claims like this made these medications one of the most widely prescribed class of prescription drugs in the world, with global sales that make it a $19-billion-­ayear industry” (Kirsch 2009, 3). That is to say, since the publication of White Noise, the issue of whether drug trials are disinterested scientific experiments or rife with the cognitive biases inherent to interested Big Pharma has been put on the table for discussion. What I want to emphasize here is the way the novel, which is usually read as being full of postmodern symbols of cynicism and inauthenticity (cf. Buell 2001, 51),

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nonetheless engages socially significant issues, critically evaluating the risk inherent in psychopharmacological practice by representing it through the aforementioned Derridean logic. The pharmaceutical is also the pharmakon, and the solution is to place the pharmakon’s effects in a dialectical structure so they can be critically evaluated.

Corecktall: Pharmakon as Commodity A material understanding of drugs and the science behind them informs Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections (TC), as well. This novel not only refers to medications and drugs actually on the market, such as Xanax, anti-depressants, and street drugs, but also to fictional substances, such as Corecktall, a medication that seems to be a ‘magic bullet’ said to relieve ailments from many forms of illness, including Parkinson’s. In addition, a drug called Aslan, described at one point as a ‘personality optimizer,’ plays a role. Aslan, which the matriarch of the Lambert family, Enid, ends up taking, is also the same chemical substance as the party drug used by her grown-up children, Chip and Denise, called Mexican A. Tellingly, by the end of the novel, the reader finds out that all three of these drugs are identical in chemical substance. This absurd coincidence is much less subtle than White Noise’s postmodern approach: It is satirical and critical in exposing the gap between how we are told drugs should work (as particular solutions to specific afflictions) and how they actually work (as producing a general effect that might be interpreted differently depending on the context or on the questions one is asking). The Corrections also represents multiple discourses in doing so, including the perspective of a pharmacologist who works on developing the drug for a corporation. The Corrections satirizes contemporary medical practice when Enid and Alfred go on a cruise and Enid must go to the ship’s doctor, Dr Hibbard, in order to get help for Alfred, whose Parkinson’s condition is deteriorating. Dr Hibbard seemingly intentionally confuses her request for help with the notion that it is she herself who is suffering in some way. She attempts to correct his mistake, and he attributes this to her having a psychiatric condition. He tells her: “In fact a crippling fear of asking for Aslan is the condition for which Aslan is most commonly indicated. The drug exerts a remarkable blocking effect on ‘deep’ or ‘morbid’ shame” (TC 366). A “blocking effect” refers to what certain drugs do to neurotransmitters; they inhibit the reuptake by the presynaptic neuron (e.g. the term

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SSRI stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor). The conflation of pharmacological language with social language (shame) is striking here. The scene also serves as a parody of the depression checklist and the practice of dispensing samples: Hibbard barely listens to Enid’s self-reported answers, denying her own subjective self-understanding and overstating the influence of the material brain. It is not Enid who needs help but Alfred. Dr Hibbard ignores this and instead provides her with a chemical model for why she should take the drug: “Aslan optimizes in sixteen chemical dimensions,” he says. “Mainly that it switches your anxiety to the Off position” (TC 370). “Chemicals in your brain […] What else can it be but chemicals? What’s memory? A chemical change!” (TC 371). In the end, Enid acquiesces, believing she needs the medicine: She ignores her mind after learning about the brain. She gradually becomes chemically dependent on Aslan, and it is only because her daughter Denise has had substantial experience partying with Mexican A (the same substance, we find out) that she is able to taper down and overcome the withdrawal symptoms. When the drug manufacturer, through the spokesperson and pharmacologist Dr Eberle, provides an account of how the new drug called Corecktall works, it is also a purely chemical explanation. The Axon Corporation has isolated the right structures of the brain and has developed the drug to “make any action the patient is performing easier and more enjoyable to repeat and to sustain” (TC 277; original emphasis). Sometimes the presentation explicitly uses economic metaphors: “[A]n idle corner of the brain may be the Devil’s work-shop, […] but every idle neural pathway gets ignored by the Corecktall process. Wherever there is action, though, Corecktall is there to make it stronger! To help the rich get richer!” (TC 225; original emphasis). One can see from this statement that, even more so than White Noise, The Corrections satirizes the way that the sciences of mind—and psychopharmacology—have been appropriated for selling products, a concern that trumps medicine’s ethical imperative of ‘doing no harm.’ It does do harm—it often does damage that requires another correction, a pattern the novel explores through other examples of technology and modern culture in a way that critically assesses a risk society. And the novel also suggests that drugs are for optimization in a capitalist culture, cynically decoupling them from medicine proper. Unlike DeLillo’s leaving open the question of psychopharmacology as a form of scientific knowledge, and the question of whether the medication works to treat a natural affliction, Franzen’s post-postmodern style exposes

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what is suggested to be psychopharmacology’s essentially pseudo-scientific status:  The sciences of mind  (or at least their rhetoric) are used to sell products. And, as the reader gleans from Gary’s depression, this is to the detriment of those who suffer from a mental illness.

The Pharmakon and Psychopharmacology in Twenty-­ First-­Century Fiction In more recent fiction, the representation of psychopharmacology is similarly ambivalent. Indeed, psychopharmacology in twenty-first-century fiction mirrors what is happening in novels that incorporate knowledge from other sciences. In recent decades, works of fiction have increasingly explored scientific knowledge through narrative strategies that represent science and society concerns in plausible ways, often through complex scientist characters (Kirchhofer and Roxburgh 2016). Even if their aim is critical, recent works about psychopharmacology explore the logic of the pharmakon—and the reflexive modernity inherent in a risk society—by drawing the reader into a story world that resembles our own. The tendency to satirize and criticize pharmacology for its close alignment with profit motives rather than with the public good can also be found in Gerard Donovan’s Doctor Salt (DS), which contains a bitterly critical view of psychopharmacology. The protagonist and narrative focalizer suffers from a devastating mental illness and is currently the subject of a drug trial through a company called Pharmalak, a lucrative corporation that has managed to buy up train lines, hospitals, and other public services—an element that resembles that of The Corrections (and might be the exception to the otherwise plausible story world). As a reviewer for The Observer put it, the novel is “placed in a recognisable world, but since this world is perceived through the eyes of ‘Sunless,’ a man with complex psychological disorders, the reader is entirely at the mercy of his delusions and reality is an elusive prospect” (Merritt 2005). That is to say, the main character’s mental illness and the way he experiences drug effects govern the way the reader experiences the story world of the novel. This manifests as an unreliable narration: He is paranoid and anxious, and believes that flies are persecuting him. Since he is the narrative focalizer, the reader observes a disturbing and terrifying story world along with the protagonist. Like The Corrections and even White Noise, this novel’s psychopharmacologist and psychiatrist, Fagoon, explains the symptoms of the p ­ rotagonist

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through a material-chemical model of the brain: “At Pharmalak, our focus on mental health is the hypothalamus, a cluster of cells in the ancient part of the brain that houses our primitive instincts, where we know fear originates” (DS 86), and his drug company seeks to “find the right chemical response to anxiety” (DS 87). More so than The Corrections, the novel attempts to account for the way Sunless thinks and feels by evoking the logic of the pharmakon: It is full of fictional drug ads and disease categories that have contributed to the overmedication of the protagonist and his family members. Doctor Salt emphasizes the risk-producing side of psychopharmacology and suggests that his mental illness is, at least in part, caused by the treatment. What is striking about more recent examples of what I am calling ‘psychopharmacological fiction’ is that they explore psychopharmacology through even more realist styles. Further, not all novels about psychopharmacology are inherently critical, focusing on the risk-producing side of the pharmakon rather than the beneficial aspects. Many works thoughtfully explore the important—but also ambivalent—role played by psychopharmacology in advancing modern medicine and thereby contributing to meaningful social progress. Dirk Wittenborn’s Pharmakon, published in 2008, is part campus novel and part family narrative, and it reflects on the history of psychopharmacology from the 1950s to the present, exploring both the risks and advantages of using drugs to treat mental illness. It features two psychopharmacologist characters, Dr William Friedrich and his colleague, Dr Bunny Winton. Focalized by Friedrich’s son Zach for most of the text, the novel gives an account of Zach’s trauma as a child (he is kidnapped by a former patient of his father) and subsequent drug addictions. Zach’s problems are discussed through both a psychodynamic framework (which emphasizes the mind) and a psychopharmacological one (which emphasizes the brain). Coming to understand his father’s story in the past helps him to accept the present, and he explores his mind and his brain together in his attempt to heal himself. In the first part, the narrator (focalizing Friedrich) critically reflects on the state of psychiatry in the 1950s, condemning the frontal lobotomies that he sees in his hospital. In this way, the novel registers the real progress afforded by developments in psychopharmacology. The idea of using drugs in the middle of the twentieth century was new to science. The narrator tells us, “[i]n 1952, the six inches between one’s ears were the least explored territory on the planet. And the chemistry of feelings was thought

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by most to have as little to do with hard science as Kryptonite” (DS 34). Like in other examples of psychopharmacological fiction, “chemistry of feelings” is the emphasis. What Friedrich and Winton seek to explore in the lab is the possibility of using a drug from New Guinea, gai kau dong (GKD), to treat patients for a range of mental health problems, which could possibly keep patients out of hospitals. A key trial subject is a patient called Casper, who suffers from severe symptoms of neurosis as well as a stammer. One of the themes the novel explores is what it means to be a normal human, as Caspar and Friedrich share certain qualities of mind: “If he had to write a diagnosis for Caspar at the moment, [Friedrich] would have called him a highly functional obsessive compulsive with marginal schizophrenic tendencies. But there were times in his life when he would have diagnosed himself similarly” (DS 91). While the science is not advanced enough to prove it, Friedrich believes that Caspar’s problem is his brain: “Will scratched the back of his head. ‘It’s almost as if he lacks joy receptors’” (DS 49). Casper’s symptoms disappear while he is on the drug: He loses his stutter and becomes socially adept, seeming to support the chemical balance theory of mental illness through the way the drug works as a remedy. However, the drug is also a poison owing to its withdrawal effects. Because it is a double-blind trial, Casper does not know if he has taken GKD or a placebo. After the end of the trial, however, Casper’s behavior suddenly changes, conceivably because of withdrawal. He becomes angry, paranoid, and accusing, and ends up tragically murdering Winton and Friedrich’s youngest son. He is incarcerated and put on more drugs, including Thorazine, which “clamped a chemical governor on the magnificent engine of his mind. His brain slowed until there were no longer thoughts” (DS 167). This is the beginning of Zach’s story, as he is born after this event and is, as a child, kidnapped by Casper who has escaped from the hospital after his initial incarceration. Caspar seeks revenge by kidnapping Zach, whom he releases in a moment of bad conscience, but is then incarcerated for the rest of his life. This event drives an emotional wedge between Friedrich and Zach, who experiments with ways to self-medicate his pain for the rest of his life. The last lines of the novel feature Friedrich ruminating on the purpose of drugs, thinking of how, for example, five of his seven grandchildren are on Ritalin and “one of them snorted it” (DS 393). Drugs are ambivalent, and what is more, they tend to change in therapeutic value over time. “There had been no miracle cures. Wonder drugs for the mind came and went out

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of style like the hemlines of ladies’ skirts and the width of men’s ties” (DS 390). Sadly pondering his career and his inability to cry, the novel ends as he wonders “if there might be a way to prescribe tears” (DS 403), suggesting that the medical urge to diagnose and treat that which falls outside of a certain, somewhat narrow, range of human emotions might be at the heart of both the family problem and social problems writ large. Indeed, the use of this type of technology requires a critical assessment characteristic of reflexive modernization and a risk society. Another novel that carefully explores the possible benefits of psychopharmacology, Anne Patchett’s 2011 State of Wonder, is explicitly about the impact of financial interests on the field of pharmacology. In particular, it depicts the discovery of vaccinations and developments in  women’s reproductive health. Marina Singh, the main character and narrative focalizer, is a pharmacologist working for a drug company called Vogel. Marina herself ingests familiar medications such as Xanax, the anti-malaria drug Larium, and sleeping pills. The reader gets a sense of drug effects from Marina’s being the narrative focalizer whose perspective registers what it is like to take these drugs. Through a plot that echoes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Marina is tasked with retrieving a colleague and ‘rogue’ pharmacologist, Dr Swenson, who has gone off the grid and is no longer communicating with the company she works for. She has disappeared in the Amazon and has become integrated within the Lakashi tribe. The Lakashi people of the Amazon regularly eat a certain form of tree bark, which appears to be responsible for their being fertile well into old age. This is the basis for Dr Swenson’s official research and the fertility drug she is supposed to be developing. But, in fact, Dr Swenson’s research has revealed another secondary effect of the bark, which she considers more important: a new vaccination for malaria. This is what she is secretly researching, as it is obvious to Swenson that Vogel will not support the development of a malaria drug because they would not make money on a product that is mostly needed in poor third-world countries. She has gone off the grid in order to do research for the public good rather than for the financial interests of Vogel. The novel proposes an ecological notion of pharmacology:  The tree bark that is associated with lengthening fertility and also shown to cure malaria is also a narcotic. That is to say, these material substances have different uses and side effects depending on the questions one is asking. The reader finds out what the drug effects are like through the pharmacologist reflecting on her own experience: “Marina had begun to wonder if there

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wasn’t something mildly addictive in the funneled bark, something that kept the Lakashi women trudging back to the trees long after they were sick to death of babies […]. [T]he smallest touch of narcotic in the bark that kept the women leashed to the forest” (DS 292). “She wanted to get to the trees and back, before anyone else was out. She was fairly certain there was some other quality in the bark that no one was talking about and she knew she wasn’t going to make it through this particular day without it” (DS 314). The experience is also a bodily one: “As she touched her mouth to an already soft opening in the bark, a feeling of peace and well-­ being spread through her veins. She wondered if in fact it was really time to go at all” (DS 315). Marina discovers firsthand the way drug properties seem to have a relation to the way the Lakashi culture works: To isolate one drug effect is problematic because it ignores the constellation of attributes that bring people and plants together. A key drug experience represented in the novel is based on an actual drug, Lariam, the brand name for Melofloquine, which was approved by the FDA in 1989. This is the drug Marina uses to prepare for her trip. A side effect is strange dreams and hallucinations. The pharma company Hoffmann LaRoche stated that only about 1 in 10,000 people were estimated to experience the worst side effects. But in 2001, a randomized double-blind study done in the Netherlands was published, showing that 67 percent of people who took the drug experienced one or more adverse effects, and 6 percent had side effects so severe they required medical attention. This drug is still on the market despite its confirmed neurotoxicity (Croft 2007). State of Wonder makes a connection between the intended effect and the side effect, showing that drugs really are pharmakon: They may be intended for one use, but in the end they have effects— side effects—that go beyond what is desired. More so than White Noise and The Corrections, State of Wonder presents the two sides of the pharmakon, taking disinterested pharmacological science seriously for improving the well-being of humanity.

Conclusion: The Rise of the Psychopharmacological Novel The theme of psychopharmacology can be seen as one which bridges the gap between many types of novels—from what is called speculative fiction to popular fiction, to literary fiction and so on. Using fictional and actual medications allows for different modes of representation, with different

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levels of plausibility attached to them, to explore the role played by scientifically authorized chemicals in contemporary culture. And, if we are able to count these texts together under the category of psychopharmacological fiction, the role seems to be a fairly significant one. In each of these novels, a material and chemical understanding of the brain informs the way drugs function, and drug effects are often described, albeit to varying degrees. This allows for an ambivalent picture of psychopharmacology in contemporary cultural practice, as the discourses that propose these chemical understandings are often complicated by what happens over the course of the narrative. Moreover, psychopharmacology might be seen to stand in for larger questions about the role of science in a risk society, as the way it is represented in these novels entices us to scrutinize in existential terms why we develop and use certain technologies, registering the process of reflexive modernization. In one sense, this tradition of reflecting on drugs can be traced back to the nineteenth century. On the other hand, never before has so much attention been paid to the science of drugs. These works are not merely about individual experiences with drugs, as might have been the case in the nineteenth century. Rather, individual experience can stand in for social risk writ large, the pharmakon in the fullest sense. In the introduction to a volume on medicine and addition, F.A. Jenner writes: There is no doubt that medicine can be seen as aiming to control, or to help others to control. […] We nevertheless require literature or other guides to help us answer for what purpose, and what directions are to be valued. That requires some grasp of the phenomenology of being human, and it will not do to explain to someone that her amygdala is playing up when you mean she is anxious. (Jenner 1994, 21)

That is to say, literature offers an important complement to pharmacological knowledge because it exposes the complexity of the pharmakon in relation to particularly human questions and contexts. It is fundamentally opposed to reduction. Of course, reduction is part of scientific—and psychopharmacological—practice. This insight is also registered by psychopharmacological fiction. These novels therefore do not simply attack psychopharmacological science but instead take seriously what science and its necessity of reduction for the sake of objectivity can add to human experience. However, these novels also suggest that the questions we ask regarding what drugs do for us should be formulated around a more holistic understanding of both human and societal needs.

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Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) [1934–5]. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. M.  Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 259–422. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (1994). Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000). Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton. Buell, Lawrence (2001). Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 30–54. Collins, Wilkie (2008) [1868]. The Moonstone. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conrad, Joseph (2016) [1899]. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B.  Armstrong. New York: Norton. Croft, Ashley M. (2007). “A Lesson Learnt: The Rise and Fall of Lariam and Halfan.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 100.4: 170–174. De Boever, Arne (2013). Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. London: Bloomsbury. DeLillo, Don (1984–5). White Noise. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. De Quincey, Thomas (2013) [1821]. “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings. Ed. Robert Morrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3–79. Derrida, Jacques (1981). “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 61–172. Donovan, Gerard (2005). Doctor Salt. London: Scribner. Franzen, Jonathan (2001). The Corrections. London: Harper Perennial. Glynn, Alan (2001). The Dark Fields. London: Bloomsbury. Hailey, Arthur (1984). Strong Medicine. New York: Doubleday. Heise, Ursula K. (2004). “Toxins, Drugs, and Global System: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.” The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. 263–287. Herz, Christopher (2011). Pharmacology. Las Vegas: Amazon Encore. Hickman, John (2009). “When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia.” Utopian Studies 20.1: 141–170. Huxley, Aldous. (n.d.). Brave New World (1964). London: Chatto & Windus.

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Jenner, F.A. (1994). “Medicine and Addiction.” Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics. Eds. Sue Vice, Matthew Campbell, and Tim Armstrong. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. 18–22. Johnson, Gary (2008). “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction.” Mosaic 41.1: 169–184. Kirchhofer, Anton, and Natalie Roxburgh (2016). “The Scientist as ‘Problematic Individual’ in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64.2: 148–168. Kirn, Walter (1999). Thumbsucker. New York: Random House. Kirsch, Irving (2009). The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. London: Bodley Head, 2009. 3. Kindle Edition. Levin, Ira (1970). The Perfect Day. New York: Random House. MacLeod, Ken (2012). Intrusion. London: Little, Brown Book Group. Merritt, Stephanie (2005). “Pinch of Salt.” The Observer. 9 Jan 2005. Web. 19 Jan. 2018. Patchett, Ann (2011). State of Wonder. New York: Harper. Pope, Alexander (1998) [1712, 1736]. The Rape of the Lock. Ed. Cynthia Wall. Boston: Bedford. 50–87. Powers, Richard (2009). Generosity: An Enhancement. New York: Picador. Prebble, Lucy (2012). The Effect. London: Bloomsbury. Stiles, Anne (2007). “Introduction.” Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Houndmills: Palgrave. 1–23. Tevis, Walter (1980). Mockingbird. New York: Doubleday. Vice, Sue, Matthew Campbell, and Tim Armstrong (1994). Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Wittenborn, Dirk (2008). Pharmakon… or the Story of a Happy Family. New York, Penguin. Zunshine, Lisa (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle Julius Greve

The Marketers are taking that fateful step from training us like animals (via associative conditioning) to treating us like mechanisms. There are tremendous amounts of money to be made. (Scott Bakker, Neuropath, 378) There would be no more back rooms, no more murky deal-making. There would be only clarity, only light. (Dave Eggers, The Circle, 242)

What is the place of cognition and technology in contemporary fiction? How can twenty-first-century works of literature inform today’s readers about a given scientific paradigm concerning the issues of memory and self-awareness, of human identity and subjectivity? In what sense are these issues intertwined with the technological developments of our time,

J. Greve (*) University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_3

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which, in turn, have given rise to ever-new reading practices entailed by recent forms of novel writing? Finally, how does literature respond to the core technologies and media defining the millennial generation—namely, social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? This chapter argues that it is possible to outline a certain convergence between, on the one hand, a strong trend both in literary production and scholarship to analyze the human animal and its literary practices according to criteria dictated by the cognitive sciences and their technologies, and, on the other, a complementary discourse concerning the paradigmatic notion of “the network” in all of its manifestations. Put simply, to think about the human brain and/or mind today also means to think about the network and its literary, social, philosophical, and scientific connectivities. Consequently, what once was called “the psychopathology of everyday life” might be replaced by, or supplemented with, a veritable neuropathology, adequate to our times and demarcated on the pages of fictional (and nonfictional) texts, but also on the screens of mobile devices. Notwithstanding the apparent irony that Freud, the author of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), in fact started his career as a neurologist before inventing and developing his theory of the human psyche, it is for a number of reasons that a conceptual shift from psycho- to neuropathology seems necessary—chief among them the notion of “the network.” The latter has indeed become central in the humanities, the social sciences, and the cognitive sciences, in the sense that its “theories are gaining in discursive and operational currency” (Berressem 2015, 59). In addition, the question concerning the network paradigm is without a doubt deeply tied to contemporary screen cultures, which is why it is a time-specific—that is to say, historically significant—question. Given the social, political, and technological conditioning that takes place globally, in terms of audio-visually transmitted information, the network paradigm constitutes an experiential horizon that seeps into each and every aspect of contemporary life—hence “neuropathologies of everyday life.” To explicate the discursive and, consequently, practical convergence of today’s technologies of cognition and the network paradigm, I will compare Scott Bakker’s Neuropath (2009) (NP) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2014) (TC). Neuropath is an example of crime fiction set in the near future, looking at some of the more upsetting assumptions within recent developments in the cognitive sciences that suggest the revision of notions such as “meaning” and “aesthetic experience.” It does so by portraying

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the crimes and worldview of a neuroscientist-turned-psychopath who tortures his victims with a technological apparatus that directly plugs into the plasticity of the brain structure to invoke any emotional reaction from his patient whatsoever. The Circle, by contrast, has its protagonist experience the ostensible advantages of working for an internet company called “The Circle,” a company whose conditions dictate the all-encompassing transparency of the human subject within the social and, hence, technological network of everyday lived experience. If Bakker’s novel painstakingly renders some of the more distressing consequences of neuroscientific discovery for the conception of what it means to be human, Eggers’s neorealist narrative dramatizes the implications of an increasing and apparently voluntary self-surveillance in contemporary Western society. To some degree, both novels have been analyzed separately in regard to their approaches to the question concerning cognitive technologies and networks, respectively. However, they have not been compared in the context of the proposed convergence between the socio-biological brain structure and its self-conception qua subject, or in terms of the currently influential paradigm of the network (including its ontological aspiration to account for research methodologies throughout the humanities). Along the lines of recent neurophilosophical developments, I seek to examine this very convergence in terms of the two novels at hand, starting with Bakker’s work. Furthermore, given the drastic scientifico-technological impact on human subjectivities in the past decade, we might conceptualize Bakker’s and Eggers’s fictions as just such neuropathologies of everyday life mentioned above. In this regard, this chapter inquires how the increasing linkage of technology and the brain may be represented in and by fiction—a cultural practice that is itself not under the formal aegis of scientific methodology.

Neuropath and the Technologies of Cognition When reading Bakker’s crime fiction Neuropath, it is crucial to acknowledge that one is dealing with a novel that itself rethinks cultural history— the historicity of contemporary culture, that is—from a cognitive or neuroscientific standpoint. Rather than criticism providing a fresh look at literature from a cognitive perspective, Neuropath is an example of narrative art looking at those trajectories within the cognitive sciences that suggest the revision of concepts such as “meaning” and “aesthetic experience.” Moreover, ideas formulated within Neuropath call into question the status

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usually accorded to human experience in general, and the latter’s often supplementary concepts of “free will,” “intentionality,” or, most importantly, “selfhood.” The distressing consequences of neuroscientific discovery for all of these concepts are rendered in Bakker’s novel centered on the crimes and worldview of Neil Cassidy, a neuroscientist-turned-psychopath, and former NSA employee, who specializes in manipulating his victims with an apparatus called “Marionette” that can directly plug into the brain structure to engender any emotional state in the given person tied to the machine. According to Ray Brassier, Bakker’s novel serves as a “vivid fictional dramatization” (Brassier 2009, 70) of the methodological tendencies geared to gradually making human experience penetrable by and transparent to cognitive neuroscience. Bakker’s fiction quite effectively depicts that scientific imperative in a stylistic blend of near-future thriller fiction and neo-realism, which results in what could be termed a contemporary form of “didactic narrative”—insofar as it cautions the reader vis-à-vis the implications of said methodologies in the cognitive sciences. In concomitance with these implications, what Brassier terms the “commodification of experience” (70) that can be witnessed in the ever-expanding field of neuromarketing is well under way, as firms like Nielsen Neurofocus in the U.S., NeuroSense Limited in the UK, and Incore in Germany are becoming more and more powerful and will continue to do so.1 Confronting these developments, Bakker’s diagnosis of neuroscience’s social and political significance indexes the veritable neuropathologies of contemporary human life, calling into question the relationship between the cultural present from the standpoint of neuroscience, on the one hand, and the significance of the neuroscientific view of the world for the conceptualization of ourselves as human beings, on the other. What is this twofold relationship between the intentional stance of humans and its scientific counterpart, with each of these two standpoints having a unique perspective on the other? Can these two images of the world be integrated into a synoptic vision, as the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars once proclaimed? Can the “manifest image of man-in-the-­ world” and the “scientific image” (Sellars 1963, 18) stand side by side on equal terms or is there a hierarchy in terms of truth-claims about the world’s states of affairs? And if so, what precisely are the socio-political upshots of that supposed hierarchy? In the tradition of novels such as Philip K.  Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Bakker’s novel re-addresses these questions in

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light of contemporary neuroscientific research. In line with my reading of Neuropath as an equally diagnostic and didactic fiction, it may be helpful to recall how Bakker has himself retrospectively described the motivation and imaginary setting for the novel: The idea was to write something set in a near-future where now nascent technologies of the brain had reached technical, and more importantly, social maturity, a time where the crossroads facing us—the utter divergence of knowledge and experience—had become a matter of daily fact. A time when governments regularly use non-invasive neurosurgical techniques in interrogations. A time when retail giants use biometric surveillance to catalogue their customers, and to insure that their employees continually smile. (Bakker 2008, n. pag.)

There are a number of crucial points to be singled out in this paragraph, yet I want to focus on the relationship between the already mentioned convergence of technology and the brain, on the one hand, and the “utter divergence of knowledge and experience,” on the other. While the modern distinction between the natural and the cultural seems to blur in the context of technical apparatuses directly experimenting on the human brain’s plasticity (with 1980s and 1990s cyber-culture appraising the imbrication of human bodies and machines), on a theoretico-disciplinary level the findings of cognitive neuroscience, as portrayed in the novel, seem to reaffirm that distinction in alarming ways. What the main protagonist Thomas Bible, a psychology professor at Columbia University and former college companion of the villain Cassidy, calls the difference between “the mechanics of the meat” and “the syntax of the ineffable” (NP 59) is precisely that: the distinction between the neurological and the psychological accounts of the world’s objects and phenomena, with the former supposedly exerting an explanatory force over the latter. This hierarchy, in which neuroscience inhabits a hegemonic position with respect to psychology, then, is what links Bible to Cassidy. It is what they called “The Argument” in their undergraduate college years. As Mark Fisher notes, this Argument is “a version of the philosophical position known as eliminativist materialism” which basically states that “we should look forward to a time when neuroscience will entirely replace the vague language of feelings and beliefs with a language appropriate to what actually happens in the brain” (Fisher 2012, 5–6).2 While Cassidy’s stance makes him a “naive eliminativist,” as Fisher puts it, the protagonist “Bible, by contrast, is more of a Kantian, in that he accepts that there is a basic incompatibility between

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experience and the Real” (7). Fisher has moreover established a connection between Bible’s standpoint and the position expounded by the German neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger (8). In the latter’s fundamental work Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003), Metzinger replaces the traditional notion of “self ” with an elaborate concept of a “phenomenal self-model” (Metzinger 2003, 236) instantiated by neurophysiological processes in the brain. In an ingenious recasting of the parable of Plato’s cave, he proposes that what the people in the cave see the shadows of are not real things or individuals but mere projections of the neuronal apparatus, which is the brain itself: There certainly is a phenomenal self-shadow as well. But what is this shadow the low-dimensional projection of? I claim it is a shadow not of a captive person, but of the cave as a whole. It is the physical organism as a whole, including all of its brain, its cognitive activity, and its social relationships, that is projecting inward, from all directions at the same time, as it were. There is no true subject and no homunculus in the cave that could confuse itself with anything. It is the cave as a whole, which episodically, during phases of waking and dreaming, projects a shadow of itself onto one of its many internal walls. The cave shadow is there. The cave itself is empty. (550; original emphasis)

And yet, as Metzinger concedes (and thereby echoes statements made by Bakker in the afterword of Neuropath, as well as by the character Thomas Bible), his theory of the non-existent self will always appear contrary to what seems to be the case as regards one’s own experience of subjectivity and selfhood (566).3 Moreover, Metzinger has reportedly read Bakker’s novel and has expressed his worry vis-à-vis the book: “This book has emotionally hurt and disturbed me in a way none has done in many years. You should think twice before reading this—there could be some scientific and philosophical possibilities you don’t want to know!” (Metzinger n.d.). Therefore, while Bakker’s narrative might easily come across as an exaggerated dystopia with a specific type of science-scare being in full throttle, Metzinger’s comments should at least avert interpretations that would regard Bakker’s novel as overly exaggerated at all; they might be viewed as the confirmation of an anticipatory realism at work in Bakker’s fiction, rather than a poetics of exaggeration. In other words, Metzinger’s comments help to take Bakker’s fictional scenario seriously in terms of its diagnostic function vis-à-vis the already existing

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social consequences of cognitive technologies. In addition, Metzinger’s acknowledgment of Neuropath literarily and literally striking a nerve concerning contemporary neuroscience mirrors the abovementioned shift from psychopathologies to neuropathologies of everyday life. In any case, after having depicted the viewpoint that Neuropath explores in terms of its Argument, let me return to its plot. Unlike Bible, a father of two children by the time the novel’s main plot evolves, Cassidy remains faithful to the Argument, and terrifyingly so. In order to demonstrate to his once best friend the persisting urgency and importance of their Argument, and in obsessional admiration for a monograph called Through the Brain Darkly, in which Bible the psychology professor had elucidated one version of the eliminativist rationale, Cassidy abducts people variously connected to Bible’s life—an ex-student, a politician, and an evangelical preacher.4 Experienced and trained in neurosurgical techniques of interrogation at the NSA, he sometimes tortures his victims, but mostly alters their brain structure, manipulating the ways in which the blood flow and the processing of the neuronal network in their brain proceeds, thereby directly and purposively changing the way they experience themselves as selves. As Thomas recounts the Argument to Samantha Logan, who is one of the FBI agents assigned to work the Cassidy case, “‘Your every experience is a product of neural processes’” (NP 66; original emphasis). Yet, even as a qualitative product of increasingly measurable quantities of information processing, individual phenomenal experience would surely remain the grounding backdrop for our basic conception of selfhood, of being in the world, as critics of the Argument might postulate.5 In Neuropath, the results of neuroscientific research seem to tell a different story: There is a fundamental asymmetry between the vast number of processes that make consciousness happen and the manufactured end-result we experience as consciousness—which is why the phenomenological, or in Bible’s case psychological, grounding in a specific life-world does not really matter when it comes to the determination of the sensation of “being conscious,” of “having an experience.” The gap between that sensation and its cause is so extensive that the product turns out to be just a minute fraction of the process, so that their relationship might be quite similar to that between a large bonfire and its tiniest sparks: “Our brain is almost entirely blind to itself, and it is this interval between ‘almost’ and ‘entirely’ wherein our experience of consciousness resides […] [C]onsciousness is so confusing because it literally is a kind of confusion” (Bakker 2012b, 2).6 As Steven

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Shaviro elucidates in a brilliant reading of Neuropath, this stance, in its extreme form, goes well beyond the modernist claim of a “disenchantment of the world,” which, in any case, “has become our obvious condition” (Shaviro 2015, 105). In fact, the Argument potentiates that claim by asking: “what happens when we apply the scientific method not just to the surrounding physical world, but also to ourselves, and especially to our minds?” (105). After Cassidy’s neurosurgical interventions into the victims’ brain structures, and after the FBI’s many attempts to get hold of him prove ineffective, he puts his former best friend as well as Bible’s ex-wife, Nora, into the “Marionette,” a “deep-reaching version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” (NP 377) as Bakker himself describes it in his novel’s “Afterword.” The point in the narrative at which Bible has to endure the treatment in the machine plugging into his brain’s neural circuitry is an affectively charged passage, as Cassidy performs experiential simulations of high emotional intensity within his patient’s psyche, with feelings ranging from an extreme form of pleasure to aggression to overwhelming fear, until the machinery finally undoes Bible’s capacity to feel empathy at all. This is demonstrated in a climactic scene in which Bible is forced to confront Cassidy’s neurosurgical manipulation of Nora’s brain in a separate Marionette, making her cry and scream by the flick of a switch, while Bible laughs at Nora’s agony, as though someone made a joke. During Cassidy’s rewiring of Bible’s neuronal circuits he is constantly talking to his victim and former college buddy, freely reciting from the already mentioned fictional book Through the Brain Darkly: Our brains […] are able to track down their own prospective behavioral outputs, but are entirely blind to the deep processing that drives them. […] Causality is turned on its head for consciousness. Results and consequences—goals—become the engine of our actions because the neural correlates of consciousness have no access to the real neurophysiological movers and shakers down below. (NP 346)

Again, this account of ostensibly willed actions performed by human beings is consistent with many theories of consciousness within cognitive science and psychology, according to which each and every conscious and seemingly intentional decision is preceded by unconscious, and often completely random, neural processes in the brain.7 According to some scholars, there is a fear, within the humanities, “that those things that once seemed to be forever beyond the reach of science might soon succumb to

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it: neuroscience will lead us to see the ‘universe within’ as just part and parcel of the law-bound machine that is the universe without” (Roskies 2006, 420). However, the naturalization of this unconscious processing mechanism that is our brain does not at all warrant the eradication of the intricacies of human experience within “the manifest image” of the world from the scope of academic discourse. Accepting the fact that each and every conscious decision, intentional movement, and even the notion of selfhood is unconsciously premeditated by neurobiological means does not necessarily result in declaring the unimportance of the allegedly illusory nature and meaning of phenomenal experience. Brassier states: “It is as inadmissible to proclaim the indubitable epistemic authority of phenomenal experience as to denounce it as illusory” (Brassier 2011b, 22). Even if the cultural history of human beings is embedded in a larger biological, geological, or cosmological picture of historical stratification, the singular phenomenon of the individual experience of phenomenality itself—both generated within the human brain’s neuronal structures and generative of the sensation of significance—needs to be accounted for as well, and, in particular, the social reality it entails. Irrespective of the physiological antecedence of natural history with respect to cultural complexity, neither of these realms is reducible to the other. On another level, the personal drama in Neuropath between Thomas Bible, the psychologist, and Neil Cassidy, the neurosurgeon, does not simply reflect the public struggle for explanatory hegemony concerning the determination of consciousness within academia. It also suggests the impact of neuroscientific research on present and future marketing strategies and methods.

The Market, The Circle, and the Network Bakker’s novel alludes to the current investment of globally functioning corporations such as General Motors and American Express in neuromarketing firms and their research when it introduces already active low-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods (NP 100–1), a technology that today is still in its early developmental phase (Singer 2010, n. pag.). In the novel, low-field fMRI machines are characterized as mobile brain scanners that are able to track your actual neuronal response to, that is, your experience of, particular products for example, and therefore “infer […] what kind of customer or employee you’ll be” (NP 101).8 To repeat the initial epigraph of this chapter: “Marketers are taking that fateful step from training us like animals (via associative conditioning) to

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treating us like mechanisms. There are tremendous amounts of money to be made” (NP 378). Thus, the redefinition of the unconscious on naturalist grounds has political significance in a double sense. It becomes political both as an issue of controversy about explanatory hegemony within ­academic discourse and as the problematic generative of the “commodification of experience” in everyday human life, as Brassier has noted. It is the latter issue that Neuropath has in common with the ideas concerning the network paradigm explored in The Circle.9 According to Alison Gibbons, Dave Eggers’s novel examines “the facets and fears of the contemporary global world” (Gibbons 2015, 11). In a more trenchant statement on The Circle, Alexander Starre writes that it “leans toward blunt expressions of technophobia” (Starre 2015, 257), resulting, consequently, in a cautionary tale concerning contemporary network culture and its corporations. This is one of the ways in which it is comparable to Neuropath: as a reflection of current sentiments in society and its analysis within the humanities, generally, it is one of the quintessential “network novels” of this century. Its plot is centered around Mae Holland and her involvement as an employee of The Circle, which like today’s real-life internet companies Google and Facebook, is extremely powerful and influential.10 In the fictional Silicon Valley town of San Vincenzo, set in the Bay Area, Holland gets more and more entangled in the (work) ethics of her new co-workers and bosses, after a few moments of suspicion regarding the increasingly seamless eradication of privacy and the diminution of autonomy. With everyone working and living “on campus,” as her new peers call the place where the offices, restaurants, bars, and venues of The Circle are located, Holland learns to embrace new technologies and social media such as “TruYou,” which, in a straightforward extrapolation from today’s applications and platforms, unifies each and every alias, account, and profile that one might possess, both online and, formerly, offline: “There were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity—the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable—was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing, reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life  online” (TC 21–2). In a similar fashion, technologies such as “SeeChange”—that is, the installment of a myriad of webcams across the globe for the sake of “transparency,” which, according to one of The Circle’s CEOs, Eamon Bailey, leads to “peace of mind” (TC 67–9)—and

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“ChildTrack”—a program developed to prevent the abduction of children by inserting “a simple tracker […] in bone” (TC 89)—are depicted by Eggers to dramatic, if somewhat predictable, effect. The narrative’s heroine, Mae Holland, who, in the beginning, starts at the Customer Service department of the c­ ompany, or “Customer Experience” (TC 92) as The Circle calls it, soon becomes a quasi-celebrity among her co-workers and globally. Indicative of the tendency toward virtually networked transparency, at some point she starts wearing a necklace with an inbuilt camera, so that the whole world can see her every move, a significant step for her as a model “Circler”—that is to say, citizen—that follows a tendency in the arena of senators and other politicians who already have “gone transparent” (TC 241). And Eggers quite straightforwardly meditates on the implications of such a scenario, cautioning the readership regarding those implications in a sarcastic fashion: “There would never again be a politician without immediate and thorough accountability, because their words and actions would be known and recorded and beyond debate. There would be no more back rooms, no more murky deal-making. There would be only clarity, only light” (TC 242). In her further commitment as an employee at The Circle whose everyday routines are literally watched by millions of her fans at home or on portable screens and other devices, Holland becomes more and more estranged from her family as well as from an ex-boyfriend, Mercer. At a late point in the novel, he even commits suicide in a bout of panic, while being chased by an array of drones which Mae has sent out to search for him, as part of a game at The Circle, the so-called “SoulSearch program” (TC 461), while, again, her watchers are eager to see the footage provided by the camera attached to the drones. The nature of Holland’s popularity, which a threefold paragraph of her own mottoes, made public on campus, substantiates—“SECRETS ARE LIES,” “SHARING IS CARING,” and “PRIVACY IS THEFT” (TC 305)—ultimately expounds the ideology of the network society that, outside of The Circle’s cosmos as well, has already been at work for some time now. This is an ideology in congruence—formally and content-wise—with the credo of contemporary neuroscience that “everything is connected (the way it ought to be)”; and thus the model most adequate to describe the brain is, as should be expected, the network. Like many scholars working in the field of media studies and cultural studies, Alexander R. Galloway has noted that this model, which extends beyond contemporary fiction, technologies of human subjectivity, and

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cognitive neuroscience, is also the cultural dominant of today’s humanities. In a somewhat flippantly phrased, yet acutely perceptive, statement, he proclaims: “Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is definitely over! We have a new grand récit. As metanarrative, the network will guide us into a new Dark Age” (Galloway 2014). ActorNetwork Theory, materialist ecologies, resurgent vitalism: everything is connected, everywhere and at all times, it seems. The questions for Galloway, as for so many scholars who had been wondering about how to escape what Michel Foucault once termed the “micropolitics of power,” are as follows: “What is the political fate of networks? […] What would a non-net look like? And does thinking have a future without the network as guide?” (Galloway 2014).11 These questions speculate about the possibility of a mode of critique or contemplation outside of the network paradigm, outside, in fact, of a mantra—“everything is connected”—that also belongs to a discourse and field of research that is, and does take part in, the ontological elevation of “the network” as concept, namely, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. Therefore, the tall order entailed by Galloway’s reflections includes both a critical stance toward the concept of the network as a “one size fits all” sort of term and a reevaluation of an immanent ontology that is not opposed to literary and cultural ecologies but which engages in a rearticulation of the latter.

Conclusion: Neuropathology and Contemporaneity In this context of a paradigm that relies on a networked neurocognitive model of the self, Bakker’s and Eggers’s novels suggest that we do, indeed, need a generic supplement to the various “psychopathologies of everyday life” formulated over the last decades within cultural and literary studies, namely a well-nigh “neuropathology.” This concept of “neuropathology” as a form of critique partly corresponds to and expands on Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping.” In a paper bearing this notion as its title, he characterized it as the analysis of “the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience” (Jameson 1988, 283). Both Neuropath and The Circle seem to be early examples of just such an undertaking, especially if we understand the concept not only as the study of diseases within the nervous system, but more generally as the discourse on the effects of simultaneously exploiting and ignoring the

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results of cognitive neuroscience and its concomitant network paradigm within capitalist society at large. Additionally, what Jameson referred to as “the totality of class structures” would, in our time, have to be rearticulated in terms of neuropathological ecologies and geographies: the equilibria and spacings of socio-technological distributions of knowledge (about oneself and about one another). Returning to the starting point of this chapter—meaning the ways in which the humanities, philosophy and, above all, literature might address and respond to the current networked neuroscientific imperative and its technologies—the following statement by French philosopher Catherine Malabou is particularly apt: “So long as we do not grasp the political, economic, social, and cultural implications of the knowledge of cerebral plasticity available today, we cannot do anything with it” (Malabou 2008, 82). Irrespective of some of the stylistic shortcomings the attentive reader of both Eggers’s and Bakker’s novels might detect, both books are indispensable texts for any scholarly examination of the way in which twenty-first-­ century fiction explores cognition, technology, and the network paradigm. There is a general lack of narrative subtlety in Neuropath, whereas The Circle is wanting in consistency vis-à-vis the construction of character, for instance. If this aspect of a sporadically abrasive style in the case of Neuropath is not surprising given the novel’s marketing as a common airport novel (which it clearly is not), The Circle, conversely, does not really live up to its image as what has been termed literary fiction. In any event, it has to be said that what Margaret Atwood has attested in regard of Eggers’s novel—namely, that it is a “novel of ideas” (Atwood 2014, n. pag.)—equally applies to Bakker’s take on the neuroscientific intrusion into contemporary human life. Therefore, both Neuropath and The Circle amount to literary forms of diagnostically potent neuropathology, which themselves trace the socially, technologically, and historically determined circumstances of the neuropathological present.

