The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science [1 ed.] 9783030482435, 9783030482442

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The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science Edited by The Triangle Collective

Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science Series Editor Howard Marchitello Department of English Rutgers University–Camden Camden, NJ, USA

This series of handbooks is devoted to the study of the rich and complex history of the relationship between literature and science, from medieval times to the present moment. While this is a topic not unknown to literary criticism (especially in the middle years of the 20th century), the work assembled in these five volumes represents a fundamentally new approach to the vital story of the interconnectedness of literature and science, an approach that is grounded firmly upon an understanding of the status of both literature and science as discourses dedicated to the production of knowledge. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15721

Neel Ahuja · Monique Allewaert · Lindsey Andrews · Gerry Canavan · Rebecca Evans · Nihad M.  Farooq · Erica Fretwell · Nicholas Gaskill · Patrick Jagoda · Erin Gentry Lamb · Jennifer Rhee · Britt Rusert · Matthew A.  Taylor · Aarthi Vadde · Priscilla Wald · Rebecca Walsh Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

Editors See next page

Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science ISBN 978-3-030-48243-5 ISBN 978-3-030-48244-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Chapter 19 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Editors Neel Ahuja University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Monique Allewaert University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI, USA

Lindsey Andrews North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, USA

Gerry Canavan Marquette University Milwaukee, WI, USA

Rebecca Evans Southwestern University Georgetown, TX, USA

Nihad M. Farooq Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA

Erica Fretwell University at Albany, State University of New York Albany, NY, USA

Nicholas Gaskill University of Oxford Oxford, UK

Patrick Jagoda University of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA Jennifer Rhee Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA, USA Matthew A. Taylor University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA Priscilla Wald Duke University Durham, NC, USA

Erin Gentry Lamb Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH, USA Britt Rusert University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA, USA Aarthi Vadde Duke University Durham, NC, USA Rebecca Walsh North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, USA

We dedicate this work to the many whose lives have been adversely affected by the pandemic that has swept across the globe while this work came to fruition, revealing at every turn the inextricable links among science, politics, and society, the inequities of our global society, and the paramount importance of careful and critical acts of reading, responding, and caring for one another, in every field and in every encounter. We acknowledge both the hopeful role and the limits of knowledge communities as we move into a future in a world that gives privileged voice and access to some, while denying the very right to breathe for a great many more.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ben Doyle and Howard Marchitello for their eager and open-minded support of having a collective edit this volume as well as for their encouragement and sage editorial counsel along with that of Shaun Vigil and Allie Troyanos. We are grateful for Rachel Jacobe’s excellent (and patient) editorial assistance as we edged across the finish line. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [203109/Z/16/Z].

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Praise for The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

“This is an eclectic collection in the very best of ways: wide-ranging in genre, method, and conceptualisation. Most valuably it reveals a democratising impulse that speaks directly to the contemporary politics of literature and science, illuminating the field’s strength in bringing together scholars in a united effort of understanding.” —Martin Willis, Professor of English, Cardiff University, UK, and Editor, Journal of Literature and Science “This superb collection finally puts to rest the myth of ‘the two cultures’ by comprehensively showing how, over 120 years of accelerating transformations, literature and science have become inseparable. The volume will be at the forefront of debates about the interconnectivity of twentieth and twenty-first century thought, culture, and practice.” —Martin Halliwell, Head of the School of Arts and Professor of American Studies, University of Leicester, UK, and author of American Health Crisis: 100 Years of Panic, Planning and Politics (forthcoming) “This exciting collection is an excellent contribution to the field of literature and science. It is ideally suited for class adoption for courses in this and related areas such as science and technology studies, literature and medicine, and literature and technology. The section on ‘Ethics and Politics’ is an especially welcome exploration of the issues that the editors bring up in their introduction, wherein the positionality of one’s own discipline and institutional setting is, far from being ignored in the analysis, very much included as a part of it. Highly recommended for humanities scholars and others interested in interdisciplinary methodologies and inquires.” —N. Katherine Hayles, author of Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (2020)

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 The Triangle Collective Part I  Epistemologies 2

Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission Kurt Beals

3

Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi 47 Anindita Banerjee

4

The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil 63 Brent Ryan Bellamy

5

Literature and Energy 79 Jordan B. Kinder and Imre Szeman

6

Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by Computing Machines 97 Yves Citton

7

Behaviorism and Literary Culture 117 Scott Selisker

29

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8

I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal 129 Dana Seitler

9

Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination 145 Bishnupriya Ghosh

10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science of Language 163 Emily Coit Part II  Methods and Approaches 11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific Charity, and the Matter of Evidence 183 Todd Carmody 12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute to Science Policy? The Case of Henrietta Lacks 201 Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King 13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia: Futurist Practices in Contemporary Science Fiction 221 Rebecca Wilbanks 14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature 243 Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth 15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 263 Joseph Fitzpatrick 16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes 283 Avery Slater 17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories and the Biology of Emergence 309 Robert Peckham 18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright 325 Steven Meyer

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19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry 345 Lara Choksey Part III  Ethics and Politics 20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics Before the Atomic Bomb 363 Jenni G. Halpin 21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres of Future Life 375 Coleman Nye 22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science and Fiction 397 Sherryl Vint 23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals in White Noise and The Corrections 415 Natalie Roxburgh 24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century 433 Kyla Schuller 25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures 449 Everett Hamner 26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short Stories 469 Chris Pak 27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy Sofia Ahlberg

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28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer, Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain Jeffrey Gonzalez

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Part IV  Forms and Genres 29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion, and Early Twentieth-Century American Theatre 511 Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr 30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-Century 525 Sarah Daw 31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel 541 Josie Gill 32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q., Afropessimism, Genre 559 Michael Collins 33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge and the Manhattan Project in Comic Books 577 Lindsey Michael Banco 34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis 597 Lorenzo Servitje 35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic Sphere in Sinophone Cinema 621 Nathaniel Isaacson 36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia 637 Carlos Rojas 37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief History of Seven Killings 653 Lindsay Thomas Index

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Contributors

Sofia Ahlberg is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, with a special focus on the importance of energy humanities in educating citizens of the future. Her publications explore ecofiction, climate change, pedagogy, as well as the intersection of narrative and information in contemporary fiction. Neel Ahuja  is an Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (2021). Monique Allewaert is an Associate Professor of English at UW-Madison. She works on American literature, colonialism, and environmental criticism. Her first book Ariel’s Ecology drew on a range of colonial American texts to theorize a “parahumanity” whereby human beings understood themselves as being composed by and in relation to their material surround. Her book in progress, Cut Up, focuses on the small and the particulate as key aesthetic and scientific problems of the colonial era. It argues that we can draw on this eighteenth-century’s micro-scene to develop a counterpoint to the Anthropocene. Lindsey Andrews  is a Lecturer at North Carolina State University where she teaches classes on the relationships among science, medicine, and literature. Her writing has appeared in Catalyst, American Literature, Configurations, Lute & Drum, and The Edinburgh Companion for the Critical Medical Humanities.

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Lindsey Michael Banco is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Saskatchewan and has interests in nuclear culture, conspiracy theory, and gothic/horror literature. He is the author of two books: Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature (Routledge, 2009) and The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the Chair of Humanities in the Environment and Sustainability Program at Cornell University. She is the author and editor of four books on science fiction and technocultural studies, environmental humanities, migration studies, and media studies across Eurasia and the Americas. Kurt Beals  is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, specifically avantgarde and experimental literature, and media theory. His book Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde was published in 2019. Brent Ryan Bellamy  is an Instructor at Trent University. Bellamy co-edited An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM’ Publication, 2018). He has recently been published in Open Library of the Humanities, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal. Gerry Canavan is an Associate Professor in the English department at Marquette University, teaching twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. He is the co-editor of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015), and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), as well as the co-editor of the academic journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television. His first book, Octavia E. Butler, was published in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series at University of Illinois Press in 2016. Todd Carmody received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He is presently an NEH Fellow at the Newberry Library. His first book, Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and Reform in Progressive America, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Dr. Amy C. Chambers is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, working in the fields of science communication and screen studies. Her research examines the intersection of science and entertainment media with specific focus on religion, the presentation of women’s scientific expertise, and the public understanding of science in science fiction film/TV and medical-themed horror.

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Dr. Lara Choksey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. Her first monograph, Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2020), considers how new descriptions of life and biological value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing registered a crisis in narrative form, involving the rearrangement and disappearance of realist sites of transformation from the late 1970s. She has had articles and chapters published in the Journal of Literature and Science, Sanglap, Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2020), and Media Diversified. Yves Citton is Professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis and Director of the EUR ArTeC. He is co-editor of the journal Multitudes. He recently published Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard, 2018), The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016), Gestes d’humanités (Armand Colin, 2012), and Renverser l’insoutenable (Seuil, 2012). Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. Author or editor of five books and numerous articles, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the NIH, and elsewhere. Emily Coit is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has just finished her first book, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture, and the Genteel Tradition (Edinburgh, 2021), and is co-editing a volume of short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. Michael Collins is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture at King’s College, London. His first monograph, The Drama of the American Short Story, was published by Michigan in 2016, and his second, Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetic of Everyday Life, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Dr. Sarah Daw is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. She has held Postdoctoral and Visiting Research Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and she is the author of Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Rebecca Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Southwestern University, where she researches and teaches American literature and culture and the environmental humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including American Literature, ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Nihad M. Farooq is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research moves between literary studies, American and Atlantic Studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies of science and ethnography. She is the author of Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the Americas, 1830–1940 (NYU, 2016). Joseph Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Letters and an Assistant Professor of the Practice, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University. Erica Fretwell  is an Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany (SUNY). She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP, 2020). Her essays have appeared in the journals American Literary History and J19, and in the volumes Timelines of American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, and The New Walt Whitman Studies. Dr. Lisa Garforth is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. She has published extensively on environmental utopianism, including her 2017 monograph with Polity, Green Utopias. Her current research focuses more broadly on science fictionality and social futures with a particular emphasis on readerly practices and pleasures. Nicholas Gaskill is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and an editor of The Lure of Whitehead. Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the monographs, When Borne Across (2004) and Global Icons (2011), she has turned to media and risk in the co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (work in progress). Josie Gill is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020). Jeffrey Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University. He writes and teaches on contemporary US literature’s relationship to neoliberal life, and he has published articles in Critique, Mosaic, and College Literature. Jenni G. Halpin is the author of Contemporary Physics Plays and editor of the Newsletter of the British Society for Literature and Science. An Associate Professor of English at Savannah State University, her publications include “Godly Mass Extinction and Representing Science that Isn’t: Harvest as Science Fiction Theatre.”

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Everett Hamner is Professor of English at Western Illinois University. His recent work includes Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age (Penn State, 2017) and essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Science Fiction Film and Television. Nathaniel Isaacson  is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University. His research interests include literary and visual culture. His book, Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, examines the emergence of sf in late Qing China. Patrick Jagoda  is Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago and a game designer. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. His books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020). Jordan B. Kinder  is SSHRC-FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His recent work includes a co-edited issue of MediaTropes entitled Oil and Media, Oil as Media and a chapter on oil sands reclamation in Energy Culture. Claire Sisco King is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (2011), as well as numerous articles, and has recently completed a book manuscript on celebrity culture, networks, and metonymy. Erin Gentry Lamb  is a Visiting Associate Professor of Bioethics and Faculty Lead of the Humanities Pathway at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Her research interests include aging, death and dying, disability, bioethics, and health care and social justice. She co-edited Research Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019) and her work appears in such forums as The Journal of Medical Humanities, The Health and Humanities Reader, The Disability Bioethics Reader, and the Encyclopaedia of Health Humanities. Steven Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes in interrelations among twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, philosophy, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, 2001) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (2018). Currently completing Cadences of an African American Culture, a study of the poetry of Jay Wright from the 1960s to the present, he was the 2019–2020 Franke Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.

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Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Nye is the co-author of the graphic novel Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Her current book project Biological Property: Race, Gender, Genetics examines the mutual constitution of genetic understandings of relation and property-based models of inheritance. Nye’s work on science, medicine, and performance has also been published in such journals as Social Text, TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Global Public Health, and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Chris Pak is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures at Swansea University, UK. His research focuses on ecology, the environment, and human-animal relations in science fiction (sf). His book, Terraforming (Liverpool University Press, 2016), details the history of planetary adaptation in sf. His website is https://chrispak.wixsite.com/chrispak. Robert Peckham is MB Lee Professor of the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, where he is concurrently Chair of the Department of History and Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. He is the author of Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Jennifer Rhee  is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research and teaching examine connections across contemporary science and technology, literature, and art. She is the author of All Too Human: Labor and Dehumanization in the Robotic Imaginary (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She is working on a new book on counting technologies, from the emergence of statistics to big data. Carlos Rojas  is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China. Natalie Roxburgh  (Ph.D. Rutgers 2011) is a Lecturer and Research Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany. She is author of Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject (Routledge, 2016). Her work can be read in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Mosaic, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the 2020 Palgrave volume, Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900. Britt Rusert  is an Associate Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017) and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).

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Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2018) and co-editor of special issues of American Quarterly (2019) and Social Text (2020). Dana Seitler  is Professor of English and Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture, queer theory and sexuality studies, feminist theory, science studies, and visual culture. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019). Her current project, Narcopoetics: A Queer History of Addiction, focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the opioid crisis at the intersections of race and sexuality in the USA. She has published articles in American Quarterly, American Literature, Genre, Cultural Critique, GL/Q, and Criticism. Scott Selisker  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and of articles in journals including American Literature, NOVEL, Science Fiction Studies, American Literary History, and New Literary History. Lorenzo Servitje is Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine, a dual appointment in the Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and Society Program at Lehigh University. His monograph, Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY 2021), traces the metaphorical militarization of medicine in the nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in Literature and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Science Fiction Studies, among other journals. He has co-edited three collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn State Press 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave 2016), and Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave 2017). Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Catherine’s College. Her books include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020). Avery Slater  is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of English and an inaugural Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Her research focuses on contemporary questions emerging at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, with

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an emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics in a global context. Her work has recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, Symplokē, Cultural Critique, American Literature, and other journals. Imre Szeman  is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication at the University of Waterloo. He is author (most recently) of Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019) and is currently working on Energy Impasse: Scenes from a Resource Interregnum (with Mark Simpson). Matthew A. Taylor is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he works on the intersections among nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, literature, and philosophy in a transatlantic context. His first book, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature, was published by the University of Minnesota Press, and he currently is finishing his second book, which examines depictions of life-as-such from Lamarck to Watson and Crick. With Priscilla Wald, he is the co-editor of the journal American Literature. Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching interests include the digital humanities and contemporary US literary and cultural studies. Her book, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Aarthi Vadde  is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Computational Media, Arts, and Culture program at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (Columbia UP, 2016), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2018 Harry Levin Prize. She is the co-editor of The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the open-access “Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism” (Post45, 2019). With the support of an NHC fellowship, she is completing a second monograph tentatively titled: “We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.” Her essays have appeared in such journals as Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Public Books. Sherryl Vint  is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. Her books include Bodies of Tomorrow, Animal Alterity, Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed, and Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge. She is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science and Popular Culture. She has edited several books, most recently After the Human: Theory, Culture and Criticism in the 21st Century. Her current research, The Living Capital: Speculative Futures and Biopolitics, explores the exchanges between speculative imagination and material practice in biotech.

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Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008). She is co-editor, with Michael Elliott, of volume six of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The American Novel 1870–1940 and, with Matthew Taylor, of the journal American Literature. She is currently at work on a book-length monograph, Human Being After Genocide. Rebecca Walsh is an Associate Professor of English and the Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. Her book, The Geopoetics of Modernism (UP of Florida, 2015), examines the intersections between environmental determinist academic geography, the National Geographic Magazine, and the transnational politics of space in modernist American poetry. She has also published in edited collections, in PMLA (as a co-author), and has guest edited a special issue, “Global Diasporas,” of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Current projects examine the Anthropocene in the modernist and contemporary periods, and African American and Indian transnational networks of resistance in the 1930s -1950s. Rebecca Wilbanks  received her Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature, and was a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her work draws on literary studies and science and technology studies to address the intersection of science and culture. Her current book project is entitled Life’s Imagined Futures: The Speculative Science and Speculative Fiction of Synthetic Biology. More information can be found at rrwilbanks.com.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 21.1 Fig. 21.2 Fig. 21.3 Fig. 21.4 Fig. 21.5 Fig. 21.6 Fig. 33.1 Fig. 33.2 Fig. 33.3 Fig. 33.4 Fig. 33.5 Fig. 33.6 Fig. 33.7 Fig. 34.1 Fig. 34.2

First diagram of triangulation Second diagram of triangulation Third diagram of triangulation Women dressed as handmaids protest against US Vice President Mike Pence in Philadelphia, 23 July 2018 (Screenshot: The Hill 07/23/18) Data visualization by K.H. Oliver, with data provided by J.W. Hazel from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar Data visualization by E.W. Clayton from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar Google Burger tasting, Cultured Beef and Google (2013) In-vitro frog leg tasting, SymbioticA (2003) BiteLabs.org CulturedBeef.net Descriptions of James Franco-Furters and Kanye Salami on BiteLabs.org Celebrity cubes on the menu of Next Nature’s “In-Vitro Bistro” Robert Oppenheimer in Picture News, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 8 Trinity test site in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, end-papers Countdown, Trinity, p. 69 Atomic bomb detonation in Trinity, pp. 70–71 Milliseconds into the first atomic detonation, Trinity, pp. 72–73 Prior to the Trinity test, Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, n.p. Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild, co-creators, David Miller and Rudy Vasquez, artists Hiroshima bombing, Trinity, pp. 126–127 Chapter 1 Chapter 1

104 107 110 159 206 209 379 379 382 382 385 388 579 584 587 588 589 590 592 601 603

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 34.3 Fig. 34.4 Fig. 34.5 Fig. 34.6 Fig. 34.7 Fig. 34.8 Fig. 37.1

Chapter 4 604 Chapter 1 605 Chapter 2 605 Chapter 2 606 Chapter 1 610 Chapter 1 611 Detail from the social network of A Brief History of Seven Killings 656 Fig. 37.2 The strength of the adjacent edges for each node with a strength value greater than 10 in the social network for A Brief History of Seven Killings 659 Fig. 37.3 Strength values for the top 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes in each network 660

List of Tables

Table 37.1 Table 37.2

The sample set; word counts are from electronic editions, and page counts are from U.S. hardcover editions Social network metrics

655 658

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction The Triangle Collective

In his oft-referenced 1959 Cambridge lecture on “The Two Cultures,” British novelist, physicist, and civil servant C.P. Snow famously resurrected an erstwhile lament about a presumed and growing “gulf” between the arts and the sciences in which the sciences are unduly disregarded by the “traditional” intellectual pursuit of the arts. Snow’s scientific evangelism registers a persistent tension in Western cultural history, which we can track from Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold’s late-nineteenth-century debates on whether the natural sciences should finally be included alongside literature in college curricula to Bruno Latour’s post-9/11 suggestion that a new form of generative critical “gathering” is needed, one that does not pit scientific pursuits against cultural critique, but treats all constructed objects and ideas with caution and care (Snow 2012; Huxley 1880; Arnold 1882; Latour 2004). Indeed, this manufactured “two cultures” paradigm is now so fully ingrained in our contemporary era that shocked post-2016 liberals were prepared to march for the abstract concept of science as the incontrovertible panacea to the post-truth era of Trump, an era of dangerous relativism inaugurated, some would argue, by art and theory’s post-structuralist insistence on the relativity of truth and reality. Once the perceived gatekeepers of intellectual endeavor, the humanities meanwhile find themselves on the other side of the “two cultures” coin, labeled as an esoteric and impractical field of knowledge that has also unwittingly sowed the seeds for a war against facts from which only science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields can save us.

T. T. Collective (*)  Durham, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_1

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Yet however counterintuitive it may seem in our current moment—which has witnessed the alliance of scientific research and global capital, as well as the facile opposition of useful scientific “know-how” (useful to whom and for what?) against the supposedly rarefied humanities—literature and science have been and continue to be domains of knowledge that are, far from monolithic, perpetually in flux and intertwining. For example, in the vibrant fields of feminist science studies and the history of science and medicine, many scholars have documented the capacious meanings and practices of science and literature in earlier centuries. Initially, “science” referred to knowledge as such. Yet with the rise of empiricist paradigms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (following Francis Bacon’s articulation of the scientific method) up through the technological developments brought by the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, definitions of science began to narrow. And as the modern research university emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as academic disciplines began to coagulate—though they had not yet calcified—into distinct research programs, science increasingly specified a particular kind of knowledge, one derived from empirical procedures and tightly focused on the study of the natural world. Nonetheless, science in this earlier moment was not viewed as inherently oppositional to the more imaginative, speculative knowledge that literature represented. More often than not, the two worked together. Up through the nineteenth century, in other words, science and literature did not even name distinct fields of study. Embryology, for instance, arose around 1800 as a science that sought to explain how living organisms continually change while still being able to organize themselves independently; it gave rise to the concept of rhythm, which became “a new way of imagining that played a critical role in the consolidation of the new science of biology” that cut across aesthetics, poetics, and philosophy (Wellmann 2017, 17). In another notable example, as Amanda Jo Goldstein (2017) argues, Romantic writers such as Blake, Shelley, and Goethe developed a “sweet Science” that deployed classical philosopher Lucretius’s poetic materialism—the idea that tropes have physical substance and physical things are capable of figurative activity—to challenge the reorganization of knowledge spurred by the modern university, which invalidated poetry as a way of knowing the natural and social worlds. While the natural sciences were turning toward the problem of organic life, Romantic writers and thinkers redeployed Lucretian materialism in order to bolster poetry’s claim upon the real. Thus, the gap between the epistemic communities of the natural sciences (biology, geology, astronomy, physics, and chemistry) and “human science” (the humanities and social sciences) widened not simply along a methodological fault line (inductive versus deductive logic) but, Goldstein points out, along a linguistic one as well: prose the dominant medium for describing the natural and social world “as it is,” and poetry the medium for describing the “immaterial reaches of subjectivity,” including

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emotion and memory (Goldstein 2017, 7). Using figuration and verse to remake empirical procedures, these literary experiments sutured scientific and aesthetic knowing. These particular examples of the cooperation of science and literature illustrate that in many pre-twentieth-century contexts the literary—contingent, figurative, subjective—was widely understood not to supplement empirical knowledge of the world but, rather, to arrive immanently within it. Not yet fully professionalized, science was a capacious mode of inquiry “legitimately claimed by a surprisingly broad range of practitioners and practiced in a number of nonacademic and noninstitutional spaces, from the parlor to the workshop, the church to the park,” Britt Rusert (2017) points out (5). Indeed, as she shows, in the early-nineteenth-century United States a set of “fugitive sciences” emerged that saw free and enslaved African-Americans repurpose ethnology, astronomy, and botany in the name of freedom. Excluded from most if not all institutions of learning, these “amateur” scientists fused empirical procedures with speculative thinking, as their investigations of the natural world became the basis for broader meditations on kinship, being, and the category of the human. Speculation frequently plays the foil to the practical applications of knowledge codified by Bacon’s scientific method, yet even amid the dominance of the empiricist paradigm from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, it remained central to the kind of undertaking science was understood to be. Speculation, in some ways, serves as the hinge upon which literature and science have pivoted for so long: a form of thought that is fundamentally concerned with querying “abstract” notions (of being, of beauty), and a form of thought that unfolds in the subjunctive grammar of potentiality, the future possibilities of the could be or might be. However much it emphasized specialization by the end of the nineteenth century, science “remained a discipline that was not one,” as Nihad Farooq (2016) writes, offering “as much in the way of philosophy, literature, travel narrative, cultural study, and social theory as it did in the way of ‘pure’ science” (11). The focus of this handbook is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even as both the editors and the contributors resist the popular tendency to view earlier scientific practices through an arguably twentieth-century lens of hierarchy and fixity. While phrenology, taxonomy, eugenics, and the general depiction of racially based traits as unyielding markers of inferiority or superiority are all certainly woeful narratives that plagued science in the nineteenth century, the actual science that came to fruition in this period proved quite the opposite: that all organic processes are, in fact, in constant flux, transforming and transformative, adapting, changing, mobile, and most importantly, that human beings are not biologically separable by any kind of discrete racial markers. To this end, we approach science and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.

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However, the distribution of scientific expertise beyond disciplinary modes of knowledge production becomes harder to sustain in the twentieth century. Literature and science remain co-evolving speculative forms even while significant differences arise in their material conditions and methodological identities as they become institutionalized within the university. Nowhere is the division between the humanities and the sciences more obvious than in the study of language in the early twentieth century. As philology split into the distinct paths of literary criticism and linguistics, hermeneutics became the basis of close reading (think F.R. Leavis) and logical positivism dominated the philosophy of language (think Bertrand Russell). One critic, I.A. Richards, actually crossed this chasm, and yet these two sides of his professional career―an interpretive literary critic on the one hand and the co-designer of an artificial language called Basic English on the other—have largely remained isolated from one another. As those in the field of literary studies start to remember the more positivist endeavors of its leading lights, it is possible that literary methods will become more computational (as we see in the rise of quantitative methods in the digital humanities), but it is unlikely that computation will displace hermeneutics as the core of disciplinary identity. If logical positivism turned the study of language toward computation, then the development of the digital computer turned science ever more firmly, if problematically, toward the language of code. Although DNA was discovered in 1869, it wasn’t until the 1950s, shaped as they were by cybernetics, information theory, and wartime and Cold War cryptography, that sciences such as molecular biology reimagined DNA as the “code of life.” With the growth of computer power, neuroscience and genomic science have increasingly relied on computational methods and processing that require considerable funding for research.1 Representative here is the Human Genome Project (HGP), which set out to sequence and map the entirety of the human genome, spanning from 1990 to 2003 and representing the efforts of multiple institutions across the globe. Indeed, during the postwar era of “Big Science,” scientific projects expanded significantly in size and required considerable funding. Much of this work has been conducted in the laboratories of universities and private companies and is beholden to the funding bodies, both public and private, that enable this work. This financial structure, in turn, opens up scientific research to the objectives of the funding organization, whether noble or otherwise, such as the goals of for-profit commercialization (e.g., the extension of the HGP into DNA testing kits or proprietary pharmaceutical formulas) or social control through the continuation of racist and eugenic narratives (again, DNA testing kits)—even as the tests have also sometimes proved useful to others as a way to probe complex questions of cosmopolitan identity in the present and to correct lies and omissions in the historical record. Or consider the case of US university-based robotics and artificial intelligence

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research in the mid- to late-twentieth century, much of which was funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the name of militarization and strategic defense. And yet, Snow’s two cultures diagnosis does not hold in the contemporary era any more than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the practice of science does not stand in isolation from the larger political and cultural milieus its practitioners inhabit. Rather, science, like all forms of knowledge production, is co-evolutionarily constituted by and with these milieus. Katherine Hayles makes this point in her 1990 study of the concept of chaos across postmodern literature, critical theory, and sciences including mathematics, thermodynamics, and epidemiology; she notes that the connections she identifies across these fields emerge because “writers, critics, and scientists, however specialized or esoteric their work, all share certain kinds of everyday experiences” (Hayles 1990, 4). In other words, literature and science are decidedly worlded practices that unfurl and unfold each other. Working in the shadow of Big Science, scholars in feminist science studies have been essential to undercutting the “two cultures” claims. Donna Haraway’s (1988) feminist objectivity emphasizes that knowing is ever situated, or shaped by the specific position of the one seeking to know, and thus ever partial. Similarly, feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad (2007) describes scientific observation as informed by the scientific observer and the techniques and technologies deployed in observation. Thus, science, which is often characterized by authoritative claims of neutrality and disembodied objectivity (indeed, an impossible subject position!), is in fact shaped by specific worldviews, positions, and epistemological assumptions and tools. Science shares this quality with literature, as well as with other cultural practices that seek to know something of the world. To understand science as such is not to prescribe a slippery, untethered relativism, but rather to insist that a rigorous scientific account acknowledges that what we know of the world is shaped by how we come to know it, a methodological claim familiar to many working in the humanities. It is important to note, of course, the political and intellectual significance of inquiry in the humanities in its work to debunk the “fake news” most often proffered historically by pseudo-scientific narratives―i.e., the “science” of races as separate species; the “science” of hysteria as a “female disease”; the “science” of same-sex desire as pathological; and so forth. The intent of the arts, and of critical theory specifically, as Latour (2004) defends in his own contemporary lament, “was never to get away from facts but closer to them” (231, emphasis in original), by examining and challenging the conditions of certain historical moments that have allowed blatant falsehoods and discriminatory logic to be delivered as facts or truths. It is, then, not surprising that the emerging field of literature and science coincided with the increasing attention to problems of social inequality, power, and violence and efforts to make scholarship relevant in part by

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enabling the possibility of envisioning more just and life-sustaining worlds. Analyses of how literature might inform a more socially just science, as well as how science frames discourses and material practices relating to colonialism, race, sex, labor, and state formation, are at the heart of the field of literature and science, which, in turn, is well-situated to articulate a critical view of problems including inequality, exploitation, overconsumption, and ecological crisis. While literature and science has largely remained a subfield of literary studies, many scholars of literature and science have found academic homes in related interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology studies (STS) and health/medical humanities where they position their work explicitly in relation to social justice. Scholars working in STS see social justice as deeply implicated in the questions they raise, from access concerns about where and how people encounter science and technology to how scientific and technological innovations are imagined and funded, for whom the end results are intended, whom they ignore, and who the researchers and research participants are. Research in STS often pushes for increased equity across ­ all of these measures and has resulted in, for example, the inclusion of more women, people of color, disabled people, and older people within research studies. As another example, scholars working in the health humanities have claimed “a shared commitment to social justice” as the unifying value of the field, which is evinced in an emphasis on translational research that seeks to “[involve] outside stakeholders in the research and [transmit] the findings of that research back to the groups or participants being studied” (Klugman and Lamb 2019, 5, 7). In essence, participation in this field requires literary scholars unabashedly to apply their training, bringing methods of critique from the humanities to interrogate questions of identity and power in relation to lived experience. At the same time, such work is often presented by pundits, politicians, and college administrators as undertaken in the “service” of other fields or institutions (such as STEM education, community organizations, or medical schools), a point that has led to the criticism that instead of seeking radical change, “medical humanities seeks to improve the status quo” (Herndl 2005, 595). Such critiques point to tensions between the justice-oriented goals of scholars in literature and science and the institutional contexts for the integration of the humanities with science, medicine, and technology in the contemporary university. The development of programs of study in these areas at times depends on the growing influence of donor-driven university finance and shrinking public outlays for university education, reflected for example in the proliferation in tuition-generating Masters of Arts programs in the Medical Humanities. Thus the intersection of literature and science is itself a site of contestation for those advocating for a more socially just university, suggesting that scholars in this area still have room to productively aid social justice efforts by contributing knowledge and resources to efforts to expand

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marginalized segments of the curriculum (ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, poverty and labor studies, disability studies, among others); to use the university to reduce inequalities in access to technologies; and to push back against state efforts to reproduce militarism and policing through technology and communications research. Another way to trace the emphasis on social justice within literature and science is to move away from the academy and toward the field of culture itself, examining literature rather than literary studies or humanistic fields. Indeed, within those literary subfields most explicitly intertwined with science and scientific developments, the long twentieth century has witnessed an emergent and growing engagement with social justice. Science fiction, for instance, is a literary genre that has since its inception been preoccupied with science, and particularly with scientific futures. Over the course of the long twentieth century, the genre took a number of turns: early developments included the fin de siècle scientific romances of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others, the pulp era of popular magazines such as the Hugo Gernsback-published Amazing Stories during the 1920s and 1930s, and the largely techno-utopian fantasies of the “Golden Age” during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, however, with the emergence of the “New Wave” of science fiction, the genre began to evince not only more diversity among its canonized authors, but also more critical engagements with science and more explicit investments in the social. Whereas the Golden Age tended to endorse narratives of technological progress, New Wave writers explored the ways in which scientific development was sometimes unlinked from and sometimes at odds with social justice, often centering power-based estrangements from the social sciences rather than the imagined feats of engineering. From the rise of the pointedly techno-dystopian visions of cyberpunk in the 1980s to the current explosive interest in Afrofuturism, science fiction has not only engaged social questions in its representations and imaginations of science, but has indeed attended specifically to highly differentiated access to scientific “progress” and to forms of violence Western science has inflicted on marginalized groups. In this way, science fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is something of a return to the original form from the nineteenth century: arguably, the literary genre has always been defined by its critical interest in how social relations and structures of power interact with technoscience. Similarly, environmental literature—another literary subfield defined by its engagement with the sciences—follows a trajectory of increasing recognition that science and social justice cannot be disentangled, especially since the 1960s. Just as the preservationist and conservationist movements of the early twentieth century are largely overshadowed in contemporary environmentalism by the environmental and climate justice movements, so too has “nature writing” valorizing a “pristine” wilderness given way to literary works that engage embodiment and social vulnerability in their representations of the

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nonhuman. Since the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, and especially with the rapid growth of the environmental justice movement following the activism surrounding the dumping of PCBs in Warren County, NC, environmental literature has increasingly engaged global and local contexts of colonialism, racism, masculinism, hetero- and cis-sexism, ableism, and classism. In contemporary environmental literature, including climate fiction (sometimes called cli-fi), power and social difference are not banished to the human realm of the political, but properly identified as central to scientific and other engagements with the nonhuman. The trends in environmental literature, science fiction, and literary studies in developing critical approaches to race, sex, empire, and militarism were deeply influenced by the geopolitics of the Cold War and the assertion of the New Left and decolonization movements that developed transnational calls for social change in the 1960s. While the Cold War tension and nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union produced dystopian, speculative narratives and images of potential nuclear catastrophe, the challenge to the twin US and Soviet imperialisms by the Non-Aligned Movement, decolonization movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and movements for racial and gender justice across continents emerged as central concerns among authors responding to the social contests over the militarism of the Vietnam War, forms of racial segregation, and the expansion of capitalist inequalities with the onset of economic globalization. A variety of science fiction and environmentalist authors integrated such concerns into both visions of dystopian violence and imaginings of creative resistance, such as in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. In these novels, the post-apocalyptic environment of nuclear disaster produces widespread social violence, which is challenged by the protagonist, Lilith, as she encounters an alien species that upends humans’ organizations of racial and gender difference. There are, of course, differences in how authors and scholars handled such themes, and certain writers and traditions within these literary subfields recognized the centrality of social justice to scientific culture even before the “turns” toward the social identified above as occurring roughly in the 1960s. Still, these fields help to show that social justice is integral, not just to the study of literature and science in the long twentieth century, but also to cultural production within literary fields defined by their engagements with science. A brief consideration of these conditions demonstrates how the intersections between literary studies and science influence every level of thought and production at the universities. To offer some context, the editorial collective began the work on this handbook in late Spring 2015. Some of us had studied together directly, while others had connected through geographical proximity in North Carolina. Most of us emerged from English or Literature programs, but many of us had also been trained in science studies and considered our disciplinary home to be in the nascent field of literature and science.

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In the preceding years, interdisciplinary collaboration between literary studies and the sciences had flourished, conferences and journal issues convened around the topic, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) job postings began to include faculty positions for scholars working at the intersection of literature and science. The idea of putting together a primer that would help solidify the field was exciting to all of us, as was working as an editorial collective. Editing a collection together would, we fantasized, be a gesture toward the democratization of knowledge that could allow us to share labor and simultaneously help to advance the field. At the outset, if we considered our political and professional goals as connected to our objects of study, it was perhaps in somewhat theoretical and even utopian terms: could published humanities scholarship reflect the same level of authorial and editorial collaboration as the sciences? Could such a collection—inspired by the ethics of both citizen science and models of co-authorship in the sciences—make accessible the often seemingly abstruse connections between aesthetics and empiricism? But these theoretical questions, as our field teaches us, cannot be separated from our working conditions and situations. Since the Great Recession, and accelerated with the emergence of COVID-19, full-time, tenure-track positions in the humanities have been in decline, replaced by part-time, shortterm adjunct positions. Those of us involved in the collective were in a range of positions, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to postdocs and lecturers, working in a range of institutions, although primarily R1s and SLACs. It took three years from the initial proposal to getting the official go-ahead for the project from the publisher, and another two years to collect, edit, and revise the chapters submitted by scholars whose work we admired and had solicited for inclusion in the volume. In those five years, the university changed, and so did our positions and locations within the institution, as did those of the contributors. By 2020, it was impossible to ignore that our initial political and professional goals were not merely connected to, but more explicitly, constituted part of our object of study. We were a living, breathing example of the very thing we aimed to study: the cultural and material implications of the charged rhetoric around science and the humanities. We cannot ignore how our relative positions within the university are tied to the topic we have sought to analyze, and that our training has something to say about the ongoing crises (of the humanities, of adjunctification, and others) in the neoliberal university we are living through. We have experienced and also bear witness to intensified adjunctification, a decline in full-time and tenured positions, the continued rhetorical pitting of STEM against the humanities as a justification for differential funding, a decline in humanities majors and undergraduate degrees awarded, an increase in discussion of “alternative academic” (altac) careers, the underfunding of humanities departments, and the rise of the austerity university. While the majority of chapters in this collection do not take the university as their

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object, they do lay out various histories and representational strategies that lend to this auto-critique. Our own lives, the lives of the writers whose work is collected herein, and the nature of the fields in which we have been trained necessitate a brief foray into what we now see as the urgent mapping of the institutional contexts we occupy. During the period within which we have been editing this volume, the humanities responded in multiple directions to the financial pressures and changing landscape of the university. One major way was through the formation of institutional alliances with the sciences, one sign of which has been the increased application of the scientific lab model to the infrastructure of the humanities. Examples of humanities “labs” include the Health Humanities Lab at Duke University, the Health Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration (HHIVE) Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago, Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, and Humanities Lab at Arizona State University, all of which pursue applied and practice-based work, seeking to demonstrate the value of humanities inquiry and methods (e.g., cultural analysis and narrative-based methods) to problems in STEM fields, and to bring humanities-oriented values (e.g., an attention to structural inequality and social justice) into scientific conversations. They bring together work between the humanities and the sciences, often in interdisciplinary fields such as the medical humanities, digital humanities, experimental humanities, and media arts and design. Although the content of such spaces often touches upon science and technology, building on a longer humanistic interest in STS, the form of the science lab itself has also changed the way some humanities scholars work together and with colleagues in other disciplines. Given the reliance of such labs on ongoing institutional or grant funding, some of the challenges are those faced by all collaborations, including our own. Whether innovative or opportunistic, these labs suggest changes within the institutional relationship between the humanities and sciences. Since the organizational, disciplinary, and financial shifts within the university have made starkly visible the conditions under which we labor, they also offer opportunities for transforming those conditions. The structural reorganization of the academy today―and our own experience of that restructuring―presents opportunities for imagining alternative genealogies and new periodizations of science and the humanities across the twentieth century. Crises are turning points (the word comes from medicine), and they are also opportunities for transformation, especially if we attend to the memories flashing up at this moment of danger. We might, then, consider the lessons of earlier moments of institutional crisis and reorganization, including how non-institutional practices and collectives historically refused the disciplinary divides that have defined the sciences and humanities within the academy, how marginalized subjects have challenged the bifurcations of literature and science within and without the academy, and even the history of adjunct

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labor―in both the humanities and the sciences―in earlier historical periods. We might use this crisis to examine how we attend to new modes of dispossession and precaritization while understanding that the university has always been a site of exclusion and immiserating violence for historically disenfranchised populations in the United States and for colonized populations abroad. In more positive terms, the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of STS scholarship, including our own here, potentially strains against models of collectivity as they are practiced and co-opted in the sciences, especially in lab settings. If humanities lab settings offer one site of the perils and promises of networking in the sciences and humanities today, the science lab remains a particularly vexed site, as a space and form that brings together what is most utopian about scientific praxis (intensive collaboration, dialogue, and experimentation) with its dystopian underbelly (epistemological and other forms of secrecy, transfer of public resources and knowledge to the private sphere, deeply hierarchical structures under PIs, and the hidden cultures of sexual harassment and assault, in labs as throughout the university system, that our institutions are only beginning to address). This may be a moment when STS scholarship and humanities scholarship more generally―including digital humanities―need to untether from models of collaboration poached from the sciences in favor of ethical models of collaboration that are developed with explicit attention to differential access to resources, time, and institutional power among collaborators within a group. Furthermore, while STS scholars have at times found models for their own collaboration within the sciences, the natural sciences might productively turn (back) to the humanities for tools, models, and even as predictive models for their own likely future. Capital, as Walter Benjamin so famously pointed out, can only proceed through the production of crises, which is why in the current reorganization of the economy and its institutions, natural sciences are experiencing their own crisis and full-scale reorganization, facing the extension and deepening of already existing inequalities and divisions, such as are evident in huge funding gaps between designer fields like bioengineering and the basic sciences, as well as the expectation that Ph.D.s in the sciences will spend years relocating for multiple postdocs or remain dependent on grant cycles and the “soft money” of grants that always run out and thus keep researchers trapped within a cycle of financial precariousness and movement among institutions. This project has made us acutely aware of the tensions of our contemporary moment, but also of the possibilities for the productive engagement that grows out of scholarly work that crosses fields and disciplines to address issues that are of broad historical and contemporary concern. The exciting range of work collected in this handbook attests to the generative potential of scholarship at the intersection of literature and science.

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Chapter Outline The work on the intersection of literature and science is contributing significantly to the changing terrain of literary studies in a variety of ways. Any new focus brings novel works to light, and this turn in literary studies is no exception. But perhaps the most exciting consequence involves the emergence of new epistemological and methodological questions moving in both directions: literary studies and scientific inquiry. The contributions to this volume represent a range of areas of inquiry and approaches that consider how the integrated study of literature and science generates new insights into the underpinnings in both fields. The contributors show how a focus on literature and science draws out new ways of conceiving how literary works produce and circulate knowledge about the world: how, for example, novels can reveal the infrastructure shaped by fossil fuels; how the relationship of image and word in graphic novels illustrates a peculiarly effective way to address atomic fallout; or how humans imagine the ideas of “nature” or “illness.” Conversely, literary and literary critical approaches to scientific works broaden our understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, emphasizing the role of narrative or image in conceptual shifts: how, for example, the affective charge of words and images influences scientific models and uses of new technologies; how language can shape ways of imagining life itself; or how linguistic figures can be translated into computational ones. The chapters solicited for this collection represent a wide range of scientific fields, including epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies. They consider how literary works register and often facilitate epistemological shifts and how they are in turn affected by those changes. Many of these chapters address how fiction across media uniquely explores the consequences—imaginative, social, economic, and/or geopolitical—of scientific developments, whether past, present, or future. Chapters examine such issues as how the prevalence of concepts like networks or microbes has affected literary form; how contemporary novels have turned, in light of cognitive science, to the brain in place of the mind; how more sophisticated computers have made literary works more sensitive to the ways information circulates through language, images, and stories; and how literary works can sensitize us to the slow violence of environmental disaster and other forms of destruction. Given the increasing speed of such developments from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, it is not surprising that analyses of speculative fiction in particular are well-represented in this volume, as the genre has become an increasingly mainstream avenue through which to explore the blurring of science fiction and scientific fact in the contemporary world. Most broadly, these chapters share an interest both in how the fields of literature and science know and make the world and in how the intersection of literature and science reveals the ways concepts change and new concepts emerge. While this focus on how

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literary works register conceptual shifts is not new, the work on the intersection of literature and science has certainly augmented it. Several of the chapters focus directly on that intensification. The authors represent a wide range of fields and cross-disciplinary specializations as well as a range of professional levels, affiliations, and approaches, but all are making significant contributions to the burgeoning field of literature and science. Given the focus of this volume on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we have found it necessary and invigorating to think expansively about the category of “literature,” especially as it intersects with newer media forms such as film and digital writing. Our contributors consider long-standing literary genres such as the novel, poetry, and memoir alongside film, comics, new media narratives, and other aesthetic forms that have increasingly made their way onto the syllabi of scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and science. We note, moreover, that this expansion is not historically unique even if it is technologically specific. In some ways, we see our contemporary use of the term “literature” as deriving from much older definitions of “literature” or “letters” that encompass fictional and nonfictional works of the creative imagination. We have divided the volume into four units, an organization of the work assembled here that reflects and represents the cutting-edge scholarship across the field: epistemologies; techniques and methods; ethics and politics; and forms and genres. But while we intend these heuristic clusters to show how the chapters begin to suggest emergent conversations within the field, the richness of the chapters often made the decision of where to place them difficult; the chapters consistently spoke to each other across our divides. Just as this volume refuses the boundaries placed between the fields of literature and science, we encourage readers to listen for the conversations that emerge throughout the handbook as they challenge the volume’s own categorizing system.

Epistemologies The chapters in this unit address the knowledge that emerges at the intersection of literature and science, focusing on how the intersection produces, in a Kuhnian sense, a conceptual shift, a new way of thinking about familiar problems, or, more broadly, a new understanding of the world. Neither “literature” nor “science” has a clear definition; both describe creative processes, although they differ in the ways they engage the world. As we noted in the opening of the introduction, the stark distinction between them—if indeed there is one—is a relatively recent development; the difference between a scientific and literary imagination would have made little sense in centuries past. Their convergence is the subject of the chapters in this section, which explore both the insights each gains from the other and the brave new world that emerges through their joint perspectives.

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The production and orientation of affect figures centrally in the sorts of knowledges produced at the intersections of literature and science. Humankind’s reaching for the moon long precedes any disciplinary inquiry; Kurt Beal brings that longing into the mid-twentieth century through his exploration of a multimedia project inspired by the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Chapter 2 chronicles how stories shaped the human experience of the moon even as they gave expression to that longing. Kriwet’s work, Beal contends, helps us understand how knowledge of the world is mediated by the imagination, how we are motivated by our longings, and how we therefore dwell, as Emily Dickinson might say, in poetry and possibility. If human wonder inspires Beal’s chapter, the writers Anindita Banerjee considers in Chapter 3 were motivated by their effort to make sense of the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. Seeking to capture the unimaginable led these writers to scientific language, which, though challenging literary language, offered an alternative view of catastrophe “as a web of relations between matter and energy.” Following the insights of these works into imperceptible human and nonhuman relations, Banerjee muses on the connections between the camps and nuclear catastrophes (Hiroshima, Chernobyl) and on the changing coordinates of time and space that disclose the history of human destruction and the uncertain future of human imagination. Like Banerjee, Brent Ryan Bellamy is intrigued by the intersection of literary and scientific texture as well as textuality. In Chapter 4, he draws on literary and visual depictions of oil landscapes to show the often invisible impact of oil on the landscape as well as the human imagination. Where Banerjee traces a particulate path through the elements of devastation, Bellamy journeys through the infrastructure of petroculture, but both are pilgrimages through disaster with the at least implicit hope of revelation. If Beal, Banerjee, Bellamy turn attention to the affects―wonder, horror, hope―to which literary and scientific modes of expression give expression, another line of chapters in this section investigates the ways that structures of power shape what is known, and how one knows, in addition to the affects that follow on knowledge. For instance, Jordan Kinder and Imre Szeman’s engagement with petroculture stresses the impossibility of understanding the contemporary moment without perceiving humanity’s thorough saturation in the infrastructure and economy of oil. All contemporary literary works, they maintain, register that saturation, and if, as a number of contemporary critics have noted, authors have not always cognized that fact, their works are important in displaying—to the critical eye—the ways in which oil and its manifestations hide in plain sight. In Chapter 5, they chronicle the dawning awareness of how the contemporary imagination has been shaped by the relationships among energy, aesthetics, and culture both in the emerging

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academic field of energy humanities and in the increasing number of literary works that have begun to treat energy—specifically, oil—as a topic. The problem of how contemporary organizations of power shape knowledge also drives Yves Citton’s analysis of how the added complexity of the computing machine has recast traditional dichotomies between literature and science, showing both new convergences and new divergences between literature and science. In Chapter 6, he takes us into the programmed world we have always inhabited but not recognized as such to introduce us not to the horror of the matrix, but to the everyday mediation of refracted experience as well as the shifting relations between literature and science as technological and political structures reconfigure over the course of twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In closing his anatomy of shifting knowledge structures that follow on the changing relation between literature, science, and computing, Citton returns to Vilém Flusser’s sanguine proclamation of how the advent of mechanized computing has liberated numbers from letters and unleashed a “visionary power” through which “science presents itself as an art form and art as a source of scientific knowledge” with cautious optimism. Caution because the near half-century that has elapsed since Flusser’s observation has not fully liberated the imagination from the deadening machine of financial capitalism, but optimism because the human imagination, manifested variously in such figures as artists, scientists, and hackers, rebels against “the pre-programmed ends of financial profit” and seeks instead its ends in life itself. The ways that contemporary organizations of power are shaped by the literary and scientific methodologies also inform Scott Selisker’s argument that behaviorism—a psychology of the mind—was an especially powerful ­illustration of that contemplation. “Behaviorism and Literary Culture” chronicles how the sciences of behaviorism influenced literary culture in two often competing ways: in its influence on the quest for a scientific literary criticism, which found its most influential expression in the methodology of close ­reading, and in its adoption by speculative fiction in the form of the dominant theme of mind control. Selisker’s Chapter 7 illustrates the intertwined ­influences of science, literature, and literary criticism on how as well as what we read. Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics arguably represents the consummate epistemological conjunction between science and literature in the narrative harnessing of life itself through which it constellates a population and facilitates certain forms of governance. If there is a literary aspect to biopolitics, then literary works might offer particular insight into its constitution. That assumption informs Dana Seitler’s Chapter 8. Noting the structural inequities implicit in biopolitics, Seitler considers the variable experiences not only of biopolitics but of life in her reading of the treatment of suicide as allegory and critique in novels at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Arguing against the pathologizing and medicalizing of

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suicide in these novels, she reads it as an imaginative act—a fundamentally distinct epistemology—that challenges the conceptions of life emanating from the narrative of biopolitics. The investigation of how power in our own cultural moment— petroculture, computing, biopolitics—shapes scientific and literary knowledge production doesn’t only delineate how power operates through knowledge. Each also explores ethical responses that might reroute contemporary organizations of power. Lamenting, with Latour, the consequences of the hardening of disciplinary boundaries since at least the mid-nineteenth century, Bishnupriya Ghosh returns to Mary Shelley for her insight into the danger of pursuing science in the absence of philosophy. In Chapter 9, she traces Shelley’s legacy in the emerging academic fields and subfields that are harnessing the conjoined imaginative power of science and literature. Drawing on Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction as an example, she concludes with a reminder of the importance of attending to how readily today’s fiction bleeds into tomorrow’s reality. In Chapter 10, Emily Coit traces the fall of the protagonist, a microscopist who gains fame through a satire of popular science, in “The Descent of Man” to show the convergence of literature and science in the power of the word. Coit considers Edith Wharton in the context of a group of prominent intellectuals of the moment—many her friends—who were grappling with what the lessons of biology and linguistics were revealing about the past and what, in turn, they predicted about the fate of civilization.

Methods and Approaches The chapters in this section focus on how the intersection of science and literature produces new methods or approaches either to the history of science, to literary and cultural criticism, or to both. While methods and approaches suggest epistemology—hence there is considerable overlap with the chapters in the epistemologies section—these chapters focus more specifically on how one side of the science and literature equation might challenge the disciplinary practices or categories of the other as well as how literature and science variously impact the world. The rise of the research university at the turn of the twentieth century derived from as it contributed to the rising prestige of science and the scientific method. Todd Carmody documents the influence of that turn on literary criticism, itself an emerging discipline, in Chapter 11, showing how literary critics turned to science as a model for how they might establish their expertise and prestige. But that turn, he suggests, had surprising consequences, notably the emergence of the third branch: social science. Thereby establishing an important but overlooked corollary between reading texts and reading the world, he offers a new framework through which to understand such

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institutional events as the culture wars and the contemporary challenge to the importance of humanities scholarship. While that challenge has received considerable attention since the turn of the twenty-first century, the previous three decades have also witnessed a growing awareness among scientists and policy analysts of the important contribution literary and cultural critical works and the approaches they inspire can make to the study of science as well as to science policy and ethics. Several of the chapters in this section explore that turn. In Chapter 12, Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King chronicle their participation in a ­multi-disciplinary policy initiative concerning genetic policy funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Showing how recent changes in the way health policy is formulated have opened new opportunities for humanities scholars, they describe how they used literary and cultural works and the methods of literary and cultural criticism to demonstrate the human—and communal—dimensions entailed in decisions concerning genetic research and personal privacy. Science fiction in particular lends itself to these efforts because of its emergence as an engagement with the impact of science and technology on social and geopolitical relations. As SF critics have noted, it is an intrinsically critical genre. Rebecca Wilbanks documents the long-standing demand for science fiction “to do rather than teach…to bring about or ward off real-world states of affairs” in Chapter 13. She calls the works explicitly responding to this mandate “incantatory” because of their authors’ faith in the power of literature—of science fiction in particular—to impact the world. Tracing this faith to “an evolving relationship between SF and the tradition of foresight practices or futurology that dates back to the mid-twentieth century”—when, in fact, science fiction emerged as a mass-produced genre—she shows how incantatory fictions restore some of the techno-scientific optimism of an earlier moment while, at the same time, they are tempered by the darker, more critical turn the genre took after its Golden Age. Wilbanks herself expresses faith in the salutary effect this sub-genre can have both on the genre as a whole and on the culture in which it is being summoned to intervene. For Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth, that impact comes from readers’ engagement with SF. While literary critics are among the readers they consider in Chapter 14, Chambers and Garforth are interested in the wide array of approaches to fiction—in particular, to science fiction—for what it can reveal about the power of the genre and, conversely, about the readers themselves. The genre allows readers to consider both the strange world science fiction readers encounter and the ways that experience helps them recognize and negotiate the strangeness of their own worlds. In the way science fiction stages the encounter between science and literature, it offers readers a useful way of making sense of the changes that attend rapid developments of science and technology and of the world it is registering as well as the one it is ­helping to create.

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If literary works can facilitate the process of negotiating the strangeness of a rapidly transforming world, it is in part because they can offer insight into scientific methods and approaches—perhaps, in the process, opening up new areas of inquiry. That is the focus of three of the chapters in this section. In Chapter 15, Joseph Fitzpatrick explores the attraction of linguistic theories—in particular, of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures human thought and experience—for science fiction. Although he is interested, in this chapter, in why that thesis has such purchase for science fiction, his focus is on what science fiction contributes to a largely discredited linguistic theory. Drawing mainly on Babel17, he shows both why the subject of language—and translatability—appeals to authors exploring strange alien encounters and the power and urgency of communication, and how science fiction gives material form and cultural context to linguistic theory, thereby drawing out the insightful creativity and the ideological underpinnings of the hypothesis. Mutual borrowings between science and literary criticism are also the subject of Avery Slater’s chapter, in which she documents the journey of the term “autopoiesis”—the process by which a system reproduces and maintains itself—from its emergence in theoretical biology in 1970 through systems theory to literary theory and cultural criticism. Chapter 16 considers the appeal of that concept but also the wonderful irony, as Slater puts it, that the literary and cultural critics are not so much borrowing the term as “borrowing it back.” In her analysis of the strange history of the term and concept— which, she contends, began in a philosophical treatment of Don Quixote, mutated in its adoption by scientists, and returned to open new modes of inquiry in literary and cultural criticism―Slater illustrates the methodological similarities and differences between literary critical and scientific inquiry, but also the ways in which through their borrowings and reborrowings, they anatomize and expand each other. Such borrowings make sense, according to Robert Peckham, because of the literariness of science, although that literariness is typically obscured by scientific claims to authority. In Chapter 17, Peckham shows how the use of sound in three works focusing on pandemics and biological containment offers insight into how our senses—in particular, visual and sonic—constitute our experience of the world. With his focus on the sonic, Peckham demonstrates the intrinsic politics of these ways of knowing. But he is interested as well in how the sonic can challenge the visual authority of epidemiology, and science generally, showing, for example, how it exacerbates the social and geopolitical inequities pandemics inevitably underscore. The literariness of these fiction and non-fiction works demands a reading of the “critical dissonances” produced by the scientific approach to these problems and offers insight into possibilities for a multi-factorial approach to pandemics that can potentially address them more effectively and reduce their augmentation of inequities.

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The final two chapters in this section focus on two poets’ treatment of science and medicine as ways of making them more accessible to a broader readership, as a way of exploring their complexity (Jay Wright) or offering a critique of their assumptions (Max Ritvo). In Chapter 18, Steven Meyer chronicles the parallel development of experimental ideas pertaining to science and poetry. Jay Wright’s engagement with philosophy and physics, he contends, finds expression in poetic experimentation that juxtaposes “multiple symbolic discourses,” including physics, to simulate “a pluralistic cosmos.” This experiential poetics allows readers to grapple with complex scientific concepts. Where Wright is interested in how these scientific ideas open the world to a more engaged inspection for a public unfamiliar with and perhaps intimidated by the complexity of the ideas, Max Ritvo’s interest was in publicizing his experience of genetics and scientific medicine for what it revealed about assumptions he sought to challenge. In Chapter 19, Lara Choksey shows how Ritvo turns his medical diagnosis, his treatment, and his dying into a poetic meditation that explores assumptions about the discrete and unique—and isolated―body that at once determine and are reinforced by scientific medicine. Considering how Ritvo’s poetry dissects as it engages with the contemporary concept of precision medicine, Choksey shows how Ritvo thereby offers an account of the human condition—and the value of the human community―that challenges the very premise of contemporary medicine.

Ethics and Politics The chapters in this section are concerned with the ways in which literary works address the ethical and political questions that arise out of scientific research. They are interested in how literary works speculate about the broad implications of the social and cultural changes wrought by new sciences and technologies as well as in the difficulty of responding adequately to uncomfortable or politically inconvenient scientific knowledge. Taken together, these chapters offer insight into the nature of literary works, their differences from other forms of inquiry, and the various ways these works circulate in and intervene against the social realities in which they were produced. Jenni G. Halpin takes up the quintessential literary template for thinking through the relationship between scientific discovery and social consequences, the Faust myth, in Chapter 20. In 1932, before the Manhattan Project provided the ultimate case study for scientific ethics, friends and students of Niels Bohr produced a play, written by Max Delbrück, called “The Blegdamsvej Faust” as part of a variety show traditionally held at an annual Copenhagen conference. The play reimagines the debates between Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli over the existence of the neutrino as the conflict between the Lord and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Halpin navigates the Blegdamsvej Faust along two parallel axes, simultaneously understanding it as a student roast of the habits and mannerisms of their teachers but also as

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a sublimated articulation of the tensions fracturing the physics community at that time—in the process presaging all the joys and terrors twentieth-century atomic science would unleash. In Chapter 21, Coleman Nye considers a contemporary Faust-style bargain between science and social progress in a study of in vitro flesh, which would allow for widespread meat consumption without requiring the raising or slaughtering of livestock. Artificial meat has been variously served as a marker of utopian futurity (as with the cruelty-free replicators of Star Trek: The Next Generation) as well as dystopian possibility and hypercapitalist global impoverishment (as in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy). Nye’s study explores multiple vectors of fictionality and journalistic reportage to explore how the concept of a future of in vitro meat is being “sold” to customers in the present by activating existing circuits of racial and social capital. In these transactions/exchanges, the power of agrocapitalist megacorporations extends to an entirely new market that will give them even more direct control over everything we consume. Sherryl Vint’s Chapter 22 similarly explores the extraction of value from life itself through her reading of contemporary science fictions about biocapitalism and biotechnology. Her reading of Carrola Dibbel’s The Only Ones (2015) and Ben H. Winter’s Underground Airlines (2016) shows how literary works can register and agitate against the massive social changes produced by scientific discovery, in this case the way biocapital’s ecstatic promises of life extension and genetic perfection obscure the more sinister intensification of corporate wealth and social control. Science, we see in these novels, is never science by itself, but is always imbricated in existing networks of power—a reality that literature can help us understand and strategically assess/address. Natalie Roxburgh explores a similar circuit between science, capitalism, and the consumer in her study of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-firstcentury American literary “neuronovels” about psychopharmacology. Chapter 23 interrogates the way Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen frame psychiatry as a potentially suspect pseudoscience whose trademark drugs threaten to flatten individual subjectivity into homogenized, universalized brain chemistry. “Pharmaceuticals offer useful fodder for contemporary fiction,” Roxburgh says, “because they are somewhere between science and technology, substances for treating an ailment and products manufactured according to a market demand resulting from the transformation of patients into consumers”—which the novels problematize through their figuration of psychopharmaceuticals as potentially fraudulent, potentially addictive, potentially harmful, and potentially life-saving. The novels pit neoliberal market imperatives against medical ethics and find both compromised when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry. In Chapter 24, Kyla Schuller explores a historical instance of a political crisis caused by science and registered by literary history: the promulgation of racist and eugenic ideals by some of Anglo-American literature’s most

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revered and celebrated writers. Here we find literature working not against science, as some heroic exemplar of “resistance,” but rather extending the most pernicious version of what circulated as knowledge. Schuller finds this “eugenic aesthetics” in literature not simply in the content of these works, but in their very form, which sought to “improve” its own readers toward some pseudo-evolutionary reproductive ideal. And the way these writers aligned their own reception with the health of the social organism is no mere historical oddity; as Schuller shows in her conclusion, it has an unhappy parallel in contemporary defenses of the humanities that insist on the power of high-prestige artistic objects from the Western tradition as an allegedly “civilizing force.” Everett Hamner’s Chapter 25 reads three of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novels—New York 2140 (2017), 2312 (2012), and especially Aurora (2015)—as meditations on the crisis of political optimism in an era of mass extinction and climate disaster. Robinson’s well-known utopian thinking is here tempered by a Gramscian pessimism of the intellect, growing angry without also becoming despondent, and calling for long-term, intergenerational action to remediate the ecological crises caused by technoscience in the twentieth century. Hamner uses Robinson’s science fiction to link difficult political action in the present to the prospect of a better future, albeit one that can fully never escape the mistakes of the past (or, for that matter, cannot avoid making its own, new mistakes). Chris Pak’s Chapter 26 offers an extended reading of oil and energy infrastructure systems in the science fiction genre, focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century figurations of petrocapitalism. In a time when the workings of oil capitalism are so ubiquitous as to seem nearly invisible, almost synonymous with modernity as such, how has literature attempted to register its presence and its consequences, as well as the ongoing geopolitical disruptions caused by the bottomless need to extract more oil from the ground? Pak discusses stories from as early as 1933 and as late as 2011, which figure oil simultaneously as incredible resource and enormous vulnerability, a diagnosis that only becomes more frantic and severe as the Western world’s reliance on oil grows both more unshakable and more precarious. As Pak shows, the cultural anxiety around oil ultimately turns this mode of storytelling to representations of oil as possessing its own agency, almost as a sinister Lovecraftian God, intruding on the human world—a figuration which helps us recognize the true enormity of petroculture’s radical break with the preoil, pre-carbon past. In Chapter 27, Sofia Ahlberg similarly turns to the emerging genre of the “New Weird,” linking Jeff VanderMeer’s fantasy of a toxified exclusion zone, abandoned by and dangerous to humans, to the radical transformations of real-life ecologies produced by global warming and by industrial catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon spill. Ahlberg argues that it is VanderMeer’s consideration of permeable boundaries and liminal spaces—metaphorized in the novel by skin—that helps the reader of the Area X books to push past an

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overly rationalist, anthropocentric approach to the environment that assumes the exceptionality of human beings in favor of ways of knowing that foreground the interconnectedness of life. Skin, Ahlberg argues, is the point of contact between us and a world that is both us and not-us, an assemblage of connections between inside and outside that can reorient our thinking, not only in VanderMeer’s storyworld but in our larger time of crisis. Finally, Jeff Gonzalez’s Chapter 28 uses Richard Powers’ Gain as the occasion to cognitively map the complex relationships among illness, masculinity, the environment, and biocapitalism. As Gonzalez notes, the frequent rhetorical attribution to cancer of a sort of malicious agential consciousness has a parallel in conspiratorial narratives about evil corporations—and lets us rethink the role of the consumer-citizen in resistance to both of these hostile alien agents. Powers thus ultimately suggests that we must think about the relationship between humans and megacorporations the way Ahlberg argued we must think about ecosystems, with the same sort of polyvalent, promiscuous mixing between insides and outsides that makes it hard to know where one begins and the other ends.

Forms and Genres The chapters in this final cluster concern how science has changed literary forms and genres as well as, conversely, the ways in which literary works have challenged scientific categories and classifications. While these challenges certainly produce epistemological transformation, lead to new techniques or methods of analysis, and/or address ethical and political concerns, the focus of these chapters is on how the literary critical vocabularies of form and genre make boundary-crossing itself more visible. These chapters explore how ways in which the ongoing, multi-generational dialogue between science and literature is constantly producing new innovations in both fields of inquiry. In Chapter 29, Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr considers how scientific and medical science structured two American plays of the progressive era in the early twentieth century. Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors (1921) and Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack (1934) consider genetics and epidemiology, respectively; considered from the perspective of a century hence, the two plays together show how robust our habits of dramatizing scientific discovery still are, as well as how assumptions about science and gender shape historical narratives. S.H. Daw’s Chapter 30 examines Muriel Rukeyser’s manifesto The Art of Poetry in light of the development of quantum physics, showing how she seeks to “forge a new poetics responsive to this new scientific field.” Rukeyser’s combination of cutting-edge science with a reach back to the Transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century creates a new field for poetics appropriate to the governing epistemology of the twentieth century, an achievement for which Rukeyser has not received sufficient appreciation due to appropriative erasure of her work by some of her male contemporaries.

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A different sort of look back at the nineteenth century can be found in Josie Gill’s Chapter 31, which seeks to understand how neo-Victorian novels (contemporary novels that are set in the Victorian period or which seek to reimagine or reinterpret classic Victorian literature) deal with the horrifically out-of-date racial presumptions of the era. The neo-Victorian novels seek to emphasize the poisonous nature of race thinking in science. While these neo-Victorian dramas seek to challenge the Victorians as well as the eugenic, pseudo-scientific “race realism” that was emerging in that time, the requirements of Victorianism as a historical genre made it difficult for these novels to ever fully break away from the racist presumptions of that period (or our own). In Chapter 32, Michael Collins looks at the intertwined history of race, anti-racist activism, and IQ, showing how W.E.B. Du Bois deployed IQ testing as part of his larger project of education and enlightenment, in the name “of black survival within a racist world.” Du Bois, Collins argues, was no more able to speak back to “scientific authority” than any of us, and so was forced to maneuver within the epistemic terrain defined by the state’s embrace of IQ rather than refusing or transcending it. Posed and validated by the proper authorities, “I.Q. becomes an intractable and sprawling ‘fact’ everywhere that thought occurs”—forcing even Du Bois to accept its authority if he wants to be heard by the cultural elite of his moment. Lindsay Michael Banco, in Chapter 33, considers the representation of the atomic bomb in comic books, exploring the ways nonfictional and historical comics try to represent the history of nuclear science. In particular Banco explores the antinuclear politics of such graphic narratives—always inflected by the retrospective, post-Hiroshima knowledge of the bomb as an epoch-defining horror—against the more complex history of the actually existing Manhattan Project. Because comics is an art form that always foregrounds its own artificiality and constructedness, Banco argues, they help us to see the constructedness of scientific narratives, as well as create an intervention point from which the possibility of other, nonnuclear worlds might emerge. Lorenzo Servitje’s Chapter 34 uses comics in a similar fashion to explore a potential future of antibiotic-resistant microbes, serving as both warning and education about a science-fictional nightmare that is rapidly becoming our actual present. Servtje’s interdisciplinary approach foregrounds the difficulty in accepting the enormity of antibiotic resistance, even as it becomes an increasingly important part of contemporary medical practices. The comic strip deploys an aesthetic of cognitive estrangement to help readers understand both the enormous threat posed by such antibiotic resistant microbes as well as the historical and political-economic forces of austerity and ­impoverishment that are facilitating their rise. Nathaniel Isaacson’s Chapter 35 explores the usefulness of this volume’s union to area studies, considering the use of robots and other artificial lifeforms in recent Chinese-language film. Isaacson’s study explores how the

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local use of robots in post-socialist Sinophone nations intersects with global concerns about automation, technoscience, and global capitalism. In Chapter 36, Carlos Rojas introduces the “sick man of Asia” trope in Chinese literature, which uses medical discourse to diagnose social anxieties in China’s relation to the West. Analyzing the Taiwanese narrator of Luo Yijun’s novel Superman Kuong, Rojas argues that the sick man trope can be generative of identity and nationalist feeling, in this case as Luo’s novel explores Taipei’s contemporary relationship to multiple imperial formations. Finally, Lindsay Thomas’s Chapter 37 uses quantitative analysis to model the connections between characters in extremely lengthy prose narratives, attempting to merge scientific and literary heuristics to produce a new sort of criticism. Thomas playfully refers to her chapter as an experiment leading to the development of a hypothesis, which is that character co-occurrence (“the average number of times any given character name appears with another character name in a 1,000-word slice of the novel”) can serve as a proxy for the length and complexity of a novel. In its articulation of a tendency across novels as well as its discovery of an interesting outlier (Marlon James’s 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, which contains an unusually high co-occurrence index for a novel of its size), Thomas’s method models how quantitative, data science-oriented approaches to literature can help us uncover new literary truths. *** In view of Latour’s timely reminder that arts and theory should bring us closer to the facts, the critical project of Arnold’s “belles lettres” remains very much the same, and very much coincident with contemporary scientific practice. For, as Latour (2004) insists, and as this collection shows, the cultural critic “is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles… not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (246). A manufactured culture war between the arts and sciences is certainly not to blame for today’s ugly post-truth moment, but their continued coalition is the essential arsenal needed in the wake of our growing global crises, including climate change, structural racism, rapidly expanding income inequality, and the COVID-19 pandemic that is ongoing at the time of this publication. It is just such a collaborative gathering space that our volume has assembled.

