American Literature and Science 0813117852, 9780813193410

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AMERICAN liTERATURE AND SCIENCE

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AMERICAN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE Robert j. Scholnick Editor

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Copyright © 1992 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback edition 2010 The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows: American literature and science I Robert J. Scholnick, editor. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1785-2 (alk. paper) 1. American literature-History and criticism. 2. Literature and scienceUnited States. 3. Science in literature. I. Scholnick, Robert J. PS169.S413A8 1992 810.9'356-dc20 92-373 ISBN 13- 978-0-8131-9341-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

~···,·~ Member of the Association of 'I&! • American University Presses

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1 Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America RoBERT J. ScHOLNICK

1

2 "This Brazen Serpent Is a Doctors Shop": Edward Taylor's Medical Vision

CATHERINE RAINWATER

3 Benjamin Franklin: The Fusion of Science and Letters A. OWEN ALDRIOOE

4 Thomas Jefferson JosEPH W. SLADE 5 An Intrinsic Luminosity: Poe's Use of Platonic and Newtonian Optics 6

WILLIAM J. ScHEICK

Fields of Investigation: Emerson and Natural History DAVID M. RoBINSON

18

39

58

77 94

7 Thoreau and Science RoBERT D. RICHARDSON, }R.

110

8

128

(Pseudo-) Scientific Humor

juDITH YAROSS LEE

9 Traveling in Time with Mark Twain 10 11

Hart Crane and John Dos Passos

H. BRUCE FRANKLIN

JosEPH W. SLADE

157

172

Fields of Spacetime and the "I" in Charles Olson's The Maximus

Poems STEVEN CARTER

194

12 "Unfurrowing the Mind's Plowshare": Fiction in a Cybernetic Age 13

DAVID PoRUSH

Turbulence in Literature and Science: Questions of Influence N. KATHERINE HAYLES Bibliography: American Literature and Science through 1989 ROBERT S. ScHOLNICK Contributors Index

209 229

251 273 275

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Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to the contributors to this volume for their patience, support, and many valuable suggestions, from inception to completion. My William and Mary colleagues Scott Donaldson, Elsa Nettles, Christopher MacGowan, Robert Gross, Carl Dolmetsch, and Thad Tate read portions of the manuscript and offered pointed and pertinent observations. The anonymous readers of the manuscript for the University Press of Kentucky showed me how to strengthen the project in many ways. My work on this and related studies has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which I am most grateful. I have benefited in many ways from the generous support for faculty scholarship from the College of William and Mary. Wanda Carter, who oversees the graduate studies office at William and Mary, took time to provide much,needed assistance. My son Jonathan graciously listened to my discussions of literature and science during several long automobile trips-and in more ways than one kept me awake with his comments. Joshua Scholnick, Amy Napier, and MaryKate McMaster provided crucial assistance with the bibliography. As with all my projects, my wife, Sylvia Scholnick, combined the most searching criticism of my work with the most powerful love. This book is dedicated to my parents, Ruth and Allen Scholnick, and the blessed memory of my wife's parents, Ken and Berniece Huberman, who became my parents also.

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1 Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America ROBERT j. SCHOLNICK

Reaching back to the Puritan poet Edward Taylor and forward to the contemporary novelist Thomas Pynchon, this collection of original essays explores the relationship in American culture between literature and science. These two ways of knowing are often thought to be unrelated, if not actually antagonistic. Through analyses of the ways that such writers as Franklin, Jefferson, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hart Crane, Dos Passos, and Charles Olson have understood the sciences and explored them in their work as essential and powerful methods of knowing and changing the world, these essays seek to comprehend how literature and science have evolved together in American culture. Over the more than three and a half centuries of American literature the modes of investigation that we now include under the heading "science" have changed radically, as has "literature." Up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, literature and science were understood as parts of a unitary endeavor, but by mid-century they had diverged. Science became the province of the professional, while concurrently poets, novelists, and other imaginative writers asserted the autonomy of their art. Despite moving in different directions, science and literature have continued to speak with one another in ways that have helped to shape each. Focusing on the languages that writers have used to explore the interpenetrating realms of science and literature, this collection seeks to open for wider analysis a neglected dimension of American culture. We undertake this inquiry at a time when the familiar understanding of science as an objective, systematic, progressive, and transcultural means of investigating reality has come under increasing attack from several quarters. Historians have learned to approach science as only one among other social constructs, and so the subject has been opened to the sort of