Notes 1. According to the website Neurorelay: Thinking Through the Mind of the Consumer and its listing of “Neuromarketing Companies Worldwide,” among the services offered by these three examples of the bulk of neuromarketing firms are electroencephalography, eye-tracking, biometric authentification, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and psychophysics. On the topic of neuromarketing technology and its methods, see Pradeep (2010, 7–15 and 109).

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2. On the topic of eliminativist materialism, or eliminativism, see Bennett and Hacker (2005, 366–7), Bermúdez (2006, 33), Brassier (2007, 9–31), Churchland, P.S. (1996a, 297–8), and Churchland, P.M. (1989, 2). For a classical definition by one of the most important representatives of this faction within neuroscientifically informed philosophy—in fact one of the key scholars in the field tout court—see Churchland, P.S. (1996b, 396). 3. Note that an older version of Metzinger’s theory was already published in 1993 as Subjekt und Selbstmodell: Die Perspektivität phänomenalen Bewußtseins vor dem Hintergrund einer naturalistischen Theorie mentaler Repräsentation. An alternative but quite comparable definition of selfhood can be found in Wegner’s notion of the “mind’s self-portrait”: “Far from a simple homunculus that ‘does things,’ […] the self can be understood as a system that arises from the experience of authorship, and is developed over time. We become selves by experiencing what we do, and this experience then informs the processes that determine what we will do next. The self, in this view, is not an agent, an origin of action—but instead is an accumulated structure of knowledge about what this particular mind can do” (Wegner 2003, 12). 4. This title clearly alludes to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, on the one hand, and Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, on the other. 5. This is precisely what the enactivist camp within neurophilosophy argues, which is also why the work of these scholars and researchers has also been termed neurophenomenology. On enactivism and its difference with respect to computationalism, see Noë and Thompson (2002, 5) and Thompson et al. (2002, 351–418). 6. This is actually from Bakker’s own take on the rift between the quantitative and qualitative interpretation of phenomenal experience, which he has elaborated in a paper called “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness” (2012b). He has written on his theory of the blind brain with respect to what he calls “post-intentional philosophy” on his blog Three Pound Brain; see Bakker, “How to Build a First-Person (Using Only Natural Materials)” (2012a). It is important to note that Bakker himself has a particular stance toward cognitive neuroscience and its results—a standpoint that can be called mechanistic, rationalist, and realist. For a comparably mechanistic account within neuroscience itself, see Koch and Tononi (2008, 55). 7. See, for example, Bargh and Morsella (2008, 77), Bennett and Hacker (2005, 240), Damasio (2003, 208–9), Haggard (2005, 291), and Wegner (2002, 55). It is important to be clear about the—not primarily—Freudian sense of the word “unconscious” in this context. As Debiec and Ledoux have elucidated, “the cognitive and emotional unconscious […] are unconscious not because of repression but simply because their functions are not wired into the circuitry of consciousness” (Debiec and Ledoux 2003, 309).

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8. The prospect of machinic inference is interesting in light of a rationalist philosopher of language such as Robert Brandom who has capitalized on Sellars’s proviso that human beings cannot but think in terms of a normativity that is inferentially structured. See, on this topic, Brassier (2011a, 50). For a critique of this position vis-à-vis Neuropath, see Shaviro (2015, 124). 9. I have already partly addressed the first issue earlier in this chapter. For more on this point, see Brassier (2011a, 48, 2012, n. pag.), Thompson et  al. (2002, 351–418), and Schröder (1997, 172). On the highly contested research field “cognitive poetics” and the influence of cognitive science on literary studies, see Freißmann (2012, 58) and Kelleter (2007, 166). 10. It has to be said that, in particular in 2018, with scandals such as that of Facebook/Cambridge Analytica and the concomitant violations of user privacy, Eggers’s novel seems as important as ever. Notably, both Google and Mark Zuckerberg’s company are mentioned as corporations that are “subsumed” by the “force” that is The Circle (TC 23). 11. See also Galloway and Thacker’s The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007).

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret (2014). “Circle dustjacket.” Dave Eggers. The Circle. 2013. New York: Vintage Books. Bakker, R. Scott (2008). “The End of the World as We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse.” Three Pound Brain. Web. 5 Apr. 2013. ———. (2009). Neuropath. London: Orion Books. ———. (2012a). “How to Build a First-Person (Using Only Natural Materials).” Three Pound Brain. Web. 14 Apr. 2013. ———. (2012b). “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness.” Web. 14 Apr. 2013. Bargh, John A., and Ezequiel Morsella (2008). “The Unconscious Mind.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3.1: 73–79. Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S.  Hacker (2005). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Bermúdez, José Luis (2006). “Arguing for Eliminativism.” Paul Churchland. Ed. Brian L. Keeley. New York: Cambridge University Press. 32–65. Berressem, Hanjo (2015). “Déja Vu: Serres after Latour, Deleuze after Harman, ‘Nature Writing’ after ‘Network Theory’.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.1: 59–79. Brassier, Ray (2007). Nihil Unbound. Extinction and Enlightenment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2009). “Genre is Obsolete.” Noise & Capitalism. Eds. Mattin Iles and Anthony Iles. Donostia-S. Sebastiá: Arteleku Audiolab. 60–71.

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———. (2011a). “Concepts and Objects.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press. 47–65. ———. (2011b). “The View from Nowhere.” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8.2: 7–23. ———. (2012). “Interview with After Nature Blog.” After Nature Blog. 26 Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Apr. 2013. Churchland, Patricia S. (1996a). “Do We Propose to Eliminate Consciousness?” The Churchlands and Their Critics. Ed. Robert N. McCauley. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. 297–300. ———. (1996b). Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Churchland, Paul M. (1989). A Neuromputational Perspective. The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Damasio, Antonio (2003). Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Debiec, Jacek and Joseph E. Ledoux (2003). “Conclusions: From Self-Knowledge to a Science of the Self.” Annals New York Academy of Sciences 1001: 305–316. Eggers, Dave (2014). The Circle. New York: Vintage Books. Fisher, Mark (2012). “A Critique of Practical Nihilism: Agency in Scott Bakker’s ‘Neuropath.’” Incognitum Hactenus: Journal on Art, Horror, and Philosophy 2: 5–12. Freißmann, Stephan (2012). “Cognition—A Travelling Concept at the Interface between Cognitive Science and Literary Studies.” Travelling Concepts, Metaphors, and Narratives: Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of Interdisciplinary Research. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach, Beatrice Michaelis, and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT. 55–68. Galloway, Alexander R. (2014). “Network Pessimism.” 10 Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2018. Galloway, Alexander R. and Eugene Thacker (2007). The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibbons, Alison (2015). “Eyes of the World.” American Book Review 36.5: 11–12. Haggard, Patrick (2005). “Conscious Intention and Motor Cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9.6: 290–295. Jameson, Fredric (1988). “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 347–357. Kelleter, Frank (2007). “A Tale of Two Natures: Worried Reflections on the Study of Literature and Culture in an Age of Neuroscience and Neo-Darwinism.” Journal of Literary Theory 1.1: 153–189. Koch, Christof and Giulio Tononi (2008). “Can Machines Be Conscious?” IEEE Spectrum 45.6: 55.

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Malabou, Catherine (2008). What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Metzinger, Thomas (1993). Subjekt und Selbstmodell. Die Perspektivität phänomenalen Bewußtseins vor dem Hintergrund einer naturalistischen Theorie mentaler Repräsentation. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. ———. (2003). Being No-One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (n.d.). “Blurbs.” R. Scott Bakker. Web. 28 Mar. 2018. Neurorelay: Thinking Through the Mind of the Consumer (2012). “Neuromarketing Companies Worldwide.” 8 May 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. Noë, Alva, and Evan Thompson (2002). “Introduction.” Vision and Mind. Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Eds. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1–15. Pradeep, A.K. (2010). The Buying Brain. Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Roskies, Adina (2006). “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility.” Trends in Cognitive Science 10.9: 419–423. Schröder, Jürgen (1997). “Qualia und Physikalismus.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science/Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 28.1: 159–181. Sellars, Wilfrid (1963). Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shaviro, Steven (2015). Discognition. London: Repeater Books. Singer, Natasha (2010). “Making Ads That Whisper to the Brain.” The New York Times. 13 Nov. 2010. Web. 20 Apr. 2013. Starre, Alexander (2015). Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Thompson, Evan, Adrian Palacios and Francisco J.  Varela (2002). “Ways of Coloring: Comparative Color Vision as a Case Study for Cognitive Science.” Vision and Mind. Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Eds. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 351–418. Wegner, Daniel M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (2003). “The Mind’s Self-Portrait.” Annals New York Academy of Sciences 1001: 1–14.

CHAPTER 4

New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction Kanta Dihal

As quantum physics began to be known beyond the scientific sphere, writers soon recognized its potential to provide both new material for narratives and new ways to apply existing narrative tropes. The physics of the smallest scales sketched a previously unimaginable world in which probability rules the universe, a world in which particles are also waves, their paths and interactions mathematically describable by wave functions that contain all of these probabilities until a measurement is made. Authors in recent decades have used quantum physics to provide a scientific underpinning for plots which a century ago would have sounded fantastical. The Copenhagen interpretation from the 1920s, which presents a single timeline, offers the possibility of travelling back in time to cause a different collapse of the wave function and thus change the past and future. The conscious collapse interpretation (von Neumann [1955] 1996; Wigner [1961] 1967), which posits that only a conscious being

K. Dihal (*) Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_4

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could cause the collapse of the wave function, hinted at instant communication and ­telepathy. Finally, the many-worlds interpretation has been linked with ideas of alternative histories and the possibility of time travel (Everett 1957). Under all interpretations, quantum physics offers the possibility of encountering oneself, or dealing with multiple versions of oneself, thus offering new perspectives on character interactions and human relations to themselves and to others. Explicitly using quantum physics in a novel requires overcoming major obstacles to facilitate reader comprehension; however, as I will show in this chapter, the possibilities quantum physics opens up for both plot and structure are so revolutionary that authors throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have nonetheless considered it worthwhile to feed this mind-boggling science into their works. Two major obstacles arise when one attempts to incorporate quantum physics in a narrative. First, the limits of the current understanding of quantum theory limit the extent to which one can build a narrative upon it. In order to determine which possibilities the use of quantum physics opens up for the narrative, the author must decide which interpretation to employ. Making this choice means extrapolating from the present situation in which there is no common agreement regarding the validity of various interpretations, as there is no verification method available yet. In the early twentieth century, several works of fiction anticipated developments in quantum physics: Jorge Luis Borges and Andre Norton used many-worlds-like multiverse structures in “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges [1941] 1998) and The Crossroads of Time (Norton [1956] 1978) respectively, before the many-worlds interpretation was first theorized (Everett 1957). These fictions show both that existing narrative tropes could help in popularizing and explaining quantum physics, and that these tropes provide an anchoring point for incorporating this science into fiction. Interpretation choice itself can be made part of the narrative, as Gregory Benford has done in Timescape (1980) and Iain Pears in Arcadia (2015a), bringing an exciting scientific discovery plot into the narrative. Quantum physics is able to open up new narratives by showing that things previously thought entirely impossible are now being seriously considered; at the same time, it offers structural rules that the narrative should adhere to, thus maintaining order and reader comprehension. The influence of quantum physics on fiction has led to two kinds of estrangement at the same time. It has made the familiar strange again, by providing new

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ways to apply existing story tropes, and it has made the strange comprehensible, by introducing complicated science in a captivating fictional ­narrative. Fiction about quantum physics shapes the way in which the reader thinks about the topic: what they understand quantum physics to be, which concepts are associated with it, and what its potential future implications could be. The second major obstacle is the fact that the author cannot assume that the reader already understands quantum physics. Nonetheless, critics have pointed out the frequent appearance of quantum physics in science fiction from the late 1980s onwards. Patricia Warrick discusses the simultaneous appearance of popular quantum physics books, such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) and John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat ([1984] 2012) with quantum tropes in science fiction, by writers such as Gregory Benford (Timescape 1980), Greg Bear (“Schrödinger’s Plague” 1982), and Rudy Rucker (The Sex Sphere 1983) (Warrick 1987). Non-physicists in these decades could therefore seek out books that would teach them about quantum physics, but those readers who did not actively look for information on the topic were also more likely to learn about it in fiction. Although science fiction has no obligation to be didactic, the explicit introduction of quantum physics often relies heavily on the “infodump” convention of science fiction, asking readers to absorb large amounts of new information in an expository section. Quantum physics permeated fiction beyond science fiction  from the 1990s onwards, after a rise in popular science publishing during the 1970s–1990s (Leane 2007, 1). Its influences range from simple references to make the story sound more scientifically informed, to an entirely original narrative that relies heavily on quantum physics for both its form and content. I investigate fiction that uses quantum physics explicitly and obviously, making the reader aware of its presence. The fact that a novel is written in an age in which knowledge of quantum physics is widespread is not sufficient in itself: if a work is written after a scientific discovery is made, the author will not necessarily have been aware of the discovery, or have intended to use it; the chronological plausibility of influence is seductive but insufficient evidence. The works discussed in this chapter deliberately side with a particular interpretation of quantum physics. The three interpretations used most frequently in fiction are the conscious collapse interpretation (Egan, Quarantine and Kosmatka, The Flicker Men), the Copenhagen interpretation (Walton,

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Superposition and Supersymmetry), and the many-worlds interpretation (Benford, Timescape and Pears, Arcadia). The earliest of these works show the potential for quantum physics to create new kinds of plots, providing new possibilities for focalization and first-person narration. However, the influence of quantum physics on fiction does not need to end there: twentyfirst-century technological developments in interactive fiction allow for a complete overhaul of the physical act of reading in a quantum physics-influenced plot, as exemplified in Pears’s Arcadia.

The Conscious Collapse Interpretation The idea that everything in the universe exists as a wave function in many different potential realities, “eigenstates”, until observation by a conscious entity causes it to “collapse” and become real, is a controversial view among quantum physicists. Both the conscious collapse and the many-­ worlds interpretations occupy a fringe position within the scientific establishment, yet the former seems to have been embraced by pseudoscientific writers more than the latter. Pseudoscience has seized upon the opportunity to present the conscious collapse interpretation as a scientific theory that supports belief in the existence of the soul, as something granted only to humans to make the universe real, and/or in God, as the ultimate conscious observer. This section will discuss one science fiction author who makes use of the conscious collapse interpretation in a non-mystical way, Greg Egan, and one who brings in these mystical aspects, Ted Kosmatka, in The Flicker Men (2015). In Quarantine (1992) (QU), Greg Egan introduces the concept of the conscious collapse of the wave function in order to create an original narrative around probability, death, and suicide. After the physicist Po-kwai proves that the human brain is indeed responsible for the collapse of the wave function, the first-person protagonist, Nick, obtains a brain modification with which he can prevent his own wave function from collapsing. Nick is now able to “smear” himself out over different eigenstates, and is able to perform different actions simultaneously in each eigenstate, before collapsing into the most ideal reality. In a test, Nick is able to instantly open a combination lock with a ten-digit code, because each eigenstate is able to enter a different number, until the wave function collapses into the version of Nick who has guessed the code correctly. In the novel, this collapse is represented with jumps in the narrative: the reader follows Nick entering the code 1450045409 into the lock, but

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when the lock opens, they read that the code was 9999999999 (QU 152). The collapse has taken place outside the narrative: the only instance of Nick that is left becomes the focalizor. This ability to collapse at will becomes useful for Nick when he needs to prevent his antagonist, Lui Kiu-chung, from releasing a nanomachine virus epidemic that will allow everyone on the planet to prevent their wave function from collapsing. Nick does not know where to find Lui, but is able to smear himself out and try all of the options at once; the option that leads to Lui is the one onto which he will end up collapsing his wave function. As long as Nick can keep entering a superposition state, he can explore different branches of the narrative. The reader thus sees him kill Lui, but on the next page, Nick does not draw his gun in time and Lui manages to throw the virus vial out of the window (QU 206–207). The virus escapes, which is not the most desirable outcome for Nick, but it is the most desirable for all minds in the city. Everyone in the city enters a superposition state: Nick and Po-kwai discover that this outcome has been selected by this collective superposition of minds (QU 214–217). This superposition, however, chooses “suicide”, making itself collapse: the psychological pressure brought on by a limitless malleability of both oneself and the world is too much to bear (QU 218). Quarantine questions the concept of identity under the conscious collapse interpretation through focalization. The first-person narration allows the reader to see only one perspective at a time, yet the focalizor can change from one paragraph to the next—it is clear that there is no logical continuity between Nick killing Lui and Nick failing to fire his gun in time. These are two different focalizors, even though they both claim to be Nick, the first-person narrator, the “I”. Yet the multiplicity of characters is not presented to the reader all at once: the focalizor is one person at a time, presenting the subjective singular experience of one particular Nick. The reader will question the reliability of the first-person narrator once it is clear that the next sentence might be written from a different perspective owned by the same narrative agent. Quarantine thus expresses one way in which quantum physics questions the concept of identity and of being a single, independent self. Egan published a blog post about Quarantine in which he explains where exactly he deviated from accepted scientific theory. He stresses that his use of this particular interpretation, which he does not name, “was chosen solely for its technological and existential ramifications, not because I considered it plausible” (Egan 2008). He stresses several times that he

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has selected this interpretation only for the fictional possibilities it opens up, not because of its factual accuracy or support among scientists. He emphasizes that his work is purely fictional and does not reflect his personal scientifically informed views as to which interpretation of quantum physics is likely to be correct; he is using the conscious collapse interpretation in order to make a new kind of fictional narrative possible. Unlike Quarantine, Ted Kosmatka’s The Flicker Men (2015) (FM) does use the conscious collapse interpretation to confront the religious implications often associated with this interpretation, in particular the question of the existence of the human soul. Kosmatka’s science fiction thriller features a quantum physicist, Eric Argus, as its first-person narrator. Eric has returned to research at a private institute after a successful career as a theoretician was interrupted by a breakdown and alcoholism. He manages to perform the double-slit experiment with photons that Richard Feynman described as a thought experiment in 1964 (Feynman et al. [1964] 1965). As Eric investigates the influence of observations on the outcome of this experiment, his findings confirm the conscious collapse hypothesis.1 The reader encounters lengthy infodumps explaining quantum physics; the explanation of the Feynman double-slit experiment includes diagrams (FM 44; 45). The first interpretation of quantum physics that is explained in the novel is the Copenhagen interpretation, in an extradiegetic section focalized through Eric, in which he emphasizes the role of the observer (FM 59–60). The question of consciousness is avoided at this point. Kosmatka introduces the conscious collapse interpretation two pages later, when Eric and his colleague Satvik test their own abilities to collapse the wave function (FM 61). Kosmatka takes liberties with the physics in assuming that it is possible to somehow record the fact that the wave function has not collapsed, so that a human can observe this absence of collapse. Eric and his colleagues subsequently test animals for their ability to collapse the wave function, and make the extraordinary discovery that no animal can induce a collapse, not even chimpanzees (FM 75; 78; 79; 89). Eric writes up his findings as an academic paper published in the (fictional) Journal of Quantum Mechanics, the title and abstract of which are presented to the reader (FM 90–91). The paper suggests that the conscious collapse interpretation is the accepted interpretation in Eric’s world: “It has long been known that subjective observation is a primary requirement for wavefunction collapse”, the abstract reads (FM 90). The singular ability to collapse the wave function sets humans apart from the rest of the

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animal kingdom, and in the novel is immediately interpreted as scientific proof for the existence of the soul. Kosmatka enters the controversial territory where religion and abortion meet, by introducing Dr Robbins, who aims to use Eric’s new findings to “‘prove the age at which a baby is ensouled’”, work that he claims “‘is going to save a lot of lives’” (FM 100; 101). Dr Robbins adheres to the religious view that the foetus becomes “ensouled” during gestation. Yet Kosmatka avoids giving a conclusion to the religious debate he introduces. The reader is not given an answer to the question of ensoulment in foetuses: this discussion is sidelined when Dr Robbins’s team discovers that some people, including older children and adults, are entirely unable to collapse the wave function. The only information the reader is given with regard to the outcome of the foetus experiments is that “some fetuses did […] trigger wavefunction collapse. But others didn’t” and that “gestational age had nothing to do with it” (FM 130; 131), a phrase that leaves the narrative open to interpretation both against and in favour of the view that foetuses are conscious or have souls from a very early developmental stage. An entirely new issue is now introduced: the idea that some humans do not have souls at all. Unfortunately, these metaphysical questions are not only sidelined in favour of a more thriller-like plot involving kidnappings and chase scenes; surprisingly, the fact that some humans are unable to collapse the wave function is resolved by the end of the novel. Somehow, everyone who had this inability dies, on the same day (FM 398). The Flicker Men, then, uses the implications of the conscious collapse interpretation to pose philosophical questions about consciousness and the soul, but unlike in Egan’s Quarantine, interpretation choice does not affect narrative structure. As we shall see next, the consequences of Egan’s choice of interpretation for both plot and structure are clearest when compared to works that make use of the Copenhagen interpretation.

The Copenhagen Interpretation The Copenhagen interpretation was the only available interpretation for science fiction authors who wished to use cutting-edge physics before 1957, such as Jack Williamson in “The Legion of Time” ([1938] 1977). However, it has not been entirely replaced in fiction by the more narratologically attractive many-worlds interpretation, and in contemporary fiction the concepts of superposition and the collapse of the wave function

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are still used to question the concepts of identity, focalization, and death. David Walton, trained as an engineer, used the Copenhagen interpretation for his duology Superposition (SP) and Supersymmetry (SS) (2015a, b). Using the principles of superposition and the collapse of the wave function, the author is able to write a detective story through the eyes of one protagonist, but from different perspectives. In the near future, physicist Brian Vanderhall visits his former colleague Jacob Kelley to prove that he is in contact with so-called “quantum intelligences”, nicknamed the varcolac, that allow him to demonstrate quantum physics effects at the macro scale. The next day, Jacob finds Brian dead at his workplace, the New Jersey Super Collider, only to find him alive again in the back of his own car. Brian is in a state of superposition; when his wave function collapses, the only Brian that is left is the dead one. Jacob and his family, meanwhile, have also entered a state of superposition: one Jacob is arrested for murder in front of his family, but the other Jacob escapes with his daughter Alessandra after the varcolac kills his wife and other children. There are therefore now two Alessandras as well as two Jacobs: the girls each develop a distinct personality, one calling herself Alex, the other Sandra. The structure of the novel reflects this split: the odd chapters, all called “Up-spin”, depict Escaped Jacob’s story, and the even chapters, all called “Down-­ spin”, narrate Arrested Jacob’s story. The reader learns about quantum physics alongside the jury that will determine Arrested Jacob’s fate. Arrested Jacob and his lawyer Terry Sheppard need to convince the jury that the quantum physical effects that have influenced Jacob’s and Brian’s lives are real. Quantum physics is put on trial, and the reader is made to take up the position of the jury. The reader of course believes Jacob’s side of the story, having witnessed the events of the previous chapters through his eyes; therefore, they must also side with the idea that quantum physics and its effects as predicted by the Copenhagen interpretation are real. The prosecution claims that the technobabble will turn their heads: Mr. Sheppard is going to try to convince you that this case is about technology. He’s going to make your mind spin with words like ‘quarks’ and ‘leptons’ and confuse the facts with expert testimony about science that only a few people in the world understand. […] In our great country, we don’t believe the highly educated or the very rich are more qualified to find the truth than you are. (SP 19)

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Sheppard, however, flatters the jury by explaining to them that they can indeed understand the scientific explanations. I am going to cover a lot of science in my side of the testimony, and some of it can get a bit complicated. The difference is that, unlike Mr. Haviland, I think you can handle it. Mr. Haviland seems to believe that you’re not smart enough to understand science. He wants to spoon-feed you only the bits he thinks you can grasp. Personally, I find that kind of condescension offensive, but he’s entitled to his opinions. What he’s not entitled to do is withhold from you all the facts of the case. He’s not entitled to decide that there are some facts you’re not qualified to understand. (SP 21)

Sheppard makes the trial a test of democracy, even as Haviland is relying on US democratic principles to support his argument to exclude science from this trial. The reader is persuaded, along with the jury, that they indeed can understand the explanations that will follow. Of course, Sheppard too is only going to feed the jury (and thus the reader) the bits of the science he thinks they can grasp, as shown by a passage in which Sheppard, Arrested Jacob, and Jean, another physicist colleague of Jacob, are rehearsing the scientific explanation that Jean is going to give at the trial: “They just need to get the idea that something can be in two states at once,” I [Jacob] said. “They don’t have to understand it entirely, but they have to believe it as a thoroughly tested and noncontroversial finding of modern science. So how do we do that? Quote Einstein? Cite polls of leading scientists?” “None of that matters to a jury,” Terry said. He pointed at Jean. “What matters is her. If she can sell it, and not let Haviland talk her in circles or undermine her credibility, then they’ll accept it as fact.” (SP 74)

The reader witnesses both the rehearsal and the trial, and is thus given an extremely detailed explanation. Singling out these sections gives the impression that Walton is masking a popular science book as fiction, but the infodumps serve a higher purpose for the fiction: quantum physics needs to be explained in order for the most compelling parts of the plot to develop in a way that is understandable to the readers. The discursive form of exposition displayed in the three block quotations above is a common feature of nearly all works

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­ iscussed in this chapter, whether they are marketed specifically as science d fiction or not. The reader is typically informed about the science underpinning the narrative in a dialogue between a physicist and the most important non-physicist character: Po-kwai and Nick in Quarantine, Jean and Terry in Superposition, and Alex and Sandra in Supersymmetry. Even though they feel contrived, the dialogue-heavy interactions create a vital expositional context, one in which mathematics is avoided. Most of Superposition focuses on the Copenhagen interpretation and the principle of superposition. The Copenhagen interpretation demands that the two or more different states that Brian, Jacob, and Alessandra find themselves in will eventually have to resolve. Later on in the book, the many-worlds interpretation is also introduced, when Brian mentions that “Every decision you make is made the other way by another version of you in a parallel universe” (SP 85). However, at the climax of the novel, when it is revealed that Jean is a villain, the two interpretations that Walton presents conflict. The revelation that Jean is a villain may surprise the reader of Superposition due to a long history in both science fiction and mainstream fiction of depicting scientists, especially villainous ones, as male. However, she soon turns from a non-stereotypical female scientist villain to a stereotypical desperate mother. She uses Brian’s quantum technology to improve the quality of her life as a mother: she is able to “manipulate the Higgs field” to access a parallel world in which her child does not have Down syndrome and swap the two babies. Jacob explains to Jean’s husband Nick that “‘the Higgs field extends across multiple universes. […] It means she can access alternate versions of your daughter. […] It means she can retrieve versions of your daughter that might have been if different choices had been made…’” (SP 269). Shortly afterwards, the narrative favours the Copenhagen interpretation again, when Jacob’s wife and children end up in a Schrödinger’s cat-­ like situation (Schrödinger 1935). The cat paradox is quickly explained in two infodump paragraphs; the explanation assumes the Copenhagen interpretation, with the system described by “a probability wave that had not yet collapsed” (SP 292). Since his family is currently both dead and alive at the same time, Jacob realizes that there is a 50% chance that his family will be dead when he finds and observes them. He hesitates: “The thought crossed my mind that I should stop digging, that it was better to be caught in a state between life and death than to be completely and irreconcilably dead” (SP 292). The novel finds itself in a contradiction: the

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narrative is made more exciting by positing that Jacob is somehow in ­control of his family’s fate. However, Jacob’s dilemma does not take into account an issue already inherent in the Schrödinger’s cat paradox: the idea that Jacob’s family, observing themselves, would have already caused a collapse. Whereas one might debate whether a cat can count as an observer, all interpretations agree that humans are valid observers. Refusing to observe his family only results in Jacob not knowing what happened to them. Scientific accuracy is subordinate to narrative requirements; at the same time, the idea that these action-packed events are based on real scientific knowledge adds to the impact of the narrative. Superposition and Supersymmetry were published in the same year. Whereas the first title refers to a quantum mechanical phenomenon that is key to the plot, supersymmetry is a particle physics phenomenon that is not necessarily connected to quantum physics, and which does not feature in the novel. Having a title that resembles that of the first novel seems to have been more important than maintaining the connection to the quantum physical contents of the novel. The sequel is set 15 years after Superposition. Although the superposition of the two Jacobs collapsed at the end of Superposition, in Supersymmetry Alex and Sandra Kelley are still two separate people, living drastically different lives as a physicist and a police officer. They are still terrified of what might happen to their personal identities if their superposition should ever collapse. Jean’s two roles are repeated: she first enters the story as an explainer, someone who is able to understand the mechanics of the varcolac, but then becomes the transgressor, willing to murder all others to become the chosen one to receive the knowledge of the varcolac. In the sequel, Jean’s actions are no longer those of a desperate mother, but rather those of the overly ambitious scientist usually depicted as male in fiction. Both David Walton and Greg Egan show how adherence to a specific interpretation of quantum physics can influence not only the structure of a narrative, but also character development and psychology. Both investigate the concept of identity by means of a first-person-singular narrative in which the narration shifts between different focalizors who are the same person. However, when Nick in Quarantine smears himself out over several different eigenstates, the reader only ever follows one eigenstate at a time, thus maintaining a singular sense of identity. Nick cannot remember the paths the other Nicks have explored after the wave function collapses, and the perspective of a focalizor whose wave function has collapsed will not be accessible again. He cares little about these other Nicks, as their

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“deaths” are an affirmation that the current focalizor is succeeding against enormous odds. Walton’s characters, on the other hand, obtain separate identities when they undergo superposition, which leads to tension in the narrative. Throughout Superposition, therefore, there are two focalizors who are both Jacob, and whose perspectives are accessed in alternate chapters. For Nick in Quarantine, it is not relevant what the other Nicks have done, so the reader can stick to a single narrative and focalizor; for Jacob and Alex/Sandra/Alessandra, it is relevant, so the novel must be able to combine multiple narrative threads. In Supersymmetry, the storylines of Alex, Sandra, and Alessandra are narrated in the third person, emphasizing their identities as two separate individuals who merge at the end of the novel into a third, new, character. Surprisingly, Supersymmetry (SS) ultimately turns out to follow the Copenhagen rather than the many-worlds interpretation after all, assuming a single timeline rather than a branching multiverse. After the superposition of Alex and Sandra collapses and they become Alessandra again, she explains that the multiverse theories have always been a bit fanciful. It’s hard to believe that entirely new universes are being created all the time, whenever any particle’s probability wave collapses. The math certainly doesn’t require it. […] There’s only one timeline. The universe solves the equation so that causality is preserved. (SS 273–274)

Alessandra’s explanation contradicts the information given in the first novel, yet it corrects the paradoxical application of both the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation in the previous novel. Jean’s attempt to change her child is now explained as time travel rather than accessing multiple worlds: “She had tried to use the Higgs projector to change the past, to alter the fall of the dice, and resolve her unborn daughter’s probability wave as a healthy, able child” (SP 162). This approach is explained at the end of the book, when Alessandra uses it to change the past and prevent a nuclear world war instigated by the varcolac. Truly changing the past would not have been possible under the many-­worlds interpretation, in which she would have created a new branch; there would still be a parallel universe that would suffer a nuclear war. Walton moves from the many-worlds to the Copenhagen interpretation in order to create an unambiguously positive ending.

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Although it may sound odd that Walton would have his characters abandon the many-worlds interpretation after they have used technologies that assume it to be true, we will see that he is not the only one to have done so. Iain Pears’s Arcadia similarly makes use of many-worlds travel that turns out to be time travel. In Gregory Benford’s Timescape, the opposite applies: the physicist characters assume that they  are changing their own past, but it is eventually revealed that they have created a better future for a parallel universe. Quantum physics occupies an uncertain position in our own time: we do not know which of many different possible interpretations could turn out to embody the truth. Fiction is therefore able to present a near-future world in which the correct interpretation is only just being discovered; such fiction can even be set in the far future. These narratives of discovery can be particularly suitable to a mystery or detective plot, with unexpected outcomes and sudden plot twists.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation has been to date the most influential interpretation of quantum physics in popular science and in fiction. This interpretation  resonates with many existing narrative tropes, which makes it an interesting interpretation to communicate in popular science books as well as a useful one for fiction. As Marie-Laure Ryan points out, narratives that make use of the Everettian multiverse overlap with three fiction tropes in particular: transworld exploration, time travel, and alternate history (Ryan 2006, 656). The many-worlds interpretation has the ability to provide a scientific validation for these three existing modes, lifting them out of the realm of fantasy and giving them  a more realistic potential. However, using the many-worlds interpretation as a trope can do much more. The works discussed here use this interpretation in such a way that the science plays a significant part in the construction of the narrative, both at the level of the structure and at the level of the plot. Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980) makes use of both special relativity and quantum physics to combine time travel and alternate history in a science fiction novel. In the novel, set in 1998, physicists discover the possibility of time travel, but cannot physically travel; instead, they send a message back to the 1960s to prevent the ecological catastrophe that endangers their world. To make this plot possible, Benford makes use of tachyons, hypothetical particles frequently used in science fiction, which

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can travel faster than light and therefore backwards in time. The lives of the people sending the message will not be affected by its consequences; instead, they hope to have established a better future for people on an alternate timeline. Benford, who is a professor of physics as well as a science fiction author, does not refer to Everett anywhere. Instead, he lets his character Gregory Markham discover this interpretation: “Markham felt a sudden stab of perception. If the universe was a wholly linked system with no mythical classical observer to collapse the wave function, then the wave function did not have to collapse at all” (Benford 1980). Markham builds on the work of a scientist called Tanninger, who created a new function that did not describe probabilities—it spoke of different universes. When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. […] All this came from using tachyons to produce the standing-wave kind of time loop. Without tachyons, no splitting into different universes occurred. (Benford 1980)

Since Everett’s supervisor John Wheeler, alongside more than a dozen other physicists, is mentioned by name in the novel, Everett’s absence is remarkable. It is unlikely that Benford had not heard of Everett by 1980; however, leaving Everett out allowed him to create a version of the many-­ worlds interpretation that would fit his story more closely through merging the already popular science fiction concept of the tachyon with a new interpretation of quantum physics, which together would allow for the sending of the message to the past. The opposite discovery, that the Everett interpretation is incorrect, is made in  Iain Pears’s Arcadia (2015). This work is unique among the works discussed in this chapter in the way it borrows concepts from quantum physics not only for the contents of the narrative, but also for its structure. The work was originally intended to be available only as an iOS app (Pears n.d.), but most of the contents of this app have also been published as a printed novel with an imposed reading order. Part of Arcadia is set in the year 2222, when the physicist Angela Meerson discovers an inter-universe travelling method. However, she is convinced that what is actually made possible is time travel: “This whole project is based on the assumption that what we are doing is not time travel. Laws of physics. Accepted and proven for two centuries or more. All we can possibly do is transit to a parallel universe. Right?” […] “Wrong,” I went on. “Wrong, wrong. It’s all wrong. I know it is. Think.

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In theory, we should be able to access any number of universes. So why can we only seem to access one, eh? No one has thought about the implications of that. I think the whole alternative universe theory is complete nonsense. We would be moving in this universe. The only one there is. Time travel, to put it bluntly. If that is the case, we have to stop now.” (Pears 2015a, 30)

In Angela’s time, the “multiple universe theory” has been the “accepted convention for nearly two hundred years” (Pears 2015a, 233). Angela is the one who now proves this interpretation wrong, as she shows how people can travel back and forth on a single timeline, which does not branch; however, she is not believed. The question of whether the world she and her colleagues have discovered, Anterwold, is their own future or a parallel world becomes particularly pressing as her colleagues decide to destroy this world with nuclear weapons to create more living space for humanity. The conflict between these two interpretations, the many-worlds interpretation and the idea of a single timeline on which one can move back and forth, is reflected in the structure of the app version of Arcadia. The narrative in this app, which is longer than the novel, is broken up into short sections, at the end of which the reader is given the opportunity to select which section to read next, from up to seven options. The reader can choose to follow the storyline of one character, or switch between characters; in most cases, following one single character strand from beginning to end will not provide enough information to understand the plot. The characters are not identified by their name in the superstructure, but by their identities: Canterbury Tales-like, the different strands are called The Teacher’s Tale, The Scientist’s Tale, The Young Girl’s Tale—there are ten strands in total, containing between 16 and 73 sections per strand. The novel is read by scrolling; at the end of each section a new header appears, at which point the reader can choose to keep scrolling on to the next suggested section and follow the same character, but they can also tap arrow icons to switch to a different header, and character, instead. The reader also has the option to select bonus chapters, which are not included in the paper novel.2 The app contains a map of all the sections there are to read, marking which have already been read. The reader can see which path they are taking, and whether they may have missed a section along the way. The app does not impose linearity: it is possible to scroll back and forth through the superstructure and simply choose a s­ ection at random.

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However, the map is visually constructed to display a structure that is ultimately directed towards a single final chapter, just as the scrolling involved in the reading process suggests. Notably, there is only one first chapter, “A Landscape”, from which all of the branches spread out; similarly, there is only one final chapter, “Evening Sky”, which brings all of the branches back together. Both chapters are extremely short, designed to precisely fill the iPhone screen.3 This structure makes the narrative as a whole similar to B.S.  Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), where the reader is allowed to read the chapters in any random order, but the first and last chapters are designated as such by the author. Pears’s reader may have the idea that their choices are actively influencing the narrative, that there are other stories they are not reading because of their choices. Yet the structure of the narrative is largely predetermined, and its contents wholly so. Pears has emphasized that he opposes any use of the word “interactive” to describe Arcadia (Pears et al. 2016): his narrative is not interactive; the many-worlds interpretation is not adhered to. There are no different branches that the reader can explore, along which events play out differently. Pears has explained that he introduced the physics into the story in order to make it possible to have two events that are set thousands of years apart seemingly happen simultaneously, in a single narrative (Pears et al. 2016). Interactivity implies that the reader’s actions shape the narrative, not only its reading order, but its contents and, crucially, its ending, too. Quantum physics could potentially influence narrative form to a much fuller extent than existing fiction has attempted. Interactive narratives, and the reader’s (limited) freedom of choice, allow for the creation of branching worlds in the narrative’s very structure. Arcadia, however, is limited in its usage of interactive technology, and I have so far not identified any other works that explore the possibilities of quantum physics in interactive fiction. The most common usage of quantum physics in fiction is still rather limited: as a post-hoc explanation, a passing reference which suggests that something works because of quantum physics. The reader is supposed to suspend disbelief, because the narrative requires this leap to get to the next step in the storyline. A narrative might follow the many-­ worlds interpretation of quantum physics by starting off from a single origin, from which the reader would be able to choose where to go next at any given moment; the story would have a linear cause-and-effect structure, but the reader would be able to go back to a previous point and explore a different branch from there. A many-worlds storyline would

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have a range of different possible endings; however, unlike other open-­ ended works of interactive fiction such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987), it would not be possible to go round in circles by choosing the same sequence of hyperlinks again and again.

Conclusion Fiction that explicitly made use of particular interpretations of quantum physics concepts began to appear less than a decade after the publication of the first papers on these topics. The authors of such works were willing to dedicate significant portions of text to explaining quantum physics to their readers, to allow for the fantastical new stories, or new interpretations of old stories, that the science made possible. Quantum physics in fiction presents new possibilities for focalization. Identity becomes a questionable concept: narratives can present a single focalizor who still gives the reader different points of view through being spread out over eigenstates; they can also present various different focalizors who are, or have once been, one and the same character. The very meaning of the personal pronoun “I” is questioned when quantum physics is made to influence the narrative. Introducing quantum physics can change the reader’s understanding of the story. Walton’s duology is able to make apparently supernatural events hold up in court because they can be explained scientifically: fiction in which supernatural occurrences are brought to court usually involve an opposition between science and the supernatural, as in The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson 2005). The reader will have expectations regarding the development of the plot as the science, its rules, and its consequences are explained. If the collapse of the wave function occurs, as in Egan’s and Walton’s works, the reader will know that eventually only one instance of the main character will be left over; if the reader knows the many-worlds interpretation applies, with its constant branching, they might expect several instances of the same character to appear and conflict with each other. The form and structure of a novel can also be influenced by the use of quantum physics. Chapter breaks can function as a marker of a perspective switch, even when this change in perspective does not imply a change in protagonist: Walton uses chapter breaks to switch between different instances of the same character. Quantum physics can also be used to

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imagine a story that does not have a predetermined reading order; the physical form of the codex limits such a structure, however. Such explorations of new narrative structures could be further developed in new media; however, novelists do not seem to have made as strong a connection between this new science and new narrative modes. The potential for interactive fiction to reflect the worlds of quantum physics does not seem to have been explored fully, or even tentatively, not even now that the internet has made this possibility cheaper and more accessible. Iain Pears has been a ground-breaker in combining new media with mainstream literary fiction to reflect the narrative structures made possible by quantum physics, and one can imagine narratives that incorporate quantum physics further into their structure. One reason for the lack of further development might be the logistical difficulties involved in constructing the software behind hypertext fiction. Pears states: After working my way through three publishers, two designers, four sets of coders and a lot of anguish, I am no longer surprised that few others have done anything about it. I also understand why the NHS database could go five times over budget and not work. What should be a simple task—write story, create software, publish—turns out to be anything but in practice. (Pears 2015b)

The issue of commercialization is connected to these design issues. Creating an interactive work online may be easier, but making that pay in an age of piracy is not. Apps offer a possibility for a payment model, but as Pears shows, these are difficult and expensive to make. Digital works of art and hypertext fictions soon turn into intermedial works that are no longer easily classified as literature. Another reason for the limited success of these hypertext forms might be the unwillingness of the reader to abandon the paper book as a material object, along with the sense of accomplishment that physically finishing a novel and closing the book gives, a feeling that has also slowed down the adoption of e-reader technology (Hancock et  al. 2016). Interactive fiction, especially the fiction that does not have a single ending, often cannot inform the reader how far along they are in a narrative, meaning that there is no way for the reader to check whether they are making progress and being a “good” reader. The need for this feeling of accomplishment is reinforced when reading longer narratives. A novel with an open ending can give the reader a sense of dissatisfaction, but at least they know this

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novel has physically ended now. A novel with neither a narrative nor a physical ending might give the reader so much dissatisfaction that the pleasure that can be gained from the reading experience becomes drastically reduced. Since literature can present only one narrator at a time—although many texts offer, in sequence, different narrators—the introduction of branched and superposed narratives leads to experiments that push the form to its limits. Although an analysis of other media is beyond the scope of this universe’s iteration of this chapter, one might consider how similar questions of identity could be approached in modern media: for instance, the ways in which film and TV might approach superposition by means of a split screen, or the opportunities for the many-worlds interpretation for video games, which often struggle to create a narrative in which repeated character death is part of the story. Literature, on the other hand, can use the conventions of the medium to confront the reader with questions about identity and perspective, showing the immense changes these issues undergo when influenced by ideas from quantum physics.