Note 1. For an account of mid-twentieth-century molecular biology and its development alongside emerging computation technologies and information theory, see Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford University Press, 2000). Notably, Kay challenges the metaphor of gene as code because, among other things, “technically speaking it is not a code” (6).

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References Arnold, Matthew. 1882. Literature and Science. Nineteenth Century XII (August): 216–230. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farooq, Nihad. 2016. Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the Americas, 1830–1940. New York: New York University Press. Goldstein, Amanda Jo. 2017. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Hayles, Katherine. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herndl, Diane Price. 2005. Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies. PMLA 120 (2): 593–598. Huxley, T. H. (1880) 1893. Science and Culture. In Science and Education: Essays, 140. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Klugman, Craig, and Erin Gentry Lamb. 2019. Introduction: Raising the Health Humanities. In Research Methods in Health Humanities, ed. Craig Klugman and Erin Gentry Lamb, 1–11. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248. Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Freedom and Empiricism in Early African American Culture. New York: NY University Press. Snow, C.P. (1959) 2012. The Two Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wellmann, Janina. 2017. The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830. New York: Zone Books.

PART I

Epistemologies

CHAPTER 2

Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission Kurt Beals

One of the central questions addressed in scholarship on literature and ­science concerns the two fields’ respective claims to knowledge—particularly the (coequal? complementary? critical? dependent? parasitic? reciprocal?) relationship of literary to scientific knowledge.1 In recent decades, German scholars such as Joseph Vogl and Jochen Hörisch have argued for a “poetology of knowledge” or a “knowledge of literature.”2 The former focuses on the function of (literary and other modes of) representation in the production of (scientific and other forms of) knowledge. The latter examines the various ways in which literature not only receives and reflects upon scientific developments, but also constitutes its own form of knowledge—one that is not always separated by clearly defined boundaries from the forms of knowledge associated with science. Vogl builds on Gilles Deleuze’s assertion in his work on Michel Foucault—“Science and poetry are equal forms of knowledge” (Deleuze 1988, 20)—and thus distinguishes between a “history of knowledge” (“Geschichte des Wissens”) and a “history of science” (“Geschichte der Wissenschaft”), arguing that “knowledge is transmitted via various forms and modes of expression and appears in equal measure, for instance, in a literary text, in a scientific experiment, in a prescription or in an everyday sentence” (Vogl 1999, 10–14).3 From this perspective, the processes and products of modern science appear as one form of knowledge among others, rather than as a privileged or paradigmatic locus of knowledge as such. To be sure, these claims have not been without their critics4; nevertheless, they K. Beals (*)  Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_2

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have been instrumental in the development of approaches to literary study that consider how literature participates in cultures and practices of knowledge that overlap or intersect with those of the natural sciences. The present chapter draws on these developments to examine the intersection of scientific and literary/artistic forms of knowledge with respect to twentieth-century lunar exploration. The example of the moon is particularly revealing because it illustrates the complex and interdependent relationships between literature and science. Indeed, the history of knowledge(s) of the moon is illuminating in part because it demonstrates precisely how difficult it can be at times to distinguish between literary and scientific knowledge; decisive events in the history of human knowledge of the moon frequently occur along the boundary between the two.5 As the German literary scholar Hans Krah has argued, theoretical advances in the early twentieth century not only brought rocket-based space travel within the realm of technological possibility, but also and consequently transformed space travel from an object of literary imagination into one of mathematical calculation: “Something becomes science which was previously (already) literary utopia” (Krah 2002, 113–117).6 As this example demonstrates, a given object may cross or bridge the divide between literary and scientific forms of knowledge, and developments within one of these disciplines may have consequences in the other. On the one hand, space exploration was a staple of literature long before it became a reality, and some literary fantasies proved so compelling that they were even cited in support of scientific proposals; in these moments, literature took the lead (Krah 2002, 120). On the other hand, once scientists began to speculate in earnest about the possibility of space travel, and to take decisive steps toward its realization, literary representations of the moon and of lunar travel inevitably adapted to this new reality. Given that the moon had enjoyed a prominent position in literature long before the advent of space travel, it is hardly surprising that the prospect and eventual realization of a manned mission to the lunar surface profoundly impacted subsequent literary representations of the moon, influencing what stories could be told and what symbolic value this heavenly body would henceforth hold. But literature is not the only field of knowledge that spins its objects into stories and symbols; science tells its own stories, and these narratives become all the more important when the aims of science are bound up with those of high-stakes geopolitics. If twentieth-century technological innovations transformed the exploration of space, and of the moon in particular, from a literary fantasy into a scientific reality, that reality was in turn (and continues to be) woven into literary, scientific, and political story lines about human potential, global unity, and/or national (Soviet, American, or more recently Chinese7) superiority. Even as the advent of real lunar exploration altered the symbolic value of the moon in literary texts, the literary reception of this event offered an alternative view of these scientific developments, showing how the moon landing could be reassessed from the standpoint of aesthetic tradition.

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Needless to say, the history of knowledge(s) of the moon—ranging from Romantic poetry to twentieth-century science-fiction novels and films, and from ancient mythology, religion, and astrology to modern lunar missions—is far too extensive to even outline in a brief chapter. A great deal of work has been done on the literature and science of the moon in earlier eras, which this chapter. can only address in passing. In particular, the pioneering work of Marjorie Hope Nicolson in the mid-twentieth century demonstrated clearly the impact of early modern astronomy on literature, laying the foundation for much subsequent work in the field of science and literature, and showing that the rapid and dramatic transformations in the scientific understanding of the moon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exerted a particularly pronounced effect on literature: “there is an awareness, both in prose and poetry, of the new moon of science – an awareness which grows gradually through a more realistic description reflecting the scientific discoveries of the day” (Nicolson 1936, 11).8 But whereas Nicolson’s work describes a primarily unidirectional influence of science upon literature, finding the “real source of a new literary genre” in “the ‘new astronomy’ of the early seventeenth century,” my aim will be to show how the lunar landing takes on a different significance when it is viewed within the framework of literary knowledge, and specifically as part of a history of mediation (Nicolson 1948, 22). This article will also bring the focus closer to the present, considering how lunar exploration was imagined, and later reflected, in a few representative works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the transformations that took place in literature as lunar travel became first a realistic possibility, and then a reality. Beginning with Goethe’s poem “To the Rising Full Moon,” I will argue that the literary trope of the moon as an object of unrequited longing is replaced in the twentieth century by representations of the moon as an object that can be reached, but only by means of technological mediation. If the scientific aspiration to reach the moon was inspired at least in part by a long tradition of literary longing, the achievement of that goal would in turn be reflected in literature. But rather than a conclusive fulfillment of longing, the literary and artistic representations considered here replace the distance of miles with the distance of mediation, showing the moon as an object that remains just out of reach. After considering literary representations of the moon from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jules Verne, and Italo Calvino, this chapter will concentrate on a multimedia project by the German poet and artist Ferdinand Kriwet concerned with the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. While the earlier depictions considered here present the moon as an object of longing accessible only through mediation, the first manned moon landing was frequently touted as the overcoming of mediation, the final arrival of human explorers at their longed-for destination. Kriwet, however, subverts this narrative by representing the moon landing as a quintessentially mediated experience for readers, listeners, and viewers back on earth. In doing so, he implicitly invokes timeworn literary tropes to challenge the images of

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scientific and geopolitical triumph that accompanied media coverage of the event. Kriwet’s multimedia project thus engages simultaneously with scientific and literary forms of knowledge, placing them in conversation with one another, while implying that the moon’s literary status as an object of longing may not be exhausted by its scientific conquest, after all. Since Ferdinand Kriwet largely faded into obscurity after abandoning the art scene in 1975, and has only recently enjoyed renewed attention, a brief overview of his life and work may provide useful background for the discussion of his works below. Born in Düsseldorf in 1942, Kriwet was something of a prodigy; he published his first poems by the age of 14, and took a particular interest in modernist writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett. By the time he was 18, Kriwet had either met or corresponded with some of the most innovative German-language poets of his day, including Paul Celan, Max Bense, Helmut Heißenbüttel, and Franz Mon. Kriwet’s early poems clearly reflect the influence of these writers, and particularly of the Concrete poets.9 But his work is especially notable for the wide range of media that it employs. Inspired by the media theories of Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and others, Kriwet sought new modes of literary and artistic production that went beyond the limits of the conventional printed book. Working across media, he produced vinyl records, radio Hörtexte (audio texts, a term that Kriwet preferred to Hörspiel, or radio play), films, and text-based art designed for display in galleries and public spaces, such as Rundscheiben (poems in circular form) and a lesewald (a “forest” of text, inspired by Litfaßsäulen, the poster-covered pillars common in German cities). A central feature of many of these works was Kriwet’s interest in media as such, diverse semiotic systems, and the materiality of signifiers. In 1969, Kriwet had the opportunity to apply his mixed media program to one of the largest media events of the century: the Apollo 11 moon landing. Klaus Schöning, the director of the Hörspielstudio (radio play studio) at the radio station WDR3, commissioned a project for radio from Kriwet, and also put him in touch with Suhrkamp Verlag, which would publish the book Apollo Amerika. In order to realize his multimedia project, Kriwet traveled to New York, where he collected print materials and made recordings of American radio and television broadcasts. Aside from the fact that West Germany at the time did not offer the same variety or the same sheer number of radio and television stations as the United States, Kriwet’s visit allowed him to record the triumphant, patriotic rhetoric of the first country to place a man on the moon, and to investigate the function of the moon mission in the context of American media culture. As Helmut Heißenbüttel later observed, “Kriwet himself said that for him America speaks with the voice of its television” (Heißenbüttel 1983, 115). While the actual Apollo 11 mission can be seen as a quest for immediacy—for physical contact with the distant moon— Kriwet’s Apollo works focus their attention instead on the heavily mediated nature of the event. Kriwet’s project casts the moon in a new light: rather

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than an object of longing, or even of scientific knowledge, Kriwet’s moon is the subject of a media obsession, a spectacle that nearly eclipses the moon itself.

The Moon from Afar: From Goethe to Verne Let us begin with longing. Among the many symbolic attributes that have accrued to the moon in the Western literary tradition is a recurrent, though not always flattering, association with (generally female) love objects.10 As Michael Ferber writes, “Virginity or chastity is frequently attributed to the moon, partly through its connection with virgin goddesses and partly because its light is cold. […] The moon’s continually changing phases led to its association with mutability, metamorphosis, inconstancy, or fickleness” (2007). While these attributes are equivocal at best, they nonetheless demonstrate a clear parallel between the unattainable moon—“comfortingly familiar yet achingly distant,” as David Cressy has recently put it—and more mundane, human objects of desire (2016, 45). Indeed, in many works the moon either explicitly embodies the love object, or provides a visual link to the far-off beloved—or sometimes both. One instance of this association of the moon with love and longing surfaces in the classical era of German literature, in Goethe’s 1828 poem “To the Rising Full Moon” (“Dem aufgehenden Vollmonde”): Wouldst thou make such haste to leave me? Even now thou wast so near! Massing clouds surround, enwreathe thee, ’Til no trace of thee is here. Shouldst thou see me, though, so gloomy, Up thy light would climb, a star! Proof that I am loved yet, truly, Though that love remain afar. Onward, then! grow bright and brighter! Shine with all thy glorious light! Let my aching heart beat lighter, Oh, how blessed is the night.11

The moon in Goethe’s poem is the object that links the poet to his far-off beloved; gazing at the moon, the poet is reminded that she still loves him despite their distance. But the moon is also identified with or even as the beloved—the poet addresses the moon itself with the informal “thou” (“du”) and reproaches it for its hasty withdrawal. The line “Proof that I am loved yet, truly” (“Zeugest mir, daß ich geliebt bin”)—literally, “[You] show me that I am loved”—notably leaves the agent position unoccupied, allowing it to be filled either by the beloved or by the moon. Like the beloved, the moon

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is characterized in this poem above all by its distance from the poet, and by the poet’s desire to replace its absence with presence; indeed, it is far from clear that the beloved is anything other than the moon itself. Goethe’s poem thus presents the moon as an object of desire, but one that is defined by its distance, by the impossibility of contact. Of course, the distant, unreachable moon was an empirical fact of the early nineteenth century, but as the prospect of lunar exploration came closer to reality, the symbolic position occupied by the moon in literature began to shift as well. Steps in this direction can be observed in Jules Verne’s novels From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune, 1865) and Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune, 1870).12 These two books exemplify the transition that Krah describes with respect to space travel in general: rather than a permanently unbridgeable ontological distinction, the distance that separates the earth and the moon is treated in these novels as a mere engineering problem. While Verne was hardly the first author to explore the possibility of a lunar voyage—Lucian, for one, had done so in the second century CE, while Cyrano de Bergerac, Francis Godwin, Johannes Kepler, and John Wilkins, among others, had followed suit in the first half of the seventeenth century13—the extensive technical descriptions in Verne’s novels of the preparations for the journey support Krah’s argument for a qualitative change in such fictions around this time, bringing practical problems to the fore. In From the Earth to the Moon, a man named Impey Barbicane, president of the Baltimore Gun Club, proposes that the superfluous production capacity remaining after the end of the American Civil War be applied to the construction of a cannon capable of firing a manned projectile all the way to the moon. Barbicane specifically cites the desire for unmediated contact with this unmistakably gendered object: ‘The moon, gentlemen, has been carefully studied,’ continued Barbicane; ‘her mass, density, and weight; her constitution, motions, distance, as well as her place in the solar system, have all been exactly determined. […] Photography has given us proofs of the incomparable beauty of our satellite; in short, all is known regarding the moon which mathematical science, astronomy, geology, and optics can learn about her. But up to the present moment no direct communication has been established with her. (Verne 1874, 12)

As this passage indicates, the desire to supplement or supplant the scientific observations made from earth by making immediate contact with the moon itself is central to these two novels. Indeed, the first book contains extensive descriptions of the technologies devised to decrease, either virtually or actually, the distance between the moon and its human observers: the telescopes that make the moon appear closer, and the cannon that will fire a projectile to (hopefully) carry men to the moon. This desire is further exaggerated when a second participant in the mission, the French poet and dilettante Michel Ardan, hyperbolically expresses the wish to conquer not only the distance between the earth and the moon, but distance as such:

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‘Distance is but a relative expression, and must end by being reduced to zero.’ […] ‘Distance is but an empty name; distance does not really exist!’ And overcome by the energy of his movements, he nearly fell from the platform to the ground. He just escaped a severe fall, which would have proved to him that distance was by no means an empty name. (Verne 1874, 94–95)

The literary problem of the moon’s vast distance from the earth is reimagined here as a scientific or technological problem; Ardan’s ardent hope is that advances in science and technology will allow the inhabitants of the earth to experience “the incomparable beauty of our satellite” close at hand. But as the narrator’s ironic commentary suggests, this definitive overcoming of distance is precisely what does not happen in the novel. Despite the book’s title, at the end of From the Earth to the Moon the lunar capsule has only recently been launched into space; the fate of this journey still hangs in the balance. Even in the sequel, Around the Moon, the voyagers circle the moon but never set foot upon it. Here, too, technologies of mediation play a strikingly prominent role. As the voyagers near the moon, Verne writes: “The distance which then separated the projectile from the satellite was estimated at about two hundred leagues. Under these conditions, as regards the visibility of the details of the disc, the travellers were farther from the moon than are the inhabitants of earth with their powerful telescopes” (Verne 1874, 228). But then they draw even closer: Could they close their eyes when so near this new world? No! All their feelings were concentrated in one single thought:— See! Representatives of the earth, of humanity, past and present, all centred in them! It is through their eyes that the human race look at these lunar regions, and penetrate the secrets of their satellite! A strange emotion filled their hearts as they went from one window to the other. Their observations, reproduced by Barbicane, were rigidly determined. To take them, they had glasses; to correct them, maps. (Verne 1874, 230)

This passage plunges the reader into a maelstrom of mediation. The voyagers are closer to the moon than any human has ever been, yet still far enough that optical instruments are required to view its surface with precision, and their observations are subsequently corrected by reference to maps drawn based on previous, earthbound observations. Still more striking, at this moment the voyagers themselves become optical instruments: “It is through their eyes that the human race look at these lunar regions.” Rather than the satisfaction of a human foot stepping onto the lunar surface, this scene foregrounds and intensifies the act of looking, the fixation on the moon as an object of visual fascination that remains out of reach. What we do not see in either of Verne’s novels is the fulfillment of the desires expressed by Barbicane or Ardan for “direct communication” with the moon, or distance “reduced

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to zero.” Indeed, this might be understood as the implicit thesis of the two books: efforts to bridge distance must necessarily employ forms of mediation that do not disappear when they have served their purpose; mediation itself is the true content of any longing for the distant and unattainable.

The Moon Up Close: Kriwet’s Apollo Project A century later, the reality on the ground, and in the sky, looked rather different. After the Soviet Union succeeded in landing the Luna 2 on the moon on September 13, 1959, and the United States followed suit with the less than fully successful Ranger 4 in 1962, John F. Kennedy made explicit America’s mission to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Against this background, the Italian author Italo Calvino published his 1965 story “The Distance of the Moon,” in which he imagined that the moon had once been so close to the earth that it could be reached by a flying leap from the top of a ladder, but had gradually begun to drift away. One character in Calvino’s story, a young man, falls in love with the moon, while another, a woman who loves him, chooses to stay on the moon as it recedes from the earth, so that the young man will forever identify her with the true object of his desire. Here Calvino performs a clever inversion of the identification of the moon with the beloved in works like Goethe’s. The moon becomes the unambiguous object of desire, whereas the woman is loved only by association. But there is also a space-age twist to Calvino’s lunar fantasy: whereas Goethe’s moon, and even Verne’s, can only be seen at a distance, Calvino’s moon is one that has been experienced up close (even if it has subsequently moved away). Although Calvino’s story is set in an imaginary past, its reworking of classic literary tropes reflects the changing realities of the 1960s in its depiction of a moon that is not eternally, absolutely unreachable. Like Calvino, the German author and multimedia artist Ferdinand Kriwet recognized that lunar exploration had fundamentally altered the symbolic significance of the moon; once contact had been made, the moon could no longer represent the irredeemably distant, the forever unattainable. For Kriwet, however, what the first manned moon landing offered was not the immediacy of direct contact, but rather a new form of mediation: in this case, the mediation of the moon landing itself, which dominated the news cycle both in America and around the world, allowing billions of people to experience the moon up close—albeit vicariously. Thus in the summer of 1969, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached the moon in the Apollo 11 spacecraft, Kriwet embarked on an Apollo mission of his own, traveling to the United States to collect media documentation of the event. What Kriwet was there to document was not the moon landing itself, but rather its representation in American mass media. Kriwet was hardly the only one to remark on the hypermediated character of the moon landing; even mainstream news outlets were well aware

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that the landing was a spectacle that the media themselves were helping to produce. The New Yorker, for instance, reported on July 26, 1969, that “twelve hundred people had gathered at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street” to see “the thing everyone was trying to watch—a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot screen, on the west side of the intersection, on which N.B.C.’s coverage of the moon landing was being shown in color,” thus acknowledging that the screen, rather than the moon itself, was the object of the crowd’s attention (“The Moon Hours”). But Kriwet drew dramatic consequences from this mediation by taking it a step further, transforming media coverage into the source material for his multimedia project. That project consisted of three components—a book and an audio montage for radio, both called Apollo Amerika, and a film montage for television, Apollovision—all of which offer critical perspectives on this media frenzy, while also drawing attention to social and political tensions that were drowned out by the lunar lovefest. All three works consist primarily of found materials, collected from mass media sources and assembled into a collage or montage; since the three works share certain structural principles, my discussion will begin with an examination of the book, before considering how the same principles are applied in audio and video formats. The organization of the book Apollo Amerika is unusual for the fact that it can be read in both directions—either right-side-up from front to back, or upside-down from back to front. Read in the conventional direction, the book proceeds chronologically, covering a period of nine days from July 16 to July 24, 1969—from the day the Apollo 11 took off to the day it splashed down, with the moon landing taking place in the middle, on July 20. Eighteen pages are devoted to each day, containing newspaper clippings, quotes, radio transcripts, sports scores, advertisements, and more. Read upside down and from back to front, the book proceeds alphabetically, with 6 pages devoted to each letter, from A to Z. Although the moon landing plays a key role in both directions, the alphabetical half of the book incorporates a wider range of non-lunar materials. Most notable are the critical passages that slip in and challenge the dominance of the moon in mainstream media. The six pages devoted to the letter “B,” for instance, spell out the word “BLACK,” one letter per page, in large white letters on a black background, and then list quotes attributed to Harlem residents: for instance, “Sure it’s a great achievement — but what about Harlem” and “The moon? They ought to clean up this garbage around here” (Kriwet 1969a, B1–5).14 Racial inequality is not the only social or political issue to disrupt the lunar focus of Kriwet’s book. The “G” section begins with two advertisements promoting gay rights; “K” features news of Teddy Kennedy’s accident at Chappaquiddick, and mentions of Vietnam appear throughout the book, including newspaper clippings that list the latest war casualties. In short, while Apollo Amerika is a study of the media spectacle surrounding the moon landing, it also draws attention to everything

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that the Apollo mission overshadowed—the tensions and tragedies of 1960s America, from which the moon landing offered a distraction. Kriwet’s montage techniques challenge the centrality of the moon landing in the mass media, juxtaposing it to other, “peripheral” stories, many of which reveal political instability, dissent, and discontent. By employing two different systems of organization, Kriwet implies the arbitrariness of both systems and, by extension, of the media hierarchies in which the moon landing was given pride of place. In the process, he sheds light on the character of the moon landing as a media event above all. This point is made remarkably clear by several texts that Kriwet includes in his book. In one of these, a proclamation issued by Richard Nixon on July 16, the president presents the moon landing as pure spectacle, announcing that the Apollo 11 carries the hopes and prayers of hundreds of millions of people here on earth, for whom the first footfall on the moon will be a moment of transcendent drama. Never before has man embarked on so epic an adventure. […] In past ages, exploration was a lonely enterprise. But today, the miracles of space travel are matched by miracles of space communication; even across the vast lunar distance, television brings the moment of discovery into our homes and makes all of us participants.” (Kriwet 1969a, Wednesday 13)

The president, speaking the language of advertising, encourages employers and public officials to give their workers time off so that they can “share in the significant events” of the day. A few pages later, an advertisement from LIFE magazine invites readers to attend a “Moonathon” at Rockefeller Center, where they can not only watch NBC’s live coverage of the moon landing, but also visit models of the lunar module and the Saturn V rocket that provide more immediate, less vicarious enjoyment (Kriwet 1969a, Saturday 14). Kriwet’s selection and arrangement of these details shifts attention away from the moon landing itself, and onto the unprecedented scale of the media event surrounding it. Similar themes run through the 22-minute radio version of Apollo Amerika. As Kriwet wrote: “The theme of my audio text is the electronic publication of [the Apollo] project with the media of telecommunication, and not [the Apollo] project in its technological and scientific aspects and details themselves” (Kriwet 2007, 1). Like the book, this text is composed of found material, but the focus is narrower, rarely deviating from the moon mission. However, the role of repetition is even stronger; various announcers’ voices are cut together, repeating phrases such as “on the moon” (Kriwet 2007, 1:41–1:55). This repetition has an alienating effect, redirecting attention away from the moon—the subject of these broadcasts—and toward the broadcasts themselves, the particular tone of the announcers’ voices, the material and sensual qualities of language rather than its referential function. Here again, as in the book, Kriwet focuses his critical attention on the

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commercial and political functions of the lunar spectacle. His clearest critique is reserved for the contradiction between the ostensible message of peace underlying the moon mission and its actual political function in a Cold War context, clearly expressed in the juxtaposition of voices speaking phrases such as “a trip in quest of peace” or “for all mankind” with “Flag-waving has reached historic proportions” or “How do you feel about the fact that we got there ahead of the Russians?” (Kriwet 2007, 4:47–4:52, 18:52–19:12). The message of these juxtapositions is clear: even more than the book, the radio version of Apollo Amerika presents the moon landing as a spectacle manufactured for geopolitical purposes. The actual contact with the moon is less important than what the moon landing signifies, and how it is received, on earth. Finally, Kriwet’s 22-minute film Apollovision, made for Westdeutsches Fernsehen, re-uses many of the materials employed in the book and the radio version, but shifts the focus decidedly toward the medium of television: the film is filled with shots of TV screens, often displaying TV channel logos. In this work, as in the book, Kriwet combines material drawn from media coverage of the Apollo mission with reminders of the social and political issues that this coverage omits; in one section of the film, words flash on the screen one at a time—“SDS BERKELEY GAS PEOPLE LSD PIG KILL LOVE OUT LAW IN ORDER RIGHT VIET FUCK”—while a voice greets attendees at a state dinner in the astronauts’ honor (Kriwet 1969b, 2:48–3:11). But the overall focus is on the moon landing as a televised event—an event ideally suited to the structure of television narratives, and to marketing tie-ins. One montage combines moon landing footage with clips of Superman, ads for “the first three-dimensional photograph actually taken on the moon,” Goodyear blimps, and a Gulf Oil logo, among others images—most of them filmed directly from a TV screen, as evidenced by the flicker of the images and the occasional visibility of the screen’s edges (Kriwet 1969b, 7:10–7:53). By turning his camera on the television that displays these images—reshooting the moon, so to speak—Kriwet makes it clear that the event he is documenting is not the moon landing itself, but rather the TV spectacle that surrounds it. The fantasy of immediacy implicit in the idea of putting a man on the moon gives way to pure mediation—an event that is experienced only through media channels. As Egon Netenjacob wrote in 1974, “Kriwet, born in 1942, is a representative of a generation for whom […] mediated experience, second-hand experience, has grown more and more important in comparison to primary experience, experience through immediate contacts” (Schöning 1983, 240). Rather than gazing up at the sky to see the moon where Armstrong and Aldrin walked, the spectators who gathered at Rockefeller Center for LIFE magazine’s “Moonathon” gazed at a giant screen. The mediated moon became an object of greater fascination than the physical moon in the sky above.

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One page of Kriwet’s book perfectly captures this shift in the moon’s symbolic significance, which is implicit throughout all three components of the Apollo project. This page is an altered version of an ad for the Honeywell corporation that shows a picture of the moon in a nighttime landscape, beneath the text: “Once, it belonged to poets and lovers.” The ad continues, “Then it became a dream of man. And what man dares to dream, he achieves. His path now etches the face of the moon….” (Kriwet 1969a, L5). For Honeywell, the moon that once belonged to poets and lovers now belongs to scientists, astronauts, or perhaps, to use the rhetoric of the time, “to all mankind.” For Kriwet, though, if the moon no longer belongs to poets and lovers as it did in Goethe’s time, it now belongs to newspapers and broadcasters—to radio, and especially to television. Thus Kriwet inserts an ironic commentary into the Honeywell ad, placing an image of his own face in the landscape, as if reflected in the water. This is not just a deadpan riff on the advertiser’s rhetoric about “the face of the moon”; rather, it also suggests that a change in the medium of representation—in this case, a change in the printed photograph—is just as significant as a change in the represented object itself. The narrative that Kriwet challenges is one in which the moon, formerly a symbol of longing and insurmountable distance, is brought within human reach, made into an object of immediate experience. In place of this narrative, Kriwet portrays the moon landing as a transition from one form of mediation to another, from real distance to virtual presence. The immediacy of contact with the moon’s surface gives way to the many forms of mediation through which this event is experienced on earth. Kriwet’s project reveals the media-oriented nature of the entire Apollo mission, a mission not only covered by, but to a great extent choreographed for these media outlets. In this context, an unmediated encounter is unthinkable. While even mainstream publications understood that mediation was fundamental to the logic of the Apollo 11 mission, Kriwet’s achievement in his own Apollo project was to make this mediation visible. Lest this moment of triumph for science and technology be mistaken for the resolution of the age-old lunar longings of literature, Kriwet reminds the viewers of his film that the moon remains a ­mediated object of knowledge, even after the Apollo 11 landing.

Conclusions Of course, Kriwet was not the only artist to see the moon landing as a media phenomenon first and foremost. As Ina Blom writes, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik often conflated the vaguely circular form of the light-screen with the light-globe of the moon itself. This conflation was made quite explicit in a 1965 installation of 12 prepared television sets called The Moon Is the Oldest TV. […] Paik presented the more specific image of an electronic touch reaching all the way to the moon in the video/film Electronic Moon No. 2, which started out showing a moonlike disc on a TV screen, against which a finger is pressed. (Blom 2001, 214)

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As in Kriwet’s work, this foregrounding of mediation functions to undercut the narrative of lunar exploration as the abolition of distance, the final achievement of longed-for contact; the finger touches not the moon, but the medium. From the standpoint provided by Kriwet’s and Paik’s works, we can recognize hints of a similar perspective in the early days of modern astronomy. In his foreword to the German edition of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, Hans Blumenberg writes: “by putting the telescope to use in order to produce visibility, [Galileo] breaks with the astronomical tradition’s postulate of visibility [Sichtbarkeitspostulat] and makes room for the inescapable suspicion that technologically mediated visibility, no matter how far it may be taken, is always a contingent fact, dependent upon conditions unrelated to the object itself” (Blumenberg 2002, 21). In other words, Galileo’s employment of the telescope revealed that rather than being the ultimate arbiter of visibility, human vision was subject to physical limitations, and could be drastically extended through the assistance of technological prostheses, but in the process, Galileo also transformed astronomy into a field defined by mediation rather than unmediated experience. Building on Blumenberg’s work, Joseph Vogl writes that Galileo’s decision to turn his telescope from earthly to heavenly objects represented a transformation of the device “from an instrument into a medium” (Vogl 2001, 115). What’s more, any subsequent discoveries that the telescope and its successor technologies made possible could only be understood, historically speaking, as the product of this technologically mediated process. Such a process held no prospect of transcendence, no promise that mediation would lead beyond itself to a new experience of immediacy; rather, astronomy was transformed into a fundamentally mediated practice. Thus the same medium that brings us “closer” to far-off objects also embeds mediation as an inextricable component of this encounter. As Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris have recently argued, “For Kepler and Galileo, empirical investigation was no longer a direct engagement with nature, but an essentially mediated behavior” (2010, 122). For Kriwet, too, the various media that depicted the moon landing—newspapers and magazines, radio and TV broadcasts—offered not an unmediated experience of the moon, but rather an intensified experience of mediation. The moon landing did not represent an epochal transformation in which the distance between man and moon was finally abolished; rather, it revealed the inescapable nature of mediation, and the inevitable failure that awaited any fantasy of immediacy. A fitting coda to these reflections can be found in the recent documentary Earthrise, which tells the story of the eponymous photograph of the earth emerging above the horizon of the moon—a photograph taken on the Apollo 8 mission, which circled, but did not touch down on, the moon (VaughanLee 2018). Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman’s reflection—“What they should have sent was poets, because I don’t think we captured, in its entirety, the grandeur of what we had seen”—suggests that the iconic photograph

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taken by his fellow astronaut William Anders somehow failed to convey the experience of presence to viewers at home, and that literature could have provided a sort of knowledge of the moon that a photograph could not offer. Blumenberg, by contrast, cites this same photograph as the most revealing image produced by all of the moon missions; however, he complicates this observation: “One could almost say that it would not have been worthwhile to send man to the Moon if we could have brought only his words back with him, though, on the other hand, perhaps it would not have been necessary to send people to the Moon at all if what was to be brought back was, above all, pictures” (Blumenberg 2000, 676). Language, Blumenberg’s account suggests, is too indirect a medium; it would fall too far short of the ideal of unmediated experience. Why bother with a voyage to the moon at all, if there will be nothing to show for it but a poem? Pictures, by contrast, offer an illusion of immediacy; yet this semblance of presence renders the actual presence of a man on the moon almost unnecessary. Why bother with a voyage to the moon at all, if pictures sent to earth by satellite could save us the trip? As Blumenberg’s considerations suggest, these mediated representations (whether linguistic or visual) inevitably give rise to contradictions, because they aim at the one thing they cannot offer: the experience of immediacy itself. If the moon once “belonged to poets and lovers,” as the Honeywell ad claims, Kriwet’s works imply that it was not wholly torn from their grasp by the arrival of astronauts on the lunar surface. Even when men walked on the moon, it remained a mediated affair for those who watched the landing on TV from back on earth. The longing for contact with the moon, which began as a literary fantasy before becoming a scientific reality, could not be fulfilled by technological feats of mediation, no matter how dazzling. As Kriwet’s works indicate, the actual moon landing and its technological reproduction and dissemination in print, audio, and visual media could only excite, but never fully satisfy, the desire for an impossible immediacy that the moon had meant for centuries of poets and lovers. Kriwet’s project resituates the moon landing in a literary and artistic history of mediation and longed-for immediacy, depicting the Apollo 11 mission not as a giant leap that fulfilled centuries of desire, but as one small step along a path of infinite mediation. The lunar landing is thus cast not as a grand achievement of science and technology, but as an event in the histories of overlapping fields of knowledge—scientific, literary, and artistic—that each in their own way express an impossible longing for immediate contact with the distant moon.

Notes

1.  Recent perspectives on this question are outlined in the introduction to an earlier volume in this series: Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, “Introduction,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (2017). See also Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann, “Vorstellung eines Forschungsprojekts: ‘Literatur und Wissen(schaften) in der Frühen Moderne’” (2002) and Roland Borgards et al., “Vorwort” (2013, 1).

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2.  See, e.g., Joseph Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen (2011, 12–16); Jochen Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur (2007, 7–14). For a concise overview of these approaches, including bibliographies of relevant works, see Yvonne Wübben, “Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen nach 1945” (2013) and Armin Schäfer, “Poetologie des Wissens” (2013). 3. This translation and all others from the German are mine unless otherwise noted. 4. See, e.g., Gideon Stiening, “Am ‘Ungrund’ oder: Was sind und zu welchem Ende studiert man ‘Poetologien des Wissens’?” (2007). 5. See the discussion of Galileo below. 6. Nicolson advances a similar claim about an earlier period, arguing that “the balloon ascents of the Montgolfiers brought to an end the period of fantasy and romance associated with the belief in flight to the moon and planets; although these themes continue after 1784, the implications are different” (1936, iv). 7.  See Sarah Pruitt, “China Makes Historic Landing on ‘Dark Side’ of the Moon.” 8. For more recent surveys of the history of the moon as an object of both scientific and literary analysis and imagination, see Joachim Kalka, Der Mond (2016), and Scott L. Montgomery, The Moon and the Western Imagination (2001). 9. The American Concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt also responded to the moon landing in her wordless “Moonshot Sonnet.” See the discussion of this poem in Craig Saper, “Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia Performance, Publishing, and Pop Appeal” (2015). 10. Numerous examples are cited in Kalka, Der Mond (2016), esp. 38ff. 11. My translation. The original appears in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1966, 109). “Willst du mich sogleich verlassen? / Warst im Augenblick so nah! / Dich umfinstern Wolkenmassen, / Und nun bist du gar nicht da. // Doch du fühlst, wie ich betrübt bin, / Blickt dein Rand herauf als Stern! / Zeugest mir, daß ich geliebt bin, / Sei das Liebchen noch so fern. // So hinan denn! hell und heller, / Reiner Bahn, in voller Pracht! / Schlägt mein Herz auch schmerzlich schneller, / Überselig ist die Nacht.” 12. The quotations here are drawn from an 1874 translation that combines the two books in a single volume: Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It (1874). 13. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, primarily by English authors, that envisioned the possibility of travel to the moon, see Cressy, “Early Modern Space Travel” (2016); Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (1948); Nicolson, A World in the Moon (1936). 14. The page numbers given here reflect the book’s unconventional pagination.

Works Cited Blom, Ina. 2001. The Touch Through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde. Leonardo 34 (3) (June 1): 209–215. Blumenberg, Hans. 2000. The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

44  K. BEALS ———. 2002. Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit. In Sidereus Nuncius: Nachricht von neuen Sternen, Galileo Galilei, 7–75. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Borgards, Roland, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben. 2013. Vorwort. In Literatur und Wissen: ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben, 1–2. Stuttgart: Metzler. Cressy, David. 2016. Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon. In Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery: From Copernicus to Flamsteed, ed. Judy A. Hayden, 45–73. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferber, Michael. 2007. Moon. In A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Credo Reference. New York: Cambridge University Press. http://www.credoreference.com/entry/ litsymb/moon. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. 2010. Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye. In The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25. New York: Springer. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1966. Gedichte. Nachlese und Nachlass. Vol. 2. Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Aufbau. Heißenbüttel, Helmut. 1983. Was sollen wir senden? (1–4) Zu vier medienkritischen Hörstücken von: Helmut Heißenbüttel, Dieter Schnebel, Ferdinand Kriwet und Mauricio Kagel. In Hörspielmacher: Autorenporträts und Essays, ed. Klaus Schöning, 105–122. Königstein/Ts: Athenäum. Hörisch, Jochen. 2007. Das Wissen der Literatur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Kalka, Joachim. 2016. Der Mond. Berlin: Berenberg. Krah, Hans. 2002. ‘Der Weg zu den Planetenräumen’. Die Vorstellung der Raumfahrt in Theorie und Literatur der Frühen Moderne. In Literatur und Wissen(schaften) 1890-1935, ed. Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann, 111–164. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Kriwet, Ferdinand. 1969a. Apollo Amerika. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1969b. Apollovision. Westdeutsches Fernsehen. ———. 2007. Hörtexte - Radiotexts. Berlin: Edition RZ. Maillard, Christine, and Michael Titzmann. 2002. Vorstellung eines Forschungsprojekts: ‘Literatur und Wissen(schaften) in der Frühen Moderne’. In Literatur und Wissen(schaften) 1890–1935, ed. Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann, 7–37. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Marchitello, Howard, and Evelyn Tribble. 2017. Introduction. In The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, xxv–xlvi. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Montgomery, Scott L. 2001. The Moon and the Western Imagination. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1936. A World in the Moon; a Study of the Changing Attitude Toward the Moon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Northampton, MA: Departments of Modern Languages of Smith College. ———. 1948. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan. Pruitt, Sarah. China Makes Historic Landing on ‘Dark Side’ of the Moon. HISTORY. Accessed January 11, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/ china-plans-historic-landing-on-dark-side-of-the-moon.

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Saper, Craig. 2015. Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia Performance, Publishing, and Pop Appeal. Coldfront, October 26, 2015. http://coldfrontmag. com/concrete-poetry-in-america/. Schäfer, Armin. 2013. Poetologie des Wissens. In Literatur und Wissen: ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben, 36–41. Stuttgart: Metzler. Schöning, Klaus (ed.). 1983. Hörspielmacher: Autorenporträts und Essays. Athenäum: Königstein/Ts. Stiening, Gideon. 2007. Am ‘Ungrund’ oder: Was sind und zu welchem Ende studiert man ‘Poetologien des Wissens’? KulturPoetik 7 (2): 234–248. “The Moon Hours.” The New Yorker, July 26, 1969. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/1969/07/26/comment-5238. Vaughan-Lee, Emmanuel. 2018. Earthrise. https://www.earthrisefilm.com/. Verne, Jules. 1874. From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It, trans. Louis Mercier and Eleanor E. King. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company. Vogl, Joseph. 1999. Einleitung. In Poetologien des Wissens um 1800, ed. Joseph Vogl, 7–16. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. ———. 2001. Medien‐Werden: Galileis Fernrohr. In Mediale Historiographien, ed. Lorenz Engell and Joseph Vogl, 115–123. Weimar: Universitätsverlag. ———. 2011. Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen. Zurich: Diaphanes. Wübben, Yvonne. 2013. Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen nach 1945. In Literatur und Wissen: ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben, 5–16. Stuttgart: Metzler.

CHAPTER 3

Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi Anindita Banerjee

States of Suspension 2005 was a year of overlapping anniversaries. Marking a half century after the liberation of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, it was also the threshold of the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986—an explosion in a civilian reactor in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine which released about forty times as much radioactive matter as the first atom bomb and resulted in the displacement of more than a million people. This conjunctural year presents a test case for what the renowned historian Dipesh Chakrabarty would soon thereafter call “the climate of history.” The phrase encapsulates a radical reconceptualization of time and space in an era of catastrophic environmental change. Challenging the foundational assumption that human intentions and actions alone defined the past and would prove to be the sole determinants of the future, Chakrabarty called for a kind of writing which would both recognize and account for the active role that the non-human elements of the planet play in shaping society, politics, and culture. The climate of history recalibrates chronology and cartography according to the shifts and scales of the geophysical matter that constitutes our world (2009: 197–198). Decades before the publication of the historian’s manifesto, the two authors juxtaposed in this chapter attempted precisely such an experiment in reckoning with the horrors of their shared twentieth century. Turning to the states and scales of the elements to account for human atrocities and A. Banerjee (*)  Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_3

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technological catastrophes together, Primo Levi and Varlam Shalamov developed an inimitable mode of storytelling as science in the climate of history. Levi (1919–1987), an Italian chemist from Turin who spent eleven months in Auschwitz, and Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), a Russian writer who toiled for seventeen years in Kolyma—a vast network of extraction sites in which inmates of the Soviet Gulag extracted gold, uranium, and other rare earth minerals in the harshest conditions of the Siberian Arctic—were contemporaries who did not personally know or read each other. Yet their writings merit comparison, not by the usual literary-historical standards of contact and influence but by the non-human metrics of their scientific language. Appropriately enough, it is a particular geophysical environment rather than a personal or literary encounter that serves as the ground for reading the two authors separately and together. In the conjunctural year of 2005, a day after commemoration ceremonies were held at the site of the Auschwitz death camp, a pair of filmmakers from Italy and the United States began to retrace the path Levi took after his liberation. Their intention was to follow the trajectory of a book called La Tregua, published in 1963 and translated into English as The Truce, which appeared almost twenty years after Se questo è un uomo (If This Is A Man)—Levi’s iconic testimony of the Holocaust penned soon after his return in 1946. Starting from the defining moment when “four young men, Russian soldiers on horseback,” arrived at the barbed-wire fence to herald “the coalescing of a nucleus from nothingness” (12), La Tregua covers a nine-month-long period that would take the author even farther from home. Levi was rescued from the hospital block of Auschwitz along with a remaining group of inmates deemed too old or too infirm to retreat westward in the face of the advancing Red Army. Instead of heading south toward Italy, however, he was transported again, this time in a northeasterly direction. On a meandering network of trains and trucks across Poland and Galicia, the liberated prisoner would eventually arrive at a displaced persons’ camp called Starye Dorogi (Old Roads) on the borderlands straddling Ukraine and Belarus—the same catchment area of the Pripyat River that would later be dedicated to the Chernobyl nuclear power complex.1 Despite the hardships following a war in which the Soviet Union suffered enormous losses, Levi’s vignettes of Pripyat—an environment of elemental liminality suspended between land and water, with grassy meadows, coniferous forests, and sprawling marshes teeming with colorful animal and human life—seem idyllic at first glance. Just like its natural elements, however, Pripyat in Levi’s testimony exists in a state of suspension, and not merely because of the indeterminancy of the travelers’ trajectories or the author’s anxiety about his ultimate destination. The Italian phrase La Tregua, as Sam Magavern reminds us, conveys not so much the finality of the English term “truce” (113)—a state of harmony between the self and the world that Levi’s character in the book defines as

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an eternally elusive “parenthesis of unlimited availability” (Levi 1964: 220)— as a ceasefire, a temporary suspension of hostilities that could be arbitrarily terminated by calling combatants back to the battlefield. Indeed, despite the distance that separates the German and Soviet camps, Auschwitz reaches out across space and time to infiltrate every element of the chemist’s journey through a typographic act of suspension. The account of life after liberation is preceded by a poem from 1946, hanging unframed on a blank page in lieu of an epigraph, while the final sentence of the book returns to the last word of the poem, “the dawn command, a foreign word, feared and expected: ‘Wstawàch’” (Levi 1964: 223). Returning to resonate among the natural elements and human settlements of postwar Ukraine, the reveille, rendered and remembered in the language of the Polish guards at Auschwitz, insinuates itself into the present much as Chernobyl’s radionuclides would transform the very molecules of Pripyat’s natural elements. Far from fostering a renewed state of lucidity after the madness of the past has been left behind, both the unfolding present and the foreseeable future appear to the chemist as a semi-opaque “gelid state of suspension” (Levi 1964: 12). From the perception of freedom as the formation of a nucleus to the contamination of homecoming with inassimilable residues of the past, Levi’s scientific lexicon poses a serious challenge to literary language. Science, however, contributes far more than a set of metaphors for the kind of trauma that Cathy Caruth describes as “stand[ing] outside representation” (17). On the contrary, atomic structures of the “nucleus” and elemental interfaces in the “gelid suspension” shift the very ontology of the unthinkable away from the realm of human experience and expression alone. Subjected to crystallographic imaging in the laboratory, catastrophe reveals itself instead as a web of relations between matter and energy, a mutually constitutive field of collisions and convergences between human and non-human entities on the face of the planet. By the same logic of elementary particles and elemental suspensions, Pripyat’s liminality provides the perfect staging ground for remembering Auschwitz not just in the shadow of Hiroshima but also as a foreshadowing of Chernobyl. Looking back from 1963, the height of the nuclear arms race between Levi’s erstwhile liberators and their geopolitical rival across the Atlantic, the chemist positioned his sojourn in northwestern Ukraine “between Hiroshima and the ill-omened name of the Cold War” (Levi 1964: 59). In the cinematic reconstruction of his journey, this observation takes another quantum leap across futures past to confront Pripyat’s reincarnation as a nuclear wasteland, still outwardly peaceful yet saturated with lethal radionuclides. The moving camera translates “the invisible poison of Auschwitz coursing through the veins of all returnees” (Levi 1964: 220) into vast assemblages of natural and built environments: quarantine zones for contaminated machinery and mass graves for livestock, pine forests that have turned red, and marshes devoid of microbial life.

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Pripyat also serves as the crucial crossroads at which Levi’s all-too-fragile truce converged with the sites and semiotics of Shalamov’s own rendition of the unthinkable. “Siberia,” the metonymic shorthand for penal colonies in the Arctic such as Kolyma, registered its presence on Levi’s writing as indelibly as the radioactive cloud stretching from Hiroshima to Chernobyl. Implicit or explicit threats of being “sent off to dig ditches in Siberia” (Levi 1964: 93, 107, 130) were accompanied by physical embodiments of the camps as a further reminder of its looming presence beyond the eastern horizon. Starye Dorogi, where Levi waited in limbo, also served as a railroad hub for German POWs who fell through the cracks of postwar exchanges, their apathetic bodies “indistinguishable from the pile of logs” (Levi 1964: 120) on flatbed cars. Contingents of Ukrainian and Belarusian women and children, repatriated from formerly occupied territories on accusations of conspiring with the enemy, went by as Levi and his companions looked on, fearing a similar fate (Levi 1964: 121, 124, 125, 154, 155). Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag, each of these words, straining the limits of language in isolation, confers meaning on each other in Shalamov’s prose as they do in Levi’s: not as singular instantiations of inhuman ­atrocity but as intimately related elements in a comprehensive report on the climate of history. Eschewing the narrative conventions of camp literature and documentary testimony, which continue to baffle literary scholars to this day, both writers turned to the physical sciences in a world that had irrevocably transformed not only the concept of the human but also the boundaries between life and non-life. Although a story from Shalamov’s iconic Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy) constitutes the principal case study of this chapter, it draws upon Levi as a powerful counterpoint for identifying and theorizing the two writers’ startlingly similar experiments in literary form and scientific language.2 Such a contrapuntal reading—which Edward Said famously defined as an awareness of “overlapping and intertwined conditions of language in the very places where there seems to be only one” (18)—puts Shalamov’s work in a different light from that of an exceptional testimony to an unthinkable state of exception. Reading the chronicler of Kolyma from Primo Levi’s Pripyat situates his Gulag stories in a global dialogue, not just about the future of art but also the fate of the planet: a scientific literature, avant la lettre, for the coming consciousness of the Anthropocene.

Scales of Representation The repeated invocations of Auschwitz in Shalamov’s writing provided the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym with a powerful framework for reading Kolyma Tales through Theodore Adorno’s famous declaration about the impossibility of literature after the Holocaust (342). In order to illustrate Shalamov’s “paradox,” Boym turned to the preliminary notes for an essay titled “About my Prose” (“O moei proze”) published long after he was released in 1971:

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In the new prose – after Hiroshima, after Auschwitz and Kolyma, after wars and revolutions – everything didactic is to be rejected. Art does not have a right to preach. Art neither improves nor ennobles people. Art is a way of life [sposob zhit’], not a way of understanding life [poznaniia zhizni]. (cit. and trans. Boym 342)

Addressing only the two latter elements of Shalamov’s catastrophic triad, Boym acknowledges the author’s rejection of literature’s traditional functions yet focuses her inquiry on mimetic representation. The vexed question of whether his short prose pieces in Kolyma Tales should be called “documents” or fiction (Boym 344) justifiably remains central in a cultural context that, as Alexander Etkind puts it, remains suspended in a state of “warped mourning” over the legacy of the Gulag more than half a century after Stalin’s demise and a quarter century after the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In order to resolve the Shalamov paradox, Boym returns to the enduring friction between “the individual and the state” in Russian and Soviet history, concluding that the author substitutes mimesis with mimicry of official language to recuperate a form of “humanism via negativa” (344). Once Kolyma moves from the framework of its singularity to the overlapping force fields of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, however, Shalamov’s writing presents a further challenge to this redemptive aspiration—a quality Boym herself acknowledged as “something radically unassimilable” (342) and “inhuman” (344), and other critics characterized as a peculiar “scientific detachment” in the face of the same suffering that produced Solzhenitsyn’s evocative landscapes and deeply developed characters reminiscent of Tolstoy (Hosking 164). Far from conveying a kind of Chekhovian clarity as Shalamov’s translator John Glad suggests in his foreword to Kolyma Tales (xvi), it is precisely this inassimilable turn away from the human that provides a key to Shalamov’s repudiation of “literature as a way of understanding life [poznanie zhizni]” (Boym 342). It is what aligns him not just with his contemporary Primo Levi, but also with a future generation of writers and thinkers struggling with the sheer scale of what Amitav Ghosh called “the great derangement” of the Anthropocene (2016). Shalamov’s counter-human turn is signaled through the very term poznanie that Boym singles out in her analysis. While the critic interprets the term as merely “didactic” (Boym 342), poznanie means cognition, the ontological foundation of the modern concept of the human. René Descartes in 1634 named cognition the defining criterion by which subjects endowed with a rational soul superseded all other living and non-living entities in the world. It was cognition that granted humanity not just the capacity for mimetic representation, manifested in painting and poetry, but also the unique power to transcend the limits of the body by manipulating the environment. Ghosh, following Bruno Latour, approaches the contemporary crisis of the imagination in the face of planetary catastrophe as a direct legacy of the “partitioning” function of cognition, which excluded the elements of nature from the

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narrative of culture and today separates the expressive arts from the knowledge and practice of the sciences (7). Shalamov voiced a very similar criticism: It seems to me that the human being of the second half of the twentieth century—survivor of wars, revolutions, the conflagrations of Hiroshima, the atom bomb, and above all, the betrayal—the shame of Kolyma and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, this human […]—having survived the scientific revolution of Descartes and Newton—simply cannot approach the questions of art in the same way as before. (“O proze” 148)

If the Cartesian revolution stands as the common denominator of the twentieth century’s continuum of catastrophe, then poznanie, cognition, is at once the myth of its origins, the roots of its “betrayals,” and the key to forging a different form and function of art for the future. Shalamov’s version of Levi’s question, If This Is a Human, therefore starts by interrogating not just the primacy of cognition but also its fate in the face of the unthinkable. Long before composing his critical commentary on the future of literature, Shalamov attempted to lay out a new approach to the aforementioned “questions of art” in an impassioned correspondence. In 1953, soon after his release from the penal zone, he approached Boris Pasternak, who at the time was drafting his novel Dr. Zhivago and undergoing a similar crisis of the imagination. Among the letters in which Shalamov provided his reactions to Pasternak’s developing manuscript, which would go on to win the Nobel Prize following its clandestine publication in Italy in 1957, was this note about his own ongoing struggle: If every atom in all matter holds within itself the explosive power of annihilation, then that is the measure of cruelty contained in the world, a world whose tenderness and beauty—flowers, lavender bushes—can never look the same again. (“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 39)

Palpable in this brief passage are the tropological resonances with Levi’s chilling inversions in The Truce: logs becoming emaciated POWs headed to Siberia and “nature in flower” transformed into the “gelid state” in which the future perpetually rubs up against the past (222). Shalamov’s letter, however, also invokes the twentieth-century legacy of the second “scientific revolution” associated with the name of Isaac Newton: the insight that elementary particles constitute all living and non-living matter and serve as the source as well as the conduit of energy. Taking the “measure of cruelty contained in the world,” unleashed by humans yet confounding humanity’s vaunted capacities of cognition and representation, requires the equal and opposite reaction of stripping down the scale of that measurement. Unimaginably large systems, be they labor camps or nuclear weaponry, can only be approached through the smallest unit of the elements.

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This attention to scale not only reveals Shalamov’s consanguinity with contemporary environmental thought, but also explains why the splitting of the atom would become the foundational template for a new art to be forged by the “survivors” of the dual scientific revolutions. Reclaiming the future would consist of a new mode of writing catastrophe, not in discrete categories of human, natural, and technological disasters separated by context and causality but rather as a continuing state of suspension. The author’s proposal strikingly anticipates Timothy Morton’s theorization of radiation as a “hyperobject.” Notoriously difficult to represent yet registering its presence across all forms of living and non-living matter, it typifies the challenges thrown up by the Anthropocene to both scientific and literary imaginations. Like climate change, fallout cannot be contained within geographical locations and historical periods, making it impossible to separate Trinity from Hiroshima and Chernobyl from Fukushima (169). As the following sections demonstrate, it is in the unlikely place of everyday life in the camp, on the pages of the Kolyma Tales, that the hyperobject of radiation emerges as the “measure” of humanity’s reduction to what I call hyposubjects: human forms that are presumed to lack or have been forcibly denied the Cartesian privileges of cognition and agency. It is the interface between the hyposubject and the physical environment of the Siberian Arctic that translates Kolyma into Shalamov’s “inhuman” (Boym 344) diction. In his correspondence with Pasternak, the author himself re-inscribed what Giorgio Agamben would famously theorize as “bare life” into this much more fundamental equation of elemental life: We may pressure nature, but nature presses back: this is a truth long known to poets, but science is just beginning to confirm it. … And maybe the splitting of the atom is the revenge of the elements against the lies and betrayal of man. (“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 40)

In this ethos of dialogic interpenetration, Shalamov similarly anticipates contemporary environmental theory’s new attention to material objects and states of matter, not as passive backgrounds of human thought and action but rather as active participants in the shaping of humanity itself. The following description deploys precisely such an ontic reversal to subvert the euphemism “conquerors of the North,” a phrase that was frequently used to reintroduce former Gulag inmates to the mainstream (Bruno 268): All of two months ago, lost in a winter that couldn’t care less what else existed in it, a winter that did not want anything to do with people who, in turn, wanted at all costs to wrench from it whatever nooks of warmth they could among the inescapable stone and wood … . (“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 27)

In the extraction zone that was Kolyma, moreover, the “agential” (151) elements of nature, to use the philosopher of science Karen Barad’s terms,

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entered into a remarkably “intra-active” (139) relationship with the scientific, physio-chemical concept of the elements—a concept, codified in alphanumeric abstractions, that would also give form to Levi’s remarkable memoir The Periodic Table, published twelve years after The Truce in 1975. In a perverted reflection of the confluence of natural and human resources that served as the raison d’être of the labor camp, elements at both the largest and the smallest scales inscribe a lively continuum in Shalamov’s and Levi’s works alike. They function as the measure of both life and non-life and are assigned divergent scales of value. Just like atoms in the periodic table, consequently, the multidirectional entanglements of elemental life in Kolyma develop isotopic variations, split to release energy, metamorphose into each other, or combine to form entirely new entities in the Arctic’s ecology of extremes.

All That Is Solid (Does Not) Melt into Air While the harshness of Kolyma’s geophysical environment is a truth universally acknowledged, Shalamov’s poetics of the elements have not been considered in humanistic analyses of his Gulag writing. Alexander Etkind, for instance, approaches the lingering traces of the camp in late and post-Soviet culture through a series of performative encounters with the past—a past which, unlike the Holocaust, remains largely shrouded from public view and is yet to be widely acknowledged as an object of individual and collective reckoning. In dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, he takes Walter Benjamin’s theory of the trauerspiel or mourning play as a model for Shalamov’s many sketches of Kolyma (38–40). In Etkind’s analysis, the camp is a repository of the “undead” who keep demanding recognition, only to be thwarted by the very insubstantiality of their material beings; whether alive or dead in the physiological sense, the untold ranks of the “unburied” are neither identified nor put to rest in the earth in full acknowledgment of their predicament (196–219). As the journalists Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman recently reported from the places where the Kolyma camps once stood, the spectralization of the Gulag continues to this day. Literally absent from the discursive practices of local residents, they are not marked by any physical signs. In recording the encounters between death and life in Kolyma, Shalamov, in contrast, offered an all-too-material counter-model to this politics of disembodiment. Though couched in a performative mode similar to those explored by Etkind, a “camp mystery play” (Kolyma Tales 280) unfolding on a steep hillside on the left bank of the Kolyma River illustrates the crucial role of the elements in inscribing the necropolitics of the north: A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses from 1938, was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma. In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our

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loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years. There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. … Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no “assignment,” no “norm” calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy waters where they mined gold – the “basic unit of production,” the “first of all metals.” … The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storehouse, for they contained not just gold and lead, uranium and tungsten, but also undecaying human bodies. These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. (KT 280–281)

The category of the “undecayed”—netlennyi, also translatable as “imperishable”—stands in radical contrast to the phantoms that haunt the world of the living but cannot be identified by their material remains. Explicitly framed as an inversion of Christ rising from a stone tomb, they offer no prospect of redemption or salvation to the witnesses. In keeping with Shalamov’s skepticism toward both the Orthodox tradition in which he was raised and the scientific worldview that dominated his world in adulthood, the undecayed challenge both the spiritual potential for forgiveness and the rational faculty of cognition. Unlike the undead, the corpses are not defined by the loss of the body (telo) through the soil’s chemical and biological processes that turn humans into humus—or, as Shalamov underscores in his implicit reference to Auschwitz, by industrial means devised to accelerate the vaporization of flesh. On the contrary, they are the product of the elements’ perverse refusal to perform their assigned roles. Consigned to the ground by fellow prisoners yet failing to decompose, the imperishables demand recognition not merely for themselves but for all the non-human components of the Arctic that came to define their terrifying state of suspension between life and nonlife: the hardest forms of earth and water, the heaviest elements of gold and uranium, and a cliff face strewn with “iron logs” from “three-hundred-yearold larches” that had until recently been cleared by the “brittle shoulders” of fellow convicts (KT 279). In the sheer solidity of “twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and the eyes burning with a hungry gleam” (KT 282), the undecayed mirror the recalcitrance of Kolyma’s physical environment. Far from being mistaken as manifestations of the uncanny, each of them is perfectly recognizable to the spectators of the mystery play as “our loved ones” (KT 281), connected through their very fleshliness with the ranks of the living: “I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this … house-warming for dead men” (KT 282). Their power of interpellation and interrogation, consequently, derives not from the moral imperatives

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of remembrance and reconstruction but from an elemental logic that lay at the very foundation of the penal colony. Disgorged from “the storehouse of the north,” the undecayed offer an insistently material perspective on “the secret of Kolyma” (KT 280–281). The camp’s enduring notoriety was indeed shaped by a well-defined exchange between the human element and the elements of nature. As has been widely documented, separating gold—symbolized by the first two letters of the Latin word aurum, meaning radiant dawn, on the periodic table— from a formidably hostile terrain had made Shalamov’s ironically cited “first of all metals” (KT 281) synonymous with forced labor and political exile since the nineteenth century. Initially established to boost the imperial treasury, the euphemistically named “conquest of the north” took on a much more expanded role in the solvency of the Soviet state under Stalin—so much so that the country became the second largest producer of gold in the world by the middle of the twentieth century (Glad x). The above-cited scene, from a story titled “Lend-Lease” (Po lendlizu), marks a particularly significant point of stress in Kolyma’s alchemy of geology and biology. Like the undecayed, the force that releases them from the hillside is suspended between living and non-living matter. An alien entity “crawling out of the Bering Sea” to leave its “tracks visible on the marshes” (KT 275) is the cause of the simultaneous disruption in the Arctic’s crust and the history of the camp. The “prehistoric beast” (KT 275) that brings victims from 1938 face to face with the no less brutalized ranks of the living in 1941 is a part of the eponymous program called Lend-Lease that was inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide material support to allies of the United States in World War II. “The foreign word called bulldozer” (KT 276)—which, unlike the primitive wood-fired trucks of Kolyma, runs on “light aviation fuel” (KT 276) and possesses blades so shiny as to reawaken dreams of shaving among the convicts—brings global conflict into the isolated enclosure of Kolyma, but is not employed as a military instrument. It is immediately recruited to the same labor of extraction as the human bodies consigned to the mines. The bulldozer’s “first assignment on Russian soil” (KT 280), however, fails to fulfill even this role. What the sublime machine catalyzes instead is an inverted spectacle of the Soviet ideal of Cartesian humanity and Promethean modernity on the face of the cliff. Far from unveiling a tableau featuring a harmonized collective of workers overcoming the elements, stikhiia, to usher in the radiant future of communism, “a cascade of thousands upon thousands of the undecayed” (KT 282) greets the onlookers gathered to witness the triumph of technology over nature. The brigade of imperishables “attempting to arise” (KT 282) similarly mocks the pinnacle of Soviet corporeality epitomized by Stalin himself: an indomitable alloy of flesh and metal immune to the elemental processes of degeneration and death (Hellebust). Defying the hierarchies of solidity and evanescence, this human substratum of the Arctic erects a tangible threshold where flesh and metal behave contrary to the laws of physical chemistry. The elements of nature become the registers

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of domestic terror and international conflict, while “the predatory leap that leaves the area without trees for three hundred years” (KT 379)—an invocation of the proverbial great leaps forward of five-year plans that laid vast swathes of people and ecosystems to waste—is unexpectedly halted by stone and frozen earth pressing back. Shalamov wrote in 1969 that “every poet is an anthropomorphist; it’s a basic element of art. My formula is a lot more complex: it unifies the concept of fate with the concept of natural elements” (“Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh” 107). Musing on how his experience in the camps might inform a poetics “oriented towards the future,” he noted: Communing with nature has taught me that there is nothing in our affairs that has not already been inscribed in the elements. … I have long tried to translate the language of wind, stone, water, spoken not for humankind but for their own sake. I am convinced that stone has its own language. (“Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh” 108–109)

Translated back into the language of the elements, the undecayed tell a “much more complex” story than what the two dates of 1938 and 1941 might signify in macrohistorical terms. 1938, encoded by Shalamov as the era when “digging graves was easier” than panning gold (KT 281), constituted a well-known turning point for the penal colonies of the Arctic. It marked the deadly convergence of Stalin’s Great Purge with the handover of the Far Northern Trust, the company which oversaw the shipping of convicts via ports on the Sea of Okhotsk and managed the resource economy of the camps. 1938 was the year when Kolyma was given over to a genocidal bureaucracy after the leader allegedly accused the Northern Trust management of “coddling” the convicts (Glad xii). While 1941—when “fourteen-hour-days, assignments, and quotas” in Shalamov’s telling (KT 281) were imposed as part of the war effort, “our response to Lend-Lease” (KT 279)—marks yet another spike in the camps’ chronology of death, the geological disruption triggered by the alien technological artifact signals a profound shift in the economy and ecology of its elemental life. This change is inscribed in stone, the very matter that created the imperishables, and the air into which they refused to disappear. It is also reflected in the transgenic bulldozer, whose blades remain miraculously “mirror-like” (KT 283) at the end of the operation. Rather than gold, whose retrieval from “icy water” (KT 280) marked Kolyma’s iconic form of labor, the hard surfaces of rock and steel that collide on the cliff direct the gaze toward another kind of intra-action between the human form and the sources of radiance embedded in the “storehouse of the north (KT 283).” To be sure, both aurum and uranium are heavy metals that seamlessly transfigure from solid matter to the abstractions of currency and energy. But whereas Kolyma’s traditional output of gold itself remains impervious and separate from the body, uranium and carboniferous biomatter, both prone to decay and

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dispersal, are not only similar in their properties but also capable of interpenetration. Living bodies share with radioactive elements the capacity to register their presence in the ambient environment by releasing isotopes, albeit of different masses such as C-14 and U-235, and are expected to melt away at the end of their vastly divergent spans of existence. As Levi reminds us in the last chapter of the Periodic Table, carbon, the constituent element of all life, is capable of forming long chains, which enables it to fix and carry energy and act as both food and fuel. Carbon is also the only element that flows freely between life and non-life in the processes of photosynthesis and decomposition, between solid matter and atmospheric traces. It emplaces rocks, plants, animals, and human bodies in a single elemental continuum (225). While gold remains the most visible measure of cruelty in the historiography of Kolyma, Shalamov’s undecayed serve as an unprecedented index for a far less documented interface between matter and energy, carbon and uranium, which was no less significant. Their intra-action thrust the elemental life of the camp deep into the emergence of atomic energy as a principal arbiter of the world to come. Lend-Lease, not coincidentally, overlapped with Stalin’s approval of the program that historian Paul Josephson calls “red atom,” earmarking the production of nuclear power as a priority for fulfilling the country’s geopolitical and energy aspirations. It was in 1941 that the Soviet Union’s first atomic weapons development program started under the leadership of Ivan Kurchatov, founding member of the renowned Kharkov Physical Institute. The heightened demand for uranium, correspondingly, put great pressure on what Josephson euphemistically dubs the “difficult and distant sources” (17) from which it was shipped to the various processing facilities scattered across the nation. Along with uranium’s daughter element, lead—which appears side by side with the undecayed in Shalamov’s story and was necessary for both transporting the ore and lining the reactors themselves—the new “first metal” of nuclear fuel was principally mined in the Arctic. Like the gold sifters of 1938, pictured knee-deep in frozen rivers wearing nothing but galoshes on their frostbitten bare feet, convicts in the uranium mines of Kolyma extracted the prized resource without any protective equipment, resulting in a lethal contact between carbon and uranium. Butugychag camp in the Kolyma zone became the most notorious example of this exchange of elements when it was shut down in 1955 because of unsustainable rates of radiation mortality. As Kate Brown has documented, convict labor was instrumental for building the infrastructures of weapons development facilities at the end of the war (83–86). Shalamov’s writing, however, demonstrates that the very foundations of the Soviet nuclear program were also inextricably linked with the elemental intra-action of carboniferous bodies and radioactive rock. Both literally and figuratively, therefore, Kolyma’s undecayed represent as much a geological haunting as a call to memory-work in the conventional sense. They constitute a stratigraphic

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record of the transition from the pre-war economy of flesh and metal to a new equation of radiance and its remnants. The tragicomic opening of “Lend-Lease” and an uncharacteristic set of speculative reflections at the end of Shalamov’s mystery play provide powerful bookends for the entanglement of carbon and uranium within the unimaginable spans of geological periods and unthinkable arcs of history. Ironically, it is the bodies of the living that set the stage for the spectacle of the undecayed. Convicts lap up “tears” dripping from cliffs of limestone (KT 273), “stone that was once a soft oily creature” (KT 275). In doing so, the inmates of Kolyma literally ingest sedimentary rock, comprised mainly of calcium carbonate, which simultaneously serves as a repository of lost time and a source of future energy. While they dig up uranium and lead alongside gold, the starving inmates recklessly ingest fossil fuel by-products that accompany the bulldozer from the other side of the Bering Sea; machine grease and glycerin are promptly sold off in the camp’s black market as “American butter” and “American honey” (KT 273). While their hardened intestines don’t decay from this transversal convergence of carbon, their encounter with uranium provokes an altogether different reckoning after the same bulldozer carries off the corpses to a new grave in soft soil. From the cliff face, the narrator’s eye travels upward to suddenly reveal Moscow’s skyline, illuminated by an ominous glow, as a searing replica of the Gulag. The towering buildings of the capital city reign over the horizon like the infamous guard posts, vyshki, which in Kolyma were made out of the same “three-hundred-year-old forest” (KT 282) whose remnants on the cliff are indistinguishable from the imperishables. This terrifying vista of the nation as a vast penal extraction zone, bathed in the afterglow of an unseen source of energy, thereafter extends over the entire surface of the planet to reveal a no less apocalyptic configuration of the elements. Kolyma’s uranium mines, in which radioactive decay literally ate away human matter, serve as Shalamov’s templates for a world created by what Elizabeth Povinelli has recently termed “geontopower”: new regimes of regulating life operating in conjunction with radical disruptions of the earth’s elemental systems (6–9). Shalamov’s story concludes with a picture of the world remade by the unique geontopower of the Soviet Arctic: I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountains. (KT 282)

It follows that the human mind alone cannot serve as a reliable repository of revelation, recognition, or commemoration for Shalamov. Instead, the only possible archive of Kolyma emerges from the point where carbon meets uranium, indelibly imprinted by radioisotopes on living matter yet sharing the same proclivity for decay. This web of mineral, vegetal, and animal elements

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constitutes a material form of remembering that would survive the fragility of the human frame and the limitations of its capacity for confronting and writing the unthinkable: And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man … And if I forget, the grass may forget. But the stone and the permafrost will not forget. (KT 283)

This is a crystallograph of the world to come, transformed at once into a penal colony, extraction zone, and nuclear wasteland seared with the signatures of its human and non-human elements. It encapsulates both Shalamov and Levi’s striving for an art that refuses the reduction of not just the planet but catastrophe itself into what Hannah Arendt called a “small, comprehensible icon” (134). Suspended between the largest and smallest scales of matter and energy, their elemental poetics offer not a pathway for cognition, poznanie, but a “way of life,” sposob zhizni, grounded in a politics of recognition. This politics may be discerned not in the clarity of sight that liberates the Cartesian subject from the material confines of the body and grants it the power to transform its environment. Rather, recognition emerges from the resonances between Shalamov’s imperishables and Levi’s late poem, “The Little Girl of Pompeii,” in which Anne Frank’s shadow on the wall of her hiding place becomes indistinguishable from the silhouettes of vaporized bodies left on the surfaces of the city of Hiroshima. The scales and states of matter and narrative that constitute such a climate of history—one in which Auschwitz and Kolyma exist in an unbroken continuum with Hiroshima and Chernobyl—put great pressure on the cartographic and chronological partitioning that enables us, to colloquize the Cartesian model of cognition, to “wrap our heads around” the unthinkable. The aporia haunts humanistic and scientific approaches alike to the catastrophes that defined the twentieth century and continue to shape our proleptic imaginations of the unfolding present and imminent future on an increasingly threatened planet. Breaking through the categorical distinctions between subjects of literature and objects of scientific inquiry, Shalamov and Levi’s distinctive poetics may open the way not just for a new mode of engaging with the Anthropocene, but perhaps also a lexicon for its as-yet-unseen elements.