2

American Literature and Science

critical analysis directed at any form of cultural expression. As Clifford Geertz observes in "A Lab of One's Own," a recent essay on feminist approaches to science, "If, like everything else cultural-art, ideology, religion, common sense-science is something hammered together in some place to some purpose by partisans and devotees, it is, like everything else cultural, subject to questioning why it has been built in the way that it has. If knowledge is made, its making can be looked into." 1 In the final essay in this collection, N. Katherine Hayles looks into the making of several new sciences, including chaos theory, fractal geometry, and fluid dynamics, as a means of opening "passages between literature, science, and culture in which the influence is construed as a turbulent complexity, not a one-way street." Because American writers themselves have explored the meanings of science and its offshoot technology, literature offers us multiple new perspectives on science as a cultural expression, even as science offers new perspectives on literature. Certain of the principles of twentieth-century physics have served to undermine from within the perception of science as an objective mode of knowing that exists apart from the human investigator. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, for instance, holds that we can precisely measure the position of a subatomic particle or its motion, but not both at once. Consequently, in the words of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, investigators are forced "to decide which measurement we are going to perform and which question our experiments will ask the system," and so there exists "an irreducible multiplicity of representations for a system, each connected with a determined set of operators." In short, the "postEinsteinian" physics has placed new attention on the agency of the investigator-interpreter. And since the human investigator frames his or her questions in language, the codes of science touch those ofliterature in unsuspected ways. Prigogine and Stengers draw the conclusion that on one level both literature and science can be understood as "fictions" or conceptualizations of reality: "One of the reasons for the opposition between the 'two cultures' [C.P. Snow's famous division between the culture of science and that of the 'humanities'] may have been the belief that literature corresponds to a conceptualization of reality, to 'fiction,' while science seems to express objective 'reality.' Quantum mechanics teaches us that the situation is not so simple. On all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization." 2 Neither is literature immune to such fundamental questioning. The work of Terry Eagleton and other Marxist critics, for instance, has brought

Permeable Boundaries

3

into question the very existence of the category of writing we refer to as "literature." They have argued that "literature" is a term used by dominant social groups to privilege certain kinds of writing for purposes of social hegemony. 3 Modes of investigation, conceptualization, and expression within culture, both literature and science are also instruments for the exercise of power. This is not to ignore the very real differences between literature and science as ways of knowing, but to suggest the grounds for an investigation of their interaction within a single culture. The authors of these essays focus on the particular historical situations of the writers, asking how the writer came to understand science on its own terms and in its relationship to literature. Hence, the essays work together to define the changes in literature and science over the course of American history. Beyond a common attention to the specificity of historical circumstance, no one synthesis unites them. Given the writers' very different situations, such critical eclecticism is to be expected. However, by providing a historical grounding for discussions of literature and science as related modes of discourse within the context of a single culture, this volume seeks to establish the essential framework for that possible synthesis and to stimulate the new scholarship that will make it possible. Given our epistemological uncertainties, however, such a critical synthesis may well be out of reach. As Josue V. Harrari and David F. Bell have written in their introduction to Michel Serres's Hennes: Uterature, Science, and Philosophy, literary texts "are born of spaces of communication among several domains. Legend, myth, history, philosophy, and science share common boundaries. . . . The domains of myth, science, and literature oscillate frantically back and forth into one another, so that the idea of ever distinguishing between them becomes more and more chimerical." 4 While ultimate distinctions among the terms may be impossible, historical understanding of the interaction of these ways of knowing is not. This collection identifies two closely related aspects of the interaction between literature and science over the course of American history. To use a metaphor from electricity, the first is one of resistance. Writers have opposed those destructive and controlling powers made possible by science and technology. The second is one of conduction. Writers also have drawn images and vocabularies from science and technology as powerful expressions of new ideas for their work, even as their autonomous investigations have enabled them to express ideas that have a parallel or complementary relationship to those of science.

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American Literature and Science

The aspect of resistance is to be found as early as Benjamin Franklin's warning against the potential for mass destruction of bombardment from the newly invented balloon, a subject that A. Owen Aldridge treats here in "Benjamin Franklin: The Fusion of Science and Letters." And Mark Twain, in the late nineteenth century, as H. Bruce Franklin shows in "Traveling in Time with Mark Twain," symbolically "explodes" the dan~ gers of a technological military machine, the product of industrial cap~ italism, by converting its powerful energies into the sort of destructive heat and electrical explosions that we witness in the apocalyptic "Sand Belt" chapter of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Similarly, David Porush argues that what he calls "cybernetic fiction" "is an expression of literature's need to contest cybernetics' claims for an ultimate description of human communication and thought." But, as Porush demonstrates, even as cybernetics and the fiction that makes use of its methods contest the question of "who does the better job of describing how humans think and communicate?" they collaborate "in a larger postmodern mission: defining from opposite sides that gap where humanity remains inexpressi~ ble in mechanical terms." H. Bruce Franklin argues that the American belief in an ever~ improving future is closely tied to a faith in science and technology as the essential vehicles for realizing that future. However, in creating memorable images of the destruction that they have made possible, writers have exposed fundamental contradictions within the culture. For instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne's extensive gallery of mad scientists grew out of his "fascination," Taylor Stoehr has asserted, with a culture that "displayed a remarkable popular interest in science and technology, even among cit~ izens who had little notion of the actual methods and aims of the labora~ tory." 5 At least from the times of Franklin and Jefferson, American writers have critically examined the complex of contradictory expectations sur~ rounding those central terms, "science," "technology," and now "high technology," and have found languages and artistic methods to resist their potentially dangerous uses. This tradition is essential, for in the words of the historian Robert V. Bruce, "Science and technology are the prime instruments of irreversible change in the thought and life of mankind, and for much of our own century the United States had led in wielding them." 6 Yet, as the examples in this collection illustrate, for the most part American writers have not found science and technology to be destructive per se. Their concern has been with the way human beings have used them as instruments of power and control within the industrial capitalism of the