Notes 1. The experiment was in fact performed in 2013, and did not confirm the conscious collapse hypothesis (Bach et al. 2013). 2. These bonus chapters are presented as extracts from notebooks that provide more details about the geographical and social structure of Anterwold. 3. The book chapters, in contrast, are much longer, and do not have chapter titles. The book does not open with “A Landscape” or close with “Evening Sky”. Each book chapter is divided into sections: the short chapters of the app.

Works Cited Bach, Roger et al. (2013). “Controlled Double-Slit Electron Diffraction.” New Journal of Physics 15.3: 033018. Bear, Greg (1982). “Schrödinger’s Plague.” Analog: 62–69. Benford, Gregory (1980). Timescape. Ebook. New York: Simon and Schuster. Borges, Jorge Luis (1998). “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Allen Lane. 119–128. Capra, Fritjof (1975). The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. London: Wildwood House. Derrickson, Scott (2005). The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Sony Pictures. Egan, Greg (1992). Quarantine. London: Legend.

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——— (2008). “Quantum Mechanics and Quarantine.” 18 Jan. 2008. Web. 7 Dec. 2016. Everett, Hugh (1957). “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” Reviews of Modern Physics 29.3: 454–462. Feynman, Richard P., Robert B.  Leighton and Matthew Sands (1965). The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Vol. 3. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Gribbin, John. (2012). In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat. London: Random House. Hancock, Gabriella M., et al. (2016). “Is E-Reader Technology Killing or Kindling the Reading Experience?” Ergonomics in Design 24.1: 25–30. Kosmatka, Ted (2016). The Flicker Men. London: Penguin. Leane, Elizabeth (2007). Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies. Hampshire: Ashgate. Norton, Andre (1978). The Crossroads of Time. New York: Ace Books. Pears, Iain (n.d.). “Arcadia.” Web. Accessed 2 Sep. 2016. . ——— (2015a). Arcadia. London: Faber & Faber. ——— (2015b). “Why You Need an App to Understand My Novel.” The Guardian. 20 Aug. 2015. Web. 6 Nov. 2016. Pears, Iain, et  al. (2016). “TORCH Book at Lunchtime: ‘Arcadia.’” TORCH: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. University of Oxford. Web. 2 Oct. 2018. Rucker, Rudy (1983). The Sex Sphere. New York: Ace. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27.4: 633–674. Schrödinger, Erwin (1935). “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics).” Die Naturwissenschaften 23.48: 52, 808–812. von Neumann, John (1996). Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1996. Walton, David (2015a). Superposition. Amherst, NY: Pyr. ——— (2015b). Supersymmetry. Amherst, NY: Pyr. Warrick, Patricia (1987). “Quantum Reality in Recent Science Fiction.” Extrapolation 28.4: 297–309. Wigner, Eugene P. (1967). “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question.” Symmetries and Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 171–184. Williamson, Jack (1977). The Legion of Time. London: Sphere.

CHAPTER 5

Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body Paola Carbone

Electronic literature is a contemporary art form that experiments with modes of writing in the digital environment: digital devices become writing tools, and the screen (along with more unorthodox surfaces such as the human body, building façades, and real-time interactive 3D virtual environments) becomes the reading ‘space’ of literary works. Although a relatively recent form, we can already outline a history of electronic literature: the first experiments go back to the 1950s when a computer called Mark I produced basic generative works. With the development of information technology (IT), e-literature has turned into a fertile ground for experimentation with new cognitive models, and now it encompasses, to name just a few examples, hypernarrative, cyberpoetry, database fiction, social media storytelling, and forms of narration in virtual and augmented reality. In this chapter, I illustrate how after ‘art in the age of mechanical reproduction,’ we have entered into the twenty-first century as an age when algorithmic processing has become part of the artistic process. Not only has technology changed the way we perceive and interact with the world, but

P. Carbone (*) Università IULM—Milan, Milan, Italy © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_5

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it has changed the way we conceive and produce poetry. In what follows, I demonstrate how the fusion of literature and technology gives rise to more conscious and creative representations of contemporary reality. Even if e-literature is a new form of writing and quickly develops in the twenty-first century, it still engages with its roots in experimentalist writing and the work of European vanguards such as Laurence Sterne, Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, T.S.  Eliot, William Burroughs, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, George Perec, and Marc Saporta, as well as OULIPO, Futurism, and Dadaism. These writers and movements prefigure formal ideas crucial to digital communication, such as abandonment of linearity, narrative fragmentation, montage, and multimedia convergence. Though it might seem contradictory to talk about ‘concrete’ poetry in relation to electronic literature, which is normally seen as ‘virtual’ par excellence, this chapter investigates how some of the main features of concrete poetry are radicalised and renegotiated in the age of digital media. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on ways in which twenty-first-century e-literature and digital concrete poetry can foster awareness of the relationship between human beings, machine code, and software culture.

Electronic Literature and Concrete Poetry Before turning to relations between technological changes and formal innovation in concrete digital poetry, I examine conceptualisations of ‘traditional’ concrete poetry. Eugen Gomringer, one of the fathers of concrete poetry, sets out: the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object to be both seen and used: an object containing thought but made concrete through play-activity (denkgegenstanddenkspiel), its concern is with brevity and conciseness. It is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture. Its objective element of play is useful to modern man, whom the poet helps through his special gift for this kind of play-activity. […] The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions. The constellation is ordered by the plot. He determines the play-area, the fields or force and suggests its possibilities. The reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play, and joins in. […] [T]he constellation is an invitation. (Gomringer 1968, 67)

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Concrete poetry transforms the traditional lines, stanzas, and rhyme scheme into a verbo-visual configuration, which represents a conceptual synthesis of an abstract idea. The latter activates the wit of the reader who is supposed to unveil—in a sort of playful confrontation with the text as poetic ‘object’—the hidden connections between the meaning and the shape of the printed words, as they are purposely or symbolically dislocated within the writing space of the page. In that respect, Decio Pignatari and Luiz Angelo Pinto defined concrete poets as “linguistic designers” (Pignatari and Pinto 1964, 81). The poem turns into a sort of amusing charade, and the sympathetic interaction with the mysterious, cryptic, puzzling composition enacts its poetic action. Critic Rosemarie Waldrop explains the nature of a ‘constellation’ or composition of this kind: we do not usually see words, we read them, which is to say we look through them at their significance, their contents. Concrete poetry is first of all a revolt against this transparency of the word […]. Concrete poetry makes the sound and shape of words its explicit field of investigation […]. Further, it stresses the visual side which is neglected even in the ‘sound and sense’ awareness of ordinary poetry (as well as in the oral bias of most linguistics). This does not mean that concrete poets want to divorce the physical aspects of the word from its meaning […]. Words are not colors or lines: their semantic dimension is an integral part of them. (Waldrop 1982, 315; my emphasis)

The above quotations emphasise that in concrete poetry the text should be visually perceived as a whole. If the poem is a visual object to be read as well as to be seen, verbal language works to re-evaluate its opacity and ‘physicality’ (read ‘concreteness’) so that words become visual objects with a meaning. Gomringer and other concrete poets aimed to create poetry that could “speak out on man and society” (Morgan 1961, 18) in a catchy and highly communicative way. They found inspiration in the verbal-visual language of mass media and advertising, which often conveys content in a few words, for example in headlines and slogans. Writers of concrete poetry believed that sense-concentrated and simplified language of this kind shares features with poetic language, and they aimed to exploit its peculiarities to create a new poetic art that would be “aware of graphic space as structural agent” (de Campos et al. 1971, 70). We see the commitment to

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investigating the power of the word as both verbal and visual entity in Gomringer’s most famous work, “schweigen” (1953) (see Gomringer 1960): in the poem, the word “schweigen”—“silence”—is repeated 14 times, forming a square of three columns and five rows, with a blank, ‘mute’ space in the middle. The physical absence of the word “schweigen” at the centre of the composition ties in with the meaning of the word, thus implying that silence is tantamount to a lack of oral or written language. Here absence does not mean deficiency, but enactment, as it triggers the play(-activity) of signification. The reader is invited to give a creative response by making use of two different semiotic systems: the linguistic (focusing on the meaning of the word “silence”) and the visual (noting the blank—silent—space in the middle). In its immediacy, the poem hides the complexity of the double cognitive procedure: viewing and reading. The poem impressively illustrates that in concrete poetry, the word does not only represent a concept, but presents it at the visual level, and that it is only because of the meaning of the word that the form takes on significance. If concrete poets drew on the poetic potentiality of commercial language in the 1950s, in the twenty-first century digital artists find inspiration in the shift from mass-media culture to personal-media culture, and developments in multi/cross/trans-media, machine code, and social media communication. In what follows, I first focus on the role of linguistic opacity in contemporary electronic literature and on the use of both verbal and visual texts to convey meaning on digital reading surfaces, and then I examine how a computational algorithm transforms an e-text into a poetic process. As the argument develops, we should keep in mind that, unlike the white page of the book, digital writing space is a de-structured space deprived of margins and centres, but contained within screens of different dimensions and resolutions. To write for the screen means to create a more or less fluid architecture that can contain and present the text ‘efficiently,’ that is, in accordance with its meaning and/or communicative purpose: as an example, consider how the layout of an online newspaper differs from that of a dictionary, a literary text, or Facebook or Twitter account interfaces. Likewise, not only does a text have a visual concreteness due to size, colour, and shape, but it can also move, emerge, disappear … and thereby surprise or intrigue the reader. In electronic literature, the fluidity or the kinesis of the text is part of the poetic process. It is in such instability that the complexity of digital concrete poetry takes form.

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Digital Concrete Poetry Digital concrete poetry arose in connection with digital technologies, that is, developments of new writing/reading surfaces, reader-machine interaction, and kinematic text/image, that is, text and image that moves on the screen. Among the forerunners, it is worthwhile remembering Vuk Cosic’s Contemporary ASCII (1998) and Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997). The poets, rather than taking inspiration from the language of mass media and advertising, found their muse in IT, specifically in ASCII and HTML codes. As Philippe Bootz maintains, in the 1980s, “some authors, coming from a variety of concrete and sound poetry movements, thought that the prominence of formal and structural dimensions of the texts that automated or combinatorial generators made, was a reduction of the text to an abstraction” (Bootz 2012), and they believed it vital to reintroduce the ‘physicality’ of the word into the digital text. Digital text has always used space as a primary instrument for organising knowledge. In his conceptualisation of hypertext, David J.  Bolter talks about “topographical writing,” which he explains in the following way: “Electronic writing is both a visual and verbal description, not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics […] signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech” (Bolter 1991, 25; my emphasis). Hypertext is made of lexias and links, with each lexia being conceived as a conceptual space or a minimum unit of meaning that contains an idea or a significant element of the narration. Links, which make lexias interact, are responsible for creating a net of possible non-linear readings. It is obvious that digital textuality has broken away from the peculiarities and limits of the white page, suggesting different ways of creating and communicating knowledge. New surfaces imply new conceptual spaces, which modify the logic of writing. Indeed, even if we extend the concept of writing space from hypertexts to other kinds of digital textualities such as databases (organised around unconnected items gathered as logical fields), or cybertexts and real-time installations where events happening in time take over control of contents, we realise that we never escape from an idea of circumscribed areas of signification. The writing space of digital concrete poetry has been challenged by moving images and texts, that is, by the addition of a temporal dimension as a new aspect of creative writing and reading processes. DHTML and software such as Flash and Shockwave have empowered the transition from a syn-optic to a syn-chronic text, where events happening on the screen are

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defined by their development in time as much as by their visual form. The animated gif (graphics interchange format) is an apparently simple example of such a process. Ana Maria Uribe has created gifs since 2000, and it is clear that these texts are specifically designed for performance. In the gif “Gym” (Uribe 1998) one set of letters is replaced by another: the succession of sets of letters conveys funny, unexpected changes in time that allow the reader/beholder to glimpse figures taking different gymnastic positions. Single static letters would not produce the same effect on the printed page: it is only in their temporal animation that the ‘play’ is activated. In their reliance on a specific manner of reception, Uribe’s gifs remind us of concrete poems that must be seen and cannot be simply recited. John Cayley stresses the fact that letters, rather than words, become the object of the poetic playground in the new concrete poetry: Letters are very good at defining space for literate humans. Letter forms give excellent visual clues concerning relative distance. It would require experimentation in perception and cognition to verify this empirically, but my hypothesis is that, because letter shapes are both complex and familiar (to their readers, to the literate), they are highly suitable as reference shapes for spatiality. Unlike abstract shapes, letters possess an intrinsic scale […] it should be possible to “play”—affectively, viscerally—with their form and arrangement in ways that are likely to have aesthetic significance, and some bearing—potentially, ultimately—on literary practice. (Cayley quoted in Roberts et al. 2012)

It is my opinion that the familiarity of the alphabet and the archetypical nature of an object that preludes language are highly engaging for the reader/beholder. Moreover, the moving image gives the sense of action in time—a dimension that is lost on the printed page. Uribe does not use the letters in her gifs to create words that represent content, but she employs them for their visual action potential. Using digital technology, she brackets representation—the content—and foregrounds presentation. So, just as concretism stood for immediate consumption, destined to be produced and consumed at once (on a par with advertising), digital animated poems might become an immediate, easy, mechanical experience in time. We should bear in mind, however, that what seems to be simple is not always truly predictable and banal: the artist and the programmer make the difference.

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Seiichi Niikuni’s “River/Sandbank” (1963) (Niikuni 1967) is a poem shaped like a square, separated diagonally into two triangles made up of ideograms of different densities. The Japanese word kawa—‘川’ (river)— dominates the upper left side, and the word sasu—‘砂州’ (sandbank)—fills the lower right. The composition produces an optical effect due to the different densities of the ideograms and the visual effect is supported by their meanings, leading the reader/beholder to consider a particular landscape mediated by language. Concrete poems prevent eye movement by locking an entire communicative universe into an image: the whole and its parts, as Gomringer stated. So concrete poems localise both the semantic and the syntactic process. Yet, “River/Sandbank” alludes to movement: the sinuous ideogram kawa has a vigour that the ideogram sasu does not possess. But, in turn, the ideogram sasu points to the narrative element of the visual narration by embodying the stationary feature of the riverbank opposed to the fluid water. Niikuni’s poem acts on the mind of the reader in a similar way to Uribe’s letters that carry forward the story of a gymnastic exercise, though the latter is less demanding. In literature, a story always develops in time, but in the case of “River/Sandbank,” it is the evocative power of the form, the succession and the proximity of the different objects (ideograms), that creates conceptual connections which turn into a diegetic process. As Gomringer writes, concrete poems are not “about something, but concrete realities in themselves” (Gomringer 1997, 17), and, I would add, they are self-reflexive realities, attracting attention to the process of meaning-­ making. Where concrete poetry emphasises the “structure-­ content” relationship (de Campos et  al. 1971, 70–2), digital concrete poetry refers to a “process-content” relation. As Philippe Bootz contends, in electronic literature it is not only (or no longer) the product of a process that is represented but the process itself. It is no longer an object represented, but it is a process. The procedural work thus comprises two levels of representation, that of the product and that of the process. […] [T]his product [… is the] transitory state of a process endowed with autonomy. (Bootz 2010, 20–1)

Process in digital media is embodied in the algorithm, or set of mathematical instructions, which is needed to design the properties of the process of creation and fruition of the work of art. In some advanced forms of electronic literature the text is entirely made up by an algorithm, as, for

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instance, in Twitterbots, which get their contents in the form of data inflowing from the web. Referring to traditional literature, Umberto Eco defined ‘poetics’ as the operational programme or the operative project of the writer; in electronic literature, poetics is defined by the paradigms of interaction within the algorithm. Whatever the artist wants the poem to be, to look like, and to perform—in other words, the aesthetics of the piece—is outlined by the rules of the algorithm. Therefore, the algorithm is much more than a set of technical instructions; it is the poetic intention itself. In effect, the reading process implies interaction with the hardware and software of the computer that run the programme through machine code. Alexander Galloway insists: “Code is the only language that is executable” (Galloway 2004, 165). The machine produces the text according to the mathematical directions prearranged by the author in collaboration with the programmer. The text is then experienced by the reader, who progressively and continuously, interacts with the machine in a cyber-­ feedback loop in order to create (a possible reading of) the text and the artistic experience. The algorithm, as an instruction to move from an initial input to a final output, together with the interaction between text and reader introduces a temporal dynamism into electronic literature. Concrete poetry displayed ideas of transformation in action even before the advent of the computer, and the new technology took these up and developed them along new lines. For example, “Like Attracts Like” (1967) by Emmett Williams (see Williams 1998, 307) makes visually explicit the attractive power of two words: forming a V-shape, repetitions of the word ‘like’ gravitate towards each other and merge with a middle column made out of the word ‘attracts,’ finally melting into a indistinguishable mass of words at the tip of the V. “Pêndulo” by E.M. de Melo e Castro (1961/1962) (see Melo e Castro 1973, 67) uses a similar process: the graphic pattern of the letters making up the word ‘pêndulo’ are arranged into the shape of a swinging pendulum. A comparison with a later audio-­ visual adaption (available on YouTube)1 illustrates how new technologies offer new possibilities: here, the addition of a temporal dimension (a static line of letters slowly becoming animated to form a pendulum in full swing) realises and further develops the original idea of the concrete poem. Clearly, the animation elaborates on the poem since it does not simply present an immediate verbal-visual object but displays a time-based development. To ensure attention over this longer temporal span, the viewing has to be made more attractive for the observer of the animation. Over a period of two minutes, signs in the middle of the screen grow to become

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letters, letters fade as if disappearing into distant time and space, while rhythmical movements determine the readability of the strings of words. As this example shows, the complexity of the surface in the electronic environment offers additional dimensions that can challenge writing. Brian Kim Stefans created “The Dreamlife of Letters” (2000), a flash-­ animation, based on several keywords which the author had extracted from texts by the American poet and essayist Rachel Blau Du Plessis and by the American novelist Dodie Bellamy, in order to explore the ground between classic concrete poetry, avant-garde feminist practice, and “ambient” poetics, that is, those artistic texts which are considered in terms of how they manage the space in which they appear. In Stefans’s work, in a series of 36 short concrete poems, individual words seem to take on their own distinct and lively characters by means of what can be described as a verbal-visual poeticmorphing process. The words are arranged in alphabetical order, and they are generally connected by alliteration and assonance, but they also meet in conceptual or ideological correlations. Each poem was originally intended to be read linearly, but since the words almost invariably take on nearly obscene meanings once left to linger on their own, the author decided to create the animation, 11 minutes long. Each poem uses different methods to transform the words on the screen, and several unsuspected patterns develop and suggest a correspondence between the transformation process and the meaning of the words. Taking into account that it is difficult to describe what needs to be seen in action, in animation number six, “Dread to Drip,”2 an uppercase “D,” set at the centre of the screen, becomes the initial of a sequence of two alternating strings of letters—“ream” and “read”—that flows from the top of the screen to form the words “dream” and “dread.” The reader immediately tries to understand the relationship between “dream” and “dread,” but, after a while, the stream of these two words disappears and the lexeme “drip” takes the stage at the right bottom of the writing space. At first, the initial “d” draws apart from the rest of the word and disappears, then “-rip” fades away in a short lapse of time. We can, of course, speculate on the meanings of the three words ream/read/RIP…. At the beginning of the animation the evocative power of the words “dream” and “dread” takes us into a highly contradictory and emotional conceptual dimension, only to abruptly break it with the introduction of the word “drip.” The lightness of a drop introduces a process of estrangement from the dreamlike and introspective state of mind, and takes the reader back to a more concrete and physical existence. The form of the signifier is central to the animation and makes it a cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and poetic experience.

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Janez Strehovec reminds us how digital morph, or mutation induced by an algorithmic process, often replaces metaphor in print-based modern poetry (Strehovec 2010, 72), so we could say that the kinetic operation on the screen corresponds to the literary complexity of the text: once again we are talking about a visualisation of meaning through the visualisation of the word. Where in concrete poetry, structure/form and subject of the poem correlate—as, for example, in Gomringer’s “Silence”—in digital concrete poetry, the correspondence is between process and subject. In practice, “The Dreamlife of Letters” asks its reader/beholder to interpret the sense of the textual animation in relation to the meaning of the words and vice versa, constantly bearing in mind the connectivities among these semantic universes. Although the author states that the flash-animation is “really just plain fun to watch” (Hayles et al. 2006), the work engages the reader in a complex interpretative activity, demanding attention to the way in which words meet and transform following philosophical rather than merely aesthetic criteria. Electronic textuality emphasises what is usually meaningless in a linear, two-dimensional, static poem, namely, the shape of the written word. Changes in its consistency—size, colour, transparency, dislocation—allow a specific rhetoric to emerge and the “dream of the letter” to come true, that is, its dream to become word, meaning, cognitive universe, experience. In view of “The Dreamlife of Letters,” we might agree with Alkamar Luiz dos Santos that digital writing is characterised by an epigrammatic rhetoric, being essentially brief and incisive and having “no need to use images to illustrate words or words to comment on images […]. [I]t is a question of reversibility between pictures and words returning, inaugurating, and giving access to one another” (dos Santos 2010, 92). In the case of Stefans’s flash-animation, we are not dealing with words and images, but with words as both linguistic and typographic signs whose transformations define their connection to adjacent words. As words become objectified, they are freed from their (purely) representative function (see Waldrop 1982, 315). As we have seen, the way the poetic word is presented in a digital environment changes the reader’s perception of it. The mis en scène of the message engages the reader in a playful exchange with the text and the medium. The creative use of technology empowers poetry with new literary devices and rhetorical strategies, offering new ways to represent and present contents as well as new strategies to create estrangement effects, which are essential to the poetic message. I do not agree with Andrew

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Darley when he talks about a “‘poetics’ of surface play and sensation” (Darley 2000, 193), since digital poetry is much more than that. To me, twenty-first-century technology gives writers and readers new tools of interaction to revisit and challenge our certainties about the use of language. Words adapt to the new means of communication and techno-­ logics. Not least, the playground of digital concretism involves the senses and the body of the reader and thus challenges boundaries between fiction and reality and can overcome the separation between the flat writing space of the page and life in three dimensions. Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s video-installation Text Rain (1999) is among the first works playing with the body and senses of the reader, and anticipates more sophisticated works in augmented and virtual reality. It makes use of the body as both ideal writing surface and reading tool. The work asks the reader/user, who stands or moves in front of a large projection screen, to interact with the text via the mirrored image of his or her own body. At first sight, Text Rain is a cascade of letters that spill down from the top of the screen onto the participants’ silhouettes. As the authors state, letters respond to participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again (Utterback and Achituv 1999). The falling text ‘lands’ on anything darker than a certain shade threshold, and ‘falls’ further whenever that obstacle is removed. At the beginning, the work consists only of these falling (virtual) ‘objects’ (or letters), so that the reader does not perceive that there is a narration beyond them. At this stage, some readers simply play with the alphabet and leave aside any literary experience, but others feel challenged to understand what is going on and are surprised to realise that through their bodily interaction they are able to accumulate enough letters along their silhouette to pick out an entire word, or even a sentence. In this way they become aware that the falling letters are not random but form lines of a poem about bodies and language: the game of signification has now begun. In Text Rain, the white page of the printed Gutenberg book has become a screen and then a body and its environment. Without the image of the reader’s body, no text appears but only individual letters: without the reader’s body, no text, no poetics, no artistic experience, no aesthetics could exist. This encourages readers to start playing with their physicality in the digital environment and with the interactive algorithm. They become conscious of the fact that their bodies give consistency to the text, just as the book acts as support for all written literary works in the print era. So the concreteness of the body becomes part of the text, a reading

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tool and a critical device. The work of literature is no longer only an immaterial, logical set of words in the mind of the reader, but is defined and expressed on the reader’s limbs through letters, words, and verses. In Text Rain, and in electronic literature more generally, the reader lives through both an intellectual and a physical, sensorial experience. Text Rain also provides a very good example of correspondence between the content of the text, the form of expression, and their visual display in concrete form. The content of Text Rain is built around Evan Zimroth’s poem “Talk, You,” where the act of conversing is conceived as a physical interaction between two interlocutors in the sense of “a turning-with or—around” each other: “[…] At your turning, each part of my body turns to verb./ […]/We are synonyms for limbs’ loosening/of syntax,/and yet turn to nothing: It’s just talk” (Zimroth 1993, 40). Mirroring the content of Zimroth’s poem, Text Rain sets up a dialogue with the beholders when the work needs the performance of the readers and their bodies in order to exist. At the same time, the installation presupposes a certain reading rhythm, a conscious harmonious movement (or reading technique) as well as knowledge of English. Readers have to undertake a highly complex task, unequal to any previous literary experimentation. They become dancers in the rain of letters, as they need all their physical and perceptive sensitivity to give life to the text. The latest technological development with an impact on concrete poetry is a highly opaque, linguistic ‘object’ that concentrates meaning in striking, enigmatic new forms: the printed QR (Quick Response). Between Page and Screen (2011) (see Fig. 5.1) by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a popup book augmented by QR. Each page of the volume shows a QR that a webcam scans, so that a verbal (and/or visual) text appears on the monitor of the computer where it can be read. The book consists of cryptic missives that the two characters—P/page and S/screen—write to each other about both their relationship and the action undertaken by the readers in order to read the book itself. As Mara Logaldo points out, the typographical signs “forming the text seem to pop out of the monitor and overflow into the surrounding context” (Logaldo 2017, 117) (see Fig. 5.1). The experience implies the dissolution of the body of the book and the re-forming of the body of the reader within the virtual frame of the screen, which makes the ‘reading-event’ unique and ‘customised’ by the projection of the reader behind the text. The text, the reader, and the physical environment of the reading performance lose the concreteness they possess in the real world, in order to become virtual entities operating within the monitor.

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Fig. 5.1  Borsuk and Bouse, Between Page and Screen (2011)

While guided through an immaterial experience, the readers are asked to be aware not only of the reading process, but also of the importance of the word in human communication and the concreteness versus evanescence of the written language both on the page and on the screen. Indeed, the readers give life to content by means of their imagination, but they also make the ‘code’ (namely linguistic signs endowed with meaning as well as the machine code or the algorithm that works behind the monitor) take life on the screen by reproducing the conventional turning of the page. By doing so, the readers affranchise the primary physical visual typographical code, that is, the QR, from the codex (or the book in which the QR is printed). At this early stage, the verbal language does not come into play: the first task of the reader is to transform the QR into a readable text in verbal language. The text first exists in its iconic status (QR), then as concrete letters in the virtual environment within the monitor, and only ultimately as verbal language and meaning to be read as a piece of literature. The text needs to be digitally decrypted by the machine and made visible in the virtual space before it can be a literary text.

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The ultimate purpose of electronic literature is to encourage digital creativity and to raise critical awareness of technology in a constant challenge of tradition. In particular, augmented and virtual realities are two interesting technological frontiers that work as imaginatively immersive media for illusion in art. Such technology is widely used in videogames and in engaging 3D or mixed-reality environments. From a literary point of view, they are often exploited to create locative narratives, that is, those site-specific narrations which can be read only by walking through a specific space. One such example is Haunted London, an iPhone app produced by students from London College of Communication’s MA Interactive Media course, which was selected as a finalist at the British Interactive Media Association Awards in 2011. Also noteworthy is experimentation in the virtual cave, especially the programme CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) developed at Brown University. A virtual cave is a four-by-four-metre-long room, whose walls and floor are made of screens displaying 3D images and words. Wearing 3D glasses that guarantee stereo-separated views, the readers/performers of 3D virtual literature seem to be physically immersed in floating words. Hanging in the air around the reader, the words are objectified: words seem to be solid and tangible, and readers can manipulate them, for example by deciding whether to draw words towards themselves or to distance them in a ‘bodily’ interaction. Poetry in this virtual environment thus becomes a sensuous experience. Here, the reading surface is no longer thin, rigid paper, but a three-dimensional space, and the possibility to manipulate the text makes the readers act on the word-objects as well as on the story, since the possibilities of manipulation offered by the algorithm are always contingent on the contents and the message of the text. This shift from content to creative event moves the focus of e-literature from the message to the creation of a ‘space’ where the text, the environment, and the reader’s body engage in dialogue.

Conclusion As the verbal-visual language of mass media and advertising inspired the first concrete poets, digital language is becoming the new artistic and narrative playground for both artists and readers in the twenty-first century. Writers and technicians work more and more side by side to make poetic language and machine language interact. As the development of concrete poetry and its interconnection with new technologies shows, artistic aims have shifted, so that it is no longer only the creation of a verbal-audio-­

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visual experience that matters. Instead, we see an emphasis on participatory experience, which implies physical engagement. The readers’ interaction and participation are achieved by process and control, that is, by their ability to master the process. A main aim is to create a beautiful, harmonious, rhythmical, symmetrical interaction—what has been called the performative aura. This chapter has highlighted how digital media augment the principle of concrete poetry by stressing the visual component of the word in a different, experimental, and challenging communicative context. The concreteness and opacity of the written and oral word now depends on the narrative space of the digital device and the possibilities provided by the interactive computer. The writing and reading process emphasises the physical sensation and perception of the word so that in a virtual reality the word grounds the reader in the literary space rather than in content. The plasticity and dynamism of letters and words in the screen space illustrate that it is the digital environment that gives form to knowledge. Digital concrete poetry, in particular, can foster awareness of the relationship between human beings, machine code, and software culture, as Lev Manovich called our global, shared use of the same software and operating systems (Manovich 2013). Investigating how new technologies change our perception of art and representations of the contemporary age, this chapter showed how the techno-logics offered by digitalisation, for example hypertext, flash-animation, and augmented or virtual reality, contribute to raising our awareness of the way we use technologies and of their influence on our lives.

Notes 1. For the audio-visual adaptation of “Pêndulo” see: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Ff9XAvGJMPE. 2. For Brian Kim Stefans’s animation “Dread to Drip” see: http://collection. eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__the_dreamlife_of_letters/the_dream_ life_cleaned.html.

Works Cited Bolter, David Jay (1991). The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bootz, Philippe (2010). “The Unsatisfied Reading.” Regards Croisés. Perspectives on Digital Literature. Eds. Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 11–25.

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——— (2012). “From OULIPO to Transitoire Observable. The Evolution of French Digital Poetry.” Dichtung Digital 41 § “Towards a New Paradigm.” Web. 5 Aug. 2017. . Borsuk, Amaranth, and Brad Bouse (2011). Between Page and Screen. Los Angeles: Siglio. Web. 7 July 2018. . Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos (1971). “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry.” Concrete Poetry: A World View. Ed. Mary Ellen Solt. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. 70–72. Cosic, Vuk (1998). Contemporary ASCII. Web. 5 Aug. 2017. . Darley, Andrew (2000). Visual Digital Culture. Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London and New York: Routledge. Galloway, Alexander (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gomringer, Eugen (1960) [1953]. “schweigen.” 33 Konstellationen; mit 6 Konstellationen von Max Bill. St. Gallen: Tschudy-Verlag. n.pag. ——— (1968). “From Line to Constellation.” Concrete Poetry: A World View. Ed. Mary Ellen Solt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 67. ——— (1997). Theorie der Konkreten Poesie: Texte und Manifeste 1954–1997. Vienna: Edition Splitter. Hayles, Katharine, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Barbara Strickland (2006). Electronic Literature Collection 1. Cambridge, MA: Electronic Literature Organization. Web. 13 Oct. 2018. . Logaldo, Mara (2017). “ARvertising and the Remediation of Meaning.” The Many Facets of Remediation in Language Studies. Eds. Michela Canepari, Gillian Mansfield, and Franca Poppi. Beau-Bassin: Lambert Academic Publishing. Manovich, Lev (2013). Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury. Melo e Castro, E. M. de (1973). “Pêndulo” (1961/62). O Próprio Poético. São Paulo: Quiron. 67. Morgan, Edwin (1996) [1961]. Sovpoems. Collected Translations. Manchester: Carcanet. 27–31. Niikuni, Seiichi (1967) [1963]. “River/Sandbank”. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York et al.: Something Else Press. n. pag. Pignatari, Décio and Luiz Angelo Pinto (1964). “Nova linguagem, Nova poesia.” Invencão: Revista de Arte de Vanguarda 4: 79–84. Roberts, Andrew Michael, Lisa Otty, Martin H.  Fischer, and Anna Katharina Schaffner (2012). “Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology.” Digital Dichtung 42, §3. Web. 8 Aug. 2017. .

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Santos, Alckmar Luiz dos (2010). “How to Read Words in Digital Literature.” Regards Croisés. Perspectives on Digital Literature. Eds. Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 84–92. Shulgin, Alexei (1997). Form Art. Web. 5 Aug. 2017. . Stefans, Brian Kim (2000). The Dreamlife of Letters. Web. 5 Aug. 2017. and . Strehovec, Janez (2010). “Digital Poetry Beyond the Metaphysics of ‘Projective Saying.’” Regards Croisés. Perspectives on Digital Literature. Eds. Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 63–83. Uribe, Ana Maria (1998). Tipoemas y Anipoemas. Web. 5 Aug. 2017. . Utterback, Camille and Romy Achituv (1999). Text Rain. Web. 2 Sep. 2017. . Waldrop, Rosemarie (1982). “A Basis of Concrete Poetry.” The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. 315–323. Williams, Emmett (1998) [1967]. “Like Attracts Like.” Poems for the Millennium. The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Vol 2. From Postwar to Millennium. Eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. 307. Zimroth, Evan (1993). “Talk, You.” Dead, Dinner, or Naked. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books. 40.

CHAPTER 6

Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation Pia Balsmeier

Biotechnology in the Twenty-First Century Technology has always played a decisive role for the human, who has been developing tools long before the twenty-first century. Drawing on its ancient Greek origins (τέχνη + λόγος), technology can be defined as the study of craft or skills, and as such it points to our ways of developing capabilities in order to use, produce, and process things. The recourse to such instruments for the mastery of the environment has always been part of human agency, and yet twenty-first-century technology adds a new dimension to our selfdefinition: recent developments in biotechnology1 enable us not only to produce the tools we need in order to shape and exploit our environment, but to intervene in the creation and development of life itself. Biotechnology appears as a “set of powerful tools” giving “scientists the ability to make

P. Balsmeier (*) University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_6

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precise and rapid changes to any type of living organism” (Hoban 1995, 189). Currently one of the most progressive of these developments can be found in the realm of food production, predominantly in agriculture. The development of genetically modified food has lower ethical barriers than human medicine, and so for the wider public, GM foods are the most commonly experienced example of biotechnology: genetically altered crops and vegetables already crowd the supermarket shelves, and information about the first successful attempts at modified livestock keeps appearing in the news.2 Rumours about fast food chains using genetically modified chicken for their products have spread in the past,3 and vividly express speculations and concerns about biotechnological processes being extended to living beings, producing what has come to be known as GMOs—genetically modified organisms. With the increasing probability of such scenarios in the twenty-first century, developments of this kind trigger fierce anti-GMO positions in the public debate about biotechnology. Sociologist Thomas Hoban explains that anti-GMO argumentations are often marked not only by well-reasoned appeals to issues of health and security, but also by highly emotional and partly misinformed and exaggerated claims about risks, as well as by philosophical debates about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (cf. Hoban 1995, 206). The latter concerns are especially visible in speculative theories of how increasing technologization will affect not only the shape of our food, but our human identities. The existence of various discourses tackling the growing impact of biotechnology shows how important this most current progress is for the self-identification of today’s (Western) societies in this it raises economic and political, ethical and philosophical debates around very practical matters such as food production, as well as affecting theories about identity and agency. This chapter examines ways in which Critical Theory addresses these matters in the form of posthumanist conceptualizations of society, and consults works by Margaret Atwood and Ruth Ozeki to analyse their speculative negotiations of the biotechnologically informed posthuman future that lies ahead.

Posthuman Societies: From Transhumanist to Critically Posthumanist Concepts Theories of posthumanism address the changing conditions for humans and nonhumans in a world apparently leading towards a state that requires the prefix ‘post-.’ Biotechnology has a significant impact in positions that take the scientific developments of the past few decades as the trigger for this

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newly conceptualized human identity. In distinction from a critical posthumanism, technophile theories consider the possibilities of concrete genetic changes of bodies as the constitutive factor of becoming posthuman—in the sense of overcoming what has for centuries been a characteristic part of human identity. Such ‘popular posthumanisms’4 build their argumentations on visions of concrete and materialist changes in our DNA as advocated by the narrative of transhumanism, which “seek[s] the radical removal of the constraints of our bodies and brains and the reconfiguration of human existence according to technological opportunities” (Jotterand 2010, 617), and thus envisions the outcome of these developments to be literally post-human. Famous transhumanists such as Max More, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and Hans Moravec conceptualize future humans as an enhanced version of the current human species, whose setup entails all kinds of technologically improved features. These transformations are “so fundamental that they bring about life forms with significantly different characteristics as to be perceived as other than human” (Ranisch and Sorgner 2014, 8), rendering the transhumanist posthuman the kind of species which comes after the human. Based on the same premises, but entailing fierce critique rather than welcoming such futuristic visions, are forms of popular posthumanism that can be categorized as “dystopic posthumanism” (Sharon 2014, 5). These bioconservative objections to transhumanist thought share underlying assumptions with theories they oppose: just like the transhumanist ideas they reject, advocates of this dystopic ‘pop’ posthumanism understand the process of becoming posthuman as showing in concrete bodily transformations achieved with the help of biotechnology. One of the most prominent representatives of this position is Francis Fukuyama, who points to the threat genetic modifications of human bodies carry for central aspects of human nature. As a consequence, he advocates the regulation of biotechnological practice as well as the preservation of certain determinants that he considers to be constitutive of human identities. Fukuyama views any biotechnological interventions into the human corporeal condition as a threat to the basic constitution of the species, and he explains that “what we want to protect from any future advances in biotechnology” is “the full range of our complex, evolved natures against attempts at self-­modification. We do not want to disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature” (Fukuyama 2002, 172). Fearing a too hybrid world which lacks clear borders between species, the posthuman future is conceptualized as one “in which any notion of ‘shared humanity’ is lost, because we have

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mixed human genes with those of so many other species that we no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is” (218). Both versions of ‘pop’ posthumanism premise the literal post-human. Envisioning future society to be determined by progressive biotechnological advancements that provide for an ontological transformation from human into posthuman, transhumanists represent enthusiasm about the prospect of overcoming limiting factors such as death and disease, whereas bioconservatists consider this scenario to imply the loss of fundamental aspects of humanity. Both visions express the anthropocentric argument inherent in liberal humanist thought: the human occupies a central position as that which is either reinforced or inviolably preserved. As such, both versions of the posthuman differ fundamentally from the one advocated in critical posthumanism, which aims neither at enhancement nor the nostalgic preservation of any kind of human identity, but “refers to a state of being that is beyond our understanding from a humanist philosophical paradigm” (Philbeck 2014, 175). As such, the posthuman of critical posthumanism epitomizes fundamentally different ideas: becoming posthuman here implies the renunciation of anthropocentric endeavours, among them the Enlightenment discourse about the supremacy of human reason and the teleological ideal of progress, both of which are parts of transhumanism. One concrete difference to the “pop” posthumanisms described above lies in the way technological advancements are embedded into the theories: for critical posthumanism, the intended outcome—the posthuman—does not necessarily entail any bodily or mental transformation, but is interpreted as a change in the epistemological parameters surrounding human identities, and thus as a transformation from humanist to posthumanist rather than from human to posthuman. Cary Wolfe explains that posthumanism does not just “talk[…] about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” (Wolfe 2010, xvi). Much more, he claims, “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist” (xvi). With the principal objective being to refrain from anthropocentrism, critical posthumanism sees biotechnology as contributing not to an enhancement of the human, but to the blurring of distinct boundaries between human and nonhuman: it offers possibilities of becoming increasingly hybrid and less distinctively human—a prognosis that critical posthumanism sees as rewarding as it helps in reconfiguring essentialist discourses. As such, and in contrast to the transhumanist and dystopic versions outlined above, critical ­posthumanism does not rely on a literal translation of the prefix. Instead, Stefan Herbrechter explains, it accentuates a double awareness:

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the undeniable experience that a certain humanism has reached its end (post-­ humanism); and the certainty that this humanism because of its own plurality and slipperiness cannot just be classified without remainders and repressions but needs to be “worked through” in a critical deconstructive sense (hence, post-humanism). (Herbrechter 2013, 16)

Similarly, posthumanist critic N. Katherine Hayles emphasizes that critical posthumanism does not promote “the end of humanity” but envisions “the end of a certain conception of the human” (Hayles 1999, 286). The idea of being embedded in, entangled with, and dependent upon the nonhuman makes the biotechnologically informed posthuman a representative of critical posthumanism, one that does not fall back on the “lingering ghosts of humanism” (Simon 2003, 5) through either fantasizing about enhancement or reinforcing rigid views of an alleged human nature. Instead, this posthuman represents the shift from any such centric focus on the human to a more comprehensive consideration of what has for centuries been conceptualized as circling around us: the nonhuman other—technology, the animal, the environment. The following literary analyses shed some light on the concrete implications of these theoretical reconceptualizations of societal structures, and thus help us envision how we should become posthuman.