Note 1. Here I wish to acknowledge “Traumatic Ecology,” a wonderful talk I attended while working on this chapter, in which Avery Slater traced Levi’s journey home from Auschwitz through what would become the Chernobyl landscape, and his poetic rendering of the traumatic command, “wstawać”. The talk was part of a Cornell University conference “Listening to Trauma: A Conference in

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Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience” (April 27–29, 2017). 2. All citations from Kolyma Tales (KT) are from John Glad’s 1996 translation. All unattributed translations from other sources in Russian are mine.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2008. Banality of Evil, Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt. Slavic Review 67 (2): 342–363. Bruno, Andy. 2016. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1998. Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–665. Caruth, Cathy. 2010. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gessen, Masha, and Misha Friedman. 2018. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulag in Putin’s Russia. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press. Hellebust, Rolf. 2003. Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. 1980. The Ultimate Circle of the Stalinist Inferno. New Universities Quarterly 34 (2): 161–168. Josephson, Paul. 2005. Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Program from Stalin to Today. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Levi, Primo. 1959. If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf. New York, NY: Orion. ———. 1964. The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head. ———. 1984. The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY: Schocken. Magavern, Sam. 2009. Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey. London: Palgrave. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Radiation as Hyperobject. In The Nuclear Culture Sourcebook, ed. Ele Carpenter, 169–173. London: Black Dog Publishing. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Knopf. Shalamov, Varlam. 1934. Nauka i khudozhestvennaia literatura. Front nauki i tekhniki 12: 84–91. ———. 1994. Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad. London: Penguin. ———. 2013. Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 95–111. Moscow: Terra.

62  A. BANERJEE ———. 2013. O proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 114–156. Moscow: Terra. ———. 2013. O novoi proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 157–159. Moscow: Terra. ———. 2013. Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 6: 7–76. Moscow: Terra. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 2003. The Gulag Archipelago. London: Harvill.

CHAPTER 4

The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil Brent Ryan Bellamy

In the photography series Oil (1999–2010), Edward Burtynsky captures images of oil’s industrial extraction, refinement, and use in Canada, China, Azerbaijan, and the United States.1 Literary scholar Sofia Ahlberg describes Burtynsky’s oil photography as taking on a “god-like perspective,” arguing that the “compositional frame stages his vision of something that is literally impossible to see at once” in that his photographs “depict localised large-scale signs of processes that, being global, cannot be comprehended within any finite visual frame” (Ahlberg , 78, 85). On the account of Ahlberg and other critics, Burtynsky’s work enables something like extra-sensory perception for mere mortals, allowing viewers to realize their embeddedness in the built world of oil and meanwhile, perversely, minimize their sense that they can do anything to affect such wide-angle, satellite-rendered spaces. The historian of photography Catherine Zuromskis describes this conceptual problem as “a world that cannot comprehend itself without the comforts of that same industry and the culture it creates” (Barrett and Worden, Oil Culture, 292). Though there can be no critique of oil without the fossil economy, the revelatory work of photographic images such as Burtynsky’s consists in its capacity to show that no one alone can observe or know the whole picture. As Co-editor of Petrocultures Adam Carlson elaborates, there’s no singular subject who can know the whole…there are only fragments of experience, expertise, action, and thoughts to be apprehended and assembled in new and revolutionary ways. The material and infrastructural unconscious that constitutes these petroscapes is precisely the field for these new politics, and this is precisely why we need to understand oil to understand everything else. (Wilson et al., 410) B. R. Bellamy (*)  Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_4

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Alongside these other petrocritics, Carlson reveals something crucial here ­vis-à-vis Burtynsky and the photographic image: the role of the petrocritic looms large in the political work of mapping fossil fuel infrastructure, policy, and relations. In perverse ways, oil’s energic boon literally empowers petrocritics to argue for an energy transition away from such carbon-rich resources. In this chapter, I take up this knot of representation and knowledge under the heading of the aesthetic textuality of oil. The aesthetic textuality of oil names both oil’s impact on cultural production and the development of particularly oil-bound social formations and habits. My apprehension of oil’s material and aesthetic impact originates in Living Oil (2014) where Stephanie LeMenager establishes the groundwork for the aesthetics of petroleum (66–101). Drawing on media theorist Friedrich Kittler and discussing Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, LeMenager answers the question “Why is oil so bad?” (70; emphasis original). The first answer is that oil supports and produces multiple, layered media environments to which “there is no apparent ‘outside’ that might be materialized through imagination and affect as palpable hope” (70). By focusing on the circulation of Sinclair’s book, LeMenager illustrates oil’s saturation of environments, both living and media. The first edition could not have traveled the distance books travel today to reach its audience. LeMenager estimates that today books travel approximately 12.5 million miles in containers on ships, trains, and trucks. But the rabbit hole goes deeper. LeMenager’s 2007 copy of Oil relied on oil for more than transportation. The inks are made of petroleum-based resins, the paper it was printed on was shipped from a manufacturer to the printer, and the press that printed it runs on electric energy as do the buildings housing it. After its production, the book would be housed in a warehouse, retail store, library, or home. If it were to be thrown away, it would need to be carted to a landfill, and we would need to add one more diesel bill and carbon plume to the expense report. Ultimately, then, “To step outside of petromodernity would require a step outside of media, including the modern printed book” (70–71).2 LeMenager deepens the bind of oil’s aesthetic textuality. Petrocriticism vivifies the total, unbreakable hold of fossil fuels on media at every level: production, distribution, consumption, and waste. LeMenager’s work goes farther than this observation though. The oil-printed book is capable of generating “an immersive, virtual environment,” yet LeMenager calls this “petroleum language” (71; emphasis mine). Cultural life with oil is not different in degree but in kind. Here, LeMenager’s description of the aesthetics of petroleum takes on a decidedly textual emphasis. Oil’s aesthetics are not limited to the representation of oil, nor do they solely seek to express the interconnected systems of fossil fuel-powered circulation and distribution of aesthetic objects, nor do they solely name the writing upon and within the earth of millions of miles of gas and oil pipelines. Oil’s aesthetic textuality encompasses all of these things: mimesis, artistic production, and the

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infrastructural rewriting of the Earth’s surface. Fossil fuels provide the basis for the aesthetics of human artistic production, even as they reproduce systems of economic production. The writing of oil landscapes can take the form of a removal or subtraction. In a provocative piece titled “Improvement and Overburden,” postcolonial theory and decolonization studies scholar Jennifer Wenzel describes resource extraction as a rewriting of landscape from the standpoint of oil extraction. Wenzel writes, “The profitable and the beautiful are brought into alignment, envisioned as one and the same.” She explains that overburden is “everything lying on top of the buried resource (or underground infrastructure, like pipelines or tunnels), as well as the pressure exerted by that everything on what’s beneath it. Overburden is topsoil, sand, and clay; sedimentary rock; surface water and groundwater. Everything in the way of paydirt.” The rewriting of topsoil, muskeg, flora, and fauna as “overburden” enables the rewriting of landscapes in the image of fossil fuel infrastructures and petrocultures. Land becomes palimpsestic yet reveals little of its former configurations. Writing that captures these changes might preserve a descriptive image of what once was, but little can be done to put things back as they were previously. This chapter begins with an overview of literary and filmic approaches to making the world of oil apparent. Yet, such texts tend to offer only a p ­ artial sense of oil relations. They do not quite achieve the leap from text to matter one might hope for given the urgency of climatic deterioration and ongoing intensification of fossil fuel extraction. In its back half, this chapter turns to James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 travelogue The Oil Road, which offers a compelling way of mapping the relation of oil to literature. The Oil Road struggles with the limits to representing oil’s grip on cultural, economic, and social systems. By tracking fossil fuel infrastructure, The Oil Road is able to consider both history and geography; it describes produced landscapes and their origins. In this way, The Oil Road offers an entry point for activists, artists, and researchers to map the spatial, historical, and social and economic relations created by oil. Its travelers move with the barrels, tankers, trains, trucks, pipelines, refineries, petrol pumps, and carbon plumes and among communities, workers, service industries, and institutions. The Oil Road ruminates on this information, meanwhile keeping one eye on history and another on the present. This exemplar of the aesthetic textuality of oil names landscapes, infrastructures, social forms, cultural forms, and resources in mediated relation to one another. It seeks to hold up the relationship between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century infrastructures and cultures as one bound with and indelibly imprinted upon by the ongoing social use of fossil fuels. Oil is historically central here, and dominant, specifically because any future one seeks to imagine in its wake will necessarily be shaped by the flourishing of the highly mobile, eminently wasteful commodity culture it made possible. Critique, even when raised to the impressive level of LeMenager’s or Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s projects, never gets outside of

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the oil relation. Instead, it does its work internally to the aesthetic textuality of oil. Central to these projects’ mapping of greater-than human relations (i.e., infrastructural and planetary) is the mediation of those relations from the vantage of the petrocritic within petroculture. Whether in the imperial core or on the periphery, fossil fuels shape the lived realities of daily life.

Archiving Oil Texts Many literary texts and films help us understand the history of narratives featuring the discovery, extraction, use, and control of oil. Since its 1858 North American discovery just south of what is now Petrolia, ON, and its successive 1859 drilling in Titusville, PA, oil has had a dramatic impact on the North American landscape.3 Frank Norris’ The Octopus (first published in 1901), Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (first published in 1927), John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy (first published in 1938), and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (first published in 1939) tell of the discovery and extraction of oil, the rampant escalation of its use, and the incredible impact petroleum had on the reorganization of agriculture and the agrarian class in the early-twentieth-century United States. These texts act as touchstones for the transition to oil’s dominance and the development of the contemporary archive of oil-focused literary texts.4 This oil-bound North American landscape exists in relation to oil exploration and extraction elsewhere, for instance, in the Arabian Peninsula or off the coast of Scotland and, later, Newfoundland. Oil encounters in the long twentieth century result in reshaped landscapes and social relations. Communities are destroyed, founded, and transformed in Abel Rahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt (first published in 1989)—the first in a quintet of novels about the mid-twentieth-century development of extractive industries in what is now the United Arab Emirates. Following the arrival of foreign figures and then the development of a sea-side community Harran, the novel depicts the fate of a community of Bedouin Wadi al-Uyoun. The novel tracks developing reactions to the implanting of capitalist labor practices, the development of oil infrastructure, and the introduction of modern conveniences. Indian writer Amitav Ghosh praises Munif’s novel as one of the few books to elaborate the oil encounter from the perspective of collective narration, creating the moniker “petrofiction” in the process (see Ghosh 1992), while John Updike critiques the novel for lacking the standard by which he measures narrative success: “individual moral adventure” (Updike, 117).5 The fractures of the oil encounter reproduce themselves in Updike’s commentary, which reveals much more about his anti-immigrant sentiments than about Munif’s novel. Cities of Salt builds its critique and lament of fossil-energy transition with care. For instance, the emerging city of Harran is divided early on, with an Arab Harran built around the old city and an American Harran built away from the city center. Whole urban spaces are shaped in oil’s imperialist-inflected image. The workers build Harran house-by-house: “…in less than a month the nucleus of a large and well-ordered city had appeared

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and sped toward completion” with “hard streets, some wide and others narrow, all perfectly straight, rolled smooth by the accursed heavy machines and coated with a gleaming black substance” (Munif, 207). The city is both divided and united by the roadways of the internal combustion engine, here represented as strange and blasphemous. Moving to Scotland and dramatic form, John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (first published in 1973) imagines the oil encounter as one more in a long history of colonial extractive enterprises undertaken by the British in the Scottish Highlands. The play takes up Bertolt Brecht’s approach to drama in general and could even be considered in dialogue with Brecht’s (1977) suggestive statement that “petroleum resists the five-act form” (29). The Cheviot confirms Brecht’s claim in more ways than one.6 The play tells the story of three rounds of enclosure that divorced the highlanders from their lands. These three moments are named in the title of the play: first sheep replaced highlanders, then the great hunt took more land, and finally, at the time of the play’s composition, offshore oil development was looming on Scotland’s political horizon. Structurally, The Cheviot develops without clearly demarcated acts or scenes. The cast often breaks the fourth wall to describe the significance of events on stage. Oil itself is not the major focus of the play either; only the ultimate scene raises the question of what to do about the newly discovered offshore reserves—a question that reverberates across historical and the as yet unbroken ground of future extraction zones. Through this historical scope, the play suggests that the Scottish people endured enough hardship to know that they are most likely to succeed when they stand together. Here, the long history of clearances blends with oil’s energic promise to present a clearly imagined future: the question the play closes on is not whether or not to drill, but who will be in control of the drilling? Moving from the collective impact of fossil fuel extraction to the way a single family is impacted by the resource economy, Lisa Moore’s February (2009) follows the Newfoundlander Helen O’Mara after she loses her partner on the Ocean Ranger, which sank several hundred kilometers off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982. Her husband Cal was aboard the s­emi-submersible, mobile, offshore oil drilling platform. She fixates on the technical books that describe platform operations, coming to realize that the men on duty, if they’d had the training, if they’d had the manual aboard, could have stopped the rig from capsizing. O’Mara speculates: “She is thinking again about the portal. It had a metal deadlight that could be lowered and secured over the two panes of glass, but nobody had lowered the deadlight. If that metal deadlight had been lowered, the water wouldn’t have gotten over the control panel” (293). O’Mara imagines what may have happened to cause the rig to list, to take on water, to capsize, to drown the men. She receives a settlement from the oil company for the loss of Cal’s wages, which brings home the fact that the company has only ever seen Cal as a number on a page. Despite its focus on one family, such imagined experiences are not singular: there were eighty-four other men lost to the waves. Because St. John’s is such a small,

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tight-knit community (approximately 150,000 people lived there in the mid1980s), it’s unlikely that anyone avoided losing someone on the rig. February narrates the multiple temporalities of dangerous work, the long wake of crisis, and the way living with these realities shapes character. Rather than focusing on the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use, it describes the pain of proximity to sites of extraction through loss. The risk undertaken in the name of extraction writes itself more deeply on some lives than on others. Literature is not the only medium in which oil becomes a central driver of narrative; film has been used to capture the impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use. Writing on oil documentaries in general, Imre Szeman claims that such “documentaries both reflect and are a source of the social narratives through which we describe oil to ourselves” (Barrett and Worden, Oil Culture, 424). Though many documentaries have been made about the impact of fossil fuels on modern life, perhaps most interesting for involving viewer interaction are two video-game-like documentaries.7 David Dufresne’s Fort McMoney (2013), part documentary, part video game, constitutes a deviation from strict realism and offers a variation on the standard documentary as the viewer is immersed into a northern Alberta oil boomtown. As an agent who can explore the city for themselves, viewers engage in interviews with real Fort McMurray residents, attend town meetings, and vote in referendums. The film offers a form of critical, documentary tourism and introduces viewers to an oil space that they would not properly be able to explore otherwise. Looking at extraction zones in a similar mode, Brenda Longfellow’s interactive documentary Offshore (2015) allows viewers to explore a constructed, virtual rig.8 These interactive documentaries allow viewers to travel to sites of oil extraction they could otherwise not go, introducing real people who are empowered to tell their own stories through the formal innovation of a gamified documentary. Warren Cariou and Neil McArthur’s 2009 documentary Land of Oil and Water offers a view of oil’s impact on indigenous communities. It focuses on the northern Saskatchewan Cree and Dene community of La Loche, the Metis community of Buffalo Narrows, and the northern Albertan aboriginal communities of Fort Mackay and Fort Chipewyan. In this way, the documentary offers community members in La Loche and Buffalo Narrows an opportunity to describe their hopes for resources development, while community members in Fort Mackay and Fort Chipewyan have a chance to respond with their experiences of extractive industries, from hopes for jobs and other opportunities to anxieties about emissions and tailings ponds. The film stages a conversation between the four communities, and the resulting documentary tours the spaces most impacted, and set to be impacted, by the development of the bituminous tar sands found in the traditional and current territory of Cree, Dunneza, and Chipewyan peoples and currently part of Treaty 8 territory. These texts provide the starting point for a robust account of literary and filmic encounters with fossil fuels. Geographically and culturally diverse, these

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texts show that there is no singular way to narrate the impact and promise of fossil fuels, yet the decisions made in how to represent and narrate the worlds of petroculture have a profound impact on how readers and viewers might come to understand their own connections to fossil fuels and one another. These pieces show that the impact of fossil fuels on culture is immense and ongoing. The final example of the aesthetic textuality of oil that I will offer here takes a specifically political approach to mediating the role of oil in the art world and the Middle East.

Case Study: The Oil Road James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 critical travelogue The Oil Road takes the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as the backbone of its plot, which, at the same time, determines the terrain of its story. This focus has the formal effect of creating a travelogue that is at once historically deep and politically focused—the book aims its targeting apparatus on the energy company now known as BP. Marriot and Minio-Paluello move along the same route as the crude pumped from the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield—a complex of oil fields buried beneath the Caspian Sea situated between the Caucasus Mountains to the east and the broad steppe to the west. They pause to recount major shifts in regional power, from an era of Soviet dominance in the early-twentieth century to the present multinational control. They attempt to know about oil, in both a cognitive and physical sense, by depicting the complexity of its infrastructures. They make the clear point that the way to stop oil’s dominance is by ceasing to engineer, build, and expand its platforms, pump jacks, pipelines, tanker routes, refineries, and pumping stations. My aim in this case study is to propose that the pipeline of The Oil Road is an infrastructural innovation of petroculture and to examine the effects it produces as a narrative tool in travelogue. Marriot and Minio-Paluello work very carefully to undo the assumed “smoothness” of oil transport, by calling attention to the bumps, snags, corrosions, and ruptures that occur along the way. As they eloquently put it, “This global oil trade does not just flow by itself”; rather, “Every day, close to 100 million barrels of crude are collected from zones of extraction and delivered to points of consumption…. The mass relocation of great vol­ umes of fossil fuels requires constant coordination of logistical and financial resources” (250). Oil cannot move on its own. In a review of The Oil Road, Doreen Massey (2013) incisively claims that the book depicts a “space full of obstacles,” listing “the Caucasus, the sea, the Alps” as geographies that the pipelines have to overcome. Massey continues, every kilometre along the pipeline route there is a metal stake, with a yellow hat and numbers on, to mark where it is buried, itself a vast earthmoving exercise. Every few kilometres there is a block valve, where the oil can be shut off in an emergency, surrounded by steel and concrete. There are pumping stations, to

70  B. R. BELLAMY force the oil on and on up gradients and through mountain ranges. The oil only flows because of all this material effort - grinding, tough, often slow, often bitterly contested, heavy. (130)

Rather than describing the immense undertaking that is the shipment of fossil fuels outright, Marriot and Minio-Paluello show the reader each painstaking step in the construction and maintenance of the oil road. They create an itinerary of their journey and of petrol’s journey. As they construct this itinerary, they produce a conceptual map of BP’s legal, economic, and cultural dealings. As members of Platform London—a collective that combines research, artistic practice, and activism—Marriot and Minio-Paluello have the experience, contacts, and resources to undertake the more than five-thousand-kilometer-long journey along the path of oil. Reviewer Terry Macalister points out that they “know the industry from a decade of campaigning against it.” A part of these resources means that they have been able to work to devise a theoretical map to match the infrastructural one traced in the book. In the prologue, they describe this map, writing, Our experience, gained over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a massive project is not carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network of bodies, which we have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil corporation are gathered institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These include public and private banks, government ministries and military bodies, engineering companies and legal firms, universities and environmental consultants, non-governmental organizations, and cultural institutions. All of these make up the Carbon Web that drives forward the extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels. (6)

The Carbon Web designed by Platform London and charted in The Oil Road reveals the connections of London-Based International Oil and Gas Companies (BP & Shell) to five sectors of political economic significance, which are subdivided and itemized. The chart shows Law (Law Firms, Arbitration Tribunals, International Legal Bodies), Government (US Government, Host Government, European Union, UK Government), External Affairs (Lobby Groups, Cultural Institutions, NGOs, PR Firms, Media), Industry (Environmental Consultants, Oil Services, Exploration Companies, Business Affairs, University and Research Institutes), and Finance (Institutional Investors, Banks, Analysts, International Financial Institutions).9 Seen as a list, or even as the diagram available on Platform London’s website (http://platformlondon.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/), the carbon web overwhelms. The relations are not mediated by more than a straight line connecting one entity to another. Moreover, the ways that one branch might influence another are left undivulged by the list and the image. But, the image of the carbon web is not a starting point. It is the product of a much longer journey. The Oil Road itself offers readers the

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historical, geographical, technical, and political knowledge necessary to make sense of the carbon web. It trains readers in the aesthetic textuality of oil. The Oil Road describes the struggle over the way oil moves, both as substance and as fuel. The authors enumerate the juridical battles fought over the development and construction of the pipeline. In “Without Having to Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around Them by Using a Treaty,” they outline the legal massaging that BP had to carry out across three countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey—from two other legal contexts—the United Kingdom and the United States. These “Agreements” circumvent local laws by “overriding all existing and future domestic law apart from the constitutions of the states in question” (144). Furthermore, a new tax structure was put in place to exempt the energy companies and construction companies that worked on the pipeline. Any disputes arising would be settled by international tribunals in Stockholm, Geneva, or London. Authorized adjustments to state law, made on behalf of energy transport, define the legal maneuvering in the struggle over the energy future. In a passage headed with the title “Burnaz, Turkey,” Marriot and Minio-Paluello write that “People have learned from the nearby experience of BTC and the Isken coal plant that battles must be fought early on. New projects need to be challenged before they are approved, financed, and planned…in far-off capitals” (239). The importance of these insights into the infrastructure of post-industrial energy systems seems worth emphasizing here: the development of energy infrastructure displays economic, engineering, industrial, and political effort on a massive scale. The only way to get ahead of it is to do so literally: to be ready beforehand and to map before the mappers. Travelogue can tell multiple stories at once. Succinctly “plot”-able on the map (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey), the itinerary of the trip remains linear even as the authors delve into the history of region. For instance, the drama of the text arrives from it fulfilling a promise it makes early on: that the journey along the oil road will pass “through the crucibles of Bolshevism and fascism, Futurism and social democracy, through the furnaces of an industrial continent” (9). The descriptions of the pipe’s visibility—sometimes it is buried, sometimes it runs through private property, sometimes it is under heavy guard—are supplemented by other layers of the text. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello recount stories of their previous visits to the region, they ­ describe the development of the pipeline as technology and offer a political history of the area from its soviet days through to its corporate present. In one particular instance, they describe the seizure of Rijeka, a port city with a large refinery, in 1919 by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who arrived “triumphantly in a red sports car at the head of a column of 297 black-shirted Arditi followers” (265), while, in another, they turn to the “outbreak of World War II,” when Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, and BP, then Anglo-Persian, “shared 57.8% of the German market,” and “all three companies provided fuel to the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialized, and established its structure

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of terror” (301), and, they note, BP’s web-published history passes over the years spanning 1932 and 1948 in silence. These strata of description in The Oil Road tellingly reveal the difficulty of knowing about energy infrastructure. Traveling the route of oil offers a place to start, but the book also suggests that more time is needed to grasp the magnitude of energy extraction and transport. The Oil Road makes available the years missing from BP’s timeline just as it describes the multiple unfolding struggles over oil transport. It accomplishes both tasks through its own familiarity with the oil archive. The book makes use of other oil texts such as industry journals, promo materials, investor updates, and so on. This effort tells us about the genres of writing that oil both traffics in—engineering tracts, investor opinion, public promotion, CEO biographies—and the types of approach that a materialist critique of energy must navigate in order to register as mapping at all. It uses the aesthetic textuality of oil history and infrastructure as the basis for its own narrative unfolding. A crucial part of this mediation is that at times the text must operate on a speculative register. Along their journey, the authors encounter barriers, such as fences or seas. Before leaving Baku, they note that The Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield is not shown on maps of Azerbaijan. There is no trace of the institutions and flares as we search on Google Earth. We have less than thirty photographs of it on our laptop, and all of these are promotional images published by BP…the wells lie in a forbidden zone to which only our imaginations can travel…the route we are following is obscure. It is described only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government memos. (16)

In this way, Marriot and Minio-Paluello attend to the mediated nature of every moment of their journey. They write, further down the page, “if we were to sail…” and then describe the winds, the current, and the looming platform, extending the terrain the travelogue could cover through hypothetical assumption and descriptive speculation. Later, when they find their travel plans blocked at the other end of the pipeline, they perform a similar imaginative and descriptive journey from Yumurtalik, Turkey, to Muggia, Italy. They had planned to board a tanker and make the journey by sea, but instead they settle for tracking the oil tanker Dugi Otok through marinetraffic. com and shipping forecasts. As such, the whole journey must be described imaginatively. Marriot and Minio-Paluello note various weather events and passing ships, describing the geography of the region and using their knowledge of marine history to fill in this leg of the journey.10 They describe those silent seafaring tankers as “the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of the industrial age” (250). Imagined moments such as these are no less real than when the authors are able to reach out and touch the pipeline itself, and moments that seem all too real are no less mediated. The Oil Road teaches

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readers that the assessment of the aesthetic textuality of oil requires interpretation as much as it requires knowledge: narrative and emplotment are critical tools for comprehending the built world of fossil fuels, the economics underpinning it, and the institutions ruling over it. Like LeMenager’s Living Oil, The Oil Road seems to move a step beyond the limits inherent to representing oil. As slippery as oil can be, by taking it as the structuring force of its plot and the ground of its story, The Oil Road effectively begins to figure the larger structure lurking in the background— that other, much more difficult to grasp totality: the mode of production itself. The carbon web bears a striking resemblance to Marxist descriptions of the economic base and the cultural, juridical, and political superstructure. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson revises the classic base-superstructure schema: the base, which encompasses labor and infra­ structure, is understood as underlying or absent cause of social relations; meanwhile, culture, ideology, the juridical, the political, and the economic forces branch off from it as the superstructure. For Jameson, narrowly economic entities (i.e., “the forces of production, the labor process, technical development, or relations of production” [36]) are not segregated as the base, as they form their own elements within a larger totality of the mode of production. The mode of production is “nowhere present as an element,” is “not a part of the whole or one of the levels,” but is rather “the entire system of relationships among those levels” (36; emphasis original). Turning back to fossil capital, I would argue that the oil rigs, pump jacks, pipelines, oil tankers, refineries, shipping trucks, petrol stations, and so on are not directly identifiable as part of the base; within Jameson’s schema, I would situate them within the superstructure. This distinction should be understood as central to what I have been describing as the aesthetic textuality of oil. Certainly, there are crucial differences between an oil drum and a travelogue: these are representative elements of different branches of the superstructure. The power, then, of The Oil Road and the carbon web it describes is in making vivid the social relations that animate fossil capital. The Oil Road mediates the relationship between the fossil-fueled mode of production and culture, ideology, the juridical, the political, and the economic forces that shape and are shaped by it. It intervenes in a world where the aesthetics of oil might only be understood as urban infrastructure that fades into the background or as the name adorning the wing of an art gallery (i.e., British Petroleum). Marriot and Minio-Paluello develop the material spatial and temporal connections that are not entirely evident or legible in the world of culture, outlining the absent cause of fossil capital. As with LeMenager’s meditation on the materiality of the book in Living Oil, Marriot and Minio-Paluello push for an understanding of oil that identifies superstructural elements as full participants in a larger whole. Yet, simply because they are connected within the totality, one should not mistake that for their identity. As The Oil Road makes clear, there are some places one cannot go.

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There are others where political intervention will make more of a difference in disrupting the smooth flow of oil. The carbon web they offer is one attempt to map such institutional connections; the travelogue itself provides the map to one route that oil takes from extraction to refinement. Oil’s aesthetic textuality inheres within the relations of fossil capital. In light of these considerations, The Oil Road thus offers the start of a mapping of the mode of production from the standpoint of energy. This map includes not only the physical structures, whether buried or running above ground, not only the tankers hauling crude, not only the refineries, and not only the petrol pumps. It also includes the communities bisected by pipelines, the workers at each point, the service industries that spring up to support ­oil-sector laborers, and the institutions that benefit from the massive amount of wealth and work generated by extraction projects. What is astounding about The Oil Road is that it manages all of this information without losing sight of history or of the present as a moment subject to change. Sarah Brouillette has argued against “simply mapping the mapmakers,” outlining that merely emphasizing “capitalism’s mysteriousness and intractability, […] our incapacity in the face of it, [or] our anxiety about our incapacity, and so forth” are paths to nothing. To avoid such traps for the jaded, Brouillette implores critics to foreground “the importance of a given map’s relationship to struggle” (emphasis mine).11 Claire Westall makes a similar point: “What must come with this new [energetic] materialist perspective, though, is a systemic and relational conception of capitalism and culture, and a commitment to a ‘worlded’ mode of reading capable of grasping this systemic and uneven relationality” (269). This level of mapping, not only of the what and the where, but also of the how, is precisely what The Oil Road accomplishes. The practicality of Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s map lies in its dialectic between infrastructure and form. The oil pipeline presents a through line for the travelogue’s recounted plot. Each entry in the book is marked by progress (or regress in one case) along the oil road. This tale of the oil road enables the story of the carbon web. In this sense, the text’s careful development of BP’s connections as a totality is central to its political usefulness. The labor and the maintenance of such roads comprised of pumps, steel tubes, security fences, security personnel, spouts, gauges, monitoring devices, tanker ships, refineries, more steel tubes, more spouts, more security personnel, delivery trucks, gas pumps, and on and on, are a very real, ongoing kind of work. Marriot and Minio-Paluello show us this work, which in a way helps us to understand the scope of the task at hand and to locate crucial starting places to begin to dismantle the oil road and the carbon web it weaves. Acknowledgements   This chapter grows out of research I conducted as a Social Sciences and Humanities postdoctoral research fellow at the Memorial University of Newfoundland under the supervision of Danine Farquharson. My thanks go to Danine, as well as to Fiona Polack, Jennifer Lokash, Andrew Loman, and Christopher Lockett. Special thanks are due to Neel Ahuja, a most gracious and insightful editor, and to Monique Allewaert, a thoughtful reader. Priscilla Wald deserves my thanks as well for

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inviting my contribution. Adam Carlson and I talked about the text as I was composing it, and it was on his suggestions that I read The Oil Road to begin with. I presented an early version of this work at the American Comparative Literature Association held in Seattle in 2015 in a seminar titled Infrastructure and Form organized by Joseph Jeon and Kate Marshall. They also have my thanks. Finally, I would like to thank the students of ENGL 487: Energy/Literature (Fall 2017) who read many of the texts mentioned here for their enthusiasm and insight about energy humanities.

Notes







1. There are others besides Burtynsky whose work is worth thinking about and with. See Peeples for artists that engage with the relations of extraction, pollution, and landscape (376). 2. Many representational approaches could prove instructive in the endeavor to track oil’s formal impacts on artistic production. Recent critical works that address the cultural dimensions of oil range from descriptions of the components of artworks to comparative assessments of oil and thought. Oil occupies a crucial position in the history of modern art, especially in the form of oil-based paints and then in the form of acrylics. Early forms of cinema were underway well before petrochemicals reorganized film technologies early in the twentieth century, but the reproducibility and shelf-life of mid-century films would have been impossible without cinema’s technological incorporation of oil (see Bozak). From the polymers used in film stock, to the electricity powering cameras and lighting rigs, Hollywood has long been mired in the thick materiality of fossil fuels. This transformation has also been attempted in reverse, as Stephanie LeMenager informs readers: “in recent years, polyester or PET film stock has been experimentally recycled into fuel” (Living Oil, 100). The mutual development of culture and fossil fuel use are so entwined that it makes little sense to consider them separately. 3. Petrolia and Titusville vie for historical relevance as the first sight of the extraction of crude oil (and this is despite the fact that people have been using fossil fuels around the world for millennia). We might simply consider them contemporary discoveries. For more on Petrolia, see visual artist Andreas Rutkauskas’s Petrolia project here www.andreasrutkauskas.com/petrolia. 4. For an account of for Oil! see Hitchcock “Oil in an American Imaginary,” for the USA Trilogy see Whalan “Oil Was Trumps,” and for The Grapes of Wrath and The Octopus, see Diamanti “From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value.” 5. Ghosh returns to this point in his recent book The Great Derangement (2016). 6. The play itself was composed in the spirit of the ceilidh, featuring a small cast, musical interludes, and collective storytelling. The centerpiece prop was a large painted book made of heavy cardboard that acted as the backdrop. Its pages held various scenes of the highlands and could be easily manipulated during performance, packed after shows, and transported from town to town. See Graeme Macdonald’s excellent critical edition of the play for an in-depth framing and analysis. 7.  See Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil (2009) and for a list of oil documentaries, see http://greenplanetfilms.org/ blog/a-list-of-films-about-oil-and-fracking/. For criticism on oil documentaries, see Szeman “Crude Aesthetics” and “Art Against Oil.”

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8. The creators have further supplied a study guide for classroom use, which is available here: http://offshore-interactive.com/collateral/Offshore_Study_ Guide_03.pdf. 9. See “The Carbon Web.” 10. I decided to locate the Dugi Otok at marinetraffic.com and found it still actively shipping crude: as of February 8, 2018, it has nearly reached its destination Skagen, Denmark, having shipped from Rotterdam, Netherlands, on January 30, 2018. Its gross tonnage is 59315. 11.  Brouillette’s salient point here was made as part of a conversation on the publishing platform e-flux under the heading of “Paranoid Subjectivity and Cognitive Mapping.” The conversation included Brouillette, Martin John Callanan, Alberto Toscano, and Tom Eyers.

Works Cited Ahlberg, Sofia. 2017. Goodbye Crude World: The Aesthetics of Environmental Catastrophe in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Photographs. The Comparatist 41: 78–92. https://doi. org/10.1353/com.2017.0005. Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden (eds.). 2014. Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bozak, Nadine. 2012. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1977. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang. Brouillette, Sarah. 2015. Paranoid Subjectivity. https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/ paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capitalism-to-be-represented/1080/9. Accessed 8 Feb 2018. The Carbon Web. n.d. Platform: Arts, Activism, Education, Research. http://platformlondon.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/. Accessed 8 Feb 2018. Diamanti, Jeff. 2017. From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value: The Energy Unconscious of the Octopus. Western American Literature 54 (4): 391–407. Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel. In Incendiary Circumstances, 131–151. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2016. The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hitchcock, Peter. 2010. Oil in an American Imaginary. New Formations 69: 81–97. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macalister, Terry. 2012. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello—Review. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/14/oil-road-james-marriott-mika-minio-paluello-review. Accessed 8 Feb 2018. Marriot, James, and Mika Minio-Paluello. 2013. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London. New York: Verso. Massey, Doreen. 2013. Mapping the Carbon Web. Soundings 54: 127–130.

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Munif, Abdelrahman.1989. Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux. New York: Vintage International. McGrath, John. 2015. The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, ed. Graeme Macdonald. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Moore, Lisa. 2009. February. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Peeples, Jennifer. 2011. Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes. Environmental Communication 5 (4): 373–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/1752 4032.2011.616516. Rutkauskas, Andreas. 2011. Petrolia. https://www.andreasrutkauskas.com/petrolia. Accessed 8 May 2019. Szeman, Imre. 2012. Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries. Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 423–439. ———. 2015. Art Against Oil: Offshore and Other Experiments in EcoRepresentation. Point of View Magazine 97: 28–31. Updike, John. 1988. Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns. The New Yorker, October 17, pp. 117–121. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2016. Improvement and Overburden. Postmodern Culture 26: 2. https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0003. Westall, Claire. 2017. World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism. Journal of Post-Colonial Writing 53 (3): 265–276. Whalan, Mark. 2017. “Oil Was Trumps”: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., World War I, and the Growth of the Petromodern State. American Literary History 29 (3): 474–498. Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (eds.). 2017. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Literature and Energy Jordan B. Kinder and Imre Szeman

Introduction In the fossil fuel era, energy has come to be associated with transnational corporate intrigue, machinations of statecraft, exertions of geopolitical power, environmental destruction, and (more recently) the advent of wondrous techno-scientific developments (such as electric cars and solar panels). It’s easy to see why this might be the case. The importance of fossil fuel energy to the ongoing operations of the global capitalist economy and the fact that pools of oil and gas are located in specific global regions have fundamentally shaped the character of international politics; at the same time, growing awareness of the environmental consequences of fossil fuel use at its current level (in 2017, 98 million barrels of oil per day or nearly 36 billion barrels per year globally1) has generated a concerted attempt to fashion new technologies to harness cleaner forms of energy that might allow capitalism to continue along in a greener fashion. The daily struggles being waged over access to and control over energy include everything from demonstrations to block the Dakota Access Pipeline to attempts to instantiate versions of Germany’s celebrated Energiewende (energy transition) in other countries, and from media excitement over Elon Musk’s battery-powered automobiles to the ongoing (if slow) expansion of renewable energy worldwide. Energy matters to how power and privilege circulate in the world, to the location of sites of conflict, and to the environmental direction of the planet. J. B. Kinder  McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada I. Szeman (*)  University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_5

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What could be characterized as the world-historical import of energy might seem distant from the concerns of literature or literary criticism, except perhaps as topics for politically and environmentally concerned fictions. Indeed, the energy historian Vaclav Smil (2004, 55) has written that “timeless artistic expressions show no correlation with levels or kinds of energy consumption.” However, recent critical work on energy and culture has begun to identify just how much energy matters for art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression.2 The intervention of this critical work has shown that, far from being timeless, cultural and aesthetic expressions are deeply marked by the shape and character of the energy systems in which they were created. The arts of a world powered by horses and the labor of bodies cannot help but be distinct from the expanded time, space, and power of our own petro-modernity: the production and consumption of cultural artifacts, including literature, are bound to their historical and material energic contexts. Offering the term “fossil fuel fiction” as a critical category through which to approach the cultural and aesthetic dynamics of our warming present, ecological historian Andreas Malm argues that “global warming changes everything, including the reading of literature” (Malm 2017, 125). Malm’s provocation draws attention to an important methodological dynamic this chapter develops in relation to energy: all literature of the Anthropocene needs to be thought of as fiction of the age of petroleum. The growing social and cultural presence of global warming, our awareness of and alertness to the significance of the human impact on planetary systems, cannot help but reframe critical approaches to literature, and in a deeper and more critically significant manner than through attention to those texts that more prominently feature the environment than others (as in climate fiction or ecocritical texts). By focusing on the energic contexts of literary and cultural production, the energy humanities establish a material basis for the critical analysis of literary and cultural production in a warming world, thereby opening up a way of tracing our conscious and unconscious energy imaginaries. There are two main challenges involved in making sense of the relationship of energy (and distinct energy regimes) to literary and cultural production. First, there is no simple, easy, or direct way of forging a relationship between dominant modes of energy use in a given period and literary form or theme. Typical divisions of literary style, form, or genre that have been used to develop a periodizing relationship between literature and historical shifts and developments (as carried out, for instance, in the work of Fredric Jameson) do not easily map onto the mid-nineteenth-century shift from coal to oil, or even the rapid expansion of energy use following World War II. Postmodernism is not the outcome of the 1973 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil crisis, nor is modernism the result of the decision by the British Navy to switch to oil from coal in the years prior to World War I, a move some critics have identified as central to the decline of British hegemony. The links of energy to developments in literary history are deeper and more difficult to parse out.

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This difficulty results in large part from a second challenge involved in discussing the significance of energy for literature. For much of history, including a modernity soaked in oil, energy has managed to hide in plain sight—an obviously important force in shaping geopolitics and culture, yet seldom foregrounded in literature, including the fiction of the period that has come to be known as the Great Acceleration.3 This astonishing absence of oil in the literature of a lifeworld deeply shaped by the substance was first noted by writer and critic Amitav Ghosh, who attempted to account for the failure of contemporary US literature to name a key site of American power: the Middle East. The belated recognition of this absence and its aesthetic implications has comprised much of the literary-critical work on energy to date. This chapter begins with a survey of the origins of and contemporary developments in the energy humanities,4 offering a historical and conceptual account of how energy has become a site of inquiry for the humanities and social sciences. It then offers an account of some of the ways in which literary criticism and contemporary petro-literature have attempted to account for the absence of energy in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literature. This critical work is only now beginning. The absence of energy from literature mirrors a larger cultural gap with respect to energy: as long as there were ever growing levels of energy, it was treated as a small part of the bigger picture of technological or sociopolitical progress, including narratives of literary historical change and development. For this reason, the reintroduction of energy to literary study needs to create new explanatory models to account for the cultural force of energy, rather than adopting older critical models that were unattuned to the import of energy. The literary periods and styles of modernism and postmodernism, for instance, have been narrated in the context of a world emptied of energy. A commitment to think about energy in relation to literature demands a reconsideration of the adequacy of these older categories in understanding the sociocultural significance of energy and the critical capacity of the literary to actively speak to the environmental challenges faced by the planet. Speaking to and addressing these environmental challenges involves challenging conventional modes and categories of literary analysis in a way that attends to the limitations of earlier approaches.

From Energy Infrastructures to Energy Superstructures and Cultures The literary and cultural study of energy remains a niche venture, with its origins hidden in the scattered pages of political economists and anthropologists. While energy figured in the work of political economists in the nineteenth century, it rarely, if ever, played a role in their understanding of society beyond that of a relatively insignificant input.5 To date, energy has been understood primarily as a force of production that narrowly determines broader economic relations. The technical fields of natural sciences and

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economics—fields that both took their respective shapes as we understand them today in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—became the sole domains through which to study energy. Energy in the nineteenth century became decoupled from the realm of the social and cultural, isolated as an object to be studied primarily by scientists (Debeir et al. 1991, xii–xiii). As this section demonstrates, the social and cultural significance of energy has only recently been taken seriously by understanding the dialectical ­relationship between energy infrastructures and energy superstructures—a relationship that is central to the project of the energy humanities. As we argue throughout this chapter, the dominant ways energy is viewed as a technological or economic relation has contributed to the failure of literary and cultural production to adequately address the energy question; the reasons for this failure are foregrounded by the past and present theoretical accounts of energy with which this section engages. The effort to conceptually position energy in relation to society, and so challenge dominant assumptions about energy’s irrelevance to culture, would not begin until the mid-twentieth century with anthropologist Leslie White’s 1943 essay “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” The anthropologist Dominic Boyer calls White “a maverick who granted energy a prominent place in his efforts to resurrect evolutionary theory in anthropology,” explaining that for him energy “was the conceptual key to understanding everything about human life and history” (Boyer 2014, 310; emphasis added). White’s work constitutes an understanding of energy as a force that makes possible the conditions for specific kinds of social relations. As Boyer observes, White put forward “the notion that modern capitalist society was a fuel society to its core” (Boyer 2014, 311). In White’s formulations, energy is a singularly crucial component to the “evolution” of culture and society. In this way, his work established cultural anthropology and, in turn, the social sciences and humanities, as disciplines well-equipped to examine the complex role energy has played in the shaping of society. Even with such compelling assertions of the centrality of energy in both the history of humanity and the experiences of everyday life, the social and cultural study of energy and society continued to be uneven in its development. Fred Cottrell’s work in Energy and Society (1955) picks up where White’s left off, historicizing the dominant energy sources and developing the concept of “energy surplus,” “the energy available to man in excess of that expended to make more energy available” (Cottrell 1955, 11–12). While Cottrell argues that the history of civilization or society as such can be understood in terms of developing energy surplus, he also provides an early energy-based criticism of capitalism resulting from its need for high-energy yields and encouragement of the centralization of political power. Although their views of the ways energy influences society are inflected with a kind of determinism some consider problematic, White and Cottrell helped lay the groundwork from which the humanities and social sciences would approach energy a half century later.

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It was arguably not until Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery’s In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization Through the Ages (1986) that the study of energy as an economic, political, and social relation was renewed, rearticulated, and refashioned with vigor. Written in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery’s exhaustive account of historically dominant forms of energy and major energy shifts throughout history crystallizes the trace arguments found in White and Cottrell, while also unraveling some of their more heavy-handed determinism. Their aim in writing In the Servitude of Power was to get past what they perceived as the restrictions of earlier technical approaches. Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery historicize energy through the notion of “energy systems,” defined as the totality of the ways energy functions economically, socially, ecologically, and politically in a given historical moment or epoch. They argue that while “there is a powerful energy determination at work in all societies,” it is important to grasp how “the energy determination is itself determined: it is the result of the interplay of economic, demographic, psychological, intellectual, social and political parameters operating in the various human societies” (Debeir et al. 1991, 13). In the formulation developed by Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery, “energy infrastructures” and “energy superstructures” form a dialectical pairing, each shaping the other so deeply that it is difficult to separate one from the other. It would take the better part of two more decades for the project of the energy humanities to begin its full realization. The recent work of Andreas Malm has done much to solidify important connections between the physical infrastructures and sociocultural superstructures of what he terms the “fossil economy,” particularly in the ways that steam power reconfigured labor and, in turn, broader social relations. The fossil economy names the energic underpinnings of capitalist economies, systematically outlining the role fossil fuels have played in capitalism’s development in a way that accounts for the class antagonism that underpinned the transition to fossil fuels. In Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), Malm develops a historical materialist analysis of the transition from water power to steam power—or, as he frames it, from “flow” to “stock”—during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Contrary to many accounts that see in this transition the harnessing of cheaper, more efficient forms of energy for the betterment of humanity, Malm sees a calculated move of class warfare. Coal, he points out, was not adopted because it was a cheaper source of fuel than water (it was not), but because it was, among other things, more mobile, which allowed for factories to concentrate in urban areas away from the flow of water and to exploit a class of unspecialized laborers. Steam thus “arose as a form of power exercised by some people against others” (Malm 2016, 36). It is within this context that Malm inverts Marx’s famous energic formula, declaring “steam begets capital—not the other way around” (Malm 2016, 33).

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Throughout Fossil Capital, Malm addresses the veiled ways in which fossil fuels function in and shape society. His insights help explain the absence of fossil fuels in literary and cultural production by drawing attention to how they figured into the Victorian cultural imaginary at the time of transition. In the Victorian cultural imaginary, coal was conceptualized as a mystified abstraction experienced in the effects of steam power and the rotative engine, establishing “steam fetishism.” Steam fetishism names an ideology through which “the British bourgeoisie gathered its family of cherished ideals—progress, science, mechanical ingenuity, accumulation of wealth, the rights of private property, [and] freedom” (Malm 2016, 194). In this way, coal was seen not as a thing, but as an abstraction, a legacy that persists into the age of oil as well. The energy humanities have begun to develop a literary-critical approach to energy responsive to the social and cultural implications of energy superstructures as they register in literary production. In so doing, they extend the critical capacities of work such as Matt Huber’s (2013) or Malm’s into the literary sphere. The relationships that have been developed between energy and broader social practices can be examined through literature, especially literature that probes the social significance of energy, often with a desire to challenge the quotidian belief in fossil fuel modernity as the only imaginable mode of subjectivity. However, there is a bigger claim that undergirds the energy humanities regarding the concatenation of literature and energy: that all literary production is shaped by its energic context. As Patricia Yaeger puts it, “thinking about literature through the lens of energy, especially the fuel basis of economies, means getting serious about modes of production as a force field for culture” (Yaeger et al. 2011, 308). Yaeger’s provocation calls for a re-evaluation of what constitutes “energy literature” in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This has led critics like Graeme Macdonald to declare that “all modern writing is premised on both the promise and the hidden costs and benefits of hydrocarbon culture” (Macdonald 2012, 31)—that is, that all writing in the fossil fuel era is in many ways made possible by the surpluses afforded by fossil fuels, even if energy’s presence is absent in a given text. There certainly is a subfield of contemporary literary production that might confidently be referred to as “energy literature” that includes texts such as Rachel Kushner’s Flamethrowers (2013) and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015), both of which explicitly identify the cultural import of energy and the sociocultural mechanisms that have worked to make energy less significant than it might otherwise be. Kushner’s novel connects the apparently endless energies of postwar car culture to revolutionary artistic and political imaginaries, both of which fail to see their dependence on and commitments to fossil fuels. In McCarthy’s text, the “corporate anthropologist” tasked with making sense of the deep character of contemporary culture quickly identifies oil as key to the era’s Grand Narrative, even if he struggles to wrangle energy into the story,

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lacking the right concepts and theories to do so. In expanding what constitutes “energy literature” as such, Yaeger, Macdonald, and other prominent critics that foreground energy (such as Stephanie LeMenager and Jennifer Wenzel) insist that reading literature through energy and energy through literature, particularly in the fossil fuel era, demands a re-reading of all literary production. If energy runs through the social from top to bottom, it also runs through the literature, whether or not any particular literary object foregrounds energy.

Literature, Energy, and Aesthetics There is a tricky balancing act being played out in the theoretical attempt to bring energy and literature together. The critical opening to think about the relationship between literature and energy emerges from a recognition that, in general, literary texts have failed to attend to the pervasive sociocultural significance of energy noted in the work above. This is especially true with respect to the culture of modernity, which has been shaped by the ever-increasing use of (and dependence on) petrochemical energy year after year since its introduction in the mid-nineteenth century. This movement between absence and presence might suggest a critical confusion or lack of clarity about the object of critique. However, in the still early stages of energy humanities, both critical gestures constitute an important way of mapping the significance of energy for literature and are necessary for developing a broader understanding of the sociocultural functioning of energy. The foundational insight into the relationship between literature and energy concerns the failure of literature to provide an account of energy in society. Amitav Ghosh made one of the earliest explicit links between energy and literature in his influential 1992 essay, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.” Ghosh offers a broader critique of this failure of literary fiction to address what he names the “oil encounter”: the intertwining of the fates of Americans and those living in the Middle East around this commodity, a connection that continues to have far-reaching economic, cultural, and political reverberations. The politics of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are deeply wrapped up in the pursuit of foreign oil in the Middle East; even so, Ghosh finds no example of literary texts that attend to the sociocultural repercussions of this persistent geopolitical drama. It is not only with respect to this specific geopolitical oil encounter Ghosh identifies that literature has seemed to miss the mark. Although there are a number of novels that, for instance, have contended with the importance of oil to modernity—from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) to more recent work such as Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011) and Fred Stenson’s Who By Fire (2015)—there remains an absence of literature that fully engages with fossil fuels as a social relation. Ghosh’s insight has resonated with critics who have explored the representational challenges presented by energy and fossil

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fuels. The slow emergence of energy in the examination of culture and society traced above is evident in the specific history of literature, too—even, it seems, within the textual imaginaries or unconscious of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century texts from which critics have been so adept at uncovering other subjects or issues (most prominently, the often hidden dynamics of class, gender, and race). Ghosh has continued to raise questions about the lack of literary attention to fossil fuels as well as to one of the principal consequences of its use: global warming. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) constitutes an extended and expanded analysis of the novel’s failure to take on the oil encounter. That failure, in turn, raises the question of why the novel has failed to make climate change central to its depictions of contemporary reality. After all, 2015—the year prior to the publication of Ghosh’s book—was the hottest year on record. “Few indeed were the quarters that remained unperturbed,” he remarks, “but literary fiction and the arts appear to have been among them: short lists for prizes, reviews, and so on, betray no signs of a heightened engagement with climate change” (Ghosh 2016, 150). For Ghosh, the limits of literary fiction, and specifically of the novel, with respect to climate and energy lie in its origins as a genre, in “the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth” (Ghosh 2016, 7). The forms and conventions to which he draws attention are, in part, ones the novel shares with narratives that undergird the humanities, sciences, and social sciences— the production of a “modern” worldview in which Nature is “moderate and orderly” and the individual is championed over the collective, in both liberal philosophy and the novel’s “individualizing imaginary” (Ghosh 2016, 22, 135). Here Ghosh underscores the key problem that the inherently collective characteristics of a fossil fuel society and climate change are formally resisted by the individualizing tendencies of the novel. In this way, the representational limits Ghosh identified twenty-five years earlier in the incapacities of US fiction to figure the Middle East are in The Great Derangement extended to an indictment of modern literature as such, which he sees not just as unwilling but also unable to narrate energy and environmental crises. Ghosh’s strong argument about the limits of contemporary fiction in relation to energy might seem to constitute the opposite of Macdonald’s insistence that all modern writing is organized around the costs and benefits of hydrocarbon. In fact, both critics are making a similar intervention. They offer an invitation to scholars to take up the critical labor of understanding the complex coordinates of fossil fuel modernity, whether to grapple with how and why the novel fails to properly account for energy and global warming (Ghosh) or to employ an awareness of the import of energy to social form to produce new readings of literature (Macdonald). Ghosh’s insistence on the limits of the genre of literary realism to represent climate change leads him to suggest that only speculative fiction and poetry might offer insights into

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our fossil fuel imaginaries. By contrast, in “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction,” Macdonald (2013) argues that critics can interrogate fiction as a way of grappling with the entwined histories of energy and culture. For Macdonald, “fiction, in its various modes, genres, and histories, offers a significant (and relatively untapped) repository for the energy aware scholar to demonstrate how, through successive epochs, particularly embedded kinds of energy create a predominant (and oftentimes alternative) culture of being and imagining in the world; organizing and enabling a prevalent mode of living, thinking, moving, dwelling and working” (Macdonald 2013, 4). His insight unfolds the implications of what fossil fuels have meant not only for living in a fossil fuel society, but also for the fictional forms that have developed in relation to a world shot through with “narrative energetics” and “psycho-social dynamics” linked to oil’s force and power (Macdonald 2013, 4). Even in the short history of energy humanities, it has already become alltoo common for critics interested in literature and energy simply to focus on those fictions that deal with energy—texts from the obvious (Pablo Neruda’s poem “Standard Oil Co.” [1940] and Italo Calvino’s “The Petrol Pump” [1974]) to the more obscure (the recent collections of poems such as Stephen Collis’ Once in Blockadia [2016] or Garth Martens’ Prologue for the Age of Consequence [2014], the first about pipeline blockades and the second about the experience of working in Canada’s oil sands). Other critics, however, have moved beyond this gesture by being more attentive to the theoretical and conceptual challenges—and possibilities—energy poses for literature in terms of genre, setting, and form, particularly in relation to realism. Sharpening the general literary category of “magic realism,” Jennifer Wenzel argues that the “political ecology” of Nigerian literature is better described as “petro-magic-realism,” which she defines as “a literary mode that combines the transmogrifying creatures and liminal space of the forest in Yoruba narrative tradition with the monstrous-but-mundane violence of oil exploration and extraction, the state violence that supports it, and the environmental degradation that it causes” (Wenzel 2006, 456). Brent Bellamy identifies a new genre he calls “petrorealism,” which looks at the multiple ways in which it is possible through fiction to “elaborate the near omnipresence of oil in everyday life in an attempt to defamiliarize or to make strange our petrosubjectivity” (Bellamy 2017, 260). None of the five categories of petrorealism Bellamy identifies addresses fictions set in oil fields or in the corporate borders of oil companies; rather, they include texts that offer maps of our energy present without explicitly and didactically foregrounding energy, as well as science fiction energy futures such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992, 1995, 1996). These realisms and genre fictions offer formal and representational challenges to the individualizing tendencies of the conventional novel that, following Ghosh, contribute to the failure of literature to account for energy and climate. In conjunction with Michael O’Driscoll and Mark Simpson, Bellamy has expanded on the concept of petrorealism through the introduction of “resource aesthetics,” an aesthetics that emerges from the

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logic of resource culture and that names “the ways in which we do or do not see, feel, and act in response to the abidingly material power of resources: not merely inputs, but forces, relations, and practices that fundamentally shape or indeed render culture and society” (Bellamy et al. 2016, n.p.). An increasing number of literary works are also attempting to fill in the gap in our imaginaries to which Ghosh pointed through formal experimenta­ tion that foregrounds the problem of energy in complex ways. The sharpest of these works are those attuned to how literature is deeply constituted by fossil fuels. One of the most distinctive is Reza Negarestani’s theory-fiction Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). In this book, oil possesses qualities well beyond those we normally assign to it: it is a “satanic sentience” that “possesses tendencies for mass intoxication on pandemic scales (different from but corresponding to capitalism’s voodoo economy and other types of global possession systems)” (Negarestani 2008, 17). The petro-geopolitics being enacted on the surface of the planet nurtures the ­liquid energy in its bowels; Negarestani suggests that through our actions, we are, whether we know it or not, making sacrifices to a demon that thrives on struggle. “Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on Earth,” writes Negarestani (2008, 19). Cyclonopedia is simultaneously a political manifesto, demonology, theological treatise, and science fiction, a new genre intended to help us to really and truly comprehend the depths of our commitments to the dominant energy form of the modern era. In his writing, Negarestani attends to both the total absence of energy from our sensibilities and its unmistakable presence in our lives, a mode of being that allows us to continue to use it without worry at a self-destructive scale and at a rate that condemns us to its consequences for millennia. Contemporary poet Adam Dickinson pushes us to recognize the degree to which our culture is suffused with our dominant form of energy. He configures the poems in The Polymers (2013) around the chemical shape of the polymers at the heart of the plastics that have become an index of modernity. His poem “Hail” offers a taxonomy of the plastics that now exist within all living systems, including human beings. We unwillingly ingest plastics into our bodies throughout our lives, passing them on to subsequent generations at birth through the milk infants ingest from the bodies of their mothers: Hello from six-pack rings and chokeholds, from breast milk and cord blood, from microfibres rinsed through yoga pants and polyester fleece, biomagnifying predators strafing the treatment plants. (Dickinson 2013, 7, ll. 28–36)

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Today, we don’t just depend on oil for energy; by converting it into plastics, and by ingesting those plastics even without noticing it, many of us spend our lives becoming petroleum. Dickinson’s most recent collection, Anatomic (2018), extends this investigation of the depths of our oil subjectivity, exploring the relationship between the inside and outside of our bodies via a poetic “chemical autobiography” that traces the full range of chemicals (including petrochemicals) to which humans are exposed. “I want to know the story of these chemicals, metals, and organisms that compose me,” Dickinson writes. “I am an event, a site within which the industrial powers and evolutionary pressures of my time come to write” (Dickinson 2018, 9). Contemporary literature is written by subjects materially constituted by fossil fuels and the chemical regimes of modernity: we are petrosubjects whether we know it or not, which shapes daily life as well as aesthetic practice. While the oil encounter remains largely elusive in literatures from across the globe, there is a difference in its treatment in literatures of the Global South and the Global North. The examples in this section thus far have largely been from literatures produced in the Global North. However, literatures of the Global South have a tradition of engaging oil that challenges the broader elusiveness of the oil encounter, resulting from the ways these literatures address oil’s deleterious effects on colonial and postcolonial societies through experiential and affective registers that articulate the consequences of oil extraction on communities, environments, and peoples. Postcolonial literary criticism that has engaged with energy has drawn insightful attention to the stark differences of how energy is experienced around the world. In the concluding sentences to his foreword to Oil Fictions (forthcoming), Ghosh argues, for instance, that a key reason for the persistent elusiveness of the oil encounter is largely the result of a focus on only one domain of the encounter—the Western encounter. Another essay in Oil Fictions compellingly challenges the perceived invisibility of oil and its infrastructures through a reading of two short stories by Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor that make tangible the putrid smells of petroleum pervading the Niger Delta (Walters, forthcoming). Oil is far from absent at the sites of its extraction, even if there, too, the deeper cultural and social significance of resources quickly disappears into the fabric of the everyday. Ogaga Ifowodo’s 2005 collection of poems The Oil Lamp concretizes oil, displacing it as global abstraction by localizing the social and ecological effects of oil production in the Niger Delta. Consistent among these examples that articulate the antinomies of the oil encounter—that is, antinomies of the experience of oil as a commodity or as a destructive substance—is proximity to oil and its infrastructures. Such proximities and the struggles that emerge from them, however, are not only relegated to the Global South. Indeed, Indigenous North American communities face similar consequences from the production and transportation of oil. Indigenous and postcolonial treatments of literature and energy, such as Thomas King’s 2014 novel The Back of the Turtle, provide some of the most compelling accounts of the

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social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of oil by subverting the universalizing tendencies of the Western oil encounter and offering a vision of a future that moves beyond the colonizing inertia of the petrocultural present. The critical and aesthetic practices described here draw attention to the degree to which contemporary culture and society are constituted by the energy we use and, in particular, by the infrastructures and superstructures that have developed in conjunction with our use of fossil fuels. As evidence of global warming begins to transform from an indistinct “hyperobject”—Timothy Morton’s term for the sublime invisibility of climate and other equally expansive “things”6—to a reality experienced daily through weather crises, sea level rise, crop failures, climate migrants, and more, the need to figure our relationship to fossil fuels and to map resource aesthetics will no doubt expand, whether in literature or in other forms of cultural expression.

Energy and Periodization Beyond the Oil Encounter In developing analyses of the relationships among energy, aesthetics, and culture, one of the most prevalent critical tools that have emerged in the energy humanities is energy periodization. The argument that the energy we use fundamentally shapes culture and society has prompted the question of whether it might make sense to map specific moments of literature in relation to the developments in energy history of which we provided an account earlier in this chapter, building on the common ways of organizing the historical development of the arts into aesthetic movements or periods, such as Romanticism and Victorianism or modernism and postmodernism.7 One could, for example, read modernism in relation to the acceleration that is part of the history of fossil fuel use, identifying literary-cultural resonances in the key dates of 1870 and 1890 (the first being the moment when more energy begins to be extracted from fossil fuels than from photosynthesis; the second, the year in which more than half of global energy comes from fossil fuels). Alternatively, one might consider postmodernism in relation to the OPEC crisis, a moment in which narratives of petromodern futures and US hegemony were deeply unnerved, and so, too, the self-certainties of narrative and the Western subject. It might also be possible to read the far lower levels of energy use in much of the world in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries as important to the constitution of colonial and postcolonial culture, for instance, by providing an account of the vast disparity in energy access in the Global North and South and the relationship of this disparity to development and underdevelopment. Periodizing literary and cultural production in terms of dominant energy sources attunes critical reading to the sociocultural causes and effects of “energy deepening” in the fossil fuel era, a task made all the more urgent in a warming world. In “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy,” Jeff Diamanti proposes that energy deepening “provides the infrastructural link between what in an older vocabulary would

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have been the base (postindustrialism) and superstructure (postmodernism) of our current era” (Diamanti 2016, n.p.). Diamanti’s underscoring of the relation between the postindustrial base, the postmodern superstructure, and their energic foundations echoes our own points above—energy permeates both infrastructure and culture. While he makes this argument to probe postindustrial philosophies grouped under the heading of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this line of argument has important implications for the study of energy and literature. The term “energy deepening” draws attention to the importance of the intensification of energy use over time; the specific form of energy involved—say, oil instead of coal—matters less to Diamanti. The link between energy regimes and aesthetics turns energy periodization into a critical tool. If, for instance, postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism (in the terms outlined by Jameson) is linked to an energy surplus provided in large part through oil, all literary and cultural production from this period demands to be re-read with this recognition at the forefront. A now-classic example of a literary energy unconscious is in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road, a novel narratologically propelled by road trips across the United States. Yet considerations of petroleum are virtually absent, save for a dramatic episode when Sal Paradise’s car stalls and he winds up at an abandoned gas station (Yaeger et al. 2011, 306). The material or narratological absence of energy in a book about travelling in automobiles fuelled by petroleum suggests its fundamental ubiquity and ease-of-access. The condition of surplus in large part produces the general representational absence of fossil fuels in much of the literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In her discussion of On the Road’s energy unconscious, Yaeger asks if her question as to whether or not Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise “worry about how much fuel they’re using or the price of oil … is a question for the twenty-first century” (Yeager et al. 2011, 306). It very well might be, but Yaeger’s own anxiety in posing a question for the past generated from the conditions of the present is arguably misplaced. This critical trajectory is precisely where the strength of arguments developing out of periodization is located. If, as Malm argues, “[t]he thermometer can be legitimately suspected as a barometer of the rolling invasion of the past into the present” (Malm 2016, 10), then approaching literatures of the recent past through the present knowledge of global warming is one way of reading the cultural barometer of the fossil fuel era. Turning to past literary imaginaries as a means to trace the cultural and material origins of the Great Acceleration offers important insight into the social and cultural dimensions of energy and, it follows, climate change. Periodizing literature in relation to historically dominant energy systems is one way to begin grappling fully with the causes and consequences of the still-limited response to climate change in our era—an age that continues to produce and consume increasing amounts of fossil fuels as it positions global warming as a problem to be solved in the future, despite warnings to the contrary.8 Other texts of the period in the United States, which saw oil consumption overtake coal, are marked by a similar absence. Thomas Pynchon’s short story

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“Entropy,” like On the Road, indirectly foregrounds energic relations, but avoids directly confronting them. Written at some point between 1958 and 1964, the story is set in two apartments during the 40th hour of Meatball Mulligan’s “lease-breaking party” (Pynchon 1985, 81), as it descends into chaos. While the story is pervaded at the levels of both form and content by energic and other metabolic relations, including explicit and implicit references to the Laws of Thermodynamics, weather (rain, snow), and climate (“for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees” [Pynchon 1985, 85]), energy remains abstract, except for a reference to the wattage of a speaker playing music, and fossil fuels are absent. This abstraction is significant when considering our earlier arguments that the mystification of energy has in part contributed to its absence in the broader cultural imaginary. Pynchon’s story, like Kerouac’s novel, takes a new shape when re-read in the wake of global warming fuelled by the entrenchment of fossil fuels in everyday life. Scientific certainty about the realities of global warming would take until the early 1990s, but the biophysical processes at its core occurred long before. Malm reminds us that “the process [of global warming] as such had been underway since the nineteenth century, when Britain first developed the fossil economy” (Malm 2017, 127). Read in this context, the paranoiac obsession with weather, stasis, and equilibrium foregrounded in “Entropy” is unsettling. Its conclusion sees one of the story’s main characters, Callisto, “[turn] to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion” (Pynchon 1985, 98). The lease-breaking party, complete with “a litter of empty champagne fifths” (Pynchon 1985, 81)—that is, complete with surplus—parallels the energic abundance of 1950s that critics such as Cottrell foreground.9 Its conclusion offers a projection of a contradictory, fantasy future world where the temperature remains the same and all motion is absent. Kerouac and Pynchon express a carefree affect, but the latter registers a looming anxiety around the conditions of the future perceived through the experience of weather, an experience that finds contemporary reverberations in relation to “eco-anxiety.” Periodizing literature in relation to energy certainly expands the possibilities of literary and cultural analysis by forcing us to recognize the significance of fossil fuels in shaping modernity. But merely adding dominant energy forms to already existing literary periods is not enough to help us better understand either energy or literature. The question of energy determinism looms over this exercise and is, in part, what troubles the conceptual and analytic possibilities of periodization: reconfigurations of energy did not produce modernism, nor did they create postmodern style. Even if these reconfigurations did not play a completely insignificant role, critical accounts of energy and literature that mobilize periodization as a central analytic framework must

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move beyond it. As energy begins to be more frequently figured into literary and cultural analysis, the challenge is to know how to explain the precise social impact of a force that, for much of the culture produced over an extended period, was not explicitly figured in literary–cultural production. Other modes of investigating the concatenation of energy and literature are still unfolding, such as those that look to energy futures imagined in speculative and science fiction to think through the dynamics of our fossil-fuelled present. The emergent genre of solarpunk, for instance, exemplifies productive and inspiring imaginings of futures beyond fossil fuels. A form of speculative fiction “typically set in futures where solar energy takes center stage,” solarpunk “prioritizes hope and resilience in the face of the climate crisis” (Williams 2018, n.p.). In using the speculative mode, solarpunk offers the promise of possibilities at a time when the future seems determined to be an intensified version of the present or, indeed, something worse.