Permeable Boundaries

5

United States. To return to the metaphor of electricity, we can say that even while resisting the destructive potential of science and technology, American writers have at the same time developed ways of conducting certain of their methods, languages, and discoveries across the shifting boundaries that now separate them. Many of these essays focus on what precisely happens at the point of contact, when the languages or codes of the sciences touch those of art. The writer may seek a way to co,opt the scientist by demonstrating a gain when a scientific idea is amplified through an examination of its meta, phorical meanings in the realm of art. Joseph W. Slade shows that John Dos Passos and Hart Crane sought both to "assimilate and reshape" the new sciences and technologies in their respective literary structures. On the other hand, little sense of rivalry between poet and scientist emerges from Steven Carter's analysis of the ways that Charles Olson used ideas from the physics of Heisenberg and Bohr to help structure The Maximus Poems. Carter quotes Bohr's famous assertion that "when it comes to atoms, the language that must be used is the language of poetry" to show that energy may be conducted both ways, from science to literature and from literature to science and without struggle for precedence. Further, as autonomous investigators, writers may independently for, mulate in literary terms ideas that also find expression in the sciences, a point which we can approach through Bohr's principle of complemen, tarity. An "extension of Heisenberg's uncertainty relations," Prigogine and Stengers explain, this principle is based on the recognition that "various possible languages and points of view about the system may be complemen, tary. They all deal with the same reality, but it is impossible to reduce them to one single description. The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality expresses the impossibility of a divine point of view from which the whole of reality is visible." From this perspective, we can see that multiple languages may be needed to investigate the "wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure." 7 Liter, ature and science independently investigate a "reality" that exceeds any single system of explanation, any one language. This principle is reflected in the poetry of Robert Frost. As Guy Rotella observes, Frost "was writing poems that can be described by the terms indeterminacy, correspondence, and complementarity long before he became aware of those concepts in science." 8 We may approach Frost's work and that of other writers as a place of exploration, a kind of experi, mental chamber, where the similarities and differences between conflict,

6

American literature and Science

ing conceptualizations of reality, between science and art, subjectivity and objectivity, and power and contemplation, are played out through the medium of language. This collection has been organized to enable the reader to explore the interaction between literature and science over the entire course of Amer~ ican literary history. The essays on Taylor, Franklin, and Jefferson treat the relationship between literature and science when it was possible to pursue both as part of a unitary endeavor. The essays on three major writers from the first part of the nineteenth century, Poe, Emerson, and Thoreau, consider their responses to the growing separation between science and literature and the underlying search for new and deeper ways of relating them. The final essays, analyzing the relationship after science and liter~ ature moved apart at mid~century, treat the growing gap between popular understanding and the increasingly complex sciences. The essays also examine the attempts by writers to develop languages that are responsive to the new scientific complexities and the ever~increasing importance of science and technology as agents of change. We begin at the outset of the Scientific Revolution with Catherine Rainwater's essay on Edward Taylor. Rainwater shows how the great Pu~ ritan poet~physician~minister was able typologically to integrate recent medical concepts with his orthodox Puritan theology. "Taylor's Paracel~ sian poems," she writes, "demonstrate his vision of himself as an instru~ ment in the healing and redemptive process; his conception of himself as poet (user of words) and as reader~interpreter (of the Word) is synonymous with his sense of himself as physician, as reader~ interpreter of the Book of Nature who looks for the earthly signifiers of spiritual conditions and cures." As Rainwater and other scholars have demonstrated, Taylor de~ veloped a hermeneutic system that could respond to the latest scientific intelligence from many fields, including Copernican astronomy. Her exploration of Taylor's immediate situation adds to what we know about the reception and dissemination of science at the time. But Rainwater also looks forward, identifying Taylor as the first in a tradition of physician~ writers in America, which includes Oliver Wendell Homes, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Oliver Sacks, and Richard Selzer. Such writers, Rainwater writes, remind us "of the sacramental dimension of healing that is also a dimension of the writer's art. Such resonance suggests that despite the persistent efforts of empirical science to abandon the metaphysical territories that science once occupied, some central mystery of speech and existence prevents any such absolute separation."

Permeable Boundaries

7

Nor did the coming of the Newtonian scientific revolution bring with it such a separation between science and the other dimensions of one's being. In his essay on Benjamin Franklin, A. Owen Aldridge explains precisely why "Newton demanded the muse." Neither in America nor England was it a mechanical universe empty of meaning and purpose that the expositors of Newton described. On the contrary, the "Enlightened theory of science," as Perry Miller has remarked, "coming to these shores with incalculable prestige, taught Americans to conceive of it as consisting in an aesthetic contemplation of a perfected universe and then to salute the comprehension of this universe (mainly through the grasp of Newton's system) as providing an entrance into the cosmopolitan culture of the West. " 9 Aldri