Ecocritical and Post-speciesist Community in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam5 Many characteristics of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy speak for an association of the novels with definitions of dystopian fiction: the stories around Jimmy, Toby, and Ren and their attempts at survival in a world created by Crake make the trilogy an exemplary case of “a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected into a disastrous future culmination” (Abrams 1999, 328). With the fate these characters face in Atwood’s postapocalypse, one is indeed inclined to categorize this world as “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives” (“Dystopia,” Merriam-Webster)—with dehumanization expressed literally in Crake’s plan for the radical extinction of the human. Yet there are approaches that detect a utopian aspect in the stories, which is argued to result directly from the dystopian circumstances described above: it is claimed that when analysed ecocritically,6 the novels can be viewed to offer “new hope for humanity as well as other life forms” (Rozelle 2010, 61). However, an analysis of the

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forms of biotechnology in the trilogy shows that this hope emerges not from a transhumanist enhancement or literal replacement of the human, but from the outlook of interspecies relations and the shift from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric epistemology. In this respect, Oryx and Crake (OC), The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam (MA) offer a negotiation of the kind of posthuman we need to become, demonstrating that what our societies need is not the literal transformation into posthumans, but a shift from anthropocentric humanism to critical posthumanism. A closer look at the genetically engineered creatures in the novels first of all leads to critically evaluating the effects of biotechnology. What superficially appears as a consumer’s paradise—with biotechnological products providing for the satisfaction of aesthetic desires in the form of “[p]ills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier” (OC 291)—turns out to be a kind of biotechnological singularity throughout the stories. In this highly developed, hyper-capitalist world, biotechnology is so firmly established that its methods are uncritically accepted: “In Oryx and Crake the corporations are largely left unchecked and are able to develop a wide variety of transgenic products and services, and as a consequence the corporations run all facets of life” (Sanderson 2013, 220). With this lack of restricting ethical tenets, the scientists’ experimentation with genes not only includes cosmetic therapies, but also the interference with living beings’ DNA, to the extent that in the novel’s fauna there is hardly any species boundary which is not being crossed in the biotech labs. The most common technique is a blending of two animals with the aim of creating a hybrid splice containing the advantageous features of both. The concrete combinations are chosen in view of specific commercial purposes and show in the creatures’ names: there are the “wolvogs,” a splice of wolf and dog serving as aggressive yet outwardly harmless police dogs (cf. OC 241), or the “rakunks”—creatures combining the cleanliness of the raccoon “with the skunks’ placid temperament” (Mosca 2013, 41; cf. OC 55–59), apparently a popular combination for a pet. The medical sectors of the high-­society compounds even make use of human genetic material, creating hybrid creatures such as the “pigoons,” whose bodies “grow an ­assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs” (OC 25) which can be transplanted back into humans if needed. The gastronomical section of this world has equally been overrun by biotechnology: meat can be provided by exclusive splices such as the “kanga-lamb,” or artificially in the form of the lab-produced “ChickieNobs”—chicken-like creatures which for economic profit grow the marketable body parts only. Especially

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the latter show how naturally these technological modifications of lives blend in with the capitalist and consumerist orientation of society: although the newest chicken species first triggers feelings of ethical concern in Jimmy—who wonders whether “some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed” (OC 242)—he ends up eating them regularly, resignedly admitting that “the stuff wasn’t that bad if you could forget everything you knew about the provenance” (OC 284). Despite the seeming naturalness of this biotechnologically informed society, ambiguity towards such new creatures remains, which in “conveying a general uncertainty about genetic engineering […] cause[s] actual and perceived threats to safety” (Sanderson 2013, 221). Although created according to a strict scientific outline, many of these species turn out unexpectedly once they start to interact with the world outside of the labs. The “bobkittens,” intended “to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent song-bird population,” quickly “got out of control”: “Small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled” (OC 193). Furthermore, the “wolvogs” are dangerously unpredictable: “they still look like dogs, still behave like dogs, pricking up their ears, making playful puppy leaps and bounces, wagging their tails. They’ll sucker you in, then go for you” (OC 125). Furthermore, in the postapocalyptic wild, Jimmy realizes dangerous changes in the pigoons: “Pigoons were supposed to be tusk-free, but maybe they were reverting to type now they’d gone feral” (OC 43). The intentional blending of species’ characteristics oriented at a capitalist logic of profit combined with the subsequent loss of control over such dangerous prototypes sheds a critical light on the biotechnological hybridization presented in the novels. The concept of less distinct boundaries between species may remind us of how Donna Haraway conceptualizes her “cyborg world”—as one “about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway 1991, 154). Yet, the purpose of marketability that underlies the creation of such hybridity and the failing logic of science as a manifestation of human rationality rather induce critics to read Atwood’s future world as “a critique of unbridled commercialization, rampant self-­indulgence and self-gratification together with scientific hubris” (Tiffin 2007, 260). The pre-apocalypse of the MaddAddam trilogy thus shows a clearly anthropocentric logic behind the use of biotechnology. There is one other engineered species in the story which appears as the revolutionary climax of biotechnological progress: the Crakers, designed,

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created, and named after scientific nerd and social maverick Crake, and intended to be the ersatz species for the human, whose eradication he plans to occur simultaneously with the Crakers’ release. Equipped with a combination of DNA from an ancient human species and several animals, the Crakers are intended to be “perfectly adjusted to their habitat” (OC 359). The selection of genetic material for their creation follows one specific principle: cut out the human genes responsible for exploitative behaviour. In altering or erasing certain neural complexes, Crake intends to eliminate the conditions for any kind of structural thinking, which according to him is responsible for hegemonic discourses like racism, territoriality, religion, patriarchy, and capitalism. With their metabolism allowing for a nutrition based on vegetarianism and caecotrophy, and their bodies perfectly adapted to the environment without any need for clothing or housing, the Crakers display a harmonious integration into the natural world, which is not based on the kind of exploitation manifested in agriculture, farming, food production, and other forms of industrialization. Since their hybrid constitution enables this seamless union with the environment, they “appear to fulfil the requirements of a kind of ecotopia based on the values suggested by ecological philosophers […], such as diversity and mutual respect for the Other” (Glover 2009, 55), and in this they correspond to the premises of a post-anthropocentric epistemology on which critical posthumanism is based. However, since the latter is not conceptualized as an anti-human(ist) narrative, it is not the replacement of the human with the posthuman Craker which appears as the hopeful prospect of a post-anthropocentric and eco-friendly society. Rather, as the third novel MaddAddam demonstrates, this hope is generated through “an imagined future utopia inhabited by Crakers and green-eyed Craker-­human hybrids” (Bouson 2015, 11, my emphasis) at the same time. Especially with the many shortcomings of Crake’s posthuman species, Atwood’s trilogy advocates a renegotiation of the human rather than an anti-human(ist) recreation of a literally posthuman society. A relativization of Craker’s allegedly utopian vision emerges from a more detailed analysis of the Crakers themselves, who despite their advantageous features do not come off well in the novels. Jane Brooks Bouson claims that although they “can be read as a literal embodiment of deep ecology’s belief in the interconnection between earlier humans and the natural world […], Atwood’s account of Crake’s genetically engineered, ecologically-friendly, vegetarian creatures reads like an extended joke” (9). The Crakers’ ridiculousness is especially apparent in the way they deviate from humans: not only does their mating system appear as ludicrous—

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particularly the male performance of “a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison” (OC 194)—their intellectual deficiencies further demonstrate their tedious simplemindedness, which makes their purpose as a future ersatz- and allegedly enhanced species of the human a vision to be dreaded and ridiculed: “Atwood both expresses alarm at and mocks the idea of a bioengineered posthuman future” (Bouson 2004, 149). Furthermore, with a closer look at the methods chosen by Crake, what appears as a form of “deep-ecological thinking” (Bartosch 2012, 119) is quickly shown to be built on exactly the kinds of premises which are intended to be overcome. In addition to the ethical shortcomings of Crake’s radical plan, it also shows a logical inconsistency, which is uncovered with his self-understanding as a scientist: “Crake becomes the exaggeration of all that is humanist, empowered by technology. He regards himself as the ultimate master of nature and of history, as he tries to seize control and dictate the future of life on earth, replacing humans with his own design” (Borrell 2009, 177). It is the logic of teleology and instrumentalism inherent in science as a human tool to access the world along with the bioterrorist implementation of his concepts that impedes any interpretation of Crake’s intentions as ecological and altruistic. Thus, his posthumanism does not play out as an ecocentric renegotiation of humanist errors, but in fact reveals quite anthropocentric tendencies in the way it is implemented through the radical attempts at mastery over life and death on the part of the arrogant scientist (cf. Borrell 2009, 177). The idea of enhancing the ancient human condition through acts of biotechnological engineering, as exemplified by the Crakers, even bears transhumanist intentions. A fertile post-anthropocentric vision as pursued by a critical posthumanism therefore does not ensue from the Crakers as an allegedly ecocentric version of the human, but from the way the variety of different species interacts—and even interbreeds—at the end of the trilogy. Here, humans and pigoons conclude an agreement of mutual respect and equal rights, which includes refraining from reciprocal commodification, as Toby assures the human—pig splices: “None of you, or your children, or your children’s children, will ever be a smelly bone in a soup” (MA 370). Furthermore, four human—Craker children are born, providing a hopeful outlook for the future of life on earth, as well as resulting in a reconceptualization of family structures and concepts, with responsibilities lying on both, humans and Crakers: “We all have to pitch in,” Ivory Bill states, “because this is the future of the human race” (MA 380). The human spe-

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cies which is so fervently rejected by Crake has an equally strong share in this kind of critically posthumanist future, with the result that “‘posthumanhood’ becomes the provenance of those who have helped forge a new community of the living at the end of the Anthropocene—humans, Crakers, and Pigoons alike” (Ciobanu 2014, 160). Rather than advocating the literal posthuman as a solution to human(ist) deficiencies, Atwood’s trilogy has a place for the human species in her vision of a less anthropocentric future, one which, however, requires a reconceptualization of our self-understanding implemented in a heightened awareness for community, ecology, and interspecies relations: she “settles on us as well. We, here and now, are the future readers […], the human-posthuman who is being rewritten at the end of the Anthropocene” (161). Atwood’s trilogy conceptualizes the posthuman as “a new way of inhabiting our humanity rather than a new-and-improved version of the human” (160), and as such it stands as a valuable literary contribution to the question of what it means to become posthuman, and what not.

Diverse and Post-patriarchal Affiliations in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation (AOC) differs from the MaddAddam trilogy in terms of genre and style: although Atwood herself claims that her work is not science fiction but speculative fiction, since “it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory” (MA 393), Ozeki’s realist novel is even closer to our own reality and lacks the apocalyptic speculations we find in Atwood’s trilogy. The form of biotechnology presented here is the genetic modification of food plants carried out by agribusiness corporation Cynaco. Despite being fiction, this company and its genetically engineered “NuLife” potato bears a striking resemblance to US-American concern Monsanto, which in 1995 introduced the “NewLeaf ” potato as the first genetically engineered crop. With the potato as protagonist, next to potatofarmer Lloyd Fuller and his family, the novel offers many analogies between human and nonhuman identities: in being “a staple crop that has coevolved with human beings” (Ozeki 2004), the potato points to the fact that “humans and nature have always shaped each other” (Ladino 2008, 153), constituting a symbol of the interrelations and mutual dependencies between the usually separated realms of human and nature and providing

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for a blurring of anthropocentric categories as pursued by critical posthumanism. On the first page, the reader is challenged to implement these interrelations conceptually: “imagine you are a seed” (AOC 3), narrator Yumi Fuller invites us. And by reconstructing the seed’s growth into a plant, she demonstrates the interconnectedness of different agents in evolutionary processes: “your pale shoot pushes up through the sedentary mineral elements (the silt, the sand, the clay), through the teeming community of microfauna (bacteria and fungi, the algae and the nematodes), past curious macrofauna (blind moles, furry voles, and soft, squirming earthworms)” (AOC 4). The relations between humans and potatoes are pointed out several times throughout the novel. At the age of eight, Yumi learns about the techniques of potato-farming from her father, who informs her that the most successful strategy includes the cloning of seeds rather than planting from them, “because potatoes, like human children, are wildly heterozygous” (AOC 57). “Building a potato” (AOC 57), as Lloyd calls it, thus includes quite a lot of human influence, and since “[w]e would not have edible potatoes if it weren’t for human intervention” (DiNovella 2003, 42), this is not just current practice in agriculture, but has always been the case. The connection between human and nature in general is a principal issue in the novel and provides for the detection of ontological similarities between natural and human agents. Thinking about her school years, Yumi remembers the annual Thanksgiving pageants, for which pupils were disguised as food items according to their outward appearances: “The carrot was a tall redhead named Rusty. The green beans were a pair of skinny twins. The cherry tomato went to a rosy second-grader with shiny cheeks. The corn was a tawny kid named Kellogg” (AOC 7). Whereas Yumi herself always got to be the Indian princess, her closest friend was assigned a less pleasurable role: “Cassie had started out as a pea […] but by the time she got to fourth, she had gained so much weight they made her a potato” (AOC 7). How these theatrical roles had an imprinting effect on Cassie’s identity is expressed in the way she evaluates these experiences: “do you know what it’s like to go through life as a side dish?” (AOC 65). Yumi categorizes her feelings in a similar metaphorical way: being the mixed child of a Japanese war bride and a white American and not least due to her unfortunate teenage pregnancy, she frequently felt like “a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes” (AOC 4). In addition to that, she remembers how other people referred to her as “the apple of Lloyd’s eye”—that is, until she “went rotten” (AOC 5)—and how her mother often talked about her daughter and husband as “‘[t]wo peas in a pod’”

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(AOC 19). The association of the human body with plants, and specifically food products, refers to the female characters in particular, thus placing the novel into the context of ecofeminism—a theory aiming to expose tendencies of “feminizing nature and naturalizing […] women” as a “justification for […] domination” (Garrigós 2010, 67). Furthermore, these affiliations between human and nonhuman provide for a blurring of distinct boundaries and hierarchies, and by enabling an identification with the nonhuman other, Ozeki’s novel contributes to the kind of post-anthropocentric epistemology advocated by critical posthumanism. In addition to the many ways in which human bodies are described with the help of plant imagery, the metaphor works in both ways: with the rhetoric adopted by the anti-GMO activists “The Seeds of Resistance,” the genetically modified potato is anthropomorphized to the extent that its treatment through agribusiness corporation Cynaco is compared to patriarchal structures in society and their effects on female bodies. One aspect that comes with the potato’s modification implies the sterilization of its seeds brought about by the so-called terminator gene: in order to force farmers to buy new seeds every season, the plant’s natural procreation is obstructed—a procedure which appears as “the final step in corporate domination over farmers” (Rouyan 2015, 153). This simple biotechnological procedure equals the privation of procreative freedom and personal choice for the anti-GMO activists in the novel: for spokesman Geek, the terminator gene appears like a “death gene […]. A self-­ destruct mechanism,” which makes the plant “kill[…] its own embryo” (AOC 266). Conservative farmer Lloyd, whose attitudes towards life are informed by a strict faith in God’s plan, considers this biotechnological advancement to “quite literally take[…] the breath of life right out of a seed,” thus “breaking the sacred circle of life itself ” (AOC 301). With this capitalist move, the reproduction and growth of the potato plant lies in the hands of agribusiness corporation Cynaco, and with the label of “terminator technology” and the activists’ rhetoric, the plants’ natural fertility is controlled in a way that is illustrated as analogous to Yumi’s abortion: in the same way as the life of the yet still unborn child was aborted with the help of external medical intervention—as well as urged by the child’s illegitimate and delinquent father—the potato plant’s “wanton promiscuity” (AOC 268) is artificially terminated by means of the seeds’ sterilization for the sake of capitalist profit. Related to the issue of procreation, both procedures appear as acts of male dominance over female bodies.

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A second form of comparison of potato production and human reproduction emerges from farmer couple Will and Cassie Quinn’s story: when talking about their decision to plant Cynaco’s genetically modified “NuLife” potato, their conversation contains many associations of potatoes as a farmer’s offspring—which appears as cynical, given that the couple have been trying to become parents for years. In the scene, Cass and Will’s thoughts shift from their many unsuccessful attempts at pregnancy to the concrete considerations to plant Cynaco’s “NuLife Enhanced,” which provides for a blurring of the issues of agricultural and human (re)production: “We can start small, do a couple of test fields, say, the ones closest to the house.” He spoke quietly. […] She walked over and hugged him into the curve of her body. “Cass…” He crumpled the paper in his fist and turned his face into her stomach. She took a deep breath […]. “You really want to go through it all again?” “There’s always a chance. We gotta operate on that assumption, right?” “Right.” […] “We’ll turn over a new leaf,” he said, nuzzling her. “A NuLife, you mean.” Resisting, but smiling now. “Exactly.” He sat her down so that she straddled his lap. […] “You game?” “Oh sure. Why not?” […] “For a NuLife Enhanced, even.” She put his cap back on his head. The little diapered spud smiled at her cutely. We handle ’em like babies. (AOC 98–99, original emphasis)

After their miscarriages, what constitutes their family life at this point in the story is their relation to the potatoes in their fields, which they can “handle […] like babies.” Ultimately, the couple is able to attain parenthood by adopting the half-orphaned child Tibet after her mother’s sudden death, and thereby enter a less conventional familial community as an alternative to the “natural” way of becoming parents. Similarly unconventional, even quite messy, is Yumi’s history of child conception. After her teenage pregnancy was terminated through abortion, she bears three children from men of different nationalities and sexualities, all of whom she is separated from in the story’s present. Once arrived home in Liberty Falls, Yumi again starts to sexually engage with the former teacher whose child she aborted years earlier. It becomes clear that with these choices Yumi distances herself from the conservative and patriarchal ideas about women, procreation, and family patterns she was brought up with: “While the teenage Yumi was victim of these oppressive social forces, as a young adult and woman Yumi has created a nontraditional, multiracial family to replace the restrictive racial and gender relations that had failed her in Idaho” (Stein 2010, 187).

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Explaining her choice to conceive a child with an openly gay man to her parents Momoko and Lloyd, Yumi writes in a letter: “he and I both agree that since normal families are so screwed up and dysfunctional, we might as well try to have an abnormal one. He’s smart and kind and handsome. He’ll be a wonderful and nonjudgmental father” (AOC 42)—a comment which insinuates the judgemental attitude her father has often shown towards her, especially in reference to her abortion. Yumi’s unsteady and alternative lifestyle, her changing and unorthodox relationships with men, and her patchwork family display her own kind of resistance against patriarchal dominance. In the analogy of human and plant (re)production, Yumi’s choices furthermore “symboliz[e] the possibilities of human diversity in a way that corresponds to the horticultural diversity of Momoko’s seed stock” (Stein 2010, 187), the plants of which, Momoko realizes herself, display a similarity to Yumi’s children because they are “[l]ike them. All mixed up” (AOC 118). The garden Momoko cultivates represents another instance of cross-species hybridity, contributing to the general advocacy of diversity in the novel. Although Momoko erroneously views her horticulture as the expression of explicitly natural diversity, the fact that she eagerly interferes in the cross-breeding of her flowers by preventing the bees’ random pollination and creating the desired species herself demonstrates the collaboration of natural and human agents in this matter. As such, the garden stands as an expression of a hybrid diversity which challenges dualisms of pristine nature versus artificial intrusions. With numerous hints at and juxtapositions of different forms of (re)production and familial relations—all of which represent deviations from the standard models—Ozeki’s novel represents a commentary on ideas of natural versus unnatural, stretching the boundaries usually drawn in this context and challenging conservative and limiting concepts about identity, race, gender, and family. The concept of posthuman society emerging from Ozeki’s novel is characterized by increasing awareness of an entanglement with the natural world as a constitutive part of human identities. In revealing the exploitation of nature and its nonhuman agents as forms of male dominance over female bodies, All Over Creation forms a critique of anthropocentric, patriarchal and capitalist-oriented structures, advocating in turn a more inclusive, tolerant, inter- and multispecies, and non-hierarchical way of forming a community. In establishing an identification between (female) humans and plants, especially with reference to the context of reproduction and issues of human (patriarchal) domination as well as discourses of hybridity and diversity, the

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novel challenges conservative concepts of identities and communities. It celebrates reproductive fertility and promiscuity, alternative models of procreation and family, and the diversity of species and races on the one hand, and rejects narrow-minded notions of uniformity, homogeneity, and conservatism on the other, thereby offering “a pedagogy in the politics of becoming, the transformations that occur as we let go of the rigid beliefs and subject positions that get in the way of cosmopolitics” (Cardozo and Subramaniam 2011, 39). The novel cherishes many different models of living together—in a relationship, gay or straight, married or illegitimate; as a family, multiracial, patchwork, biologically conceived, or adopted; in a wild and liberal commune, or in a familial connection to one’s crop—and in this “Ozeki purposefully models an adoptive rather than a biological structure of community, ‘queering’ the notion of belonging from a model of kinship or heterosexual reproduction to one of elective affiliation” (42). In this, the story offers “[p]ossibilities of the ‘post’” (38), represented in such alternative models of living together. The various deterministic positions in the novel are overcome by acts of border-crossings—of nations, identities, categories, and judgements—and the resulting hybrid, multiracial, and transspecies identities and alliances, which in their rejection of binary models of identification advocate a posthuman future that is marked by a shift from unjust and infertile essentialist positions to less rigid and ethically more responsible “forms of engagement [which] are truly ‘productive’” (44).

Conclusion The twenty-first-century science of biotechnology confronts us with far-­ reaching consequences for societies. In dealing with implications of these developments for traditional concepts of identity and community, critical posthumanism offers a productive way of negotiating these advancements and suggests ways of heading towards a less anthropocentric future. This transformative shift towards critical posthuman societies is made accessible via the imaginative strength of twenty-first-century fictions such as Atwood and Ozeki’s works. Both novels present current as well as anticipated possibilities of biotechnological progress, which enable interventions into processes of (pro)creation. They display societies in which it is common practice to interfere with genetic material, while each novel contains a critique of the extent to which these advancements reinforce human ways of exerting control over other living beings and entities. Yet, both provide hopeful outlooks as well, advocating beneficial prospects of a posthuman(ist)

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society that is informed not by literal understandings of the prefix, which result in technophile fantasies, but by a shift towards a different, posthumanist understanding of identity and community. The new forms of identity and community imagined by Atwood and Ozeki build on overcoming speciesist hierarchies, patriarchal and capitalist domination over other (female) bodies, and religiously informed conventions of family structures. In this way, the novels endorse future societies marked by fertile connections between the human and the nonhuman, between races, genders, and species, and across formerly rigid borders, and thus tackle one of the most pressing issues of contemporary culture.

Notes 1. The technological advancements which mark the twenty-first century are often subsumed under the acronym NBIC, which stands for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences, and which includes the large number of their respective sub-branches—among them molecular technologies, cybernetic technologies, and neurosciences (cf. Roden 2015, 14), all of which have a decisive impact on “[d]esigning the future” (Canton 2004, 186). 2. This includes news about the genetically modified salmon species developed by US-American company AquaBounty Technologies. The AquAdvantage® Salmon stems from a wild salmon stock and has its DNA enriched with growth hormones from other fish species, with the effect that it “grows to market size faster than a non-engineered farmed salmon, in as little as half the time” (Pollack 2015). The fish has been released in the USA and in Canada. 3. In early 2015, rumours about US-American fast food chain KFC using genetically modified chicken with six wings and eight legs for their products spread through social media posts in China, which resulted in a lawsuit brought forward by the fast food company. See http://www.bbc.com/ news/world-asia-china-32964606. 4. This label is used in many works which advocate the position of a critical posthumanism as a categorization of the views which they oppose for being less critically reflective and more superficial in their configuration of the “posthuman.” Transhumanists themselves never use this designation for their own views. For more information on the distinction of critical and popular posthumanism, see, for example, Simon (2003) and Nayar (2014). 5. In this chapter, Atwood’s trilogy is considered as one story, which includes the  first two novels as  “simultanials” (cf. Atwood 2010) that encompass the same timeframe from different perspectives, and the third as their common sequel. However, direct quotations are only taken from the first novel, Oryx and Crake, since it presents the forms of biotechnology in most detail,

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as well as from the third novel, MaddAddam, which constitutes a continuation of  the  stories of  both Oryx and  Crake and  The Year of  the  Flood and therefore contains the trilogy’s view of a posthuman society. 6. An ecocritical analysis of Atwood’s trilogy relates to the way it presents common ecological concerns such as climate change, contamination, overpopulation, and the human exploitation of natural resources. For a discussion about possible utopian or dystopian interpretations of the trilogy by means of an ecocritical or eco-posthumanist reading of the novels, see, for example, Roddis (2013), Glover (2009), Bouson (2015), and Höpker (2014).

Works Cited Abrams, M.H. (1999). “Utopias and Dystopias.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Edition. Heinle & Heinle. 327–328. Atwood, Margaret (2003). Oryx and Crake. London: Virago Press. ——— (2009). The Year of the Flood. London: Virago Press. ——— (2010). “Atwood on Science, Fiction and ‘The Flood.’” Author Interviews. By Jane Ciabattari. Heard on Talk of the Nation, 20 Aug. 2010. Web. ——— (2013). MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bartosch, Roman (2012). “Literary Quality and the Ethics of Reading: Some Thoughts on Literary Evolution and the Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Ilija Trojanow, and Ian McEwan.” Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism. Eds. Timo Müller and Michael Sauter. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 113–128. Borrell, Sally (2009). Challenging Humanism: Human-Animal Relations in Recent Postcolonial Novels. A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Middlesex University. Web. 5 Feb. 2018. . Bouson, Jane Brooks (2004). “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3: 139–156. ——— (2015). “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ through End Rimes: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-Apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.3: 1–17. Canton, James (2004). “Designing the Future: NBIC Technologies and Human Performance Enhancement.” Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 1013: 186–198. Cardozo, Karen and Banu Subramaniam (2011). “Truth is Stranger: The Postnational ‘Aliens’ of Biofiction.” The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction. Eds. Masood A.  Raja, Jason W.  Ellis, and Swaralipi Nandi. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company. 30–45.

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Ciobanu, Calina (2014). “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Minnesota Review 83: 153–162. DiNovella, Elizabeth (2003). “No Small Potatoes.” The Progressive 41: 41–43. “Dystopia.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, no date. Web. 17 May 2018. Fukuyama, Francis (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garrigós, Cristina (2010). “Mixed and Proud of it: Women and Meat in Ruth Ozeki’s Fiction.” Diferencia, (Des)igualdad Y Justicia/Differences, (In) Equality and Justice. Eds. Ana Antón-Pachecco Bravo, et al. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos. 65–77. Glover, Jayne (2009). “Human/Nature: Ecological Philosophy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” English Studies in Africa 52.2: 50–62. Haraway, Donna J.  (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Hayles, N.  Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in  Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Herbrechter, Stefan (2013). Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. Trans. Stefan Herbrechter. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Hoban, Thomas J. (1995). “The Construction of Food Biotechnology as a Social Issue.” Eating Agendas. Food and Nutrition as Social Problems. Eds. Donna Maurer and Jeffery Sobal. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 189–209. Höpker, Karin (2014). “A Sense of an Ending—Risk, Catastrophe and Precarious Humanity in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Eds. Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 161–180. Jotterand, Fabrice (2010). “At the Roots of Transhumanism: From the Enlightenment to a Post-Human Future.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35: 617–621. Ladino, Jennifer K. (2008). “Unlikely Alliances: Notes on a Green Culture of Life.” Journal of Religion and Society, Supplement Series 3: 146–158. Mosca, Valeria (2013). “Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Altre Modernità 9: 38–52. Nayar, Pramod K. (2014). Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ozeki, Ruth (2004). “A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki.” Interview. Web. 5 Feb. 2018. . ——— (2006). All Over Creation. London: Picador. Philbeck, Thomas D. (2014). “Ontology.” Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction. Eds. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 173–184.

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Pollack, Andrew (2015). “Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption.” The New York Times. 19 Nov. 2015. Web. 5 Feb. 2018. Ranisch, Robert and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (2014). “Introducing Post- and Transhumanism.” Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction. Eds. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 7–27. Roddis, Melissa (2013). “‘Someone Else’s Utopia’: The Eco-Posthuman ‘Utopia’ of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Writing Technologies 5: 19–35. Roden, David (2015). Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London and New York: Routledge. Rouyan, Anahita (2015). “Radical Acts of Cultivation: Ecological Utopianism and Genetically Modified Organisms in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation.” Utopian Studies 26.1: 143–159. Rozelle, Lee (2010). “Liminal Ecologies in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Canadian Literature 206: 61–72. Sanderson, Jay (2013). “Pigoons, Rakunks and Crakers: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Genetically Engineered Animals in a (Latourian) Hybrid World.” Law and Humanities 7.2: 218–240. Sharon, Tamar (2014). Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated Posthumanism. Heidelberg: Springer. Simon, Bart (2003). “Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures.” Cultural Critique 53: 1–9. Stein, Karen F. (2010). “Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake.” Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Ed. J.B. Bouson. London and New York: Continuum. 141–155. Tiffin, Helen (2007). “Pigs, People and Pigoons.” Knowing Animals. Eds. Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong. Leiden: Brill. 244–265. Wolfe, Cary (2010). What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 7

Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman Paul Hamann

The most widely publicised scientific event of the early new millennium was, few would contest, the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003, exactly 50 years after James Watson and Francis Crick proposed a double helical structure for DNA and just over a century after the inception of genetics as a scientific discipline. In light of the ubiquity of genetic discourses in the 1990s and beginning of the new millennium, it should come as no surprise that the years leading towards the HGP’s triumphant finale would see the publication of several novels directly addressing genetic science. However, these literary negotiations of science constitute a remarkable event also in the history of the novel: hardly anything as sophisticated and attuned to the realities of science had occurred in the novel before. While science and proto-scientific discourses are important staples in the Western literary tradition, as Roslynn Haynes P. Hamann (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_7

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elaborates, the 1990s saw two interconnected developments: an increase in novels addressing scientific content in a detailed fashion and a general shift in the depiction of scientists and science towards a “more humane and realistic image” (Haynes 2016, 127–8). To distinguish these texts, Norbert Schaffeld suggests the generic term “science novel” (Schaffeld 2016a). In this chapter, I will apply this label to two turn-of-the-century fictions negotiating the science of genetics that are the focus of my analysis of historicised genetic practice: Simon Mawer’s 1997 novel Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s 2002 A Whistling Woman. Within the literary development that Haynes and also Mawer himself identify as being characterised by an unprecedented attention to the practices and the experience of science (Mawer 2005, 298), these two texts represent a phenomenon that is even more specifically new. For these texts not only address contemporary ideas and practices from the field of genetics but also historicise these via perspectives on earlier stages of the discipline. In Mawer’s novel, this historical focus goes back to Gregor Mendel whose experiments with peas in the mid-nineteenth century laid the foundations for genetics, which, as a discipline, would only come into its own in 1900. Byatt’s text, in turn, traces a history of local population geneticists in Yorkshire while particularly honing in on the transformation of the discipline from an observational to a molecular practice in the 1960s. Both Mawer’s and Byatt’s novels are concerned with a science of the present as well as of the past, and this double temporality greatly affects the representation of contemporary genetics in both cases. More specifically, this double temporality performs an epistemological as well as cultural critique of the present via the former science. Thus when Norbert Schaffeld defines a distinction between science novels that prefer “a historical contextualisation” and those that instead embrace “a plot that is embedded in contemporary settings” (Schaffeld 2016b, 169), it has to be noted that the novels by Mawer and Byatt employ both. In so doing, they present not a synchronic perspective on either past or present genetics but a diachronic perspective on past and present genetic science and are the first novels to trace—related but distinct—genealogies of contemporary genetics.

Genealogies of Genetics While “genealogy” is a productive concept in the study of history generally, it is even more apt for a history of “genetics” considering that the two terms share an etymological reference to “origin or development” (OED

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2017). There are two relevant areas in which the term genealogy has currency: in the field of cultural and literary criticism, which is strongly influenced by Michel Foucault’s theorisation of the term, and in the burgeoning field of popular genealogy. Popular genealogy is part of the family heritage industry and primarily occupied with uncovering networks of kinship, mostly projected into the past. It is a mode of “personalizing the past” and “rearranging and regenerating the meaning of the past” via “the simultaneous process of self-making and the embedding of the self in kinship networks” (Kramer 2011; Carsten in Kramer 2011, 380–2). This approach towards locating kinship in the past, which has been taken to a new level by genetic testing methods, resonates strongly with the genealogical strategies of the novels by Mawer and Byatt. In both novels, the past becomes a space for reflections and revaluations of the texts’ historical present. And like all historiographical endeavours, the two novels and popular genealogy are governed by “selectivity and exclusion” (Kramer 2011, 382), which is exemplified by the two very different histories of genetics featured in the novels. To underline that popular genealogy and literary fiction both produce selective narratives is not to suggest that they essentially follow the same historicising impulse but to point to similar practices that are shared by different genealogical undertakings. In literary scholarship, genealogy has been associated with a “fascination with origins, teleology, and historiography” and drawn upon in discussions of fictional content and in critical rethinkings of literary and intellectual periods (Michie and Regier 2016, 734). Further, the critic Gilles Chamerois employs the concept of genealogy to discuss the “correspondences” in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon between issues of contemporary science and what he refers to as their “earlier mythologies” (Chamerois 2012, 37). These correspondences indicate continuities between previous and present objects of inquiry. Yet the quest for equivalences and origins can be deceiving, as Foucault cautions us. In fact, scepticism towards teleology is the defining feature of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method. Foucault’s conception of genealogy, expounded in an essay originally published in 1971 on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” thrives on a refutation of “the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies” (Foucault 1984, 77) on the grounds that such deployment obfuscates the accidental nature of historical processes in favour of a vision of history predicated on necessity. Instead, Foucault proposes a historiography that illuminates the specificities and contingencies shaping historical events. Accordingly, what

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Foucault perceives as the “duty” of genealogy is “not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present” but “to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion” and to identify the context that “gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us” (81). For Foucault, a crucial motivation for this method is not simply to disrupt reductionist accounts of historical processes but to enact a critique of contemporary conditions by laying bare the contingencies of their emergence: “truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents” (81). Genealogy here is anti-essentialist and highly conscious of the plurality of perspectives that derive from this revised understanding of “origin.” What emerges from this brief discussion of different approaches towards genealogy is a common desire to turn to the past in order to reconsider concerns and conditions of the present. The personalised histories of the family heritage industry respond to contemporary desires for identification, just as Chamerois’ genealogical correspondences are aimed to recover a dialogue between science and the humanities lost in the historical division of the disciplines.1 In the same vein, the genealogies of genetics presented in the novels by Mawer and Byatt enact an epistemological critique and a “dispersion” of genetic discourse today by turning to the historical development of the science. This turn to the discipline’s past is in both texts constructed around characters in the present who are fascinated and directly affected by changing genetic practices. Highlighting the historical difference between past and present genetic knowledge and practice, the novels’ genealogical narratives draw attention to what is actually new and pressing about contemporary genetics.

Historicising Scientific Practice in the Novel Showcasing the historicity of genetic practice, the two novels draw attention to the different epistemological contexts in which these practices are embedded. In historicising epistemology itself, the texts display a perspective on scientific knowledge production that Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has called “the most important contribution of the twentieth century to the philosophy of science” (Rheinberger 2010, 8).2 What characterises this approach, and sets it apart from previous historiographies of science, is its focus on the material alongside the sociocultural conditions that, for instance, accompanied the molecularisation of biology in the middle of the twentieth century. Fundamental to this approach is the conviction that

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a scientific understanding of phenomena is inextricably dependent on, and illustrative of, both the tools and methods that were used in the process, as well as the human impact of the scientists and institutions involved. The emerging scientific object is thus conceived of as, also, culturally ­constructed; albeit not, as some have argued, in order to brand scientific knowledge as a mere invention of reality but rather to emphasise the complex web of factors that condition scientific representations of that reality (cf. Latour 1993, 6). Representing these epistemological conditions in their historical context is at the heart of Foucault’s genealogical method. The genealogies of science resulting from this approach signify a shift from sweeping historical account to almost pedantic scrutiny of epistemologies that loosely corresponds to a similar shift in the genre of the historical novel. Twentiethcentury scepticism towards grand narratives also generated new forms of historical fiction, such as historical metafiction, which is characterised by a foregrounding of its narrative fictionality and so emphasises historiographical accounts as narrative—and therefore selective—constructions. In light of such “incredulity about the grand narratives of decisive events and genuine historical change or development,” Fredric Jameson asks what the historical novel can still be expected to do (Jameson 2015, 263). One of his answers is the “aesthetic moment” of this essentially “impossible form” (260; 312). Jameson here makes a claim for the genre’s textual affordance to make visible all the vicissitudes and human passions that constitute the historical moment that is free of any clear narrative or vision of history. Jameson’s emphasis on the particularities of historical moments closely resembles Schaffeld’s description of the subgenre of the historical science novel as ideally “attempting to narratively reconstruct the life and work of a scientist and his or her socio-historical environment,” so that Schaffeld proposes “to read the historical science novels as literary representations of the contingencies of scientific theory formation” (Schaffeld 2016b, 170; 172). Jameson’s and Schaffeld’s notion of a history of contingencies represented in the historical science novel could be argued to consist of a sequence of historicising “aesthetic” moments, which, in turn, produce the kind of genealogy of scientific knowledge Foucault and Rheinberger advertise. Jameson further claims that the historical novel is so impressed by the present that the past loses its difference. I would argue, however, that in historical science novel hybrids such as Mawer’s and Byatt’s texts, which revisit the past but include a present-day perspective, the double vision

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re-emphasises the temporal difference and all that it entails. In both novels, characters engage with and make experientially accessible the practices of genetic science which are then shown to be historically specific when they are contrasted with their earlier counterparts. In this way, Mawer’s and Byatt’s works foreground representations of historical difference as the driving force of their genealogical narratives. Consequently, the genealogies of genetics produced by the two texts are keenly reflective of the historicity and contingency of genetic knowledge.

From Garden Peas to Molecular Genetics: Mendel’s Dwarf The history of genetics as a discipline begins around 1900 with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s research from almost half a century earlier— though “genetics” was not a term used by Mendel himself. The term was a later suggestion by English biologist William Bateson who proved instrumental in the institutionalisation of the emerging field (cf. Müller-­ Wille and Rheinberger 2009, 47–8). The novel Mendel’s Dwarf brings together perspectives on Mendel as well as on his fictional distant relative in the present, geneticist Benedict Lambert. This is not the only reason, however, why the research is personal for Lambert: he is an achondroplastic dwarf, a condition that results from a genetic mutation, and in the course of the novel he will identify the gene coding for just this condition. The novel attributes this discovery, which had actually occurred only two years prior to the novel’s publication (cf. Shiang et al. 1994), to Lambert. This is a fictional flourish but also clearly marks the character as representative of contemporary genetics. The novel begins with a keynote address given by Lambert at a genetics conference organised by the “Mendelian Association of America,” an honour bestowed upon him primarily because of the scholarly and media attention around his person in the wake of his discovery. However, his invitation to speak is also due to his dwarfism since that means, as his host bluntly puts it: “Molecular genetics right there on the podium, for Christ’s sake” (Mawer MD 1997, 220; original emphasis).3 The keynote is further charged with personal and historical connotations as it is presented in Brno, which, now Czech, used to be the city of Brünn in the Austrian Empire where the friar Gregor Mendel lived and conducted his experiments in the local monastery. Yet it is not only the place and Lambert’s connections to it that exemplify the coming together of the beginning and

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the most contemporary stages in genetic research. The two temporal poles of the discipline also inform the imagery. On the very first page, Lambert, who is the narrator of both his own story and Mendel’s, compares the members of his audience to “sample tubes in a rack,” evoking modern laboratory practice, and he then classifies the tubes according to hereditary traits such as eye colour, baldness, and cleft chins (MD 1). Subsequently, the audience is described as “lying in the palm of his hand like peas newly shelled from the pod” (MD 3).4 The peas contrast the earlier tubes, and thus perform a comparison of old and new genetic practice in miniature. To appreciate this, we have to recall that Mendel’s experiments predominantly relied on the cross-breeding of garden peas. By recording the similarities between parent and offspring plants, Mendel was able to statistically arrive at what became known as the three Mendelian laws that shed light on fundamental hereditary processes and differentiate between autosomal and recessive inheritance—the latter explains, for instance, how some disorders can “skip a generation.” The pea is hence closely connected with Mendel’s experimental practice and the text devotes considerable space to depictions of his experiments. Lambert explains in his lecture: “Mendel spent eight years on his experiments with garden peas alone. By the end he had bred a grand total of about thirty-three thousand plants” (MD 3). The pea becomes an epitome of Mendel’s practice and just as it is here introduced in juxtaposition to modern lab work, so Mendel’s experiments invoke their present counterpart at later stages of the novel. The invocation is underlined by the clearly retrospective focalisation in these episodes (cf. MD 85–89).5 On a more general level, the depictions of the individual work environments are distinctly different. When showing his plants to a visitor, Mendel’s proto-laboratory is mistakenly described as a “kitchen garden” by the startled guest, prompting Mendel to correct: “An experimental plot” (MD 100). Lambert’s workplace could hardly be more different: “The incubators hummed. Someone opened and closed the doors to the sterile room. All around me was the timeless, chalky light of the labs” (MD 113). There is irony in the image of the “timeless” light, which separates the space so markedly from its historical counterpart. This effect is taken further by allusions to the plethora of state-of-the-art technology cluttering the laboratory: “In the lab the refrigerators hum, the ultra-­ centrifuges whine, the suction evaporator whirs” (MD 136). The only tool used by Mendel that bears a semblance of contemporary scientific instruments is his “gleaming brass microscope” (MD 222). Yet even this

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continuity is complicated when Lambert recounts that in his school days the biology classes were hopelessly neglected and they had to work with completely outdated microscopes, “ancient things with more than a hint of brass about them” (MD 28). Besides these historical specificities of what Mendel and Lambert do and what tools they use, the contrast between their scientific practices is also made explicit when Lambert operates a PCR machine used to multiply strands of DNA for further experimentation: The process goes on, the number of molecules of DNA doubling for each cycle: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 … You see nothing. It takes place in a miniature test tube in an automatic heating block. Photocopying the messages of life. What would Great-great-great-uncle Gregor have made of that? He who inferred the existence of hereditary particles only by counting numbers, by reckoning ratios, he who fumbled with language—merkmal, anlage—to try to give these unknown, unimagined, unimaginable entities semantic substance, how would he have come to terms with the modern reality—that now you can make unlimited copies of a gene at will? (MD 164; original emphasis)

Here the historical distance between the proto-geneticist and his future acolyte is clear. The counting has been computerised and Mendel’s imagined particles have become a concrete substance. The chemical analysis of the hereditary material that lies at the core of this change can be summarised as the molecularisation of genetics which transformed not only the ideas about what a gene is but also the ways in which geneticists go about their research. For, as Michel Morange explains, “through its discoveries, molecular biology [and therefore genetics] has metamorphosed from a science of observation into a science of intervention and action” (Morange 1998, 216). In other words, Mendel’s empirical method was succeeded by an active manipulation of the genetic substance itself. This step also enabled the development of genetic engineering techniques, which the novel addresses when Lambert tests his own sperm for the achondroplasia gene and plans to use it for in vitro fertilisation (IVF). In addition, the PCR machine implies that science has become a very expensive endeavour with the radical consequence that research becomes increasingly dependent on the demands of the marketplace. Lambert is confronted with this situation when his plan to search for the dwarfism gene meets with resistance as it lacks financial incentive (cf. MD 72). This

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moment mirrors a later passage in the novel when Lambert explicitly “sets nineteenth-century attitudes towards science off from the present-day intellectual poverty of capitalism” (Voigts 2014, 87). Lambert’s contemplation of his and Mendel’s practices in the passage quoted above also exemplifies difficulties of naming hitherto unknown scientific objects. Note that “semantic substance” is “given” and not, say, immediately obvious. Mendel is shown as struggling with language, aiming to shape the representation of what his experimental set-up and his mathematical interpretation have produced and knowing that various linguistic representations are possible. His “fumbling” with language is also felt when he presents his findings to the city’s naturalist society for the first time (cf. MD 203). His mathematical representations disastrously fail to bring across the truly novel theory he proposes. And, as Lambert narrates, Mendel was not to fare any better when he came in contact with the time’s grand men of science (cf. MD 266–268); as a consequence the scientific community failed to explore his theory for decades. Foucault suggests that Mendel’s objects and theory were simply too foreign and too different from the knowledge of the time for his colleagues to understand or accept (cf. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2009, 34). In the novel, this rejection provides the motivation for Lambert, for whom Mendel is clearly both family hero and scientific fascination, to narrate his great-great-great-uncle back into the history of science. His positive bias towards Mendel is particularly visible when he points out where Mendel was right and Darwin wrong (cf. MD 240). Lambert follows a discernibly personal impulse and provides a history of his ancestor whose life became inextricably linked with the history of his own discipline. And for all the differences between their knowledges and day-to-day practices, Lambert very much considers his own work as a continuation of Mendel’s, describing Mendel’s theory as a bomb that finally exploded in 1900 and whose “explosion is going on still” (MD 10, 282). While the novel emphasises the complexities and contingencies of its genealogy of genetics, Lambert’s account also exhibits a tendency to embrace a hagiographical narrative of scientific progress, for instance, by picturing his ancestor as the “Galileo of biology” (MD 3). There is a historiographical and epistemological tension between the novel’s representation of genetic science that is historically contingent and Lambert’s hagiography of Mendel. The novel does not ultimately resolve this tension. On the one hand, it posits a direct and ongoing impact of Mendel’s purely hypothetical hereditary particle, and on the other, it shows

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that the contemporary concept of a molecular gene has little in common with its historical counterpart. This tension is also figured in the text’s formal construction around two narrative strands—one past, one present: the juxtaposition invites discovering continuity in what appears analogous but the structure also implies a categorical temporal divide by formally separating then and now. On a thematic level, the text suggests continuities across the divide of then and now: firstly, the human dimension of the scientist’s practice— Mendel’s obsession with his peas to understand the underlying ratios of heredity and Lambert’s personal desire to find “his” gene—and, secondly, the ethical concerns surrounding heredity and genetic discourse. The spectre haunting genetic discourse is eugenics. The topic is introduced early in the text when at the conference it is announced that Lambert is also giving a lecture on “The New Eugenics” (MD 6). Delivered near the end of the novel, the lecture echoes what the narrator has already discussed at previous moments in the narrative, namely, how Mendel’s concepts fuelled eugenicist thinking across Europe and America and merged with the discourse of degeneration that had spilled over into the new century from the old. Lambert directly links Mendelism with the atrocities of the Third Reich when he argues that “an unknown friar […] had discovered the mechanics of inheritance and had, all unbeknownst to himself, created a new science that was to be taken up by the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (the Society for Racial Hygiene) in 1905 and the Nazi Party two decades later. It was a science that would ultimately lead to the ovens of Auschwitz” (MD 236). Lambert then argues that eugenicist thinking has by no means run out of steam and points to the fact that testing against certain conditions, like his own, is an accepted procedure in assisted reproduction (cf. MD 283). Earlier in the text, the issue of “designer children” is connected to eugenicist arguments during a dinner party (cf. MD 107–110), and eugenics is later again tied to commodity culture (cf. MD 286). The issue is painted as a continuous element and— possibly inadvertent—danger of genetic research. When contemporary circumstances are projected onto historical precedents, the past acts as warning for the present in the twenty-­first century. In the end there is a twist, however. While in his lecture Lambert underscores the ethical dilemmas that underlie modern genetic applications such as IVF, he has fathered a child and used the very same method to test against the presence of the achondroplastic gene. The decision costs him considerable anguish, and

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yet, without having belied the ethical pitfalls surrounding the practice, his actions betray an acceptance of the technique while setting it apart from the horrendous excesses of eugenicist discourses in the past. Whereas ethical concerns are thus shown to continue to be an issue around the application of genetic science, the novel also invites the reader to revisit these concerns in the light of changing genetic practices and technologies. It is a notable feat of the novel that its contemporary perspective on the ethics of genetic potentialities, its “presentism” (Jameson 2015, 313), does not efface historical difference but foregrounds it. The novel’s historical narrative may be shaped by Lambert’s contemporary narration— Lambert’s decidedly positive portrayal of Mendel is evidence for this. Voigts is correct in claiming that via Lambert “the present inserts itself into the past” (Voigts 2014, 90). However, the novel’s two narrative temporalities give rise to a complex set of historical relations and reflections that defies a presentist overwriting of the past. As Mendel’s Dwarf narrates the history of genetics from the old to the new practices, there is, however, a tension in the text between the contingency of the historical moment and Lambert’s narrativisation of change leading up to the present. A productive consequence of this duality is that the novel suggests both continuities and analogies as well as differences between contemporary and former genetic science. On the one hand, the historical specificity of genetic practices undermines claims of absolute truth—without rejecting scientific knowledge per se—and critiques the reader’s notion of contemporary genetics. On the other, the analogies between then and now suggest a transhistorical feature of science: the impact of human desires and social contexts on the formation of knowledge. Also, historical similarities afford a way of thinking the present through the past by showing, for example, modern anxieties about genetics reflected in historical precedents. The past, as the genealogy of genetics in Mendel’s Dwarf shows, offers one more means to explore potential future scenarios. This aspect of the novel’s form seems to suggest an extension of Jameson’s argument, made with science fiction’s imagined futures in mind, that the historical novel “must now also include our historical futures” (Jameson 2015, 313). It certainly exemplifies how the novel’s literary genealogy of genetics not only communicates with recent trends in the history of science but also negotiates the many cultural and personal meanings that have been attached to a changing scientific field.