Conclusion Critical and literary practice of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has largely failed to account for the social significance of energy. In part, this is attributable to a gap that originated in political economy’s absence of attention to energy that carried over into other domains of cultural production and persisted.10 As dependence on energy deepened, and dominant energy forms became all the more “invisible” (i.e., in the shift from the dirt and smog of coal to underground pipelines infrastructures that move gas and oil), critical and literary efforts followed suit by reproducing this absence. However, the recent effort of critics and writers to close this gap, and so make visible a hitherto largely invisible social force in literary and cultural production, has been an important first step in putting energy into the picture of literary and cultural analysis. The critical work of this first step has opened up the promise of still further work in literary and cultural studies in relation to energy. The first stage of intervention into the social and cultural dimensions of energy, especially fossil fuels, is driven by a desire to enliven our critical epistemologies by drawing attention to the ubiquitous presence of energy in our lives. The next stage is a more difficult and radical one. At its core, the demand made by the energy humanities is not only for attention to energy as a theme within literary studies, whether energy appears in texts directly or symptomatically, but also for a refashioning of literary or cultural theory. Theory (writ large) as a mechanism through which to conceptualize and understand texts also developed without attention to the material significance of energy. In contemporary theory, modern subjectivity is not deeply and indelibly shaped by access to energy, nor is the apparatus of governmentality defined by the growing presence of energy for its operation and continuation (to take but two sites of work in theory). The problems we raise here about simple mappings of energy type to literary period point to deeper redefinitions of the forces shaping literature

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prompted by a recognition of energy’s material and historical importance. Still in its early stages, this critical work is essential for grappling with climate change. For only by understanding the degree to which we have been defined by cheap and readily available fossil fuels will we have the capacity to engage in the forms of sociocultural transition needed to become different kinds of subjects, living different forms of life.

Notes

1. For recent statistics on worldwide energy consumption and production, see the June 2018 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, available at https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/en/corporate/pdf/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2018-full-report.pdf. 2. See, for instance, LeMenager (2014), Macdonald (2014), and Lord (2014). 3. On the Great Acceleration, see McNeill and Engelke (2016). In terms of the dominance of the geopolitical perspective in discussing energy and climate, Matt Huber (2013, xi) notes that “the story of oil is almost always told from the perspective of ‘big’ forces … Yet the problem with these big stories of oil is they ignore the fact that oil is also incredibly ordinary because it is embedded in everyday patterns of life.” Literary and cultural production has generally been complicit in this framing. 4. The “energy humanities” explores the significance of energy in shaping cultural and social practices. It is especially concerned with assessing the complex ways in which access to an ever-expanding amount of fossil fuel energy over the past two centuries has impacted all aspects of subjectivity and sociality, including those related to literary and cultural production. Building on work such as Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), E.J. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), and Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity (1974), energy humanities attends not only to visible energy practices (e.g., modern values of mobility and personal autonomy linked to automobile use) and their immediate impacts, but also to the manner in which energy shapes the unconscious aspects of subjectivity as expressed in literary and cultural production. Due to the impact of fossil fuel use on environmental systems, energy humanities is also concerned with investigating the mechanisms of cultural and social transition that would help propel a shift from fossil fuels to other, more sustainable forms of energy. See Baptista (2017), Szeman and Boyer (2017), and Wenzel (2016). 5.  Karl Marx’s (1847, 92; emphasis added) observation in The Poverty of Philosophy that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill, society with the industrial capitalist” is a well-known example of such viewpoints. 6. See Morton (2013). 7. This is the guiding idea of Yaeger et al. (2011). 8. See Wallace-Wells (2019). 9. Annual petroleum consumption in the United States increased from 6 quadrillion BTUs in 1950 to 19.9 quadrillion BTUs in 1960 (EIA 2011). 10. On the absence of energy in political economy and its effects on the discipline, see Beaudreau (2008).

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References Baptista, Karina. 2017. Petrocultures. In Global South Studies. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/ petrocultures. Beaudreau, Bernard C. 2008. Energy and the Rise and Fall of Political Economy. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. Bellamy, Brent Ryan. 2017. Petrorealism. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 259– 262. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Bellamy, Brent Ryan, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson. 2016. Introduction: Toward a Theory of Resource Aesthetics. Postmodern Culture 26 (2): n.p. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/635537. Boyer, Dominic. 2014. Energopower: An Introduction. Anthropological Quarterly 87 (2): 309–333. Calvino, Italo. 1996. The Petrol Pump. In Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, 170–175. New York, NY: Vintage. Collis, Stephen. 2016. Once in Blockadia. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks. Cottrell, Fred. 1955. Energy & Society: The Relation Between Energy, Social Change, and Economic Development. Toronto, ON: Authorhouse. Debeir, Jean-Claude, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery. 1991. In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilisation Through the Ages. London: Zed Books. Diamanti, Jeff. 2016. “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy.” Postmodern Culture 26 (2). https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/635541. Dickinson, Adam. 2013. The Polymers. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press. ———. 2018. Anatomic. Toronto, ON: Coach House Books. EIA. 2011. History of Energy Consumption in the United States, 1775–2009—Today in Energy—U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). U.S. Energy Information Administration. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. Forthcoming. Foreword. In Oil Fictions, ed. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi. State College, PA: Penn State University Press. Habila, Helon. 2011. Oil on Water: A Novel. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Huber, Matt. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ifowodo, Ogaga. 2005. The Oil Lamp. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Illich, Ivan. 1974. Energy and Equity. London: Calder & Boyars. King, Thomas. 2014. The Back of the Turtle. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kushner, Rachel. 2013. The Flamethrowers. New York, NY: Scribner. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lord, Barry. 2014. Art & Energy: How Culture Changes. Washington, DC: The AAM Press. Macdonald, Graeme. 2012. Oil and World Literature. American Book Review 33 (3): 7–31. ———. 2013. Research Note: The Resources of Fiction. Reviews in Cultural Theory 4 (2): 1–24. ———. 2014. Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF. Paradoxa 26: 111–144.

96  J. B. KINDER AND I. SZEMAN Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. New York, NY: Verso. ———. 2017. ‘This Is the Hell That I Have Heard of’: Some Dialectical Images in Fossil Fuel Fiction. Forum for Modern Language Studies 3 (2): 121–141. Marx, Karl. 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy. London: Martin Lawrence Limited. McCarthy, Tom. 2015. Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape. McNeill, J.R., and Peter Engelke. 2016. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mumford, Lewis. 2010 [1934]. Technics and Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.press. Neruda, Pablo. 2011 [1940]. Standard Oil Co. In Canto General, 176–77. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Pynchon, Thomas. 1985. Slow Learner: Early Stories. New York, NY: Little, Brown. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 1992. Red Mars. London: Harper Collins. ———. 1995. Green Mars. London: Harper Collins. ———. 1996. Blue Mars. London: Harper Collins. Schumacher, E.J. 2010 [1973]. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered. New York, NY: Perennial. Sinclair, Upton. 1927. Oil! New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap. Smil, Vaclav. 2004. World History and Energy. In Encyclopedia of Energy, vol. 2, ed. Cleveland Vutler, 549–561. New York, NY: Elsevier. Stenson, Fred. 2015. Who By Fire. New York, NY: Anchor. Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer. 2017. Introduction: On the Energy Humanities. In Energy Humanities: An Anthology, ed. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, 1–13. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books. Walters, Wendy W. Forthcoming. “We Are Pipeline People”: Nnedi Okorafor’s Ecofeminist Speculations. In Oil Fiction, ed. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi. State College, PA: Penn State University Press. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature. Postcolonial Studies 9 (4): 449–464. ———. 2016. Taking Stock of the Energy Humanities. Reviews in Cultural Theory 6 (3): 30–34. Williams, Rhys. 2018. Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future. Los Angeles Review of Books, March 10. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/solarpunk-against-a-shitty-future/#!. Yaeger, Patricia, et al. 2011. Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources. PMLA 126 (2): 305–310.

CHAPTER 6

Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by Computing Machines Yves Citton

For centuries, the emergence of “literature” and the emergence of “science” have run a parallel course, oppositional, symmetrical, but also intertwined, entangled around a functional solidarity. The (in)famous “two cultures” needed each other to define themselves—often repetitively, and pointlessly.1 Something, however, has thrown a wrench into this well-rehearsed debate since the 1940s: let’s call it “computing machines.” They write and they think, don’t they? Just like literary folks, although not quite. They calculate and test and verify, don’t they? Just like scientists, although differently. Since the advent of “deep learning,” a.k.a. “machine learning,” they even generate hypotheses (belying Newton [1713, 482], who pretended not to: hypotheses non fingo), and mimicking fiction writers and theorists, who thought they were so quintessentially human. The (rather slow) emergence of computing machines upsets the traditional boundaries between literature and the sciences: it reveals deeper solidarities between them, as well as new contrasts. This article suggests that we may gain a better understanding and a firmer grasp on their present and future developments if we move from a cultural logic based on the binary opposition between two modes of knowledge (scientific vs. literary) to one that emerges from the triangulation of three forms of intelligence (scientific, literary, computational). A couple of preliminary remarks about the status of what will be addressed as “Literature” in the following pages may prevent misunderstandings. Even if I have been “teaching literature” for more than three decades, on both Y. Citton (*)  Université Paris 8 & EUR ArTeC, Saint-Denis, France © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_6

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sides of the Atlantic, I feel increasingly unable to define what the word “literature” may mean nowadays. Nor do I even know whether it ought to be used at all. I start my “Introduction to Literary Studies” undergraduate course by sharing my discomfort with my students: I ask them what they enjoy reading, viewing, practicing, or listening to, and I tell them that whatever they will bring to class as enjoyable will be considered “literature” by my standards. This is the only literary way to teach literature I have been able to come up with. While I am confident that I might defend theoretically such an unorthodox (non-)definition of “literature,” I understand the reader may find it unsettling, as we are about to set off for an assessment of the relative virtues and domains of the sciences, computation, and literature. My point will be that it is of the essence of “literature” to question the meanings of the signs it uses, including those it needs to define itself and its function. Three implications follow, however, which need to be acknowledged upfront. First, I will include literary studies (and not only literary creations) within the category of “literature,” as one of its possible forms of experience. Second, I tend to treat the disciplinary specificity of “literature” as providing a platform of in(ter)disciplinary cross-pollination, and I tend to consider the “humanities” as reflexive modes of interpretation—which leads to a constant overlapping (and potential convergence) between literature and the humanities at large (see Citton 2010). Third, and more disturbingly, since scientific discourse or experiments, as well as computational adventures, can be claimed as enjoyable by my students—binding me to integrate them into my rather generous definition of “literature”—all the dichotomies discussed below between science, computation, and literature will be provisional at best. I hope to show that even such an initial chaos of utmost confusion can result in an operational reconfiguration of our intellectual endeavors, once we reconsider it under the triangulation provided by computing machines.

The Great Divide Let us start with a quick glimpse of the good reasons that led the previous decades (and centuries) to draw a foundational opposition between “the sciences,” on one side, and “literature,” on the other. I will briefly survey these dichotomies—ignoring their complex origins to envisage them mainly as they have been incorporated into our common sense. From the point of view of their content, the sciences have been identified as referential, insofar as they pretend to account for the ways our actual world presents itself to us, while much of literature has been seen as devoted to fictional entities. Science emanates from observers, literature and the arts from imaginers. Scientific inquiry provides a descriptive approach of the world we live in, while a majority of literary writings stage narrative trajectories within actual or possible worlds. Not only the natural sciences, but psychology too, are outer-oriented, insofar as they consider their objects of description from an external point

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of view, whereas literary inquiries can often be inner-oriented, accounting for perceptions and sentiments from within the worldview that is described. As far as their operational agents are concerned, the modern sciences are reputed to progress through collective endeavors, teamwork, and multi-authored articles, while modern literature is largely seen as an individualist activity. The former rely heavily on technologically equipped procedures, while the latter, perceived as artfully crafted, can always be minimally practiced with paper and a pen. As a consequence, scientific activity tends to be expensive, in order to pay for the equipment or staff it requires, while literary practices can come as cheap as the cheapest forms of food and lodging available. From the point of view of their methods, the sciences ought to deal with the quantifiable, while literature revels in dealing with the unquantifiable. The former rely on refutable assumptions and procedures, while the latter is happy to rest on undecidable hypotheses. The former are expected to be disciplined and standardized in their operations, while the latter is valorized insofar as it is creative in the forms and procedures it mobilizes along its way. The scientific methods claim to be objective, insofar as they attempt to erase any personal interference generated by the singularity of their agents, while literary writing has no qualm about being subjective, insofar as it acknowledges the inescapable dependence of the results on the singular personality of the agent. As a consequence, the former have some legitimacy in pretending to reach some form of universal necessity, while the latter is limited to asserting contingent singularities. More important for our present purpose, than their content, their operational agents, or their methods, the sciences can be opposed to literature in terms of their modes of abstraction. In the vocabulary popularized by Tim Ingold (2007), the sciences do their best to construct an “above perspective,” whereby they consider facts and behaviors with distance and superiority, as if bending over a colony of ants. Literature, instead, tends to adopt an “along perspective,” whereby the reader follows a certain path of life along the way experienced by the narrator-wayfarer. The benefits of the superior position reached by scientific abstraction come with a heavy price tag, however: they can only consider the workings of the ant colony one relevant parameter at a time. In a novel, conversely, a jealous passion can be mentioned alongside a certain financial interest, a change in the weather, a calumnious rumor, an unpleasant smell. While the scientific approach would start by dissecting the co-occurrence of these multifarious phenomena into different fields of investigation, each ruled by its specific method and discipline, literary narration or poetry confront us to their agglomeration into one single block of reality. Contrary to the sciences, literature performs analytic abstraction without enslaving itself to it. This enslavement of the scientific approach to the fragmentation of the reality it studies will appear more clearly in another contrast raised by their respective mode of abstraction. Even if they often fail fully to reach their

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ideal, the sciences attempt to maintain a level of explicitness that formalizes their measures and relevant parameters in non-ambiguous terms, whereas implicitness, polysemy, and equivocity play a crucial role in our so-called natural languages, allowing literary writing to mobilize the potentialities of ambiguous expressions in order to help new perceptions and reflections emerge from our ever-changing relations with our environment. In other words: scientific investigation constrains itself to the (impossible) task of making fully explicit and unambiguous all the terms it uses to refer to the world (generally devising a systematically formalized language in order to do so more rigorously), while literary writing not only tolerates, but exploits as a vital resource the variable amount of implicitness, ambiguity, and equivocity inherent to our natural languages. To wrap up (provisionally) this rough opposition between literature and the sciences, one can refer to Roland Barthes’s famous 1987 depiction of the odd structure of literary communication. While a play by Racine or a novel by Richardson seems to be making a series of positive assertions about the characters and situations they present to us, it is more accurate to read them as raising questions under the guise of providing answers. Hence a final contrast between the sciences and literature: whereas the goal of scientific inquiry is to provide reliable answers, the goal shared by literary writing and the humanities is to help us formulate relevant questions—i.e., public problems. Should one look more closely at any of these massive traditional dichotomies, one would easily find exceptions, borderline cases, and hybrid practices that blur such neat distinctions. As a matter of fact, rather than taking these terms of opposition as satisfactory criteria to separate scientific from literary activities, it would be much more interesting to hone in on these cracks and flaws, which is where “real” science and “real” literature actually take place, far from the clichés into which one tends to corner them. Taken as a whole and considered from a safe distance, however, this set of dichotomies can suffice to account for our common intuitions, as well as for the apparent oddity of witnessing, at different periods of our literary history (the 1880s and the 1970s, in the case of France), a “science of literature” emerge among the disciplines, while several forms of “scientific literature” have been around for quite a long time.

Computing as Ubiquitous Writing The point I would like to make is that the emergence of computing machines, over the last seventy years, should lead us to acknowledge the collapse of some of the dichotomies evoked in the previous section, and the radical reconfiguration of others. Let us run the list quickly a second time, to see how often computers introduce a wedge into these traditional dichotomies. In the following pages, I will use the word “computer” to refer to what Alan Kay defined as a meta-medium, i.e., an electronic apparatus (potentially

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connected to sensors and networks) processing digitalized information with the capacity to simulate any other medium (Kay and Goldberg 1977, 32–33; see also Manovich 2013). The oppositions of content—between, on one side, a referential effort, performed by mere observers attempting to produce an outer-oriented description of an exterior reality and, on the other side, fictional imaginers generating inner-oriented narrative events—find themselves deeply upset by the workings of our computers. As Vilém Flusser (1985) realized many decades ago, a radically new ontogenesis entered our world with the advent of what he then called “telematics” (i.e., the capacity to digitalize every type of information into binary bits, to store, compute, recombine, and send them at will). The indexical nature of the chemical photographic image—which, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown (2010), played such a crucial role in the definition of scientific objectivity—is nowadays merely “simulated” by digital metamedia which rely on binary symbolic codes and software ficta (i.e., modelized and modelizing fictions) in order to detect, monitor, record, and transmit “objective” facta. In our digital world, a referential photography is no less reconfigured than the dinosaurs resuscitated in the Jurassic Park film series: it too results from one possible Photoshop setting among many others. Whereas the analog camera, once it had been built, was bound to document the input in an indexical fashion, the computing metamedium is only simulating an indexical mode of representation, as one of its many possible settings (see Mitchell 1992). The same hardware could equally well be programmed to selectively erase certain forms, or substitute certain colors or sounds for other. As soon as they use the mediation of digital devices, observers can only see through the eyes (i.e., screens) of imaginers, inescapably introducing the fictional (i.e., a modelization) into the heart of the referential. The apparatuses that (re)launched the adventure of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth century (cameras, microphones) drew their epistemological power from their ability to bypass human subjectivity and human intervention (see Kittler 1986). A purely physico-chemical process generated an imprint from the exposure of a certain portion of reality to a sensitive medium. This analog imprint was reputed and bound to be iconic-indexical, to recombine two of Peirce’s famous categories. It consisted both in an imaginary resemblance (like all icons) and in forensic evidence (like all indexes): something had actually been there, in front of the camera or the microphone, and it looked or sounded like that. Today’s computing apparatuses, by contrast, unavoidably reintroduce the filter of human intervention and human subjectivity, since the programs that run the machines have been devised and designed by social and historical subjects (software programmers, who have been moved by sexual drives, motivated by ideological agendas or salaried by capital). Or, to state this in a vocabulary more obviously relevant to discussing the relations between literature and the sciences: scientific equipment (in

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its apparatuses as well as in its epistemology) ingeniously attempted to have Nature write itself through the sensitive (but ideally “neutral”) intermediary devices presented to her; computers can simulate such a neutral intermediation, with unprecedented degrees of accuracy and fidelity, but they necessarily (re)introduce human writing at the very core of the process of documentation (recording, monitoring, transmitting). During two centuries, the sciences have done their best to repress human (“subjective”) writing in order to let us hear and see matter express itself: mechanical objectivity has written rules and generated devices capable of neutralizing the deformations inherent to the human activity of reading and writing. As a reaction to this victorious trend, literature, from Mallarmé to Woolf, and from Joyce to Rushdie, has staged the unchained freedom of human writing in its multifarious capacity to permeate matter with human meaning. With the advent of ubiquitous computing, it becomes clear that writing intermediates all of our relations to our world—and, soon, to ourselves. This ubiquitous writing is both intensely human and never-merely-human, since it is massively machinic, automatized, inhumane, and sometimes de-humanizing (Kittler 1986). Literature—as the art of writing and of paying attention to the art of writing—is, quite literally, everyware (Greenfield 2006), even though it is indeed increasingly difficult to find it in its traditional human-centric guises.

Arts of Programming In our common imaginaries, there is certainly a great distance between the Romantic poet drafting love verses under a tree, the devoted scientist mulling over data in her high-tech campus lab, and the software-designer (poorly) paid to devise new algorithms giving capitalism a firmer grip on our minds and behaviors. And yet, all of them are in the business of programming—a term considered here in accordance with its etymology: to “write ahead,” to “write in advance,” to “pre-scribe.” The poet, the scientist, and the software designer all write (today) what will be done and thought (tomorrow) by their fellow humans. What they are in the business of writing are not mere statements (matters of fact or matters of concern), nor even rules, as legislators do—but rather protocols. As we learned from Alexander Galloway’s classic book (2004), protocols— illustrated by the TCP-IP standards that operate our access to the Internet— leave us free to receive and send any content as long as we respect certain formal and functional rules of syntax, playing a similar role to that of grammar in our common languages. The message conveyed by your sentence can be anarchist or royalist, but it will need to respect the formal rules of word positions and agreement in order to reach the understanding of your addressee. What we learned from (French) theory in the 1960s and onward is that literature does not merely produce messages: it reshapes the very protocols through which we communicate with each other. Similarly, science does not

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merely tell us whether our health is determined by our DNA or by our intestinal microbiote: it provides us with protocols helping us to investigate questions in order to reach reliable conclusions. Science, literature, and coding: all three program us insofar as they constantly write the grammar through which we are led to account for our experiences, orient ourselves in them, react to them, and share our reactions with others. Galloway (2004) suggested that protocols are the way power imposes itself after decentralization. We could add that protocols and programs—i.e., written procedures which write ahead of time how we will write each other’s fate—are what remains after the Great Divide between literature and science has been reconfigured into a triangulation with computation. A suggestive polysemy positions the word matrix to encapsulate simultaneously the mathematical root, economic productivity, and the social effects of protocols. A matrix is a computational device, a rectangular array of numbers arranged in rows and columns, widely used in computer graphics. Its etymological root (mater, “mother”) points to its cross-generative properties. As an abstract structure, a matrix can not only generate a wide variety of objects, depending on the data introduced in it: a matrix can also be multiplied by another matrix, combining two operations (a horizontal displacement and a folding upon itself) into one compounded transformation. It certainly is more than a coincidence if The Matrix (1999) provides the title for one of our most popular cinematic anxieties about the all-encompassing and totalitarian power of ubiquitous computing machines. The matrix literally appears as the computational womb out of which our relations with reality are generated, modulated, and controlled through algorithmic recombination. Our (perception of the) environment is structured as well as populated by forms of writing which are forms of matricing. The storyteller does not merely tell us about a sequence of events: she instills inside of us a narrative pattern (a matrix) which will prime our future expectations. A discoverer does not merely uncover a certain portion of reality: with each major discovery, she provides us with a new paradigm (a matrix) which alters and renews the way we understand, explain, and experience reality. Much like the programmer does, the storyteller and the discoverer write formal protocols—matrices—which condition us a long way beyond the punctual content of what they write. This content still matters, of course. But computation helps us relocate agency at a higher level—that of matricing—which happens to be equally decisive for literature as for the sciences, but directly rooted in computing operations. The operational agents, when viewed under the light of such arts of programming, can be neither fully individual, since a grammar and a protocol gain traction only insofar as they are shared, nor merely collective, since the emergence of new forms of writing always sprouts from singular encounters and insistent idiosyncrasies. As Pierre Lévy (1992) and Anthony Masure (2017) have eloquently shown, the fine art of writing software brings together the reputedly contradictory characteristics of being technologically

104  Y. CITTON Fig. 6.1  First diagram of triangulation

equipped (like the sciences) and artfully crafted (like literature). As for the methods involved in the arts of programming, they need to be both highly disciplined, since one small error in syntax can suffice to paralyze a giant machine, and highly creative, since a truly “elegant” solution to a strictly localized problem can pave the way for an unforeseeable range of unsuspected applications. Nowhere else than in the arts of programming mobilized by and around computing machines can one observe such a tight articulation between, on one side, the (supposedly scientific) universal necessity of purely logical relations set into motion to generate a perfectly understandable course of action and, on the other side, the (supposedly literary) contingent writing of all-too-human individuals, who can be brilliantly or poorly inspired on the day they wrote any particular line of code (Fig. 6.1). What lesson can we draw from this first foray into the triangulation? The arts of programming developed by computation can be positioned as a third term which reveals the protocological nature of the work performed in the sciences as well as in literature. The content, the operational agents, and the methods which were used to oppose both sides of the Great Divide seem overdetermined—and, up to a certain point, neutralized—by computation, insofar as ubiquitous computation immerses us in a world of ubiquitous writing, which hybridizes the supposedly incompatible features considered to be specific to each side, and exclusive of the other. In this version of the triangle, computing “absorbs” and rearticulates what the sciences and literature used to do separately. This first diagram of triangulation foregrounds the importance of the “meta-” level of writing illustrated by matrices and protocols: a writing which writes ahead (“pro-grams”) how it will be (im)possible to write in the future.

Powers of Abstraction, Dangers of Extraction This first diagram of triangulation discussed issues of content, operational agents, and methods, but it left aside the contrast based on different modes of abstraction. Addressing these will generate a second diagram, significantly different from the previous one. The triumph of everyware computing is the triumph of abstraction. Everything, at any moment—we are told—is (about to be) digitalized and computed by algorithms. This digitalization is a form of abstraction. My shopping habits, my blood pressure, my communications with my friends, my cat’s wanderings around my garden: all of these highly

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complex forms of material and mental behaviors are translated into sequences of 0 and 1, into data formatted by computing machines in order to be processed by computing machines. This massive enterprise of digitalization and computation continues, accelerates, and industrializes a gesture that has been performed for half a millennium, on the artisanal level, by scientists in their laboratories—the gesture of extraction resulting in what we call abstraction. Since Galileo, Newton, and Lavoisier, the sciences have progressed by extracting ever more precise relevant figures from their environmental grounds. These figures consisted both in objects of knowledge (a constellation, a chemical element, a bacterium) and in quantitative data (the speed of light, the frequency of a given sound wave). This extraction of (quantifiable) figures from what previously appeared as a mere background gave Western modernity a truly amazing traction on the physical, biological, and social world. The development of the technosciences, rooted in and fueled by this power of abstraction, has provided the cognitive means which, through the industrial revolution, have allowed Western nations and empires radically to reconfigure (and ravage) our physical, biological, and social environments, pushing humankind into the Anthropocene. The sciences, literature, and early forms of computation (like financial accounting) have each played their part in this progressive triumph of abstraction, which has both dramatically expanded human control over “nature” and folded it back on itself in countless highly threatening and uncontrollable feedback loops. Anthropologists like Anna Tsing (2015), political thinkers like Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson (2006), and environmental activists like Frédéric Neyrat (2018) jointly denounce the dangers and calamities generated by the extractivist attitude which has been the flip side of this triumph of abstraction. Western industrialists, in striking similarity to Western scientists, have (mis)treated our world as a mere supply of resources, reducing its entangled complexity to quantifiable figures (assets) that could be extracted from insignificant backgrounds. Extractivism mines our natural as well as social environments in search of profitable assets, which it extracts without bothering to ask how these resources were generated, nor how they can be renewed in a sustainable manner. Extractivism extracts the profitable figure without caring for the ground, hence undermining our perspectives of future well-being. What does all this have to do with our triangulation between sciences, literature, and computation? Here again, as it was the case with writing and protocoling, computation brings in full light the far-reaching implications of the process of abstraction which was already at work within the operations performed by literature and the sciences. What is a poem, an essay, or a novel if not an extraction of meaningful figures from the (otherwise meaningless) background of a certain experience? What is scientific formula, spelled out after years of trials and errors in order to account for a certain physical, biological, or social phenomenon, if not an extraction of meaningful figures from

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the puzzling backgrounds of nature and society? Both appear as a sequence of symbols (letters, numbers)—very similar and reducible to a sequence of 0s and 1s—abstracted from the multifarious entanglement of an infinitely complex relational situation, encapsulated into a matrix allowing us to understand and modulate future outcomes. As we saw in the first section, however, there are a few crucial differences between the modes of abstraction practiced by literature and by the sciences. They are most strikingly expressed in Gilbert Simondon’s 1958 book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. In the last part of the book, Simondon presents the social function of the religious and of the aesthetic experiences as connecting us to the ground out of which the technosciences have extracted their figures. Call it God, Allah, or Nature: all religions invite us to care for what remains after the profitable asset has been cleverly extracted, profitably exploited, and individually enjoyed. Something lingers behind this punctual enjoyment, a background which is very difficult to identify, to name, to figure out—precisely because it consists in what is left behind what we can figure out of it. When Timothy Morton (2013) attempted to illustrate the category of “hyperobjects”—which, too, demand from us to identify a presence which is not perceptible as an isolable object—he did not turn to religions but to art works and aesthetic experiences. The basic problem was similar, however: how does one establish a (caring) relation with the ground itself (the environment), when the inner structure of our perceptual habits obfuscates this ground, by focusing our attention on the extracted figures which blind us to what remains left behind? This is where the difference between the modes of abstraction developed by literature and by the sciences become relevant. Abstracting from an above position, as the sciences attempt to do, or from an along position, as literature and the arts usually do, induces a significantly different attitude toward the environment. The wayfarer feels and touches the ground, while the balloon flyer merely maps it. The literary mode of abstraction generally acknowledges that it is situated within a sensory world of entangled relations, while the scientific mode of abstraction tries hard to extract itself from its living background (in the name of “objectivation”).

A Fundamentalist Universe of Information, or a Livable World of Meanings? More importantly, and more directly linked to the third player of the triangulation, the ideal of univocity which guides scientific discourse as well as analytic philosophy can be seen as a form of figural fundamentalism: only that which manages unambiguously to detach itself from its living background will be accepted in the purified microcosm ruled by rigorous demonstration, formal proof, and experimental refutability. Only pure figures can enter the debate, to confirm or refute other pure figures. The imperative of explicitness

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presupposes that “objects” can only be properly identified if they are unequivocally isolated—extracted—from their milieu. Here again, computing machines help us realize the full scope of such an imperative, both in the tremendous power of abstraction that it unleashes, and in the disquieting dangers of extraction that it materializes. The “artificial intelligence” developed in computing machines is both amazingly powerful, when it comes to sorting out billions of data in a millisecond, and pathetically dumb, when it comes to do something as basic as walking up a staircase. A verb as semantically simple a “to walk” makes sense to any human being, even if none of us is capable of explicitly delineating what it exactly entails to walk up a staircase. It is because their “natural” languages ignore figural fundamentalism that human intelligences manage to communicate with each other on a practical basis, i.e., in our lived world of objects undetachable from their background. One error message commonly encountered in programming emblematizes the gap between these two modes of abstraction: object reference not set to an instance of an object. In literature and in the arts, as in our lived world, objects may be extracted from their original environment, but they remain connected to entanglements of entities which pre-exist any explicit definition we may attempt to provide about them. In the world of computing machines, one has to set an object as an instance of an object (in a procedure bound to obey a certain protocol) before a reference can be made to that object. Here is the epitome of figural fundamentalism: whatever has not been explicitly pro-grammed to be an instance of an object has no existence whatsoever. The computing world both functionalizes and radicalizes the ideal of explicitness that the sciences professed, but were never (and will never be) capable of fully enforcing (Fig. 6.2). Our second diagram of triangulation looks quite different from the first one. Instead of computation bringing forth the commonalities between literature and the sciences, it now reveals a limit of the scientific endeavor (both in the sense of an asymptote and of a limitation), as well as a virtue of literary activities (both in the sense of a merit and of a power). The triumph of the computing abstraction projects us in an unlivable world, since this world requires objects to be explicitly pre-defined and programmed before they can be referred to. Symmetrically, this second triangulation sheds light on the importance of being ambiguous (much more than of being earnest): implicitness and equivocity are a pre-condition for relating to the world in a livable

Fig. 6.2  Second diagram of triangulation

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(i.e., in a non-fundamentalist) manner. We need literature and the arts, literary studies and the humanities, to make our world of ubiquitous computing livable, thanks to the flexibility introduced, maintained, and nurtured by an art of writing that takes polysemy as a challenge, an ally, an opportunity, and a source of inspiration, rather than as an enemy to eradicate. As Tega Brain (2018) recently put it, “the environment is not a system”—and we need something else than systemic computation to live in our environments. In order to tie together two claims made separately in the previous paragraphs, one could suggest that the care for the background attributed by Simondon to religious and aesthetic approaches constitutes the other side of the tolerance and inclination toward equivocity. Ambiguous statements need contextual reference in order to make sense: their figures maintain a certain dependency toward the environment and the background out of which they were abstracted. Literary enunciation simultaneously abstracts itself from its contextual origins (contrary to non-literary statements like “You owe me ten bucks”) and assumes its anchorage within situated and situating backgrounds. Literary enunciation acknowledges that one always says more (implicitly) than one knows (explicitly). It is this exceeding of what is tacitly conveyed over what is explicitly intended that connects our statements, as well as our knowledge, to our social and natural surroundings. Retrospectively, the mechanical demands of computational programming reveal the extremism of the (dominant) scientific epistemology (and its twin brother, analytical philosophy). One way to account for this extremist proximity between computing machines and the sciences would be to project the gap that separates them from the literary attitude on a polarity opposing a universe of information to a world of meanings. Computing machines allow us to redefine information as that support of knowledge (data) which can circulate (be stored, transmitted, processed) within electromagnetic circuitry. Our computers, servers, hard drives, and usb keys are full of information, which algorithms can sort out and recombine in countless manners, according to countless goals. Information technology, in the digital era, is only a matter of electricity—strictly physical. Information is only endowed with meaning once some form of human attention invests its bodily (analog) energy into it. It takes flesh for information to make sense. Beyond the piles of books and articles devoted analytically to distinguish “meaning” from “sense,” I use both terms indifferently within the scope of this article, insofar as both presuppose something more than mere information. Namely: the capacity pragmatically to apply and adjust a set of instructions and data to a singular environment of action, as an affective response to a socially constructed but individually felt situation. Such a definition of meaning/sense is not to be limited to the “propositional content” or “message” of intentional act of communication between humans. My caresses probably have meaning and sense for my cat. The greater part of our literary experiences is carried under, above, or beyond what an author may have intentionally meant to convey to her readers, under, above, or beyond

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what our explicit reasons can identify as the purpose(s) of our actions. It takes flesh for information to make sense, because it takes a living body for affects to process and express a “felt reality of relation” (Massumi 2002, 16). Compared to the intents, goals, and purposes we can be aware of, meaning is fundamentally open-ended, insofar as a feeling comes prior to the reaction a relation may generate in us. Meaning and sense are rich with the ­“pre-acceleration” that emerges in (animal) moving bodies before they even start to move, from the simple fact that they always-already belong to certain relations (see Manning 2009). Computing machines concretely display the fully achieved abstraction of information reduced to purely electric differentials (0s and 1s), thus accomplishing the ideal of objectivity, necessity, explicitness, and universality the sciences have dreamed about over the last four centuries. Conversely, the dumbness and senseless nature of computing machines reveal the extent and importance of the fleshing out of information into meaning, performed every time an animal body makes a physical or mental movement. By doing so, computing machines set the parameters for what ought to be the most extensive ground of action opened for literature by the advent of ubiquitous computing: there is room (and there is need) for literary work to be done each time information is in want of meaning and sense. (Hence my apparently mad claim that anything undergraduate students can consider as enjoyable will be considered literary by my standards.)

Writing Programs Against the Programs Coming from a professor in literature, this second diagram of triangulation—which portrays literature as a potential savior against the dangers of an extractivist attitude pushed to a fundamentalist extremism by scientists and computers alike—can legitimately be suspected to reek of shameful corporatism. It would obviously be ridiculous to fall back on the worn-out cliché opposing a soulless technoscience to a humanist conscience. Biologists and climate scientists are much more active, visible, and efficient than poets and novelists at the forefront of our current ecological struggles. Hackers2 have denounced and fought against totalitarian computation much more inspiringly than literary scholars. We therefore need to complement our triangulation with a third diagram, in order to show how literature, the sciences, and the arts of programming can converge and set up new alliances in overcoming the dangers of our digital age (Fig. 6.3). Practitioners of literature (and, more generally, artists), scientists, as well as hackers, can indeed all be enrolled under a common banner, whenever they operate as writers of programs that paradoxically attempt to overcome the limitations inherent to (pre-existing forms of) programing. Adopting such a view would suggest, however, that the sciences may be on the verge of experiencing a split that has affected the literary domain for quite a while. One has long ago ceased to expect novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics to provide us with answers to the burning questions of the day: their role is

110  Y. CITTON Fig. 6.3  Third diagram of triangulation

rather to question our current responses and solutions, not to provide better or definitive ones. Scientists, by contrast, are still often expected to function as authoritative sources of answers to tackle the problems faced by our societies. This expectation may wane in the decades ahead, just like it progressively waned for literary writers and critics during the twentieth century. As the figure of the “information processor”—once devoted to the clerc and the lettré, then delegated to the savant and the scientist—tends to be mechanized and automatized in our computing machines, the function of the scientist will have to redefine itself along displaced lines. And this process is likely to bring about new parallels between artists, scientists, and hackers. All three categories deserve to be resituated and reconsidered within the new mode of algorithmic governance identified for half a century with the rise of cybernetics. The Cyberneticist—i.e., the expert in information science capable of writing programs likely to provide trustable answers by sorting out relevant data and developing relevant algorithms—becomes the default figure of dominant knowledge, enthroned at the summit of our triangle. Positioned in contradistinction to the cyberneticist, artists, scientists, and hackers can find new common grounds. Just like artistic writing attempts to throw a gestural wrench into the automatic course of programmed perceptions and values, just like hackers attempt to free the flows of information where they are unduly enclosed by exploitative rules of property or by oppressive surveillance, in a similar way, scientific research, in the age of self-learning algorithms, is called upon to supplement the automated processes of programmed investigation with a surplus value proper to human imagination and judgment (Huyghe 2017; Montani 2018). Artists play the nuances and engagement of human gestures against the rigidities of the programs (Citton 2015);

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hackers exploit network vulnerabilities to resist the hegemonic modalities of social control (Galloway and Thacker 2007); scientists amend and improve the workings of computing machines thanks to the dephasing, rescaling, and reorienting allowed by human reflection. Within this third diagram, the common cause shared by the three categories of operators consists in writing programs and protocols which help our living gestures push the boundaries of the programs and protocols they run into. In resistance to—while not necessarily in open conflict against—the cyberneticist’s ceaseless attempt to “optimize” programs and protocols, artists, scientists, and hackers tend to develop improvisational skills and creolizing tastes. Improvisation, as its etymology suggests, puts us in a position where what was programmed—pre-scribed, pre-dicted, pre-meditated, pre-mediated (fore-seen: pro-visum)—does not suffice fully to determine how one is to behave. A weak conception of improvisation claims that we improvise all the time (I usually start a sentence without having a fully clear idea of how I will end it). A more demanding, and more interesting, conception of improvisation hones in on procedures whereby one establishes “enabling constraints” (Manning and Massumi 2014, 92–97) that will push us creatively to imagine or generate the unimaginable. Along a parallel line of thought, Edouard Glissant has defined creolization—by contrast with “hybridization,” wherein a mix of previously separated elements bring about a predictable outcome—as the purposeful or chance-driven coming together of bits and pieces originated from different traditions, insofar as it leads to the “emergence of something new and totally unforeseeable” (Glissant 1997; see also Nova and Vacheron 2015). The creolization currently taking place between machinic and human improvisations calls for the emergence of a new discipline, according to Iyad Rahwan et al. (2019, 477), “the scientific study of intelligent machines, not as engineering artefacts, but as a class of actors with particular behavioural patterns and ecology.” The main result of our triangulation may be to help us identify improvisation and creolization as key features of a common endeavor to write programs against the programs shared—an endeavor shared by artists, scientists, and hackers alike.

Open Ends Such a reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape was strikingly anticipated, as early as the 1970s, by the nomadic media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920– 1991). Across his publications, he presents the constitutive tension between embodied gestures and automated programming as the crucial dynamic likely to animate the development of the arts and the sciences in the future. Flusser’s analysis of the evolution of writing characterizes the progressively unleashed power of printing as leading to the current hegemony of typing, understood as “the production of types.” As direct heirs to the writers of the Gutenberg era, IT specialists pursue the job of “unfurling the typifying mode

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of thought in all areas of culture. This consists in finding types suited to distinctive features of the world, in continually improving them, and in then impressing them on the world” (Flusser 1987, 52). In other words, more familiar to what the previous sections of this article have suggested, our commercially run computational world is based on the extraction of typified figures, which impose models to our senses and practices, often at the cost of what remains ignored in the background from which such modelizing figures have been abstracted (see also Abram 1996). As we have seen, we can no longer escape the hard truth that this “victory of typifying thought” comes with a heavy price tag: “for progress—of science, technology, economics and politics—from the concrete objects to an abstract type is slowly but surely revealing itself to be destructive madness, for example, in Auschwitz, in thermonuclear armaments, in environmental pollution, in short in the apparatuses that typify and universalize everything” (Flusser 1987, 52). The ubiquitous medialization brought about by the printing press, telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio, television, and the Internet has immersed us in a world where media (to be understood in their etymological root of “means”) function through us, at least as much as for us: “decision-making centers have become automated. They intersect with one another in complex ways and the decisions can no longer be grasped politically; rather they function on the basis of other functions of apparatus” (ibid., 115). As a consequence, “the means have become so clever that they make the ends superfluous. They become their own purpose. Means becoming their own ends and ends becoming superfluous: this is what is meant by ‘media culture’” (ibid., 131). Types blind us to both nuances and backgrounds, entrapping us in (self-)destructive modes of extraction bound to follow what has been programmed (as means for profit), instead of developing our attention to potential opportunities of more desirable ends. In the cyberneticist’s world ruled through and through by the “victory of typifying thought,” traditional forms of critique lose their traction—a partial explanation for the loss of prestige and agency enjoyed by literary studies and the humanities at large. According to Flusser, this waning of critique is due to the obsolete enduring of linear modes of causal explanation and to the understanding of critique as geared toward the substitution of old (inappropriate) types with new (improved) types. We must realize instead that our digital world, bathed in technical images and sounds, is ruled by post-linear forms of causality, as much as it is in need of post-typifying gestures. It is revealing that Flusser would situate the invention of this new (“post-critical,” “post-historical”) mode of research at the meta-level characteristic of protocological valuation and writing: “A completely different critical method is required, one that is only approximately named by the concept of ‘system analysis’” (ibid., 152). Contemporary artists, hackers, and scientists alike share a common function in our “media culture” geared by the cyberneticist governance toward the automated growth of purposeless means. All three labor in a form of

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“system analysis,” insofar as they attempt to introduce meaningful variations into the mechanical reproduction of “types.” All three challenge the flows and the management of information by raising questions of meaning and sense, and not only of optimization. All three work on points of tension between the gestural body, immersed in the media culture, and the computing machines that surround and permeate our world with their unleashed power of (re)calculation: “Now that numbers are beginning to liberate themselves from the pressure of letters, and computing is being mechanized, their visionary power can unfold: […] science presents itself as an art form and art as a source of scientific knowledge” (ibid., 28–29). This article, which is now reaching its conclusion, can be read as an explication de texte of this last quote. The (by now rather common) claim that “science presents itself as an art form and art as a source of scientific knowledge” cannot be understood in its wider anthropological stakes outside of the triangulation operated between the arts and the sciences by the rise of computing machines. Flusser’s philosophy—alongside the works of Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka, Thierry Bardini, and other practitioners of media archaeology (see Parikka 2012; Citton 2019)—provides us with a most inspiring way to conceive such a triangulation, in its multiple possible diagrams. The fact that it emerged almost half a century ago should makes us wary of any claim of absolute novelty accompanying this reconfiguration of the relations between literature and the sciences. Judging from the dramatic shrinkage of job offers in the humanities on both sides of the Atlantic, literary studies may seem desperate to devise a renewed agenda, and the type of new transdisciplinary articulation sketched by this triangulation fits the needs too closely not to sound suspect. Beyond a corporatist pro domo argument for the survival of the humanities, the perspective promoted in the preceding pages may also be of interest for scientists potentially worried by the commercial pressures which, under the guise of “disruption,” tend to ensconce scientific research in the deceptive comfort of business-as-usual—while it becomes increasingly clear that the capitalist business-as-usual will not be capable of optimizing itself out of its current ecocidal and egocidal trajectory. The call for triangulation will not be resorbed by a (hypothetical and improbable) revival of the academic institutions which have so far supported the teaching and practice of literature. Telling students that whatever brings them enjoyment will pass for a literary experience is a shorthand for a much broader claim. In a fundamentalist universe of information saturated with ceaselessly optimized means, the sheer emergence of an autotelic activity—an activity that finds its end (telos) nowhere else than in its own accomplishment—may constitute the most radical, as well as the most innocent and contagious swerve away from the business-as-usual of financial capitalism. Human practices draw their intelligence from the rudder provided by their sensitivity to pains and pleasures. The most advanced AI remains as dumb as a rock as long as it is

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not irrigated by the drives of human hopes and fears. Endowed with the amazing power of computing devices ruled by the no-less-amazing power of the capitalist machine, artists, hackers, and scientists are equally threatened to see their desires and their anxieties trapped within the pre-programmed ends of financial profit. Our deepest challenge is to devise “complex emergent processes rather than programmed organizations” (Manning and Massumi 2014, 93). Our ends need to be significantly more open than what is currently tolerated by the current regime of financial capitalism. Our environments will continue to provide us with a livable world of meanings only insofar as we reflect and act upon the emergence of ends located in life itself—rather than in its exploitation.

Notes 1.  Many thanks to Monique Allewaert for her commentaries, suggestions, and input in the writing of this paper. The writing of this paper has been made possible thanks to the support of the EUR ArTeC (funded by the French PIA Programs). 2. What I will call hackers in the following pages refers not only to code-breakers but, more widely, to all “abstracters of new worlds” (Wark 2004‚ §002) who develop a tactical use of digital media, defined as “those phenomena that are able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (Galloway 2004‚ 176).

Bibliography Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Vintage. Barthes, Roland. 1987. Criticism and Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brain, Tega. 2018. The Environment Is Not a System. A Peer Reviewed Journal About. https://www.aprja.net/the-environment-is-not-a-system/?pdf=3569. Citton, Yves. 2010. L’avenir des humanités. Économie de la connaissance ou sociétés de l’interprétation? Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2015 [2013]. Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age of Semiocapitalism. New Literary History 44 (2): 285–308. ———. 2019. Mediarchy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2010. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Flusser, Vilém. 1985 [2011]. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1987 [2011]. Does Writing Have a Future? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Galloway, Alexander. 2004. Protocols: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Gibson-Graham, Jodie-Katherine. 2006. A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Greenfield, Adam. 2006. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. New York: New Riders. Huyghe, Pierre-Damien. 2017. Contre-temps. De la recherche et de ses enjeux. Arts, Architecture, Design. Paris: B42. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. 1977. Personal Dynamic Media. Computer 10 (3): 31–41. Kittler, Friedrich. 1986 [1999]. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lévy, Pierre. 1992. De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux-arts. Paris: La Découverte. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Masure, Anthony. 2017. Design and humanités numériques. Paris: B52. Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Montani, Pietro. 2018. Tre forme di creatività: tecnica, arte, politica. Napoli: Cronopio. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Newton, Isaac. 1713. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. Neyrat, Frédéric. 2018. The Unconstructable Earth. New York: Fordham University Press. Nova, Nicolas, and Joël Vacheron. 2015. Dadabot: An Introduction to Machinic Creolization. Morges: IdPure Editions. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press. Rahwan, Iyad, et al. 2019. Machine Behaviour. Nature 568 (April): 477–486. Simondon, Gilbert. 1958 [2017]. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis: Univocal. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Behaviorism and Literary Culture Scott Selisker

In this chapter, I outline two strands of influence that behaviorism has had on twentieth-century literary culture, largely in the Anglo-American contexts where the theory originated. First, I describe a behaviorist orientation of thought in psychology and later philosophy that has had an appreciable ­influence and presence within modernist literature, the New Criticism, and subsequent theoretical debates in literary criticism. In this sphere of influence, behaviorism added to a set of conversations about how we understand the mind, the limitations of our access to the minds and intentions of others, and our conceptions of causality and will. The second strand describes the trajectory of behaviorist conditioning in popular literary works, which have focused on the societal potentials of behaviorist social programming. Behaviorism has offered a scientific underpinning for science-fictional extrapolations on various kinds of mind control, and as such marks a major part of dystopian literature. Often imagining somewhat reductive versions of behaviorist conditioning, these authors looked to understand the political consequences of the ability to condition or influence a populace against its will. As such, literary extrapolations of behaviorist techniques are also frequently meditations on broader questions about the potentials of science and ­ technology, of technocracy, and the limits of freedom. Although they overlap, this second strand corresponds with what we can call psychological behaviorism, the practical and political concern with the programmability of behavior. The first strand corresponds with what has been called logical behaviorism, a ­philosophical concern with the limits of our knowledge about the mind.

S. Selisker (*)  University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_7

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Behaviorism was established as a program in psychology by John B. Watson’s 1913 lecture and 1914 article, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson insisted that psychology, in order to become fully scientific, needed to isolate its object of inquiry and to become fully objective. It could not rely on subjective characterizations of consciousness, which Watson associated with leading figures such as William James, Wilhelm Wundt, and Sigmund Freud, whose work Watson characterized as often speculative, impressionistic, and marred by religious values (Watson 1957, 4–5). The orientation of psychology under Watson’s guidance became a more fully experimental one, and one that focused on studying human learning and behavior objectively. This move toward objectivity occurred in a historical moment when, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, the physical sciences were cultivating new kinds of mechanical objectivity, and such objectivity became an ideal across the sciences, an “epistemic virtue” (Daston and Galison 2007, 39–42, 121). Watson would insist that the object of inquiry in a scientific psychology could not be the mind itself, but rather observable and measurable behaviors. With this focus, behaviorism established psychology as a discipline based on experimental data. Let us recall two well-known experiments that can illustrate the research programs of early behaviorism. In his early 1890s experiments on dogs, in which they were taught to correlate meal time with a bell, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov precisely measured the amount of saliva each dog produced. Pavlov focused on the conditioning of a reflex that was both involuntary and precisely measurable, an experimental approach that strongly influenced Watson’s outlook (Buckley 1989, 87). Such conditioning of involuntary reflexes is possible for humans, as well: we can, for instance, in a matter of minutes, train our pupils to contract in response to a particular sound and a light stimulus (which makes our pupils contract ordinarily), and then use just the sound (Baker 1938). Pavlov’s work in physiology would prove a major influence on Watson and especially his followers who worked with ­animals; Pavlov’s experiments offered the promise that conditioning of other kinds might also be achieved and studied precisely. One of Watson’s experiments from 1919, often known as “Little Albert,” marked one beginning to this phase, as Watson and his assistant attempted to condition emotional responses in a nine-month-old baby. Watson’s conditioning in this experiment, a set of fear responses to white fur, was necessarily less precise than Pavlov’s work on involuntary reflexes, but Watson’s experiment also tried to be broader in its implications. Rather than treating emotions as the expressions of instincts or as manifestations of earlier events (as a follower of Freud might), Watson’s experiment treated them as conditioned responses, and as learned habits (Buckley 1989, 121). With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, behaviorism would become a dominant force in research universities from the 1920s through the 1960s (Lemov 2005, 4). Watson’s classical behaviorism is grounded in “the objective study of behavior,” and it was followed in the 1930s by Clark

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Hull’s and others’ research, often called “neobehaviorism,” which expanded a program of animal research into areas such as learning and problem-solving (Mills 1998, 4). By the mid-century, the “radical behaviorism“ of B.F. Skinner and his circle returned to questions about human behavior, social life, and language (Staddon 1993, 78). Although many of behaviorism’s methodological and experimental principles remain in place today, it has largely fallen behind cognitive science as a frontier in psychology. (Noam Chomsky’s highly critical review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior [1959] is ­frequently cited as the first glimmer of the “cognitive revolution” across the sciences that would displace the dominance of behaviorism [Staddon 1993, 108].) John A. Mills puts the limitations of the behaviorist project in historical perspective by noting that, for Skinner and other behaviorists, “the person was treated as the physical locus of a set of abstract but operationally definable attributes whose sole function was to promote adaptation to immediate social circumstances” (Mills 1998, 8). The pragmatic foundations of behaviorism thus limited, in Mills’s view, its social applicability, since its approach to the psychology of values, rights, and personal relationships was understood in terms dominated by “immediate gratification” (Mills 1998, 8). As Omri Moses has pointed out, this shortcoming became immaterial for the new research programs of experimental social psychology in the 1960s and 1970s; famous experiments in obedience by Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and others, for instance, took a socially oriented approach to experimental design to address similar questions (Moses 2014, 38). While Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, experts on the complexities of creativity and desire, respectively, were perhaps more prominent direct influences on literature in the early twentieth century, the broader intellectual program of behaviorism would nonetheless play an important role in literary criticism. As Joshua Gang has shown, Watson’s program helped to inspire the notion of a scientific literary criticism, through the influential work of I.A. Richards. Richards had a complex relationship with behaviorism, but as Gang demonstrates, the new science’s “cognitive dispositions came to be embedded in close reading’s theoretical assumptions, techniques, and rhetoric” (Gang 2011, 1). Richards’s approach to close reading, which also influenced Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, “would treat literary texts as behaviors [that is] as external phenomena without reference to internal mental states” and “would record how the stimuli of poems affected readers physiologically and use these results to ground analyses of meaning and form” (Gang 2011, 1). To make literary criticism scientific and systematic, it was necessary to do away with internal mental states, such as the author’s intention independent of the text itself. The early-to-mid-twentieth century also saw a related rise of this kind of methodological behaviorism in philosophy of mind, in the work of Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V.O. Quine. Ryle, in the influential The Concept of Mind (1949), urges philosophers not to suppose that a “mind” can be profitably discussed as separate from an individual’s behavior, and

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that doing so can be classified as a “category-mistake” (Ryle 2002, 17). Ryle credits psychological behaviorism as a “source of the suspicion that the two-worlds theory”—Cartesian dualism—”is a myth,” although he demurs at being “stigmatised as behaviorist” himself (Ryle 2002, 327, 328). The methodological limitations he imposes on philosophy of mind are quite similar to those of the New Critics and psychological behaviorists, in that they set aside intention, consciousness, and the mental state of an i­ndividual in their analyses. B.F. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), perhaps went furthest in applying behaviorist principles to social problems in a philosophical vein. The behaviorism in this work hews close to a philosophical pragmatism that sees less value in the invisible abstraction of “freedom” than in treating a general calculus of freedom in terms of the kinds of “aversive stimuli” in use among individuals to coerce them to do different things (Skinner 1971, 28–29). A behaviorist approach to knowledge, and to reading, also took root in sociology, through the “microsociology” of Erving Goffman. Across his oeuvre, Goffman reads the micro-movements of social gesture with scrupulous exteriority, from the eye movements of people passing on the street to differences of behavior when one occupies private as opposed to public spaces (Goffman 1971, 375, qtd in Love 2010, 379; 1959, 112). In literary studies, Heather K. Love has recently invoked Goffman’s work as a model for a mode of “surface reading” (Love 2010, 379, 383). Love uses the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where she reveals a counterintuitive “documentary aesthetic” in the novel’s depiction of Beloved’s murder, where the narration is insistently exterior (Love 2010, 386). Love suggests that the achievement of Beloved is not, as other critics have suggested, that of restoring “interiority to the disenfranchised” so much as it is Morrison’s “accounting [of] the facts of dehumanization [and drawing] attention to what is irrecuperable in the historical record” (Love 2010, 383). Relatedly, Love considers Goffman’s sociology, and literary criticism with it, as less as an act of “unveiling” than of “redescription” (Love 2010, 381). In parallel with these disciplinary repercussions, many modernist and mid-twentieth-century literary authors vocally embraced, or else forcefully rejected, the central ideas of behaviorism in their work. While it makes sense to associate literary modernism with interiority—and with the stream-of-consciousness style of narration especially—there is also a significant countervailing trend toward exteriority and flatness. The modernist author who dealt most directly with psychological behaviorism, Wyndham Lewis, railed against and satirized it as an avatar of the worst tendencies of Western industrial and scientific modernity. In the nonfiction book The Art of Being Ruled (1926), for instance, Lewis describes behaviorism as a “so-called ‘laboratory’ where the word is actually being annihilated, or where the ‘mind,’ the ‘intellect,’ is being drilled out of it” (Lewis 1989, 339). Similar descriptions in Time and Western Man (1927) rail against the behaviorist goal of “‘human engineering,’” a term

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he picks out from the work of Watson’s associate R.M. Yerkes (Gaedtke 2017, 52). Andrew Gaedtke has argued that Lewis’s 1928 novel, The Childermass, “a satirical reductio ad absurdum of the doctrines of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Bertrand Russell’s monist philosophy of mind—rendering a world in which action and agency are virtually impossible” (Gaedtke 2017, 37). For Lewis, fiction becomes a medium in which the behaviorist’s notions about the individual mind and character can be examined. Accordingly, his Snooty Baronet (1932), an even more pointed satire of behaviorism featuring a fictional disciple of Watson’s, “explores the internal contradictions of a behaviorist rhetoric that aspires to both detached, objective description and instrumentalizing control” (Gaedtke 2017, 63). A noteworthy missed connection between modernist literature and behaviorism took place between Gertrude Stein and Skinner, with Skinner’s 1938 article, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” In it, Skinner connects psychological research Stein conducted as an undergraduate, “Normal Motor Automatism,” carried out with Leon Solomons, with Stein’s style, claiming that her prose, and especially her non-narrative prose, was the product of automatic writing.1 Stein bristled against this accusation, which carried the implication that her writing was a sort of gimmick. Tim Armstrong has noted the irony in Skinner’s accusation, noting that, “What Skinner fears [in Stein’s writing] is something which his own work might seem to make an obvious subject: writing as pure behavior, considered apart from a concept of mind” (Armstrong 1998, 204). The author could be considered as a bundle of behaviors just as characters could, and the nouveau roman in France and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the United States both sought to divorce interiority from fictional character and poetic persona, respectively.2 So far I have traced behaviorism’s influence on how we read literary emotion, authorial intention, character, and the gestures of the m ­ odernist movement. There is a second side to the story of behaviorism, one of its circulation through popular culture and political culture, particularly in the United States. As Kerry F. Buckley has argued, John B. Watson, in his insistence on the practical applicability of behaviorism and its insights, was an early and important player in the social sciences’ more prominent roles in policymaking in the mid-twentieth century (Buckley 1989, 99). Psychologists, Watson wrote early on, “should be able to guide society as to the ways in which the environment may be modified to suit the group… or, when the environment cannot be modified, to show how the individual may be molded (forced to put on new habits) to fit the environment” (Watson 1917, 329; qtd in Buckley 1989, 96–97). Fiction, for its part, has depicted behaviorists as a means of asking how even benevolent projects of societal guidance and behavioral molding might be catastrophic for democratic societies. Watson’s contribution both to a program of scientific psychology and his advocacy for its governmental utility thus influenced, directly and indirectly, the ways that American and British stories about utopia and dystopia would

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be told. Skinner himself wrote a famous utopia about the potentials of behaviorism, his Walden Two (1948), pitched as an explicit sequel to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In a second-edition preface written in 1969, Skinner introduces Walden Two by revisiting Thoreau’s insights, namely that life may be lived in one’s own way, simply, and apart from the political turmoil of society at large. Skinner sets out to preserve these, but on a scale that accommodates a small, economically self-sufficient society rather than just one man. Skinner adds to Walden, then, principles of trust, of ethical sanctions rather than police force, effective (and behaviorist) childcare and educational models, rational (if traditionally gendered) working arrangements, and a willingness to experiment as conditions and dynamics change (Skinner 1969, vii–viii). If Thoreau’s Walden had solved some of the problems of economy and of the well-examined life, then Walden Two, as the community’s guru Frazier puts it early on, solves the “psychological problems of group living … with available principles of ‘behavioral engineering’” (Skinner 1969, 10). In this utopian plot, as Fredric Jameson has noted, Skinner’s focus on group psychology generally sidelines the economic questions that would preoccupy many other utopian authors, such as Edward Bellamy (Jameson 2005, 50). And Skinner’s is notably the only widely known utopian fiction of the possibilities of behaviorism. Indeed, the far larger body of literature that features behaviorism emphasizes the opposite scenario from Walden Two’s benevolent rule by committee: What harm might come from a small group having the power to control and manipulate the behavior of others against their wills? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) had a broadly engineered societal arrangements, with touches such as the “hypnopaedia,” an unsuccessful device for teaching children, through audio recordings, while they sleep (Huxley 2006, 25). While the leaders of that novel seem to have been well-intentioned, the dystopian element in Brave New World is that such a program would infantilize individual citizens, leading them not to fulfill their potentials, but rather to remain as child-like consumer subjects. As David Seed has traced, behaviorist techniques were also mentioned in the 1920s and 1930s science fiction, alongside other purported techniques of manipulation such as hypnosis. John Wyndham’s Exiles on Asperus (1933) and Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), for instance, both mention the possible psychic conditioning of populations under dictatorial control (Seed 2004, xxii). Hannah Arendt would write in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism that the “model ‘citizen’” of the totalitarian state was the “Pavlov’s dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary actions” (Arendt 1968, 587). As Timothy Wientzen has argued, the novelist and nonfiction writer Rebecca West, particularly in her Yugoslavia travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), anticipates this argument of Arendt’s, and in a fashion more thoroughly inspired by behaviorism and the reflexology of Pavlov. According to Wientzen, West grounds a fully developed theory of fascism upon the physiological basis of habits: “urbanization put people

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physically (and thus physiologically) out of touch with the everyday world of craft labor and folk knowledge [giving rise to what West] calls a ‘mindless, traditionless, possessionless section of the urban proletariat’ upon whose backs people like Mussolini and Hitler rose to power” (Wientzen 2015, 63). West would be one of the few women and minority authors who would take interest in behaviorism; we might speculate that, while behaviorism offers a vocabulary for authors to pose questions about technocratic control over a society, it offers little leverage for feminist, anti-racist, or anti-colonial projects, which need not resort to speculation to imagine forms of intolerable subjugation. Orwell’s 1984 (1949), published the year following Walden Two, remains the best-known dystopia with explicitly behaviorist principles, and it is perhaps single-handedly responsible for behaviorism’s reputation in literary texts as a kind of synecdoche for the roles of technocratic management in totalitarian states. The novel catalogs a progression of propaganda techniques, each more invasive: the misinformation of the newspaper for which Winston Smith works; the negative emotion evinced by the cinema in the “two minutes’ hate,” the linguistic technology of NewSpeak, and finally the torture chamber of Room 101.3 In Room 101, behaviorist conditioning and torture work together to break the wills of the state’s most stubborn dissidents, including both Winston and his lover Julia. Orwell’s famous scene, in which caged rats are placed in front of Winston’s face, threatening to eat him, seem in fact to combine Watson’s “Infant Albert” experiment with the rats from the mazebased reinforcement learning and cognitive mapping experiments of Clark L. Hull and Edward Tolman in the 1930s (Orwell 1950, 286). Orwell imagines, then, a near future in which a system of propaganda combined with conditioning could be perfected in order to quash all resistance against a totalitarian state. Most other texts take a more hopeful view, however. As I’ve argued elsewhere, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film about the brainwashing of Korean War POWs, The Manchurian Candidate, traces the narratives of a behaviorist subject and a Freudian one (Selisker 2016, 56–67). Raymond Shaw can be programmed to do anything, including killing his loved ones; Bennet Marco, on the other hand, resists the programming in his dreams, and his unconscious resistance help him to resist the Communists and solve the mystery of Shaw’s brainwashing. The mystery of whether individual characters might resist or succumb to brainwashing or conditioning provides a durable source of suspense for brainwashing narratives. Moreover, scenes of behaviorist conditioning offered a flexible ­ fictional device for contesting the core values of humanity. Anthony Burgess notably turned a fear of behaviorism’s anti-humanism in a socially conservative direction in A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962.4 The novel’s hero, Alex, is cured of his violent tendencies by the “Ludovico technique,” a form of aversion therapy that memorably involves the watching of violent films with his eyes held open, with Beethoven playing in the background. Burgess

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includes in his novel an author, F. Alexander, who rails against “the attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness … laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation” (Burgess 2011, 17–18). Rather than resist the conditioning, however, Alex devolves into the victim of a well-intentioned but ultimately dehumanizing postwar welfare state. Conditioned to feel nausea at the thought of violence, Alex becomes, in F. Alexander’s words, “committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good” (Burgess 2011, 100). For Orwell, Frankenheimer, and Burgess, the programmable subject of behaviorism lacks, in different ways, the dignity and autonomy of a human being. When a version of Little Albert experiment appears a decade later in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), it becomes the stuff of satire and playfully posed questions about causation and free will. Written during the decline of behaviorist psychology’s influence, but set during its heydey, Gravity’s Rainbow features a conditioned reflex in its opening conceit. The protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, had been part of an experiment, as “the famous Infant Tyrone,” where a Dr. Jamf had conditioned erection responses in the baby with a “mystery stimulus,” “x,” later thought to be “some loud noise” (Pynchon 1973, 84, 85). The noise appears to be something like that of the V-2 rocket, whose supersonic arrival famously precedes the sound of its approach. Decades later, during World War II, the adult Slothrop’s erections work as a predictor for the V-2 attacks, so that a map of Slothrop’s sexual dalliances matches that of rocket hits in London, with Slothrop escaping just in time before each one (Pynchon 1973, 85, 49). The inversion of causality here—the intimation that there might be an “extrasensory” intuition on Slothrop’s part—is both fanciful and open to interpretation. When Slothrop discovers these experiments as an adult, as Steven C. Weisenburger and Luc Herman note, he “recognizes that all he has experienced in his life as exercises of free will may in fact have been subject to apparatuses of surveillance, manipulation, and domination” (Herman and Weisenburger 2013, 2). As the mid-century height of behaviorism receded further into the past, fictional narrative often cast it in a campy light, embracing the commonplaces of genre fiction and mid-century technologies. A subplot in the third season of the hit television show LOST, for instance, recasts the theater-based aversion therapy from A Clockwork Orange as part of the retro aesthetic of the “Dharma Initiative” and its 1970s-era social science experiments; Ben punishes his daughter’s boyfriend by placing him into the locked conditioning chamber “Room 23” (“Lost: Season 3” 2007). Likewise, Paul Beatty’s ManBooker-Prize-winning satirical novel The Sellout (2015) features a protagonist whose idealistic African American father had been a behaviorist scientist. As a child, the narrator was subjected to a battery of experiments, including: a version of the “Little Albert” experiment, but instilling fears of racist objects; a variation on Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s experiment with Caucasian and African American dolls (which was cited in the majority decision in Brown v. Board of Education); and finally, an aversion therapy that forbade him from

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being sexually attracted to white women (Beatty 2015, 29, 34).5 The narrator’s father, though, is cast as a relic from another time, an idealist (and member of the Dum Dum Donuts Intellectual Club) whose faith in scientific and rational solutions to the problems facing African Americans Beatty lampoons as hopelessly misplaced (Beatty 2015, 42). Although behaviorism proper is often now treated in the camp fashion often reserved for obsolete technology, literary texts often now bring up similar questions about scientific knowledge and human being through narratives devised around robots, artificial intelligence (AI), and androids. This genre overlaps significantly with the history of behaviorism, so Isaac Asimov’s robot stories of the 1940s, including “Evidence” (1946) and “Reason” (1941) fall under this category, in addition to novels such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). But stories, films, and television continue to take up the questions of behaviorism, such as Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010), Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica (2004–), Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), and HBO’s Westworld (2016–). A related trend depicts human minds that can be programmed through computer interfaces, as they are in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1991), Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002) and sequels, and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (2009–10). While behaviorism can now be considered largely a historical phenomenon in its influence on literature, its questions about programmable behavior, and about the scientific modeling of learning and habits live on in these genres. Narratives can use the devices of the robot and AI to ask again and again about the differences between a human being and a bundle of programmed behaviors. The two directions behaviorist influence on culture took ultimately stand in a complex but instructive tension with one another. The first, the logical behaviorist tendency toward rigor, reserve, and exteriority when speaking of the mind, is one that encourages literary critics, philosophers, and sociologists to be keenly aware of the limits of their knowledge about other minds. This sort of “surface” treatment of other minds leaves room for an equalizing and ultimately ethical understanding of others in the world, one that leaves room, pace Skinner, for an equally shared dignity. The dystopian thread in literature imagines the equal and opposite position of scientists or technocrats: that they might reduce individuals to their programmable behaviors and use their expertise in manipulating behavior to manage them in violent ways. In both kinds of behaviorism, scientific theories about the mind become crucial levers for how we define, understand, and relate to humanity.

Notes 1. See (Armstrong 1998, 188–97) for a longer account of automatism and “secondary personality” theories of the nineteenth century. See also (Moses 2014, 118–25) for an account of how Stein’s writing aligns vitalist rather than behaviorist accounts of character.

126  S. SELISKER 2.  Joshua Gang, in “Mindless Modernism,” has described Beckett’s Murphy (1936) as a behaviorist text; Simon Kemp describes a strand of behaviorism in French modernism from André Gide to a leader of the nouveau roman movement, Nathalie Sarraute. 3. I discuss NewSpeak and behaviorist conceptions of language and habit at length in (Selisker 2016, 42–46). 4. Lorenzo Servitje offers a reading that also links the novel to the coming sea change in psychiatric treatment and its turn to psychopharmacology in the 1960s (Servitje 2018). 5. An additional dimension of these experiments in Beatty’s work, and also of the absence of behaviorism in African American literature more broadly, is the history, detailed in Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid and other work, of African Americans’ subjection to many kinds of violent and harmful medical and scientific experiments.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Armstrong, Tim. 1998. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Lynn. 1938. The Pupillary Response Conditioned to Subliminal Auditory Stimuli. Psychological Monographs 50 (January): 32. Beatty, Paul. 2015. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Buckley, Kerry W. 1989. Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism. New York: Guilford Press. Burgess, Anthony. 2011. A Clockwork Orange: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed. Norton Critical ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Skinner: Verbal Behavior (Book Review). Language 35 (January): 26. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Gaedtke, Andrew. 2017. Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. Gang, Joshua. 2011. Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading. ELH 78 (1): 1–25. Gang, Joshua. 2013. Mindless Modernism. Novel 46 (1): 116–32. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In Doubleday Anchor Books; A174. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1971. Relations in Public; Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. Herman, Luc, and Steven Weisenburger. 2013. Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. Huxley, Aldous. 2006. Brave New World, Reprint ed. New York: Harper Perennial. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Kemp, Simon. 2014. Stimulus and Response: Behaviorism, Tropisms, and Twentieth-Century French Thought and Literature. Romanic Review 105 (3/4): 341–60.

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Lemov, Rebecca M. 2005. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang. Lewis, Wyndham. 1989. The Art of Being Ruled. In Dasenbrock, ed. Reed Way. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Lost: Season 3. 2007. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment. Love, Heather. 2010. Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn. New Literary History 41 (2): 371–91. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0007. Mills, John A. 1998. Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology. New York: New York University Press. Moses, Omri. 2014. Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Orwell, George. 1950. 1984. New York: Signet Classics. Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 2002. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seed, David. 2004. Brainwashing the Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films Since World War II. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Selisker, Scott. 2016. Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Servitje, Lorenzo. 2018. Of Drugs and Droogs: Cultural Dynamics, Psychopharmacology, and Neuroscience in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Literature and Medicine 36 (1): 101–23. Skinner, B.F. 1934. Has Gertrude Stein a Secret? Atlantic 153: 50. Skinner, B.F. 1969. Walden Two. London: Collier-Macmillan. ———. 1971. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1st ed. New York: Knopf. Staddon, J.E.R. 1993. Behaviorism: Mind, Mechanism and Society. London: Duckworth. Watson, John B. 1917. An Attempted Formulation of the Scope of Behavior Psychology. Psychological Review 24 (5): 329–53. Watson, John B. 1957. Behaviorism, Rev ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Washington, Harriet A. 2006. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday. Wientzen, Timothy. 2015. An Epic of Atmosphere: Rebecca West, Black Lamb, and Reflex. Journal of Modern Literature 38 (4): 57–73.

CHAPTER 8

I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal Dana Seitler

I’m dying to! It’s an expression that initiates a contradiction—I want to do this thing so badly that it feels like I’m dying!—and makes manifest a performative psychology—the best way to express an intense feeling for something is to mimic the process of death. When we make use of this colloquialism, the wish for death that it houses is not a call for the actual suspension of life but the expression of an unbearable want, a perhaps orgasmic enactment of desire beyond the limits of need. What I am calling death, in other words, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or The Unbearable, call sex—“a relation that both overwhelms and anchors us” (Berlant and Edelman 2013, vii). In their sense, we might understand this expression—I’m dying to!—as performing our capacity to bear the unbearable, and even, in fact, to derive some perverse form of pleasure from it. Long before Leo Bersani’s conception of the self-shattering jouissance of sexuality, “I die!” has been the most obvious of metaphors for orgasmic release. Thus, Benedick to Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing: “I will live in thy heart /Die in thy lap”; thus Romeo to Juliet: “I must be gone and live, or stay and die.” Wink, wink. But if there is a literary history in which sex is like death is there also a literary history in which death is like sex? Michel Foucault outlines a perceptible shift in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an “anatomo-politics of the human body” and a “biopolitics of the population” through which bodies became privileged disciplinary objects of governance and state control hinged on the production D. Seitler (*)  University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_8

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and management of the discourses of life (Foucault 1990, 139).1 In the literary fiction of this period we can, indeed, see the uptake of the regulatory concept of life as a delimiting discourse. But there exist equally powerful narrative refusals of the medical and state mandates for the extension of life in the form of the suicide plot. In such texts as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (1905) Charles Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss” (1889) and “The Sherriff’s Children” (1888), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903), and others, we are privy to stories that help us to think about how suicide functions as both a sustaining fantasy and a narrative strategy. In each, the main character’s engagement with suicide is not limiting but productive: it creates a space of protection for otherwise damaged individuals, allowing them to imagine an alternative configuration as/at the end of their world. I will thus make the counterintuitive claim that the suicide plot, in particular historical circumstances, can be read non-tragically. The historically diverse texts that I take as my objects here—Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) and Lynda Barry’s Cruddy (1999)—span the length of the twentieth century and thus act as genealogical nodes through which we might view the twenty-first century’s inheritance of biopolitics. Each text responds to this discourse by re-imagining self-annihilation as a challenge to the slow violence of the present, suggesting that we understand the function of suicide in them not as the result of individual mental decline or depressive pathology, but as giving voice to an overarching, pressing question: How can one wrest a mode of living from the negations of contemporary life? My key question is how we might understand these plots as critical experiments in narrative form disobedient to both liberal and neoliberal models of personhood by trying to imagine pleasure and ecstasy in the context of the unbearable.

Biopolitical Economies In Foucault’s sketch of the relationships among life, death, power, and, briefly, suicide, he writes, “It is not surprising that suicide became in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and interstices of power that was exercised over life” (Foucault 1990, 138–39). In their Marxist treatise on contemporary life, Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw on Foucault’s premise to press the question: if political power assigns itself the task of administering life, is suicide a way to usurp the power of death from the sovereign? Accordingly, they argue that sovereign power perpetuates itself not simply by exercising its authority to kill its subjects or spare their lives but by actively producing and sustaining life. Even wars, they maintain, “must not only bring death. More important than the negative technologies of annihilation and torture […] is the constructive character of biopower” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 20). As with Foucault, Hardt and Negri understand sovereignty

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as predicated on the engineering of a populace’s well-being. Power over life includes the capacity to prolong it. For Hardt and Negri, herein lies one of the contradictions of sovereign power: “Even this seemingly absolute power is radically thrown into question by practices that refuse the control over life” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 332). They continue, “When life itself is negated in the struggle to challenge sovereignty, the power over life and death that the sovereign exercises becomes useless. The absolute weapons against bodies are neutralized by the voluntary and absolute negation of the body” for “without the subjects the sovereign rules not over a society but an empty wasteland” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 332–33). Their point is that once we understand that sovereignty is not an autonomous or absolute force, we can see the ruled as endowed with the power of resistance in the form of a refusal of life: “to refuse their position of servitude and subtract themselves from the relationship” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 333). Hardt and Negri’s notion of the exodus from life is borrowed from Paolo Virno, who argues that the right of the worker is the right of exiting the system of labor and the social relations of production it maintains through strikes, boycotts, and the like. On this basis, Virno theorizes the possibility of a mass defection from the State: It is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics. Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of ‘republic,’ however, requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal. (Virno 2006, 197)

Where Hardt and Negri argue for a crisis constituted by the loss of human bodies, albeit as less a real than a fantastic way to imagine the collapse or fragility of the sovereign, Virno sees a world-making possibility, where a new political formation (a “republic”) can emerge once a collective engages in a mass exit from existing forms of governance. However, both treatments of exit and exodus, as many critics have pointed out, fail to account for the different ways subjects are racialized, sexualized, and gendered under neoliberal capital, in effect leaving the biopolitical differentials in the models of exit they provide unaccounted for. As Lisa Cacho has argued, racialized populations in the USA are “already dead” insofar as they constitute populations that are denied, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the right to have rights.” For Cacho, “The bodies and localities of poor, criminalized people of colour are signifiers of those who are ineligible for personhood”; they are “legally illegible because they engender populations not just racialized, but rightless, living nonbeings” (Cacho 2012, 6). Racialized populations, in other words, always live under the command of death: the constant and perilous exposure of their lives to material and physical injury, but

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also more generally to a condition of life alienated from life. This alienation, for Cacho, is neither only affective nor in sole relation to material economy; rather, it is the condition of racialized bodies refused a just relation to state forms and identities. Exploring this condition of alienation in its contemporary incarnation, Michelle Murphy details a shift in US history from a concentration on the biopolitics of population through projects like eugenics in the early twentieth century to the project of “the economization of life” in the twenty-first century. Where once the aim was the regulation of populations, now it’s a project of state and global economy, what Murphy describes specifically as “the practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their ability to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state” that work to divide life into categories “more and less worthy of living” (Murphy 2017, 6). In other words, population as an organizing category no longer holds as much sway for contemporary capitalist flows as does that of the economy, which itself relies heavily on what Achille Mbembe describes as the necropolitics of neoliberal capital—an unprecedented form of the politics of death in which necropower, or the technologies of control through which life is strategically subjugated to the power of death, emerges as one of the fundamental aspects of biopolitics in the contemporary neoliberal era of normalized insecurity and terror. Building on Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” life stripped of political representation and socially viable forms of living, Mbembe specifies a contemporary necropolitics of racialized terror through which certain lives, and not others, are in a constant state of subjugation to the power of death. In this concatenation, where the categories of terror, power, freedom, and resistance are blurred, death may be an agency and thus freedom, a negation (Mbembe 2003). Jasbir Puar adds queer texture to this understanding when she describes “the queer temporal interruption” of the suicide bomber. “As a queer assemblage […] race and sexuality are denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution” (Puar 2007). If suicide bombing, as an act, is condemnable, Mbembe and Puar consider how it nonetheless operates as an anti-economy in excess of the state’s instrumentalization of death and the rationalizing project of modernity—the mandate for reason in the public sphere—upon which this instrumentalization relies. Thus, in ways related to Cacho and Murphy, Puar’s work on the discourses that surround queer suicide insists that we move our perspective away from the tragic and toward an emphasis on how instances of queer suicide “offer a different temporality of relating to living and dying” in which we shift from a characterization of individualized pathology to questions of social and structural forms of debility, disability, and precarity (Puar 2010, 1). For Puar, this means addressing the uneven distributions of capacity and liveliness across sexualized, raced, and gendered bodies and the extent to which

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states of debility—that is, various forms of bodily difficulty and incapacity— are produced and maintained as a practice of regulation and management for specific populations at the service of particular macroeconomies. What Puar’s work helps to illuminate is how the event of suicide in specific instances marks not the end of or exit from life but that which one has never been allowed to become in life in the first place, an undoing and unbecoming of what minoritized subjects already are not allowed to be or become. I move through these accounts of the biopolitical, to ask a specific question: What happens if we enlist the work of Cacho, Murphy, Puar, Mbembe and related arguments concerning the histories and practices of biopolitical economy to develop suicide as a more nuanced critical concept for literary studies? If we take as axiomatic the equally relative values of science and literature as cultural discourses, what role can literary critics play in addressing the unequal, always racialized and sexualized, distributions of the concept of life? In turn, what role does imaginative literature play in both examining the workings of our social institutions and ideological formations and shaping how we perceive and enact alternatives? Answering these questions entails accounting for the different ways structural inequality affects different bodies, and, as a direct consequence, thinking about the cultural work narratives of suicide perform over time and at different times either to bolster or challenge those structures. This means examining how acts of suicide are staged in novels, films, or short stories, and what work that staging performs (Seitler 2019). Reading the fiction of suicide as an allegorical structure, I suggest, usefully disaggregates the individual act or suicidal event from its ideation, and thus lets us consider what is at work when suicide is viewed as a scene of fantasy. The wager of this chapter is, indeed, that literary fiction, a space specifically poised as a form of ideation and imagination, can tell a story about the suicide plot as an experiment in the expansion of the concept of life and living. One of the reasons I find Foucault, Virno, and Hardt and Negri’s characterizations of suicide, exodus, and biopower partially unsatisfying is a result of the principles of universality embedded in their theories (to which Cacho, Mbeme, Puar, and Murphy point). The problem of over-generalizing that accompanies those principles relies on an idea of collective consciousness of “the ruled” in ways that really don’t account for the vastly different formal, historical, allegorical, or psychic dimensions of suicidal ideation. I think the difficulty here might be that Virno, Hardt and Negri, and assuredly Foucault, are bad literary critics. I say this not (only) because it’s funny, but because it pinpoints why their characterizations of suicide as a practice, event, or act at times collapse into political non-specificity and, at others, unwittingly valorize an enlightenment humanist ideal of self-sovereignty where the subject is seen to hold control over their own relations to life or death separate from the regulatory forces managing those relations (despite their insistence on biopolitical analysis). All of a sudden, there is a subject capable of

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exiting the structures that contain them by opting out of the system. Instead of grounding my analysis in an inadvertent hope for self-sovereignty, I want to ask what it might mean to more actively engage the forms and structures of allegory, fantasy, and genre that mediate both subjects and sovereignty as uptakes for or disobedient responses to the ever-increasing, networked domain of the biopolitical economies of racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence that saturate everyday life at both micro- and macro-levels. What can we learn by thinking about acts and events of self-harm and annihilation not as evidence for agency but as narrative forms? This is a tricky line of questioning because it threatens to lessen, or somehow mitigate, the very real suffering involved in acts of suicide. But I raise it here, in fact, to try and understand these acts, and this suffering, better— away from the pathologizing, criminalizing, and racially and sexually inflected tendencies of medical and juridical discourse, as well as the sentimentalizing inclinations of cultural production. If we understand “life” as, at once, a biopolitical object (deeply entangled in the medical-industrial complex), an object of economy (harnessed to global capitalist designations of value), and a genre (thoroughly mediated by narratives that constitute what counts as a life), what other genres for living might the plot of death imagine?

Suicidology Historically, beginning with late eighteenth-century US fiction, the suicide plot tended to take its cue from a discourse of the sovereign individual in a fight against the state, acting at the service of the ideology of the early republic. Patrick Henry’s famous proclamation is a case in point: “Give me liberty or give me death!” was infused into the suicide plot such that it, too, emerged as a form of self-determination, functioning to reinforce popular political arguments about self-sovereignty. The suicidal hero of The Power of Sympathy (1789), for instance, “had chosen to escape tyranny and flee to another world” (Brown 1972, 152). This new form of voluntarism came to epitomize the principle that life was something to be actively chosen or rejected and, therefore, always a potential resource, literally and figuratively, for revolutionary self-determination (Gaudet 2012). By the nineteenth century, however, suicide had begun to be treated as a medical problem, an act that came as a direct result of the experience of melancholy. Suicide as the personal choice of the self-sovereign subject was now challenged by new medical notions of the insufficiency of personal resolve against the overwhelming external forces of structural violence, social transformation, and chance (MacDonald 1992; Rush 1830). As a result, suicide became freighted with a double discourse—the earlier republican ideology of self-determination, on the one hand, and medicalized notions of helplessness and despair, on the other. Two definitions of suicide thus co-mingled—as an act performed by those who were seen as consciously ending their lives through

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a deliberate and agential self-harming act and those who died as a result of the pathological deterioration of their will to live. Emile Durkheim’s late nineteenth-century definition is apropos in this regard: “The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he [sic] knows will produce this result” (Durkheim 2002, 44). By the turn of the twentieth century, the medicalized notion of suicide began to hold greater sway. Processes both of secularization and medicalization amplified the view that suicide was fueled by unwanted feelings of depression that required treatment by medical specialists. By the mid-twentieth century, this view was codified by medical and psychological treatises on suicide such as psychiatrist Beulah Chamberlain Bosselman’s Self-Destruction: A Study of the Suicidal Impulse (1958), which presents a series of case studies to argue for the internal “motivating drives” of self-destruction. The science of suicidology continued to emerge as a full-fledged psychiatric theory and practice in the USA when Edwin Schneidman coined suicidology as a field committed to the study of suicide as a psychological disorder in 1968. For Schneidman, suicide was an individual act motivated by profound isolation and could be characterized by an uncontrollable desire to escape emotional anguish, what he called “a drama of the mind” (Schneidman 1996, 4, 6–7). By 1994, suicide—as both an event and an ideation—entered the DSM IV and was characterized there as a major depressive disorder. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first-century suicide had already enjoyed a long history as a biopolitical term, emerging over time in medical domains as a concern over the loss of life, where life functioned as the locus of an abstract value that must be preserved. The practice of care, as Foucault argues, is always intimately entwined in the disciplinary governance of life. It is, therefore, not just the securitizing of “life itself” that is at stake here, but also the concomitant attempt to securitize anything out of sync with both established social norms for living and life as an economic value (Rose 2016). This longue durée of the prominent conceptualizations of suicide in the USA underscores the co-relevant strains of political, medical, social, and cultural patterns that came to shape and inform it—and were in turn shaped and informed by it. Through this historical overview, we can begin to glimpse the formation of biological citizenship in the USA (Rabinow 1999; Rusert 2017; Tompkins 2017). Not only is human life governed by medical conceptions of either normal or pathological calculations of risk, but it is also the securitized locus for the possibilities of extending and enhancing economic growth, social and racial stability, and the episteme of the family—limited, as always, to privileged individuals, rich nations, and other fetishistic products of biocapitalism.

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Death Drives In what follows, I focus on Ethan Frome and Cruddy as exemplary of a strain in which the suicide plot makes both an aesthetic and a social demand on the pressure of living that refuses the medicalized linkage of suicide with sadness and pathology, offering instead ecstatic forms of pleasure as an alternative angle from which to view the narrative uptakes of the suicide plot from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. As significant work in the field of literature and science by authors such as Priscilla Wald, Devin Griffiths, and Sari Altschuler demonstrates, cultural forms like literature are not only engaged with conversations generated by the sciences but can also function as alternative arrangements of scientific and medical knowledge (Wald 2007; Griffiths 2016; Altschuler 2018). As such, these forms become important pieces in the history of biopower. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome narrates the doomed affair of Ethan and Mattie Silver, who fall in love while Mattie stays in Ethan’s home to care for his sick and cruel wife. Inherent in the story’s structure is a deep understanding, and critique, of the white heterofamily as the site for the reproduction of a healthy social body, what Foucault describes as the set of relations that wrench specific biological functions of the human species (like birth rate) into a political strategy for governing an entire population. Key to the functioning of political power, in other words, is the self-management of the family rooted in the white heterosexual couple form, itself laden with the biopolitical sorting and valuation of racialized and colonized populations. As a primary site through which bodies became located in hierarchies of race, the white heterosexual couple form ensures that whiteness emerges as both the site of the evolutionary accumulation of proper impression (Schuller 2017) and monogamy as a biological model that can reproduce whiteness as a ideal of “civilization” (Willey 2016). Indeed, coeval with the discourse of reproductive monogamy was the attendant fear of “race suicide”—where death rate was predicted to exceed birth rate resulting in the gradual extinction of a population—aggressively re-incarnated in the twenty-first century as “white genocide.” Coined by US sociologist Edward A. Ross, the alarmist discourse of “race suicide” and its pseudo-scientific counterpart, eugenics, became widespread at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, highlighted in texts such as Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn, as well as a number of presidential speeches given by Theodore Roosevelt, in which Roosevelt begins to shift the focus of blame for “race suicide” from immigrants to women (Ross 1901; Rentoul 1906). He famously claimed, for example, that a woman who is childless by choice “merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle” (Roosevelt 1901, 280). Thus, the biopolitics of reproduction powerfully came to take the form of a biological imperative that positioned white women as the central site for the reproduction of national health (Seitler 2008). There is no space within this biopolitical frame for

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adultery, divorce, or unconstrained desire, whether in the context of an extramarital affair in Wharton’s story or interracial and same-sex desire in others. The modern regime of sexuality ushers in the legitimate couple form, and, even in the context of Ethan’s wife’s apparent infertility or refusal to reproduce (the text, interestingly enough, doesn’t specify), the form continues to assert itself throughout the story as an insistent moralizing force. When Ethan and Mattie realize their affair is impossible, and Mattie is subsequently banished from their home, they decide to take a sleigh ride together: “The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk, gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night opening up below them and the air singing by like an organ.” Mattie “sat perfectly still” and “Ethan cried exultantly as they flew down the second slope […] the speed began to slacken, he heard her give a little laugh of glee” (Wharton 2001, 88). So Ethan and Mattie took a sleigh ride or they had sex. “Her breath against his neck set him shuddering again. He leaned backed and drew her mouth to his. Half-way down there was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent” (Wharton 2001, 91). This gives Mattie an idea: they can go down the hillside in the sled one more time, but this time instead of just missing the deadly elm tree that lies in their path, they can crash into it and die in each others’ arms. Ethan agrees and they go down again, accompanied by much of the same ecstatic language. The great misfortune of this event is not that it ends in suicide but that it doesn’t. They fail to “fetch” the tree that was to bring the end of their suffering and are catapulted into a life of debility instead: Ethan is permanently crippled, Mattie has what in contemporary terms we would call a traumatic brain injury, and Ethan’s cruel wife must now care for them both. Pointedly, in the story it is the constraint of desire in the advent of the modern regime of biopower that produces the white family as a site of dysfunction. But suicide would not have been Mattie and Ethan’s agential escape as espoused by early republican ideology, nor would it have been the effect of morbid depression as described by the contemporaneous medical discourse. Suicide would have been their ecstasy. And that ecstasy stands not so much against as alongside the biopolitical management of life, emerging as another trajectory within the networks of biopower that Ethan and Mattie find themselves so deeply entangled. For this reason, Wharton’s narrative frames their survival as the real tragedy of the text. Surviving, in fact, delivers them into a now heightened condition of economic and physical precarity and emotional suffering than they had already been in. But just for a moment, in the scene of their accident, sex finds dramatic expression. And it’s the novella’s formal management of suicide as a sex act that I am so interested in here. For the most challenging (because both perversely pleasurable and ultimately painful) critical climax in the story has to do with the fact that suicide emerges in the text as a sexual exercise. Standing in for sex itself, suicide exceeds its definition as act or event precisely because of its allegorical value, its literariness: it emerges

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in the story as a formal practice through which erotic gratification is sought and experienced. In turn, sex, through suicide, exceeds the biopolitical mandates for how and when to have it. Keep in mind: neither Ethan nor Mattie have a future to lose. Their illicit love is trapped in the constraints of the ­hetero-narrative ideology of monogamy and white familial obligation; that is, a narrative form, or biopolitical genre, organized around and by the cultural assumptions of white heterosexual marriage. Quite literally, there is no way out for them, no narrative form or discursive context that would enable a sexual exchange that would simultaneously be seen as a just and moral one (at least not until Wharton would write, quite scandalously, about divorce in The Age of Innocence nearly a decade later and, of course, not even then). They are, or rather their desire is, already dead (disallowed, blocked, unalloyed to social legitimacy). In a certain sense, then, suicide also stands in as an emphasis of that deadness as opposed to its enactment. That it is simultaneously and, I would argue, more significantly an ecstatic relation is what interests me. In the chapter “Take Ecstasy with Me” from Cruising Utopia, Jose Muñoz describes ecstasy as an affective transport that enables a moment of self-abandonment, “of being outside of oneself in time” (Muñoz 2009, 189). When he asks that we take ecstasy with him, he invites us to “step out of the here and now of straight time” and enter not so much another space or time but another domain of feeling: “It is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better” (Muñoz 2009, 189). And, really, that is all Mattie and Ethan want. To be undone by a sleigh ride, by its economy of danger, its capacity to produce a heightened sensory experience akin to the wish for death; or, in Muñoz’s sense, the ingestion of a drug, to accept this risk, is not to resign oneself to one’s conditions of being, nor is it to willfully enact an escape from it, but rather to attempt to whittle out a habitable notch from within those conditions, and to thus disobey the normative relation of bodies, acts, and consequences by making that relation ecstatic.

Bodies and Pleasures Lynda Barry’s Cruddy (1999) pushes the stakes of this relation even farther and begins to outline the inheritance of this discourse on the cusp of the twenty-first century. Her novel is a harrowing critique of the forms of violence that structure and modulate everyday life. We first meet its anti-hero, 16-year-old Roberta Rohbeson, when she is 11 and begins to recount an unrelentingly abusive home life. The story proceeds from her perspective in the form of a diary in which the teenage Roberta details, with an unnerving calm, a lurid cross-country road trip with “the father.” This man may or may not be her actual father; Roberta is never quite sure. He’s a butcher by trade and carries with him at all times a set of knives, leaving a litter of bodies in his wake only to be killed, eventually, by Roberta herself with a knife called “little Debbie” that he had given her from his collection. These traumatizing

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events and the psychological battering Roberta receives throughout the narrative, and their potentially paralyzing effects, are countered by the druggedout intimacies she shares with the friends she develops along the way: Vicky, Turtle, the Great Wesley, and, finally, Vicki’s brother The Stick. Roberta slowly recounts her past to them and, as she does, they decide to retrace the journey she had taken with “the father” five years earlier in the hope they might find the hidden suitcases of money he had been trying to locate in the original journey. Roberta remembers the way, so, off they go, high on Ecstasy, LSD, pot, and pills the entire time. Through this drugged haze, we learn about Roberta’s joyful attachment to trains. She writes: It is a form of tripping to stand on the railroad tracks […] to wait in the pitch-blackness with your eyes closed for as long as you can stand as the roaring gets closer and crashes all around you. The groaning vibrations and the metal screeches and the ting, ting, ting. To stay on the tracks with your eyes closed after the twisting bright headlight hits your face […] it will be any second, any second, the mighty engine blasting and its shocking sharp ray of blinding light and then the whistle screaming and you jump, flying to the side, rolling in the sticker weeds and laying flat while the black wind rushes over you. This is what I used to do in the good old days. (Barry 1999, 109)

Somewhat later, Roberta gives a similar account, but now in the form of fullblown suicidal ideation: Train vibrations are strong. Vibrations moving through the rails cool and very smooth under my hand. The rocking motion and the rolling engine and the hypnotic shine of the headlamp. The night train. The night train. If I do it just right, he’ll never see me, he won’t blow the whistle, maybe he’ll feel it and think a deer or a dog, maybe he won’t think anything. Here comes the freight train, here comes the freight train […] here it comes here it comes here it comes NOW. (Barry 1999, 181)

As with the euphoric language of Ethan and Mattie’s sleigh ride with its references to mobility, speed, motion, and through each, intense pleasure, Roberta’s autoerotic narrations of suicide by train depict a girl in the throes of ecstasy. Hers is the experience of a drama of extremity in which she seeks to feel something that belongs to her alone, is caused and imagined by her, but in such a way as to abdicate control over that feeling. This is the quasi-autonomy of placing oneself in the position of risk that forces one to accede to the possibility of nonsovereignty. Roberta’s version of suicidal ideation extends the sexual ecstasy we observe in Ethan Frome into a form of being by being undone. She wants to disturb herself in a way that does not reproduce the pain and difficulty of her childhood abuse but that enables the flows of her own inventiveness, her own desire, in order to shift the relations of the irreparability of that abuse.

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The extended metaphor or sexual allegory of Roberta’s train relations might be called “phallic,” but only in the sense that the train is her phallus to play with and use, more vibrator (“train vibrations are strong”) than a masculinist anatomical manifestation. Sexual feeling here is pointedly rooted in an autoerotic model of movement and sensation (rocking and rolling) and intoxication (tripping), which works to redistribute available models of sexual experience, but also to generate more labile forms of living. Roberta wants to inhabit the extreme feeling of losing oneself as the means to feel more herself and this entails both a move away from the biopolitics of the couple form and the epistemic ideal of the white middle-class family. This asks that we understand Roberta’s eventual suicide at the end of the narrative (yes, by train) in more complicated terms than many of the available understandings and analyses of suicidal acts: either an analysis of self-determination and self-sovereignty, the sole effect of social structure, or the medicalized construction of depression as I have discussed. Roberta informs us at both the beginning and the end of the novel, “If you are holding this book right now, it means that everything came out just the way I wanted it to. I got my happily ever after” (Barry 1999, i, 305). Marking her suicide as a narrative strategy, a form of closure that defies the tragic but just as strongly refuses the happily ever after of the marriage plot, neatly summarizes the suicide plot’s double meaning here—it is both a wish for death and a demand for another form of life. The suicide plot in both Ethan Frome and Cruddy, then, is not an end in itself, but the means by which other plots may become available, ones that disrupt neoliberal scripts of self-becoming or utopian Marxist investments in somehow willfully exiting the system. The disruption enacted by both Ethan Frome and Cruddy is thus related to but also unlike Paolo Virno’s concept of “engaged withdrawal” with which I began. For Virno, the term designates a collective exodus from ­post-Fordist capitalist political economy and emerges from the rising consciousness of the laborer. Instead, in Ethan Frome and Cruddy, we have what we could call “the ecstasy of withdrawal,” a withdrawal into an erotics of loss and risk that pushes back against what we were never allowed to be in the first place, a withdrawal that does not require explicit political consciousness to nonetheless function, narratively, as a political demand. The suicide plot, as one such instantiation of the ecstasy of withdrawal, can thus be considered a co-present, competing discourse to biopower by making use of the very thing biopower hinges on: the regulation and modification of desire. One of the key insights of Foucault’s work on biopower and biopolitics, of course, is that inherent to its ambitions to make bodies and persons the direct object of political power, is the imperative to invent bodies that are, as forms of alterity, new political resources for management. Hence biopower always, in part, produces (by naming and managing) those alterities, those perversions and irruptive practices. But if we could say that biopolitical structures of power invent perversions in order to control them, we could also say that inherent to biopower is a pleasure that matters.

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If this comes across as an easy utopian celebration of suicidal ideation, let me clarify: if what we need is the articulation of new plots for living, these narratives point a way toward imagining existence beyond the limits of existence as mandated by specific social and biopolitical structures. In them, suicide allegorizes ecstasy in the space of the unbearable. As literary critics, might it not be an ethical responsibility to point to the difficult pleasures of a text that, excruciatingly, undauntingly, stage a demand for living otherwise, and, in doing so, demonstrate how, historically, discursively, this otherwise, can, in fact, exist, has existed, if only in our thoughts, if only in the creative manifestations of our desires, if only in the fleeting sensory experiences of a fateful sleigh ride? By separating the tragedy of the act from the ecstasy of the ideation, Ethan Frome and Cruddy make use of the suicide plot as a narrative experiment in the expansion of the concept of life and living. This expansion entails not so much a politics of agency over death, and thus power over the sovereign in a re-imagined self-sovereignty. Rather, it uncouples both suicidal ideation and suicide acts from their medicalization as depression, conjuring in its stead a more ecstatic, and thus less governable, relation. Beyond the individualized moment of ecstasy in each, these texts ask that we re-value genealogies of the discourse on life alternative to the biopolitical and its gendered, racializing logics. This reading of the suicide plot doesn’t only intervene in the medical discourse of suicidology; it also points us toward a coexisting aesthetic discourse where ecstasy as a hermeneutic extends new relational and representational modes of modern life.

Note 1. In fact, in the February 11, 1976 lecture collected in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault points to the mid-eighteenth century as the beginning of this shift in power, but he goes on to underscore, in the lecture of March 17, how one of the primary signatures of the nineteenth century was the advent of biopower: “What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological” (Foucault, 203, 240). Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003). Thus, we can make a distinction between origins and perceptibility, which is to say the nineteenth and early twentieth century is when biopolitical governance becomes naturalized enough to be taken up as a central disciplinary discourse—literary, juridical, medical, and otherwise.

References Altschuler, Sari. 2018. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Barry, Lynda. 1999. Cruddy. New York: Simon & Schuster. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2013. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

142  D. SEITLER Brown, William. 1972. The Power of Sympathy. Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. Cacho, Lisa. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 2002. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York and London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, vol. I. New York: Vintage. ———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76. New York: Picador. Gaudet, Katherine. 2012. Liberty and Death: Fictions of Suicide in the New Republic. Early American Literature 47 (3): 591–622. Griffiths, Devin. 2016. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Leo Bersani. 2009. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, Michael. 1992. The Medicalization of Suicide in England: Laymen, Physicians, and Cultural Change, 1500–1870. In Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden, 85–103. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Muñoz, Jose. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. Ecologies of Sex, Sensation, and Slow Death. Social Text. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/ecologies_of_sex_sensation_ and_slow_death/. Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rentoul, Robert Reid. 1906. Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn. New York: Walter Scott Publishing. Roosevelt, Theodore. (1901) 1970. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2016. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Ross, Edward A. 1901. The Causes of Racial Superiority. Annals of the AAPSS 18 (July): 67–74. Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Rush, Benjamin. 1830. Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind. Philadelphia: Grigg. Schneidman, Edwin. 1996. The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Schuller, Kyla. 2017. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seitler, Dana. 2008. Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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———. 2019. Suicidal Tendencies: Notes Toward a Queer Narratology. GLQ 25 (3): 199–216. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2017. ‘You Make Me Feel Right Quare’: Promiscuous Reading, Minoritarian Critique, and White Sovereign Entrepreneurial Terror. Social Text 35 (4): 53–86. Virno, Paolo. 2006. Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 195–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2007. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wharton, Edith. 2001. Ethan Frome. New York: Modern Library. Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. William Shakespeare. 2004. Much Ado About Nothing, 220. New York: Washington Square Press. William Shakespeare. 2004. Romeo and Juliet, 186. New York: Simon and Schuster.

CHAPTER 9

Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination Bishnupriya Ghosh

My imagination rose, unbidden, possessed, and guided me, gifting successive images that arose in the mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bonds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—, I saw a pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

Mary Shelley, “Preface” to Frankenstein (1831)1

One of the most famous passages in English literary studies, Mary Shelley’s invocation of the imagination as a creative force spurred reflections on modern scientific and literary projects for centuries to come. Against the backdrop of present biotechnological enterprise, the philosophical questions posed in the novel have only gathered more steam, fire, and fury since the novel’s initial publication in 1818. There are shelves and servers brimming with criticism on Shelley’s engagement with the scientific research of her day. Most directly, Frankenstein is regarded as an inquiry into the human cost of extending Luigi Galvani’s research (popularized by Giovanni Aldini, his nephew, in England at the time) and Erasmus Darwin’s philosophies (published in The Temple of Nature, or the Origin of the Society, 1803)2 on human subjects. Victor Frankenstein’s anguished report to Roger Walton articulates this inquiry directly: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principles of life proceed?” More broadly, the ethical questions the novel poses regarding Erasmus Darwin’s “principle of life” are bundled together with larger planetary matters, atmospheric to geological—especially striking given the novel’s publication exactly when the biological sciences were emerging as

B. Ghosh (*)  University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_9

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disciplines in their own right. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in the previous year was largely responsible for the changing weather patterns that Shelley records as the “wet, ungenial summer” of 1816.3 Popularly known as “the year without a summer,” as early as 1816, the inescapable planetary connectivity of natural forces had become clear. The fortunes of the blue planet were universal, and therefore, scientific inquiries took on a global dimension. Hence, the period also saw geological expeditions based on the scientific hypothesis that an ice-free ocean surrounded the North Pole; in England, the British geographer, John Barrow financed several Arctic voyages from 1810 throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Popular interest in this hypothesis grew with the publication of Benjamin Bragg and Edward Thomas Paris’ A Voyage to the North Pole in 1817, just a year before Frankenstein (1818). The voyages materialize in Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger Roger Walton’s intrepid expedition to the Arctic. In all these ways, Frankenstein engages not just with the history of science but also with scientific enterprise—some personal and secretive, some publicly funded and collective—in the decades when “modern science” sought to remake the biospheric, geologic, and atmospheric foundations of a godless blue planet. Would science ensure the survival of the “modern Prometheus”? Or would scientific enterprise and emergent technologies herald humankind’s destruction? This chapter explores the varying methods through which the “literary” and “scientific” enterprises approach common concerns, arguing that, despite their differences, both are invested in mobilizing the imagination as a creative force. In the century that followed, the boundaries between the sciences, and between the sciences and humanistic disciplines, would harden. Bruno Latour (1991) sees this separation of discursive formations as constitutive of modern knowledge: we live with the implications of such boundary-making every day in the twentieth century. Looking up at the ozone layer, the impulse to leave its repair to the scientists alone is precisely why it may never disperse. In this chapter on the established and emergent conjugations between literature and science, it is instructive to hearken back to the start of these separations. As scholars have noted, the early 1800s are the decades when biology, arguably the main scientific preoccupation of Frankenstein, emerged as a discipline from the natural philosophies that preceded it, and, as late as the mid-twentieth century, the struggle between biology and physics over definitions of life would erupt in physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s landmark essay, “What is Life?” (1944).4 In this context, we can see Shelley speculating on the epistemological effects produced by the modern silos of knowledge that were emergent in her lifetime. Could “life” be understood as strictly biological existence separated from all social unfoldings? Was biological or geological survival possible without the human social structures of family and friendship, education and the law? Shelley’s novel engages in the muddling, entangling, and roiling of the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, entanglements which are especially instructive for the multi-leveled complexities of planetary disrepair with which we are faced in the twenty-first century. Frankenstein stages the potential reach of modern western science as global and planetary: the

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Arctic, India, and Turkey are the geographic coordinates at which European science materializes as a global project with planetary implications. If Victor Frankenstein and Roger Walton push the horizons of scientific discovery into the body and out to the poles, the gentle Henry Clerval receives a lesson in social responsibility from his career in the East. Through these characters’ varied fortunes, Shelley reflects on a particular history of the European modern sciences and their increasingly global impacts. Of course, the fact that Islamic scientific advances flourished well before the European Renaissance—the golden age in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, among other disciplines, dates from 800 to 1250 A.D.E.—has been well established in contemporary scholarship.5 Yet those scientific revolutions did not come to stand for the “universal” good in the same way that western scientific advances and technological developments did. For, as Shelley suggests, the history of western science is also that of European expansionism. We know the hoary histories of modernizing projects that brought science, reason, and progress to environs well beyond the Old World. Hence, Shelley’s preoccupation with what constitutes the universal good, and what differences govern the distributions of that good, interrogate the historical situation of the scientific enterprise. In Frankenstein, how we narrate the unfolding of scientific inquiries within and beyond the laboratory has everything to do with what appear as self-evident natural processes and objects.6 In short, Shelley alerts us to modern science as “an epistemology of the concrete,” as Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (2006) later christened it. As historical subject, the scientist approaches the object of inquiry—the creature that awakens Victor Frankenstein with a gaze from “yellow, watery eyes”—and encodes it according to the social values of his time. With such valuation comes the baggage of unassailable difference, perceptible and deeply inscribed, embodied in creaturely life. The novel unfolds around the consequent self-conscious struggle to reconcile (racial and sexual) perceptions of biological difference: What violence lies in turning the other into an abstract object of scientific inquiry? It is not surprising, then, that Frankenstein is situated as another kind of origin altogether—this time in literary studies. The novel is widely regarded as early feminist sci-fi, a genre that has inspired and motivated crucial and canonical critical engagements with literature and science in the last forty years. For all these reasons, Frankenstein serves as this chapter’s starting point. Most importantly, Shelley identifies the imagination as that which compels scientific thought. A creative and self-reflexive faculty, the imagination generates the mental activities of thinking, remembering, and fantasizing. This implies that the imagination maps what is not actually present to the senses and brings it into being through mediation. The artist or the scientist must conceptualize and draft the model before it materializes. In its reliance on mediation, the imagination joins literary and scientific endeavor: both materialize speculative worlds through media technologies (which were mainly print technologies in Shelley’s time). The litany of books we encounter in

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Frankenstein (as well as where and how they are accessed) point readers to media technologies that play a role in the story of modern science. Books train the imagination, instilling ethical limits and social constraints; without them, Shelley suggests, the imagination is an uncontrollable force, rising “unbidden” and unchecked in the writer and scientist who will create “hideous progeny.” Shelley’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, narrates the strength of this force as dazzling, blinding the scientist to the effects of his creation: “I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself or one of simpler organization; but my imagination by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.” The reverberation between literary and scientific authorship, then, conjures the link between them. The human urge to create is a natural force that must, like all such planetary forces, be administered responsibly, with reserve and caution. Paradoxically, it is also the force that has, time and again, propelled scientific discovery: all those “revolutions” that, as Thomas Kuhn (1962) notes, push beyond what is not yet present, questioning established protocols, often uncaring about the impact of the new. The “discoveries” featured in Frankenstein, from the creation of synthetic life to polar exploration, would mature into massive scientific enterprises in the next two centuries. Shelley’s speculative fiction thus captures the excitement of revolutionary epistemological change. Beyond speculation, another tenet of the imagination is reflection—or, more accurately, self-reflection. The Latin root of the term, imaginary, means to “picture oneself,” a sense present in Shelley’s “acute mental vision” of the “pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling by the thing he had put together.” The imagination not only mediates what is not yet present to the senses, but also reflects on what one becomes in the act of speculation. Put differently, the imagination makes new through linkages to the ­recognizable “self.” Thus, what one makes is historically located in a place and time: Victor Frankenstein’s creation, like all scientific innovation, materializes from its particular historical situation. What this self-reflexive dimension of the imagination implies for the scientist is epitomized in the story of Victor Frankenstein, the man who sought distance from his historical situation; locking himself away with his experiments as the revolutions raged outside, he nonetheless fell prey to all its social prescriptions. Meanwhile, this “making new” distances the “self” (“a being like myself”) from the creation (“the hideous progeny”). This distance is an experiential rupture: Victor Frankenstein sees his creature as not-quite-human. In science fiction, the rupture between the speculative (what is to come) and the reflexive (what is now present) constitutes a cognitive estrangement that assumes literary form. The work of the imagination is speculative and critical; it compels us to think, remember, and fantasize. One approach to the relations between literature and science is to ask: What is the role of the imagination? In what follows, I trace those

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relations as they have emerged, morphed, or settled in the last forty years. I am concerned less with literary texts or scientific advances than with critics who have theorized the fold between literary studies and science studies. My chapter does not offer a comprehensive overview but etches disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary relations in three short sections and through a selection of exemplary works. On a broader level, the three sections return to the questions that never left Mary Shelley: At what (human or non-human) cost do we pursue modern science? What are the dangers of the modern sciences’ separation from philosophical questions or social thought? What is the relationship between modern sciences and modern literatures?

Epistemologies: Modes, Methods, Paradigms The many histories of science written throughout the twentieth century establish the historicity of scientific objects and processes, protocols and techniques‚ in no uncertain terms. An object such as the “gene,” for instance, notes Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in An Epistemology of the Concrete: TwentiethCentury Histories of Life (2006), is a fuzzy concept as it migrates across the biological sciences: it signifies differently within the discursive domains of microbiology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology. Even within these domains, multiple experts, and sometimes, non-experts debate the nature of the scientific object. If objects (the gene, the virus, the cell) evolve over time in scientific epistemologies, then twentieth-century histories of science offer insights into the contexts within which scientific facts emerge.7 Early twentieth-century theories of quantum mechanics embraced the uncertainty principle, thus spurring the turn away from the positivist certainties of the nineteenth century and propelling historical epistemologies that underscored the historicity of science. Ludwig Fleck’s 1935 The Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact—a notable treatise on the fabrication of scientific fact which preceded Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions8—argues that there is ongoing feedback between concepts and evidence, terms which mutually define each other and regularly marginalize whatever appears to contradict or overly complicate the standardized definitions. Analyzing syphilis as a multi-symptom syndrome, Fleck notes the slippages around the disease concept ever since its first emergence in the fifteenth century. At that point, the condition’s causes and treatments were part mysticalethical (resulting from the movement of stars or from carnal excess) and part empirical-therapeutic (treatable with mercury). The debate regarding whether or not one could characterize the syndrome that included sores, dementia, and progressive paralysis as a disease entity raged for centuries before nineteenth-century germ theory established spirochaeta pallida as a single causative agent. The protocols of the early twentieth-century Wasserman test were critical to the agent’s materialization: clinical symptoms now told the story of microbial proliferation based on pathological evidence (Fleck’s

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“changes in blood”). Even as systemized vademecum sciences (for general experts) followed linear disease causalities, the difficulties of identifying one particular form of this parasite livened discussions in journal science (for researchers). Fleck’s greater point in tracking the debates is to suggest that what appears as “scientific fact” in fact emerges from protracted negotiations between multiple “thought communities,” expert and non-expert. Closer to our time, the well-documented histories of the AIDS clinical trials have only underscored the salience of Fleck’s thought communities to the construction of diseases. Enter literature, and the question of what roles literary thought communities, including science fiction writers, play in defining scientific facts. One point of entry into this impossibly large question is through critical thinkers who have pursued direct links between literary and scientific imaginaries as they “picture” scientific phenomena. Sarah Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007), for instance, examines Dolly, the famous lamb clone that Scotland’s Roslin Institute created in 1997. Franklin tracks the sneakily simple concept of “sheep” in recombinant histories of British agriculture and reproductive medicine and shows Dolly to be a complex creature: a product of scientific creativity, but also, in the context of Britain’s rural heritage and the new fact of synthetic reproduction, a redefinition of abiding cultural concepts such as sex, nation, and kin. Franklin’s laborious tracing of discursive shifts around “sheep” after Dolly establishes a method for tracking the relations between science and literature. “Literature,” here, is one part of a larger cultural domain; its significance lies in the capacity to represent previously unknown phenomena. In short, it is the speculative dimension of literary texts that make them particularly efficacious for charting the futures of experimental science; literature whets the imagination to make worlds with synthetic creaturely life. Biotech sci-fi explicitly speculates on the anthropocentric encoding of synthetic creatures that effectively turn them into commodities to be used and discarded at will: Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian Never Let Me Go (2005), for one, follows children who come of age only to realize they are clones whose organs belong to anonymous elites. The coming-ofage genre destabilizes the reader, who might expect more about the technical processes of cloning; instead, readers grapple with the attachments that are foundational to making kin. Both Never Let Me Go and Dolly Mixtures ask: What kind of kin are synthetic creatures? What genealogies link “us” with “them”? In Franklin’s book, genealogy is both theoretical concept and method: following Michel Foucault, genealogical thinking eschews direct lineages for complex, often fragmented, often dispersed, linkages. Genetic codes flash in Dolly much like blue eyes surface from a forgotten branch of a family tree. Dolly Mixtures foregrounds the knotty discursive terrains within which scientific objects come to be known. The larger cultural imaginaries that frame scientific thought are Priscilla Wald’s concern in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

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(2007), a book devoted to mapping the presence of scientific concepts in popular science. Popular science includes literary texts and journalistic writings, policy papers and science communication. Exploring the literary conventions of outbreak narratives, Wald unearths what is shared across these domains: for instance, desires for the origins of disease events such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Ever since the famous Emerging Infectious Disease conference in Washington, DC, 1989, we know that disease events are better understood as “emergences,” multi-leveled multi-causal phenomena untraceable to a single origin,9 and yet time and again, epidemiological accounts attempt to narrow the “source” to a patient zero. Wald points to Gaetan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant, and Typhoid Mary, the Irish-American cook, who were the racialized and gendered points of origin for HIV/AIDS and typhoid transmission in North America, and discredits the mythologies that surround them: while the Dugas case has been roundly disputed, Mary Mallon’s forcible isolation between 1907 and 1938 has been criticized as cruel and unusual punishment inflicted upon a socially vulnerable subject (Broverman 2018). The facts of both cases demonstrate all the ways in which literary and scientific narratives emerge from shared social imaginaries of health and illness, racially and sexually coded imaginaries that testify to the social values of their time. Wald shows how medical communities and popular science journalism, confronted by bewildering symptoms and alarming rates of infection, participated in narrating these origin stories. The formal characteristics of shared narrative conventions in science communication on diverse platforms provide evidence of a deep structure: the political unconscious of epidemiological outbreaks. A litany of contagion narratives explores this unconscious as it unfolds across epidemics. Alejandro Morales’ sweeping The Rag Doll Plagues (1991), for one, moves from colonial Mexico to AIDS-riven Southern California to a twenty-first-century future. Everywhere, there is the same logic of segregation and sequestration; everywhere, there is the messy interdependence of worlds, new and old, California and Mexico, present and future. Wald’s analysis of contagion’s structuring modes is especially pertinent in the context of such fictions, which show that the will to separate, to scapegoat, to distance, to dispose, is intrinsic to the management of large-scale human tragedies. Finally, a third direct way to approach the relations between science and literature is to consider their joint contributions to historical knowledge paradigms. This is Colin Milburn’s project in Nanovision: Engineering the Future (2008), a book that straddles scientific and literary imaginations concerning nanotechnology. Throughout, Milburn examines the speculative roots of nanotechnology. For instance, before the new technology was realized, scientific visions—such as molecular engineer and futurologist Eric Drexler’s armies of small robots and carbon nanotube discoverer Richard Smalley’s elevator of nanotubes stretching from the earth into space—were the stuff of science fiction, a speculative reaching toward potentialities yet to come.

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One of Milburn’s stories concerns the “origins” of nanotech discourse that is classically attributed to Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture (“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”). Milburn shows how Robert Heinlein’s short story, “Waldo” (1942), is a source text for imagining the world at ever-smaller scales until one can manipulate matter at molecular levels. If Feynman spoke of remote-control hands that make smaller and smaller sets of hands, the incomparable Waldo’s delightful ever-smaller waldoes that can perform surgery at sub-cellular scales is Fenyman’s font of inspiration for the technology to come. Such connections between literary and scientific imaginations are not just fortuitous. Rather, they involve a paradigmatic way of seeing the world and its futures, which Milburn names “nanovision.” To “see” beyond the limited paradigms of the present involves a rupture in time, a jump ahead estranged from the present. Such cognitive estrangement is the founding temporality of science fiction, and Milburn locates such temporality in the speculative science of nanotechnology: “Nanotechnology entails a way of seeing, a perspectival orientation to the world, that operates through a productive dynamic of blindness and insight. It produces a blind spot, a wall, a veil, a black hole, or a barrier and therein discovers a scission—between present and future, between human and posthuman, between science and science fiction. But at the same time, even in breaching its own blindness, it sees through it toward the beyond. It breaches the wall, breaks the barrier, lifts the veil, and voyages into the black hole. It is a way of seeing that lyses the membrane between the technological present and the nanotechnological future” (13). The speculative embrace of the radically unknown is the imaginative great leap forward that has brought us nanotechnology. The imagination is indisputably a creative force; it dallies with the unknown and courts danger, sometimes to the cost of the human good. But then, as we have learned the hard way in the late twentieth century, an exclusive focus on the human good is precisely the problem. Milburn’s work exemplifies the turn to thinking human-animal-machinic relations in technoculture studies, one of the first interdisciplinary fields that addressed literature and science together within the academy. In the last forty years, those fields have flourished, diversifying in stable configurations that address specific knowledge paradigms: they explore how we should “know” about the world in order to remake it. The critical works discussed above that directly address the imagination speak to the mutual constitution of the literary and the scientific: intellectual histories, cultural imaginaries, and linguistic etymologies yield evidence of the thoroughfare between the two. All three scholars variously span interdisciplinary formations such as science-and-technology studies (STS), history of science, cultural studies, techno-culture studies, and new media studies. As the preliminary list of these relatively new sub-fields suggests, the boundaries between the literary and the scientific are increasingly nebulous and fraught. Priscilla Wald’s exploration of science communication in popular

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science journalism, for instance, shores up shared fictions that bleed into ­literary works and scientific research. Colin Milburn articulates a shared way of seeing through his conception of “nanovision,” while Sarah Franklin tracks large discursive formations that are constitutive of both scientific and literary paradigms. Their varying methods raise disciplinary questions about the ­differences or distances between literary and scientific domains. In the s­ ection below, I pause on other exemplary instances of scholarship that demarcate these domains, pursuing interdisciplinary scholarship, as critical thinkers parley abiding and emergent reasons as to why the literary and scientific are never too far from each other.

Constitutions: Humans, Animals, Machines The increasingly strong engagements between literature and sciences have visible institutional presence: there are professional organizations (such as the Society for the Literature, Science, and the Arts) and research programs (such as History of Science, Science and Technology, and the Environmental Humanities) devoted to developing and sustaining relations between the two disciplines. One approach to those relations is to track interdisciplinary research that follows homologous lines of inquiry while recognizing the separate domains of each discipline. A striking instance is Philip Thurtle’s The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in the American Biological Sciences, 1870–1920 (2007), a book that examines the enmeshment of the biological sciences in a larger epistemic shift toward genetic thinking that begins with the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. Thurtle argues that new conceptions in biology must be thought in relation to largescale technological, cultural, and economic transformations, including the rise of managerial capitalism and new information processing technologies. In other words, changes in political economy and new technologies created the conditions that made genetic thinking possible and desirable. Literary works play a role in debates over the proper relation between biological hereditary traits and social inheritance, which raged through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Turning to Edith Wharton’s famous portrait of America’s Gilded Age in The Age of Innocence (1920), for example, Thurtle argues that a dinner table conversation over breeding trotting horses through which Wharton stages a conflict between the old moneyed New York elites and the brash newly wealthy is equally a contribution to contemporaneous conversations regarding the social value of hereditary traits. Thurtle offers evidence not only in the fact that breeding trotters was a very popular leisure activity among rich industrialists such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, and E. H. Harriman, but also in a remark by the head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for Eugenics, Charles B. Davenport, that much social progress would be achieved if human matings were to simulate practices of horse breeding based on preserving superior

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biological traits.10 For Thurtle, literary (the inheritance narrative in the novel), scientific (experiments on hereditary traits), and social (horse breeding practices) inquiries are homologous: that is, they pursue similar lines of critical inquiry into how hereditary traits constitute the human, both biologically and socially. Hence, this encyclopedic work is truly interdisciplinary. He gives us prehistories of what becomes commonplace in the mid-twentieth century, from the interdependence of the tools that process information and animate life to the gradual enmeshing of information processing in corporate industrial cultures. The latter is the concern of the digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that conjugates literary studies with computer science. In literature departments, computational tools and methods have opened up new arenas of research, hermeneutic and archival; digital platforms and formats have further nudged digital humanities to engage more fully with “new media” that ranges from information culture to bioinformatic studies. On the one hand, new media theorists and digital humanities engage the textualities that are the bread and butter of literary studies, studying everything from new epistolary cultures of text messaging to the global dominance of new post-alphabet languages. On the other, the foundational object of scrutiny is coding and its discontents, a preeminent literary object since the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century. It would be virtually impossible to characterize all the ways in which literature is now embedded in the study of the information sciences, but one could begin to delineate this embedding through one landmark book: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), which attempted to conceptualize information systems and networks, nodes and pathways, firewalls and vulnerabilities. One of the contributions of the book was to cybernetic histories, especially industrial/ corporate and military armatures, salient to the study of literature. To make their point, Galloway and Thacker engage with information exchange as a foundational activity that structures natural and social networks. They offer microbial networks as models for uncontrollable divergences and mutations that can express radical disturbances in the existing state of things, theorizing constant emergence as the unpredictable feature of networks. If organisms are not complex machines but aggregates of large populations of simple machines whose variable actions are calculable, then what can the biosphere teach us about cyber-worlds? The analogical relation between scientific research on microbial networks and cultural/social research on cyber networks shows, argue Galloway and Thacker, that both kinds of networks are constantly emerging, but are also always subject to new regulation and control. Control can manifest as a large social body (like the state) fighting bottom-up proliferating networks (made of terror cells) or as “networks fighting networks.” The latter is most effective, they maintain, in critical infrastructure such as Disease Surveillance Networks (DSN) tailored to track “viral chatter,” or in military intelligence units (under as the US Defence Advanced Research

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Project Agency or DARPA) that exhort trainees to “think like a virus.” Here, science (as microbial culture) and literature (as information culture) are placed in modular relation to each other: the one serves as a blueprint for constructing the other. Of course, modular preoccupations do not obtain across the digital humanities; I highlight Galloway and Thacker’s text because it exemplifies interdisciplinary conjugations of literary studies (as it articulates with cultural studies) and computer science (as it intersects with larger information sciences). Their conjugations find resonance in literary fiction on viruses, in particular Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed Snow Crash (1992), which staged a faceoff between a computer virus from the Metaverse and a hacker in the real world who must defang its attacks. Like Galloway and Thacker, Stephenson theorizes the virus behavior to think about the collective actions of micro-machines that can substantially alter present equilibria. A final instance of two well-demarcated disciplines that remain distinct within their new shared ecologies is the interdisciplinary field of literature and neuroscience. A seminal work is Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), in which Damasio explores the biological processes constitutive of “consciousness”—a construct that was traditionally the concern of literary and philosophical study. The “self,” argues Damasio, is the reflexive sense of neural maps, and is therefore deeply embodied; myriad neural connections enable learning, remembering, and recognizing past and future selves. Conversely, cultural encounters regulate neural networks, an evolutionary perspective. In short, with Damasio, “mind studies” established a feedback between neurological and cultural changes. Neuroscientists rushed to study the effects of culture (reading, following narratives, wordplay) on body-brain networks, while literary scholars turned to cognitive processes beyond the cerebral or deliberative. Affect studies, neuroaesthetics, and trauma studies—to mention just a few intellectual trajectories—all feel the impact of these emergent theories of the mind. The connections between literature and neuroscience have now given rise to “neuro-novels” that engage brain biology (injury, degeneration, alterations) to explore human actions and behaviors. Sebastian Faulk’s A Possible Life (2012), for instance, fictionalizes a neuro-nexus of self-awareness— Glockner’s Isthmus—that is “discovered” to be the basis of the self. Yet as the story proceeds, the major protagonist who is a neuroscientist grows increasingly uncomfortable with her findings; once more, we find a questioning of biological determinism in the constitution of the self. Here, as elsewhere, there is no fusion of neuroscience and literary studies, but their relevance to each other’s preoccupations is eminently clear. The examples in this section have highlighted interdisciplinary research clusters that see humans, animals, and machines as mutually constitutive. Whether it is Phillip Thurtle’s socially significant horse-breeding practices or Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s microbial information exchange, interdisciplinary inquiries cross and re-cross established boundaries.

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Taken together, what these works suggest is that if human consciousness and its effects are to be radically rethought, literary and scientific studies must draw on each other’s histories and genealogies, integrating each other’s insights and discoveries.

Fields: Inquiries, Impacts, Actions In this last section, I turn to institutionally established sub-fields that take interdisciplinary research a step further: to common projects, coordinated or collaborative, tuned to the quest for socially responsible scientific and ­technological progress. My focus is on “multi” disciplinary endeavors that arise from a keen sense of historical urgency: a sense of common enterprise that has impelled new public-facing academic work in the humanities and the sciences. Three widely recognized subfields—the medical humanities, environmental studies, and animal/multispecies studies—once more serve as exemplary instances, and I elaborate the forms and genres, the platforms and spaces of collaborative research within them. The idea of the medical humanities is not new. Doctors and patients have always negotiated the terms on which health emerges as a horizon. But changes in information access and the intensifying patient activism of the last forty years have had lasting impacts on the medical production of health and illness. Institutional knowledge is regularly assessed and evaluated in the context of a deluge of information across media platforms; hence, medical decisions are based on contingent collaborations among doctors, patients, state officials, drug companies, hospital administrators, clinicians, public health workers, caregivers, activists, counselors, and sometimes self-constituted affected communities (with the “support group” as its post-industrial organizational form). Patients hyper-attuned to their vital states actively seek, collate, and organize data into information, actively participating in emergent “bioscapes” (as Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit name shared ethical plateaus).11 In this context, patient narratives or “autopathographies” have assumed new significance. The interest in autopathographies—everything from memoirs to journals and diaries—suggests both medical investments in understandings of bodily changes, lifespans, and disease events and literary engagements with the significance and value of biomedical advances. An early investigation of the broader societal implications of biomedical advances is Susan Merrill Squier’s Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004), a book in which she argues that literature, including pulp fiction as well as literary novels, is at the front and center of social and ethical questions pertaining to new distributions of “human” matter. Like Milburn, Squier suggests that science fiction paved the way for consenting to everything from embryo adoptions to intra- and interspecies organ transplantation. Thus, both the fabulation of fiction and the realism of autopathographies are salient to increasingly technologized medical practices and their accompanying bioscapes.

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Both literature and medical science invest heavily, and often together, in a common project: multidisciplinary explorations of what health should be and what counts as the human. A second expanding multidisciplinary enterprise is environmental studies, a field with its own internal boundaries: programs and research clusters in environmental justice studies, the environmental humanities, and the environmental sciences mushroom across institutional divisions in universities. While the individual fields in the environmental humanities (ecological literary criticism, environmental history, eco-theology, and so forth) have been in existence for decades now—in some cases dating back to the 1960s with works such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1964)—it has only been in recent years that “environmental humanities” has begun to consolidate expertise in the interpretative sciences as crucial to the study of the environment. The main thrust of this sub-field pushes beyond the mere acknowledgment that environmental media is important to intervening in ecological devastation or sustaining environmental growth. The environmental humanities address the histories, methods, concepts, and archives that animate mediations of the environment. Several books represent this multidisciplinary enterprise: Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2010), arising from postcolonial optics, and Stacey Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), based in feminist and queer theory, are exemplary instances that foreground literature as a social force in environmental repair. Nixon criticizes the public habits of consuming sensational violence, habits which, he argues, obscure the slow violence of environmental impacts. Multi-generational toxicities such as the Chernobyl or Bhopal disasters become business as usual unless literary articulations bring them to the surface as human experience. Nixon explores journalist Indra Sinha’s memorable character, Animal (in Animal’s People, 2007), a young boy permanently damaged in a fictionalized version of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak. The novel’s scorn of the legal dog-and-pony show around the ineffective disaster compensations cogently elaborates Nixon’s larger argument about political spectacles; if anything, the real repair work is in Animal’s growing ability to make a fable of catastrophe. In a different kind of move, Alaimo names the entanglement of human matter within the environment as “transcorporeal” movement, moving from creative to philosophical writings as she shows how everything from X-rays to genes have contributed to the sense of distributed subjectivity with which we live today. The history of thought attunes us to the social and physical consequences of an anthropocentric separation of the human from non-human matter, animate or inanimate. For both writers, questions of social justice that challenge the universal category of “the human”—a category that enacts violence on those who are disposable in the long fight against environmental harm–are at the forefront of public-facing humanities. Such scholarship provides foundational arguments for collaborative projects—among scientists, policy wonks, activists, journalists, artists,

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state officials, and NGO actors—to harvest necessary expertise in local “solutions” to planetary problems. Finally, one of the strongest multidisciplinary subfields to enmesh the literary and the scientific is animal and multispecies studies. Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007) was a landmark text in claiming the centrality of the animal in the constitution of the human, carving a space for what is now institutionally entrenched as animal studies. The field has a diverse array of thinkers, ranging from those who study the ethical parameters of human-animal relations (pace Derrida) to those who do historical research on animal husbandry, hunting, or animal rights societies. Building on animal studies, in recent years, multispecies research has emerged at the intersection of interdisciplinary fields such as environmental studies and science and technology studies as well as animal studies. Multispecies ethnographers bring non-charismatic animals, non-useful plants, and under-studied organisms such as insects, fungi, and microbes into the purview of anthropological study. The volume The Multispecies Salon (2014) brings together a range of writings in natural and cultural history that demonstrate the experience of otherness—anthropology’s raison d’être. Only this time‚ “nature” itself is the unfamiliar exotic culture. In this collaborative venture, artistic accounts are of cultural significance because they mediate present and future processes and events that are not readily discernible: microscalar interactions and slow geological or evolutionary time become legible and palpable in the reflexive mode. Physical and virtual “salons” are the spaces of multidisciplinary “collaboration” (the buzzword in multispecies research). In such effects, both literary and scientific imaginations surface as part and parcel of multispecies coexistence. These multidisciplinary endeavors not only orchestrate literary and scientific conjugation, but also insist that the two imaginations are structurally necessary to each other. Through them, scientific epistemologies of the concrete become modes of everyday life.

Coda Flash forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century (Fig. 9.1). The literary imagination materializes on the street as women fight over the governance of their bodies. What was once a speculative future immortalized in Margaret Atwood’s work of apocryphal science fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), becomes a possible present. As we know, Atwood’s novel opened into a dystopian future in which young disposable women had lost all control over their reproductive capacities; against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s renewed war against abortion rights, the novel was televised in a 2017 series. I close with Atwood because unmasking political desires behind technoscientific futures has been her life’s work. Science appears as a regime of truth, dangerous in its objectivity. “Falling in love,” she says in Oryx and Crake (2003), “although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to

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Fig. 9.1  Women dressed as handmaids protest against US Vice President Mike Pence in Philadelphia, 23 July 2018 (Screenshot: The Hill 07/23/18)

him. In addition, it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.” Her prophecies force us to not only confront scientific truths as historical epistemologies but also as the ­powerful occult work of the imagination.