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Pastoral Genetics in 1960s England: A Whistling Woman At first glance, A.S. Byatt’s novel A Whistling Woman may seem to form an unlikely pair with Mendel’s Dwarf. On closer analysis, however, the two share many of the same concerns about the history of science and the role of contemporary genetics. Byatt had previously written about a historicised scientific practice in her 1992 long story “Morpho Eugenia,” published in Angels & Insects. There, as June Sturrock points out, the “history of science, as well as science in itself, comes under scrutiny” (Sturrock 2002, 97). This story evinces “Byatt’s preoccupation with the complex interactions involved in the ways knowledge, ideas, and culture change” (97). Yet while “Morpho Eugenia” is set in the early 1860s, offering another neo-Victorian perspective (Voigts 2014, 80), A Whistling Woman is set in the late 1960s. Although the novel does not share a 1990s present with Mawer’s text, the temporal distance is comparatively short as Byatt’s novel, too, is “about relatively recent history” (Johnson 2010, 70). In addition, A Whistling Woman contains anachronistic references to future historical events and conditions, such as the coming ubiquity of personal computers (cf. Byatt WW 2003, 167).6 In A Whistling Woman, the present is 1968 and the novel’s two geneticists, Luk and Jacqueline, pursue individual projects monitoring snail populations on a section of the North Yorkshire moors. The novel is in fact the fourth novel in a tetralogy and Luk and Jacqueline’s research is already introduced in the preceding volume, Babel Tower. There, their scientific practice is described in terms reminiscent of the pastoral: “the hunting in the damp and dark, the peaty breath of the moorland air, the cold, the sunrise, the movement, all of which were also delicious” (Byatt BT 1997, 53). So when the beginning of A Whistling Woman describes another snail expedition at dawn in similar terms of flowing hills and in view of dew drops as “glittering prisms” (WW 17), the same pastoral atmosphere is evoked. This atmosphere is underlined by a continuity that is established between Luk and Jacqueline’s snail expedition and their historical predecessors: “The snail populations of Dun Vale Hall, and the surrounding moorland of the rich limestone of Gungingap, had been studied by several generations, beginning with a Victorian vicar, Richard Hunmanby, and an Edwardian schoolmaster and distinguished amateur conchologist, Joseph Mann” (WW 17). Via this retrospective, Luk and Jacqueline’s genetic observations are contextualised in a tradition that reaches back to Victorian

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England and alludes to the stereotypical gentleman naturalist. This continuity between their scientific practices imbues the later practitioners with a sense of the obsolete. This is all the more apparent when their shared observational method is contrasted with the molecularisation of genetics during the 1950s and 1960s—the new understanding of genes as biochemical entities called molecules, rather than mere statistical abstractions. The novel exemplifies the difference between the biochemical genetics we know today and the statistical population genetics that is part of what is now called “classical genetics” (Morange 1998, 244; Keller 2001, 2). Luk makes this change explicit when recounting how his and Jacqueline’s practice is beginning “to become redundant” in light of new technology. He refers to the “discovery of electrophoresis—the grinding and mashing of snail-flesh (or any flesh) to be stretched and measured and mapped on a gel in an electric current” which “had provided a quick way in the lab to replace all the local observation, recording and guesswork” (WW 68). Here, as in Mendel’s Dwarf, the novel demonstrates that the molecularisation of genetics involves a change in scientific practice: where previously the snails’ genetic make-up had been observed from the outside, their genetic material is now acted upon at a molecular level. However, while this contrastive “hard science” (WW 20) approach of molecular genetics is evidently a more efficient way of going about the science—before they “worked at snail-level and snail-speed” (WW 17)—Luk points out that it will result in a different epistemic perspective on reality: “But this was not a substitute for the precise observation of what creatures did, how creatures related to each other, in the world of living things” (WW 68–69). Here, as in many other instances in the novel, scientific observation of creatures is associated with Luk’s own observation of Jacqueline, whom he is in love with, and with the novelistic representation of human interaction in general. The novel proposes a connection between the arts of population genetics and fiction, a connection becoming less obvious with the new molecular methodology. The “grinding and mashing” of the snails is also distinctly anti-pastoral in comparison with the old methods, and the contrast between fieldwork and the laboratory becomes even more pronounced when Jacqueline moves on to do hard science and her crammed and dark cubicle bears hardly any relation anymore to her previous studies on the moors (cf. WW 162). While the novel never rejects the new methods, it exhibits both fascination for the new and nostalgia for the old practices and for what is lost as they disappear.

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The geneticists’ practice in A Whistling Woman, as well as in Babel Tower, is tied to both the larger symbolism of the snail and the testing of linguistic representation of reality. Snails appear in numerous manifestations: as objects of study, as ornamental section breaks enclosing the novel-within-the-novel, Babbletower, in Babel Tower, and as a governing trope, which Byatt has called the “solid metaphor” of the two texts (Byatt 2005, 295). So, as Johnson states, the snail “functions both on a literary level as a symbol of life and, in a scientific sense, as a means of studying genetics and neuroscience” and thus “serves to bridge the two cultures of the literary and scientific worlds” (Johnson 2010, 57; 58). The complex set of associations between life, the structure of DNA, and genetic practice as encapsulated by the snail underlines the two novels’ emphasis on genetics as a major discourse on central issues of human existence, from kinship and reproduction to language and learning. In both texts, the genetic discourse is subjected to a linguistic critique in the context of a general investigation of language and its grasp on material reality. In the earlier novel, the title Babel Tower is already a not-too-­subtle evocation of the chaos and general pitfalls associated with the aim to communicate productively about the world. The novel draws on the biblical legend of the Babylonian confusion to illustrate that different forms of language represent different approximations of reality. For instance, protagonist Frederica struggles greatly with subjecting her experience of her abusive husband to her lawyer’s jargon when she files for divorce (cf. BT 379). In the end she finds solace in her Laminations project: a collage uniting various kinds of texts, suggesting an interdiscursive production of meaning as the solution to the disorienting plurality of language and knowledge systems that surrounds her (cf. Butter 2004, 375). Frederica’s collage also contains scientific text fragments, which places science alongside other language-based forms of knowledge such as literature and law. The—potentially misleading—impact of language on scientific knowledge is also already illustrated in Babel Tower when the philosopher Hodgkiss asks “whether the word information means the same in all cases, that of immunology, that of the DNA, that of the mind of the scientist building a computer, or whether you are all thinking by analogy, which is dangerous” (BT 251). The novel exhibits a strong awareness of how scientific ideas are shaped by the language employed. Consequently, historically specific concepts, such as the 1960s idea of DNA as information, contain a representational claim on the workings of inheritance that will differ from earlier concepts based on a different ­analogy. This awareness, together with the historicised genetic practice in the novels, points towards a complex understanding of how genetic epistemes change as methods and metaphors evolve.

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The panoramic discussion of language and narrative in Babel Tower, with its strong metafictional elements, works as a kind of epistemological prologue to the more pronounced scientific concerns in A Whistling Woman. In this novel, too, philosopher Hodgkiss’ warning is iterated when a keynote speaker at the interdisciplinary conference at the end of A Whistling Woman cautions against the “dangers of analogy” (WW 355). For the scientist, the danger of analogy consists in the imprecision that it entails in describing the biological reality of consciousness. The discourse of genetics features in this debate as part of the “synaptic and biological connections” the scientists want to uncover to understand the workings of the mind (Brown 2007, 56). In the face of this rejection of analogy, it is striking to note that A Whistling Woman, nevertheless, thrives on analogy and metaphor. This is nowhere more evident than in the figure of the snail. Introduced as a leitmotif already in Babel Tower (cf. Campbell 2004, 232–3), the snail is both literary symbol of life and Jacqueline’s object of study, first in the field of population genetics and then in neuroscience. Combining in the snail the text’s central metaphor and research object, the novel shuns the warning of analogy and emphasises its creative potential. What is more, since the snail as metaphor and the snail as object of study are inseparably linked and the novel historicises the scientific practices that investigate the snail—so that knowing the snail becomes a historically variable phenomenon—the snail as metaphor acquires a historical-epistemological specificity that affects its meaning depending on whether the snail is portrayed on the moors or in a petri dish. In A Whistling Woman, the changing discourses and practices of genetics are hence closely embedded within the text’s aesthetics. The novel’s genealogy of genetics reflects—conceptually and aesthetically—the insight from the history of science that scientific practice and knowledge changes in interaction with social and technological development. When showing how practices and the particular epistemological connotations they entail become redundant, the novel ultimately also questions the absolute truth claims that are put forward by the Human Genome Project. Criticism of the contemporary project is particularly evident in the novel’s nostalgic presentation of pre-molecular genetics as a pastoral genetic practice concerned with understanding relations, human and animal, in contrast to the intrusive genetic engineering methods promoted by the HGP which ­literally intervene upon and manipulate the matter of life. Tellingly, the novel closes with an image of geneticist Luk looking up, serenely, from what he knows to have become an obsolete kind of science.

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Conclusion The genealogies of genetics drawn up by Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Byatt’s A Whistling Woman zoom in on different phases in the history of the discipline. The novels exemplify the twentieth-century notion in the history of science that historicisations of scientific practice not only open up different perspectives on the peculiarities of historical moments but also provide a powerful critique of contemporary scientific paradigms. Both novels reflect on the fact that their fictional genealogies integrate these concerns into the language and character negotiations inherent to their literary forms. In Mendel’s Dwarf, the parallel narrative construction of past and present mirrors the text’s investigation of what it meant to discover the foundations for the discipline of genetics in the mid-­nineteenth century and what it means for the geneticist narrator Lambert to pursue this discipline in the late twentieth century. Despite the novel’s tendency to sometimes translate its fascination with the history of genetics into a narrative of scientific progress, its portrayal of the personal pains and ambitions of Mendel and Lambert as well as their social-material contexts emphasises that while the impact of these contexts remains instrumental to the production of knowledge, the epistemological foundations and research aims change considerably. This decidedly non-teleological evolution of genetic practice also informs Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, as it traces the succession of statistical, field-study population genetics by molecular genetics in 1960s England. This novel demonstrates how the lives of the geneticists change alongside the new epistemes and suggests a pastoral nostalgia for the now bygone practice of snail observation on the moors. The historicisation of genetics in the novel is part of a larger investigation into the varieties of knowledge and linguistic representations of reality, a theme introduced in Babel Tower and developed further through the debate about analogy and science in A Whistling Woman. In Mendel’s Dwarf just as in A Whistling Woman the past differs in temporal distance from late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries when the texts were published. Yet, both historical perspectives on genetics, and the resulting critiques and differentiations of its propositions, resonate with the genetic discourse that was so familiar to their ­contemporary readership. No longer focused especially on the Human Genome Project, genetic discourse continues to generate new and controversial headlines today, and the two novels discussed here represent an exciting development in the literary negotiation of genetics in the twenty-first century

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and of science in general. And the literary genealogies of genetics do not end here either. In works such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, comprising the novels Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam (2003, 2009, 2013), the next historical moment of genetic practice—even if still in the future—is already being envisioned.

Notes 1. See also Jay Clayton who identifies a trend in recent fiction to negotiate convergences of literary and scientific cultures, especially through two-­ generational plots that juxtapose past and current science. He suggests that such histories of science offer insights into risks and opportunities arising from scientific cultures today. Mendel’s Dwarf employs a variant of the two-­ generational plot (Clayton 2003, 202–4). 2. While Rheinberger explicitly acknowledges Foucault, his emphasis on the materiality of epistemological conditions is an addition to Foucault’s more discourse-oriented genealogical method. Foucault’s conception of genealogy is also not specific to a study of science. 3. In the following, all references to Mendel’s Dwarf are marked with MD plus page. 4. Lambert occasionally assumes a third-person narrative instance which allows him a more detached narrative perspective on events. 5. This aspect of the focalisation is discernible, for instance, through the use of “genetic,” a term that after all had not yet been coined. 6. In the following, all references to A Whistling Woman or Babel Tower are marked with WW or BT plus page.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret (2003). Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury. ———. (2009). The Year of the Flood. London: Bloomsbury. ———. (2013). MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Alistair (2007). “Uniting the Two Cultures of Body and Mind in A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman.” Journal of Literature and Science 1: 55–72. Butter, Stella (2004). ‘Babbling Voices’: Einheit und Differenz, fremde und eigene Stimme(n) in A.S. Byatts Babel Tower.” Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman. Eds. Stefan Glomb and Stefan Horlacher. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 351–375. Byatt, A.S. (1995) [1992]. Angels & Insects. London: Vintage. ———. (1997) [1996]. Babel Tower. London: Vintage. ———. (2003) [2002]. A Whistling Woman. London: Vintage.

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———. (2005). “Fiction Informed by Science.” Nature 434: 294–297. Campbell, Jane (2004). A.  S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Chamerois, Gilles (2012). “From Bosons to Titans: The Genealogy of Science in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Science and American Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From Henry James to John Adams. Ed. Claire Maniez. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. 31–48. Clayton, Jay (2003). Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1984). “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. D.  F. Bouchard and S.  Simon. New  York: Pantheon. 76–100. Haynes, Roslynn D. (2016). “Bringing Science into Fiction.” ZAA 64: 127–148. Jameson, Fredric (2015). The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso. Johnson, Jennifer Anne (2010). “Soothsaying Song Thrushes and Life-Giving Snails: Motifs in A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman.” Journal of English Studies 8: 57–71. Keller, Evelyn Fox (2001). The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Kramer, Anne-Marie (2011). “Kinship, Affinity and Connectedness: Exploring the Role of Genealogy in Personal Lives.” Sociology 45: 379–395. Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. New  York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mawer, Simon (2005). “Science in Literature.” Nature 434: 297–299. ———. (2011) [1997]. Mendel’s Dwarf. London: Abacus. Michie, Helena, and Alexander Regier (2016). “Introduction.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 56: 731–735. Morange, Michel (1998). A History of Molecular Biology. Trans. Matthew Cobb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2009). Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomik: eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandaufnahme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. OED Online. (June 2017). -genesis, comb. form. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Web. 4 Oct. 2017. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (2010). On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay. Trans. David Fernbach. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Schaffeld, Norbert (2016a). “Aspects of the Science Novel.” ZAA 64: 121–125. ———. (2016b). “The Historical Science Novel and the Narrative of an Emergent Scientific Discourse.” ZAA 64: 169–187. Shiang, Rita, Leslie M. Thompson, Ya-Zhen Zhu et al (1994). “Mutations in the Transmembrane Domain of FGFR3 Cause the Most Common Genetic Form of Dwarfism, Achondroplasia.” Cell 78: 335–342.

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Sturrock, June (2002–2003). “Angels, Insects, and Analogy: A.S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’.” Connotations 12: 93–104. Voigts, Eckart (2014). “Bio-Fiction: Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics.” Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. Eds. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss. Abingdon: Routledge. 79–92.

CHAPTER 8

The Lures and Limitations of the Natural Sciences: Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree Elizabeth E. J. Gilbert

Setting the Stage: The 1860s When natural science is dealt with in contemporary prose fiction, particularly when it is written for a young adult (YA) readership, we typically expect future scenarios with a distinctly dystopian touch—novels that negotiate the unforeseeable changes that we are submitted to in the face of ever-increasing innovations in science and technology. When, in contrast, we talk about neo-Victorian literature, children’s or young adult fiction is not even mentioned.1 Frances Hardinge’s novel The Lie Tree (LT) does not look to the future; instead, it is one of exceedingly few neo-­ Victorian novels written for the teenage reader, and as such, in spite of its nineteenth-century setting, it ultimately asks us to reconsider present-day attitudes towards what defines the sciences and a scientific mindset, proposing more openness to the imagination and the senses rather than more rationality or more algorithms. The Lie Tree is a young adult fantasy gothic detective novel and as such it is an outstanding sample of the hybrid genre fusion which is evolving in

E. E. J. Gilbert (*) University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_8

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twenty-first-century teen literature (cf. Falconer 2010). But it is also a novel that introduces us to the state of the natural sciences as they were in the Victorian Age, in all its ranges and varieties, where what in the meantime has been snubbed as a pseudoscience, such as Mesmerism, was still drawing a large following. But it not only features the sciences that have made it into the twenty-first century and those that have not, it also explores the ways in which certain areas of research were—and still are— gendered. The second children’s book ever to have been given the Costa Book of the Year Award (in 2015) after Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000) addresses the dichotomies of science and the rational male world versus myth and the irrational female, supposedly in a historical framework, but ultimately with the appeal to the young reader of the twenty-first century to shed the binaries of intuition and logical thinking, and to invite a combination of both into the world of natural sciences. The story takes us back 150 years to times when the natural sciences were just beginning to leave their mark, when the reverberations of the publications of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin palpably shook the world of the gentlemen who “dabbled” in the sciences. Hardinge unfolds a broad spectrum of Victorian life that focuses on her fourteen-year-old heroine Faith Sunderley, whose father’s sudden death forces her to investigate into his life. In line with many neo-Victorian novels for adult readers (see Hadley 2010; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010; Kaplan 2007; Kohlke 2008), The Lie Tree addresses the past and shows how it still impacts our present and our future: although the detective plot is garnished with atmospheric elements from gothic and fantasy fiction and rife with intertextual references, in its essence, the novel addresses ethical questions that arose with the professionalisation of the sciences and that we still have to tackle in the twenty-first century: what is the nature of truth; who determines what the truth is; and might the canonical sciences not also be susceptible to flaws? By using a protagonist who, by nature of her gender and age, is forced into the background of society, who can only observe rather than act, Hardinge brings to the fore the ideological conflicts of nineteenth-century scientists, the debates and rivalries concerning Genesis, evolution, geology and natural history. As will be shown below, every character in the novel is shown to stand in some relation to the natural sciences and every character’s approach to the sciences not only reflects their individual traits but

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also marks their social position concerning rank and gender. Hardinge uses references to the past to appeal to today’s readers to reflect on the future of scientific research and shed their preconceptions concerning the agents and objects of scientific study, thereby highlighting that embracing rational thinking while allowing the imagination free rein is the key to courage, knowledge, empowerment and agency.

The Leader of the Pack: Reverend Sunderley The first ten chapters of the novel show Faith in her social surrounding and focus especially on her relationship to her father, the Reverend Erasmus Sunderley, a highly renowned naturalist and man of the church, whose finding of a “fossilized human shoulder with faint traces of wings spreading from it” (LT 62) six years previously helped him prove the unprovable: the truth of the Bible’s Creation story. Ever since, Sunderley has been busy publishing articles and communicating with fellow scientists; he has travelled far and wide; his opinions and recommendations are weighty; he is a guest of honour at museums, gentlemen’s clubs and tea parties. Indeed, the father is the epitome of Victorian erudition, reminiscent of George Eliot’s Reverend Edward Casaubon from her novel Middlemarch (1871–1872), who lives entirely for his studies. One of the most alluring features of Hardinge’s work is that she links characters and events to existing facts and figures of British eighteenthand nineteenth-century scientific history, thus making the historical setting of the novel more vivid and palpable for the teen readership. The novel opens with the family on board a steamer, heading for a remote British island with the tell-tale name of Vane, in what looks more like an escape than a scientific voyage. This mysterious journey already highlights the detective elements of the novel while allowing the author to introduce Faith and her living conditions. To the uninformed reader of the twenty-­ first century, it might seem incompatible that religion and natural sciences are embodied in one person. Hardinge explains this via Faith’s thoughts: Many of her father’s friends were clergymen who had stumbled into natural science […] Gentlemen’s sons destined for the Church were sent to a good university, where they were given a respectable, gentlemanly education—the classics, Greek, Latin and a little taste of the sciences. Sometimes that taste was enough to leave them hooked. (LT 14)

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The Victorian Age with its manifold contrasts is often described as the “age of science” (Lyons 2009, 1). Victorians held the firm belief that ­science could solve all problems and help make life better for mankind. However, the various and often competing theories also led to an “unconsciously bred habit of doubt” (Lyons 2009, 3). The Reverend being a geologist who specialises in fossils allows Hardinge to aim straight at the roots of this Victorian doubt: “The most dramatic […] incompatibility was the discovery of fossils and the challenge they presented to the story of Genesis” (Lyons 2009, 7). In fact, fossils were the dominant topic in the early years of professional geology, so this again adds to the authentic framework of the novel: By the mid-nineteenth century, the pursuit of nature had become a craze. Men, women and children from all levels of society were exhorted to ‘make collections of common objects, animal vegetable and mineral’ because ‘such studies tend to sharpen the natural facilities, while they humanise the intellect’. Collectors were encouraged to seek out nature’s hiding places, to examine, quantify, classify, describe, make pictures and attach names to natural history specimens gathered on rambles in the countryside. (Cheater 2008, 167)

The figure of Erasmus is inspired by real-life scientists who collected specimens on exploratory voyages “to be dissected and classified in an attempt to comprehend the natural history of the planet” (Lyons 2009, 22). Initially, palaeontological research was done explicitly to bring evidence that supported Natural Theology (cf. Lyons 2009, 7). However, Earth History constantly brought palaeontologists and geologists into a conflict concerning the Bible’s story of Creation. Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794–1802), argued that the Bible had been written by men and might thus be faulty at times, whereas nature, created by God, was flawless, and that its study “would reveal the true power and wisdom of God” (Lyons 2009, 9; see also White 2017, 41–3). In accordance with Scriptural Geology, Erasmus Sunderley’s aim is to use fossils to provide “scientific proof of the Bible” (LT 390). Faith’s father embodies the passion for studies of nature and the characteristically Victorian doubt in his double profession of being a geologist and a Christian priest. His name not only alludes to the famous religious critic Erasmus of Rotterdam but also calls to mind Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a natural philosopher of the Enlightenment—hence two famous doubters converge in the

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naming of the sullen Erasmus Sunderley, whose surname further stresses his state of being torn between two conflicting worldviews. In his diary, Erasmus explains his growing religious doubts triggered by Darwin’s concept of evolution: For a long time I had been losing my grip on the rock of my faith, as wave after wave of new knowledge struck me cruelly. […] I needed to know, once and for all, wherefore came Man. Was he crafted in God’s image and given the world, or was he the self-deluding grandson of some grimacing ape? (LT 170)

During his voyages in China eight years prior to the beginning of the novel, Erasmus hears of a special tree that can convey the ultimate truth of things. He suspects that it might actually be connected to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge. The discovery of fossils in the nineteenth century opened up a more direct connection to Earth’s history and to creatures and plants that might theretofore have been deemed mythical: “The discovery of fossil plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs not only suggested a scientific basis for the sea monsters of ancient myth and legend, but also made plausible the possibility that the ancient creatures had survived” (Lyons 2009, 3). This explains why Erasmus believed in the authenticity of the “Lie Tree.” Hardinge explains this background in an interview: I started thinking about the tree in terms of how it would be perceived as something connected to the Book of Genesis, because obviously all my characters would have been brought up in a culture suffused with Biblical teachings. There’s no way they weren’t going to see it at least at some point in those terms, but also in terms of it as a botanical specimen, which then got me thinking about natural science and the context of untruths that people would be desperately clinging to. (in Kirkbride 2016)

The tree apparently feeds on lies and produces a fruit which, when eaten, creates visions that give hints to the truth. The higher the number of people who believe the lie, the bigger the fruit it produces and the more substantial the truth it reveals. To get his hands on the tree, Erasmus sacrifices the life of a fellow Englishman, the naturalist Hector Winterbourne (an allusion to the protagonist in Henry James’s Daisy Miller). He then applies scientific methods to carefully experiment with the tree, records its development and the effects of eating the fruit. Eventually, he creates a fake fossil as the lie that should prove the existence of angels—not out of

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vanity or ambition but “in the interests of Truth” (LT 171). This “famous New Falton fossil” is celebrated as “the find of the decade” (LT 20) and catapults him to stardom among his fellow geologists. To make his discovery more authentic, Erasmus takes his seven-year-­ old daughter to the beach and hides the “Nephilim” between some rocks so that the child, with her allegorical name Faith, makes the spectacular find: “an unwitting innocent opening the door to Nature’s marvels” (LT 40). Here Hardinge implicitly refers to thirteen-year-old Mary Anning (1799–1847), who found an ichthyosaur skeleton in Lyme Regis in 1812. Anning “discovered the first complete plesiosaur and Britain’s first pterodactyl, [… she] was the most famous fossil hunter of her time” (Lyons 2009, 40). But Hardinge not only draws references to famous real-life females who played an important role in the sciences, she also connects this episode intermedially to William Dyce’s famous Victorian painting “Pegwell Bay, Kent—a recollection of October 5th 1858” (1858/60), which shows women and a child on a rock-strewn beach, gathering shells. As a scientist and as a clergyman, Erasmus Sunderley is expected to be honest and truthful—but he violates the conventions of both professions. Hardinge resorts to historically recorded scandals concerning fossil finds to add authenticity to her story: in the early eighteenth century, the alleged find of traces of a Nephilim shook the world when a farmer discovered a giant tooth near Albany, New York. Cotton Mather wrote about the discovery to the secretary of the Royal Society of London, declaring that the fossil was proof of the Genesis, where the legend of divine giants called Nephilim is related. A few decades later, in the mid-1840s, a Mr Koch supposedly found a fossil of a monster (Hydragos sillimannii), which he identified as the leviathan mentioned in the Book of Job. However, an anatomist uncovered the fossil as a hoax glued together from the bones of five different specimens (cf. Lyons 2009, 28–9). These examples illustrate the urge of people to believe in proof of the Creation and underline the susceptibility of the sciences to fraud. The Reverend’s wilful deception eventually leads to his being cast out from “the club” of gentleman scientists. The natural sciences are still a small male circle in the tradition of the res publica litteraria, and their standing as a serious profession is so vulnerable that rumours can be fatal, and anyone with a stained reputation is immediately snubbed: “If they had continued to associate with your father, with such a scandal breaking, all their findings would be thrown into doubt! Nobody would take their discoveries seriously!” (LT 250).

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Faith’s father is the perfect projection plane to introduce the many aspects concerning the natural sciences in the Victorian Age: his profession as a clergyman; his growing inner doubts; his journeys; his commitment to a methodologically sound scientific approach; his relation to the scientific community; the early form of fan cult surrounding him; and the volatile professional status of the scientific world. What’s more, he represents the repressive Victorian patriarchal society against which the heroine has to stand up and the invincible boundary between the male and the female spheres.

Ambition and Serendipity: The Geological Society The Lie Tree hosts a variety of characters who all represent different positions within society concerning class, gender and religion, different attitudes to scientific progress and different professions within that field. Scientific life on the island revolves around the excavation site and the house of Mr Anthony Lambent, the magistrate, landlord and most powerful inhabitant of the island, who stages himself as the patron of the scientific community (on the role of the aristocracy in the sciences, see Lyons 2009, 42). The geologists, a strictly male group, illustrate the everyday details of a nineteenth-century excavation: they collect, mark, classify, record, photograph and exhibit their finds. Unfortunately for the avid Faith, they are only interested in the male representatives of the Sunderley family: while her little brother Howard is taken to see the excavation site, Faith is left behind in the tent for ladies and “felt as if a door had slammed in her face” (LT 46). At Magistrate Lambent’s house, in contrast, the reader is introduced to the social life of a gentleman scientist. In the nineteenth century, the natural sciences had obviously taken over from the old world of explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: now it is the scientist who travels to faraway places, collects items and exhibits them. Lambent is the proud owner of a trophy room with “African masks, Chinese jade carvings, a walrus tusk, a boomerang and other souvenirs of strange and exotic lands” (LT 56) as well as a cabinet of curiosities with birds’ eggs, butterflies, dried lizards, stuffed animals and remains of carnivorous plants, each meticulously classified and labelled. The house as a private sphere traditionally being the ladies’ domain offers Hardinge the chance to let Faith and the readers listen in on a conversation of the men, which ladies were usually excluded from: over tea, an intense and passionate debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution unfolds. The issue is

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whether it is conceivable that species change or not, and what this means with respect to Christianity. The anti-evolutionist parson Clay embodies the voice of Scriptural Geology: to him, believing in the evolution of species implies that they were not created perfect, so this theory is blasphemous. Dr Jacklers, in contrast, has changed his opinion in the “last ten years” (LT 60) since Charles Lyell, Britain’s first professor of geology, proved from the age of fossil finds that the world must be older. The impact of Lyell’s and Darwin’s findings is related to the reader via Faith’s thoughts: But then gentlemen of science had worked out how long it took rock to fold itself like puff pastry. They had found fossils, and strange misshapen man-­ skulls with sloping brows. Then, when Faith was five years old, a book about evolution called On the Origin of Species had entered the world, and the world had shuddered, like a boat running aground. And the unknown past had started to stretch […] and the longer the dark age stretched, the more glorious mankind shrank […] ancestors had struggled up from the slime and crawled on the earth. The Bible did not lie. Every good, God-fearing scientist knew that. But rocks and fossils and bones did not lie either, and it was starting to look as if they were not telling the same story. (61)

This state of ambivalence increased the need of scientists to provide lucid and coherent experiments and evaluations, hence the very meticulous work of the geologists. Yet, palaeontology and its related fields exuded an air of adventure, novelty and excitement that held many gentlemen in its thrall, also because it was a field where one might yet attain fame and fortune. Indeed, all of Hardinge’s male characters are shown to be struggling with rather unscientific motivations—emotions interfere and ambition, jealousy, hatred, suspicions and wishful thinking take centre stage. In fact, none of the scientists on the island trusts the other, each wanting to promote his own reputation only: If there was a chance of breaking into an exciting new cavern, all the gentlemen scientists would want to be ‘in at the kill’. They would certainly not trust each other not to start stealing bones for their own collections, or naming fossils after themselves with extreme prejudice. (LT 360–361)

Hardinge comments ironically on the men in charge of the excavation and ridicules them as self-centred, narrow-minded and rather useless. Indeed, the actual cave was only discovered because the curate’s dog fell down a drop—an ironic pointer to the role that serendipity played in the sciences at the time.

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Taking Science Personally: Dr Jacklers Dr Noah Jacklers, like Erasmus Sunderley, embodies the quandary of mid-­ nineteenth-­century men of science, whose religious faith was tested when the fossils began to link science and myth. Jacklers is a bookish character whose doubts stem from his reading. He has devoured the reverend’s articles “in the Royal Society journal” (LT 39), owns various “[p]apers from the Society of Antiquaries and his precious copy of the Reliquiae Aquitaniae, the latest and most exciting book about cave artefacts” (LT 272), and deems himself the only serious scientist on the island: “I have read the latest works on cave hunting and the others have not” (LT 43). The self-professed “skull man” is “writing a paper on the human brain and the roots of intelligence. I measure my patients’ heads” (LT 57). Mostly he studies Lamarck and experiments in craniometry, taking character studies from measurement to judge someone’s intelligence (cf. LT 215–216). Dr Jacklers is trying to prove that skull size and gender are related: men, having larger skulls, are more intelligent, whereas “too much intellect would spoil and flatten” the female skull (LT 58). When he talks to Faith about these pseudo facts and data, the effect is dramatic: Faith flushed. She felt utterly crushed and betrayed. Science had betrayed her. She had always believed deep down that science would not judge her, even if people did. Her father’s books had opened to her touch easily enough. His journals had not flinched from her all too female gaze. But it seemed that science had weighed her, labelled her and found her wanting. Science had decreed that she could not be clever […] and that if by some miracle she was clever, it meant that there was something terribly wrong with her. (58–9; original emphasis)

Faith has to reconsider her belief in the neutrality and unshakeable truth of the sciences. Eventually, however, it turns out that the real problem is the human who provides the data—Jacklers’s preconceptions and self-­deception lead him to violate scientific facts until they match his expectations. When he measures Faith’s head, “[t]he screws were tightened until she was unsure whether he was measuring her head or trying to crush it down to the right size” and he rounds down the results in order to “acquire a credible reading” (LT 255). In fact, the doctor abuses the sciences to perpetuate gender discrimination: he was once snubbed by Miss Hunter, the postmistress and telegraph operator (who eventually turns out to be in a lesbian relationship), and is still resentful. Miss Hunter gives Faith new hope by ironically chal-

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lenging Dr Jacklers’s theory: “Large people tend to have large heads. Men are no cleverer than we are, Miss Sunderley. Just taller” (LT 405), thereby stressing how easily scientific data can be misinterpreted. Thus, the figure of Dr Jacklers is used to address the reliability of the sciences and in how far a scientist can be responsible for spreading falsehoods, consciously or subconsciously. Against these socially accepted male scientists, who turn out to be ambitious, narrow-minded, egocentric and vengeful, Hardinge pits a female approach.

A Natural Born Scientist: Faith Faith is modelled according to popular heroines of Victorian fiction like Jane Eyre. She, too, has free access to her father’s library—“pouring over books dedicated to the beasts of prehistory, marvelling at the sketched bones of long-extinct creatures” (LT 30)—and has gained expert knowledge in geology by assisting him. But however much Faith asserts her cleverness—having taught herself Greek, read Bunyan and history books, as well as knowing the Latin names for garden plants (cf. LT 105)—she will never be accepted by her father or any other member of the scientific community: “She had always known that she was rated less than Howard, the treasured son. Now, however, she knew that she was ranked somewhere below ‘miscellaneous cuttings’” (LT 17). Erasmus, aware of his daughter’s uncommon cleverness, lets her “copy out his notes in longhand and take dictation” (LT 41) or prepare the taxidermy of an iguana, but he keeps her limited in the private female sphere. Hardinge here alludes to the fate of many female relatives of scientists, who were encouraged to help but never came into the limelight of the scientific community. To Faith, the natural sciences are a way of connecting with her father, and as such are very emotionally laden. Finding the New Falton fossil is the happiest day of her life and her personal initiation into the world of sciences. Though her father never takes her fossil-hunting again and it is the first and last time for her to be acknowledged by the scientific community, she is hooked: “It was as if he had opened a door to her that bright, salt day, but then closed it again” (LT 41). Faith is eager to prove her worth and cleverness to her father, but as a female she is officially doomed to passivity—her father brutally highlights Victorian gender constrictions by admonishing her: “As a daughter, you […] will never serve with honour on the army or distinguish yourself in the sciences, or make a name for yourself in the Church or Parliament” (LT 105–106).

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Like Jane Eyre, Faith is characterised by her thirst for knowledge and her passion to learn more about what lies beyond the confines of her domestic world. Even though eminent voices like Erasmus Darwin and Maria Edgeworth had propagated the idea that girls, too, should be given a scientific education, there were distinct limits (cf. Fara 2008, 17; Boswell 2017, 55). Hardinge stresses Faith’s thirst for knowledge by describing it with gendered food metaphors: There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too. A few stale lessons from tired governesses, dull walks, unthinking pastimes. But it was not enough. All knowledge—any knowledge—called to Faith, and there was a delicious, poisonous pleasure in stealing it unseen. (8)

Faith’s hunger is a burning desire for knowledge and for agency, for being able to partake in the public life. Instead, she has to fake a lack of interest, pretend to be bland and boring while secretly she observes, spies, listens in, conjectures, reasons—and applies her knowledge. To her, geology is fascinating and alive; she has a sensuous relationship to it: “The past was all around her. She could smell it. It did not feel dead. It felt alive, and as curious about her as she was about it” (LT 51). Her mother Myrtle, in contrast, embodies the typical Angel in the House; she finds Faith’s behaviour “absurd” (LT 48) and embarrassing, as a “normal” female’s reaction to the excavation should be bored incomprehension. Myrtle is afraid that an expert knowledge in the scientific fields of geology and palaeontology will make her daughter look unwomanly. So Faith has to learn to suppress her desires, but it makes her suffer and illustrates again and again how painful the restrictions for females were in the Victorian Age. However, Hardinge allows her heroine a form of rebellion that embraces otherness: from the moment when her father is found dead and she decides to prove that it was murder, fantastic, mysterious and gothic elements abound, as if the death of the patriarch had also freed the novel and opened a new narrative realm of the imagination: Faith is increasingly described as a dark, Gothic character and compared to creatures such as a salamander, hydra, snake and “a misty female monster of myth” (LT 162). Whereas monsters in the Victorian discourse usually gave humans a sense of their insignificance and weakness, accepting the inner monster here is an act of liberation and empowerment for Faith.

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Her curiosity and thirst for knowledge and the fact that she knows of it being forbidden (not to mention her emotional ties to both the tree and her favourite pet, a Mandarin trinket snake that came to England together with the tree) put her in the tradition of notoriously curious Eve while at the same time highlighting her status of liminality, which in turn connects her to the object of her scientific studies, the mysterious Lie Tree. The novel uses traditional tropes of the detective novel and internal focalisation to show both the activities and the thought processes of the female Sherlock: she explores the house, memorises specific features, searches for clues and sifts through her father’s documents. She asks a lot of questions, uses rational deduction and explanations and repeatedly readjusts her conclusions when new facts surface. Even the showdown scene, when she confronts her father’s murderer and listens to the justification, is a bow to the typical detective plot (cf. LT 370). These characteristics of the rational detective are linked to the similar step-by-step thought processes and character traits of a scientist. Faith’s ways of questioning the world and everything she observes qualify her as a scientist from the very outset. “Faith was full of questions, coiling and writhing like the snake in the crate” (LT 7). The way she goes about probing the plant calls to mind the basic tenets of positivist practice: experimenting, providing evidence, interpreting and evaluating. Faith prepares by studying her father’s annotations and thinking methodically: “She was a scientist, she reminded herself. Scientists did not give in to awe and superstition. Scientists asked questions, and answered them through observation and logic. […] Magic was not an answer; it was an excuse to avoid looking for one” (LT 227; original emphasis). She takes her father’s field kit, including a microscope, corked jars, tin box for samples, bottles of acids for testing rocks, a compass, a goniometer and callipers, a ruler, matches, watch and folding knife (cf. LT 229), to examine the plant, take measurements, cut samples of leaf, bark and spines, take a rubbing of the leaves, and to detect magnetic fields (cf. LT 231). Faith tries to find out where the tree takes its energy from and formulates hypotheses about why her skirt caught fire, thinking along the lines of Darwin about how the plant could profit by this: “How could bursting into flames be an advantage? How would a tree like that evolve?” (LT 258; original emphasis). The reader here is given an insight into some rather obscure scientific approaches of the nineteenth century, ranging from chemistry to spiritualism: it is suggested that the plant “forms a bond with one person, and then the rest is just a matter of currents in the magnetic fluid. […] Animal

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Magnetism […] induces trances, unobstructed visions, allows living things to affect each other without touching, causes physical effects” (LT 394). Whereas Mesmer’s theories on the cosmic fluid spread from the 1770s on, Spiritualism was actively researched in the 1860s, exactly at the point in time in which the story is set. The discussion unfolding between Faith and Mrs Lambent reveals some of the competing theories of the time. Mrs Lambent is enraged to hear Faith “apply such old-fashioned nonsense to my Tree” (LT 394, she means Animal Magnetism) and proposes that the tree is “obviously some sort of spiritual carnivore. […] that it consumes ghosts, and is able to provide answers using the knowledge of the spirits within—like a vegetable medium” (LT 394). In the late eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century, scholars attempted to rationalise inexplicable phenomena, for example, by applying theories such as Mesmerism and Spiritualism (for more details cf. Kirkby 2008, 100). Erasmus Darwin himself saw nature as “animated by desire and intelligence” (Kirkby 2008, 109). This conviction “of the reality of spiritual phenomena” (Lyons 2009, 2) justifies the introduction of the Lie Tree to the novel, which to a modern reader might seem like an element of fantasy fiction, but which in fact would have been a phenomenon seriously studied by a scientist of the nineteenth century, and so it lends credibility to the characters and the plot. By introducing the tree, Hardinge also intricately taps into a Victorian discourse beyond that of the popular gothic and detective novel: stories of “strange plants with anthropomorphic qualities” (Chang 2017, 83), which featured a wild genre mix of adventure, mystery and gothic. Antimimetic fiction of the late nineteenth century used familiar narrative techniques to tell new stories of worlds much like the Victorian reader’s own, with certain striking exceptions […] These works sought to invoke a world beyond the constraints of natural laws, while always emphasizing an inevitable return to the world that those laws governed. […] all began with an affirmation of the scientific principles and rhetoric that the fiction would then fantastically invert and rearrange. (Chang 2017, 82)

This is exactly what Hardinge does by adopting the genre of neo-­Victorian novels and arranging a setting and characters that are authentic and have evidently been thoroughly researched, while at the same time adding the purely fantastical element of the tree. Demonising the native and exotic flora might have been a means to criticise British colonial greed and

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exploitation (cf. Chang 2017, 85), but here the tree is used for more general ethical reflections concerning the ambivalence of truth and deception. The plant’s transgressive and indistinct qualities could also be seen as a hint to the liminal state of Faith herself, her search of agency and self-­ fulfilment. Indeed, the tree’s link to the state of females is even more intricate than that.