Notes



1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42324/42324-h/42324-h.htm. 2. In the first additional note to a didactic poem written in 1802 and posthumously published in 1803, Darwin discussed spontaneous vitality, describing the experiments of Ellis, Reamur, Buffon and others. He believed that, under certain circumstances, microscopic life could arise from non-living matter in a very short span of time. 3.  The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia spewed 2 million tons of debris, particles, and sulfur into the earth’s atmosphere, and subsequently influenced weather patterns for years. 4.  The botanist, physician, and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus’ refers to the Latin “biologi” in his Bibliotheca Botanica (1735), a book that proposed a massive classification of plant genera and species in the known world. A century later, by 1838, biologists established the cell as the basic unit of life, and theorized principles governing life from this perspective. Over the course of the nineteenth century, biology evolved into different branches, physiology to microbiology; by the early twentieth century, not only was biology gradually

160  B. GHOSH differentiated from physics, but the “life sciences” also underwent internal differentiations (physiology, genetics, zoology, botany, and so forth). Indeed, by the twentieth century, biology was a many-sided and multiform discipline concerned with the study of life and living organisms. 5. See, for instance, George Saliba and Jed Z. Buchenwald, 2011. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press. 6.  The points have been variously established in histories of science such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact (1979); Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth (1994); Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (1999). 7. The historicity of science preoccupied several philosophically minded biologists. As early as 1872, German physiologist, Emil du Bois-Reymond, delivering one of the first lectures on the history of science at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, would insist “we teach science and its history at the same time.” Historical epistemologists such as Gaston Bachelard (Essai sur la conaissance approchée, 1922), Edmund Husserl (The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1934–1937), Ludwik Fleck (Genesis and Structure of Scientific Fact, 1935/1979) and George Canguilhem (The Knowledge of Life, 1973) would suggest science was a collective project sustained and driven by its open-ended, provisional nature—it always sought to surpass its own past. 8. The time lag is in part attributed to the rise of Nazi Germany: Fleck’s research was disrupted when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; he survived the war and returned to the question of historical epistemology in the postwar years. 9. Emergence (from the Latin emegere, “to appear”) is a capacious term for multi-leveled occurrences across scales of action, human and non-human that resists linear causality and is therefore difficult to predict. The term was first used in the ecological context by French-born American microbiologist, René Dubos, in his 1959 classic, The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). New conjunctions between cybernetics and molecular biology have revived the classical concept of emergence. Manuel De Landa (2011)‚ for instance‚ conceptualizes emergence on a synthetic-biologic continuum‚ arguing for the ontological irreducibility that we find in all emergences.  10. Phillip Thurtle, “‘Beaufort’s Bastards’: Horses and the Institutional Inheritance of Gilded Age Capitalism,” http://stanford.edu/dept/HPS/thurtle.html. 11.  Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, 2008. “Indeterminate Lives, Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes,” in Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life, eds. Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, 223–228. London: Routledge. As uncertainties—about genetic testing, about high-tech knowledge, about corporate medical and scientific infrastructures, to name just a few—accumulate even as numerous, often consecutive, decisions must be made, the medical situation is increasingly stratified. The ensuing uneven terrain, an “ethical plateau” as Michael Fischer (2003) names it, means that what health is, could be, or should be is no longer a unilateral decision made by one medical authority.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacey. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Broverman, Neal. 2018. ‘Patient Zero.’ hivplusmag.com, May 15. https://www. hivplusmag.com/stigma/2018/5/14/patient-zero-correcting-record-mediamade-gay-aids-villain. Burri, Regula Valérie, and Joseph Dumit. 2008. Indeterminate Lives, Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes. In Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life, ed. Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, 223–228. London: Routledge. Cetina, Karin Knorr. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. De Landa, Manuel. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Scientific Reason. London: Continuum Press. Dubos, René. [1959] 1987. The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fleck, Ludwig. [1935] 1981. The Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press. Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kirskey, Eben, et al. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. [1962] 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago. Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. [1979] 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Milburn, Colin. 2008. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham: Duke University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2010. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2006. An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Saliba, George, and Jed Z. Buchenwald. 2011. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shapin, Steven. 1995. The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shelley, Mary. [1831] 1994. Frankenstein. New York: Dover Publications. Thurtle, Phillip. 2007. The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in the American Biological Sciences, 1870–1920. Washington: University of Washington Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2007. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science of Language Emily Coit

Literature and science are both contested, inconstant categories, and their histories overlap more significantly than their current configuration may suggest: students of modern disciplinary history know well that in its formative years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the discipline that would consolidate itself as English was made up partly of philologists who called their work “science.” Literature and science also interrelate during this period because both language and literature are understood to be racial phenomena. That understanding makes language and literature a body of hard evidence useful to scientists studying race; it also makes the study of language and literature itself an investigation of the racial qualities that inhere in words, grammars, and texts. In the English departments of the period, these assumptions informed the work of not just philologists but also their “generalist” colleagues. The understanding of literature and culture that generalists took from Matthew Arnold (and others) was itself crucially informed by comparative philology and its arguments about race and nation. Such interrelations between the mobile categories of literature and science on the expansive terrain of nineteenth-century philology help to account for certain strangenesses in Edith Wharton’s “Descent of Man” (1904). “Descent” is a short story about science and a scientist. Its plot, however, concerns words, readers, and reading. Wharton refers to evolutionary science in her title, makes her protagonist a “microscopist,” and then offers a tale that turns on the operation of language. Her microscopist writes a satire of E. Coit (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_10

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the popular science writing he despises, but when his satire is marketed and then read avidly as a sincere expression, he earns fame and dollars; snared in the trap of that tawdry success, he neglects the true science he initially sought to defend. The descent of this particular man is, we gather, a degeneration rather than a progressive evolution. Taking Wharton’s story as a clue and a provocation, this chapter examines links between the study of language and the study of evolutionary science around the turn of the century. In order to make these links more readily visible, it casts glances at a wide range of thinkers, including Charles Darwin, the Oxford linguist Friedrich Max Müller, and two of Wharton’s own friends with particular interests in the English language: Henry James and Harvard Professor of English Barrett Wendell. Together, this array of thinkers reminds us of a shared intellectual history that is easily forgotten but enormously significant: the pasts of literary study and scientific study converge in the history thinking about race. In “Descent” and in her writing about how to transmit the precious inheritance of the English tongue, Wharton works from within that convergence: she thinks about the evolution of species and of language. That she does this thinking in fiction places her work within a larger pattern: as Will Abberley has shown, “Victorian and Edwardian scientific visions of the evolution of language emerged symbiotically with popular fiction about the subject” (Abberley 2015, 2).  Wharton’s interest in Darwin, Spencer, and the broader body of p ­ opular evolutionary science writing is well known, and the role of race science in her thought has been brilliantly treated by Jennie Kassanoff.1 Although Kassanoff shows that language is central to Wharton’s thinking about race, she doesn’t discuss philology as the terrain on which these interests merge. Keeping philology in mind as we reexamine those interests shows that even as biological and linguistic anti-essentialisms inform her perspectives, Wharton’s conservatism manifests in a distaste for the instabilities that such anti-essentialisms imply. As the professionalized study of language increasingly takes a synchronic approach that seeks to understand how a word operates in the present, Wharton favors the diachronic, genealogical methods of comparative philology and evolutionary science, which comport with her sense that a reverence for the past is crucial to order in the present. Wharton was well acquainted with the sprawling body of thought that was nineteenth-century philology. In what remains of her library, we find a number of works by writers whom historians of philology identify as key thinkers in the discourse, including one volume of a two-volume 1884 edition of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (1854), an 1876 edition of Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation (1868); and a number of works by Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan (Ramsden 1999, 48, 55, 102, 122).2 Renan expresses the remarkable expansiveness and ambition of nineteenth-century philology when he defines it in L’Avenir de la science (1848) as “the exact

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science of the productions of the human intellect” and affirms “the founders of the modern spirit are the philologists” (qtd. Harpham 2011, 51).3 But Wharton did not have to read philological texts to encounter philological ideas: she also would have encountered these ideas in her study of evolutionary science. As Stephen G. Alter has shown, the analogy between the development of language and the development of species plays an important role in the study of both language and evolution. Comparative philology offered Darwin and other thinkers a useful genealogical model of change over time; evolutionary science, in turn, gave philologists ways to imagine and describe the process by which languages develop and die out (Alter 1999). Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s account of philology’s role in the history of the humanities emphasizes this mutually constitutive reciprocity: “The effect of this collaboration,” he observes, “was to create the appearance of a powerful scientific consensus around the proposition that the deepest mysteries of language and species were capable of being solved through the application of genealogy.” Pointing to a “dialogue” between Darwin and philological writers, Harpham suggests that “linguistics and biology came to identify themselves as joint partners in a shared enterprise” (Harpham 2011, 60–61). This dialogue is explicit, direct, and well documented in letters and published writing. As the dialogue between philology and evolutionary science began, Harpham notes, “philology was by far the more advanced and prestigious science” (Harpham 2011, 56). Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) thus gained force and authority from analogies that grounded its arguments in the established truths of philology. Origin, in turn, helped philologists to talk about a specific kind of mechanism for change, one in which the agents of change operate without consciousness or intention. We can observe this sort of “collaboration” in an exchange between Darwin and Müller. In an 1870 review, Müller notes August Schleicher’s use of Origin and his comparison of the extinction of languages to the extinction of races. Having quoted Schleicher quoting Darwin’s phrase “struggle for life,” Müller then suggests using Darwin’s ideas slightly differently: “a much more striking analogy… than the struggle for life among separate languages, is the struggle for words and grammatical forms which is constantly going on in each language. Here the better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand” (Müller 1870, 257). Soon thereafter, Darwin himself quotes this comment by Müller in an extended discussion of language in Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Calling Müller’s observation “well remarked,” Darwin affirms: “The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is Natural Selection.” Making reference to a range of philological texts and thinkers, Darwin works from the observation that the “formation of

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different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel” (Darwin 1992, 21:95, 21:94). Although he quotes Müller approvingly, he also disparages him in a footnote and offers praise for the Yale philologist William Dwight Whitney, who would be Müller’s longstanding opponent (Darwin 1992, 21:90n53, 21:93n63). Darwin notably makes his observations about the “interesting parallelism between the development of species and languages” with reference to the work of Charles Lyell; like biologists studying change in species over time, philologists studying change in language over time adopted from geological science the uniformitarian principles articulated by Lyell (Darwin 1992, 21:94n67, 21:95; Turner 2014, 243). Wharton’s reading exposed her to such interrelated applications of evolutionary logic, and also to philological work more narrowly focused on the history of words and grammar: Emelyn Washburn, an intellectual friend of her youth, seems to have given her an 1873 edition of The Philology of the English Tongue (1871) by the Oxford philologist John Earle (Ramsden 1999, 37). Reading that volume, Wharton would have encountered the characteristic statement, “Philology may be described as a science of language based upon the comparison of languages” (Earle 1873, iii). Earle repeatedly cites his more famous colleague Müller, who popularized philological knowledge in his lectures of the early 1860s. Especially after the turn of the century, the term “philology” referred specifically to linguistics or the study of words. Paradoxically, this usage sought to distinguish these “scientific” practices from precisely the supposedly less scientific set of practices that “philology” had previously denoted, including the study of literary form and literary history (Turner 2014, 272–273). Philologists at American institutions of higher education would affirm repeatedly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century that philology was the “science” of language. As Michael Warner notes, the Modern Language Association began as a body dedicated to “a scientific model”: “The MLA… was not primarily, either in intent or in membership, a literary organization,” and its members “thought of literary texts as pedagogical tools” (Warner 1985, 2, 4). Gerald Graff, building on Warner’s account of professionalization, notes that philologists repeatedly insisted that their work must be grounded in “scientific methods”: one professor declared at the MLA’s inaugural meeting in 1883, “our department is a science” (qtd. Graff 1987, 68). Such claims sought to consolidate a prestigiously rigorous disciplinary identity, but they were not as presumptuous or wishful as they may sound. To our ears today, “science” means specifically the physical or natural sciences, but up until the turn of the century, “science” referred to “rigorous, systematic knowledge”—as, for example, when Müller in 1870 mentioned the natural sciences as the counterpart of the historical sciences in order to insist that the study of language belonged to the former (Turner 2014, 249, 268–269; Müller 1870, 257).

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The science pursued in American English departments had significant interests in race. The object of scientific study in those departments was often the Anglo-Saxon language, which witnessed a surge of interest after the Civil War. Thomas Gossett notes in his history of American racism that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, “strong racial reasons were… given why the students in this country should learn Anglo-Saxon” (Gossett 1997, 129). Even the generalists who did not presume to be scientists worked from philological knowledge in their approaches to literature, which they too understood as a product and expression of race. The liberal culture inculcated in generalists’ classrooms drew importantly from Taine and from Arnold, who drew in turn from Renan, all three of whom were deeply interested in race and nation. In their polite, gentlemanly fashion, generalists tended to understand their work with English literature as a national project for the Englishspeaking race.4 Shortly before the turn of the century, Wharton became friendly with one of the most influential generalists in the discipline, Harvard’s Barrett Wendell, who helped to shape the practices and assumptions of English composition and American literary history. Wendell opens his Literary History of America (1900), one of the foundational texts in the genre, by observing: “literature is of all the fine arts the most ineradicably national. […] Nationality is generally conceived to be a question of race, of descent, of blood; and yet in human experience there is a circumstance perhaps more potent in binding men together than any physical tie.” That binding circumstance is “these languages which we speak,” which “grow more deeply than anything else to be a part of our mental habit who use them”; “each language,” Wendell explains, “grows to associate itself with the ideals and the aspirations and the fate of those peoples with whose life it is inextricably intermingled” (Wendell 1900, 3). Wendell names race, descent, and blood as “physical” properties, implying that they are biological and essential. Language, his comment suggests, is otherwise: non-essential, acquired. That it can be acquired makes it a force for assimilation and domination. Wendell subscribes to the idea that the language of “the English-speaking race,” or the “Anglo-Saxons,” has unique colonizing capacities: like Anglo-Saxon race that speaks and sings it, English excels at conquest (Wendell 1900, 152–153; Gossett 1997, 135–136). Wendell sees his own Harvard classroom as a site for such assimilation: there, he writes, young men become “not Frenchmen or Italians, Irishmen or Germans or Jews. They are rather Yankees like their native Yankee teacher. Unwittingly, almost unobserved, they have become Americans” (Wendell 1906, 10). In making these remarks, Wendell wades casually into complicated questions. His reference to “physical” qualities speaks to tensions between essentialism and anti-essentialism in both philology and the science of race and evolution. Historians of race science (including its philological elements) tend

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to identify in the late eighteenth century a shift toward biologism or biological materialism, along with a corresponding turn to biological racisms that understand race as essential and physically embodied.5 Philology participated in this shift. As the middle of the nineteenth century approached, essentialist arguments mustered philological evidence: “the ambiguities of philological data, which had previously seemed to unite human beings, could now be used to separate them” (Abberley 2011, 48). But this shift played out in complex ways. Recent studies emphasize the “ideological open-endedness of biologism”: considering a wide range of discursive contexts, this scholarship shows that materialist understandings of race, along with monogenist arguments about evolution, could serve a variety of perspectives and agendas (Ellis 2018, 4).6 Darwin and Müller shared an anti-essentialist logic in their emphasis on mutation. But Darwin’s application of this logic pointed to a continuity between humans and animals, while Müller’s affirmed the distinction between them. “Müller’s philology,” Abberley observes, “attacked racial essentialism to protect species essentialism” (Abberley 2011, 50). Influenced significantly by Kant, Müller described a universal, eternal human spirit or nature for which language was the marker. He famously declares: “the one great barrier between the brute and man is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it” (Müller 1994, 1:340). Darwin’s arguments suggest that daring is not the issue, and that these waters form a boundary that’s entirely permeable. But for Müller, language remains the distinct and unique sign of a unified humanity: “No process of natural section,” he insists, “will ever distill significant words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts” (Müller 1994, 1:340).7 While Wendell confidently sets language apart from the physical stuff of race and blood, Müller in the early 1860s compares language to the organic, the physical, and the bodily: “Language is something more palpable than a fold of the brain, or an angle of the scull” (Müller 1994, 1:340). He also goes beyond comparison to make language itself a fleshly thing: “not a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the English language. The grammar, the blood and soul of the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was when spoken on the shores of the German ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Juts of the continent” (Müller 1994, 1:70). Müller’s arguments about an original race of Aryan people and the pure blood of the English language now carry profoundly sinister connotations. He himself, however, rejected the idea of Aryan racial superiority with increasing force as the century advanced. During the 1880s, dismayed at crudely racist interpretations and applications of his ideas—especially in the US—he disavowed the idea that race and language were one. While his earlier rhetoric made language something as physical as blood, his writing from this later period seeks to disambiguate language from the body, and define it as much more significant than mere flesh. He states

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with frustration: “I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language” (Gossett 1997, 124–126; Harpham 2011, 64–63). For the body is not what matters: “Language is surely more of the essence of man than his skin, or his color, or his skull, or his hair. Blood, flesh, and bones are not of our true essence” (Müller 1895, 49). That true essence, Müller argues, lies in language. Müller’s resistance against racist applications of his ideas might seem to find an echo in Wendell’s distinction between blood that is physical and language that is not, as well as his claim that language binds more powerfully than race. But Wendell in fact espoused the sort of American racism that Müller assailed. The same influential Literary History that declares literature the most national of all the arts also casually questions the humanity of Black people; if Wendell partakes of Müller’s species essentialism, he does so in a profoundly racist way. And indeed, though more recent scholarship on Wendell does not discuss these tendencies, Gossett describes him plainly and accurately as “an extreme conservative as well as an extreme racist” (Gossett 1997, 134). Racist thought, Gossett notes, found a particularly secure home in English departments. By the 1890s, most historians regarded as disproven the Teutonic origins theory that located the origins of and capacity for modern democracy in the Anglo-Saxon race; for historians, that theory could be disproven because it was “a fairly specific thing,” a set of distinct claims that evidence had contradicted. But, Gossett explains, “in English departments the theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority was not tied to anything so definite… Among the literary scholars, racism was vaguer and therefore harder to disprove” (Gossett 1997, 138). Professor Wendell was not the only one of Wharton’s friends with an interest in language and nation. Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly emphasized the importance of the English language in assimilation and “Americanism.” Though Roosevelt and Henry James diverged significantly on the question of assimilation, James too expressed profound concern about how Americans talked. Roosevelt worried that people in the US were not speaking English; James worried that they were not speaking English well.8 James objects to Americans’ “vocal habits as a nation,” which, he observes, make speech a “mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises.” James pleads for enunciation and distinction, pointing to “the forms and shades of our language.” Language, he explains, is made up of “innumerable differentiated, discriminated units of sound and sense that lend themselves to audible production, to enunciation, to intonation; those innumerable units that have, each, an identity, a quality, an outline, a shape, a clearness, a fineness, a sweetness, a richness, that have, in a word, a value, which it is open to us… to preserve or to destroy” (James 1999, 48, 49, 47). These comments come from the writing elicited by James’s visit to the US in 1904–1905; in these writings, he repeatedly advocates an aesthetic of form, distinction, discrimination, enclosure,

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delimitation, color, texture, and enunciation, contrasting this against the predominant ugliness of the US, which he characterizes as uniform, flat, borderless, slurred, blankly whitewashed, and wide open. Wharton gives voice to this aesthetic of distinction in 1927, when she observes the US “inheriting an old social organization which provided for nicely shaded degrees of culture and conduct,” and destroying that inheritance, opting instead for the “impoverishment” of simplification and uniformity; like James, she praises qualities that “differentiate” and “give special color,” hailing “traditional society,” with its “exclusions” and “delicate shades of language and behavior” (Wharton 1996, 154, 155). Wharton had in fact described the American tendency to “impoverish” language and expressed this aesthetic of distinction over two decades earlier, several years before James developed it in his writing about the US. In a 1901 letter to the editor, she bemoans the loss of “shades of speech,” noting that “hundreds of useful distinctions have been lost—not the pedantic shades of meaning with which speech has no time to reckon, but the kind of distinction that helps the average man to express his meaning more quickly and precisely.” These changes, Wharton warns, “weaken and blur the language.” They also move it farther from its heritage: “the American language, is, in fact, rapidly differentiating itself from the English, and not always to the profit of the younger branch” (Wharton 1996, 61–63‚ 61). The genealogical tree that Wharton’s “branch” refers to is a key figure in evolutionary science that has origins in philology: Schleicher is pleased to see his Stammbaum affirmed in Darwin’s “great Tree of Life.”9 Like James, Wharton sees in the US a dissolution and a neglect of fixed forms: instead of seeking stability and preservation, Americans lazily slur and let meanings slide. She observes in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) that although the US has a vestigial “European heritage,” there are “whole stretches of this heritage that have been too long allowed to run to waste: our language, our literature” (Wharton 1997, 37–38). Like James, Wharton believes that language is “ours to preserve or to destroy.” Americans, she feels, are opting unthinkingly for the latter. Wharton pushes back against a growing consensus among philologists when she implies (as does James) that individuals should feel some sense of responsibility—and thus power— as keepers of a language; by deliberately knowing and using a language well, she suggests, a person might prevent it from changing in impoverishing ways. But, as Linda Dowling points out, one of the chief insights of late Victorian philology is that language operates autonomously: it is always evolving, and its evolution is steered by its speakers, but that steering cannot result from those speakers’ conscious will, much less any one speaker’s. This account of change over time without individual agency is what philology ­articulates in cooperation with evolutionary science. Noting the potentially troubling nature of these ideas, Dowling argues that the “spectre of autonomous language—language as a system blindly obeying impersonal phonological

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rules in isolation from any world of human values and experience… was to eat corrosively away at the hidden foundations of a high Victorian ideal of civilization” (Dowling 1986, xii).10 For Wharton, the preservation of civilization is one of the chief reasons for preserving language. Thus, she despairs that “it is not uncommon nowadays, especially in America, to sneer at any deliberate attempts to stabilise language.” The US’s European heritage includes “the magnificent, the matchless inheritance of English speech and English letters,” but Americans disrespectfully neglect this inheritance, exposing it carelessly to corruption and dilapidation. Wharton asserts that if the US had “a more mature sense of the value of tradition and the strength of continuity she would have kept a more reverent hold upon this treasure… She would have preserved the language instead of debasing and impoverishing it; she would have learned the historic meaning of its words instead of wasting her time inventing short-cuts in spelling them.” For Wharton, such learning is a way to “preserve” or “stabilise” language, which is in turn a way of preserving and stabilizing society itself. If the Americans did these things properly, they would “cultivate the sense of continuity” by remaining in contact with “the world’s great stabilising traditions of art and poetry and knowledge.” For Wharton, language itself is a device for conservatism: when preserved, it serves as a force for preservation, a protection from change (Wharton 1997, 49, 96, 97). James and Wharton worry in particular about what happens to English in the US that contains (as James puts it) “such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients.” Observing the immigrants who acquire English after arriving in the US, James writes that they treat the language as they would “so many yards of freely figured oilcloth, from the shop, that they are preparing to lay down, for convenience, on the kitchen floor or kitchen staircase” (James 1994, 92; 1999, 55). Wharton echoes these comments when she bemoans the state of English in the US, noting “what that rich language has shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of the heterogeneous hundred millions of American citizens who, without uniformity of tradition or recognized guidance, are being suffered to work their many wills upon it” (Wharton 1997, 50). She later extends this commentary in her memoir, where she remembers James’s image: her parents, she recalls, taught her that “you could do what you liked with the language if you did it consciously, and for a given purpose—but if you went shuffling along, trailing it after you like a rag in the dust, tramping over it, as Henry James said, like the emigrant tramping over his kitchen oil-cloth—that was unpardonable, there deterioration and corruption lurked” (Wharton 1998, 51). For Wharton, such lurking deterioration portends the dissolution of civilization itself. “It is not difficult to discover,” she notes in French Ways, “what becomes of a language left to itself, without accepted standards or restrictions; instances may be found among any savage tribes without fixed standards of speech. Their language speedily ceases to be one, and

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deteriorates into a muddle of unstable dialects” (Wharton 1997, 49–50). In making linguistic decline the means and signal of civilization’s decline into savagery, Wharton drew from well-established tropes and arguments in the larger nineteenth-century discourse of philology. Dowling draws attention to this pattern and gives as an example a Victorian writer of popular philology drawing from an earlier generation of philological thought by quoting Schlegel’s warning that “a nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of her intellectual independence and testifies her willingness to cease to exist.” As Dowling notes, Victorians’ ideas about linguistic ruin were shaped partly by imperialism, and the barbarism they imagine is often a contamination or an infiltration of the civilized by barbarousness. She points to another echo of Schlegel in the late 1880s: “There is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words… [A] corrupt and decaying language is an infallible sign of a corrupt and decaying civilization. It is one of the gates by which barbarism may invade and overpower the traditions of a great race” (Dowling 1982, 162, 171).11 Wharton expresses concerns about civilization and savagery in an undated manuscript titled “The Bitter End” to which Kassanoff draws attention. The story describes a magazine editor, Sheraton—his name notably drawn from the idiom of the Colonial Revival, with its kin affinities for antique furniture and Anglo-Saxon lineage. Sheraton wishes to defend “Pure English” from its sad fate in “our poor polyglot country.” This polyglot character arises from the diversity of races that populate the US due to immigration; Wharton’s “Pure English” recalls Müller’s comments about the total absence of “foreign blood” in the “pure and unmixed” grammar of English, linked directly to its ancient antecedents; there Müller is pointing to a continuity over time, and continuity is precisely what Wharton sees threatened in the US. Her editor Sheraton demands that everyone associated with his new publication “speak & pronounce the English language as if it were English & not Choctaw.” He defends this policy: People talk about the conservatives turning English into a “dead language,” because they respect usage & are aware of etymology. But if fluidity is what you want, say savage dialect is fluid, & stability is the essence of any speech that has a great historie [sic] and intellectual past. A language made over every six months by emigrants & drummers can never provide the material for great literature—or even for civilized human intercourse. (qtd. Kassanoff 2004, 28)12

In this passage, Wharton characteristically merges the modern phenomena of the US’s immigrants and consumer culture with savagery (including, specifically, the savagery of Native Americans) and describes all of these things as destructive of a civilization that is dependent on continuity, order, and preservation. Quite self-consciously, she fell among the “conservatives”

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mentioned by her fictional editor: her complaint, like Sheraton’s, was that American speakers of English had not “learned the historic meaning of its words” and did not “preserve” and “stabilise” the language. In failing to do those things, she felt, Americans failed to achieve the continuity and stability that foster and perpetuate civilization. Although Wharton suggested that language that is always rapidly changing is the language of savages, she did not argue that language and its meanings should be perfectly static, nor did she make any suggestion that the meanings of words are natural, integral, and fixed. Unsurprisingly, given her wide reading in philology and evolutionary science, she was too savvy to advocate a crude linguistic essentialism. But the implications of linguistic a­ nti-essentialism did not necessarily please her. In her 1901 letter, she acknowledges explicitly that language changes; but, there as in her story about Sheraton, she deplores the actual nature of present changes in the contemporary US: “It is inevitable,” she writes, “that time and altered surroundings should modify the language, and such changes that enrich it are welcome, whatever their source. Unfortunately, however, the tendency of American speech (and not only that of the uneducated) is to impoverish rather than enrich the mother tongue” (Wharton 1996, 61). In 1901 and in 1919 alike, Wharton’s comments on the richness or poverty of language as it changes correlate with the visions of evolution and degeneration that are embedded in thinking about race. Her savage dialects change without developing, whereas carefully maintained language can evolve in a progressive rather than degenerative manner. In suggesting that such maintenance includes learning “the historic meaning of words” and staying “aware of etymology,” Wharton touches upon live issues within philological discourse. Nineteenth-century comparative philology emphasized that one must study the history of a language to understand it: this diachronic perspective found meaning in genealogies and etymologies. But in the early twentieth century, this diachronic approach was superseded by the synchronic approach most famously articulated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique général (1916). Saussure drew from Whitney, who, although his own work investigated history, pointed out that such investigations are not necessary in explaining how a language works in the present. Noting that Whitney had a brother who was a geologist, Turner observes that his “view of language mirrored contemporary uniformitarian geology. To understand why earth is as it is, you needed to uncover the slow workings of geological change over time. But the earth is as it is, and you do not need to know its geological history to farm it, mine it, sail its seas.” Whitney was drawing not just from contemporary geology but also from the eighteenth-century philosophers who had asserted “that language is arbitrary and conventional.” The idea that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is contingent and mutable was not a new one, but Saussure made this idea part of an approach that treated language as “a formal system of arbitrary elements,” ushering in the structural linguistics of the twentieth century (Turner 2014, 250, 248, 250).

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Saussure emphasized that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, contingent, and subject to change. These are qualities that Wharton disliked. Her abiding preference for preservation, secure order, and stable hierarchies would seem to have extended into a preference for a signifier securely fixed to the signified. For Wharton, the modern democratic American affinities for speed and easy money produce an approach to language that embraces change, novelty, ease, and profit. Both in speech and in social matters, she tended to dislike what was uppity and what fostered rupture or rapid change. As an informed thinker interested in science and language, she saw that languages, like species, are subject to change over time. But as a conservative thinker who prized the preservation of standards, forms, and traditions, she deplored slidings and shifts of meaning, perceiving them as impoverishment and decline: rather than a progressive evolution, they manifested an alarming degeneration. Wharton sharply expressed her distaste for rupture and change in her statements against literary modernism. As Frederick Wegener and Kassanoff have shown, her anti-modernist arguments about language and literature were inextricably connected to her political thought about race and nation (Wegener 1999, Kassanoff 2004). The error of new fiction, Wharton writes in “Tendencies in Modern Fiction” (1934), is that it mistakenly believes “that the past is not the soil of the future”: it cuts itself off from that past in its “determination to be different.” This severing is fatal, for “the accumulated leaf-mould of tradition is essential to the nurture of new growths of art,” which depends on “natural processes” and “fecundating soil.” Several years before, Wharton had pointed to “the depth of the soil” that nourished the great art of Balzac and Austen (Wharton 1996, 173, 170, 154). These metaphors had also served Müller: he refers to “the slow accumulation of the humus of language” (Müller 1870, 256). In the organic imagery that Wharton repeatedly uses to argue against modernism’s (and modernity’s) affinity for rupture, we can see traces of an account of gradual development drawn from philological thinking about language, race, and civilization. Wharton would seem to draw even more conspicuously from philology when she derides contemporary fiction as “amorphous and agglutinative” (Wharton 1996, 172). In addition to its sticky generic meaning, the latter term also has a specific meaning in linguistics: agglutination is “the morphological process of successively adding affixes to a root in order to form a compound, contrasted as a mode of word-formation or of the expression of complex ideas with inflection or the use of isolated elements”; it is “a particular characteristic of certain non-Indo-European languages, including (for example) Hungarian, Nahuatl, Korean, Japanese, and Turkish” (“agglutination”). Müller had affirmed that the “structure of the agglutinative languages” prevented speakers such as Turks from producing “great works of art in literature,” because “all expressive elements are carefully glued one to the other”; whereas “more highly developed” languages (such as Sanskrit, German, Greek, or Latin) could carry speakers to higher thoughts (qtd. Turner 2014, 246). Once again, philological knowledge and its ideas about

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development seem to haunt Wharton’s argument that literary modernism threatens art and civilization. Wharton’s “Descent of Man,” brings together her interests in language, science, literature, degeneration, and Darwin in a remarkably neat package. A witty tale for the readers of Scribner’s, “Descent” tells the story of one Professor Linyard. “Known chiefly as a microscopist,” Linyard specializes in beetles: “on the structure and habits of a certain class of coleoptera he was the most distinguished living authority.” This “distinguished microscopist,” an “eminent biologist,” writes a parody of popular science writing, ironically emulating its vapid religiosity and floral clichés in a work titled “The Vital Thing” (Wharton 2001, 404, 409, 403). But when he submits it for publication, his friend the publisher Harviss, an educated man, fails to see its irony: he takes “The Vital Thing” as a sincere statement—and, with sharp professional acumen, he recognizes it as a hot commodity. Promising profits, he persuades the Professor to let him market it as a sincere rather than a satirical book. “The Vital Thing” is an explosive success: the idiot women-and-clergy mass-market readership adore its vapidities, which they, like the publisher, read as sincere rather than ironic statements. The Professor, now a booming author, becomes a commodity like his text: his face sells soap and chocolates. When he tries to return to writing true science, he finds himself trapped in the role of popular writer: the promise of more profit leads him to commit to a sequel to “The Vital Thing.” The thrust of the story is that literature and science have a common enemy in the feminine consumer culture that would commodify and vulgarize them both. “Descent” is not about philology, but it evokes it. Its repeated description of the Professor as a “microscopist” recalls negative accounts of philologists’ myopically narrow expertise in their dryly scientific approach to language. More specifically, microsopes and microscopy had been associated with the study of language (Abberley 2015, 1–3). Although the Professor’s sad tale is a story about a scientist and science, its plot is about reading, words, and a crucial literary skill: the ability to distinguish the sincere from the satirical. Wharton’s title alludes directly to the work in which Darwin, drawing from philology, explicitly compares the evolution of species with the evolution of languages. And in this story as in the other texts by Wharton that we’ve considered, she responds to an anti-essentialist argument about evolution by pointing to the prospect of degeneration. “Descent” shows literature and the scientist alike degenerate into trashiness. The story’s plot is a kind of nightmare dramatization of anti-essentialism: it turns on the instability of the signifier. One “infinitely small” set of readers will take a set of words to say one thing; another set, the vast consumer public, will take the same set of words to mean something completely different (Wharton 2001, 402). This contingency of meaning seems to depend significantly on the relative intelligence of readers. The readers of lesser intelligence in the story are mostly women. “Descent” thus refers not just to Descent’s comments about the evolution of language but also its affirmation of the intellectual inferiority of the female human.13 Though the story makes linguistic anti-essentialism the nightmare that drives its plot, that same

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plot leans on a certain essentialism when it comes to sexual differentiation.In “Descent,” it is women who fail to maintain language, keep up the standards of literature, and understand words well. They are responsible for the degenerate slide of signification that propels the plot. Professor Linyard’s voiceless beetles will never cross Müller’s Rubicon, but his loquacious lady readers do nothing to glorify the speaking side of that divide. The alarmingly uncontrolled slide of the Professor’s meanings evokes a larger instability. We might hear a travesty of Kant’s Ding an sich in “The Vital Thing,” especially given Wharton’s play with the word “thing” during the awkward exchange in which Harviss learns the manuscript that he wants to buy was in fact written as a satire, and the Professor learns that Harviss has read his satire as a sincere “confession of faith.” Referring to his book, the Professor asks in bewilderment, “What in heaven do you think this thing is?” Harviss pleads: “If you’ll let me handle this book as a genuine thing I’ll guarantee to make it go.” “A genuine thing?,” the Professor replies. His friend assures him: “You’ve got hold of a big thing.” Asking for permission to market the book as he likes, Harviss insists: “I wouldn’t let you alter a word of it.” And they agree: “not a word of the book was to be altered.” But “The Vital Thing” made up of these words is not actually any one fixed “thing” at all: the exact same set of words will be a different book to different readers (Wharton 2001, 400, 402, 403). Wharton’s knowledge of philology made her richly aware that a word’s relationship to its meaning was arbitrary and conventional, but she often deplored departures from convention. Against the synchronic perspective that considers only the systems operative in the present, she pleaded throughout her career for respectful awareness of the past and argued that language could become art only when its writers and speakers knew the history of the words they used. Like many other nineteenth-century practices favored by Wharton, the diachronic, genealogical approach to the study of language would be superseded. Her story nods at Darwin and portrays a biologist, but it is a story about words: that the study of words and the study of biology mutually informed each other explains why her tale should portray a microscopist who can’t control the signification of his signs. For Wharton, that instability and that disconnect from historical meaning prevent the development of civilization, and lead instead to decline and degeneration.

Notes

1. Kassanoff (2004); on Wharton and Darwin see Bender (1996, 314–321), Liming (2016, 137–160), Ohler (2006). 2. For histories of philology, see Turner (2014), Harpham (2011), and Dowling (1986). Abberley (2015) shows how Victorian and Edwardian fiction and science together imagine the evolution of language, identifying “language progressivism” and “language vitalism” as key tendencies in this symbiosis. “Descent” plays conspicuously with both of these tendencies. Harvey (2015) examines the perceived relationship between language and race in the context of the English colonies and the early US, showing that philological study

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of Native American languages played an important role in colonialism. Hui (2017) offers a helpful account of philology that extends into the present. Lee (2008) discusses Wharton’s reading of Taine and other philological thinkers; on Wharton and Renan see Singley (2003). 3. Harpham quotes an 1891 American edition, The Future of Science (1891); emphasis in original. 4. See Graff (1987, 69–72); on the role of study of English language and literature in the history of American racism, see Gossett (1997, 123–143). On the (related and overlapping) nationalist functions of American literature and literary history in the US, see Renker (2007), Shumway (1994), and Stokes (2006). 5. For discussions of this shift as it applies in philology, see Harpham (2011, 54); and Abberley (2011, 47–48). 6. See also, e.g., Schuller 2018, 11–12; and Lecourt 2018, 33–42, 63. Abberley and Harpham similarly push back against simplifying accounts of philologists’ thinking about race; see Abberley (2011, 50–52); and Harpham (2011, 63–64, 68–70). 7. Turner notes that the disagreement between Darwin and Müller “got nasty,” observing that Müller “appears not to have grasped well Darwin’s theory of evolution, which furthered misunderstanding” (Turner 2014, 244–245). 8. These concerns, and Wharton’s, participate in wider anxiety about American speech. See Cmiel (1990) and Daniels (1983). 9. On Darwin’s tree and Schleicher’s Stammbaum, see Harpham (2011, 57–59) and Turner (2014, 242–243). 10. Ferguson (2006) revises Dowling’s argument, contending that these ideas from philology also yielded more positive thinking. 11.  The first of these quotations comes from Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench; Wharton owned his Proverbs and Their Lessons (Ramsden 1999, 130). 12.  Kassanoff shows that Wharton’s “Pure English maintains political-linguistic order by insisting that ethnically fluid Americans conduct themselves according to the best usage. It is a linguistic sanctuary for the educated few, a refuge for those who share Wharton’s distaste for the culture of Indians, immigrants and peddlers that has overtaken modern America” (Kassanoff 2004, 29). 13. Schriber (1980) discusses these women readers. On Darwin and the intelligence of women, see Russett (1995) and Hamlin (2015). On the important interrelation of ideas about sexual differentiation, race, and “development” see Bederman (1995) and Schuller 2018.

Works Cited “agglutination, n.”. OED Online, June 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www. oed.com/view/Entry/3903. Accessed 3 Sept 2019. Abberley, Will. 2011. Race and Species Essentialism in Nineteenth-Century Philology. Critical Quarterly 53 (4): 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2011. 02021.x. Abberley, Will. 2015. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alter, Stephen G. 1999. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

178  E. COIT Bederman, Gail. 1995. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. London: University of Chicago Press. Bender, Bert. 1996. The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cmiel, Kenneth. 1990. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: William Morrow. Daniels, Harvey. 1983. Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1992. The Works of Charles Darwin, Vol. 21, ed. P.H. Barrett and R.B. Freeman. London: Routledge. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9781851964017.book.1. Dowling, Linda C. 1982. Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language. PMLA 97: 160–178. ———. 1986. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Earle, John. 1873. The Philology of the English Tongue. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ellis, Cristin. 2018. Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xzh0z9. Ferguson, Christine. 2006. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Graff, Gerald. 1987. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamlin, Kimberly A. 2015. From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. 2011. The Humanities and the Dream of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2013. https://doi. org/10.7208/chicago/9780226317014.001.0001. Harvey, Sean P. 2015. Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hui, Andrew. 2017. The Many Returns of Philology: A State of the Field Report. Journal of the History of Ideas 78: 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1353/ jhi.2017.0006. James, Henry. 1994. The American Scene. New York: Penguin. ———. 1999. The Question of Our Speech. In Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kassanoff, Jennie A. 2004. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lecourt, Sebastian. 2018. Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812494.001.0001. Lee, Hermione. 2008. Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf. Liming, Sheila. 2016. ‘It’s Painful to See Them Think’ Wharton, Fin de Siècle Science, and the Authentication of Female Intelligence. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 49: 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2016.0045. Müller, Max. 1870. The Science of Language. Nature 1: 257–259.

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———. 1895. Three Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court. http://archive.org/details/threelecturesons00mulliala. ———. 1994. Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. London: Routledge. Ohler, Paul. 2006. Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Ramsden, George. 1999. Edith Wharton’s Library. Settrington: Stone Trough Books. Renker, Elizabeth. 2007. The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1995. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schriber, Marysue. 1980. Darwin, Wharton, and ‘The Descent of Man’: Blueprints of American Society. Studies in Short Fiction 17: 31–38. Schuller, Kyla. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Shumway, David. 1994. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Singley, Carol J. 2003. Race, Culture, Nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan. Twentieth Century Literature 49: 32–45. Stokes, Claudia. 2006. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Turner, James. 2014. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warner, Michael. 1985. Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875– 1900. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 27: 1–28. Wegener, Frederick. 1999. Form, “Selection”, and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic. In A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton, ed. Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, 116–138. London: Associated University Presses. Wendell, Barrett. 1900. A Literary History of America. New York: Scribner’s. ———. 1906. Liberty Union and Democracy: The National Ideals of America. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, Edith. 1996. The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1997. French Ways and Their Meaning. Lee, MA: Berkshire House Publishers. ———. 1998. A Backward Glance. New York: Touchstone. ———. 2001. The Descent of Man. In Collected Stories 1891–1910, 394–413. New York: Library of America.

PART II

Methods and Approaches

CHAPTER 11

Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific Charity, and the Matter of Evidence Todd Carmody

Is literary studies a science? Can literary scholarship, or the academic study of literature in a university classroom, be called scientific—and in what sense? Questions like these can seem by turns open-and-shut and by turns all but unanswerable. If we would want at times to insist that studying literature offers us absolutely unique insights into human life, at other times we might find ourselves arguing that the very complexity of these insights demands the empirically rigorous methods of analysis more typically associated with the natural and physical sciences. The plot only thickens when we realize that empiricism denotes a theory of knowledge derived from the senses. Is not the knowledge produced by the study of literary texts—which are colloquially understood as repositories of sensory experience—thus by its very nature empirical? Questions like these, opening as they do onto further complications and entanglements the moment we pose them, may seem merely rhetorical. But the seemingly unanswerable issue of whether literary studies is a science—and what kind—is in fact foundational to the history of literary studies as a modern academic discipline. As such, any examination of the complex and shifting relations between literature and science in the twentieth century, the aim of this volume, would be incomplete without an understanding of the institutional and social contexts in which these relations are inevitably enmeshed.

T. Carmody (*)  Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_11

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In its contemporary form, the question of whether and how literary studies is scientific first became pressing in the late nineteenth century, when a new generation of literature professors struggled to find a place in the emerging research university. Whereas scholars in the natural and physical sciences had little trouble cordoning off a specialized domain of expertise, their colleagues in literature fared less well in the growing competition for institutional legitimacy and prestige. Their best bet, many literature professors thought, lay in a provocative neologism: scientific criticism. With this term, literary scholars meant to signal a decisive shift away from the practices of their forebears, who often valued literature not as an object of research in its own right but as a tool for fostering students’ moral character and for teaching grammar, rhetoric, and elocution. Scientific criticism, on the other hand, endeavored to follow the example of the natural and physical sciences, which by the early twentieth century were dominated by positivist empiricism. “Science” as such was synonymous not only with technical knowledge and the culture of expertise more broadly, but also with the belief in a unified set of practices—of observation, inductive experiment, and comparative analysis—that could be used to study biological or physical phenomena of any kind (Andrews 2015, 8–9).1 This latter notion was popularly associated with John Dewey, whose writings on high school and higher education influentially distinguished between science as a method of inquiry and as a body of content, generally championing method over content (Rudolph 2014, 1059). At base, Dewey’s “scientific method” consisted of five steps: “(i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solutions; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of suggestion; and (v) further observation and experimentation leading to its acceptance or rejection” (Rudolph 2005, 344). Heralding a development they believed was as inevitable as it was necessary, literary scholars declared that scientific criticism was but the extension of the scientific method into the study of literature. Not everyone, of course, greeted this extension of the scientific method with enthusiasm. Economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, for one, objected to how science in the modern research university had become “a word to conjure with. So much so that the name and mannerisms, at least, if nothing more of science, have invaded all fields of learning” (Veblen 1906, 606). There were now “‘sciences’ of theology, law and medicine,” but also a science of literature. Veblen’s point was not that scientific approaches do not produce interesting and fruitful literary analyses, but that the cultural authority of positivist science threatened to crowd out a host of competing and complementary methods. At greatest jeopardy for Veblen was the “cultivated sense of literary form and literary feeling that must always remain the chief end of literary training” (Veblen 1906, 606–7). Some fifty years after Veblen, the English novelist and chemist C.P. Snow famously distinguished between “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists” along similar lines. But Snow ultimately concluded that the former should simply learn to think more like

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the latter (Snow 1959, 4).2 Today, the legacy of Snow’s “two-culture” paradigm persists whenever scientific rigor is popularly opposed to fuzzy humanism. But rejoinders are no less common, at least among literary scholars eager to oppose binaristic oppositions with inter- and even anti-disciplinary inquiry. Indeed, whether exploring how epigenetic models beget cultural metaphors or how neurodiversity shapes narrative, literary critics now create complex networks and alliances with the natural and physical sciences as a matter of course (Markley 2018, 260–61).3 Back of these efforts, however, may lurk the same professional anxieties that prompted the rise of “scientific criticism” in the late nineteenth century, updated now to address the austerity conditions of the corporate university. As an influential scholar described his own experiences bringing structuralist anthropology to bear on literature, making literary studies more recognizably “scientific” can only help “justify it as a mode of knowledge and allow us to defend it with fewer reservations” (Culler 2002, xiv). This chapter returns to the emergence of scientific criticism in the modern US research university at the end of the nineteenth century, though not to document the lasting institutional impact of the natural and physical sciences on literary studies. The chapter posits rather that scholarly attention to these continuities has occluded the perhaps less likely but no less consequential influence of another upstart field on literary studies—the social sciences. Readers familiar with the latter disciplinary history may accuse me of wanting to tell the same story twice. The social sciences, after all, experienced their own crisis of institutional legitimacy in the early twentieth century, and like literary scholars many social scientists sought to follow the model established by the natural and physical sciences. But another history linking literary studies and the social sciences comes into view when we stress the roots of social science in late nineteenth-century charity reform projects and particularly in the reformist doctrine of “scientific charity.” This latter agenda was grounded not only in the positivist empiricism enshrined in the scientific method, but also in the affective experience of “social facts.” Charity reformers and later social workers were taught not only to document all aspects of their clients’ lives, but also to interpret the information thus gathered from a sympathetic vantage that necessarily encompassed their own subjectivity. This peculiarly scientific practice of reading the social world finds an equally unlikely correlate in the practices of literary analysis of certain turn-of-the-century scientific critics. Explored here through the writings of literary scholar Richard Green Moulton and reformer Mary Richmond, the nexus of scientific criticism and scientific charity thus offers a new genealogy of responses to the institutional hegemony of the scientific method at the turn of the twentieth century. If this tradition anticipates recent feminist sciences studies scholarship about the “epistemological inseparability of observer and observed,” the mutual becoming scientific of literary studies and charity work also resonates with contemporary interest in the sociology of literature (Barad 2007, 33).4

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From Classical Curriculum to Scientific Criticism The landscape of US higher education underwent a radical shift at the end of the nineteenth century, as the ideal of the classical college was gradually supplanted by the priorities of the research university. For centuries, the bedrock of the classical curriculum had been two to four years of Greek and Latin, accompanied by additional coursework in math, history, logic, theology, and natural science. Before graduating, seniors also took a capstone seminar in moral philosophy that was commonly taught by the college president and often called Evidences of Christianity (Graff 1987, 22). This course was intended to synthesize the disparate insights of the classical curriculum into a transportable body of moral and religious guidance. After the Civil War, curricular coherence on this order was harder to come by, threatened by the forces of secularization and professionalization sweeping through the broader culture. For their part, secular reformers argued that higher education should be concerned less with discovering fixed verities than with exploring how ideals develop in a cultural context (Marsden 1994, 104). This approach meant deemphasizing moral uplift and expanding the classical curriculum beyond Greek and Latin to include an ever-growing list of new academic fields. With these new fields in turn came the drive to professionalize the largely amateur professoriate. Whereas for many years personal morality and an inclination to teach had been the only real prerequisites for the job, professors were soon expected to become experts in narrowly defined fields of inquiry and to produce rigorous scholarship modeled on the empiricism of the natural and physical sciences. “Pure research” as guided by the ideals that would later be codified as the scientific method became one of the main goals of the modern university, the mark of both professional achievement and disciplinary legitimacy (Veysey 1965). From the beginning, literary studies had a difficult time shoring up its scientific bona fides, in large measure because of how literature had first entered the antebellum curriculum. In most colleges, literature was treated as belles lettres and valued less for its intrinsic merit than for what it could teach students—grammar, civic ideals, or elocution. In classrooms dominated by the drudgery of recitation, students grappled with Paradise Lost not to study Milton’s craft but to cultivate social polish and good character (Turner 2015, 147–48). “Literature” did not become a distinct scholarly field until the early nineteenth century, when the genteel critics who had long championed the literary arts in polite society began taking up academic posts. These urbane advocates valued literature for its power to edify, and they taught students to read with near-spiritual devotion (Reuben 1996, 6–7). They also produced scholarship on the model of the popular book review and placed a premium on aesthetic judgments of good and bad. In both the classroom and as a critical discourse, this reverential approach to literature found favor among advocates of what Harvard president Charles Eliot and others called “liberal culture” (Menand 2010, 31). But with the mounting authority of positivist

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empirical science, it was soon clear that literary studies would only claim its place in the research university by abandoning these increasingly outmoded commitments. As Princeton’s Theodore Hunt noted in 1885, professional scholars had first to disprove the popular opinion “that English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers” (Hunt 1885, 126). At the turn of the century, literary studies was thus under enormous pressure from university administrators but also from more established disciplines to become more “rigorous” and more demonstrably evidence-based. To many scholars—chief among them the growing number of young men returning from abroad with doctorates awarded in Göttingen and Berlin— German philology seemed the most expedient means of making literary studies scientific. An historicist method born of etymology and what we would today call linguistics, the philological study of literature was comparatist in orientation and driven by inductive argument (De Man 1986, 22). Only by grasping the historical origins of a text and the course of its cultural circulation, philologists believed, could a work of literature truly be understood. In its most orthodox form, philological literary study involved scrutinizing texts, weighing the importance of variants, and tracking transmission (Warner 1985, 14). Even where these methods were haphazardly adopted—or where philology was invoked rather than practiced—philological ideals still profoundly changed how US scholars understood the work of interpretation. No longer a matter of personal judgment, a literary interpretation was an inductive hypothesis based on “facts” that could be precisely confirmed, whether through by-the-book philology or analogue practices of close observation, analysis, and categorization. Soon known as “scientific criticism,” this model of interpretation also required the creation of a scientific community that could corroborate an increasingly rarified body of scholarship (Warner 1985, 14). At first, there were few barriers to joining this interpretative cum scientific community. But before long, and especially after the rise of Ph.D.-granting graduate schools, only appropriately credentialed scholars could produce properly scientific criticism. Some seventy years after the fact, René Wellek gave voice to what is now received wisdom about the naïve and even embarrassing origins of literary studies in early twentieth-century scientific criticism. “The useless antiquarianism,” Wellek noted, “the dreary factualism, the pseudo-science combined with anarchical skepticism and a lack of critical taste characteristic of this scholarship must be apparent to almost everyone today” (Wellek 1973, 299). It is true that contemporary literary scholars rarely declare explicitly scientific ambitions, as we have seen, even if their aim is to create new patterns of interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration across the humanities and the natural and physical sciences. But in making such a blanket rejection, Wellek characterizes as uniformly misguided a dynamic and improvisatory set of critical practices that coalesced at best contingently around the idea of “science”

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and more particularly around popular understandings of the scientific method later codified by Dewey and his followers. In fact, the writings of many self-avowed practitioners of scientific criticism suggest that the “dreary factualism” Wellek denigrates is far from straight forward. The influential work of Richard Green Moulton, to which we now turn, is a case in point. Not only does Moulton’s scholarship trouble any easy distinction between the objective analysis of literary texts and the aesthetic impressions they make. But he also insists that literary scholars grapple with the vagaries and varieties of readerly experiences in ways that are easily lost on more recent critics eager to cast turn-of-the-century scientific criticism as a regrettable if colorful prehistory to the real work of literary studies.

Richard Moulton and Literary Facts Trained at the University of London and Cambridge, Moulton played a prominent role in England’s University Extension Movement before earning a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1890 and becoming a Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Moulton dedicated his career to transforming the “miscellaneous and unorganized” field of literary studies into a methodologically coherent discipline (Moulton 1915, vii). His first foray in this direction was Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism (1885), which laid out the critical methods he would later extend to treatments of classical drama and the Bible before returning to questions of method in The Modern Study of Literature (1915). Beginning with the “Plea for an Inductive Science of Literary Criticism” that prefaces Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, Moulton argued that literary studies should aspire to the positivism ascribed to the hard sciences. “As botany deals inductively with the phenomena of vegetable life and traces the laws underlying them,” Moulton noted, and “as ­economy reviews and systematizes on inductive principles the facts of commerce, so there is a criticism not less inductive in character which has for its matter literature” (Moulton 1888, 1). All inductive sciences “occupy themselves directly with facts, that is, with phenomena translated by observation into the forms of facts.” It follows that literary criticism should likewise approach the “matter” of literature as so many facts. At first glance, Moulton’s emphasis on literary facts would seem consistent with the empirical methods favored by philologically trained literary scholars. And like these other advocates of scientific criticism, Moulton held that interpretation “is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis,” not based on the critic’s regard for a particular text but “founded on the positive observation of details” (Moulton 1893a, 4). But unlike his philological colleagues, the facts that mattered to Moulton were not discovered by meticulous attention to cultural transmission or textual variants, but by close formal analysis alone. In this regard, Moulton anticipated the central tenets of New Criticism. Born of

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his experience teaching extension students who generally lacked prior training, Moulton’s method was to reduce the “subject-matter” of literature “to the form of fact” and interpret “with strict reference to the details of the literary works as they actually stand” (Moulton 1888, 39). Not the imposition of an externally derived methodology, however, for Moulton scientific criticism issued from the essentially experimental nature of literature itself. In this regard, literature was much like the natural sciences as popularly understood at the turn of the twentieth century and institutionalized in the modern research university. Literature, in other words, involves the “observation of material expressly arranged for observation.” Both the natural scientist and the novelist, Moulton argues, “have arbitrary freedom as to what data they may choose to bring together,” and neither controls what happens next: they are “helpless reporter[s] of the reaction that ensues” (Moulton 1895, 100). Literature, though, was for Moulton ultimately “a more powerful weapon of research for human life” (Moulton 1917, 100). Literary experiments, he argued, are not bound by practical constraints, but only by the limits of a writer’s talent. As such, the inductive scholar is tasked with analyzing the experimental design inherent in each work of literature. The goal is to learn how that text produces both semantic meaning and the affective experience that Moulton called “literary effect.” The latter is related to but distinct from the literary facts gleaned from empirical analysis. As Moulton writes, “it is not the objective details but the subjective impressions they produce that make literary effect” (Moulton 1888, 24). In drawing on the evidence of both literary facts and literary effects, Moulton thus elaborates a rather idiosyncratic theory of objectivity. He is less concerned with sidelining the individual psychology of the investigator than with understanding the relay between empirical detail and readerly impression. Moulton clarifies his approach most clearly when distinguishing between sympathetic and subjective criticism. The scholarship produced by the urbane critics who first entered the US academy falls into the subjective category. These so-called judicial critics make pronouncements on the relative quality of a literary work with reference only to their own tastes. While there is no reason not to make such judgments—“the science of Zoölogy does not interfere with our having favorites and the reverse in the animal world”—for Moulton these preferences tell us less about the object at hand than about the person doing the preferring (Moulton 1893a, 11). Works of judicial criticism “thus have value not as fragments of literary sciences but as fragments of Addison, Jeffrey, or Macaulay” (Moulton 1888, 22). The subjective fallacy of judicial criticism contrasts with the sympathetic ethos of inductive criticism, which for Moulton is not a matter of fellow feeling but a state of formal receptivity in which readers suspend their personal tastes and habits of sense-making. “It is a foundation principle in art-culture,” he notes, “as well as in human intercourse, that sympathy is the grand interpreter: secrets of beauty will unfold themselves to the sunshine of sympathy, while thy

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wrap themselves all the closer against the tempest of sceptical questionings” (Moulton 1888, 7). Only by engaging openly with the formal details of the literary text can one hope to achieve an accurate understanding of that text. “[I]t is not by hardening his heart that the young student will be initiated into the deep beauties of art,” but by learning to read sympathetically. In many regards, Moulton’s “Plea For an Inductive Science of Literary Criticism” anticipates contemporary work in science studies that explores the sympathetic relationship between object and observer in their co-creation.5 In Moulton’s own day, by contrast, responses to his particular elaboration of scientific criticism split along the methodological fault line separating research scholars from reverential critics. But even Moulton’s defenders worried whether his evidence base—literary facts and literary effects—could be used to construct literary interpretations on the model of the inductive hypothesis. As one skeptic wrote, wouldn’t sympathetic readers be better off simply “plung[ing] in among the crude facts once more” instead of speculating about what these facts might prove in the aggregate? (Quoted in Lawrie 2014, 99). Didn’t scientific criticism tend in any case toward interpretations that were irreducibly personal? Moulton met these objections head on. If science deals only with “ascertained facts,” he conceded, the facts that concern literature and art might seem to belong to a different category altogether: “They can leave conflicting impressions on different observers, impressions both subjective and variable in themselves, and open to all manner of distracting influences, not excepting that of interpretation” (Moulton 1888, 23). Drawing again on his experience in the Extension classroom, Moulton turned to the literary seminar in order to work out a practical rebuttal. His syllabus for a course on “Literary Criticism and Theory of Interpretation” at the University of Chicago contains the following note: Difficulty: That in literature and art details cannot be positively observed, but make different impressions on different observers. — Answer: a) That literature differs in this degree from other subjects of scientific method only in degree. b) that as in science, so in literature, such differences must be settled by a fresh appeal to the details. c) in the absence of settlement it must be remembered that all results in inductive science are only provisional – at the most, the uncertainty of inductive criticism is far less than any other system. (Moulton 1893b, 7)

The different impressions that literary and artistic facts make on readers and viewers are for Moulton but a point of departure, the first step in making positive, verifiable observations. Sympathetic reading is thus a laboratory practice of repetition and corroboration by means of which provisional observations gradually give way to agreed-upon certainties. In this regard, inductive literary criticism is no different from the natural sciences: it requires the testing and refining of provisional hypotheses in the interest of ultimately landing on

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an accurate interpretation. Idiosyncratic impressions, in other words, are in due time and with ample corroboration sufficiently corrected. The fantasy of accuracy that seems to have underwritten Moulton’s pedagogy, probably more of a teaching tool than an infallible doctrine, was tempered in Moulton’s critical writings by a more nuanced, if no less heuristic, model of interpretation. Here Moulton was less interested in eliminating the variability of readerly impressions than in understanding how that variability works. As he notes in Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, the inductive scholar understands that interpretation is less a matter of determining which subjective impression is right than a question of how “the objective details are the limit on the variability of the subjective impressions” (Moulton 1888, 24). In other words, the task of scientific criticism is twofold. On the one hand, sympathetic readers are to enter the literary encounter without allowing the subjective impulse of judicial criticism to diminish their receptivity to the formal complexity of the literary text under study. On the other hand, after an experimental process of corroboration that seeks to minimize differences in readerly impressions with reference to the formal particularities of the text, the inductive critic explores how those details create a finite range of subjective responses. In this regard, the literary facts specific to a given work of literature produce a variable range of literary effects that the inductive critic must in turn read sympathetically. To the critic who objected that Moulton would have us read Shakespeare the same way we read the “post-office directory,” we can thus answer “yes and no” (Quoted in Lawrie 2014, 100). One could read both Hamlet and the directory with a sympathetic eye for the formal details of each. But just as the facts gathered in each case would vary dramatically, so too would the range of readerly impressions produced by these two very different texts.

Mary Richmond and Social Evidence Moulton’s should not be taken as the definitive account of early twentieth-century scientific criticism. Although his methods of inductive scholarship were indeed influential, literary scholars never agreed on a standardized practice. Scientific criticism, we might say, remained inchoate until it became outmoded. Moulton’s methods do make clear, however, that objectivity meant different things to different critics and that a commitment to literary facts did not preclude a commitment to readerly experience, or what Moulton called literary effect. A similar dynamic was at play at much the same cultural moment in the realm of social science, the wide-ranging reformist project that paid particular attention to rationalizing a patchwork system of social welfare provision at the end of the nineteenth century. Like scientific criticism, scientific charity intended a break with past practices. And like research-minded literary scholars, charity reformers sought to transform an unabashedly amateur and subjective undertaking into an empiricist

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methodology suitable for the research university. But just as Moulton suggested sympathy rather than objectivity as the antidote to judicial criticism, reformers like Mary Richmond argued that objective facts only become meaningful through individual interpretation. Collating the only ostensibly disparate histories of scientific criticism and scientific charity brings into focus two allied projects of reading that understand the literary text and the social world as objects of analysis ultimately inseparable from the experiences of the analyst. Optimistic in spirit and promiscuous of approach, US social science began with a diffuse enthusiasm for European social philosophy and led to the founding of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The organization’s Constitution laid out a suitably broad mandate: “[T]o aid the development of social science, and to guide the public mind to the best practical means of promoting the amendment of laws, the advancement of education, the prevention and repression of crime, the reformation of criminals, and the progress of public morality” (Sanborn 1876, 25). This sweeping agenda was rooted in the Spencerian idea that society—an organism like any other— could be rationally understood through rigorous analysis (Breslau 2007, 45). Once the rules governing society’s ideal operation were established, dysfunction could be easily eliminated. Initially, the practical aims of social science complemented a sophisticated theoretical agenda that aimed to conceptualize society with ever greater sophistication. But before long these two projects took divergent courses, inaugurating the intellectual labor that produced sociology and social work as distinct disciplines. Of the two, sociology had an easier time finding a place in the modern university. Sociologists, after all, could point to a sizeable body of specialized research to justify their entry. Social workers, by contrast, struggled to reconcile their field’s practical ambitions with the academy’s emphasis on pure research. The challenge issued by Abraham Flexner at the conference of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1915 was but the latest articulation of a much older set of anxieties. For social work to be recognized as a profession, Flexner argued, it would have to possess “a technique capable of communication through an orderly and highly specialized educational discipline” (Austin 1983, 368). Did social work have a methodology of its own? The earliest efforts to answer the spirit of Flexner’s challenge gave rise to the late nineteenth-century charity organization society (COS) movement. Originating in England and soon arriving in the USA, the COS movement was a reformist project that sought to eliminate “indiscriminate almsgiving” in all its forms. “The simple, old-fashioned ways of charity,” one activist remarked, “will no longer work” (Paine 1883, 1). Whether handed out to distressed “beggars” or disbursed by public organizations, “[g]ratuitous relief fosters thriftlessness, indolence, and blamable inefficiency.” Most donors probably were inspired by genuine feelings of pity and generosity. But back of such compassion, reformers argued, was a desire for emotional gratification

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that brought little benefit to those in need. “Relief is easy to give. Permanent improvement is slow and hard” (Paine 1883, 2). Progress would be made only if haphazard giving was replaced by a resolutely scientific approach. As reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell wrote in the first US statement on the COS philosophy: “the task of dealing with the poor and degraded has become a science, and has its well defined principles, recognized and conformed to, more or less closely, by all who really give time and thought to the subject” (Lowell 1884, n.p.). Not only was each applicant to be scrutinized by expert investigators, but increasingly sophisticated methods of record-keeping promised an impartial evaluation of need. The science in scientific charity was thus above all a commitment to observation and documentation in the service of objective decision-making. In this regard, the advent of scientific charity not only mirrored the so-called managerial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, which made rigorous bureaucratic documentation part of every corporate entity, but also anticipated the consolidation of scientific objectivity in the twentieth century.6 As Theodore Porter has written, although the scale and applicability of science advanced tremendously after 1900, scientists generally “preferred the detached objectivity of service to bureaucratic experts over the cultivation of an engaged public” (Porter 2009, 292). Initially, organized charity was neither as novel nor as objective as its boosters declared (Katz 1986, 59). In the first charity organization ­societies, in fact, investigatory work was done not by credentialed experts but by socially minded middle-class women. Volunteering to go “friendly visiting” among the poor, the latter did conduct interviews and gather information, but their primary goal was to pressure clients to become more conventionally respectable.7 In time, however, friendly visitors stopped thinking of themselves as sisters to the less fortunate and sought to cultivate the observational practices proper to the scientist (Abel 1998, 34). The quest for facts also gradually became rooted less in a shallow moralism that blamed poverty on individual failings than on an increasingly dynamic conception of human behavior (Lubove 1965, 20).8 The result was a standardization of the innovative but haphazard practices of scientific charity into the modern methods of social casework. As first defined by Mary Richmond, social casework was “a comprehensive method of inquiry and treatment” that began with the gathering of evidence. Of relevance were “all facts as to personal or family history which, taken together, indicate the nature of a given client’s social difficulties and the means to their solution” (Richmond 1917, 50). After assessing material gathered from clients, their acquaintances, and municipal agencies, caseworkers determined the correct “social diagnosis” and drew up the most appropriate plan of “social treatment.” These plans varied from client to client. Because no two cases were the same, it was only by means of diligent casework and well-managed intervention that the needs of a given individual could adequately be met.

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Social casework thus emerged as the culmination of earlier efforts to make charity scientific. For Richmond, social work was above all a means of reading the social world that relied not just on the objective registration of facts but also on the irreducibly personal interpretation of those facts. Such was the nature of what Richmond theorized as “social evidence” and differentiated from the kinds of facts consulted in other scientific. Perhaps most clearly, Richmond writes, “social evidence is distinguished from that used in natural sciences by an actual difference in subject matter.” But social evidence also differs from the kind of evidence on which legal cases are decided. Unlike legal evidence, social evidence “can include facts of slight probity” (Richmond 1917, 39, 43). Without this advantage social casework would not be possible, since the problem of the orientation of a family or individual is far more complex than the single question as to whether or not a litigant or a defendant is to be penalized. Moreover, facts having a subjective bearing, like that of delayed speech just instanced, are especially characterized by their cumulative significance…. Evidence of this cumulative sort, therefore, is essential wherever, as in social work decisions rest upon intimate understanding of character. (Richmond 1917, 39–40)

Whereas legal facts must be conclusive and irrefutable, social workers rely on evidence that is often only “imperfectly relevant” or even hearsay. Social evidence is compiled with the understanding that more is better—more records, observations, interviews, and intuitions—and that the social worker is the final interpreter of this material. Social evidence draws on an “intimate understanding” of what Richmond glosses only as the “character” of both the situation and client at hand. This interpretative process was of necessity provisional and personal. “The absence of any generally accepted tests of the reliability of such evidence,” Richmond argued, “still keeps this new demand itself ill defined and unstandardized.” As such, social work has “much to learn from law, history, logic, and psychology” (Richmond 1917, 48–50). Such disciplinary modesty notwithstanding, Richmond also noted that the social worker’s use of social evidence created “ways of thinking and doing that prove useful in quite other fields. The fact that law, medicine, history, and psychology, in their effort to break new ground, have been opening the same vein of truth, shows a growing demand for the kind of data that social practitioners gather” (Richmond 1917, 48). The particular contribution that social work could make, Richmond argued, follows directly from the interpretative demands that social evidence places on “social practitioners.” Social evidence, to be sure, is grounded in facts, but not in any strictly determinative sense. Rather, social workers draw on their experience and intuition to weigh the ambiguous and competing claims made by different data sets, all with the ultimate goal of arriving at a scientific interpretation on which a decision about the case at hand can be

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based. Not the objectivity of the natural sciences or the callous denunciation of indiscriminate almsgiving earlier reformers had called for, the interpretative methods of social work has far more in common with the tenets of scientific criticism laid out by Moulton and other literary scholars. Like Moulton, Richmond was committed to understanding facts not in isolation from but in relation to the impressions these facts made on investigators. And in abandoning the moralism of earlier reformers who reduced social problems to personal failures, Richmond also followed Moulton in embracing a more complex notion of causality. What began as a movement to make charity scientific thus led to an interpretative practice that questioned conventional notions of objectivity, much as Moulton’s inductive method had done for literary criticism. In both contexts, reading scientifically reveals that facts only become meaningful in and as affective experience.

The Science of Critique and the Sociology of Literature René Wellek’s evisceration of turn-of-the-century scientific criticism finds a striking parallel in recent assessments of literary studies. To many contemporary scholars, the discipline has once again become mechanistic and predictable, rendered insensible to the textured specificity of its object by a sedimented commitment to methodological rigor. Evidently bearing out the fears that Veblen first raised about the rise of scientific criticism, to some observers literary studies has simply run “out of steam.”9 There are many explanations for this state of affairs, depending on whose account one follows. But rare is the observer who suggests that literary studies remains beguiled by the natural and physical sciences. Many critics instead fault the rise of ideology critique or what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970). These practices of reading and interpretation invite the critic to expose hidden truths and political complicities and to elaborate unflattering and counterintuitive meanings that are not obvious to lay readers. As literary scholar Rita Felski observes, such methods—now often identified simply as “critique”—became a touchstone because they usefully shored up the discipline’s claim to legitimacy at a moment of waning public and institutional support. Critique, Felski writes, was for a generation of literary scholars a bulwark against “all those sins we’ve been warned against since we were bright-eyed neophytes: naïve reading, sentimental effusion, impressionistic judgment, fuzzy-headed amateurism, and mere ‘chatter about Shelley’” (Felski 2015, 151). In other words, contemporary literary scholars found in critique the same institutional and disciplinary legitimacy that turn-of-the-century literary scholars sought when confronted with the research university’s demands for objective and verifiable knowledge production. But as in Moulton’s early-twentieth-century elaboration of inductive scholarship, it is not always clear today that effusion, judgment, or even

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fuzzy-headed amateurism should not play a part in literary studies. And just as Moulton’s scientific criticism shared an affinity with the reading practices born of scientific charity, so too have contemporary scholars looked to the social sciences to articulate a mode of analysis attentive to the interplay between “literary facts” and “literary feelings.” In a growing body of scholarship known as the sociology of literature, the concept of “affordance” imported from the discipline of psychology has proven especially useful in this regard. Affordance was first coined by James J. Gibson to explain how animals interact with their environment, such that certain elements of the environment offer or “afford” the animal the possibility of a certain action (Gibson 1986). A chair, for instance, “is for” or affords support. Importantly, for Gibson an affordance “is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (Gibson 1986, 129). When taken up as a theory of literary interpretation, the idea of affordances returns questions of readerly experience—often eclipsed by the imperative of critique—to the center of literary studies. As C. Namwali Serpell has argued, just as Gibson’s chair “is for” support, so too do works of literature have properties that afford certain uses and options for moving through them (Serpell 2014, 9). And though literary affordances may vary more widely than environmental affordances, the possibilities for action are nonetheless finite, bound as they are to the particular formal qualities of the individual text at hand. As such, the concept of affordances developed in the social sciences becomes for literary scholars a mode of “scientific criticism” attentive not only to the empirically observable details of the individual work of literature, but also to the affective experience of reading. Affordance, in Serpell’s phrase, captures the tension between “measurable form and experiential dynamism” (Serpell 2014, 22). For Moulton, writing more than a century earlier, this tension obtained between “literary facts” and “literary feeling.” For Richmond, it named the analytical work demanded of social evidence. Contemporary interest in the sociology of literature, it would thus seem, extends a much older project of making literary studies scientific and as such takes up the legacy of “reading generously” launched at the intersection of scientific criticism and scientific charity around 1900.

Notes 1. As Theodore Porter writes, it was not until the twentieth century that science came to be regarded as primarily technical in nature. Technicality in this sense means not just having appropriately difficult subject matter but “relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists” (Porter 2009, 292). 2. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, Snow reduces a divergent but equally estimable set of practices into two categories—superior and inferior (Smith 2005, 21).

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3. See Squier (2017) and Bérubé (2016). 4. On feminist standpoint theories that elaborate “stronger standards for objectivity” which challenge the standard “view from nowhere,” see Harding (1992, 438). 5. Relevant here is Barad’s notion of “agential realism,” an epistemological, ontological, and ethical framework in which the “primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what [Neils] Bohr terms ‘phenomena.’ In my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting proponents” (Barad 2007, 33). 6. On the managerial revolution in US business, see Chandler (1977). On the changes in internal communication that arose as a consequence of the managerial revolution, see Yates (1989). 7. The friendly visitor was qualified not by virtue of technical training or scientific understanding of human behavior, but rather by moral insight (Lubove 1965, 12–13). 8. The nature of social casework would, of course, evolve over time. Gradually, as the trajectory of Richmond’s own writings show, what Lubove calls “the quest for facts” would give way to a psychological emphasis on “personality” in social casework. As Richmond wrote in What Is Social Case Work? (1922). The social caseworker’s task was to determine what material changes might be made in a client’s life to facilitate self-realization. “Social case work,” Richmond concluded, “consists of those processes which develop personality through adjustments consciously effected, individual by individual, between men and their social environment” (Richmond 1922, 90, 98–99). Emphasis in original. 9. See, for instance, Latour (2004) and Marcus et al. (2016).

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Richmond, Mary Ellen. 1917. Social Diagnosis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 1922. What Is Social Case Work? An Introductory Description. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rudolph, John L. 2005. Epistemology for the Masses: The Origins of ‘The Scientific Method’ in American Schools. History of Education Quarterly 45 (3): 341–76. ———. 2014. Dewey’s ‘Science as Method’ a Century Later: Reviving Science Education for Civic Ends. American Educational Research Journal 51 (6): 1056–83. Sanborn, F.B. 1876. The Work of Social Science Past and Present. Journal of Social Science 8 (May): 23–39. Serpell, C. Namwali. 2014. Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 2005. Figuring and Reconfiguring the Humanities and the Sciences. Profession 2005 (1): 18–27. Snow, C.P. 1959. Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Squier, Susan Merrill. 2017. Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor. Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, James. 2015. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1906. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. American Journal of Sociology 11 (5): 585–609. Veysey, Laurence R. 1965. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warner, Michael. 1985. Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875–1900. Criticism 27 (1): 1–28. Wellek, René. 1973. American Literary Scholarship. In Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen J. Nichols, Jr., 296–315. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yates, JoAnne. 1989. Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 12

How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute to Science Policy? The Case of Henrietta Lacks Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King

Literature and film have served an important role in producing larger public narratives about science—narratives that often inform public policy. The prominence of cultural narratives about science offers an opening for specialists in literature and film studies to engage in policy work, but few of us in the humanities are aware that this opportunity exists or understand how to translate our expertise into effective interventions in the public policy sphere. The authors of this study have had an opportunity to learn about the policy world by participating in a large, transdisciplinary research project focused on genetic privacy. We have chosen the case of Henrietta Lacks, popularized by Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as a way to illustrate several of the ways that literary and film studies can contribute to the development of science policy. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks chronicles the story of Henrietta Lacks, an economically insecure African American woman receiving treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in the 1950s. Lacks’s cells were harvested without her informed consent while she was undergoing treatment for cervical cancer and were subsequently developed into the most important cell line in the history of biomedical science. Labeled “HeLa,” these cells have enabled scientific research and discovery for over half a century, while also raising thorny questions about the ownership and use of private genetic material. A film adaptation of the book directed by J. Clayton (*) · C. S. King  Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_12

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George C. Wolfe and starring Oprah Winfrey first aired on HBO on April 22, 2017. Skloot’s book mixes science, history, and social commentary on race and medical ethics with the autobiographical story of the journalist’s quest to uncover the mystery of the woman behind the HeLa cells. The film brings out a more melodramatic account of the Lacks family, with a primary emphasis on Henrietta Lacks’s children, especially her daughter Deborah. Winfrey, who was also executive producer on the film, plays Deborah as a woman physically and emotionally traumatized by her struggles to understand what happened to her mother. Both works depict Deborah and her siblings as distrustful of medical institutions and as largely uncertain about how or why their mother’s cells have been deployed by medical science. The book and film also both emphasize the ethical problems and eventual controversy surrounding the acquisition and use of Lacks’s cells without her knowledge. Although “informed consent” did not become a professional norm until after Lacks’s death—meaning that her physicians were neither legally required nor typically expected to gain her permission to use her cellular material—both the book and film adaptation question the ethics of the way HeLa cells were acquired and used, particularly by those entities that have profited from research and development tied to this material. The book and film contextualize these ethical questions by focusing on the reactions of Lacks family members who have expressed dissatisfaction with the treatment of their mother and distrust of the medical institutions involved. The texts further overlay these concerns with attention to Skloot’s attitudes about the case and her attention to the intersecting dynamics of race and class at work in the case. As much as Skloot’s book and its film adaptation address ethical concerns about the treatment of Lacks by Hopkins and the medical e­stablishment more generally, the texts themselves have also incited controversy and critique. Some members of the Lacks family have been unhappy with both the book and the film, which they have accused “variously of misrepresentation, exploitation, and fraud” (Hendrix 2017). One of Lacks’s grandsons not only criticizes the texts for offering stereotypical and reductive portrayals of the family but also expresses resentment at the considerable profit Skloot and Winfrey have made from Lacks’s story. Another family member has suggested that Skloot’s and Winfrey’s actions are comparable to those of Johns Hopkins, stating in a press release about the film, “It’s bad enough Johns Hopkins took advantage of us. Now Oprah, Rebecca and HBO are doing the same thing. They’re no better than the people they say they hate” (Zurawik 2017). Such a response suggests that the commodification and circulation of the Lackses’ story without the entire family’s approval replicates the exploitative practice of harvesting Lacks’s cells without her informed consent. Adding to this complex critique is the fact that Skloot is a white woman whose efforts to tell the Lacks’ story may be considered a form of “appropriation of black women’s experiences” that reinforces white privilege (Vogt-William 2017, 141). These are important issues, which would need careful treatment in a critical reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but our purpose is not to examine or compare Skloot’s book and the film adaptation. Rather

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we explore the cultural narratives these works promulgate and their resulting impact on public policy. Our goal is to model ways that literary and film studies can contribute to larger, transdisciplinary research projects focused on aiding the development of science policy. Because of changes over the last several decades in how public policy is formulated, humanities scholarship has new opportunities to make a difference in the real world. In our participation in a major policy initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)1 and in publications over the last decade, we have been demonstrating how humanities scholars can begin to do policy work (J Clayton 2007, 2009, 2016). This chapter illustrates what we have learned about collaboration with the sciences and social sciences, while using the cultural narratives surrounding Henrietta Lacks to gauge the adequacy of existing bioethical research on one of the central concerns raised by her case, genetic privacy. Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film may have victimized the Lacks family all over again, but concerns about that possible injustice are not the chief impact these texts have had on society. Quite the contrary. Skloot’s book has been received by the public and by the scientific community with extraordinary acclaim (Shavlik 2011), and its influence on public policy can be documented clearly, as we discuss below. Named one of the best books of 2010 by more than 60 publications, it was reviewed widely in scientific and medical journals, and received prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the Wellcome Trust. An instant popular success, it spent over 75 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over 2.5 million copies. The film adaptation, though less of a phenomenon than Skloot’s book, received mostly positive reviews from media critics and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie in 2017. In bracketing our critical reservations about these texts, our approach has affinities with that of “surface reading” and some “postcritical” methods (Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2015). We share with surface reading the impulse to describe rather than deconstruct our texts because we think it is important to register their explicit lessons, which are connecting with audiences in profoundly emotional ways and are shaping people’s opinions about biomedical research. We share with postcritical methods the understanding that interpretation is only the first stage in a two-step process, the second of which, in our case, is an effort to propose recommendations that address a larger ethical, legal, and social problem. Finally, this chapter models a transdisciplinary approach to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, offering new ways for literary scholars to collaborate with researchers in science, medicine, and the social sciences on public policy issues. Our work reflects a problem-based approach, in which researchers from a variety of disciplines focus on a single issue—genetic privacy—from diverse perspectives. Thus, our interpretation of both versions of the Henrietta Lacks narrative is guided by its bearing on a shared problem and pressing social concern, rather than by a logic internal to either text. As linked cultural phenomena, the book and film provide valuable data for social

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science approaches to studying the influence of culture on genetics; as a powerful account of the intersection of race and genetics, these works are of interest to genomic scientists; and as complex narratives, these texts are well-suited to humanities approaches that study the role of story, image, and symbol in shaping cultural attitudes toward medicine and science. This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, we explain what genetic privacy is and why so many people care about it; next we outline the methods and results of a systematic review our team conducted of scientific literature related to the subject of genetic privacy; finally, we offer an analysis of the book and film versions of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to illustrate what literary studies has to offer to the larger policy debate about genetic privacy.

Genetic Privacy From the earliest days of widespread genetic testing in the mid-1960s, fears about potential violations of individual privacy shadowed research on the human genome. Commentators have worried about how disclosure of genetic information could make it more difficult to acquire health insurance or employment; lead to discrimination against racial groups or people with disabilities; stigmatize people with genetically based medical conditions; reinforce pernicious stereotypes about ethnic, racial, sexual, or gender traits; promote eugenic policies; and more. For many people, these fears seemed justified by egregious violations of patients’ rights in the past, such as the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which studied the course of untreated syphilis in over 400 African American men without telling them that they had the disease or treating them for it, even after penicillin was found to be an effective therapy. Adding to such fears are the frequent news reports of data breaches not only in the medical realm but also in businesses, credit agencies, technology companies, the government, and elsewhere. The nearly constant stream of narratives about data hacking in popular fiction, film, television, comics, video games, and social media compound concerns over genetic privacy. Breaking into encrypted databanks constitutes a staple plot twist in many of the largest entertainment genres—from action movies such as the Jason Bourne films (2002–16), to TV science fiction series like Orphan Black (2013–17), to superhero films like the X-Men series (2000–14), to horror films like Jurassic Park and its sequels (1993–2018), and even to movies “based on real events” like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Genetics plays a prominent role in all these examples; but movies having nothing to do with genetics, like Citizenfour (2014) or Snowden (2016), with their depiction of ubiquitous surveillance by the NSA, contribute to the general climate of concern about the vulnerability of one’s personal data. Such stories all too often portray the act of breaking into secure databanks as something an accomplished hacker can pull off in a few frenzied minutes at a keyboard. By the early twenty-first century, the speed and reduced cost of genome sequencing enabled the collection of genomic information on a massive scale. Today, genomic data is gathered and stored in an unnerving array of locations:

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electronic medical records (EMRs), research biobanks, direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies, patient advocacy groups, ancestry services, voluntary open-access repositories, and non-voluntary depositories of genomic samples collected by the police, military, and other state agencies. The laws protecting this genomic data are often piecemeal or incomplete and reflect significant trade-offs between accepting a degree of risk to individuals and fostering perceived public goods (e.g., aiding research or relieving burdens on industry). The most important US laws governing genetic privacy include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects individuals’ medical records and other personal health information; the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination against people with a range of disabilities; and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). These laws, however, incorporate numerous exceptions that permit the sharing of genomic data for research and other purposes as long as identifiers are removed. More troubling, both accidental and intentional (i.e., criminal) breaches of privacy occur regularly in other areas of the healthcare system.2 In addition to the unintended disclosure of genomic information, many people freely give away genetic information to organizations with a wide variety of privacy policies (or none at all), such as direct-to-consumer testing companies like 23andMe, patient support groups working to find cures for particular diseases such as breast cancer, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis, or non-profits like the Personal Genome Project, which links individuals’ genome sequences with their medical records and other personal information, and then openly shares them for the betterment of science. Although voluntary, such donations often carry privacy risks that extend beyond the individual who makes the donation, since genomic data can provide information about family members, who might not want such information made public. With the publicity surrounding the apprehension of a suspect in the Golden State Killings through the use of GEDmatch’s database of voluntarily shared, publicly accessible genetic information, many people were surprised to learn of the several, perfectly legal ways in which such repositories could be put to use by police and other government agencies.3 Despite this recent attention, many people are still unaware of the diverse types of services offered by direct-to-consumer genetic information companies. Of the 90 companies providing genomic testing, 34 offer ancestry and genealogy services, 24 offer lifestyle and wellness services, and 54 offer what might euphemistically be called family relationship services, which includes paternity and infidelity testing companies, with such colorful names as She Cheated, Test Infidelity, and PaternityDepot.4 Twenty-seven of the 90 companies encourage surreptitious submissions of genetic samples from a child or spouse, a practice that appears to be legal in nearly half the states.5 While many companies posted policies regarding the sharing of genetic data with third parties, the quantity and quality of that information varied greatly (see Fig. 12.1). Judging from consumers’ actions, one might speculate that the users of forprofit genetic testing companies are either unaware or else unconcerned about

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Fig. 12.1  Data visualization by K.H. Oliver, with data provided by J.W. Hazel from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar

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the issue of privacy. Or it may be that consumers are engaging in trade-offs between a service they want—genetic testing—and a risk they are willing to hazard. However we resolve such questions, another factor needs to be considered: the individual is not the only person put at risk by threats to genetic privacy. The choice to share one’s genomic information with an unregulated company (which may or may not have a privacy policy and which can, in any case, change that policy without permission) entails consequences for many other people. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks demonstrates that the violation of a patient’s privacy can have devastating and far-reaching effects beyond the individual. It can affect relatives down through the generations; touch a larger circle of neighbors and friends; and influence attitudes of a still-wider community—in this case, African Americans in Baltimore, Virginia, and beyond, many of whom saw what happened to Henrietta Lacks as another confirmation of long-held suspicions about the medical world’s exploitation of minority populations. Cultural phenomena like Rebecca Skloot’s book and Oprah Winfrey’s movie do not just affect public attitudes; they can also play a direct role in shaping science policy and industry practices. For example, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was featured prominently in an article in Nature announcing a precedent-setting agreement between the NIH and the descendants of Henrietta Lacks stipulating the conditions under which her genomic data would be published.6 In addition, many high schools, universities, and medical schools have used the book and/or film as teaching tools for their students and outreach programs for the general public, often including Skloot or members of the Lacks family as featured speakers (Berry 2014, 226); and the healthcare consulting firm Rabin Martin has used the book to guide discussions among its employees about the ethics of informed consent. Understanding the influence of cultural sensations such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on public attitudes and policy debates is a goal of our transdisciplinary research project and an example of how others in the humanities could contribute to public policy debates. One of the ways we are working toward our goal is to ask how the compelling issues raised by this book and movie correlate with the type of concerns emphasized by policy researchers to date. Do these literary and cinematic treatments reinforce existing policy concerns, raise new topics for our consideration, or complicate current assumptions about genetic privacy?

Systematic Review of Research on Genetic Privacy In the sciences, systematic reviews deploy highly structured methods of assessing the state of current knowledge on a given topic. They differ greatly from the reviews of prior criticism that were once required of dissertations in the humanities and sometimes still serve as assignments to beginning graduate students. Instead of asking an individual scholar to search a disciplinary database for what he or she deems relevant and then “follow the footnote trail” to determine which articles and books look most promising, systematic reviews assemble a team of content experts, who agree on a predefined set of

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search terms, a comprehensive list of the relevant databases, fixed criteria for inclusion, and measures for assessing the quality of each study.7 Investigators in our research group reviewed the research addressing genetic privacy to identify what is already known about the views of patients, researchers, and other stakeholders. They began by searching scientific, medical, social science, and humanities databases, including PubMed, Web of Knowledge (Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Index), Applied Social Sciences Index, PsycInfo, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore, MLA, and Sociological Abstracts from January 1990 to November 2016. The team used a combination of controlled vocabulary and key terms related to genetics, privacy, and perception, and they supplemented it with hand-searched citations from recent articles. This initial search identified 6985 articles of potential relevance. They used a computer algorithm to eliminate non-empirical studies. Three investigators from our team then reviewed the titles and abstracts of the remaining 2464 articles to determine which ones appeared to provide empirical evidence of views about genetic privacy. The same investigators then read the full text of those abstracts that were found to be promising, retaining only those that provided substantial evidence. These articles were assessed for quality, using the method of Garrison et al. (2016); the majority were classified as only “fair.” This culling procedure was supplemented by hand searching of citations and updating searches until July 2017, resulting in the inclusion of 53 articles for detailed analysis. Taken together, these 53 articles represent the most accurate current state of knowledge concerning public attitudes toward genetic privacy. We use the analysis of this secondary literature to guide the questions we ask in the discussion of the book and film versions of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks below. This approach aims to assess whether the concerns charted across empirical studies of genetic privacy have affinity with the concerns raised by Skloot’s book and its filmed adaptation. The systematic review revealed a range of concepts that recur in studies of genetic privacy and a tendency to conflate privacy with related concepts such as confidentiality, data security, anonymity, and identifiability. One influential definition of privacy comes from an article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890, where they defined it simply as “the right to be let alone” (193). Privacy, at times, also refers to anonymity, or the wish not to be identified or otherwise made known to be a member of a group or class of persons. A related concept that is frequently conflated with privacy is confidentiality, whereby a person can share information without making it widely available if the recipients, such as primary care physicians or psychotherapists, are legally or ethically obligated to keep secret what they have learned. In total, the systematic review identified nearly twenty analytically distinct concerns about privacy. To make sense of the diverse set of issues lumped together under the broad category of genetic privacy, the authors of the systematic review created a typology of the major concerns identified in the secondary literature. The chart below lays out the typology in schematic form.

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Fig. 12.2  Data visualization by E.W. Clayton from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar

Concerns in the blue column involve the confidentiality and identifiability of one’s genetic data and are subdivided into concerns about whether one’s EMR is truly safe, whether one can be identified or reidentified from that data, and whether the research or medical providers’ guarantees of confidentiality can be trusted. The green column includes concerns that arise around who controls one’s genetic data and encompasses the vast literature on informed consent, as well as issues surrounding ownership of genetic data and the kind of protections safeguarding those data. Concerns about the adequacy of privacy policies, computer security, and anonymization all fall under this heading. The red column assesses concerns about what end-users—researchers, drug companies, government agencies, etc.—could do with genetic data about a person.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks What this chart fails to capture are the far-reaching collateral damages that can be caused by a privacy violation and the depth of psychic harms that can befall a family and community, especially for those living in poverty and subject to racial discrimination. Such intersectional harms have proven difficult to capture in existing survey-based literature, but the increased burden of this privacy violation on an African American family and community comes

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through with extraordinary power in Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film. In this section, we focus on literary and filmic elements in the Henrietta Lacks story—features like genre, characterization, affect, imagery, temporal structure, and dramatic impact—to show how humanities approaches can deepen and extend the insights obtained by quantitative and qualitative assessments of genetic privacy, and reveal new, intersectional harms. The story recounted in the book has three beginnings, one in 1988, when the investigator first learns of Henrietta Lacks’s unwitting contribution to modern medicine and science. Reading the Prologue, the reader might be excused for thinking the book will be a first-person account of a reporter’s efforts to get to the bottom of the injustice done to a poor, uneducated black woman in the 1950s. The story of Skloot’s efforts is handled with mild irony at her own expense, as it captures the eagerness and missteps of a neophyte investigator. But her efforts are beset with difficulties too. She will face discouragement; doors will close in her face; skeptics will tell her that it’s not worth the trouble, that the trail is cold; others will ask what difference does it make now that someone who died in 1951 had her cells used for research without permission. Skloot recounts people telling her not to upset the apple cart because she might set back science immeasurably. Whatever ethical mistakes were made back then, other people argue to Skloot, things have changed now—we know better today. And besides, they say, think of the scientific discoveries resulting from research on HeLa cells. If an injustice was done back then, surely the balance is now firmly on the side of the benefit to humanity rather than the harm done to a long-dead woman. With Chapter 1, however, the book begins again, shifting away from the autobiography of a cub reporter and toward the biography of an African American woman from backwoods Virginia, supporting a family of her own (and taking care of many neighborhood children as well), on the day she learns from a doctor at Johns Hopkins that she has cervical cancer. This story will turn out to be a drama of one woman’s suffering, a personal drama that quickly morphs into a family melodrama full of misunderstandings and conflicts spanning three generations. Inevitably, Henrietta Lacks’s story is intertwined with an account of misdeeds by the researchers and doctors that she encountered, actions that although legal, even routine, back in the 1950s, would be illegal today. Indeed, regardless of their legality, many of the decisions made about Henrietta Lacks’s cells seem highly unethical by contemporary standards. If Skloot’s autobiographical story adds a personal note to the quest to get to the bottom of what happened, the biographical narrative humanizes “Henrietta,” as she is called throughout the book, as a vibrant young woman whose life was tragically cut short by cancer. By bringing Henrietta Lacks alive on the page, this second story helps readers respond to what we today would see as ethical lapses in an intensely personal way.8 Three chapters later, Skloot introduces a final compositional layer, in the first of many chapters dedicated to popular science. In an abrupt shift, the chapter titled “The Birth of HeLa” takes us into the world of Dr. George

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Gey and his chief lab assistant, Mary Kubicek, who were the researchers that achieved the surprising feat of culturing an “immortal” cell line from cervical tissue discarded from Henrietta Lacks’s biopsy. Later chapters reference other episodes of popular science less closely related to the Lacks case, including a history of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, the legal debates over who owned a patent on drugs made from John Moore’s spleen, and a gruesome experiment by a virologist named Chester Southam, who injected cancerous HeLa cells into more than 600 patients without their knowledge in a quest to find a vaccine for cancer. Wolfe’s film also combines multiple compositional layers. The film opens with a montage that combines fictionalized and found footage of the discovery of HeLa and its profound impact on the biomedical industry, noting the cells’ impact on research and development related to a wide range of medical issues from polio to AIDS to Parkinson’s disease. The film then cuts abruptly to images of a rural home with close-ups on family photographs and keepsakes. Oprah Winfrey speaks in a voiceover narration as Deborah, describing the hardship of not knowing what happened to her mother, before it becomes clear that the images shown to the film’s viewers are memories from her childhood, shown in flashback. Next, the film cuts to a scene set decades later in which Skloot, played by Rose Byrne, begins her investigative work into the Lacks case; as she speaks to the family’s physician about the case and the racial politics involved, the film presents shots of present-day Deborah taking medications. Through the interaction of these compositional layers, Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s flim register virtually every concern about personal privacy uncovered in the systematic review. Look again at the blue column in Fig. 12.2. The simple desire to be let alone motivates a number of Lacks family members. Some of the first words we hear from Deborah in the book is that she “can’t never get away” from people asking about her mother’s cells.9 Other family members resent that doctors violated their professional duty of confidentiality by publishing Henrietta Lacks’s name. Initially, Henrietta Lacks’s cells were labeled only with letters drawn from her first and last names, HeLa—and the source of the initials misidentified for many years as “Helen Lane” and “Helen Larson”—but the true identity of the cell’s “donor” was eventually exposed by researchers at Johns Hopkins in 1971, ironically in a tribute to George Gey, not Henrietta Lacks, published in Obstetrics and Gynecology (Skloot 2010, 172). Later, the renowned Johns Hopkins geneticist, Victor McKusick, published a photograph of Lacks in what became a standard textbook, Medical Genetics (Skloot 2010, 188). Over the years, this picture was reprinted in countless magazines and textbooks. A culminating indignity was the publication of much of Henrietta’s medical record, including excruciating details of her suffering and death, in a book of popular science by Michael Gold called A Conspiracy of Cells (Skloot 2010, 209). Skloot treats these breaches of privacy with dramatic power, and Wolfe’s film displays many of these same breaches in the opening montage. So much for the desire to be let alone.

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Turn to the middle column of the chart in green. Every concern about personal consent and control of one’s data listed there is traduced in the case of Henrietta Lacks. No one asked Henrietta Lacks if they could use her cells for medical research. “Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells,” Lacks’s daughter-in-law Barbara protests. “She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask” (Skloot 2010, 169). No one got Henrietta’s permission to share those cells with researchers at pharmaceutical companies and other universities, not only in the USA but abroad. No one even explained the basic facts about her medical care, such as that her radiation treatments would make her infertile (Skloot 2010, 46). Lacks’s husband puts it starkly: “‘I didn’t sign no papers,’ he said. ‘I just told them they could do a topsy [autopsy]. Nothin else. Them doctors never said nuthin about keepin her alive in no tubes or growin no cells’” (Skloot 2010, 164). Family members had different opinions about how they would have answered the question of consent if they had been consulted. Some said they just wanted to be asked—if a doctor had come to them for permission, they said, they would have been glad to say yes. Others disagreed. Henrietta and her cells, they stated, should be left to rest in peace. But in either case, it was the ­family’s helplessness, their utter lack of control, that rankled. Finally, look at the column on the right in red. This column concerns “downstream” uses of genetic data by third parties—researchers, employers, healthcare institutions, governments (here and abroad), and commercial entities. One of the things the Lacks family resented most was that people were making money off of their relative’s cells. Her son Lawrence was the most outspoken about this grievance. “‘Hopkins say they gave them cells away,’ Lawrence yelled, ‘but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?’” (Skloot 2010, 168). They all had the feeling that they’d been taken advantage of, and this fed a pre-existing distrust of all kinds of people and institutions—hospitals, research universities, drug companies, insurers, tax collectors, attorneys, journalists, and more. Skloot describes Deborah Lacks’s occasional paranoia about Johns Hopkins Medical Center: “It was like all those terrifying stories she’d heard about Hopkins her whole life were suddenly true, and happening to her. If they’re doing research on Henrietta, she thought, it’s only a matter of time before they come for Henrietta’s children, and maybe her grandchildren” (Skloot 2010, 180). Wolfe’s film captures these concerns vividly, often quoting dialogue from the book verbatim. Oprah Winfrey is palpably shaking as she utters Deborah’s words about Hopkins coming for her and her children. Where the Henrietta Lacks story goes beyond the concerns captured by the systematic review, however, is in registering the intersectional impact of family, race, gender, and class on how individuals and communities respond to the loss of genetic privacy. With the publication of Henrietta

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Lacks’s name, Skloot comments, “Henrietta’s doctor and his colleagues forever linked Henrietta, Lawrence, Sonny, Deborah, Zakariyya, their children, and all future generations of Lackses to the HeLa cells, and the DNA inside them” (Skloot 2010, 173). Sometimes the linkage resulted in direct exploitation. Researchers from Johns Hopkins contacted Lacks’s children and collected samples from them years later, without telling them why. Victor McKusick went further—he and a colleague published a table in Science that “mapped forty-three different genetic markers present in DNA from [Henrietta’s husband] and two of the Lacks children,” using those markers to produce a genetic profile of HeLa. “Today,” Skloot comments, “no scientist would dream of publishing a person’s name with any of their genetic information, because we know how much can be deduced from DNA, including the risks of developing certain diseases” (Skloot 2010, 197–98). Skloot does not mention, although she certainly knows, that mapping a family’s DNA will reveal privileged health information not only about the named family members but about their children, their children’s children, and even more distant relatives. The family data published in dry scientific tables intersect with racial and class dynamics throughout the book and film. While anyone may feel some degree of vulnerability regarding genetic privacy, those people who have been subjected to structural and systemic forms of oppression often experience even greater senses of precarity and distrust. The systematic review notes that “in almost all studies reporting differences in perspectives by race or ethnicity, NonWhite individuals had greater concerns about privacy, including more desire for control over use of their data” (E Clayton et al. 2018, 12). Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film go beyond the empirical studies surveyed in the systematic review, however, by situating the Lacks family’s attitude toward Johns Hopkins and the widespread use of HeLa cells by medical researchers in the context of their experiences of anti-black racism in the United States. Family, race, gender, and class intermingle in this living-room colloquy Skloot overhears, amplifying their suspicion of the medical world “Well what do you expect from Hopkins?” Bobbette yelled from the kitchen, where she sat watching a soap opera. “I wouldn’t even go there to get my toenails cut.” “Mmm hmm,” Day yelled back, thumping his silver cane on the floor like an exclamation point. “Back then they did things,” Sonny said. “Especially to black folks. John Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks. They’d snatch em off the street…” “That’s right!” Bobbette said, appearing in the kitchen door with her coffee. “Everybody knows that.” “They just snatch em off the street,” Sonny said. “Snatchin people!” Bobbette yelled, her voice growing louder. “Experimentin on them!” Sonny yelled.

214  J. CLAYTON AND C. S. KING “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl,” Bobbette said, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.” (Skloot 2010, 165)

Skloot follows this scene with a section about nineteenth-century doctors paying grave robbers for cadavers from African American cemeteries. The genre-switch from family melodrama to popular science effectively sutures “black oral history,” as Skloot describes it, “filled with tales of ‘night doctors’ who kidnapped black people for research” (Skloot 2010, 165) with the history of racial oppression in America. This narrative juxtaposition allows Skloot to invoke historical abuses without having to prove that the Lacks family knew about this history or that their distrust of medical institutions was motivated by actual historical events. To be clear, we regard this narrative suturing as legitimate and valuable. We emphasize the literary sleight-of-hand to underline what narrative can accomplish more effectively than statistics. Preeminently, in this case, the intersection of race, family, and community shapes the Lacks family’s attitudes toward the medical establishment. Both the book and the film rely heavily on such juxtapositions aimed at generating emotional responses, encouraging identifications with and affective investments in the figures of Skloot, Henrietta Lacks, and Deborah Lacks. Such temporal and spatial shifts not only add variety to the narratives but also invite unexpected insights and articulations. The conventionalization of such juxtapositions in narrative and cinematic montage helps legitimize connections that an academic researcher would have to justify with evidence and argument. So, for example, when Skloot’s book links a historical episode like the Tuskegee Syphilis study to the Lacks family, this strategy encourages readers to accept such associations as logically related. They are related, of course, but as a cultural legacy stemming from the structural violence of racism, not as documented historical links. The most dramatic example of such literary juxtapositions occurs in the book’s epigraph, where a quotation from Elie Wiesel in The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code contextualizes the story to come against the backdrop of the Holocaust.10 Epigraphs don’t make an argument, but they can make an impact. Skloot is generally careful to point out the ways in which the Lacks case differs from murderous medical atrocities, but the power of narrative juxtaposition remains, reinforcing the sense of injustice that radiates outward, beyond an individual to encompass the wrongs done to her family and community, even the historical wrongs inflicted on entire populations. The activist critic bell hooks has indicted Skloot for the kind of scene we analyzed above, pointing out how such depictions echo sentimental black stereotypes. Other scenes of Henrietta Lacks caring for her large family turn her into the “stereotypical strong black woman” (hooks 2013, 84), while dramatic moments between Skloot and Deborah Lacks cast the latter both

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as a “crazy black woman bitch” (hooks, 86) and a “caring black mammy” (hooks 2013, 87). These stereotypes undoubtedly contribute to the seamless acceptance of Skloot’s narrative by a majority white readership, but they also redirect attention away from a radical critique of racism and sexual violence, which haunt the margins of this text (hooks 2013, 86–91). Although hooks’s intervention is powerful and persuasive, textual criticism alone is not likely to reach beyond the literary and race studies readerships who largely share her perspectives already. We also need approaches that address the groups that shape policy in this area. Analyses that identify shortcomings in current policy research are more likely to result in recommendations, and even regulations, that can change how disempowered individuals and communities are treated in the medical and research domains. As an audiovisual text, Wolfe’s film has its own affordances for generating affective responses that differ from the juxtapositions that structure Skloot’s book. In the movie, the scene in the Lacks family’s living room is preceded by Skloot’s ride in Sonny’s car to meet Henrietta’s husband for the first time. As Sonny drives, the camera focuses attention on the economically insecure neighborhood in Baltimore where the family lives, featuring shots of boarded up buildings and abandoned homes. In the background, the song “Living in the Alley” by Miss Tony plays, its lyrics recounting the levels of poverty and homelessness often experienced by communities of color in Baltimore. This framing encourages viewers not only to have emotional responses to the Lackses and their family’s loss but also to consider their experiences in the context of systemic racism and its intersection with socioeconomic precarity. When Skloot talks with the family in the living room, shaky, handheld cinematography combines with close-up shots of the home and its inhabitants to create a sense of realism with melodramatic affects, heightening the impact and rhetorical force of the characters’ words. Taken together, both Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s filmic adaptation of it remind researchers that individuals do not make decisions about genetic privacy in insolation from other people, nor do they do so outside of historical or cultural contexts. These texts also serve as reminders that people do not come to understand issues related to genetic privacy on purely rational or factual grounds. Their memories, beliefs, and emotions matter—as do their encounters with literary and media texts. This fact is one that Skloot’s and Wolfe’s texts strikingly illustrate. Both texts include a scene in which Deborah Lacks, trying to show how hard she has worked to understand her mother’s case, dumps out on a bed a bag full of her research materials, which consist of tabloid clippings, scientific articles, a genetics textbook, and a VHS copy of the film Jurassic Park. Researchers interested in understanding why people make particular choices regarding genetic privacy—or other medical issues— should be careful to attend to discourses and representations circulating in popular literature and media which may play a constitutive role in shaping public knowledge about and opinions of science and medicine.

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Conclusion Since a major goal of our research project is attempting to understand the social and cultural factors that help shape people’s attitudes toward genetic privacy, we have worked in this paper and others to construct a holistic model of the multiple factors at work. Evidence from literature, film, and television—as well as other forms of popular culture like journalism and social media—can play a significant role in helping us understand how diverse causal factors intersect. The high levels of correspondence between the concerns identified in the systematic review of secondary literature on genetic privacy and the concerns expressed in both the book and film versions of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reveal the extent to which literary and media texts may not only reflect prevailing beliefs on medical and scientific subjects but may generate those concerns as well. The familial, community, and generational concerns that are not captured in existing policy research testify to the greater power of literature and film to convey intersectional harms. Priscilla Wald, discussing the discipline of American Studies and its century-long mission to understand the full social context of great national controversies, makes a kindred point about how we should approach the case of Henrietta Lacks. Wald argues for expanding our lens beyond specific scientific missteps or ethical failures to encompass the “persistent inequities of nations and networks” (Wald 2012, 202). “The stories about Lacks and her cells illustrate the inextricability of medical scientific research from social existence as well as cultural production, economics, law, religious beliefs and practices, geopolitics, and pretty much any other aspect of human experience we can think of” (Wald 2012, 186). That is why humanities-based approaches to cultural narratives can form such a vital complement to existing policy research. Our discussion of the cultural narratives developed in Rebecca Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film have led us to some preliminary conclusions that should be of interest to the public policy community. First, breeches of genetic privacy affect families and communities, not just individuals; and communities, in turn, shape individual attitudes in multiple, interlocking ways. Policy recommendations should take into account intersectional harms touching relatives and other community members, not just affected individuals. This means not simply relying on metrics that assess how individuals want their genetic information to be treated but also attending to cultural markers that can signal how wider communities perceive genetic harms. Second, the affective dimension of a person’s response to genetic information is not superfluous but fundamental to any research into public attitudes. While concerns about objectivity are essential for ethical and effective policies, researchers and policy makers should attend to the fact that people make sense of and respond to policy decisions in ways that exceed, and even challenge, norms of objectivity and rationality. To acknowledge the affective and emotional dimensions of people’s responses to policies—particularly as

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they relate to complex issues like genetic privacy—is not to critique those individuals but to acknowledge that no human behaviors remain untouched by feelings. Finally, researchers need to attend to the intersectional nature of the forces shaping the public’s encounter with genetic information and threats to genetic privacy. Such intersections include not only overlapping oppressions or conditions of precarity, such as racism, sexism, class inequities, or disability, but also the intersections among their personal, familial, religious, and communal lives. Although the findings of a systematic review on literature regarding genetic privacy can be charted and categorized neatly, researchers and policy makers will benefit from remembering that individuals and communities cannot.

Notes







1. Funded by a $4-million grant from the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) program of the NIH, our project, “Genetic privacy and Identity in Community Settings” (GetPreCiSe, #5RM1HG009034-02), has five main goals: (1) to understand what influences US public attitudes toward genetic privacy; (2) to identify the actual risks to privacy faced by individuals and communities in genomic data; (3) to study the effectiveness of institutional, legal, and community-based measures to protect genetic privacy; (4) to develop models for quantifying the likelihood of harm resulting from the illicit acquisition of genomic data; and (5) to develop policy solutions that may prevent intrusions on privacy and the misuse of genomic data. 2. The list of privacy violations that HIPAA publishes on its website (colloquially known as the “HIPAA Wall of Shame”) testifies to how often such breaches occur. https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf. 3. Our research group has a study underway to assess whether attitudes toward giving one’s data away to direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies have changed since news broke of the police’s use of GEDmatch to track down a suspect in the Golden State Killer case. 4. The data in this paragraph and the accompanying chart are drawn from a publication by two members of our research group, James Hazel and Christopher Slobogin, “Who Knows What, and When?: A Survey of the Privacy Policies Proffered by U.S. Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Companies.” The figures add up to more than n = 90 because many companies offer more than one genetic testing service. 5. In “The Law of Genetic privacy”, Ellen Wright Clayton and other members of our research team describe the legal status of surreptitious testing as follows: “The frequency with which surreptitious testing appears to occur might not be surprising in light of the paucity of relevant federal and state law on the subject and the limited scope of the laws that do exist. Despite repeated calls from legal scholars and government advisory committees for increased oversight of surreptitious testing and stricter laws governing nonconsensual collection and analysis of the genetic material of others, no comprehensive federal laws

218  J. CLAYTON AND C. S. KING currently prohibit the practice…. Instead, the United States relies on a patchwork of state laws that place varying restrictions on the practice depending on the purpose of the testing or the context in which it is performed” (2019, 32). 6. See     https://www.nature.com/news/nih-director-explains-hela-agreement1.13521#/ref-link-2. 7. For a discussion of how “systematic reviews have transformed medicine,” see Sutherland and Wordley (2018, 364). 8. Berry comments on the power—as well as potential drawbacks—of nonfiction narratives’ capability to effect social change. “Nonfiction narratives expose social injustice and individual suffering, … in which readers become involved with protagonists and are able to feel a narrative experience like a real experience, a process that has been statistically proven to arouse readers’ empathy and influence their attitudes. Ultimately, telling the intimate stories of vulnerable people can spur prosocial behaviors among readers with social power. Along with this positive potential for narratives, however, is the opposite potential: narratives that explicitly attempt to educate readers about the effects of inequality may have a greater potential to replicate and reenact the inequalities between privileged readers and the vulnerable subjects of narratives” (2014, 225). 9. One controversial feature of Skloot’s book is her use of dialect. Skloot defends this decision as follows: “I’ve done my best to capture the language with which each person spoke and wrote: dialogue appears in native dialects; passages from diaries and other personal writings are quoted exactly as written. As one of Henrietta’s relatives said to me, ‘If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.’” (Skloot ix). For bell hooks, this explanation is not satisfactory. “Skloot consistently portrays the black folks she interviews in a sentimental manner, one that tends to evoke a folksy image of down-home black folks with no cares in the world, what I call ‘the happy darky syndrome.’ Paradoxically, she merely states that Henrietta Lacks suffered from venereal disease yet she in no way places the exploitation of Lacks’s black female body in the context of child abuse, racism, sexism, and class exploitation” (hooks 2013, 84). 10. The epigraph reads: “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (Wiesel 1992, ix).

Works Cited Berry, Sarah L. 2014. Paradoxical Worsening of Empathy: Ambassadorial Science Journalism and the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, ed. Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim, 225–37. Mla-Ib. New York, NY: Routledge. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. Surface Reading: An Introduction. Representations 108: 1–21. Callaway, Ewen. 2013. NIH Director Explains Hela Agreement: Descendants of Henrietta Lacks Endorse Controlled Access to Cell Line Genome after Meetings

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with Francis Collins. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/ nih-director-explains-hela-agreement-1.13521#/ref-link-2. Clayton, Ellen Wright, Colin M. Halverson, Nila A. Sathe, and Bradley A. Malin. 2018. A Systematic Literature Review of Individuals’ Perspectives on Privacy and Genetic Information in the United States. PLoS One 13 (10). #5RM1HG009034-02. Clayton, Ellen Wright, Barbara J. Evans, James W. Hazel, and Mark A. Rothstein. 2019. The Law of Genetic Privacy: Applications, Implications, and Limitations. Journal of Law and the Biosciences 1–36. Advance Access Publication. #5RM1HG009034-02. Clayton, Jay. 2007. Victorian Chimeras, or, What Literature Can Contribute to Genetics Policy Today. New Literary History 38. Special Issue: Biocultures. Ed. Lennard J. Davis and David B. Morris, 569–92. ———. 2009. Literature and Science Policy: A New Project for the Humanities. PMLA 124: 947–49. ———. 2016. The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle. Modernism/Modernity 23 (4): 875–96. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garrison NA, et al. 2016. A Systematic Literature Review of Individuals’ Perspectives on Broad Consent and Data Sharing in the United States. Genetics in Medicine. Hazel, James, and Christopher Slobogin. 2018. Who Knows What, and When? A Survey of the Privacy Policies Proffered by U.S. Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Companies. Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 28 (1): 35–66. #5RM1HG009034-02. Hendrix, Steve. 2017. On the Eve of an Oprah Movie About Henrietta Lacks, an Ugly Feud Consumes the Family. The Washington Post, March 29. hooks, bell. 2013. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Shavlik, Melissa Ann. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: How a Best-Seller Diffused Online. Dissertation, Portland State University. Skloot, Rebecca. 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers. Sutherland, W.J., and C.F.R. Wordley. 2018. A Fresh Approach to Evidence Synthesis. Nature 558 (7710): 364–66. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 2017. Dir., George C. Wolfe. Films, HBO. Vogt-William, Christine. 2017. Hela and the Help: Justice and African-American Women in White Women’s Narratives. In Postcolonial Justice, ed. Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein, Nicole Waller, and Dirk Wiemann, 141–75. Amsterdam: Brill/ Rodopi. Wald, Priscilla. 2012. American Studies and the Politics of Life. American Quarterly 64 (2): 185–204. Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis. 1890. The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review 4 (5): 193–220. Wiesel, Elie. 1992. Forward. In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation, ed. George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin. New York: Oxford University Press. Zurawik, David. 2017. Son of Henrietta Lacks Says Oprah, HBO Exploiting His Mother’s Memory. The Baltimore Sun, March 20.

CHAPTER 13

Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia: Futurist Practices in Contemporary Science Fiction Rebecca Wilbanks

Science fiction (SF) author Neal Stephenson’s 2011 article “Innovation Starvation” self-consciously laments the loss of a future seemingly promised him as a boy in mid-twentieth-century America: “I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donutshaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?” Although Stephenson acknowledges that some may have little sympathy “that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled,” he goes on to argue that the decline of the space program is symptomatic of a broader problem in the United States: an “inability as a society to execute on the big stuff.” Stephenson correlates changes in the slowdown of innovation with changes in the SF genre, which became “darker, more skeptical, and ambiguous” in tone beginning in the 1970s. With collaborators from Arizona State University, Stephenson produced a response: the short story collection Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2013), meant to serve as a “conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.” Hieroglyph is one of a number of recent fictional interventions that are incantatory: Their formal qualities stem from the fact that they are meant to produce effects in the real world. I borrow this term from a 1979 essay by literary critic Charles Elkins but narrow its meaning. Whereas Elkins uses it to make the philosophically pragmatist point that all literature presents scenarios

R. Wilbanks (*)  Department of English, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_13

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that inspire thought and feeling, shape action, and thereby change the present, I use incantatory to describe a recent body of work whose conditions of production are defined by an intention for the work to have tangible impact beyond the literary sphere. Writers and critics have long argued that SF is a didactic genre (Russ 1975), but increasingly it is being asked to do rather than teach, that is, to bring about or ward off real-world states of affairs. These incantatory fictions are the result of an evolving relationship between SF and the tradition of foresight practices or futurology that dates back to the mid-twentieth century. The theory of science, fiction, and social change articulated by Stephenson and embedded in the structure of Project Hieroglyph stems from this tradition and from its situation within a community of practice that includes Silicon Valley technologists and futurists. Yet Stephenson’s articulation of how science fiction inspires action does not adequately account for the ways that the stories in this edited collection actually function. Stephenson’s model of incantatory fiction presents a relatively direct model of incantation, in which the SF author originates a vision of the future that others work to realize. The univocal nature of this model stands in contrast to the diversity of standpoints that defines SF since the 1970s. Moreover, Stephenson’s retro-futurism does not substantially address the critiques that more recent cohorts of authors have made of Golden Age SF, including its lack of environmental awareness and its assumption of a largely white and male audience. However, other incantatory fictions within Project Hieroglyph and beyond suggest more pluralistic ways of relating fiction to science and technology, in part by altering the formal structure and the mode of production of the SF story. They suggest other models of incantation in which fiction does not present a blueprint to be realized, but a stimulus to think, feel, and act differently.

SF and Futurism: From Predicting to Making the Future In the post-World War II period, the future emerged as an object of concern for governments, corporations, and other institutions. Forecasting methods rooted in computing technologies and theoretical models used during the war were developed into a generalized approach to prediction at the military think tank RAND Corporation and other groups supported by the US security apparatus (including the Departments of Defense and State) in the 1950s and 1960s (Andersson 2012, 1413). SF authors and those with a professional interest in forecasting or regulating future trends displayed both mutual suspicion and interest in each other’s work. Frederik Pohl writes, “When the World Future Society began a few decades ago, I have to admit that I regarded it with a certain amount of professional jealousy” due to a feeling that he had some “seniority” in the business of writing about the future (1996, 237). In contrast, Ursula Le Guin writes in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, “Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in

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Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future” ([1969] 2016, xxvi). Their differing attitudes are indicative of differing tendencies within SF; critics have made a rough distinction between extrapolative, “hard” SF with a strong commitment to rationalist explanations of the world, and analogical approaches directed at understanding and critiquing present society, although many texts contain elements of both (Suvin 1972, 379). By the time Le Guin declined to become a futurologist, futurology was already moving away from claims that it could scientifically calculate “the future,” toward methods such as scenario studies that emphasized narrative and the plurality of alternate possible futures (Williams 2016).1 Herman Kahn, a leading figure at the RAND Corporation, was an avid reader of SF and interacted with authors such as Robert Heinlein, who did take up the invitation to attend futurological congresses (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 76; Patterson 2014, 267). However, Kahn drew on particular formal techniques to distinguish his scenarios from most SF. His scenarios are brief (2–3 pages), written in the present tense, and employ grammatical constructions that emphasize conditionality (Williams 2016, 522). Kahn sometimes used SF as a foil against which he defined his method, which he clothed “in quantitative garb” in order to command the authority of science (Ghamari-Tabrizi 76, 132). Although some futurists in the 1970s did embrace SF, and there was a good deal of informal “amiable symbiosis” (Pohl 1996, 237), futurists more often held SF at arm’s length in an effort to establish their field as a scientifically legitimate area of inquiry. Observing the situation in 1979, literary critic Charles Elkins argued that those futurists who did take an interest in SF were misguided. SF, he insisted, does not predict the future. Instead, he argued, it is fundamentally incantatory: “a mode of and goad to action” (25). Dramatic presentations of the future in SF are meant to “guide us” and to “organize” present action, rather than strive for an impossible mimesis. In fact, futurists’ attitudes toward SF were more nuanced that Elkins makes out. While some futurists turned to SF as a source of material to analyze “in the absence of data” on the future itself (Livingston 1971, 255), Alvin Toffler denied that futurism was about predicting the future, writing instead that it “has immense value as a ­mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation” ([1972] 1984, 425).2 Nevertheless, Elkins is correct that Toffler draws SF into an approach to the future that is largely “mimetic,” one in which the ultimate goal is to discover what can be known about the future in order to best prepare for it in the present. The following decades would see changes that brought futurism and SF closer together. The method of scenario studies continued to grow in popularity and spread into the business world in the 1980s through Kahn’s

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corporate consulting and through the work of Pierre Wack, a Shell oil executive and Harvard Business School senior lecturer. Military analysts and SF writers continued to mingle in the following decades, participating in visioning activities inherited from RAND.3 In the 1980s, SF also took on a different resonance as the relationship between science and technology shifted. Whereas in the 1970s even major theorists of technology understood it as a secondary effect of advances in science, in popular and academic discourses during the 1980s technology began to take precedence, increasingly seen as the higher-prestige activity and as a driver of science rather than the other way around (Forman 2007, 50–51). The 1980s and the following decades saw the emergence of fields of study in which knowing is a secondary effect of making: biotechnology, nanoscience, and synthetic biology. These postmodern sciences, as some described them, raise anxieties “not about whether we have seized the real right but about whether we are instead making the right real” (Daston and Galison 2007, 415). As calls for “public engagement” with science and technology grew, SF’s ability to make alternate hypothetical worlds accessible to a wide audience was increasingly attractive— some called it “technology assessment for the rest of us” (Miller and Bennett 2008, 598). As the twenty-first century progressed, futurists seized on SF less as a means of attaining knowledge about a future that was bearing down too quickly, and more as a way of revitalizing futurity itself, which was presented as endangered. In other words, they adopted Elkins’s basic premise that SF is “incantatory.” Following a line of argument from economists such as Tyler Cowen that the rate of new inventions had slowed since the 1970s, Stephenson’s “Innovation Starvation” essay appeared the same year (2011) that tech mogul Peter Thiel published a manifesto summed up in the (ironically Twitterfriendly) slogan: “we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” (https://foundersfund.com/the-future/). According to these commentators, the future was no longer rushing to meet us, as Toffler had described in Future Shock; rather, it seemed to have stalled. Thiel’s venture capital firm’s website refers nostalgically to Star Trek and Arthur C. Clarke; diagnosing a recent cultural sickness, it displays a graph of the rising popularity of dystopian fiction (https://foundersfund.com/2016/06/thought-thoughts-future/). In the context of calls to make rather than predict the future, SF has become a more accepted tool for futurists. For example, Brian David Johnson, a former futurist at Intel and collaborator on several projects at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, does not shy away from the term “SF” in the 2011 manual SF Prototyping: Designing the Future with SF. However, in what may be seen as a residue of mimesis, he adds the term “prototype” to define a smaller set of works he describes as more closely rooted in real-world developments in science and technology (what many would describe as “hard SF”).4 Unlike Kahn’s scenarios, Johnson’s “SF prototypes” are formally indistinguishable from works of SF. Johnson writes,

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“it is really impossible and useless to try and predict the future” (4), and states that “creating SF prototypes, writing stories, making movies and drawing comics about the future are one of those things that people can do to actually change the future… Your future is truly in your hands” (5). Project Hieroglyph follows this same model. In a talk about Hieroglyph at Google, editor Kathryn Cramer explains, “While as editors, Ed and I want you to have the best possible reading experience, Hieroglyph is not so much aimed at how you feel as what you DO” (2014). Project Hieroglyph is one of the earliest and most influential of a recent crop of incantatory fictions that have involved many of the best-known SF authors writing today. It is the first of a number of volumes produced by the Center for Science and the Imagination on topics such as solar technology, space exploration, the stratosphere, and climate change. Other examples of incantatory fictions include Infectious Futures (2015), commissioned by the UK “innovation foundation” NESTA; Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research (2012), supported by the Wellcome Trust; the Bio: Fiction film festival sponsored by Biofaction, an Austrian “research and science communication company” (biofaction.com); the multimedia Better Worlds collection from Vox media site The Verge (2018); The Tomorrow Project from Intel (which also involved collaboration with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination) (2011); the online story collections Current Futures (2019) and Seat 14C (2017) commissioned by the X Prize Foundation, in the latter case together with All Nippon Airways; and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015), a crowd-funded collection of speculative fiction by activists edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha and supported by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (Octavia’s Brood representing something of an outlier on this list, a point I will return to by the end).5 While varied, these projects generally share the following elements: (1) They involve experts who are not SF authors who collaborate, consult, produce their own speculative narratives, and/or respond to the fiction. (2) Scientific accuracy is prioritized. (3) Authors are encouraged to move away from dystopia and apocalypse, and in many cases are specifically asked to produce positive visions. (4) The futures are near-term in order to emphasize the connection with the present. In addition, many of these projects include an invitation to the public to participate in the visioning process, for example by including open contests for story submissions or through associated workshops or pedagogical tools. They may also include extra-diegetic materials, such as scientific sources, charts and graphs, and responses by technical experts. Each of these characteristics flows from the raison d’être of incantatory fiction: to inspire real-world innovation and action. Because Neal Stephenson was one of the first to articulate these ideas to a broader audience, serving as a link between the SF community and the tech industry, and because he is cited by a number of incantatory fictions that have come after Project Hieroglyph, I focus on the original Hieroglyph anthology in order to examine Stephenson’s vision, how it relates to the SF tradition, and how SF authors have responded to his call. While Stephenson’s retro-futurism

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seeks to reinvest the technological object with the optimism of Golden Age fiction, it does not adequately address the reasons why this affective economy ceased to predominate within SF. Stephenson’s hieroglyph theory offers a direct mode of incantation, in which the SF story presents a blueprint to be realized. Assuming a background of shared meaning, this model of incantation breaks down in the face of pluralistic understandings of technology’s relationship to the social good. The problem is particularly acute in Stephenson’s fictional contribution to the volume, which draws on a reactionary formulation of American greatness that fails to address the exclusionary politics of American exceptionalism, in both US history and the history of SF.

The Hieroglyph Theory of Incantation Hieroglyph theory emerges from the intersection of the hard SF tradition and Silicon Valley. Stephenson traces the origins of Project Hieroglyph and the Center for Science and the Imagination to a 2011 Future Tense event sponsored by Arizona State University, Slate, and New America, and hosted by Google’s Washington, DC offices. At that meeting, Stephenson, ASU President Michael Crow, and audience members discussed the predominance of dystopian SF as both symbol and contributing cause of the failure to innovate. Stephenson theorizes the connection between SF and innovation through the idea of the “hieroglyph,” which he credits to Jim Karkanias, formerly of Microsoft research. SF builds an imagined world around a technology, and the technological object comes to serve as a shorthand for the world. These imagined technologies, such as “Asimov’s robots, Heinlein’s rocket ships, or Gibson’s cyberspace,” are “simple, recognizable symbols whose significance everyone agrees on” (2014b). Project Hieroglyph embodies the tech industry’s call to think big, describing a desire to identify “moonshot ideas.” Mirroring a definition put forward by X (a company spun off of Google in 2010 that describes itself as the “moonshot factory”), Hieroglyph’s introduction describes a moonshot as the intersection of “a huge problem, a breakthrough discovery and a radical solution” (Finn and Cramer 2014). In many respects, Hieroglyph represents an intensification of tendencies within the tradition of hard SF. Gary Westfahl describes hard SF as “an especially heightened concern for, and an especially heightened connection to, science” (2005, 187). The collection is edited by Ed Finn of Arizona State University and Kathryn Cramer, and the introduction touts Cramer’s “expertise in hard SF”; in addition to editing the Year’s Best SF annuals, she edited the hard SF volumes Ascent of Wonder (1997) and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002). Hieroglyph could be seen as a continuation of what Cramer describes as the “hard SF Renaissance” of the 90s. It also bears similarities to Geoff Ryman’s call for “Mundane SF,” focusing on near-term futures and sticking close to contemporary science. (Ryman’s edited volume When it Changed [2009] also pairs SF authors with scientists who contribute responding essays.) Likewise, Hieroglyph emphasizes scientific and technical

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plausibility, relatively near-term futures, and optimism (“Introduction”). Extra-narratively, “recognition by one’s peers”; “a degree or profession in science or technology, publication of scientific papers, and even an explanation of the homework and sources involved” are all features that have been associated with hard SF, as has an association with the “hard” sciences (Samuelson 2009, 497). Several of Hieroglyph’s contributors are established authors of hard SF. Four authors hold doctoral degrees in physics and one in mathematics; this is not counting the foreword and afterword, which are both written by physicists. In addition, a number of other authors identify as futurists, and two hold master’s degrees in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Hieroglyph was noticed by the futurist community; the Association of Professional Futurists named it a Most Significant Futures Work in 2015. Hieroglyph opens with Stephenson’s “Atmosphaera Incognita,” which puts Hieroglyph theory into practice. “Atmosphaera Incognita” is an earnest throwback to Golden Age SF. It describes the construction of a 20-kilometer-high tower, brainchild of a billionaire name Carl, from securing the land to stabilizing a structure that will cut through the jet stream. The engineering challenges and design features of the tower are described in great detail from the perspective of Emma, a childhood friend of Carl’s who is recruited to work on the tower and manages the project from its conception through Carl’s death. A final, shorter section harkens back to magazine stories edited by John Campbell involving problem-solving in space as Emma travels to the top of the tower to spread Carl’s ashes, and is confronted by a previously unknown upper-atmospheric electrical phenomenon that damages the tower and endangers the small party that has gathered on that evening. Like every story in the volume, the Hieroglyph website provides an author’s note and links to responses and related resources. In this case, the extra-diegetic material demonstrates the Hieroglyph ideal: The narrative is inspired by scientific research, the acknowledgments effectively loop in a small cadre of people with the expertise and resources to undertake this kind of project in real life, and the story in turn generates further research and collaboration. The notes for the story explain that the design of the tower is based on papers by Geoffrey Landis and Vincent Denis, both of whom work in space science (Landis is also a SF author). Stephenson also credits Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with “the idea of using engines to push back against jet stream events” (2014a, 37). (Stephenson worked for Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin in the early 2000s.) The design of the tower was further developed through conversations with Keith Hjelmstad of Arizona State University. Hjelmstad contributes a response to the story in which he is appropriately inspired, writing, “This journey to wrap my mind around the possibility of the tall tower has caused me to recalibrate nearly everything I have ever thought about building tall…it is an idea big enough to drive new thought” (2014). The preface to the book cites Stephenson’s story as an example of how the ideas within the volume have “launched new avenues of research,” presumably through Hjelmstad’s research.

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Winged Towers, Golden Age Nostalgia, and the Problem of Inspiration Despite the fact that the collaboration opened up new research questions for Hjelmstad, at a literary level the story does not provide a plausible or convincing account of why the tower is inspiring: How it emotionally resonates with people, and why such a massive undertaking is worthwhile. This lack of motivation is inherent to hieroglyph theory as Stephenson articulates it. The theory identifies a perceived social problem (society has lost the will to execute on the “big stuff”), but locates the solution in a renewed emphasis on the technological object (i.e., the hieroglyph itself, such as “Asimov’s robots,” and in Stephenson’s story, the tall tower) without addressing the reasons why these symbols of modern technology have lost social buy-in today. The hieroglyph as an incantatory symbol recalls Leo Marx’s use of the theory of commodity fetishism to explain why technology itself is a “hazardous” concept. Marx writes, In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. (Marx 2010, 576)

Marx explains that although the term technology evolved to fill the “semantic void” created by large sociotechnical systems such as the railway, the term nevertheless reifies the sociotechnical system and all the social relationships with which it is bound up by collapsing them onto their most “iconic” elements, to which it attributes extraordinary powers. Likewise, “Atmosphaera Incognita” attributes to the tower a power to inspire and motivate which the story does not adequately demonstrate, either through emotional tone or through an elaboration of how the tower is bound up in a new and more hopeful configuration of social relations, or an improvement in people’s lived experience. While the story invokes the Golden Age tradition, it doesn’t acknowledge why, from the perspective of subsequent SF movements, that tradition failed to provide a viable vision for the later decades. The techno-optimism of the Golden Age (1950s-era) itself harkens back to the pulp era initiated by Hugo Gernsback in the 1920 and 1930s. Like Stephenson, Gernsback argued that SF predicted the future by inspiring it; his own stories were vehicles for showcasing the wondrous inventions he imagined, and at one point, he suggested that authors should be able to patent their imagined devices (Gernsback 1926, 579). He promoted a boundlessly positive vision of scientific advance

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encapsulated in the idea that “progress in science is as infinite as time, it is inconceivable how either would stop” (1916). Golden Age stories under the stewardship of editor John Campbell continued to convey optimism and a sense of wonder about technology and the vistas opened up by science. William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) demonstrates how subsequent SF authors reflected back on this era. Gibson’s story portrays SF’s past as a “semiotic ghost” in America’s subconscious, emblematized in the futuristic architecture of the 1930s and recycled in the 1950s mass media. The story is narrated by an architectural photographer assigned to photograph examples of this style, described as “superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potential bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you could only find the switch that turned them on” (1987, 27). The “burnished aluminum wings” (20) and “streamlined airfoils” (33) of Stephenson’s tall tower recall the futuristic ­architecture that Gibson’s story centers on, but without any hint of the sheen of h ­ orror and shabbiness that the buildings have accumulated in the intervening years in “The Gernsback Continuum.” In Gibson’s hallucinatory vision, the city’s architecture and its shiny inhabitants are both “tacky” and ­“sinister,” suggesting a totalitarian drive to technological perfection that the story i­mplicates in the darkest currents of the twentieth century, including war,­ eugenics, and environmental degradation. Gernsback’s vision of infinite possibility is recast in this retro-future as “a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to lose” (32). While Stephenson has said that the turn in which SF becomes “inward looking, kind of postmodern, introspective, focused more on social stuff” was “a good and healthy thing to have done,” the story largely implies that such critical reflection can be left in the past (2012). “Atmosphaera Incognita” gestures at some of the concerns raised by feminist, New Wave, cyberpunk, environmental, and postcolonial interventions in the genre since the 1970s but ultimately dismisses them. This attitude is most evident in how the story handles the environment, and in its embrace of the frontier topos. Climate change is acknowledged but doesn’t affect the building of the tower in any way. Although environmentalists oppose the tower, the story attributes their concerns either to rich yuppies who don’t want their view to be spoiled, or to activists with “bogus” claims who have been manipulated into serving as puppets for shadowy unspecified interests (12). Environmental considerations are not described as affecting the building of the tower in any way, despite the inclusion of many technical passages dealing with the project’s planning and execution. The story also resurrects the lone hero archetype associated with frontier tales, as well as the mythology of American exceptionalism. Presenting his tower as a place for rugged individualists, Carl takes aim at the phrase

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“shirtsleeves environment,” arguing: “The Cape of Good Hope is not a shirtsleeves environment. Neither was the American West. The moon. The people who go to such places have an intrepid spirit we ought to respect” (24). By referring to the people who go to such places, it is clear that he is talking about colonial expeditions, overlooking indigenous peoples whose home was the American West or the Cape of Good Hope. In the end, the tower is constructed in “between an Indian reservation and a decommissioned military bombing range” (12); the scenery to one side of the tower is enlivened by “grazing bison and the occasional horse-riding Indian” (16). The use of the generic “Indian” harkens back to the Western genre, strengthening the association of the tower with the frontier. However, there is no indication of how the local tribe felt about such a massive development in their backyard. Carl’s obliviousness to the language of social justice (he refuses to consider building the tower in a “third world hell-hole”) is portrayed as evidence of pragmatism and a bracing lack of political correctness, rather than a flaw (6). As Matthew Snyder observes, both “Atmosphaera Incognita” and Gregory Benford’s contribution to Hieroglyph “promulgate the John Galt myth — the right-libertarian fantasy that if we only had the right kind of Starryeyed Executive or C.E.O., the First World and its woeful comrades from the ‘developing world’ could be built back to the glorious possibilities we had in the past” (2014). “Atmosphaera Incognita” promotes a narrative of technological progress driven by competition between superpowers (“China was kicking the crap out of us” (4)), celebrating a return to American technological and political dominance. Although the story was published before Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, the worshipful attitude toward “job creators,” the promise of revitalizing American power by bringing back traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and steel production, a disdain for “political correctness,” and the nostalgia for a past when America was great—manifesting in an obsession with “bigness”—unmistakably taps into the political current that Trump rode into office. Carl is portrayed as the fabulously wealthy, self-made man of the people that Trump presents himself to be. The story thus celebrates the myth of American exceptionalism rather than grappling with the reasons that American workers have fared poorly in recent decades and presenting an alternative (i.e., explaining how Carl is able to finance the tower and provide the genuinely attractive, stable jobs that are increasingly rare due to automation, outsourcing, and the decline of unions). Ultimately, “Atmosphaera Incognita” suggests that a benevolent billionaire with a big dream could bypass the structural constraints that have defined the economy and produced staggering inequality over the past several decades. Thiel’s support for Trump demonstrates how technological nostalgia can dovetail with reactionary politics, and SF had its own reckoning with the alt-right in the form of the Sad Puppies episode—an anti-diversity campaign that called for a return to “traditional SF” while attempting to influence the Hugo Awards voting process. Trump and the Sad Puppies both demonstrate

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how calls to return America and SF, respectively, to past greatness can serve as appeals for a retrenchment of white supremacy.6 Stephenson has no connection to this movement, and Project Hieroglyph includes work that is politically diverse and includes a number of women authors (though few non-white authors). However, hieroglyph theory as articulated and expressed in Stephenson’s writing is hampered by its appeal to a past in which women and non-white authors were largely excluded. Most significantly, this weakness manifests in an assumption of shared meaning that falters when a more diverse audience is taken into consideration. Although Stephenson describes a hieroglyph as a symbol “whose meaning everyone can agree on,” the meaning of the tower is assumed rather than established in the story; the story succeeds at explaining “how,” but not “why.” Tellingly, the technical paper by Landis and Denis that Stephenson cites opens by stating that existing buildings have topped out at around 1km not because of technical limitations, but because of the “lack of a c­ompelling application for higher towers.” Landis and Denis present an application by suggesting that a tower reaching high into the earth’s atmosphere would have utility in launching objects into space, an idea that Stephenson’s story also seizes on. Yet going to space is not an endeavor whose value is ­self-evident. During the Apollo mission to the moon, the Poor People’s Campaign initiated by Martin Luther King Jr. protested the governments’ choice to fund the space program over domestic priorities. For the Black Panthers, the space race represented a continuation of white imperialism (Kreiss 73). Stephenson’s story acknowledges to a degree that motivation is an open question. At one point well into the planning, Carl says, “What I haven’t figured out yet is—” and Emma interrupts, “Why it makes sense?” Carl jokingly replies “Ah, I knew there was a reason I hired you” (3); however, he doesn’t elaborate further. Carl remains opaque as a character, and it’s never clear whether or how Emma signs onto Carl’s vision. She joins the project largely by happenstance, after a chance encounter with Carl; lured by the prospect of a sizable commission, she simply states, “I ended up becoming one of the advocates for this thing…” (8). There are brief moments in which the tower is shown to open up new viewpoints: a different perspective on technology or the opportunity to witness novel and beautiful natural phenomena. These moments hint at the technological sublime and sense of wonder associated with Golden Age SF. However, the text’s doggedly realist tone has the effect of muting these moments. For example, watching a thunderstorm from above is an intriguing novelty, but due to the risk of radiation, the characters are reminded to put on their space suits, a procedure that is as familiar to them as a “life vest drill” on a cruise ship (25). “The earth is an alien world,” a scientist remarks at one point (27). But the writing style has the opposite effect, normalizing and domesticating rather than estranging. It presents the tower as a nascent beginning for the space tourism industry, which is to say you could ride to

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the top of the tower, look at the curvature of the earth, and have a drink at the bar while listening to a guy next to you make a sequence of “you’ll never guess where I’m calling from” phone calls (24). Eschewing the pulpier aspects of the Campbellian adventure story, the narrative risks veering too far into the territory of real estate development and workplace safety, in perhaps an overly literal performance of “mundane SF.” Ultimately, “Atmosphaera Incognita” fails to show how the tower transcends one man’s personal quest to become something that could produce new kinds of social connections, and that a community could become invested in. It is not clear what problem the tower is meant to solve, except for the symbolic problem of lack of inspiration. Given that the technology for the tower already exists, according to the Landis and Denis paper, so that the problem must be social rather than technical, it is unclear why emphasizing technical realism above all else would solve the problem of inspiration. With its wings spread beyond the atmosphere, the tower hardly lacks symbolism, but in a circular way, it simply stands for technological achievement itself. At the same time, the story is likely to work well for those who are already inspired by the challenge of building a tower into space. Hard SF author Ben Bova explains, “My audience consists partly of SF fans, but mostly of people in technical fields. It’s a technically educated audience, people who are interested in realistic stories about how you get from here to there” (Hartwell and Cramer 2002, 253). If we understand hard SF as the result of historically situated “communities of practice” (Rieder 2017, 29), the missing motivation can be filled in by shared values and assumptions within the community. Understanding hard SF as a community of practice with a particular “moral economy” is in fact the only way to make sense of the fact that hard SF is defined not only by the presence of detailed scientific explanations but also by an attitude of optimism expressed in repeated narrative demonstration that “one can solve problems through the application of knowledge of science and technology”; this tradition “expresses, represents, and confirms faith in science and reason” (Hartwell 1997, 11). If we situate Stephenson within this tradition, and within a contemporary community of practice that includes scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley, space exploration and practical problem-solving with a technically audacious twist is motivation enough. Writing from within this context, Stephenson presents a relatively direct model of incantatory fiction, closely linking inspiration to a technological image that scientists and engineers can work to realize. It thereby assigns a high degree of significance to the SF author as the architect of this vision. Despite acknowledging multiple contributors to the tall tower concept, the extent to which the visionary function is understood to be the product of a single mind is evident in the way in which, within the text, the tower is a sui generis emanation of Carl’s vision. If Carl can be understood as a stand-in for the author, the incantatory fictions I focus on in the following section are more humble in their understanding of what any individual SF vision can achieve.