The Mythical Beast: Mrs Lambent Faith and the reader eventually realise that the true villain is Agatha Lambent, the widow of Hector Winterbourne, whose death Erasmus had caused back in China to obtain the Lie Tree. She pulled all the strings to have the Reverend come to Vane so she could finally avenge her late first husband. In accordance with the patriarchal worldview of Faith’s father, he did not even mention Mrs Winterbourne in his journal, although she had travelled to China with her husband. “Her existence would not have seemed relevant or important to him” (LT 358). However, Faith does not judge her for her evil deeds—instead, she feels empathy, understanding, pity and even some admiration. While Lambent had been strutting and posing in pantaloons, his wife had been quietly running the dig. As she understood, Faith felt the strangest mixture of jubilation, frustration and sadness. Here was that mythical beast that everybody had told her could not exist: a female natural scientist. (375; my emphasis).

The fact that the myth of the female scientist is here shown to be a reality leads to Faith’s anagnorisis and opens up visions of a future unhoped for. Accepting the truth about Mrs Lambent, acknowledging her professional qualities, is a revelatory moment for Faith, both inspiring and depressing, as it bluntly shows the means and limitations of Victorian women who want to be scientists. Mrs Lambent has become cynical and bitter; her experiences and observations of the world of scientists have taught her that there is a clear and impermeable gendered dividing line: Will I publish papers on it, stagger the scientific world and become the toast of the Royal Society? […] I think not. I had ideas of that sort once. […] now […] I know that they would not [believe me]. It is too new, too strange; it

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would push too many other scientists out of their comfortable seats. Perhaps it might sound better coming from a gentleman of good breeding, but if I talked of it? I should probably find myself in a lunatic asylum. (LT 388)

Faith painfully notices how Mrs Lambent is being subdued even after her death because her life does not reflect appropriate female behaviour: “Agatha was disappearing. Her cunning, her villainy, her scientific zeal, her brilliance and her obsessions were melting into air like steam. Soon she would be just another ‘beloved wife’ on a marble headstone” (LT 400). Yet, Agatha Lambent proves to Faith how women can push their interests even from the background. Being ignored by the male scientists served as a veil behind which she could continue her studies. Indeed, although women were excluded from universities, many females—wives and daughters of eminent scientists—were involved in scientific projects and thus “transformed science communication” (Fara 2008, 21), making it more accessible for the domestic sphere and for the educational discourse. Faith and her nemesis are soul sisters in their desire for knowledge, their love of the sciences and their methodological approach. They are, indeed, the only characters in the novel who do not falter in their rationality—everyone else is prone to self-deceit, overambitious or limited by religious doubts. When Agatha Lambent is unveiled as the true villain and mastermind, all the male characters suddenly become pale and irrelevant. She and Faith embody the budding New Woman: powerful females who seek to be independent and pursue a profession of their choice, irrespective of social inhibitions.

Conclusion In the end, Faith leaves the island, her snake with the recently shed skin on her lap “to reveal new colours, vibrant and unabashed” (LT 403). This suggests that Faith, too, will start a new life with more courage to do what she pleases, even though she will only be able to take tiny steps at a time. Faith begins to understand that there is a lot hidden behind the surface of Victorian lives: “Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies” (LT 404). Although she will very likely be shunned in her liminal position as a female scientist, she sees beyond her own life and acknowledges the role she might play for future generations:

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If Faith pursued natural science, as a female she would probably be mocked, belittled, patronized and ignored her whole life. […] Perhaps she would go abroad to visit excavations, and be despised as a scandalous woman travelling alone. Perhaps she would marry, and have all her work attributed to her husband […]. Perhaps she would end up a penniless old maid, with only a coral collection for memory. And perhaps some other later girl, leafing through her father’s library, would come across a footnote in an academic journal and read the name ‘Faith Sunderley’. Faith? She would think. That is a female name. A woman did this. If this is so … then so can I. And the little fire of hope, self-belief and determination would pass to another heart. (LT 409; original emphasis)

Wanting “to be a bad example” (LT 410), Faith is a female role model designed to inspire twenty-first-century girls to be curious, self-­determined and relentless in the pursuit of what they are passionate about. In fact, this novel is one of the few where a female takes a leading and positive role in the sciences and is not just a daughter, sister or lover—or an evil character like Mrs Coulter in Philip Pullman’s iconic His Dark Materials. For Faith and people like her—the forgotten and ignored, females and minorities— Darwin’s theory of evolution is a promise, as it points to changes in society and future possibilities for “freaks of nature like herself ” (LT 63): female scientists. As Dean-Ruzicka (2016, 51) points out, the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are still dominated by male scientists and children still imagine scientists to be male and white. So characters like Faith can inspire a girl reader to imagine female scientists with a slightly different approach. The novel refutes closure when it comes to uncovering the secret of the tree, but its critique points to the limitations of scientists rather than the limitations of the sciences. “There may be questions still unanswered, but that means that we need science, not that science is useless” (LT 389; original emphasis). The men apply their methods to the Lie Tree to find scientific proof of something beyond rationality, but their ulterior aim is to use it for personal goals. Faith and Mrs Lambent are equally adamant supporters of science, but they follow a different aim: they want to study the tree for its own sake. What the novel posits is that the male world of science uses a façade of cold rationality to hide personal interests, whereas Faith applies empathy and selflessness, compassion and gentleness to communicate with the tree alongside rational, methodological strategies, and she is the only one who succeeds.

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The plant, repetitiously compared to dragon, spider or beast and portrayed as a living organism that breathes, whispers and moves, is a typical Victorian Gothic element, and would traditionally be understood as the “meta-trope for irrationality” (Roberts 2017, 88). The rational-irrational dichotomy would in the Victorian Age have been applied to the male-­female sphere, thus allocating the plant to the females. However, it is the males in this novel who display irrational and transgressive behaviour, and the females who maintain rational thoughts in the face of mystery and myth. The novel thus invites the readers to reconsider preconceived notions—not just concerning “scientific truth” and heteronormative behaviour, but also concerning the limits of rationality—and to open up to other ways of perceiving the world. In this context, the snake, Biblical symbol of the original sin, is shown as an entirely positive animal that symbolises compassion and knowledge, and connects Eve’s negatively connoted curiosity with the positively connoted motto of Enlightenment: sapere aude. The world portrayed in The Lie Tree shows the historical reality of gendered behavioural patterns and restrictions, but it goes beyond that. It draws on a dense network of references concerning genre, style, emplotment, characters and scope, the intricacy of which defies it being marketed as a “mere” young adult novel, which again proves why it deserved the Costa Book Award. In line with Marie-Luise Kohlke, who defines neo-Victorian literature as an engagement with the Victorian past that allows one an insight into “twenty-first century cultural and socio-political concerns” (2008, 13), The Lie Tree is a prime example of the connectivities explored in this volume—it is embedded in Victorian reality and realist narrative, but it relates directly to the experiences of a twenty-first-century audience and its desire for the fantastical and imaginative to be accepted alongside the technological and rational, in one culture and one all-encompassing worldview, as it were. Faith personifies the voyage from passive observer to active agent as she navigates façades and propriety, lies and strategic silence in her struggle for social acceptance and individual empowerment. The Lie Tree addresses not only Faith’s but all young people’s struggles for freedom from prejudgment, freedom to gain knowledge and freedom to imagine a different world. By looking at the state of the sciences in the m ­ id-­nineteenth century, Hardinge invites the readership to reconsider how far we have (not yet) come in the twenty-first century, not only as concerns allowing females an equal standing as scientists, but also allowing a “female touch” to invigorate scientific research.

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Note 1. It might be that this is an evolving new genre that has so far been largely ignored by academia—to my knowledge, only one article on neo-Victorian young adult literature has so far been written, according to the website of the University of Southern Indiana (Amy L. Montz on “Corsetry and Neo-­ Victorian Young Adult Literature,” planned for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly forthcoming any time after January 2019). See faculty.usi.edu/almontz/publications/ (accessed 30 January 2019).

Works Cited Boswell, Michelle (2017). “Women and Science.” The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Eds. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston. New York: Routledge. 53–67. Chang, Elizabeth (2017). “Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century.” Strange Science. Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. Eds. Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 81–101. Cheater, Christine (2008). “Collectors of Nature’s Curiosities: Science, Popular Culture and the Rise of Natural History Museums” Frankenstein’s Science. Eds. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Farnham: Ashgate. 167–181. Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel (2016). “Of Scrivens and Sparks: Girl Geniuses in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Ashgate Studies in Childhood. Eds. Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Barteet, and Amy L. Montz. London: Routledge. 51–74. Falconer, Rachel (2010). “Young Adult Fiction and the Crossover Phenomenon.” The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature. Ed. David Rudd. London: Routledge. 87–99. Fara, Patricia (2008). “Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Frankenstein’s Science. Eds. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Farnham: Ashgate. 17–32. Hadley, Louisa (2010). Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. The Victorians and Us. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–29. Hardinge, Frances (2015). The Lie Tree. London: Macmillan Children’s Books. Heilmann, Ann and Mark Llewellyn (2010). Neo-Victorianism. The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, Cora (2007). Victoriana. Histories, Fictions, Criticism. New  York: Columbia University Press. 1–14. Kirkbride, Jasmin (2016). “The BookBrunch Interview: Frances Hardinge.” www. bookbrunch.co.uk, 4 March. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.

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Kirkby, Joan (2008). “Shadows of the Invisible World: Mesmer, Swedenborg and the Spiritualist Sciences.” Frankenstein’s Science. Eds. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Farnham: Ashgate. 99–115. Kohlke, Marie-Luise (2008). “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-­ Victorian Encounter.” Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1: 1–18. Lyons, Sherrie Lynne (2009). Species, Serpents, Spirits and Skulls—Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age. New York: SUNY Press. Roberts, Adam (2017). “From Gothic to Science Fiction.” The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Eds. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston. New York: Routledge. 87–100. White, Paul (2017). “Science and Religion.” The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Eds. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston. New York: Routledge. 41–52.

CHAPTER 9

“It’s for Fellows Only!”: On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity Norbert Schaffeld

Introduction The growing popularity of films about mathematics ranging from Good Will Hunting (1997), Proof (2005), and Gifted (2017) to the American television series NUMB3RS (2005–2010) seems to stand in striking contrast to the widespread attitude among potential viewers to charmingly admit the baffling problems the school subject once posed for them. On closer inspection, however, this apparent contradiction is quickly resolved when it becomes clear that it is not genuine mathematics that attracts the majority of the cinemagoers but the character of the mathematician who can in fact appear in different roles: as a prodigy child, an autodidact, a genius, a stigmatised outsider, a person deeply obsessed, sometimes mysterious or even mad (Haynes 2017; Henke et al. 2017). This interest in a complex character rather than pure mathematics explains the prominence of maths biopics which quite often focus on famous mathematicians of the

N. Schaffeld (*) University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_9

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past. In the last two decades, films and TV productions such as Breaking the Code (1996), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Ramanujan (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), and Hidden Figures (2016) have provided clear evidence of the appeal and success of the genre. In view of this film corpus, two historical mathematicians have repeatedly attracted the directors’ attention. While the tragic life story of Alan Turing (1912–1954) encompasses the fame of a mathematical hero as well as his persecution for being gay in a way that lends itself to filmic narrativisation, the corresponding plight of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), is of a different nature. As he moves between autodidacticism and professionalism, between religious inspiration and atheism, and between the British colony and the academic heart of the Empire, Ramanujan’s remarkable life has found numerous interpretations in biographies, novels, plays, films, TV documentaries, and an opera. The corpus comprises more than a dozen texts and productions from Britain, Canada, Germany, India, and the US, among them Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (1991), David Leavitt’s novel The Indian Clerk (2007), M.N.  Krish’s thriller The Steradian Trail (2013), the plays Partition (2006) by Ira Hauptman and A Disappearing Number (2008) by the theatre company Complicite and Simon McBurney, Gnana Rajasekaran’s film Ramanujan (2014), and, finally, Matthew Brown’s biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. The diverse representations of Ramanujan’s life will require extensive research to discover how the non-expert’s understanding of mathematicians or mathematics is canalised by the narrative qualities of the genre or medium. In contrast, this present chapter is more limited and modest in scope in that it attempts to “read” one example, that is, Matthew Brown’s film The Man Who Knew Infinity, against the backdrop of historical accounts. In that vein, it heavily relies on Robert Kanigel’s eponymous as well as hypotextual scientific biography and the evidence-based claims of this specific genre (Greene 2007). Overlooking British fiction of the twenty-first century, Daniel Lea identifies a triangle of shared concerns that offers itself as a heuristic tool for the analysis of a maths film which is mainly set in the years of the First World War. For Lea, materiality, that is, the presence of the physical world (2017, 19), is one commonality of contemporary fiction, the others being connectivity (20–2) and authenticity (22–4). In a very straightforward

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way, Lea defines connectivity in terms of “the connections between people, places, and things” (20), whilst authenticity is seen as “a significant concern of twenty-first-century writing, not just as a point of flight but also as a credible point of return” (22). In an attempt to check Lea’s diagnosis in the realm of a historical maths film, my argument will have to focus on the cultural trope of connectivity (Lea 2017, 18), mainly because it merges the key questions of spatial or institutional belonging and professional orientation with the receptive experience among the film-going public of a temporal bridge into the here and now. The dichotomic cornerstones of Ramanujan’s life have to be linked by means of a narrative which explains the lure of connectivity that biographers, novelists, playwrights, and film directors could not resist. Robert Kanigel, for one, compares Ramanujan’s biography to “a rags-to-­ intellectual-­riches story” (4), describing a career, full of vicissitudes, the self-taught mathematical prodigy from a poor South Indian background had endured to eventually become a Fellow of the Royal Society. In hindsight and in spite of his unorthodox mathematical approaches, it can be argued that “Ramanujan’s work has had deep impact on several fields within mathematics like number theory, analysis, combinatorics, and the theory of modular forms” (Alladi 2016, 31). Ramanujan grew up in Kumbakonam, South India, as a Brahmin boy whose family belonged to the urban poor. His exceptional mathematical gift was spotted at an early age and at least from the third form of his high school onwards, Ramanujan turned out to be a real challenge for his teachers (Kanigel 1991, 26). His biographer, Robert Kanigel, sums up this part of Ramanujan’s school days in British-ruled India as follows: He became something of a minor celebrity. All through his school years, he walked off with merit certificates and volumes of English poetry as scholastic prizes. Finally, at a ceremony in 1904, when Ramanujan was being awarded the K.  Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics, headmaster Krishnaswami Iyer introduced him to the audience as a student who, were it possible, deserved higher than the maximum possible marks. (Kanigel 1991, 27)

Before long, Ramanujan received a college scholarship that seemed to pave his way towards an outstanding academic career. But, given his exclusive interest in mathematics, he soon came to ignore the demands of all other subjects and, consequently, the scholarship was withdrawn. With another grant to support him, he then attended a college in Madras (now

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Chennai), but except for maths, he repeatedly failed the exams. In the years to come, Ramanujan worked as a tutor, he was alternately supported by friends and a generous Brahmin casteman, got a temporary office job, and eventually became a clerk in the accounts section of the Port Trust in 1912. It was here that Ramanujan obtained the helpful advice and support that he needed. Both the chairman of the Port Trust, Sir Francis Spring (1849–1933), and the chief accountant, S. Narayana Iyer (1874–1937), a former lecturer in mathematics and member of the Mathematical Society, actively encouraged Ramanujan to send letters and samples of his work to three Cambridge mathematicians. But only the youngest of the prominent addressees, G.H. Hardy (1877–1947), offered his professional backing. Ramanujan lived as a traditional Hindu Brahmin and felt divinely inspired by the family deity, the goddess Namagiri. “It was goddess Namagiri, he would tell friends, to whom he owed his mathematical gifts. Namagiri would write the equations on his tongue. Namagiri would bestow mathematical insights in his dreams” (Kanigel 1991, 36). Indeed, in the eyes of Ramanujan, the realms of the mathematical and the metaphysical were not to be separated. One practical obstacle that resulted from this intimate nexus was Ramanujan’s pious scruples to travel to Europe as, from the perspective of an orthodox Hindu, crossing the ocean (Kala Pani) was forbidden and would lead to the exclusion from caste (Sweetman 2016, 31). In this situation, a divine sign was needed; and legend has it that it was the goddess Namagiri herself who intervened and in a dream commanded his mother Komalatammal to let her son go (Kanigel 1991, 188). When he left for Britain in 1914 to accept Hardy’s invitation, Ramanujan’s young wife Janaki (1899–1994) agreed to stay behind. The couple had married in 1909 when Janaki was still a girl. This was not uncustomary as most girls got married well before puberty to later join their husbands which Janaki did in 1912. But according to Kanigel, Ramanujan and his wife “Janaki, not even a teenager yet, had little contact. They scarcely spoke. During the day, he might ask her to fetch him soap or an article of clothing. At nights, she’d recall, she mostly slept beside Komalatammal—at her mother-in-law’s insistence” (Kanigel 1991, 97). In 1911, Ramanujan, the self-taught mathematician, published his first paper in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society and thus inscribed himself into the long tradition of Indian mathematics, which, in a noteworthy contrast to the Euclidean step-by-step process of a formal proof,

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was inclined to stress the result over and above the method. As such, the difference between Ramanujan and Hardy could hardly have been more extreme. Where the former emphasised divine insight, the latter applied pure logic, where the former favoured the theorem, the latter concentrated on the proof. While Ramanujan worked as an autodidact, Hardy had taken the notorious Tripos, became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the heart of English mathematics, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society. And finally, while Ramanujan lived a life in accordance with the rules of orthodox Hinduism, Hardy was known to be a dedicated atheist. Yet, after some initial doubts, Hardy came to praise Ramanujan’s algebraic formulae and transformation of infinite series and compared him with the famous mathematicians Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) (Kanigel 1991, 205). Wartime Britain was probably not the most advantageous place for a strict vegetarian who, due to the lack of proper food and his tendency to sacrifice his health in the name of mathematics, ultimately suffered from malnutrition and tuberculosis. He was sent to different hospitals and sanatoriums at a time of psychological distress and loneliness that seemed to be augmented by the lack of communication with his wife. It was only later, maybe after his return to India, that Ramanujan learned how his mother had intercepted his as well as Janaki’s letters (Kanigel 1991, 318). In January 1918, he even tried to kill himself in what seems to have been a rash act, the cause of which is still unknown (295). Only a couple of weeks later, Ramanujan was named a Fellow of the Royal Society (Alladi 2016, 30) and when he arrived in India in 1919, just one year before his premature death at the age of 32, he was celebrated as the country’s most famous mathematician with a professorship at the University of Madras waiting for him. And yet, while the reunion with his wife Janaki was successful, on the day of the funeral, “most of his orthodox Brahmin relatives stayed away; Ramanujan had crossed the waters and, too sick on his return to make the trip to Rameswaram for the purification ceremonies his mother had planned, was still tainted in their eyes” (Kanigel 1991, 329). It seems as if the paradoxes and contradictions which G.H. Hardy attests to Ramanujan’s career (Hardy 1959, 1) did not end with his all too untimely death. The brief sketch of Ramanujan’s life will serve as the historical backdrop against which three major fields of analysis and one guiding question are to be specified with respect to the hypertext film The Man Who Knew Infinity, written and directed by Matthew Brown. First, the filmic representation of

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both colonial India and Cambridge as the academic centre of the Empire will come to the fore in order to identify the spatial and c­ ultural contrasts between the two. Second, the profound differences between Western and non-Western mathematics will be examined to precisely figure out how, in the case of Ramanujan and Hardy, the diverse knowledge systems and mathematical approaches find their filmic expression. And third, the film’s postcolonial stance is addressed with the objective of probing into the presence of respect and racism at two significant institutional sites as diverse as the Port Trust in Madras and Trinity College, Cambridge. What these three fields of analysis have in common is their contribution in responding to the leading question of the correlative merits of authenticity and artistic licence when the object of study is a historical, albeit fictionalised, biopic.

Going Places: From the British Colony to the Academic Centre of the Empire In his attempt to clearly differentiate between space “as unbounded extension” and place “as a location,” Ashcroft (2009, 75) describes the capacity of cultural and social places in ways that will prove particularly useful in a spatio-temporal as well as a postcolonial reading of the film The Man Who Knew Infinity. For him, one observable property of place is its potential “to signify difference and construct identity” (76), and in this quality, it can directly be equated with a text: Place is a text, this is an important feature of its cultural density. On one hand place can be constructed by the interactive operation of various texts— not only written media such as documents, books, and brochures, but also spoken, visual and non-verbal media including photographs, architecture, advertisements, performance media, and the artifacts of material culture (national parks and forests might be seen as one example of a social text). But place is also a ‘text’ itself, a network of meaning, a production of discourse that may be ‘read’. The sense of place an individual might develop is never entirely separate from the text created by cultural discourse, the ‘social place’ known and understood by the society, formalized in social behavior. (Ashcroft 2009, 76)

The meaningful places that the film has to offer encompass two major culturally inscribed areas. One is the urban landscape of colonial Madras; the other is the site of Cambridge University, especially Trinity College, at the time of the First World War.1 As far as Madras is concerned, the

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a­ udience relates Ramanujan’s appearance to four essential sites, that is, a roofed columned section of a temple, the colonial building of the Port Trust, his modest home, and Marina Beach. It is especially the sacred site of a Hindu temple that gives a spatial comment on the vital link between Ramanujan’s deeply religious views and his mathematical genius. In the take that presents the protagonist for the very first time (01:43–2:17), Ramanujan is on his knees and uses the stone slabs of the temple’s floor to write down formulae in chalk. He seems to correct one of the formulae and then has a new, apparently more successful idea. At this moment, the camera’s medium shot includes Ramanujan’s upward gaze before the reverse shot shows the bust of his goddess whom he then looks at with a mixture of devotion and thankfulness. The camera’s dominant focalisation on Ramanujan is accompanied by the voice-over of the homodiegetic narrator, G.H. Hardy, whose earlier frame comments now continue into the first inset scene. They all represent slightly modified versions of paragraphs taken form Hardy’s famous Harvard lecture delivered in 1936 (Hardy 1959, 1–2). His off-screen voice now explains: “He was, in a way, my discovery. I did not invent him. Like other great men, he invented himself. The difficulty for me, then, is not that I do not know enough about him, but that I know and feel too much” (01:43–2:17). There is a striking contrast between Ramanujan’s sense of place and Hardy’s narrative. While the religious site inspires the Indian mathematician and does indeed proxemically present him as his goddess’s instrument, Hardy’s text imposes a Western—in his case atheist—reading which classifies both the invention and the discovery of a genius as purely human acts. With the exception of the Port Trust and its textual reference to the raj or British rule in India (Kulke and Rothermund 2016), all the other places bespeak the decisive role that Hinduism played in Ramanujan’s life. What the realms of home and Marina Beach have in common is the way in which their religious and social inscriptions forbid any move that goes beyond the latter’s confines. Compared to his wife’s final sympathy for the demands of Ramanujan’s career, his mother’s position is far more rigid and disapproving because for observant Hindus, crossing the seas is prohibited. By comparison, the visualised places that the audience is confronted with when the inset story moves to Cambridge mostly lack a deeply religious network of meaning. Instead, they frequently refer to prominent inscriptions of science, philosophy, history, literature, and, of course, architecture. The moment Ramanujan arrives at the heraldic Great Gate, the entrance of Trinity College, he meets J.E. Littlewood (Toby Jones), a prominent mathematician

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and trusted colleague of Hardy. Parallel to the following dialogue, the camera reveals the impressive prospect of the Great Court, the adjacent buildings, and the grassy quadrangles in the middle. LITTLEWOOD: Are you Ramanujan, by chance? RAMANUJAN: Very much by chance. LITTLEWOOD: […] John Littlewood. Such a pleasure. I was just on my way to meet you. Oh, shall we go together?—(Ramanujan is impressed by the architecture of the Great Court.) Yes. The intended effect. Don’t be intimidated. Great knowledge often comes from the humblest of origins. Come along. You see that sapling? That’s the very tree under which Newton sat when the apple dropped on his head and he invented gravity. (chuckles) This way. We’ve been anticipating your arrival some time. (23:52–24:49)

While Littlewood attempts to reduce the intimidating impression of this academic site and even encouragingly alludes to chances that non-­ privileged people have, he is at the same time capable of actively promoting Trinity College and its legends.2 The very next place, however, already contextualises a scenic indication of the academic opposition Ramanujan will have to face. The film’s editing thus quite tellingly juxtaposes the welcome scene with a faculty get-together where critical voices are being raised. HOWARD: Well, I think it’s criminal. I mean, we bring these Indians over at great expense and look what happens. VICE MASTER JACKSON: Yeah, well, it’s not just that this chap Ramjin, whatever his name is, is Indian. After all, we do have Indian students here. MACMAHON: Just not ones with no education to speak of. It’s a disgrace. HARDY: Ramanujan is a special case. VICE MASTER JACKSON: Uh, why is that, exactly? We’ve all read his letter. There are no proofs. Are we just supposed to take him at his word? HARDY: No. You’re to take him at mine. Change, gentlemen. It’s a wonderful thing. Embrace it. (24:50–25:28)

As far as the location of Trinity College is concerned, the film makes full use of telling academic places which signify a discursive text of tradition, power, influence, and belonging. The corresponding list comprises lecture theatres, halls, offices, and diverse rooms, but, above all, the antechapel where Ramanujan respectfully touches a foot of Newton’s statue,3 and the

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Wren Library with its holdings of notable rare books and manuscripts. But it is something seemingly insignificant as the grass quadrangle that provokes a spatial reading. On the day after his arrival, Ramanujan is on his way to Hardy and crosses the lawn when he is reprimanded by the porter, who yells: “Get off the grass! It’s for Fellows only!” (28:01–28:08). Investing the lawn with the status of an area that separates ordinary members of the faculty from the Fellows is clear evidence of the hierarchies of academic life and as such a discursive process marking the special power and exclusive privileges that only a few are entitled to enjoy. In the film, crossing the lawn is used as a spatial leitmotif that even displays an anticipating quality. As a Fellow of Trinity College, Hardy can cross the lawn without being rebuked (46:15–46:43), and when, shortly before his departure, Ramanujan himself is encouraged by him to go the same way (1:36:19–1:36:35), the audience understands that the Indian mathematician will receive the honour of an elected Fellow of Trinity College in what turns out to be the very next scene. As it is, the site of the lawn and its inscribed rules of privilege and title create an image which can also be decoded on a higher, more abstract level that applies and extends Foucault’s notion of the formation of enunciative modalities (Foucault 2010, 50–5). Seen this way, the specific place under scrutiny comes to signify the academic terrain and its system of discursive rules which narrowly define the scientist or scholar’s qualification in terms of status and institutional belonging (Schaffeld 2016, 171–2).

The Mathematical Dispute Between Hardy and Ramanujan In a favourable review published in the London Mathematical Society Newsletter, the mathematicians Armando Martino and David Singerman highly praise The Man Who Knew Infinity as “perhaps the best film about mathematics ever made” (2016, 3). They base their professional judgement on the film’s double achievement in that it “depicts the love of mathematics in a very human way” (1), while simultaneously attempting to integrate mathematical questions in an authentic as well as comprehensible filmic manner (3). With this professional support, one can certainly say that it was obviously a worthwhile idea to win over the two ­distinguished mathematicians, Ken Ono and Manjul Bhargava, for the film project as advisors and associate producers.

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The film’s opening credits contain a quotation from the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), whose statement “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty” (00:44–00:46; Russell 2007, 60) defines an aesthetic quality of the field that can likewise be identified in art. Russell’s expositional phrase not only sets the tone for a specific reading of the film, in which he later appears as a minor character, it is shared by G.H. Hardy too for whom mathematical patterns had to be a thing of beauty. In his essay A Mathematician’s Apology first published in 1940, Hardy categorically stated that “Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics” (Hardy 2013, 85). When discussing the aesthetic canon of mathematics and in particular beauty in proofs, Ulianov Montano only recently pointed to the guiding principles of brevity and simplicity (Montano 2014, 30). And in doing so, his line of argument follows James W. McAllister who—as a philosopher of science—claims that “[t]he most important determinant of a proof’s perceived beauty is thus the degree to which it lends itself to being grasped in a single act of mental apprehension” (McAllister 2005, 22). In the early scenes of The Man Who Knew Infinity, Ramanujan explains his mathematical passion to his wife Janaki and compares mathematics to a work of art, a painting whose colours one cannot see (10:00–11:40). Aspects of beauty and art are still present when Ramanujan, now a student at Trinity College, inevitably provokes the first major dispute with a sympathetic G.H. Hardy. The importance of the scene, which is set in Hardy’s office, merits a longer quotation: HARDY: How do you know that theorem? RAMANUJAN: It came to me. Mr. Hardy, I don’t understand why we waste our time doing all these proofs. I have the formulas. HARDY: It’s not that I can’t see what you’ve claimed. It’s that I’m not sure that you know how you got there or, indeed, that your claims are correct. […] RAMANUJAN: But they are right, sir. I have more important new ideas. HARDY: Yes, but intuition is not enough. It has to be held accountable. And a little humility would go a long way. Why do you think they want us to fail? RAMANUJAN: Because I am Indian. HARDY: What? Yeah, there is that. But also because of what we represent. Now, Euler and Jacobi. Who are they? RAMANUJAN: Mathematicians.

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HARDY: Just names to you. […] Now, I think you are in their class. What they had in common, what I see in you, is a love of form. […] Like Euler. Form for its own sake. An art unto itself. And, like all art, it reflects truth. It’s the only truth I know. It’s my church. (37:47–39:28)

While the classification of mathematics as a form of art seems to unite Hardy and Ramanujan, the religious overtones of their work differ considerably. For the atheist Hardy, the belief in mathematical truth compensates for the lack of any religious conviction. Ramanujan, however, maintains that he owes his mathematical insights to the goddess Namagiri and that an “equation has no meaning to [him] unless it expresses a thought of God” (1:25:45–1:26:23). Within the academic relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan, which only very late in the film includes some emotional moments, a number of marked contrasts come to the fore. One is represented in the above dialogue which clearly echoes Kanigel’s biographical statement, especially when he points out that the emphasis on “the pristine proofs of the Western mathematical tradition” clashes with “the mysterious powers of intuition” (Kanigel 1991, 3). In contrast to Ramanujan, who highlights the importance of the results, Hardy stresses the necessity of step-by-step proofs to avoid professional criticism which his younger colleague is otherwise bound to attract. Although the cooperation between Hardy and Ramanujan is not without its setbacks, the Euclidean emphasis on formal proof eventually takes over. To illustrate this, the film concentrates on one specific problem of number theory known as partition. It is with great skill that the film viewers are introduced to this phenomenon. In the corresponding scene, Beglan, Hardy’s manservant, enacts the part of a mentee who, as is the case in many science novels (Schaffeld 2016, 184), represents the interests of a lay audience. When Hardy takes a piece of paper to illustrate a simple example of the five different ways, partitions, of adding up integers to get 4, the over-the-shoulder close-up which adopts Beglan’s and hence the spectators’ perspective follows the steps of the calculation. HARDY: [to Beglan] Partitions. No, no, no, wait. This even you could understand. [Hardy writes on a piece of paper.] P of 4 equals 5. Now, all that means is there are five ways to add up the number 4. 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 3 + 1, 2 + 1 + 1, 2 + 2, and 4. BEGLAN: Seems simple enough. HARDY: Yeah. So it does. But when you raise the number of P to 100, there are 204,226 different combinations. Major MacMahon did it by hand. Took him weeks. And now he [Ramanujan] thinks he can figure out a formula. […] It’s considered impossible. Unsolvable. (43:52–45:00)

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The problem of finding a formula for p(n) was solved by Hans Rademacher in 1937 but The Man Who Knew Infinity leaves us in little doubt that Ramanujan’s approach meant a major breakthrough. In a manner which it is tempting to call typical of a British context, the film presents the objective of cracking partitions in terms of a competition that involves Ramanujan (and Hardy) in an attempt to get the better of Major MacMahon, a leader in combinatorics, whose tedious hand calculations become the touchstone of any formula. When the latter finally acknowledges Ramanujan’s achievements (1:29:31–1:29:59), it seems as if his condescending arrogance and elitist xenophobia expressed earlier (1:08:21–1:09:54) have just taken a well-deserved defeat.

The Film’s Postcolonial Stance Given the two major locations of the film, colonial Madras and Cambridge, it might come as a surprise that it is most notably the latter which invites a substantial postcolonial reading. While it is true that S. Narayana Iyer, office manager at the Port Trust and Ramanujan’s early patron, likes to implicitly highlight the considerable, if largely unnoticed merits of the Indian elite within a collaborative system (04:47–05:08), he still favours a long-term process of individual acknowledgement to question the racist foundations of British control and white supremacy. Absolutely convinced that this is the right way, S. Narayana Iyer, played by Dhritiman Chatterjee, insistently talks to Ramanujan: S. NARAYANA IYER: Ramanujan? Ramanujan, listen to me. This work is too important to die with you. It must be published. If you, an Indian, are at the pinnacle with these formulas, then the British, even while they subjugate us, must recognize that our brightest matches theirs. (12:48–13:08)

Imperial historians would see S. Narayana Iyer as a collaborator in a more positive sense of the word, as a member of the local elites, an intermediary between the interests of the raj and those of indigenous regimes. In the film, S.  Narayana Iyer is shown as an active agent in the administrative running of the colonial state and the leeway that he is able to provide for Ramanujan bespeaks his privileged position under colonial rule. Indeed, the so-called Cambridge school of historians who foreground the impact of Indian agents would probably not find fault with the early scenes of the film. With the research of this group in mind, Simon Potter arrives at the following conclusion:

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Thus much recent work by historians has stressed that the British raj did not just impose European knowledge and understandings of the East, but worked closely with various Indian collaborators to gather and harness Indian forms of knowledge. Indigenous groups could use their role in forming colonial knowledge to entrench their own privileged positions. Indian and British knowledge fused: again, hybridity is the watchword for much of this scholarship. (Potter 2015, 57)

Coinciding as it does with the concept of this school of historians, the film’s narrative stance prefers Cambridge, and not the British raj, to become the site of its postcolonial critique. In this vein the university town offers two interrelated places, one academic, one public, which involve racist attitudes as well as the aggressive jingoism of the time. The latter comes to the fore in a scene in which Ramanujan is brutally attacked by a group of cadets, obviously newly conscripted students, whose leader abuses him by calling him “the genius wog,” a “freeloading little blackie,” who, so he yells, lives in luxury in a country he does not belong to, while they are sent to the front (53:55–54:24). The cadets’ jingoism, which leads to violent aggression, corresponds to a series of hostilities primarily shown by Professor Howard, whose outright rejection of Ramanujan runs through the whole film. In one of his maths classes, Howard writes a mathematical problem on the blackboard and summons Ramanujan to solve it. When he does so in what seems to be an effortless way, Howard feels like an amateur who is shown up by a student. He ends the course abruptly and everyone has to leave the room, except for Ramanujan: “HOWARD: Not you. Little wog, let me tell you something. You don’t pull a stunt like that in my class. [beating Ramanujan’s chest a couple of times with his fist] You don’t belong here and you can tell your Master Hardy I said as much! Now, get out!” (36:00–36:14). In this, its articulation of a racist exclusion, the scene serves as shorthand for an academic site whose discursive charge prompts a post-Foucauldian reading.4 Extending Foucault’s concept of enunciative modalities (50–5), especially the question of “who can speak authoritatively” (Mills 2003, 61), one has to realise that in the case under discussion the relevant issues of qualification, status, environment, and communication are all overshadowed by racism. They are addressed in a negative way, simply because Ramanujan, a colonial and proto-diasporic subject, does not adhere to the rules of inclusion that Howard intends to lay down for his students or his college. Ramanujan’s rarefaction as a speaking subject is, to use Foucault’s term of exclusion (Mills 2003, 61),

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driven forth by Professor Howard who in the film appears to be the spokesperson for a few members of Trinity College. Yet, Howard is a fictitious character who might have had a counterpart in the list of Cambridge mathematicians. There is some evidence that the scene described in the film really took place in a lecture given by Arthur Berry, but in the documents available, Berry was greatly impressed and not at all infuriated by it (Alladi 2016, 39; Kanigel 1991, 201–2). The historical model for Littlewood, Hardy’s friend and colleague, mentions an anonymous opponent of Ramanujan’s candidacy for a Trinity Fellowship and further states that his antagonism was based on open racism (Kanigel 1991, 299). In the film it is again Howard who takes over this part, but in the relevant scene he prefers a slightly mitigated form of insult when he tells Hardy that he will not have “that charlatan for a Fellow” (1:16:14–1:16:20). Prior to the First World War, Cambridge University admitted more than twenty Indian students per year. Kanigel, who provides this number (1991, 242), goes on to explain that when looking at all English colleges, “[s]ometimes, to be sure, Indians experienced downright racial prejudice; it was common enough, for example, that ugly rumors of it reached Ramanujan’s mother in India” (1991, 242). For the Indian-American mathematician Krishnaswami Alladi, an expert on Ramanujan, who reviewed the film in 2016, there is, however, hardly any doubt that “the dramatisations relating to discrimination or racial prejudice against Ramanujan in England [are] overdone” (2016, 38). With the scene of the violent attack of the cadets in mind, Alladi writes, “This never happened. There was never a single instance of physical abuse of Ramanujan in England due to racial prejudice” (2016, 39). Although The Man Who Knew Infinity might pass a plausibility check, at least in terms of its representation of Ramanujan’s stay in Britain, it is not meant to be a historical documentary, an authentic version of the past. As a piece of art, the film has every right to describe things that might have happened, without paying tribute to unattainable historical accuracy. The concept that comes to mind here is, of course, one that confirms the validity of artistic licence. This specific creative leeway has many famous advocates, one of the earliest being Aristotle who begins the ninth chapter of his Poetics with the following lines: It is also evident from what has been said that it is not the poet’s function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability or necessity. The difference between the historian

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and the poet is not that between using verse or prose; Herodotus’ work could be versified and would be just as much a kind of history in verse as in prose. No, the difference is this: that the one relates actual events, the other the kinds of things that might occur. Consequently, poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal, while history relates particulars. (Aristotle 2005, 59; original emphasis)

Aristotle’s distinction between universals and particulars classifies the difference between a literary and a historical statement in terms of their asymmetric degrees of that kind of significance that is primarily attached to processes of generalisation. When applied to a biopic and a documentary film, the truth-value gap between the two genres appears to be less wide, but it still exists even though the documentary can also only claim truth approximation as its ultimate epistemological objective. When discussing the relationship of mathematics, the history of mathematics, and mathematics in fiction, Leo Corry clearly follows an Aristotelian path. He states: Like all narrative fiction, mathematics in fiction may include real characters and real historical situations as part of the plot, but ideally these appear as archetypes that represent a universal person or situation. Authors of narrative fiction, and in particular mathematics in fiction, may try to remain as close as possible to what they consider to be the historical truth, but it is not inherent in the genre that this should be the case. More importantly, no reason can compel the reader to read the text other than as pure fiction […]. (Corry 2007, 202)

Corry proposes what amounts to a form of an archetypal or universal reading of mathematicians in fiction (and film), an understanding that the reader (or audience) is said to tacitly accept when opening a novel or entering a cinema. Seen in this way, the scenes of structural, verbal, and violent racism that The Man Who Knew Infinity includes would—as a consequence—depict Ramanujan first and foremost as the Indian mathematician, a member of a small proto-diasporic group, and only to a lesser extent as the mathematical genius that he was. In the film, Ramanujan experiences a process of Saidian othering (Said 2001) that he will share with various members of future student diasporas (O’Connor 2016, 146), irrespective of the specific academic place they are working at. It should be noted that when Howard and the cadets define their individual or group

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identity in opposition to Ramanujan as an “other,” along a colour line, their identity formations depend on what they tend to spatially exclude (Mitchell 1988, 167). In a more general sense, the British and Indian identities are perceived as mutually constitutive within the colonial system. Building on this conjecture, the film language prefers to orchestrate the place and its inscribed notions of belonging or exclusion as a site which comes “to signify difference and construct identity” (Ashcroft 2009, 76).

Conclusion As a piece of art, The Man Who Knew Infinity expresses a strong interest in temporal connectivity when it reinvests the spatio-temporal frame of academic life in Cambridge during the First World War with today’s problems. For the fictionalised biopic, the creation of universal situations adheres closely to an almost philosophic prerogative while its historiographic counterpart would have to be slightly more reserved. Racism, in its latent or open form, is a universal issue, and its depiction in terms of scenes which suggest a postcolonial critique points to a distinctive feature of this maths film. Indeed, it is the implication of my Aristotelian line of argument that the historiographical preference for the particular detail might have to suffer when a universal reading asserts greater importance. The film aims at a temporal connectivity that can only work once the past has been reinvested with an additional narrative of the present. In the case at hand, it is the film’s artistic licence that allows for an epistemological transfer into different times and places where the object of abuse happens to be a very ordinary human being confronted with forms of everyday, violent, cultural, or institutional racism (Braziel 2008, 134). The spatio-temporal reading of Matthew Brown’s biographical film provides a suitable framework for analysing scenes of deep respect as well as forms of institutional racism with which wartime Cambridge treats its colonial and proto-diasporic scientist. The question of Ramanujan’s institutional belonging is affirmatively addressed by Hardy, but his strict and, to a large extent, orthodox insistence on the Euclidean or Western mathematical tradition turns out to be a weak shield against racism and the growing jingoism of the period. Indeed, the film implies that the impact of the First World War, or, more generally speaking, the prevalence of a national crisis situation leads a number of colleagues to increasingly support an academic policy where race becomes an exclusionary category. Contrary to expectations, it is not the film’s view of colonial Madras which

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inspires a postcolonial analysis but the academic place of Cambridge. As a fictionalised spatio-temporal frame, both institution and town are reinvested with topical problems of racism or xenophobia which many diaspora scientists of the twenty-first century are bound to encounter in their host countries. Feeding into the ongoing popularity of (auto)biography and biopics, the film’s temporal connectivity transcends the already elusive boundaries of historical accuracy. Instead, it uses a fully licensed mode of representation to point to a thematic universalism beyond any specific time or place in a piece of art that enjoys the legacy and leeway of historical fiction.

Notes 1. But Matthew Brown ventured to change locations for filmic purposes. For example, the scene of the meeting of the Royal Society (London), which named Ramanujan a Fellow in 1918, was shot at seventeenth-century Convocation House, Divinity School, Oxford (1:31:02–1:34:16). 2. Littlewood points to a sapling as the one under which Newton sat when the famous apple dropped on his head, but the tree is supposed to be just a descendant of Newton’s legendary counterpart of his childhood home in Lincolnshire. 3. The camera captures the inscription of the statue. “Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit” is a quotation from Lucretius’s De rerum natura. It can be translated as: “In intellect he surpassed, survived the human race.” It is interesting to notice that the film music of this scene blends Western and Indian elements to underscore the hybrid position that Ramanujan finds himself in (36:36–37:22). 4. For the theoretical foundations of such a reading, see Schaffeld (2016, 170–2).

Works Cited Alladi, Krishnaswami (2016). “Review of the Movie on the Mathematical Genius Ramanujan.” Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter 6.2: 29–41. Aristotle (2005). Poetics. 1995. Ed. and trans. Doreen C. Innes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ashcroft, Bill (2009). Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-­ Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. A Beautiful Mind (2001). Created by Ron Howard, Universal Pictures/ DreamWorks Pictures, USA.

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Braziel, Jana Evans (2008). Diaspora: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Breaking the Code (1996). Created by Herbert Wise, BBC, UK. Complicite, and Simon McBurney (2008). A Disappearing Number. London: Oberon. Corry, Leo (2007). “Calculating the Limits of Poetic License: Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics.” Configurations 15.3: 195–226. Foucault, Michel (2010). The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1972. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage. Gifted (2017). Created by Marc Webb, Fox Searchlight Pictures, USA. Good Will Hunting (1997). Created by Gus Van Sant, Miramax Films, USA. Greene, Mott T. (2007). “Writing Scientific Biography.” Journal of the History of Biology 40: 727–759. Hardy, G.H. (1959). Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work. New York: Chelsea Publishing Company. ———. (2013). A Mathematician’s Apology. 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hauptman, Ira (2006). Partition. New York: Playscripts. Haynes, Roslynn D. (2017). From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Henke, Jennifer, Norbert Schaffeld, and Kati Voigt (2017). “Mathematicians, Mysteries, and Mental Illnesses: The Stage-to-Screen Adaptation of Proof.” Adaptation 10.3: 323–337. Hidden Figures (2016). Created by Theodore Melfi, 20th Century Fox, USA. The Imitation Game (2014). Created by Morten Tyldum, The Weinstein Company, USA. Kanigel, Robert (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. New York: Washington Square Press. Krish, M.N. (2013). The Steradian Trail. Chennai: Westland. Kulke, Hermann, and Dietmar Rothermund (2016). A History of India. 1986. London: Routledge. Lea, Daniel (2017). Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leavitt, David (2008). The Indian Clerk. 2007. London: Bloomsbury. The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015). Created by Matthew Brown, Warner Bros./ IFC Films, USA. Martino, Armando, and David Singerman (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: Film Review.” London Mathematical Society Newsletter 457 (Apr.): 1; 3. McAllister, James W. (2005). “Mathematical Beauty and the Evolution of the Standards of Mathematical Proof.” The Visual Mind II. Ed. Michele Emmer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 15–34. Mills, Sara (2003). Michel Foucault. London and New York: Routledge.

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Mitchell, Timothy (1988). Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montano, Ulianov (2014). Explaining Beauty in Mathematics: An Aesthetic Theory of Mathematics. Heidelberg: Springer. NUMB3RS (2005–2010). Created by Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, CBS, USA. O’Connor, Maurice (2016). “The Indian Diaspora in the UK: Accommodating ‘Britishness’.” Indi@logs 3: 137–150. Potter, Simon J. (2015). British Imperial History. London: Palgrave. Proof (2005). Created by John Madden, Miramax Films, USA. Ramanujan (2014). Created by Gnana Rajasekaran, Camphor Cinema, India. Russell, Bertrand (2007). Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. 1918. New York: Cosimo Classics. Said, Edward W. (2001). Orientalism. 1978. New Delhi: Penguin. Schaffeld, Norbert (2016). “The Historical Science Novel and the Narrative of an Emergent Scientific Discourse.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik/A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture 64.2: 169–187. Sweetman, Will (2016). “Hinduism and Modernity.” Hinduism in India: Modern and Contemporary Movements. Eds. Will Sweetman and Aditya Malik. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. 23–40.

CHAPTER 10

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Technologies of Modernism Simon de Bourcier

In his 2006 novel Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon renegotiates the terms of his relationship with modernism. Against the Day foregrounds scientific and technological developments which shaped modernism: by engaging with these scientific and technological contexts directly, Pynchon is able to move beyond the critique of modernism which led to his earlier fiction being widely seen as quintessentially postmodernist, towards a novelistic practice which counterbalances postmodern irony with modes of perception and representation firmly rooted in modernism. In this balancing we can find the “sincerity infused with naivety and undermined by scepticism” which according to Martin Eve constitute “the ‘metamodern aspect’ of a text” (Eve 2012, 22). This is most conspicuous in two episodes concerned with the ways modernist painting responded to developments in the scientific understanding of colour and to new points of view afforded the painter by innovations in technology. In Pynchon and Relativity I examined some of the ways in which Against the Day troubles binary categories of presence and absence through its disruption of linear temporalities and through its thematic focus on the Æther, the hypothetical medium through which light waves S. de Bourcier (*) Independent scholar, Plymouth, UK © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_10

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were imagined to travel by nineteenth-century scientists (de Bourcier 2012, 123–58). Thinking about presence and absence also helps us to map the novel’s relation to modernism. The first part of this chapter situates Against the Day in relation to literary modernism by focusing on a salient rhetorical figure in critical readings of modernism, the idea of a central and structuring absence. Here, for example, is Slavoj Žižek, in the chapter of Looking Awry entitled “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity”: The prototype of a modernist text would be Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The whole futile and senseless action of the play takes place while waiting for Godot’s arrival when, finally, “something might happen”; but one knows very well that “Godot” can never arrive because he is just a name of nothing, for a central absence. (Žižek 1992, 145)

Another key reference point is the fiction of Franz Kafka. Žižek argues that Kafka is “in a certain way already postmodernist” because in his writing “this absence, this empty space, is always already filled out by an inert, obscene, revolting presence” (146). I show that Against the Day presents a dialogue between the modernist aesthetic strategy of, in Žižek’s terms, “demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence” and postmodernism’s counter-move of “displaying the object directly” (143). Modernist procedure, Žižek says, leaves open the possibility of grasping the central emptiness under the perspective of an “absent God.” The lesson of modernism is that the structure, the intersubjective machine, works as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around an emptiness; the postmodernist reversal shows the Thing itself as the incarnated, materialised emptiness. (144–5)

The notion of the “central emptiness” as “absent God” chimes with Molly Hite’s view that Pynchon parodies the “modernist ontology” of a “theocentric world view” that has “lost its God but maintained the rest of its assumptions intact” (Hite 1983, 7–10). It also surfaces explicitly in Tancredi’s story in Against the Day, which I discuss in detail below. In its various engagements with modernism, Against the Day opens up both the modernist “possibility” and its postmodernist “reversal.” In this respect it conforms to Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s account of “metamodern discourse” which, “[i]nspired by a modern naïveté yet

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informed by postmodern skepticism […] consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 5). By setting his text in the period of artistic and literary modernism’s rise, Pynchon signals that part of the novel’s project is a renegotiation of his relationship with modernism. The second section of this chapter draws on Sara Danius’s argument that “the emergence of modernist aesthetics signifies the increasing internalization of technological matrices of perception”: “technology,” she contends, “is in a specific sense constitutive of high-modernist aesthetics” (Danius 2002, 2; 3; original emphasis). I look at how new technologies of communication, both real and imaginary, contribute to the sense that Against the Day is in dialogue with modernist writing, and at “[t]echnologies of speed,” which in Danius’s account function as “visual framing devices” (5). I argue that the Integroscope in Against the Day begins by enacting a reading of visual technologies such as photography and cinema that recognisably derives from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and alludes more generally to the mode of “unmasking” that according to Žižek is the “modernist procedure par excellence” (Žižek 1992, 141). However, Pynchon’s fantastical technology escapes this Benjaminian, modernist reading, becoming a site of postmodernist excess, though not in quite the way Žižek’s account of postmodernism would lead one to expect. By showing that the postmodernist proliferation of narrative is latent within modernist “unmasking,” the twenty-first century Pynchon refuses to choose between the two: he offers instead a metamodern fable that hints at the ways digital technologies go beyond mere “Mechanical Reproduction.” In the final section I focus on Against the Day’s most explicit engagement with modernist artistic practice, its invocation of the historical development of Italian Futurism from Divisionism. Pynchon uses the relationship between these two schools of art as a motif in the counterpointed episodes of Andrea Tancredi’s suicidal artistic revolt against the power of the plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe, and Kit Traverse’s involvement in the development of the aviation technology necessary to carry out dive bombing. Tancredi’s art is structured around a “central absence” in a way that is recognisably modernist, but Kit’s technological flirtation with the aesthetics of Futurism brings him into the orbit of the “obscene, revolting presence” which fundamentally shapes postmodernism, the industrialised killing of the 1930s and the 1940s.

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“[S]ympathy for the Invisible” Part of what has led writers of Pynchon’s generation to be labelled “postmodern” or “postmodernist” is the sense that they respond to, critique, or move beyond modernism. Brian McHale’s characterisation of Gravity’s Rainbow as a quintessential piece of postmodernist fiction hinges on its antagonistic stance towards “a particular norm of modernist reading” (McHale 1992, 83), and I have already mentioned Hite’s view that Pynchon parodies a certain kind of “modernist ontology.” My argument in this section builds on these well-rehearsed critical narratives, but emphasises the way that Pynchon appropriates elements of modernist narrative practice in his novels. As John Farrell has demonstrated in relation to The Crying of Lot 49, such appropriation serves as the foundation for Pynchon’s critique of modernism, but in a twenty-first-century context it demands to be seen not as a struggle to overturn the dominance of modernist aesthetics but as a renegotiation of the terms of his ongoing relationship with modernism. I argue that in Against the Day this renegotiation takes the form of a juxtaposition or dialogue between narration structured around absence and narration overwhelmed by something akin to Žižek’s “materialized emptiness” (Žižek 1992, 145). Pynchon’s fiction conspicuously employs narrative structures that can be traced to modernist antecedents and to the way that absences or lacunae are integral to their architecture. The main narrative and its frame in Mason & Dixon fall on either side of a war that is not narrated in the novel, very like the first and second parts of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day also refuse to look directly at the wars that dominate their historical periods. The ending of Henry James’s The Bostonians, with Olive Chancellor about to take the stage of the Boston Music Hall unsure of what she will say, provides the template for what Farrell calls “the ante-climactic ‘ending’” of The Crying of Lot 49, and for the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. Lew Basnight’s story in Against the Day begins with “a sin he was supposed once to have committed” (Pynchon 2006, 37). Lew himself, however, has no memory of it. The reference point here is Kafka’s The Trial, which begins with Joseph K. being arrested “without having done anything wrong” (Kafka 1956, 3). All these narrative lacunae manifest what Michael Sayeau describes as modernism’s “resistance to what we might call the ‘metaphysics of the event’” (Sayeau 2013, 5). Sayeau argues, for example, that the concept of the “epiphanic” in Joyce’s writing “is grounded in a fundamental ­resistance

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to the narrative event, and is perhaps the most vivid and significant instance of anti-evental technique to be found in modern literature” (190): “Joyce’s epiphanies routinely stop short of the revelation that we, as readers, know to expect. They may well gesture beyond themselves, toward purpose, but in the end quite adamantly refuse to produce it, to follow the rules of literary purpose” (195). We might recognise in this refusal of readerly expectation an antecedent of the antagonistic relationship to the modernist reader McHale sees as the mark of Pynchon’s postmodernism. Canonical postmodernist texts such as Pynchon’s early novels do not repudiate modernist modes of writing, but incorporate them into pluralistic, dialogic structures, making them available for both enjoyment and critique. Farrell argues that The Crying of Lot 49 enacts an “analysis of the modernist romance” which is “virtually the same” as that offered in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (Farrell 1992, 141). Can Against the Day be situated in a similar way in relation to modernism, that is, as performing an analysis of its forms and techniques? It has been read by McHale, influentially, as a novel which appropriates the forms of popular fictional genres from the period in which it is set (McHale 2011, 18). Does it also offer a reading of the modernist texts that belong to that period? If so, does Pynchon’s twenty-first-century reading of modernism differ from that he offered in the 1960s and 1970s? The story of Lew Basnight in Against the Day fits neatly into McHale’s reading of the novel as a compendium of popular fictional forms: Lew is a detective. He is also, as I have mentioned, someone whose story begins, like that of Kafka’s Joseph K, with an “absent presence”: “Lew couldn’t remember what he’d done, or hadn’t done, or even when” (Pynchon 2006, 37). Farrell suggests that detective fiction is a more important point of reference for The Crying of Lot 49 than The Trial is, but Lew’s story is more Kafkaesque than hard-boiled (with a dash of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for good measure). Pynchon may be, as Farrell would have it, an analyst of modernism, or, in McHale’s narrative, a thwarter of modernist readings, but his refusal to disclose not only the solution to mysteries, as in The Crying of Lot 49, but even the nature of the crime that sets his detective narrative in motion, is a recognisably modernist move: in Žižek’s phrase, “the machine revolves around an emptiness” (Žižek 1992, 145). (Žižek, of course, complicates matters by arguing that Kafka is more postmodernist than modernist, but, as we shall see, Lew’s story also develops beyond this initial absence and ultimately accommodates plenitude.)

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Lew is associated from the start with visual technologies: when we first meet him he is trying to work out how to “compensate for the movement” which causes images to become “blurry” when he uses a telescope on the Ferris wheel at the Chicago World’s Fair (Pynchon 2006, 36). Remembering Danius’s characterisation of technologies of movement as “visual framing devices,” we can understand Lew here as a visual seeker whose ability to see what is physically absent is impeded by the multiplication of technologies, the combination of Ferris wheel and telescope. However, what got Lew his job with White City Investigations was not just his powers of observation, but his “keen sympathy for the invisible” (43). Pynchon is concerned not only with absence, but with the presence of invisible, magical things. The novel’s interest in technologies of vision is not just about seeing what is, but also about picturing what might be. This is why Lew’s story starts with this failure of vision, but ends with the renewed visions enabled by Merle Rideout and his Integroscope, which I discuss in detail in the next section. Pynchon goes back to modernism to mark out the shapes of absence, but allows his unruly fictional imagination to fill that absence with a profusion of possibilities—some benign, some sinister.

Technologies of Sound and Vision Farrell’s reading of The Crying of Lot 49 rests on an understanding of Pynchon’s postmodernism predicated on a narrative in which a “fragmentation of culture into high and low” produced, on the one hand, modernism, and on the other, popular genres such as the detective story (Farrell 1992, 148). By adopting the form of the latter through which to enact his critique of the former, Pynchon strives for “the true democratization of artistic modernism, in which ordinary citizens—the engineer, the investor, the disc jockey and the housewife—all trapped in suburban solipsism, are driven to develop individual and fantastically elaborate schemes of power and transcendence” (139). By the time Pynchon gets to Against the Day his capacity to imagine “fantastically elaborate schemes” has progressed far beyond what is in evidence in The Crying of Lot 49. The later novel has evolved beyond the democratisation of modernist epiphany towards a drive to cram every absence with the proliferating products of the imagination, perhaps for fear of what else might fill it. This is coupled with an engagement with modernism that hinges on the technological milieu of the modernist period, when photography, ­cinema, and the recording and transmission of sound produced a new

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intertwining of absence and presence. People who were physically absent could by the end of the nineteenth century be heard by means of the telephone and the phonograph, or seen using the technologies of photography and cinema. Friedrich Kittler argues that whereas Romanticism had cherished the dream that the written word might evoke a complete sensorium in the reader, the new communication technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the phonograph and gramophone, film) brought about a new separation of the senses. “The dream of a real visible or audible world arising from words has come to an end” (Kittler 1999, 14). The reproduction of the human voice by early recording technologies, Kittler argues, is different from writing in that it reproduces a complete soundscape that resists intelligibility. The work of differentiating and interpreting words is left entirely to the hearer: “Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise” (23). Media are “engulfed by the noise of the real—the fuzziness of cinematic pictures, the hissing of tape recordings” (14). Much has been written about the uncanny dimension of media technologies. Kittler notes that “one of the ten applications Edison envisioned for his newly invented phonograph in the North American Review (1878) was to record ‘the last words of dying persons[’]” (12). From here it was “only a small step,” Kittler suggests, “to fantasies that had telephone cables linking the living and the dead” (12). Fundamentally, “[m]edia always already provide the appearances of spectres” (12), and “[t]he realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture” (13). The Chums of Chance, the adolescent airship crew whose storybook adventures are threaded through the narrative of Against the Day, receive their orders via a communication device invented not by Edison but by his rival Tesla (Pynchon 2006, 107). Pynchon emphasises the uncanny aspect of the disembodied voices that issue from it: “The voices which arrived over the next few days were difficult to credit with any origin in the material sphere. Even the unimaginative Lindsay Noseworth reported feeling a fine sustained chill across his shoulders whenever the instrument began its hoarse whispering” (107). The narrator prefers to anthropomorphically attribute “whispering” to the device itself rather than name absent speakers as the origin of the words. One can conceive this as an instantiation of Žižek’s notion of “the Thing itself” which is “incarnated, materialised emptiness” (Žižek 1992, 145; original emphasis).

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A little later in Against the Day, Merle Rideout shows Frank Traverse a photograph he has taken of Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, the men who killed Frank’s father. Frank is surprised by how little blurring there is in the image, despite the length of exposure that it must have required. This leads to the reflection that in pictures taken using earlier types of photographic process, when subjects had to pose for an extended period, their eyes often exhibited a “crazed radiance” that resulted from “having to blink a couple hundred times during the exposure” (Pynchon 2006, 300). This photograph, however, has been taken using the “more modern” collodion process, which superseded the daguerreotype in the 1850s. The “crazed” look in the men’s eyes, Frank concludes, is “due to something more authentically ghostly, for which these emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up till then could’ve” (300). The connection between the “modern” and the “ghostly” is explicit. The “fuzziness of cinematic pictures” and the “hissing of tape recordings” represent for Kittler what distinguishes media from writing: in Lacanian terms (which are useful whether or not one signs up for the full psychoanalytic programme), an excess of the real that resists symbolisation. The medium knows more than its human operator, more than the painter or writer. Benjamin observes that “in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens” (Benjamin 2007, 220): The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. […] Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens itself to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. […] The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. (236–7)

In Against the Day Pynchon takes these possibilities inherent in photography and cinema and extrapolates into the realm of the fantastic. Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce’s Integroscope allows them to “unfold the future history” of people in photographs, as well as “to look into their pasts” (Pynchon 2006, 1049). The possibility that “those little folks in the pictures will choose different paths than the originals” (1049) seems to Roswell like a problem, but for Lew Basnight it offers a solution. His unspoken misdeed separates him from his wife Troth, but the Integroscope

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shows her to him again many years later. It is only at the moment when the device confers on Troth a sort of “immortality” (1061) that we realise Lew’s original crime may have been killing her, although this is certainly not the only possible interpretation. Lew brings Merle a picture of Troth from which Merle creates a transparency to be viewed using the Integroscope: when the narrative tells us that “Troth continued to live” (1060), it is the first indication in the novel that she may have died. Pynchon’s text simultaneously enacts and revises Benjamin’s argument. The Integroscope episode does not fit easily into the dynamic between modernist absence and the presence which Žižek finds in Kafka (which he calls in his chapter’s title “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity”), either. It replaces absence with plenitude, but not with obscenity. If anything, Lew’s vision of Troth is contrasted with the pornographic squalor of his sexual encounter with Lake Traverse, which takes place between his first learning of the Integroscope from Merle and Roswell and his return with the picture of Troth. Žižek’s account is not quite adequate to the task of describing this aspect of Pynchon’s project: there is presence, there is excess—images come in “a cascade as unstoppable as a spring thaw,” Troth’s hair “lengthening in prodigal fair masses to be then pinned up, and released, and re-piled again and again” (1060)—but the tone is elegiac. The possibilities realised by the Integroscope are predicated on absence. The dead return as memories and imaginings. Merle puts a picture of his daughter Dally (not dead, but on the other side of the world) into the Integroscope (1061), and it is possible that the whole of the rest of the novel is what he sees, or imagines, when he looks into the device. I have resisted Žižek’s notion of the “Obscene Object” in relation to this episode from Against the Day. However, in the final section of this chapter I look at how Pynchon explores the relationship between, on the one hand, a modernist aesthetic of absence represented by the work of Andrea Tancredi, and, on the other, a threatening and obscene presence associated with Futurism.

Divisionism and Futurism The artist Andrea Tancredi, whom Dally Rideout meets in Venice, has “converted to Divisionism” after seeing the works of the Pointillist painters Seurat and Signac (584). The Divisionists were a group of Italian artists who first gained public attention at the Brera Biennale in 1891 (Scotti Tosini 2008, 21). They developed painting techniques drawing on new

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theories of colour and optics set out in works such as Eugène de Chevreul’s De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs et de l’Assortiment des Objets Colorés, published in 1839, Modern Chromatics by the American physicist Ogden N. Rood, published in 1879 and translated into French in 1881, Giulio Belloti’s 1887 book Luce e Colore, and the 1893 work La Scienza dei Colori e la Pittura by the ophthalmologist Luigi Guaita (Scotti Tosini 2008, 21; 33; 29). As Aurora Scotti Tosini explains: The Divisionists sought to reinvigorate the painting of reality not merely by recording the objects before them but by rendering light itself. Instead of mixing paint on the palette to produce the required gradations of colour, they applied pure colours directly on to the canvas in small dots, lines and threads, alternating them according to the laws of complementary colours, as described by Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden N. Rood. (21)

Rood’s premise is that colour is “only a sensation, and has no existence apart from the nervous organisation of living beings” (Rood 1879, 92). It has “no existence outside and apart from ourselves” (17). One can see immediately how these ideas, which for Rood flow from a scientific understanding of the perception of light, are conducive to a modernist aesthetic structured around absence. Rood’s approach to the understanding of colour is empirical, based partly on his own experiments and partly on work by earlier scientists. Chapter IX of Modern Chromatics, for example, is entitled “The Colour Theory of Young and Helmholtz” (108–23) and gives an account of the theory developed by Thomas Young and championed by Hermann von Helmholtz that the three fundamental colours perceived by the human eye are red, green, and violet. Rood’s empiricism dovetails neatly with his discussion of painting: he uses effects employed by artists as illustrations of optical phenomena, but also presents his insights as information that will be of practical use to painters. According to Rood, “an idea seems to prevail in the minds of many persons that Nature paints always with light, while the artist is limited to pigments: in point of fact, both paint with light” (14; original emphasis). There is a resonance here with the way Tancredi’s art moves off the canvas into more abstract realms. More specifically, the Divisionists adopted a painting technique which Rood discusses in some detail, namely “the custom of placing a quantity of small dots of two colours very near each other, and allowing them to be blended by the eye placed at the proper distance” (140): “This method is almost

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the only practical one at the disposal of the artist whereby he can actually mix, not pigments, but masses of coloured light” (140). Remarkably, Rood suggests that this technique allows the painter to create an effect which involves change and time rather than being purely static: The effect referred to takes place when different colours are plac[e]d side by side in lines or dots, and then viewed at a such distance that the blending is more or less accomplished by the eye of the beholder. Under these circumstances the tints mix on the retina, and produce new colours[.] […] If the coloured lines or dots are quite distant from the eye, the mixture is of course perfect, and presents nothing remarkable in its appearance; but before this distance is reached there is a stage in which the colours are blended, though somewhat imperfectly, so that the image seems to flicker or glimmer—an effect that no doubt arises from a faint perception from time to time of its constituents. This communicates a soft and peculiar brilliancy to the surface, and gives it a certain appearance of transparency; we seem to see into it and below it. (279–80)

Tancredi is motivated by a desire to escape the “inertia of paint” (Pynchon 2006, 586), but it is Merle’s photograph of Deuce and Sloat that most closely approximates this oscillatory radiance (300): Pynchon has more faith in the craftsman’s adeptness with technology than in the pretensions of the artist. The Divisionists were “strongly influenced by the French Pointillism of Seurat and Signac, who had explored the principle of the decomposition of colour” (Miracco 2003, 11). Renato Miracco argues that the Divisionists made “the discovery that art is not reproduction, but the construction of an intimate, highly personal relationship with an unknown world” (12): Their art became the real act of creation, whose purpose was to take a formless material, separate and charged with emotions, and use it to trigger off a reality that was no longer objective, but subjective, and with as many different facets as a diamond. (13)

Miracco’s language perhaps lacks critical rigour, but nicely captures the sense that by allowing separate colours on the canvas to mix in the eye of the viewer, the Divisionists not only embraced a plurality of subjective perceptions of their art, but also strove towards creation rather than imitation. Miracco’s image, pyrotechnic and ontological, of “trigger[ing] off a reality” finds echoes in Pynchon’s description of Tancredi’s paintings (they

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are “like explosions”; he favours “the palette of fire and explosion” [Pynchon 2006, 585]) and in the story of his final work: If Vibe was an acquirer of art, then here was Tancredi’s creation, his offering, the masterwork he thought would change any who beheld it, even this corrupted American millionaire, blind him to the life he had been inhabiting, bring him to a different kind of seeing. No one gave him the chance to say, Here it is, here is a bounded and finite volume of God’s absence, here is all you need to stand before and truly see, and you will know Hell. (742)

Tancredi does not get to give this speech, of course, because Vibe’s bodyguards gun him down. Here we have, then, not absence, but a failed attempt to conjure absence. This is very precisely a failure of the modernist strategy which, in Žižek’s terms, “leaves open the possibility of grasping the central emptiness under the perspective of an ‘absent God’” (Žižek 1992, 144–5). It is interesting, then, that Žižek describes the modernist project as a demonstration that “the structure, the intersubjective machine, works just as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around emptiness,” and that Pynchon has Tancredi imagine his final work as a “machine.” He shows Dally his Preliminary Studies Toward an Infernal Machine (Pynchon 2006, 585), explaining that he wants to “bring Hell in a small bounded space”: Some define Hell as the absence of God, and that is the least we may expect of the infernal machine—that the bourgeoisie be deprived of what most sustains them, their personal problem-solver sitting at his celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below … But the infinite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this is not so much a painting as a dialectical argument. (586)

The image of the “Machine” is a marker of technological modernity, evoking modernist works such as Lázló Moholy-Nagy’s Lichtrequisit or “Light-­ Display Machine.” This machine was created by Moholy-Nagy in response to an invitation from Walter Gropius to install a room at the Exposition de la Societé des Artistes Decorateur in Paris in May 1930 (Hight 1995, 91). Moholy-Nagy’s wife Sybil described it as “half-sculpture and half-machine” (Moholy-Nagy 1974, 147). According to Richard Kostelanetz, although the object was created to produce light effects in its environment,

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“Moholy’s technical collaborator in the project liked the invention more for its intrinsic movement, that is, as a kinetic sculpture” (Kostelanetz 1974, 3). It is on just this borderline between functioning machine and aesthetic object that Tancredi’s work sits. Elements of Pynchon’s descriptions of Tancredi’s painting technique accord with the historical practice of the Divisionists, such as his use of “an impossibly narrow brush, no more than a bristle or two, stabbing tiny dots among larger ones” (Pynchon 2006, 586–7). This technique stands for the broader attempts of modernist experimentation to fragment and recombine the elements of received reality. By invoking the idea of grammar, Pynchon makes it clear that this includes literary modernism: “The energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of becoming, in divionismo we discover how to break them apart into their component frequencies … we define a smallest picture element, a dot of colour which becomes the basic unit of reality” (587). Tancredi fails. His “precious instrument of destruction,” which “g[ives] off a light and heat Tancredi alone c[an] sense,” is simply absence, and nothing more: “His hands were empty” (742). Tancredi believes in a hidden order of things behind “this tidy surface world” (586), but in reality emptiness is just emptiness. A subtler reading of this episode, however, might be that Tancredi does indeed bring Scarsdale Vibe face to face with Hell, with the Hell of his own evil: he oversees the murder of an innocent, unarmed man. By bringing his empty hands, Tancredi claims reality as his own artistic creation. The historical Divisionists’ engagement with politics had a little less Zen about it. Although Giovanna Ginex argues that the combination of technical innovation with “profound social and political involvement […] did not constrain their choice of subjects” (Ginex 2008, 37), Divisionist paintings notably depict not only the lives of the poor and dispossessed in paintings such as Emilio Longoni’s Reflections of a Starving Man, but the collective political actions of the working class in works such as Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo’s The Living Torrent. However, the violent suppression of an uprising of Italian workers in 1898 “effectively put an end to the era of revolutionary subjects in Divisionist painting” (41). The painting techniques developed by the Divisionists were enthusiastically taken up by the Futurists. Ginex argues that the Futurists “were excited above all by [Gaetano Previati’s] vision, which broke completely with any form of naturalism, and therefore with realism” (44–5). However, although one of the paintings which illustrates most clearly the evolution of Divisionism

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into Futurism is Carlo Carrá’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, the Futurists have become more associated with Fascism than with working class radicalism. This is partly due to the founder of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s affiliation to the Italian Fascist Party and his relationship with Mussolini, but also to Benjamin’s well-known critique of Marinetti, and by extension not just of Futurism but of much of modernism, at the conclusion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: ‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus,’ says Fascism and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to provide the artistic gratification of a sense of perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘L’art pour l’art’. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympic gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. That is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. (Benjamin 2007, 242)

Benjamin’s yoking together of Futurism and Fascism on the basis of Marinetti’s aestheticising of war became, as Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla observed in the 1970s, “the orthodox attitude towards Futurism” (Tisdall and Bozzolla 1977, 17). “With hindsight,” they argued, “it is possible to see that neither violence nor the aestheticization of politics was restricted to Futurism; and Futurism was never the official art of Fascism” (17). Tancredi has an ambivalent attitude to “Marinetti and those who were beginning to describe themselves as ‘Futurists[’]” (Pynchon 2006, 584), but by the time we get to the story of Kit Traverse’s time in Torino, putting his mathematical knowledge to use developing dive-bombers, Pynchon seems to be buying wholeheartedly into the narrative that links Futurism with Fascism. The first experimental picchiatta, or nosedive, that Kit and his colleague Renzo attempt takes them up to speeds so high that “something happen[s] to time”: [M]aybe they’d slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as they continued hellward[.] (1070)

The connection between nosediving in a bomber and Futurism is thus established.

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Then we learn that the picchiatta that Kit and Renzo perform above a “Bolshevik-inspired strike of workers at the weapons factories in Torino” in August 1917 is “perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would not quite exist for a year or two” (1071). Renzo’s commentary on the dive, invoking the image of the unbreakable fasces, leaves no doubt that the “Certain Word” is Fascism: “‘You saw how they broke apart,’ Renzo said later. ‘But we did not. We remained single, aimed, unbreakable[’]” (1071). Note the coy capitalisation of “a Certain Word”— Pynchon not saying what he knows will be perfectly understood. This version of “absent presence” has nothing of grace about it. It exists in symmetry with Tancredi’s infernal machine: he imagines that the pure absence he holds in his hands will “rapidly expand” and “reveal the Future” (586); the unspoken “Certain Word” represents the “Hell-of-the-future” which has “provisionally entered Time” as a “precognitive murmur” (1070–1). The difference is that Tancredi’s “absence of God” (586) is also the absence of a weapon (742): there is a purity to the absence which allows for narrative openness. The “Certain Word” is, in its very certainty, a sign of closure, an inevitable future, not the subjective Hell that Tancredi wants to show Vibe but an objective, world-engulfing Hell, a historical future for which the picchiatta itself becomes a metaphor. By choosing this metaphor, however, Pynchon allows for the possibility of avoiding Hell, because the conclusion of the pichiatta need not be a crash (that, says Renzo, “is for the other world” [1071]): the pilot can pull out of the dive. When, therefore, Pynchon reasserts the connection with Futurism at the conclusion of the episode, it is in a way that suggests that Futurism is not necessarily a vision of the only possible future: “For a while [Kit] allowed himself to be seduced by the Futurist nosedive, with its aesthetics of blood and explosion” (1073). The aestheticising of violence which Benjamin deplores is key to how Pynchon sees Italian Futurism, and he links it, much as Benjamin does, to a self-­destructive movement in human history, summed up in the image of the “nosedive.” With the simple, quotidian phrase “[f]or a while,” however, Pynchon deftly pulls Kit, and the rest of us, out of the nosedive. It does not represent the whole future: it is a period of folly that, sooner or later, ends. It is presumably because of this episode in the novel that Tullio Crali’s 1939 painting Nose-Diving on the City was used as the cover of the 2007 US paperback edition of Against the Day. The painting is an example of aeropittura, or aeropainting, a relatively late trend in Futurist painting that took aircraft and aerial perspectives as subject matter. The Manifesto Della Aeropittura or Manifesto of Aeropainting written by Marinetti and

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others was published in 1929, but the first example of the genre, according to Douglas Tallack, was Fedel Azari’s Perspectives in Flight, dating from around 1926 (Tallack 2005, 121). The title of the painting, which in English at least is suggestively ambiguous, emphasises the impact of new technologies of flight on perception. The innovations of aeropittura are not simply about introducing aerial or bird’s eye views of terrestrial terrain. As Tallack points out, such perspectives became popular in mass-­ produced images before the end of the nineteenth century, evolving out of map-making (112). Rather, powered flight afforded viewpoints which moved and changed with unprecedented rapidity. Both Danius and Kittler recognise the importance of the automobile’s impact on visual perception. For Danius cars are “visual framing devices on wheels” (Danius 2002, 5). Kittler writes, in a neat phrase, of “the automobile as camera ride” (Kittler 1997, 92). In modernist writing the visual framing function of the moving vehicle entails the disruption not only of the visual environment but of subjectivity itself. For example, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando travels by car through London and sees “a procession with banners upon which was written ‘Ra-Un’, but what else?” Other written signs along the road are similarly truncated: “Amor Vin-” and “Undert-.” The effect of this perspective from which “[n]othing could be seen whole or read from start to finish” is dramatic: After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment. (Woolf 1992, 200–1)

The modernist “central absence” here usurps the position of the very perceiving subject through which the narrative is focalised: Orlando, for a moment, ceases to exist at all. It is the fragmentation of words that precipitates the fragmentation of the subject: the simile of “scraps of torn paper” elides “body and mind” with text, paper standing metonymically for writing. Despite Jameson’s contention that the fragmentation of the subject is characteristic of postmodernism (Jameson 1991, 14), even before Woolf, Marinetti had mapped the correspondences of vision framed by the car to its textual equivalents and to the fragmenting of individual subjectivity: he wished to translate the “foreshortened views and visual

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syntheses created by the speed of trains and automobiles” into “abbreviation and synopsis” (Marinetti 2005, 29) and envisioned “[m]ultiple and simultaneous awarenesses within the same individual” (28). This is just the kind of temporal disruption that Kit experiences during his nosedive, with “events superimposed on one another” (Pynchon 2006, 1070). For Marinetti “abbreviation” was an expression of the liberating power of technologies of speed; for Woolf’s Orlando the cutting short of words is oppressive, experienced as a kind of annihilation. In Gravity’s Rainbow a fragment of newspaper carries a message that the protagonist Slothrop conspicuously fails to decipher: MB DRO ROSHI (Pynchon 1990, 693)

To the reader, of course, it is obvious that the headline refers to the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It is here, if Žižek is to be believed, that the difference between modernism and postmodernism resides: the fragmentation of text in Orlando entails the dissipation of the subject and the installation of absence at the centre of the narrative; in Gravity’s Rainbow it is a symptom of the unavoidable irruption of obscene reality into the text. In Against the Day’s evocation of aeropittura an obscene presence also asserts itself, signified by “a Certain Word.” Pynchon finds in the proto-modernist art of the Divisionists the possibility of an aesthetic structured around absence which, as personified by Tancredi, retains a sort of innocence, a naïve integrity. The Futurist vision afforded to Kit as he dives is a corrupted version of modernism, in which absence has been filled by an unspoken but all too familiar presence. The contrast between these two episodes illustrates neatly Benjamin’s thesis that the left politicises art while Fascism aestheticises politics. Moreover, what Pynchon creates here is precisely the juxtaposition between “modern naïveté” and “postmodern scepticism” which, according to Vermeulen and van den Akker, characterises “metamodernism” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 5).

Conclusion It is through its depiction of the aesthetic implications of science and technology that Against the Day stages a dialogue between modernism and postmodernism. Martin Eve has argued that while Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of metamodernism is problematic as a historical

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classification, it usefully describes “a set of tropes that identify regulative utopianism through the dialectical image of a sincerity infused with naivety and undermined by scepticism” (Eve 2012, 22). The story of Lew Basnight, which moves from structuring absence to elegiac plenitude, and the counterpointed narratives of Tancredi’s and Kit’s machines, embodying naïve resistance to tyranny and gullible collusion with it, exemplify precisely this kind of “dialectical image.” In every instance the visual technologies that informed modernist aesthetics are recontextualised as belonging to a historical moment which, viewed from the twenty-first century, appears as an absence which the calamitous events of the midtwentieth century were to fill.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter (2007). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Danius, Sara (2002). The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Bourcier, Simon (2012). Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels. London: Continuum. Eve, Martin (2012). “Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of ‘Metamodernism’: Post-millennial Post-postmodernism?” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 1.1: 7–25. Farrell, John (1992). “The Romance of the ’60s: Self, Community and the Ethical in The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 30–31: 139–156. . 24 Oct. 2017. Ginex, Giovanna (2008). “Divisionism to Futurism: Art and Social Engagement”. Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters. Ed. Fraquelli, Simonetta, Giovanna Ginex, Vivien Greene and Aurora Scotti Tosini. London: National Gallery. 37–46. Hight, Eleanor M. (1995). Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hite, Molly (1983). Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kafka, Franz (1956). The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Revised E.M. Butler. New York: Random House. Kittler, Friedrich (1997). Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: G+B Arts.

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———. (1999). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kostelanetz, Richard (1974). “Moholy-Nagy: The Risk and Necessity of Artistic Adventurism.” Moholy-Nagy. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. London: Allen Lane. 3–16. Marinetti, F.T. (2005) [1913]. “Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination— Words-in-Freedom.” Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell. 27–34. McHale, Brian (1992). Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge. ———. (2011). “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching.” Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide. Ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 15–28. Miracco, Renato (2003). Painting Light: Italian Divisionists 1885–1910. Milan: Mazzotta. Moholy-Nagy, Sybil (1974). “The Light-Display Machine.” Moholy-Nagy. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. London: Allen Lane. 147–148. Pynchon, Thomas (1990) [1973]. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage. ———. (2006). Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape. Rood, Ogden N. (1879). Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry. New York: Appleton. Sayeau, Michael (2013). Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scotti Tosini, Aurora (2008). “Divisionist Painting Techniques.” Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters. Ed. Fraquelli, Simonetta, Giovanna Ginex, Vivien Greene and Aurora Scotti Tosini. London: National Gallery. 21–35. Tallack, Douglas (2005). “‘A Sense, Through the Eyes, of Embracing Possession’ (Henry James): Bird’s-Eye Views of New York City, 1880s–1930s.” Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. Ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. London: Routledge. 112–125. Tisdall, Caroline and Angelo Bozzolla (1977). Futurism. London: Thames and Hudson. Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker (2010). “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2.1: 1–14. Woolf, Virginia (1992) [1928]. Orlando. London: Vintage. Žižek, Slavoj (1992). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 11

Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone Ellen Moll

Introduction The 2014 play The Forbidden Zone focuses on two women, grandmother and granddaughter, in the early and mid-twentieth century, who seek to change the world with their scientific brilliance. By the end of the play, both women end their own lives. These women are depictions of the real historical figures Clara Immerwahr and Claire Haber. Through the unfolding of these events, the play evocatively raises questions about gender and knowledge work, the nature of memory and the construction of the past, and the way scientific knowledge can remake the boundaries of human bodies for generations. Written by Duncan Macmillan in collaboration with director Katie Mitchell and a team of theater practitioners, the play uses these two women’s lives and deaths, their connections to chemical weapons research, and the words

E. Moll (*) Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_11

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of women writers and activists in their time periods to meditate not only on the destructive potential of science, but also on the ways that p ­ olitics and ethics are imbricated and entangled with the ways that we—whether through science, art, or history—seek to know about the world. In this chapter, I use feminist technoscience theories, particularly Katie King’s work on “pastpresents” and Karen Barad’s work on “agential realism,” to analyze the play’s portrayal of the agencies, ethics, and embodiments of scientific and other knowledge in order to illustrate the play’s artistic and epistemological interventions in conversations about the above questions. The play explores these questions through its use of remixed textual materials, historical documents, and filmic and production apparatus, as well as its dramatic structure and thematic exploration of science’s relationship to war and violence. Through this analysis, I argue that the play reconceptualizes how to narrate science, its history, and its ethics in ways that resonate with key findings in recent feminist epistemologies of science and technology, and illustrates how feminist art’s reconfigurations of time, space, and bodies speak to the presence of the past in an age of precarity and crisis.

Dramatic Structure, Historical Contexts, and Production The play’s narrative about Clara Immerwahr and Claire Haber intertwines various moments in both women’s lives in nonchronological fashion. As a work of experimental drama, the play’s script involves significant use of voice-overs and elements that bear an ambiguous or unexplained relation to the unfolding events of the plot. Additionally, there are many scenes of soldiers being experimented on or treated, which resonate with the themes, though not always directly with the plot. Many of the voice-overs and much of the dialogue use extended quotations from other sources: letters from these historical figures, news articles of the time periods, laboratory reports, literary excerpts from feminist anti-war writers such as Mary Borden and Virginia Woolf, and so on. Through this collage of fragmented words and images, the play places the historical events in a broader context of women’s voices on war, science, and human suffering. The historical figure Clara Immerwahr was a highly regarded scientist in Germany in a time when women were almost always excluded from science, earning her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1900 and establishing a reputation as a very highly regarded researcher. After marriage to fellow scientist Fritz

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Haber, she left academia formally but continued to collaborate with him on scientific studies, and his career flourished for many years. During World War I, Fritz focused on applying the research to the development of chemical weapons, working on creating chlorine gas. Immerwahr strongly objected to chemical weapons, considering it an affront to decency, humanity, and everything that science is supposed be about (Dick 2009). In an interview, the director of The Forbidden Zone, Katie Mitchell, has stated: When I was asked to direct a production for the Salzburg Festival to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War I was immediately very keen to find a story that focussed on women’s experiences in that war. It has been called the ‘Chemists’ War’ and Clara Immerwahr was at the centre of one of its defining events—the introduction of poison gas. She was the first woman to receive a PhD at the University of Breslau, a chemist who gave up her career when she married Fritz Haber. Haber was a Nobel Prize winning chemist who won the arms race to weaponise chlorine and phosgene gas and oversaw gas attacks in Ypres and elsewhere. This was the first weapon of mass destruction and opened the door to ever more devastating devices. Clara argued with Fritz, calling his involvement with poison gas ‘a perversion of science.’ Following the assault in Ypres, a party was thrown in Fritz’s honour. Clara argued with him again and, that night, took his service revolver and shot herself in the heart. Her death is the source of much controversy as no autopsy was ever performed and no suicide note was ever found. At the time her death was barely documented, her vehement protests against chemical warfare were unreported. Since then her death has been largely forgotten and those who have mentioned her attribute her suicide to depression or Fritz’s infidelity. Part of our intention in presenting this work is to rehabilitate Clara’s death as a political protest. (Mitchell 2016)

The portrayal of suicide as an act of political protest applies also to the play’s portrayal of Claire Haber, Immerwahr and Fritz’s granddaughter, who is depicted in the play in the years following World War II.  Claire researched antidotes to poison gas, but her employers announced that they were going to shut down antidote research to focus their scientific resources on the creation of weapons. In the play, Claire views her research on antidotes as a way to make up for her grandparents’ work on weapons; her scientific work is based on hope for a more humane future in this sense. Near the time of the announcement that this research would soon be shut down, Claire discovers through newspapers that Nazi scientists

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had built on her grandparents’ research in order to develop Zyklon B, the gas infamously used in concentration camps  during the Shoah (Jewish Holocaust) and the related Nazi genocides of Romani, LGBTQ+, and disabled and other peoples. Fritz and Immerwahr were Jewish (by heritage; both had converted), and the play explores how Claire’s identity as a woman of Jewish descent makes this discovery all the more unbearable, particularly when her workplace was already taking away her hope of making up for the harm her scientist grandfather had done. Claire decides to end her life by ingesting a poisonous chemical that she takes from her workplace; like her grandmother, she takes her weapon from those who were “perverting” science to make human bodies fall apart. The play The Forbidden Zone premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2014, before moving to the Schaubühne Berlin, and then in 2016 to the Barbican in London1 as part of 14–18 NOW, a series of arts commissions commemorating the centennial of World War I. The play’s direction, script, production, and design all serve to raise questions about memory and how we tell stories about time and space, particularly how history and knowledge affects bodies across time and space. Director Katie Mitchell and writer Duncan Macmillan have collaborated often, and Mitchell is renowned as an innovative director who has pioneered the “live cinema” technique along with her collaborators, including designer Lizzie Clachan and video director Leo Warner. The innovative live cinema technique requires highly precise and well-designed staging to allow for multiple cameras to film the actors onstage live and project high-quality film footage live above the stage, including subtitles, that offer close-ups, medium close-ups, and other footage that allows the audience to simultaneously watch the action onstage and on the screen. The set design involves several period-set rooms as well as a moving subway car onstage; the cast is international, and the dialogue shifts between German and English, further adding to the way that the play bridges international perspectives, reconfiguring notions of time and space in its staging.

Women, War, and Resistance The play’s narrative structure, production, and use of repurposed historical documents and literary excerpts provide an alternative to dominant patriarchal perspectives on science, World War I, and war in general. Clearly, this play centers women’s experiences and the mechanisms by which patriarchy and nationalism cause moral and physical harm to

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women. Claire and Clara have quite different personalities, but face similar circumstances. They are brilliant scientists, but the play shows that men have power over what they can work on and what their work will be used for. Their voices, their desires, their empathy, and their ethics are seen by those in power, whether a husband such as Fritz Haber or a government, as irrelevant. In particular, the play offers a critique of how patriarchal society valorizes the desire to have power over the bodies of others, whether wives, employees, soldiers, or enemies. It is significant that the play does not suggest that there is an ethical dilemma in the situations Claire and Clara face with regard to weapons research. Or rather, the ethical dilemma is not whether using science to develop new weapons of mass destruction is ever justified; the play gives no indication that it could ever be, as the only proponents of these weapons are unsympathetic bureaucratic or military officials whose characters are only superficially explored in the play, or Fritz, who is depicted as a blustering short-sighted man with no empathy. The true ethical dilemma in this play is whether a person of principle can live in this world. Guilt is clearly a motivator for both Claire and Clara (though Claire’s of course is guilt for what her family did and not her own actions), but the play does more to emphasize their ideas and values than their guilt. Clara is depicted speaking out strongly against her own husband’s work, and the acting choices lend to the interpretation that her suicide is an act of resistance or protest, as does her choice of weapon and relatively public location of a garden. Claire’s choice to kill herself in a public women’s restroom using a chemical stolen from her laboratory also suggests that her death is a statement she was making to her employer, and to all those making weapons. The play’s depiction of suicide as resistance may be provocative, but I do not wish to offer an evaluation of whether suicide is an act of resistance, but rather argue that the play depicts it as such.2 Within the context of the play, both women are in the position of seeing science radically alter the scale and viciousness of violence and death. The science and reason that they believed would bring progress instead has brought devastation and unprecedented inhumanity; this loss of faith in progress arguably epitomizes early twentieth-century modernity, and Claire and Clara respond by refusing to take part—in anything, in any way. The play suggests that their gender offers no other form of effective resistance, as their gender precludes their voices from being heard and taken seriously, such as when Clara futilely tries to convince her husband to abandon his

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work, and when Claire has no way of preventing her laboratory from switching to focus on weapons research. More importantly, however, Claire and Clara are the only ones in the play who take a clear ethical stance, as the other characters either largely ignore the state of the world or actively contribute to making it worse. Notably, it is not science that is shown in this play as responsible for this modern crisis, at least not directly. Claire and Clara are shown working devotedly on their scientific projects onstage, and Claire’s work on antidotes further suggests the potential of science to create a more just world. The play’s plot, and the way that the female anti-war characters are the only ones whose motivations and suffering are deeply explored, suggest that these women could, under different circumstances, make positive and healing contributions to the world with their scientific work. It is politics and patriarchy, not science, that cause these women to need to resist with their own bodies and lives; war is depicted as a violent appropriation of knowledge gained by close and careful exploration of the world around us—as Immerwahr says, weapons are “perversions” of science (Mitchell 2016). While some plays or other works explore the ethics of science by highlighting the ambiguity of whether one should be held accountable for the knowledge one creates, The Forbidden Zone depicts a world tragically dominated by men who do not believe they are accountable for the deaths their science causes, and who define their own moral rightness through the lens of their nationalism and therefore deny key connections: between themselves and enemies, between their science and the destruction stemming from their scientific work. In this play, the desire to deny accountability is shown as a form of patriarchal nationalism that destroys women’s bodies. If the suicides are acts of resistance, it may be this denial, this violent conceptual separation of the human being from the impact of the human being on the world, that the suicides resist; there is no reasonable way to look at their deceased bodies and imagine that it is possible to separate the scientist and the consequences of their science. Moreover, the depiction of a time period when weapons of mass destruction were new, and an emphasis on women who found these weapons to be so unthinkable, so outrageous, that they could not be lived with, allows twenty-first-century audiences to reclaim a sense of outrage that such weapons exist, and that people chose to bring such weapons into being, a sense that has clear resonances with a heightened twenty-first-­ century awareness of how science and technology are rapidly changing the world and possibly what it means to be human. This outrage is heightened

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by a scene in the play in which characters describe what happened after the first use of chlorine gas; some German soldiers were so shocked by the damage and suffering caused that when they came upon an enemy, they shared their gas masks to try (futilely) to save the enemy soldier. The use of a scientific invention that turns breathing into an act that destroys the human body was an unthinkable outrage even to soldiers who were used to years of grisly death and violence. The play’s expressions of the unthinkability of weapons of mass destruction, of war that respects no aspect of bodily integrity, trouble the way that many in the twenty-first century have become accustomed to so much of what was once thought unbearable to accept. This entry into past outrage, heavily and visibly mediated by textual and visual expressions, is but one way the play blurs the boundaries of past and present in politically provocative ways.

Time, Space, and Boundaries Clearly, a central theme in the play is how we know and live with the past, in terms of both Claire’s relationship to history and her family’s past, and the audience’s position of commemorating the centennial of World War I and presumably pondering the causes and consequences of war. Plays and other works falling under the label of “postmodern” often use nonchronological storytelling, especially in works that portray the past and memory (e.g., Stoppard’s Arcadia, 1993), sometimes foregrounding the fraught ambiguities and uncertainties entailed with attempting to know the past. The Forbidden Zone’s nonchronological narrative, however, blurs and redraws traditional boundaries of narrating time and space in ways that show how history is inscripted onto women’s bodies. To begin, however, it will be useful to synthesize the key ways that the play narrates time and space. The play’s narrative structure is nonlinear in terms of being nonchronological and also in terms of scenes from different time periods being onstage at the same time. The voice-overs do not always precisely correspond to the location or time period of the characters onstage at any given moment. The use of excerpts of literary works and letters and the use of close-ups of small visual details on the large screen above the set and actors all contribute to the play’s portrayal of time, space, and memory as highly fragmented, free-flowing, and layered in complex imbrications. Katie King’s work on reenactments of the past and her theorization of “pastpresents” are particularly useful in analyzing both the form and the

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political and epistemological themes of The Forbidden Zone. King coined the term “pastpresents” to indicate a method of examining how the past and present mutually construct each other, inspired by Donna Haraway’s term “naturecultures” to indicate the co-constitution of nature and culture (King 2011). It is also important to note here that King’s work on transdisciplinarity takes seriously the epistemological theorizing done by artists and activists; this value is useful in showing the many resonances between King’s theories and this play. As with Haraway’s term, “pastpresents” lead one to examine specific co-constitutions and their intricate entanglements with networks of bodies, agencies, and ways of knowing. Feminist technoscience and other ethically focused or activist work, according to King, means that “we tell more stories, open up histories, work out conversations. Shifting now between patterns, over and back, I play with timeframes and pastpresents, all the layerings of time in these stories I am about to tell […]. Writing, storytelling and thinking things out are accretions of times, timeframes, assemblages of events and contexts” (King 2011). Clearly, the narrative structure of the play, its staging, and its use of multiple contexts, language, film close-ups, onstage rooms, voice-overs, literary excerpts, and historical documents resonate well with King’s notion of “layerings of time” and “assemblages of events and contexts”; in this essay, King argues that such assemblages and “layerings” offer an alternative way to generate knowledge. This alternative avoids predominant Enlightenment-based fantasies of monolithic, objective knowledge, in which the (generally Western upper class male) subject has a god’s-eye view and unmediated access to the object of knowledge, whether that object is Nature (for science) or the Past (for art or history).3 The Forbidden Zone’s use of experimental theater techniques, as outlined above, creates multiple points to look at onstage, and the audience is keenly aware that it must make a choice of what to look at. The play does not provide the audience with a fantasy that it can access the past directly but rather it theatrically depicts the complex and fragmentary pieces that the audience must pick and choose from to construct a story. The audience must use its understanding of the past to shape the narrative they see onstage in the present; the specificity of the present performance, further emphasized by the use of live cinema, is undeniably constructing a particular story of the past rather than suggesting that the past is an unchanging and fully knowable space that one can “visit” onstage. The end of the play illustrates this point; Claire and Clara are both lying dead onstage, in separate spaces. A soldier is brought into another of the

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onstage rooms, representing both a victim of war and the weaponization of science and a perpetrator of violence. A voice-over recites altered lines from Mary Borden’s poem “Where Is Jehovah?” (2014): And where is Jehovah? Why does He hide, wait and avoid this thing? If this is His world, if it is He that made it, Let Him come and put an end to it. Find Him. Bring Him down here. Hunt Him out in heaven you flying ghosts of the dead and bring Him. Bring someone—anyone who will put an end to this. Let the waters cover the earth again. Let there be an end to it—an end.

The multiplicity of Clara and Claire onstage at the same time, killing themselves, the voice-over, the soldier, the hints at the past causes and future ramifications of all of these events, the use of multiple cameras, and multiple rooms onstage evoke King’s sense of “layerings of time,” the rhizomatic threads that spread through time and space, not blending all time and space together but allowing specific configurations of pastpresents to emerge out of complex, nonlinear connectivities. King’s work also emphasizes the way that pastpresents are “implosions across discursive and other realms” and “quite palpable evidences that the past and the present cannot be purified each from the other: they confront me in each experimental historiography with interruptions, obstacles, new/old forms of organization, bridges, shifts in direction, and spinning dynamics” (King 2004, 459). The play likewise, through both script and staging, blurs the boundaries between various time periods in ways that show that one cannot purify the past from the present and from the presences that shape how we gaze at the past. King also suggests that the process of how pasts and presents co-­ constitute each other can make visible the processes by which identities are solidified, blurred, loosened, or fall apart (King 2011). For this reason it is useful to briefly compare the blurred boundaries of time and space in the play with the way the play interrogates the boundaries of the human body. The scientific work on chlorine gas reshapes the body’s relationship to the world around it; air becomes poison, breaking down membranes and ­causing suffocation; mouth and throat and lungs, access points to the

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world, fail to uphold the life-sustaining interactions that govern what is and is not allowed in the body. Moreover, where one is located, whether one is behind something that would protect from bullets, offers no protection against gas; by taking over air, chemical weapons strip away one of the last ways that an individual can protect their own bodily integrity. A gun, Clara’s weapon, works by obliterating the boundary between what is and is not within the body, but Claire’s choice of a poisonous chemical most closely parallels the way that scientific knowledge can mark itself on bodies by collapsing membranes, divisions, body parts, the control of anatomical boundaries that keep the human body alive. Clara’s sense of responsibility for her husband’s acts, Claire’s deep moral connection to her grandparents’ research and to her grandmother’s death, and both of their insistence that the deaths of strangers are directly relevant to their own physical well-­being are reminders of how the boundaries between self and other are not so clear-cut (for women especially, one might argue; the assumption of a clear boundary between one individual and the next may be thought of as the foundation for Western thought on rights, and yet was not designed to consider motherhood a large factor in personhood). Additionally, in a brief scene in the live production, a man on the train car onstage attempts to sexually assault Claire. Throughout the plot, the play questions the idea that one can live in a world as a separate being, with clear boundaries demarcating the border between self and other, and with the individual having full authority over where those boundaries lie. And, of course, the intentionally international nature of the scenes taking place in different nations at the same time, the international cast, and the use of multiple languages suggest more literal border crossings. These troubled boundaries—nation, self and other, the boundaries of the body, time and space—are all, as King suggests, not fixed but constantly emerging and reconstituting in specific, contingent ways with heady political stakes.

Ethics and Science: The Agential Cut Karen Barad’s theoretical framework “agential realism” is useful to expand on the theoretical questions raised above; the next two sections analyze The Forbidden Zone’s portrayal of agential cuts and the agencies of observation, respectively. Barad, a theoretical physicist who is now a feminist philosopher, draws on both science and feminist theory to argue that all relations and interactions are actually intra-actions; physics and chemistry tell us that everything is interconnected and part of the cosmos, and there

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is no a priori separation of objects, persons, actions, events, and so on, from the rest of the entangled matter and energy of the universe (Barad 2007, 323–38). Barad does not use this scientific understanding to suggest a metaphorical oneness; rather, she argues that these endless entanglements mean that to look at something, to know something, to identify or name something, to connect causes or objects or concepts, is to draw boundaries around certain parts of the universe—and not others. No single thing exists as a single thing until we observe it as such, by making a cut between what we are examining and what we are not examining. According to Barad, knowledge work enacts an agential cut, defining the boundaries around objects or actions, determining what is inside or outside of these boundaries (175). This cut necessarily makes some relationships of agency visible and others invisible or unnoticed, and Barad notes that no choices of this nature are politically innocent; all agential cuts have political and ethical stakes. In this section, I posit key ways that Barad’s work resonates with The Forbidden Zone’s explorations of science and knowledge, particularly this work on the agential cut. The first is the relationship between science and ethics. Conventional ways of framing ethical debates around science generally involve an examination of how ethical considerations might determine whether one should or should not pursue a technoscientific project. In Barad’s agential realism, science is not a priori separate from ethics or politics. Rather, specific material and cultural practices and agencies enact a cut that allow us to view science as a category or thing that has been cut off from ethics, politics, from the bodies who are affected by knowledge and the embodied practices that generate scientific knowledge. Asking how ethics relates to science, or asking about ethical implications of science, requires one to distinguish between science and ethics in the first place; according to Barad, this cut that separates science and ethics is a historically contingent practice shaped by complex cultural agencies. Indeed, Barad illustrates the violence that comes from assuming that science and ethics are a priori separate by analyzing Nazi attempts to develop nuclear weapons (2007, 4–22). This cut between science and ethics is not an inherent property of scientific or ethical thinking but rather a product of a specific history; one might choose to make a different cut. Through this analysis, Barad denaturalizes the separation of ethics and science; the goal of feminist inquiry, therefore, is not to show how ethics and science are connected but to interrogate how they became viewed as separate in the first place.

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Arguably, The Forbidden Zone denaturalizes this agential cut between ethics and science as well. In the play, Claire and Clara, the only characters whose lives and values are explored extensively, never have a moment where they wonder if scientists should be held responsible for the uses of their work; they never have a moment of revelation that the pursuit of knowledge may have ethical stakes. They are against the science of weapons from the start. Clara tries to convince her husband, Fritz, that he is a scientist, not a soldier, but to no avail, and Claire is likewise opposed to the changes in her laboratory’s focus from healing to killing. Fritz and other scientists view weapons research as simply a fact of modern warfare and therefore of modern life; for example, Fritz argues to Clara that “In Friedenszeiten dient der Wissenschaftler dem Fortschritt der Menschheit. In Kriegszeiten aber gehört er ganz seinem Vaterland” [In peacetime, the scientist serves the progress of Mankind. In wartime, however, he belongs entirely to his Fatherland; my translation] (Macmillan 2016). Fritz’s appeal to nationalism as a source of his identity and as a justification for his science is of course in obvious contrast with what the audience knows, that his research was later used to develop Zyklon B; his science ended up in service of a regime that committed genocide on those sharing his Jewish identity. Claire’s laboratory and bosses assume that switching from researching antidotes to creating weapons of unprecedented destruction is a fairly straightforward business decision that no rational person would object to. Kate, Claire’s scientist colleague and friend, tries to comfort her by saying that “you can’t take it personally,” to which Claire replies “It is personal” (Macmillan 2016). Later, with her suicide, Claire definitively declares just how personal it is. In this play, various scientists, nations, institutions, and other agencies attempt to assert the separateness of the scientist and the ethics of the scientific work. Claire and Clara, however, make visible that this cut is not a priori, and that, in fact, this cut,4 this choice to observe some relationships of agency and not others, is an act of violence that leads to their deaths. Barad’s work on the agential cut, especially when read in conjunction with King’s pastpresents, also provides an analytical tool for considering the stakes of separating past from present in ways that empower some relationships of agency and not others. The Forbidden Zone portrays World War I Germany and the post–World War II United States as two points in time and space that are blurred and layered on top of one another; this portrayal is expressed through the narrative structure of the play, the way

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that scenes from different time periods share the stage, the way that voice-­ overs from one time period overlay a scene from a different time period, the way that the visible camera operators and filmic apparatus highlight the twenty-first-century moment in which these spaces and times come together, and so on. The idea that various pasts and presents are entangled in specific knotty ways is vital to the very premise of the drama. Clara’s ability to foresee the death this research will cause, Claire’s visceral and undeniable reaction to discovering the results of her grandparents’ research, and the play’s status as a play marking the meaning of World War I one hundred years later all subvert the fantasy that the past, accountability for the past, and accountability to future generations can be sloughed off. Indeed, a key part of Barad’s ethical framework is the notion that questioning agential cuts—interrogating how separateness-es come into being—can reshape how we draw boundaries, and whom and what we exclude, and thereby raise “questions of accountability and responsibility for the reconfigurings of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, 93). It is through seeing connections and drawing boundaries that one can see accountabilities, which illuminates the importance of the ways that The Forbidden Zone blurs and redraws such boundaries and connections, across time and space, among people, and between knowledge work and the bodies entangled with this knowledge work.

The Agencies of Observation and the Apparatus Barad’s framework of agential realism also expands the understanding of the scientific apparatus. The scientific apparatus is what brings the observed phenomena into being (just as the type of experiment may determine something is a wave or a particle), but in Barad’s work, the apparatus may include any relationships of agency—power, histories, cultural frameworks, political pressures, and so on—that are entangled with the production of knowledge (Barad 2007, 19–30). The apparatus shapes the agencies of observation, which are necessarily, due to the nature of matter itself, entangled with all of the universe, but which we think about by including some things and excluding others, again making an agential cut that is not politically innocent. The objects of observation, in this view, are fundamentally inseparable from the agencies of observation (195). Barad’s work on the agencies of observation and the apparatus of science bring out some important points about The Forbidden Zone. First,

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the play does not depict scientific knowledge production as some Enlightenment fantasy of unmediated access to truth and Nature guided only by reason and objective observation.5 The play, through its plot and key themes as described above, suggests that scientific knowledge production is inextricably tied to the nationalism and patriarchy, and particularly to the ways that masculinity is tied to nationalism and war. Fritz’s character embodies these ties well. In addition to his claim, mentioned above, that the scientist belongs “only to his fatherland,” in one scene, Clara grabs Fritz and frantically tries to persuade him that his actions will lead to escalations of even worse weapons, presciently noting that his work is “reckless” and “mass murder”(Macmillan 2016). He responds with condescension, simply declaring, “I have decided,” asserting his authority as husband and as the head of their scientific endeavor over her well-founded objections, assuming his agency trumps hers. This scene exemplifies how fully he has naturalized the superiority of his status and how few options Clara had in her attempts to resist. Moreover, this scene demonstrates the way that, as Barad asserts, the scientific apparatus may include countless specific historical contingencies that are shaped by relationships of agency. In this case, a crumbling marriage, the patriarchal masculinity of dominance and rigidity practiced by Fitz, the complexity of early twentieth-­ century scientists of Jewish descent trying to demonstrate respectability and patriotism, and many other cultural-material practices shape the production of knowledge and its inseparable ethical entanglements. Again, however, it is not science as a method but rather the entangled political agencies that lead to the tragic ending of the play. Claire and Clara, earlier in their lives, try to build access to an apparatus they can use for their vision of what science might do—a set of social, political, economic, and material relations from which knowledge emerges—but they are cut off from this apparatus by patriarchal, capitalistic, and nationalist forces: Clara by giving up her own projects to assist her husband’s work and Claire because her antidote research was shut down in favor of weapons development. As Barad notes, “‘marks are left on bodies’: bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world as a result of the specific cuts and reconfigurings that are enacted” (2007, 176). These cuts that draw borders between Claire and Clara and their respective scientific work are acts of violence that surely leave marks on their bodies, and the bodies of countless people affected by chemical weapons because Claire and Clara were silenced.

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Moreover, the play itself, in its dramatic structure and production choices, may be seen as an apparatus in Barad’s sense; or, more precisely, the play foregrounds its own status as an apparatus for observing the past. The play’s use of live cinema, with its conspicuous choices of what to focus on on the large screen and its visible camera operators, as well as its use of quotations, voice-overs, and nonchronological dramatic structure, consistently places expectations on the audience to consider that these are indeed choices. While this effect has clear resonances with Brechtian theater,6 I would argue that the emotional impact of the story, the way the set design and direction enhance the intimate realism of the interactions in small rooms and enclosed spaces, the immersive effect of the live cinema technique, and the way the dramatic structure heads toward an ending that seems inevitable in a way reminiscent of Greek tragedy suggest a more Baradian work than a Brechtian one. Specifically, the play draws attention to these artistic choices in a way that suggests all attempts to observe the past do so by constructing an apparatus to observe the past, and that this apparatus is entangled with countless other threads through time and space, from the physical space of the theater to the language background of the actors to the poems of Mary Borden to newspaper headlines of the time. Further, the cinematic screen chooses some facial expressions, gestures of the body, and objects to show in close-up, and not others, again drawing attention to the agencies of observation and the construction of the apparatus. Most importantly, there is much the play leaves unsaid. The motives of the suicides are implied, not stated, and the relationships of various scenes to one another and to voice-overs are not clearly explained or systematic. For all its carefully recreated historical detail, the play never suggests that it offers access to the past but rather asserts itself as an assemblage of aporias, absences, that mirror the voices lost with the death of these women. It does not attempt to speak for these women so much as to speak with them, using their words and the words of other women of their time to foreground the way that any inquiry into the past is a building of an apparatus, a politically non-innocent separation of what is part of the event and what is not. As Barad notes, this apparatus, and its agencies of observation, are never completely separable from the object of observation. Claire and Clara are “real” historical figures, but it takes the construction of a particular kind of apparatus of observation in The Forbidden Zone to bring this particular Claire and Clara into being.

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Conclusions and Further Explorations: An In-Progress History of Endings The theoretical work of Katie King and Karen Barad resonate with the The Forbidden Zone in ways that illuminate key explorations of the play: the inseparability of science and ethics, the co-constitution of past and present, and the way that the world is shaped by gendered agencies of observation, to summarize a few. Moreover, the play provides a way to articulate some of the ramifications of these works of feminist technoscience and epistemology on how we understand literature, history, and particularly literary or theatrical treatments of history and science in the twenty-­ first century. It is useful to return to the fact that the play is part of a centennial commemoration, or work of remembering. This remembering, too, may be layered with gender, as all knowledge work is. This play enacts a shift to center women’s perspectives: in the characters and plot, the quotations from literary sources, the attention to how history leaves marks on bodies, the valuing of a feminized ethic of care and compassion, and the understanding of what war and science do and are. Thus, we might consider the broader question of what the play suggests about women’s history and what Claire and Clara can tell us at this particular moment. It has become common to see questions about what it means to live in apocalyptic times. The circumstances of the twenty-first century—climate change, geopolitical instability, the resurgence of more open bigotry in the politics of some nations, terrorism, the decentralization of control of chemical, bio-, and nuclear weapons, and many other factors—arguably make these fears utterly rational. This sense of ending, of the fragility of the world and the human species itself, may well be justified. But The Forbidden Zone reminds us that this sense that the world is ending is not new. The play sheds new light on the things that made Claire and Clara believe that their worlds had been made unlivable, and suggests their assessment of the state of the world and the direction it was heading has been vindicated. While the issue of how the world has changed for better or worse in the past century may be debated, the play’s explorations of Claire, Clara, and the ethics of chemical weapons research suggests a long walk downward, in which those in power, over time, develop more and more brutal and efficient ways to control others through the suffering of the human body. It is in this stark view of modernity that one can consider this play as depicting a history of endings, so to speak.

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Donna Haraway has famously noted that we are living in apocalyptic times, in a science fiction culture particularly, and have been for a while (Haraway 1991, 150–1). Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” may, of course, be thought to be more hopeful than The Forbidden Zone, as Haraway suggests possibilities for adapting to these times by taking advantage of the fissures and disintegrations of oppressive subjectivities and creating new technocultural assemblages. Yet it would be appropriate to consider both Haraway and The Forbidden Zone as part of a tradition reminding us that this question, of how to live through an apocalypse, makes us part of a long history. In particular, Claire’s understanding of her connection to the Holocaust, as both a Jewish woman and a granddaughter to the man who made Zyklon B possible, demonstrates the scale of the world-ending that Claire was responding to. And although the play focuses on European women, it is important to note that, as authors and scholars such as Cutcha Risling Baldy have observed, for some groups, including many Native American communities, the apocalypse started a long time ago (Risling Baldy 2014). Thinking about living in and after the end of history, civilization, humanity, the world—whichever way of describing the state of the world today that one prefers—has a very long history, and given the ethical thinking of women like Claire and Clara (and Woolf and Borden too), this history provides vital contexts. There are several reasons to value the capacity to imagine our own twenty-first-century moment as part of a much longer history of those struggling to live through world-ending times, which the play encourages the audience to do. For one thing, this longer history allows us to ask more astute questions about the driving forces of these endings—patriarchy, nationalism, constructions of scientific and other knowledge work, and all of their particular agential cuts. This contextualization also provides a way to imagine a long history of surviving—or not surviving—such endings. In particular, feminist epistemological analysis of The Forbidden Zone helps us to imagine a feminist history of apocalypse; we might imagine or construct a continuity among this play, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” feminist science fiction which so often speaks to the current day, and countless other woman-centered perspectives on mass endings, moments of destruction that are so horrific they simply cannot be—and yet are. This thread through modern history of women’s responses to endings may be thought of in some ways as a strange version of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1979), but in which the women are not known only for creating culture but for making knowledge

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in times when selves and worlds are collapsing. This thread of women living through the end of the world is a way of looking at a heritage of resistance, a new way of walking through others to ponder their relation to selves, just as Chicago’s work might be. This sense of specific instances of political solidarity between the twenty-first century and the past suggests that, in The Forbidden Zone as well as in Barad and King, gaining knowledge about the past is not only a creative act but also in a sense a collaboration with the past. Collaborating with the past, specifically with those thinking through disasters and horrors that are unthinkable, may thus demonstrate to us how the rapidly changing modernities of the twentieth century illuminate the fearsome and catastrophic change of this twenty-­ first-­century moment. And so, works of art about the twentieth century may offer essential context for understanding that the question of how we could possibly live through this unprecedented, unthinkable moment is a question that many have been struggling to answer for at least since World War I. Science, in this play, radically shifts relationships of agencies, accountabilities, and bodies. The two main characters represent the potential and the squandering of the worlds that scientific work could have made possible, and the horrors of the world that came about instead. By portraying these scientific-ethical-political interactions as central to modernity itself, the play suggests how the current moment is, in many ways, an elongation of an ending that has been drawn out for a century. Acknowledgments  Thank-you to Duncan Macmillan, and Rachel Taylor and Helena Clark at his representation company, for providing access to the playscript for my study of this play.

Notes 1. This analysis will use the Barbican production as well as the unpublished script by Macmillan. 2. Compare either character, for example, to Sophocles’ tragic heroine Antigone, who is often held up (rightly or not) as a symbol of both revolution and women’s power, who chooses death rather than dishonoring the beloved dead, and who claims that the laws of the gods overrule the laws of corrupt men. 3. As King’s essay suggests, Donna Haraway has also put forth arguments about the masculinist, colonial nature of the god’s-eye fantasy of unmediated knowledge.

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4. An interesting comparison is to Hannah Höch’s photomontage work, which makes the physical cut of the page visible; according to Maud Lavin’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1994), the visibility of the cut is central to the Höch’s feminist and political statements. 5. Feminist technoscience, Science and Technology Studies, and other scholars have offered numerous critiques of this Enlightenment view of science, which is often considered to still be the basis for predominant understandings of what science is today; examples of such critique may be found in Haraway (1997) and Schiebinger (1993). 6. For a fuller account of Brechtian theory’s relationship to feminist theater, see Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis (1997).

Works Cited Barad, Karen Michelle (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Borden, Mary (2014). “Where Is Jehovah?” No Glory in War. 9 Aug. . 22 Mar. 2018. Chicago, Judy (1979). The Dinner Party. Installation art. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Diamond, Elin (1997). Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London: Routledge. Dick, Jutta (2009). “Clara Immerwahr.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 Mar. Jewish Women’s Archive. . 20 Mar. 2018. Haraway, Donna (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 149–181. ——— (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouseª: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. King, Katie (2004). “Historiography as Reenactment: Metaphors and Literalizations of TV Documentaries.” Criticism 46.3: 459–475. ——— (2011). “Pastpresents: Playing Cat’s Cradle with Donna Haraway.” 14 May. . 10 Mar. 2018. Lavin, Maud (1994). Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Macmillan, Duncan (2016). The Forbidden Zone. Unpublished Playscript. n.p. Mitchell, Katie (2016). “In Her Words: Katie Mitchell on the Forbidden Zone.” Interview by David Tushingham. 16 May. . 28 Feb. 2018.

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Risling Baldy, Cutcha (2014). “Why I Teach The Walking Dead in my Native Studies Classes.” 24 Apr. . 20 Mar. 2018. Schiebinger, Londa (1993). Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Stoppard, Tom (1993). Arcadia: A Play. New York: Grove Press.

Index1

A Achituv, Romy, 85 Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), 3, 4, 48 Aesthetics, 4, 5, 8, 12–14, 80, 82, 84, 85, 98, 117, 127, 162, 174–176, 181, 182, 185–187, 189, 190 Against the Day, 13, 173–190 Algorithm, 11, 75–89, 133 All Over Creation, 11, 93–108 Animal Magnetism, 144–145 Anning, Mary, 138 ANT, see Actor-Network-Theory Anthropocentrism, 96 Arcadia, 11, 56, 58, 67–70, 199 Aristotle, 166, 167 Ashcroft, Bill, 158, 168 Atwood, Margaret, 11, 49, 93–108, 129

B Babel Tower, 124, 126–128 Bakker, Scott, 10, 37–49 Barad, Karen, 13, 194, 202–208, 210 A Beautiful Mind, 2, 154 Beck, Ulrich, 10, 22, 23 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 175, 180, 181, 186, 187, 189 Biotechnology, 2, 6, 11, 93–108 Body, 11, 21, 23, 41, 75–89, 95, 98, 100, 104–106, 108, 188, 193, 194, 196–203, 205–208, 210 Borsuk, Amaranth, 86, 87 Bouse, Brad, 86, 87 Brain, 10, 19–21, 23–25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 38–45, 47, 50n6, 58, 95, 141 Brassier, Ray, 40, 45, 46, 51n8 Brown, Matthew, 12, 127, 153–169, 169n1 Bunyan, John, 142 Byatt, A.S., 12, 113–129

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1

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.), Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1

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C Capitalism, 100, 121 Chemical weapons, 2, 13, 193, 195, 202, 206, 208 The Circle, 10, 38 Code, 58, 59, 76, 78, 79, 82, 87, 89 Cognition, 10, 11, 37–49, 80 Cognitive mapping, 48 Cognitive neuroscience, 40, 41, 48, 49, 50n6 Cognitive poetics, 51n9 Concrete poetry, 11, 75–89 Connectivity/connectivities human, 3, 6, 10, 11 temporal, 3, 8, 12, 168, 169 Conscious collapse, 55, 57–61, 73n1 Contingency, 115–118, 121, 123, 206 Copenhagen interpretation, 55, 57, 60–67 The Corrections, 21, 26–29, 32 Cosmodernism, 5 Craniometry, 141 D Danius, Sara, 175, 178, 188 Darwin, Charles, 12, 134, 136 Darwin, Erasmus, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143–145, 148 Darwinism, 121, 137, 139, 140, 144, 148 de Melo and Castro, E.M., 82 DeLillo, Don, 21, 23, 27 Digitalisation, 2, 13, 89 Digital media, 76, 81, 89 Digital poetry, 11, 76, 85 Digital technologies, 2–3, 11, 75–89, 175 Divisionism, 185 Drug, 10, 19–33 Dyce, William, 138 Dystopia, 20, 21, 42, 97

E Ecocriticism, 48 Edgeworth, Maria, 143 Egan, Greg, 57–59, 61, 65, 71 Eggers, Dave, 10, 37–49, 51n10 Electronic literature, 75–78, 81, 82, 86, 88 Eliot, George, 20, 135 Epistemology (scientific), 12, 98, 116, 117, 194, 208 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 136 Ethics, 13, 46, 123, 193–210 Everett, Hugh, 56, 67, 68 Experimental theatre, 13, 200 F Feminist epistemology of science, 194 The Flicker Men, 57, 58, 60, 61 Food, 94, 100, 102–104, 108n3, 143, 157 The Forbidden Zone, 193–210 Fossils, 136–138, 140–142 Foucault, Michel, 48, 115–117, 121, 129n2, 161, 165 Franzen, Jonathan, 21, 26, 27 Futurism, 13, 76, 175, 181, 186 G Genetically modified food, 11, 94 Genetically modified organisms, 94 Genetic engineering, 99, 120, 127 Genetic modification, 10, 95, 102 Genre, 2, 8–10, 12, 102, 117, 133, 145, 149, 150n1, 154, 167, 177, 178, 188 Geology, scriptural, 136, 140 Gif (graphic interchange format), 80 Gomringer, Eugen, 76–78, 81, 84

 INDEX 

H Haber, Claire, 13, 193–195 Haraway, Donna, 13, 99, 200, 209, 210n3, 211n5 Hardinge, Francis, 12, 133–149 Hardy, G.H., 12, 156–166, 168 Hidden Figures, 2, 154 Hinduism, 157, 159 His Dark Materials, 134, 148 Historical novel, 2, 117, 123 Holocaust, 196, 209 Human Genome Project (HGP), 113, 127, 128 Humanism, 97, 98 Hypertext, 72, 79, 89, 157 I The Imitation Game, 2, 154 Immerwahr, Clara, 13, 193–196, 198 Interactive fiction, 58, 70–72 Irons, Jeremy, 154 J James, Henry, 137, 176 Jane Eyre, 142, 143 K Kanigel, Robert, 154–157, 163, 166 King, Katie, 13, 194, 199–202, 204, 208, 210, 210n3 Kittler, Friedrich, 13, 179, 180, 188 Kosmatka, Ted, 57, 58, 60, 61 L Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 141 Latour, Bruno, 3, 4, 117 Lea, Daniel, 3, 5–7, 11, 155 Lyell, Charles, 134, 140

215

M Machine code, 76, 78, 82, 87, 89 MaddAddam Trilogy, 11, 93–108, 129 Mantel, Hilary, 8 The Man Who Knew Infinity, 2, 12, 153–169 Manyworlds interpretation, 67 Mass destruction, 195, 197–199 Materialism, eliminativist, 41 Materiality, 6, 10, 23–25, 48, 95, 129n2, 154 Mathematics (partition, number theory), 155 Mather, Cotton, 138 Mawer, Simon, 12, 113–129 Media, 2, 11, 13, 38, 46, 47, 72, 73, 75, 77–79, 88, 108n3, 118, 158, 179, 180 Medicine, 23, 24, 27, 29, 33, 94 Mendel’s Dwarf, 12, 113–129 Mesmer, Franz, 145 Mesmerism, 134, 145 Metamodernism, 13, 189 Metzinger, Thomas, 42, 43 Middlemarch, 135 Mind, 10, 19–21, 27, 29, 30, 38, 44, 59, 62, 64, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 123, 126, 127, 136, 143, 144, 164, 166, 182, 188 Modernism, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14n2, 173–190 Molecular genetics, 125, 128 N Narayana Iyer, S., 156, 164 (Neo) Victorianism, 3, 8, 12, 124, 133, 134, 145, 149, 150n1 Network, 3, 4, 38, 39, 43, 45–48, 115, 149, 158, 159, 200 Network paradigm, 3, 10, 37–49 Neuronovel, 2, 21

216 

INDEX

Neuropath, 10, 37–49 Neuropathology, 10, 13, 37–49 Neurophilosophy, 39, 50n5 O Ozeki, Ruth, 11, 93–108 P Paine, Thomas, 136 Patel, Dev, 154 Pears, Iain, 11, 56, 58, 67–70, 72 Pharmakon, 10, 21–29, 32, 33 Physicality, 11, 77, 79, 85 Physics, 2, 55, 58, 60–63, 65, 67, 68, 202 Posthuman, 2, 11, 94–98, 100–102, 106, 107, 108n4, 109n5 Posthumanism, 13, 94–97, 101, 108n4 critical, 95–98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108n4 Postmodernism, 5–7, 13, 48, 174, 175, 177, 178, 188, 189 Practice, scientific, 13, 114, 116–118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128 Progress, scientific, 12, 121, 128, 139, 204 Proof, 2, 61, 136, 138, 148, 153, 156, 157, 162, 163 Psychopathology, 38, 43, 48 Psychopharmacology, 2, 19, 21–24, 27–33 Pullman, Philip, 134, 148 Pynchon, Thomas, 13, 115, 173–190 Q Quantum physics, 2, 11, 55–73 Quarantine, 57–61, 64–66 Quick Response (QR), 86, 87

R Racism, 12, 100, 158, 165–169 Raj, 159, 164, 165 Ramanujan, 2, 154–157, 165 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 12, 154–168, 169n1, 169n3 Realism, realist, 2, 6–10, 14n2, 20, 29, 42, 50n6, 102, 149, 185, 194, 203, 205, 207 Realist fiction, 7 Risk society, 10, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 33 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 9, 10 Rood, Ogden N., 182, 183 Russell, Bertrand, 162 S Schrödinger’s cat, 64, 65 Science, 1–14, 19, 38, 55–73, 99, 113–129, 133–149, 159, 189, 194 Science fiction, 9, 20, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 123, 209 Science novel, 2, 12, 114, 117, 163 Scientist, 2, 12, 13, 60, 63–65, 68, 69, 93, 98, 101, 114, 117, 122, 126, 127, 134–136, 138–149, 161, 168, 169, 174, 182, 194–198, 204, 206 Screen, 2, 11, 38, 47, 70, 73, 75, 78, 79, 82–89, 196, 199, 207 Seiichi, Niikuni, 81 Sexism, 13 Snow, C.P., 4 Software culture, 76, 89 Speculative fiction, 2, 20, 32, 102 Spiritualism, 144, 145 Stefans, Brian Kim, 83, 84 Superposition, 58, 62, 64–66 Supersymmetry, 58, 62, 64–66 Surveillance, 41

 INDEX 

T Taxidermy, 142 Technology, 1, 3, 6, 9–11, 13, 19, 23–25, 27, 31, 33, 37–49, 62, 64, 67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 93, 97, 101, 104, 108n1, 119, 123, 125, 133, 173–190, 194, 198 A Theory of Everything, 2 Three cultures, 3, 4 3D, 75, 88 Timescape, 56–58, 67 Time travel, 56, 66–68 Transhumanism, 95, 96 Transrealism, 9 Twenty-first-century realism, 7, 8, 177 Two culture debate, 4 U Utterback, Camille, 85

217

V Victorian, 2, 8, 9, 12, 124, 134–136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145–147, 149 Virtual environment, 75, 87, 88 W Walton, David, 57, 62–67, 71 A Whistling Woman, 12, 113–129, 129n6 White Noise, 21, 23–28, 32 Williams, Emmett, 82 Wittenborn, Dirk, 21, 29 Women scientists, 193–211 Woolf, Virginia, 176, 188, 189, 194, 209 World War I, 195, 196, 199, 205 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 13, 174–177, 179, 181, 184, 189