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Analogical and Ecological Approaches To Stephenson’s credit, and to the credit of Hieroglyph’s editors, the contributions from other authors go beyond Hieroglyph theory as he articulates it. Rather than taking the meaning of technology for granted, Karl Schroeder imagines a sociotechnical innovation that attempts to build shared meaning in the context of seemingly intractable differences in “Degrees of Freedom.” Other stories leave realism behind, further demonstrating that the hard SF tradition has as much to do with shared values as with scientific content. David Brin, an established author of hard SF, departs from its conventions in favor of a parable that exhorts the reader to keep the techno-optimistic faith. Brin presents a future world of humans who have the incredible but sometimes painful ability to fly (the biomechanics of this power are completely unexplained). The story plays with reader expectations, opening with a disaffected white-collar worker leaping out of his office window in what only initially appears to be suicide. Whereas Stephenson’s story makes an impressive engineering feat mundane in order to convince the reader of its achievability, Brin pivots from the mundane to the techno-sublime in order to suggest that the present is not a dystopia but is incandescent with human and technological potential. However, by ignoring the present’s most pressing problems in order to insist that this world is already on the trajectory to be the best of all possible worlds, it offers a conservative kind of techno-optimism. Like Stephenson’s story, it ignores the substantive questions posed by critical SF since the Golden Age. In contrast, Bruce Sterling’s “Tall Tower” uses non-realist techniques to address the ideology of techno-optimism in a more critical (which is to say probing rather than arguing against) way. “Tall Tower” uses the technique of cognitive estrangement to comment directly on Stephenson’s text, by projecting its underlying dream of human transcendence through technology onto a horse who becomes “superequine.” Sterling—a cyberpunk author who wrote in the 1980s, “not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State building, the nuclear power plant” (1988, xiii)—deflates the grandiosity of tower-builders while still acknowledging the beauty of their striving, a beauty that is not exceptional but continuous with other life on earth even as it takes its own peculiar, unique and sometimes “wicked” forms. Despite their differences, by presenting fictional scenarios that figuratively refract aspects of the present rather than an extrapolation of the present that could be interpreted as a future to strive toward, Brin and Sterling both depart from the hieroglyph theory of incantation. Whereas “Tall Tower” operates in a dream-time outside history in order to play with the mythical, quasi-religious underpinnings of the hard SF tradition, Vandana Singh’s contribution takes up the challenge of writing optimistic fiction that directly addresses climate change. While hewing more closely to the parameters set out by Project Hieroglyph, Singh’s “Entanglement” offers

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a different model of incantation than Stephenson. Rejecting the moonshot mentality, her story does not (or does not only) offer a technological blueprint, suggesting instead that the problem of climate change requires a way of thinking about human relations to each other and to the environment that is better suited to the complexities of interconnected social and ecological systems. The story models the attempt to grapple with this “entanglement” at a formal level by presenting five vignettes, each one connected to another at a single moment in time. The first four vignettes follow people in different parts of the globe who are dealing with the effects of climate change. The final vignette reveals the novum that underlies the connections between each of the others, describing the invention of a new social network that connects people to strangers around the globe when they are particularly in need of support. “Entanglement” operates in a realist mode, heeding Hieroglyph’s call for plausible, near-future scenarios. (That is, while one could “play the game” of hard SF by quibbling about how realistic her imagined technologies are, the story clearly differs from the texts by Sterling and Brin by anchoring its fictional technologies to contemporary science and technology and providing explanations for them.) The vignettes present various imagined interventions that could help fight climate change. For example, “brollies” are autonomous vehicles supported by artificial intelligence that monitor biogeochemical conditions in the Arctic and sometimes intervene to nudge them in ways that slow warming processes. The brollies monitor and feed methanotroph bacteria in the ocean, on the theory that supporting the methanotroph colonies could reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. However, none of these imaginary applications are presented as a silver bullet. Instead, the orange bracelets worn by each character, providing the hardware for the social network that connects them to each other, model a different way of thinking about the future, one that attempts to bring into consciousness the way in which each person’s actions ramify globally. “Entanglement” is based on the theory of complex systems, in which a system’s behavior is understood as the summation of many emergent parts interacting locally without central control. As Singh develops it, this way of thinking suggests both despair and hope. One character, an ecologist working to restore the Amazon rainforest, thinks: The trouble with repairing the forest was that it would never be enough, without a million other things happening too, like the work at the polar icecaps, and social movements, ordinary people pledging to make lifestyle changes, and governments passing laws so that children and grandchildren could have a future. (2014, 369)

The theory can lend itself to despair, because one individual’s actions can never have enough impact to make a difference by themselves. However, it also offers hope, because many small actions together are the only thing that

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can create significant change. Moreover, through the well-known trope of the “butterfly effect,” a small action can, given the right conditions, tip a system into a different behavioral pattern. Elsewhere, Singh has made explicit the connections among complex systems theory, climate change, and narrative form. She suggests that part of the inability to adequately confront climate change—including authors’ tendency to lapse into apocalyptic scenarios that fantasize about wiping the slate of civilization clean and starting over—stems from a difficulty in dealing with complex systems. Singh connects the trope of the lone hero to reductionist thinking, writing: “Imagine the impossibility of such a hero solving a problem like global warming” (Singh 2008). The character of Dorothy Cartwright, the subject of “Entanglement’s” fourth vignette, serves as a kind of antihero who models the role of “ordinary people” in addressing climate change. Dorothy is a widow in an assisted living facility in Texas who finds herself drawn into a small group of “aging hippies” engaged in environmental activism. Despite her dead husband’s negative voice in her head and feelings of worthlessness, she takes one small step, and then another, into the world of political action—haltingly but with increasing conviction—upon prompting from her peers. In a farcical turn of events, she is struck by a bulldozer while holding a tray of cupcakes at a protest against a new oil pipeline and ends up on TV, to the astonishment and delight of her grandchildren. Unwitting practitioner of civil disobedience, she finds her voice and helps to inspire a movement of retirees that the media dubs the “Suspender Revolution” (2014, 387). Singh’s use of farce celebrates the small actions of ordinary people in opposition to heroic moonshots, a “technology of foolishness” (Singh 2008) in which one acts out of love without knowing exactly where one will end up or what difference one’s action will make. While the narrative structure argues against looking to technological solutions to serve as the “One True Hero” in the climate crisis, Singh does not reject technological approaches. Nor does she take a stance in the debate over whether SF should be “more cheerful and less gloomy…reflecting reality or making change.” Instead, she writes, we need every tool in the toolkit to mobilize both the “technological” and the “sociological imagination” (2008). Her writing suggests a different and fuller kind of realism than the realism of technical plausibility promoted by Stephenson and futurists such as Johnson because, without breaking from the conventions of hard SF, it also strives for environmental and social realism. As Kim Stanley Robinson argues in the introduction to Everything Change (an anthology produced by ASU that followed Project Hieroglyph), near-future SF must grapple with the effects of climate change as part of its “fidelity to the real” because “climate change is already happening, and has become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century” (x). In an effort to piece together how social, environmental, and technological change are interlinked, Singh consulted with engineers, anthropologists, geochemists, and geographers during the writing of “Entanglement” (396–397).

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Singh’s call for a change in literary form inspired by theories of complex systems and collective action mirrors the “emergent strategy” embedded in the production of the Octavia’s Brood anthology (brown 2015, 280–281). adrienne maree brown writes, “One of the ways we perpetuate individualism is by ideating alone, literally coming up with ideas in solitude and then competing to bring them to life” (281). In contrast, brown’s workshops promote collective world-building. In the process, within the fictional text, the lone protagonist is often replaced by “pairs or groups of lead characters to disrupt the solitary hero narrative” (281). Compared to other recent incantatory fictions, Octavia’s Brood is something of an outlier as it does not display the same preoccupation with scientific realism as many other recent projects, drawing instead on a tradition of feminist “fabulation” (Barr 2005) and Black activism. This tradition suggests an alternate understanding of literature’s incantatory power, one in which affect plays an acknowledged role: The volume’s forward quotes Toni Cade Bambara’s statement that the role of art is to “make the revolution irresistible” (Thomas 2015, 2). By claiming the name of SF, Octavia’s Brood chooses to continue the genre’s diversification and expansion rather than reject a tradition that in its mainstream forms “often reinforces dominant narratives of power” (Imarisha 2015, 4). Imarisha writes, “All organizing is SF” (3), echoing remarks by Cory Doctorow in SF Prototyping in which he states, “every activist has to be a bit of a SF writer, and most SF ends up being pretty activist” (Johnson 2011, 45). By drawing on the expertise of activists rather than scientists and engineers, Octavia’s Brood annexes SF’s heritage as the literature of change to an intensive exploration of the dynamics of social movements, declining to see that change as technologically determined. Like “Entanglement,” it challenges Project Hieroglyph’s underlying assumption that creating a better future requires a technological “moonshot” originating in the mind of a brilliant and visionary individual. Yet read alongside Project Hieroglyph and similar initiatives in Silicon Valley and beyond, Octavia’s Brood demonstrates that worries about the prevalence of apocalyptic narratives and calls to revitalize the SF imagination in order to change the future can be found across the political spectrum.

Conclusion The recent wave of incantatory fictions suggests a new model of patronage supporting SF production that may shape the genre according to the evolving practices and methods of futurology. Because many incantatory projects tend to value scientific plausibility—particularly when they are produced by scientific institutions—they provide a countervailing tendency against the blurring of boundaries between SF and other genres such as fantasy, horror, and the thriller: What Gary Wolfe calls the “evaporation” of genre (Wolfe 2011). In addition, the tradition of scenario studies that helps inspire these projects lends itself to short explorations of a single idea. The brevity of these works and their

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mandate, in many cases, to foreground contemporary developments in science and technology may encourage pieces that edge into design fiction. Design fiction can serve as a way to imagine alternate pathways for material culture, foregrounding values other than usefulness (Bleecker 2009). At the same time, its focus on prototypes may in some cases implicitly support an ideology of technological determinism. As I have argued, hieroglyph theory as articulated by Stephenson collapses the future onto the technological object as the key locus of change. By promoting realism as the best way for SF writers to create change, hieroglyph theory suggests a fairly literal method of inspiration, in which the plausible, near-future blueprints of SF serve to direct and orient those who will make the future (implied to be members of the tech community, particularly those who have the resources to initiate “moonshot” projects) toward a common goal. In fact, there are many examples of SF-tech industry symbiosis that support the idea that SF can be inspirational in this way (Bassett et al. 2013). In my own research on synthetic biology, I found that those involved with the field often looked to SF as a guide to the future, and sometimes borrowed and built directly on a work’s imagined inventions (Wilbanks 2017). As my analysis of “Atmosphaera Incognita” demonstrates, these more literal models of incantation tend to assume a shared background of values. Project Hieroglyph and other incantatory projects can be seen as arising out of a community of practice that includes a subset of SF authors—many of whom, like Stephenson, work or consult in the tech industry—together with futurists and members of the tech community. For example, Google’s resources and ideas about moonshots played a role in the origins of the project, and Google constitutes an audience for Project Hieroglyph’s reception. Yet as other stories in Project Hieroglyph remind us, it is crucial to keep in mind SF’s analogical as well as extrapolative capacities: its ability to ask the “why” questions, nourish the “sociological imagination,” and offer alternate ways of looking at the world. Often, SF authors jettison the reality effect to explore these questions, as, for example, Sterling does in his tale of equine ascension. SF scholars and feminist SF authors have long pointed out that the constraints of plausibility can foreclose social possibilities. Luckily, scenarios are meant to be read in the plural, and incantatory projects use a range of different literary techniques to present a dazzling variety of alternate futures. Contributions such as Singh’s “Entanglement” and other projects such as Octavia’s Brood suggest that incantatory fictions need not offer a blueprint for the future, but can instead model alternate ways of thinking, feeling, and imagining. Incantatory fictions can be understood in the context of broader developments in the relationship among science, technology, and society. Even as the increasing orientation of scientific research toward the market since the 1980s exposes it to capture by elite interests, sociologists of science describe a “countervailing” process of “epistemic modernization” in which scientific research agendas, methods, and concepts are increasingly subject to influence by social movements and opened up to input and critique from groups with

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diverse social standpoints (Moore et al. 2011, 520–521). As public engagement becomes a “key, legitimating idiom of institutions across the spectrum of society” (Kelty and Panofsky 2), organizations from NASA to Intel see SF as a tool to engage the public and promote social buy-in of their imagined futures. Yet SF has undergone its own epistemic modernization since the 1960s, such that the Golden Age tradition that once made up the entirety of the SF subculture now stands as one community of practice among many (Rieder 2017, 161–170). By engaging the full spectrum of contemporary SF rather than narrowing the scope to a nostalgic retro-futurism, incantatory fictions have the potential to enrich both the SF genre and real-world practices at which they are directed. Acknowledgement   My thanks to Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich for helpful feedback on a draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. It was also riven by division between approaches inherited by American military researchers and by Europeans who initiated “future studies” as an inheritor of the Blochian tradition of critical utopianism (Andersson 2012, 1425), in some ways mirroring the division within SF between extrapolative and analogical approaches. 2.  This perspective bears resemblance to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s more recent argument that SF cultivates particular “habits of mind” (2008, 2). 3. See Gannon (2005) on SF authors’ contribution to defense policies in the Reagan administration (197–198). The Highlands Forum, a think tank created in 1995 by senior military officials, is another venue for exchange, soliciting participation from authors including Bruce Sterling and David Brin (O’Neill 2001, 6, 15). 4. This distinction does not hold up over the course of his discussion. For example, he describes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as “more metaphysical than scientific” because it does not describe the “nuts and bolts” of the creature’s fabrication (35). However, the discussion with Cory Doctorow makes clear that Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, which Johnson describes as “some of the first SF prototypes” (36), are driven by metaphysical questions such as “what it means to be human and what rules should govern us” (39), and do not make any attempt to describe the construction or function of the robots’ “positronic” brains. 5. SF has also been used in a number of venues where the focus is more on the process than the product, e.g., convening focus groups in which members of the public develop stories about nanotechnology. There are also design fiction firms and consulting groups, including Sci-Futures and the Sigma Group, connecting SF authors to business, NGO, and public sector clients (including NATO); the fiction produced for these purposes is often kept internal (Romeo 2017). 6. Brad Torgersen, one of the campaign’s organizers, writes, “The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?” (https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/sad-puppies-3-the-unraveling-of-an-unreliable-field/).

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Works Cited Andersson, Jenny. 2012. The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World. The American Historical Review 117 (5): 1411–1430. Barr, Marleen S. 2005. Feminist Fabulation. In A Companion to SF, 142–55. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997055.ch10. Bassett, Caroline, Ed Steinmueller, and George Voss. 2013. Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of SF and Innovation. Nesta Working Paper 7. http://www.academia.edu/download/31044405/bettermadeup.pdf. Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction. Near Future Laboratory. brown, adrienne maree. 2015. Outro. In Octavia’s Brood: SF Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Chico, CA: AK Press. Cramer, Kathryn. 2014. Kathryn Cramer at Google: Why Hieroglyph Is a Verb. Hieroglyph, September 11. https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/ kathryn-cramer-at-google-why-hieroglyph-is-a-verb/. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. 2008. The Seven Beauties of SF, Kindle ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Elkins, Charles. 1979. SF Versus Futurology: Dramatic Versus Rational Models (Science-Fiction/Futurologie: Modèles de Théâtralisation et de Rationalisation). Science Fiction Studies 6 (1): 20–31. Finn, Ed, and Kathryn Cramer. 2014. Introduction: A Blueprint for Better Dreams. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 489–515. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. Forman, Paul. 2007. The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology. History and Technology 23 (1–2): 1–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510601092191. Gannon, Charles E. 2005. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gernsback, Hugo. 1916. Imagination Versus Facts. In The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, ed. Grant Whythoff, vol. 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1926. Imagination and Reality. Amazing Stories 1 (7): 579. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson, William. 1987. The Gernsback Continuum. In Burning Chrome, 23–35. New York: Ace Books. Hartwell, David G. 1997. The SF Century. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer. 2002. The Hard SF Renaissance. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Hjelmstad, Keith. 2014. Structural Design of the Tall Tower. Hieroglyph, August 22. https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/08/structural-design-of-the-tall-tower/. Imarisha, Walidah. 2015. Introduction. In Octavia’s Brood: SF Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Chico, CA: AK Press. Johnson, Brian David. 2011. SF Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction. Synthesis Lectures on Computer Science 3. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool. Kelty, Christopher, and Aaron Panofsky. 2014. Disentangling Public Participation in Science and Biomedicine. Genome Medicine 6 (8). https://genomemedicine. biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gm525.

240  R. WILBANKS Kreiss, Daniel. 2017. Appropriating the Master’s Tools: Sun Ra, the Black Panthers, and Black Consciousness, 1952–1973. In Music and Ideology, 1st ed., ed. Mark Carroll, 405–29. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315090979-17. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2016. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, NY: Penguin. Livingston, Dennis. 1971. Science Fiction Models of Future World Order Systems. International Organization 25 (2): 254–270. Marx, Leo. 2010. Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Technology and Culture 51 (3): 561–77. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0009. Miller, Clark A., and Ira Bennett. 2008. Thinking Longer Term About Technology: Is There Value in SF-Inspired Approaches to Constructing Futures? Science and Public Policy 35 (8): 597–606. https://doi.org/10.3152/030234208X370666. Moore, Kelly, Daniel Lee Kleinman, David Hess, and Scott Frickel. 2011. Science and Neoliberal Globalization: A Political Sociological Approach. Theory and Society 40 (5): 505–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9147-3. O’Neill, Richard P. 2001. The Highlands Forum Process. Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research, April 5. http://www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_ pdf/o’neill/o’neill-i01-3.pdf. Patterson, William H. 2014. Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948–1988 The Man Who Learned Better. New York, NY: A Tom Doherty Associates Book. Pohl, Frederik. 1996. Thinking About the Future. In Futurevision: Ideas, Insights, and Strategies, ed. Howard F. Didsbury. Bethesda, MD: World Futures Society. Rieder, John. 2017. SF and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Romeo, Nick. 2017. Better Business Through Sci-Fi. New Yorker, July 30. https:// www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/better-business-through-sci-fi. Russ, Joanna. 1975. Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 2 (2): 112–119. Ryman, Geoff. 2013. The Mundane Manifesto. SFGenics: Notes on Science, Fiction, and SF (blog), July 4, 2013. https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/ geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/. Samuelson, David N. 2009. HARD SF. The Routledge Companion to SF, March 30, 2009. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203871317-63. Singh, Vandana. 2008. SF and the End of the World. Borne Central (blog), October 12. http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/10/11/ science-fiction-and-the-end-of-the-world/. ———. 2014. Entanglement. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 352–98. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Snyder, Matthew. 2014. Saving Spaceship Earth. Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014 . https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/saving-spaceship-earth/. Stephenson, Neal. 2011. Innovation Starvation. Wired.com, October 27. ______. 2012. Neal Stephenson on Getting Big Stuff Done. Presented at the We Solve for X, X, the Moonshot Factory. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM. ———. 2014a. Atmosphaera Incognita. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 1–37. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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———. 2014b. Preface: Innovation Starvation. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. Sterling, Bruce. 1988. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books. ———. 2014. Tall Tower. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 489–515. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. Suvin, Darko. 1972. On the Poetics of the SF Genre. College English 34 (3): 372. https://doi.org/10.2307/375141. Thomas, Sheree Renée. 2015. Foreward: Birth of a Revolution. In Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. Chico, CA: AK Press. Toffler, Alvin. 1984. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books. Westfahl, Gary. 2005. Hard SF. In A Companion to SF, ed. David Seed, 185–201. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997055.ch13. Williams, John R. 2016. World Futures. Critical Inquiry 42 (3): 473–546. Wilbanks, Rebecca. 2017. Synthetic Biology and Life’s Imagined Futures. PhD diss., Stanford University. Wolfe, G. K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

CHAPTER 14

Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth

Introduction One of the most interesting places where literature and science meet is science fiction (SF), a popular genre with a rich history, a diverse archive of texts, a powerful and distinctive tradition of literary-critical and cultural analysis, and a very large and active audience. In this chapter, we suggest that SF as a genre is particularly important to exploring contemporary popular engagements with science and the probable and possible futures it generates. We also argue that to understand how SF works as a meeting point for science and literature, critics and analysts need to understand more than just texts. We need to get to grips with the act of reading SF and the responses and situations of SF readers. We use this chapter, then, to pull together some theoretical, epistemological, and methodological resources for thinking about fiction and technoscience that are not just about textual exegesis or the interpretations of the critic or the ideal or “implied reader” (Iser 1978). We explore how we might put SF readers, their agency, biographies, and practices firmly at the center of contemporary studies of science and literature. SF has been called “the literature of technoscientific societies” and is routinely credited with a distinctive capacity to speculate about human and more than human futures in rapidly changing worlds (Csicsery-Ronay 2008, 1).1 For over one hundred years SF has been engaging creatively with scientific ideas and technological change. SF has imagined worlds fundamentally transformed A. C. Chambers  Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK L. Garforth (*)  Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_14

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by technoscientific developments. It has responded to the hopes and fears for the future opened up by modernity’s incessant change, and it has articulated and explored the human and social consequences of scientific developments. SF, then, is a product of the expansive and intensive presence of scientific rationalities and technological networks and objects in the structures and everyday life of modernity (Luckhurst 2005, 1, 3). But SF has never been a mere reflection or celebration of scientific cultures. SF acts with and acts back on science, critically responding to its confident pronouncements, elaborating and complicating its narratives. SF can thus be read as a method for historically tracing and locating popular constructions of science’s stories about our collective futures. It can help us to explore how readerly pleasures and social practices inform interpretations of and expectations of futures and future technologies. And it can function as a way of understanding how publics critically engage with scientific ideas through narrative. In the first half of this chapter, we unpack some key aspects of SF’s technofuturism, focusing on literature and examining the powerful role that is often claimed for the technological imaginary in SF critical scholarship. We begin by looking at arguments suggesting that SF, more than any other genre, has generated distinctive symbolic resources and critical epistemologies for reflecting on and navigating modern and postmodern life. For many critics, there is something about the cultural history or the formal features of genre SF that offers its readers a particularly powerful way of intervening in the co-production of science and the social (Jasanoff 2004). SF literary criticism has focused on what is unique about the SF narrative and the act or experience of reading it, drawing on and echoing arguments from broader literary accounts of the phenomenology of reading and reader-response theory. As in these approaches, however, arguments about the distinctive effects of SF texts have too often relied on abstracted accounts of the reading act. Without explicit attention to the experiences and sense-making practices of embodied, empirical readers, their contextual uses of literature, and their diverse engagements with texts and ideas, these approaches tend to reproduce an “ideal reader” or universalize the critic’s reading (Felski 2008; Long 2003). What is at stake here, then, is a nuanced and socially situated sense of what multiple SF readers do with science and its futures through critical, creative reading—both in their individual interpretations and through the collective practices of sense-making that are increasingly enabled by the proliferation of online and face-to-face fan communities and spaces. In relation to SF in particular, this means thinking about the specific ways in which people are introduced to genre fiction, often by parental or other mentor figures, and how this shapes and guides their reading choices and fictional pleasures. It means thinking in creative ways about what it means to empathize and identify with fictional characters in social and technological worlds that do not, have never, and probably will not ever exist. It means exploring how these relations of identity and difference open up spaces for readers to engage evaluatively and

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ethically with alien social structures, future technological affordances and scientific challenges. It means understanding how readers use texts for pleasurable affects—wonder, fear, creepiness, hope—and for resonances with their own lives while at the same time speculating about how they might survive in technologically transformed futures. In the second half of the chapter we explore arguments and approaches that can help us to think sociologically about how readers (plural and particular), rather than “the reader” (singular and abstract), engage with the science in SF. We aim to both supplement and challenge the tendency of studies of science and literature to focus on the science in literature by considering ways of understanding how readers navigate narrative and science together through the socially shaped and situated act of reading. We focus on studies that start with readers rather than texts, and which understand reading as a social practice rather than a purely cognitive or critical act. We take our cues from empirical studies of readers and reading in sociology and cultural studies, and from media studies explorations of audiences, reception, and reader-response that offer new ways of understanding readers as active and creative. As we show, these approaches can help us to understand science/fiction in terms of active readers who bring texts to life in relation to their experiences, their biographies and their socially situated ways of knowing.

Science and Science Fiction: Literature, Modernity and Technoscientific Imaginaries Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus note that science studies has recently become interested in “the intellectual significance of fiction, literature and the imaginary” (2019, 1). But until this recent turn, historians and sociologists of science have “largely ignored” both science fiction and the well-established field of science fiction studies (Rees and Morus 2019, 9). This oversight means that scholars have failed to notice how SF might be understood as “a form of STS [science and technology studies] in action,” one that predates science studies in exploring equivalences between human and nonhuman actors and imagining radically hybrid, fragmented and temporally complex forms of agency, and one that has “been far more effective in engaging the public imagination than has the history of science” (Rees and Morus 2019, 14).2 A significant element of STS’ recent interest in SF has come via Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s influential call to examine the “sociotechnical imaginaries” that contextualize and inflect scientific cultures, research programs and national funding agendas (Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect” 2015, 1). Sociotechnical imaginaries are visions of progress characteristic of modernity which circulate in the wider (national) culture and which carry (usually implicit) ideas and ideals about collective futures and the common good. Science fiction, Jasanoff suggests, is an important “repository” of the sociotechnical imaginary, offering visions that “integrate futures of growing

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knowledge and technological mastery with normative assessments of what such futures could and should mean” (Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented Worlds” 2015, 338). Stories allow us not only to map different futures but to enter politically into the very emergence of the future; through narrative we can change the story (Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented Worlds” 2015, 338). SF is a particularly important space for working out and interrogating the different values and desires associated with different future possibilities. Jasanoff and Kim mention some well-known examples of SF texts to exemplify their case. Beyond this, however, they have little to say about the genre of SF: its history, its formal and aesthetic qualities, its textual functions, its reading protocols and pleasures. To understand why SF should have a privileged place in understanding Jasanoff and Kim’s “dreamscapes of modernity” (and postmodernity), we need to turn to SF literary criticism. SF scholars emphasize that it was the first and most important literary genre to “devote its imagination to the future and to the ceaseless revolutions of knowledge and desire that attend the application of scientific and technical knowledge to social life” (CsicseryRonay 2008, 1). SF literature is a product of technoscientific modernity; the “literature of technologically saturated societies” (Luckhurst 2005, 1). Its emergence depends on the embedding of scientific epistemologies across social institutions; the visible impact of technologies on everyday life, especially work; the extension of both reading and scientific literacy in the late nineteenth century; and the emergence of new forms of popular literature and modes of cultural and technological reproduction and circulation, particularly mass-market magazines (Luckhurst 2005, 1; Vint 2014, 17–18). From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), SF emerged as a literary genre in the nineteenth century as scientists and science fiction writers “exchanged ideas” and “established knowledge and speculation” over new technologies and possible science futures (Fayter 1997, 257). SF is defined by Darko Suvin in terms of its “interest in strange newness” that creatively extrapolates “the variable and future bearing elements” of contemporary science and technologies that are shaped by “human curiosity, fear, and hope” (Suvin 1972, 373, 375, 381). Suvin sought to present the SF genre as a literary form worthy of critical and serious debate rather than one that might be understood as fantasy or fairytale—Suvin considered the turn away from science to space opera (adventure stories that happen to be set in space, e.g., Star Wars) in the 1970s as “creative suicide” as it veered away from the genre’s potential for serious critical engagement with science and society (Suvin 1972, 375). As self-styled High Culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned away from technology or “Mechanism” to focus on the transcendent and civilized sphere of art and human experience, SF avidly got to work on the possibilities and threats of an ascendant science and technology (Luckhurst 2005, 3). As Sherryl Vint notes, the genre distinguished itself formally by rejecting the conventions of realist fiction and

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“[the] novel of bourgeois interiority” (Vint 2014, 22). It devised instead new narrative modes for exploring material worlds and social patterns, systems and dynamics; for articulating perspectives beyond the human; and for narrating stories with spectacularly extended or compressed timescales (Vint 2014, 1). But if SF literature ever was simply a product or epiphenomenon of technological modernity, it seems that it has now decisively escaped the bounds of the book or popular magazine to work more actively and more ubiquitously in contemporary cultures. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, for example, insists that to understand SF now we need to look beyond texts and even genre to a culturally widespread quality of “science fictionality.” In part, the idea of science fictionality speaks to the ways in which SF now furnishes contemporary culture and media with a distinctive “thesaurus” of images, symbols, and narratives, a stock of tropes for making sense of technological change and the future: the time traveler, the generation spaceship, the alien invasion, the singularity, and the cyborg (2008, 3). Broderick has similarly suggested that over the years SF has accumulated into a “mutually imbricated megatext,” a densely intertextual and always-evolving assemblage of images, codes, grammars, stories, and protocols for making narrative sense of the new (Broderick 1995, 59). For Csicsery-Ronay, SF has given us more than a body of texts and an accompanying megatext. It has injected into modern cultures a “mood or attitude,” “a kind of awareness” that is alert to the strange, to the other, to shifts in the fabric of reality (2008, 2, 3). Science fictionality here is a mode of perception that holds open to question new technological things and scientific ideas. For Csicsery-Ronay, then, one does not have to be a fan or a close and critical reader of literary science fiction to access the science-fictional imaginary. It is always-already part of our cultural equipment and sensibility; SF simply is how modern subjects make sense of a society. As the “myth form” of an industrial and increasingly post-industrial and globalized age, SF has often been celebratory, voicing awe and wonder in the face of technological possibilities (Broderick 1995, 8). It has sought to interpellate its readers as narrow scientific positivists or pragmatic and instrumental engineers of the future. But SF has also been the critical, doubting shadow of this techno-optimism. It has allowed readers insights into the will to power of modern science and textual spaces to explore its destructive capacities. Luckhurst characterizes SF’s generic attitude toward science and technology, then, as something like ambivalence, a working through of complex disruptive ideas and material objects, a creative embrace, and a critical examination (2005, 5, emphasis in original). For Csicsery-Ronay, science fiction opens up a “hesitation” around technoscientific novelties, creating a space for r­ eflection on emergent scientific and technological developments, both in terms of their plausible development and in terms of their ethical, social, and political consequences (2008, 3). In much SF criticism, as we show below, that hesitation is framed as either an individual cognitive response or a broader cultural space for dealing with the onrush of scientific and technological change. But SF has proliferated

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and fragmented since its supposed Golden Age and the dominance of white male technofuturists (Vint 2014, 66–67). We have seen the emergence of the so-called New Wave in the mid-1960s and the development of “soft” or social science fiction through the 1970s and 1980s (Vint 2014, 75–76; Nicholls 2011). There has been a blurring or even “evaporation” of science fiction into a wider hybridization of speculative genres in recent years (Wolfe 2010). There has also been multiplying diversity and contestation in the genre’s writers, perspectives, and concerns, as well as in scholarship and fandom. We have seen the rise to prominence of feminist voices (Vint 2014, 113– 121). There have been struggles for prestige and awards between socially conservative advocates of hard SF and social justice advocates (Oleszczuk 2017). And there is increasing openness in the genre to post-colonial critique, indigeneities and queer expression and representation. The genre is now characterized by both formal and social difference, both aesthetic and identity politics, in ways that have created not just a single space but multiple overlapping spaces for the social critique of science and technology. Never prediction or prophecy, SF calls up altered worlds and futures as creative spaces of exploration, speculation, and negotiation about and with science. This iterative “scatter” of “possible futures or alternative lifeworlds” functions, as Vint notes, as a constant provocation to reflect on technological change in relation to human action and social structure as they are and as they might be (Broderick 1995, 54; Vint 2014, 22–23). SF’s futures have a strangely paradoxical relation to history and temporality. In one sense, as we have seen, SF is an unusually historically specific fictional form. It is intimately linked to the structures and lived realities of late modern, technoscientific societies. SF belongs to worlds in states of constant, heterogeneous, plural and intense transformations linked to new knowledges, and it articulates both recurring cultural or epistemological crises and the everyday experience of mundane technological change; as Damien Broderick writes, “our social being is founded in rapid, virtually uncontrollable cognitive change, principally driven by science and technology” and provoking “a unique epistemic crisis,” or, as Roger Luckhurst puts it, “in the messy, experiential world… ambivalence towards technologies is often the presiding spirit of engagement” (Broderick 1995, xi; Luckhurst 2005, 5). It is also a kind of historical fiction. As the SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues, any SF novel “will be placed in a future of ours, and you can run a track from this moment to that moment”—even if SF “is always portraying histories that we can never know” (Heise and Robinson 2016, 24–25). At the same time, SF is, as Vivian Sobchack has observed, peculiarly “unfixed in its dependence on actual time and/or place” for sense-making—unlike other genres, which are linked, however playfully, to a particular (albeit often imagined) historical period (the Western, the gangster film) (1987, 66). Formal criticism of SF has focused extensively on why this quality of SF texts matters and what it tells us about the reading practices and protocols of the genre. It is to these arguments that we now turn.

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Fiction and Science Fiction: Reading, Poetics, and Protocols Cultural historians insist that SF as a genre, megatext, or sensibility has escaped texts to become part of everyone’s cultural equipment for making sense of technoscientific societies. A different strand of SF analysis has focused more closely on specific texts and their capacities to enact socio-political critique. A formal and Marxist approach to SF, starting with the work of Darko Suvin and continuing through the influential theories of Fredric Jameson (1982 inter alia), Tom Moylan (1986), Carl Freedman (2000) and others, sees it as the literature of cognitive estrangement and explores its particular powers to distance us from dominant social and political arrangements. Here, SF is a fiction of critique with a distinctive capacity to penetrate the ideological surfaces of capitalist technomodernity and make a transformative intervention in the consciousness of its readers. SF has less to do with representing alternative futures than it does with changing how we see our present. For Suvin, the SF novel draws readers into a text that works to estrange or alienate us from our everyday reality and to apprehend how our social worlds might be otherwise (1972). Jameson relatedly insists that SF is not really about the future. Rather, through repeated attempts to imagine difference it repeatedly shows us the power of ideological closure to truly conceive of something other than what we have: specifically, (post) modern capitalism (1982).3 In this reading, SF puts the science in literature in order to work through forms of critique and political intervention that are both necessary in and distinctive to technoscientific societies. For Suvin, the definitive feature of SF is the text’s introduction of a “novum,” a wholly new “cognitive” thing (technological object or scientific idea) with the capacity to transform the lived-in world (1979, 63). In the SF novel, the novum functions formally to disrupt the text and the reading experience. The novum forces language to articulate the new. Words and sentence structures are stretched and challenged as they wrap themselves around the novel thing. The reader works to make sense of a world in which, to borrow well-known examples of first sentences from SF literature: It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four) They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. (William Gibson, Count Zero) I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed. (Octavia Butler, Imago)

An intense engagement with textual otherness provokes the reader to recognize that the conventional ways in which representation and social order are

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made to make sense are contingent and subject to change. When we read SF, we learn to become estranged from our taken-for-granted world and to read everyday experience from a critical distance. For Suvin, alienation is SF literature’s distinctive “poetics”: its formal appeal and aesthetic effect (1972, 374– 375). SF here is more than a generic mode for reflecting on the relationship between technoscience and society. It is a privileged form of textual critique that can generate new critical and political awareness. These approaches to SF focus on text and semiotics as much as content and genre. They also suggest the critical (as in necessary, as in deconstructive, analytical, curious) function of reading SF. They help us approach the genre less in terms of its representation of technoscience, and more in terms of its capacity to engage us to think it in new ways. SF criticism has had much to say about how the genre produces creative readers who learn, navigate, and deploy what the SF author and critic Samuel R. Delany calls its “protocols.” These protocols, for Delany, are located in the “interpretive space” around a text and include “specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellent…particular ways of making sense out of language” (Delany 1980, 188; Gunn 2006, 142). All genres have reading protocols. But they are perhaps particularly important in SF because of the referential unfixedness that Sobchack notes. The speculative character of SF, its ontological challenge, generates textual surfaces that “seem bizarrely under-determined,” replete with neologisms and rhetorical strangeness (Broderick 1995, 63). SF writing, as Delany puts it, is worldbuilding, line by line (1980, 178). The words do not invite the reader to recognize a pre-existing reality, but rather to participate in the making of a new or altered one as they go along—and, as James Gunn notes, to actually anticipate and enjoy this mode of active and creative reading. In these approaches, the full richness of the SF’s text’s “semiotic density” is only available to “native speakers”—trained readers who have apprenticed themselves in the genre (Broderick 1995, 63). SF’s megatext or intertextual qualities are particularly important—but so are skilled and active SF readers. Being able to make sense of SF depends on first learning its protocols from reading SF novels and then applying them to new texts in an iterative process. SF is a difficult literature that demands real intensity of care and engagement from its readers (Gunn 2006, 141–148). But it also offers intense pleasures— active, co-constructive, knowledgeable, critical. Analyses of the poetics and protocols of SF then remind us that a narrow focus on SF texts and content misses some of the most important work that genre literature does on and with science and futures. This strand of literary criticism asks us to attend to the capacity of long-form narrative fiction to mobilize critical orientations toward existing social forms, and the skilled practices of readers who work cognitively, intellectually, and affectively with science and its futures. In this sense, we might see creative and active SF readers as partners in the genre’s work of envisioning and exploring social scientific alternatives.

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These formalist approaches to SF can certainly be challenged as “prescriptive and judgemental,” as Roger Luckhurst has argued (2005, 7). They tend to focus on and reproduce a small canon of politically and aesthetically approved texts (Luckhurst 2005, 7). Only disruptive, challenging, estranging texts are valued, and a respectable literary strand of SF is separated off from the unruly, cliched, popular wilds of the genre (Roberts 2006, 11–12).4 These critiques have merit. Yet, as we will suggest in the remainder of this chapter, such approaches have made room for analyzing reading in SF in a way that more inclusive cultural histories of the genre, for all their references to “communities of practice” and fervent but all-too-brief appreciations of fans and fan studies, typically do not (Vint 2014, 93; Luckhurst 2005, 10–11). SF criticism has also been more interested in readers and readerly pleasures and minds than literary criticism in general, which, as Rita Felski notes, has been sorely lacking in “rich… accounts of how selves interact with texts” (2008, 11). Science Fiction Studies then has given us two ways of thinking about science and literature beyond the analysis of textual content as somehow representing scientific ideas or technological change. Cultural histories suggest that the genre has been a popular and at times populist response to challenges of technoscience, whose sprawling megatext and ubiquitous attitude of ambivalence (wonder vs. rejection) infuses all of our responses to science and its futures. Formalist accounts of the genre present us with a much narrower but perhaps more penetrating account of the kind of reading experience that some kinds of SF offer, their capacity to challenge and critique social realities and estrange readers.

Readers and Reading: Reception, Phenomenology, and Social Practices What is missing in even the most sophisticated formal and cultural accounts of SF, however, is both an empirical sense of how readers make sense of texts, and the contextual and biographical ways in which reading science and literature is shaped. As in mainstream literary criticism, SF theorists have paid attention to the phenomenology of reading or the reading “act,” theorizing rich and complex relationships between mind and the text (Ricoeur 1991, 45; Iser 1989, 7). But they have “generally not considered the variety and complexity of reading as a cultural practice, all too often assuming that their readings can stand for everyone else’s, or that there is a homology between literary quality and worthwhile reading experiences” (Long 2003, 221). This is perhaps not surprising in a genre in which roles are blurred, slippery, and multiple. Readers are fans are editors are critics. Even more than other literary genres, SF is notable for its participatory audiences who construct meaning and remix and reimagine worlds via communal discussion through their knowledge and experience of the SF megatext—now

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predominately online. SF has always been “explicitly and recursively theorised by its practitioners” who are “highly articulate about their positions as writers and readers” (Broderick 1995, xii). Thus while SF criticism has been particularly interested in the act of reading and the effects of texts, it has also been particularly prone to write the critic’s experience and interpretation as the general one, with all the limits and blind spots that this entails. SF literature and criticism has of course lately become more expressive of women’s voices, queer voices, non-cis, and non-white voices; more attentive to post-colonial and non-Western experiences. Previously underrepresented writers have explored alternative, independent, and self-publishing options to reach a broader audience. The genre has increasingly (though not always easily) been opened up beyond the cliché of the white male fan. But even this diversification neglects the fullest dimension of readers as individuals and communities—socially situated, embodied, affective; classed, gendered, aged, and raced; unique, thoughtful, and irreducibly complicated (Fuller and Sedo 2013, 37). If we want to work with SF as a way of understanding the cultural circulation of technoscience, we need to enrich textual analysis and accounts of reading as a rather “bloodless and disembodied” hermeneutic practice or “text-reader transaction” with sociological, historical, and ethnographic studies of readers and reading (Fuller and Sedo 2013, 39). Despite the existence of a rich field of reader-response theory in literary studies and audience studies in fields of culture and media, James Procter and Bethan Benwell note that attention to reading as a social practice “has been comparatively neglected” (2015, 214). They identify a limited tradition of sociological and cultural studies explorations of readers and reading (none focused specifically on SF), highlighting in particular an influential early wave of feminist empirical studies focused on book groups (2015, 1–2). Its key theorists broke new ground in understanding reading not as a solitary or abstracted act but as a fundamentally social practice.5 They brought home the ways in which reading takes place in specific social and spatial settings, depends on ingrained but variable cultural scripts and habits, and is maintained by relatively stable institutions and organizations. Ethnographic and discursive studies of small-scale book (reading) groups have recently been extended and complemented by studies of larger “Mass Reading Events,” and by a growing understanding of the complex ways in which fiction reading is becoming part of a wider media culture.6 All these approaches offer resources for exploring science and literature beyond reading science in the text and toward a model that opens up how social readings and diverse readers actively navigate science and narrative together. They challenge “the primacy of the literary text as an object of study” and “the imagined and ideal readers who are often constructed from or ‘read off’ the text within the discipline of literary studies” (Fuller and Sedo 2013, 37). These studies reposition reading as active, social, biographical, and situated. They are particularly interested in the differences between professional-critical

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and lay reading. The former is usually distanced, skeptical and deconstructive; lay reading, by contrast, is more often immersive, connected, and constructive.7 Making sense of science and literature, then, might mean acknowledging that our own critical readings are only one part of the story of reception. Felski calls for us to “engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading,” to attend to its multiple and diverse purposes and pleasures in everyday contexts (2008, 14). This means reflecting on the intimate entanglement of fiction reading with desires for knowledge, longings for escape, and possibilities of recognition and fantasy that she suggests have been ignored or unvalued in literary criticism in the name of political critique. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers the idea of “reparative” reading as different from (but not necessarily separate from or in opposition to) the “paranoid” stance of the professional critic (2001, 150–151). Reparative reading speaks to what we do with fiction in the name of escape, self-care, and love. Sedgwick opens up the range of affects, desires, and epistemologies that the reader might bring to the genre and the “many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture,” especially selves and communities whom that culture has not always seen (2001, 150–151). Sedgwick’s work resonates with empirical studies that emphasize readerly pleasure and reveal multiple “uses”—of “literature,” in Felski’s title, and of “reading,” in Long’s. The predominately middle-class female book club members in Long’s ethnographic study, for example, “are stubbornly attached to reading as ‘equipment for living’” (2003, 220; see also Long 2003, 131). Like de Certeau’s textual poachers, Long’s readers are greedily “raid[ing] books for what they find interesting” and using what they find to do creative identity work, both individual and collective (Long 2003, 220).8 They read to find new versions of themselves and to understand their social and political worlds. They prefer texts that invite open-ended and multiple takes, books that allow them to move between their own social experience and the situations and characters they encounter (Long 2003, 145–149). Long’s and Sedgwick’s accounts of social or reparative reading suggest a mode of textual engagement that is both more decadent and more instrumental than the methods of “schooled readers” (Long 2003, 220). Reading is done for enjoyment, involving immersion, and escape; but it is also put to practical use in making sense, collectively and individually, of social life as we experience it, desire it, imagine it (Long 2003, 201).

Meeting Readers: Online Encounters, Ethnographies, and Interviews In this last section of our chapter, we come to the practical and methodological dimensions of adding reading practices and pleasures into accounts of science and literature. Previous waves of qualitative sociological and cultural studies research have not for the most part focused on SF readings and

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readers (with the notable exception of Penley’s fan study/cultural history NASA/TREK9). More recent work on the online lives of fans and readers offers crucial clues to where and how we might meet SF readers as they make sense of science fiction and the science fictional. Here we draw on some of that literature in relation to our own ongoing sociological research with SF readers to return to the questions and issues that we have raised in the preceding sections in relation to the empirical challenges and dilemmas of working with readers. Our own concerns focus on a cluster of related issues. We are interested in how reading and engagement are framed biographically: Where and from whom, for example, do young readers discover and learn to enjoy non-mainstream fiction? How might sharing the pleasure of a sometimes overlooked genre with a parent or teacher (or discovering it alone) shape interpretive practices? We want to know about the particular pleasures of playing in alternate technoscientific worlds, the affective as well as the cognitive encounters with transformed worlds and people. We are exploring the insights and ideas that readers bring back to their lives and their reflections on contemporary science, society, history, and culture from their reading encounters. We are interested in how readers make sense of texts individually in the social contexts and experiences of their own lives, and we are interested in how readers come together to interrogate SF texts and expand their readings collectively. Virtual and real-world sites of readerly activity, which have been multiplying in recent years, present us with a plethora of places for encountering active SF readers. With the increasing “digitisation of social life” readings can travel further; dispersed readers can meet and share their ideas; and the very idea of book groups becomes more complex (Recuber 2017, 47). Even face-to-face social groups are now often organized and enhanced with virtual discussions on platforms including Facebook and constructed through online organizing tools like Meetup. Readers are now more likely to engage with other readers on sprawling multi-member book discussions sites, such as Goodreads, than in the traditional book clubs that are discussed in the core texts concerning the sociology of reading groups.10 This discourse also occurs online in blogs, podcasts, Wikis, Tumblrs, BookTube videos (YouTube curated book clubs), and via Twitter. When readers meet in person to make sense of fiction together, this is as likely to be at book festivals, SF conventions, and mass reading events as in intimate reading groups. Working with readers in the early twenty-first century, then, offers new promises for the researcher—but also new challenges. Meeting readers in person can become more difficult as readers and reading discussions disperse and even fragment across a spectrum of readerly spaces both on and offline. Participation in discussions of texts can occur simultaneously across a variety of platforms, with readers/users potentially engaging in multiple conversations. For example, a live chat on YouTube can be accompanied by discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and in the video’s comments.11

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In our own work, we have discovered that while fan conventions are sites of collective activity and interpretation, they are also spaces in which readers vociferously disagree about genre definitions, take up and contest they ways in which academics might identify them as fans, and mobilize together to defend the value of their reading pleasures against literary criticism. We have found that online SF groups can be very intimate spaces in which small groups of friends and intellectual kindred spirits come together regularly to interrogate a chosen book in depth, build a collective negotiated reading, and use fictional texts to open up journeys into wider theoretical and philosophical debates. Such groups might use a variety of online media (Skype, discussion boards, blogs) to proliferate modes of communication within a self-selecting and relatively bounded group. We have also seen, however, how online book groups such as those on Goodreads can be text-only spaces that are open to more distanced, occasional and ad hoc contributions from globally dispersed participants, who might read a text like Parable of the Sower both in relation to national political histories and individual prospects for survival in the dystopic future world of broken infrastructure, environmental racism, and climate collapse that Octavia Butler’s text depicts.12 Social and reading interactions multiply and challenge SF scholars to make sociological sense of the huge volume of unsorted data that can be gleaned from virtual spaces. This data requires new methodologies, as researchers are predominately observers who harvest (rather than generate) data in collaboration with readers. There are also ethical considerations when contemplating consent and navigating public versus private settings for collecting and using material posted to openly accessible virtual spaces, including videos and podcasts as well as comments and forum discussions (Recuber 2017, 48). Researchers must consider the lived experience of online interactions, rather than assuming that online personas and confessions are equivalent to realworld interpersonal discussions of science and literature. More conventional qualitative methods—interviews and participation observation—thus remain extremely valuable for exploring biographical and personal dimensions of fictional reading experiences with individuals. At the same time, digital social interactions must be considered as part of everyday life, as identities are formed and performed in ways that might have been, as Steve Jones suggests, “limited in physical space” (1999, xxii). Contemporary readers can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they wish online and respond to fiction via multiple personae and roles (critic, commenter, fan, etc.) Virtual spaces offer a certain anonymity in which boundaries of age, race, gender, class, disability, geography, and expected expertise are blurred. Online book groups “tend to be ephemeral, imagined, and geographically distributed” (Gruzd and Sedo 2012). This openness and potentially radical anonymity can facilitate discussions of issues that may not be covered by books selected by face-to-face book groups, both social and commercial. Readers can use these spaces to resist or disrupt stereotypes

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concerning race, gender, sexuality, and expertise about SF readers—and also to promote and engage with texts and authors who do not align with or appear within the traditional SF literary canon. For example, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (2015, 2017, 2018), Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014), and Larissa Lai’s, Salt Fish Girl (2002) feature as increasingly popular choices for reading groups as they offer raced, queer and other underrepresented viewpoints. For even in the most feminist moments of the SF genre’s history, it is still so often the white male writer who dominates. Therefore in order to break through the canon alternative methods of reaching readers (self-publishing, crowd-funding, and direct online engagement) have been employed. SF offers a potentially radical space for intersectional, indigenous voices with new technologies, modes, and virtual spaces allowing them to gain traction and popularity.13 As Danielle Fuller and DeNel Sedo argue, “[the] urge for people to be social through their reading has not died in the face of technological change” (2014, 15). Rather, virtual spaces offer new opportunities to discuss texts with an intimacy that is not constrained by local or global barriers. Virtual spaces have allowed for communities of readers to build around specific genres, subgenres, and interests, making the exchange of ideas and experiences almost instantaneous compared to the slower (but equally social) SF fan practices earlier in the twentieth century, including correspondence with fanzines and newsletters and the search for fellow readers. Finally, we want to emphasize that the proliferation of SF reading practices online does not translate straightforwardly into access to those readers for researchers. If we are going to include readers in our understanding of science and literature, our challenge is to work with them, not on them, and to find ways of engaging in a genuine two-way dialogue. Above all, this means approaching SF readers as skillful readers of science and culture who are reflexive about their pleasures and interests. They are not objects of study, but co-constructors of knowledge about reading science in science fiction. At the same time, SF readers often have strong personal definitions of the genre and a powerful sense of the place and value of science within the texts they enjoy. SF readers are particularly quick, as we have found in our own research, to identify and respond to the labels that well-meaning but inadequately informed researchers may place on them. The readers we observed and interviewed often resisted being characterized as experts, for example, and skeptically examine their identification as fans. Expertise, for many SF readers, is a hard-earned claim about scientific knowledge, not about readerly skills of interpretation and critical revelation. Some SF readers are fans, but not all fans are SF readers. They may engage with the megatext, but not be active fans in the sense of creating and occupying literary storyworlds. Negotiating and unpacking these categories and characterizations with SF readers is one way of entering into their reading worlds and starting to read science in fiction from the inside out.

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Conclusion Studies of reading can help us to understand it as a “transitive” act, linking literature and personal experience in an iterative and under-determined way (Long 2003, 29). In empirical research with SF readers, we find that reading is critical and transformative—an ethical engagement, a political act. But it does not (only) operate in the mode of radical cognitive estrangement that Suvin suggests. Its powers are more everyday and mundane than that, more rooted in biography, personal experience, and reading contexts. Literary critics, as Felski remarks, “love to assign exceptional powers to the texts they read,” to identify texts’ capacity to mobilize social change or shift subjectivities (2008, 18). But Radway reminds us pointedly that textual meaning is not a linear process, emanating in the creativity of the author and communicated via the book to the reader (in Long 2003, 21).14 Reception or reading is not an end point; it can be a starting point for new acts of creative and critical imagination. Reading experiences are replete with multiple pleasures and opportunities for new modes of understanding and insight, which are inseparable from specific reader biographies, social and historical situations, and reading formations. Engaging with readers and reading acts is not intended to displace critical scholarly readings of science and/in literature, but to also ask how they can be complemented by an understanding of lay modes of reading. From this point of view, understanding SF and science and literature more generally cannot be reduced to critical readings of specific scientific texts or projections of ideal and implied readers. It can also involve working with all sorts of readers sociologically, both as objects of study and resources for understanding the complex ways by which readers make sense of technoscientific societies through narrative.

Notes

1. See for a recent example Andrew Dincher, “On the origins of solarpunk.” 2. See also Joanna Radin’s recent reading of Michael Crichton’s science fiction techno-thriller’s as a form of STS in “The Speculative Present: How Michael Crichton Colonized the Future of Science and Technology.” 3. Jameson first made these arguments in the article “Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future,” which was included in Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. 4. Roberts refers to Broderick, Reading by Starlight. 5. See Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, and Long, Book Clubs. 6. On mass reading events, see Fuller and Sedo, Reading Beyond the Book. On the wider story of proliferating entanglements between traditional fictional forms and more recent forms of media and digital culture, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

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7. See John Guillory, “The Ethics of Reading,” in Marjorie Garber et al. (eds.), The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Felski, Uses of Literature; and Procter and Benwell, Reading Across Worlds. 8. Long refers to the concept of textual poaching, first developed in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (e.g., 166), and popularized by Henry Jenkins, who defines “textual poaching” as “an impertinent raid on the literary preserve where fans take away only those things that are useful or pleasurable” (2013, 9). 9. NASA/TREK is study of gender, fandom, and desire in science and technology explored through non-traditional/academic, fanfiction-inspired prose. Penley argues that in American culture the NASA space program is shorthand and focus for public interest in science and technology and that fiction is used to supplement the disappointments of real-world science. NASA and Star Trek are inextricably linked in the US public imagination and its negotiation of the role and place of science and technologies in our day-to-day lives (1997). 10. See: Radway, Reading the Romance; Long, “Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies,” “Reading Groups and the Postmodern Crisis of Cultural Authority,” “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” and Book Clubs; and Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups. 11.  For example, the Vaginal Fantasy Book Club (2012–2018, http://vaginalfantasy.com/), hosted by actress and web series creator Felicia Day, used the Google/YouTube Hangouts on Air to livestream their book club, consisting of a discussion among the host, Veronica Belmont, Bonnie Burton, and Kiala Kazebee. Viewers/readers/users were encouraged to read the book in advance of viewing the video and could comment on the video, respond to and make comments on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and join and participate in the associated Goodreads forum, which had over 16,000 followers, and attend real-world local meet-ups organized by individuals through Goodreads. Discussions have included science-based texts, including: Fortune’s Pawn (Rachel Bach 2013); In the Black (Sheryl Nantus 2014); and Binti (Nnedi Okorafor 2015). 12. This paragraph discusses research with readers conducted by the authors as part of the project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narratives, and Future Histories (2016–2018, AH/M005534/1)—see www.unsettlingscientificstories.co.uk. Research with online reading groups in the second phase of that project was led by Miranda Iossifidis. For more on the reading groups mentioned here see Iossifidis (2018) “Uses of science fiction,” paper presented in the Visual Cultures Public Programme, Goldsmiths College London, November 15, 2018. 13.  adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s (2015) short story anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements was originally crowd-funded and intended to be self-published (it was eventually published by the AK Press). The collection was written and workshopped by activist-writers. It explores “the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change” (AK Press description, https://www. akpress.org/octavia-s-brood.html). Joan Haran uses the compound term

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“imaginactivism” in her discussion of this text to explore how people can be inspired by the “possibility of creating a new cultural intervention” and the radical potential of the science fiction genre to offer creative spaces for those who have been historically mis- and underrepresented (2017). 14. See also Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor.”

Bibliography Broderick, Damien. 1995. Reading by Starlight: Post-Modern Science Fiction. London: Routledge. brown, adrienne maree, and Walidah Imarisha (eds.). 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Chico, CA: AK Press. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Delany, Samuel R. 1980. Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and Mundane. In The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fiction, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward, 175–193. Madison, WI: Coda Press. Dincher, Andrew. 2017. On the Origins of Solarpunk. In Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, ed. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, 7–9. Nashville, TN: Upper Rubber Boot Press. Fayter, Paul. 1997. Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction. In Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman, 256– 280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Freedman, Carl. 2000. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. “And Then We Went to the Brewery”: Reading as a Social Activity in a Digital Era. World Literature Today 88 (3–4): 14–18. Gruzd, Anatoly, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2012. #1b1t: Investigating Reading Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture 3 (2): n.p. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1009347ar. Accessed 28 July 2018. Guillory, John. 2000. The Ethical Practice of Reading: The Example of Modernity. In The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz, 29–46. New York: Routledge. Gunn, James. 2006. The Protocols of Science Fiction. In Inside Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn, 141–148. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Haran, Joan. 2017. Instantiating Imaginactivism: Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as Inspiration. Ada: A Journal of Media, New Media, and Technology 12: n.p. https://adanewmedia.org/2017/10/issue12-haran/. Accessed 20 July 2019. Hartley, Jenny. 2001. Reading Groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heise, Ursula, and Kim Stanley Robinson. 2016. Realism, Modernism and the Future: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. ASAP/Journal 1 (1): 17–33.

260  A. C. CHAMBERS AND L. GARFORTH Iossifidis, Miranda. 2018. Uses of Science Fiction. Paper presented in the Visual Cultures Public Programme, Goldsmiths College, London, November 15. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1989. Prospecting: From the Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future. Science Fiction Studies 9 (2): 147–158. ———. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. Imagined and Invented Worlds. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 321–342. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2013. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Jones, Steve. 1999. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Long, Elizabeth. 1986. Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies. American Quarterly 38: 591–612. ———. 1987. Reading Groups and the Postmodern Crisis of Cultural Authority. Cultural Studies 1: 306–327. ———. 1992. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity. Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Nicholls, Peter. 2011. Soft SF. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz. Updated December 20. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/soft_sf. Accessed 18 July 2019. Oleszczuk, Anna. 2017. Sad and Rabid Puppies: Politicization of the Hugo Award Nomination Procedure. New Horizons in English Studies 2 (1): 127–135. Penley, Constance. 1997. NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso. Proctor, James, and Bethan Benwell. 2015. Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Radin, Joanna. 2019. The Speculative Present: How Michael Crichton Colonized the Future of Science and Technology. OSIRIS 34 (2019): 297–315.

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Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1986. Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor. Book Research Quarterly 2: 7–29. Recuber, Timothy. 2017. Digital Discourse Analysis: Finding Meaning in Small Online Spaces. In Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, ed. Digital Sociologies, 47–60. London: Policy Press. Rees, Amanda, and Iwan Rhys Morus. 2019. Introduction: Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science. OSIRIS 34: 1–15. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding. In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés, 43–64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Roberts, Adam. 2006. Science Fiction. London: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2001. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1987. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: The Ungar Publishing Company. Suvin, Darko. 1972. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. College English 34 (3): 372–382. ———. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narratives, and Future Histories (AHRC 2016–2018). Online at: unsettlingscientificstories.co.uk. Accessed 10 Sept 2019. Vint, Sherryl. 2014. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury. Wolfe, Gary K. 2010. The Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and Sightings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

CHAPTER 15

Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 Joseph Fitzpatrick

What can the science of linguistics contribute to the writing and reading of science fiction? This question serves as a starting point for Mark Bould’s entry on “Language and Linguistics” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, which begins by noting a gap between “the wealth of language problems in science fiction and the poverty of linguistic explanation” (Bould 2009, 225).1 The “problems” are obvious enough, from learning alien languages to managing galactic empires to representing this alterity in a largely linguistic medium. These problems aren’t the product of any scientific theory, and neither the writers nor the interpreters of sf texts have consistently employed linguistic theory to make sense of them. Bould discusses Saussure and Bakhtin, who have been almost infinitely productive for literary critics thinking about language; but they give him little traction in explaining the sf texts. The only linguistic theory that has inspired a significant number of sf plots and themes is the somewhat obscure Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis—the idea that the language we speak structures our thoughts and perceptions, an sf staple from George Orwell’s 1984 to the recent Hollywood film Arrival. Searching for something beyond this one linguistic theory, Bould finally turns to a 1971 essay by Samuel Delany that “introduced sf to the ‘linguistic turn’ in critical theory” by arguing that the field of sf cannot be delimited according to texts’ content, but only by their representational mode, with sf defined as texts with a “subjunctive” relationship to reality (ibid., 231–2). While this

J. Fitzpatrick (*)  Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_15

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subjunctivity doesn’t answer or explain much, the turn to Delany is a smart one: if linguistics has so little to say about the content of sf texts, perhaps an sf author with Delany’s theoretical sophistication can show us what sf is doing in, through, and to language. While Bould doesn’t attempt to explain away the gap between sf writing and linguistic explanation, his essay offers helpful starting points for thinking about it. To begin with, we need a clearer sense of why the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis has fascinated sf writers. Based somewhat loosely on the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, this theory came together in the early 1950s, in the same “technocultural conjuncture” (Luckhurst 2005, ch. 4) that transformed science fiction into a widely read and finally respectable popular genre. Rather than a coherent scientific hypothesis, it is better understood as a messy and discontinuous conglomeration of anthropological research, popular science, and philosophical supposition, all filtered through the tendentious interpretive practices of the widely interdisciplinary and wildly ambitious postwar American social sciences. Unlike Einstein’s relativity (on which it was modeled), Whorf’s linguistic relativity thesis was not an accepted scientific theory that inspired sf as a secondary effect. From its beginning, it was already a mixture of science and speculation, perhaps not different enough from sf to offer much explanatory purchase. In parsing this origin story, we’ll have to look at a second linguistic theory that emerged from the same conjuncture, a rival or complement to the Sapir– Whorf Hypothesis. The postwar academy was awash with interdisciplinary work in cybernetics, information theory, and cryptography—none of which are specifically linguistic fields. But in Warren Weaver’s revolutionary idea that digital computers could translate texts between human languages, these fields converged in a view of language as simply one form of information, with translation becoming no more complicated than coding and transmission. This unlimited translatability contrasted with the common interpretations of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis as a radical relativism that imagined speakers of different languages as trapped in their separate and incommensurable thought worlds—that is, as a theory of untranslatability. When we approach the question of linguistics in sf in terms of translation, we begin to see it as a struggle between two (equally strange and vexed) theories rather than the simple domination of one. With these theories in mind, we will turn to Samuel Delany’s 1966 novel, Babel-17. Rather than treating Delany as a homegrown linguistic theorist of sf, I want to approach Babel-17 itself as a perceptive working through of the relationship between the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Weaver’s ideas about language, information, and translation. By entangling these theories in an sf plot, Delany had to attend to aspects of them that were rarely addressed by academic critics working within and talking across scholarly disciplines. The novel’s insights come not only from Delany’s theoretical acumen, but also from his need to think about these theories in terms of character motivation, thematic coherence, and narrative closure.

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Untranslatability and the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis Why has linguistic relativity so often provided the basis for sf representations of language? The theory became popular through the 50s and 60s. By 1975, George Steiner could treat it as central to a discussion of relativist vs. universalist approaches to language; a few years later, linguistic historian Geoffrey Sampson (1980, 81) described it as having “held a perennial fascination for linguists of diverse schools.” But this fascination was not always positive, and the academic success of cognitivism brought Whorf’s theories into disrepute. In the 1990s, Deborah Cameron (1999, 153) noted that linguists had come to regard Whorf’s ideas as “that which must be refuted at all costs,” and Steven Pinker (2007, 124) has since boasted that his 1994 The Language Instinct “gave [Whorfianism] its obituary.” Perhaps inevitably, cognitivists themselves have recently returned to Whorf, with “neo-Whorfians” and their opponents quarreling via pop science books on language, thought, and perception (Deutscher 2010; McWhorter 2014; see also Evans 2014). This back-and-forth game of fascination and renunciation has been played at and across the boundaries of linguistics as a scientific field—sometimes separating linguists from cognitive psychologists, other times defining linguistics or cognitive science from within, and almost always figuring into how linguistic theory is represented in intellectual histories, introductory surveys, and popularizing trade books. To make sense of this Whorfian theory, we need to begin by recognizing how tellingly overdetermined it is: as Cameron astutely observed, “If Whorf had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, and some would say we have done precisely that” (1999, 154). What, then, are the origins of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis? Benjamin Lee Whorf’s life and work blur the boundaries separating academic disciplines from each other and from non-academic intellectual culture (Schultz 1990). Whorf’s only academic degree was a BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT, and his primary employment was as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His avocational interests in Biblical exegesis and deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs led him to taking graduate courses in American Indian Linguistics at Yale with Edward Sapir, publishing several papers in scholarly journals, and briefly teaching at Yale when Sapir was on sabbatical (Darnell 1990, 375–82). While his ideas about linguistic relativity were set out rigorously in an essay written for a 1941 festschrift in honor of Sapir, they were more widely known through three essays written for The Technology Review, a popular science journal published by MIT. Whorf’s writings were collected in 1956 in Language, Thought, and Reality, a collection edited by John B. Carroll that also included Whorf’s earlier linguistics papers, various unpublished writings, and an essay written for the Theosophical society in Madras, India. As a marginal academic contributing to a recently professionalized field, Whorf was eclectic in both his audiences and his intellectual forebears. His biographers tend to impose a teleology on his thought by emphasizing

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beginnings and endings, from his early fascination with French Theosophist Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s linguistic hermeneutics to his essay for the Theosophical society journal, his last published work (Rollins 1980; Whorf 1956, Introduction). For them, Whorf combines the idiosyncrasies of an autodidact with the rigorous training of a student of Sapir’s. Linguistic historian John E. Joseph (2002, ch. 4) has taken a different approach, depicting Whorf as skillfully combining two academically entrenched but rhetorically incongruous approaches to language and culture, the “metaphysical garbage” and “magic key” views. The former, which Joseph traces through logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, worried that aspects of logic traditionally regarded as universal and necessary (e.g., the idea that there are substances, which have attributes) are actually by-products of the grammatical contingencies of a particular group of languages (here, subject-predicate sentence structure). Whorf emphasized this line of argument in his Technology Review essays on science and logic: “when anyone, as a natural logician, is talking about reason, logic, and the laws of correct thinking, he is apt to be simply marching in step with purely grammatical facts that have somewhat of a background character in his own language or family of languages” (1956, 211). The other tradition, the “magic key” approach descended from the anthropological theories of Herder and Humboldt, treats language as formative of a culture’s Weltanschauung, and thus as a crucial tool for understanding that culture. This comes through most clearly in Whorf’s more ethnographically oriented writings: “the problem of thought and thinking in the native community […] is largely a matter of one especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena that we call a language” (ibid., 65). For Whorf, these two approaches to the language-and-thought relationship were clearly complementary. We should study languages such as Hopi and Shawnee both to gain insight into those cultures and to discover which elements of our own metaphysics are contingent (because different in other languages)—and thus also to learn new ways of seeing the world. Whorf’s work on linguistic relativity entered into academic debates largely through the efforts of another Sapir student, Harry Hoijer. Hoijer co-organized an interdisciplinary conference on “Language in Culture” at the University of Chicago in 1953, the proceedings of which were published as a special issue of The American Anthropologist. In addition to continuing the work that Whorf (who died from cancer in 1941 at the age of forty-four) had begun, Hoijer had two goals of his own: to situate Whorf’s theories within a respectable scholarly framework by emphasizing their connection to Sapir, and to extrapolate from them a hypothesis that could instigate empirical research programs across various social science disciplines. This is especially clear in his coining of the name “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” and framing the debate as “a stimulus, and perhaps even a directive, to future and more productive research” (Hoijer 1954, ix). This move toward hypothesis testing was already a marked break from Whorf’s writings. In his essay for the Sapir festschrift,

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Whorf stated explicitly what kind of link he saw between language and culture: “There are connections but not correlations or diagnostic correspondences between cultural norms and linguistic patterns” (1956, 159). Throughout the “Language in Culture” conference, Hoijer’s efforts to extract a testable hypothesis from Whorf were resisted by the participants closest to his (and Whorf’s) disciplinary background of linguistic anthropology. Fellow Sapir student Charles F. Hockett described Whorf’s theory as “a thematic analysis” that had nothing to do with hypothesis testing: “Themes are the bases for analogies, often conflicting, in terms of which the actual behavior conforms in this, that, and the other context” (Hoijer 1954, 236). The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber saw in Whorf “imagination” and “a touch of genius,” admiring his ability to identify—via “some gift of perception […], possibly aesthetic”—“a set of superpatterns” running throughout Hopi language and culture, the connections among which (Kroeber concluded) “will be very hard to prove” (ibid., 231–2). These appeals to thematic analysis, analogy making, and aesthetic sensibility make Whorf sound a bit like an sf novelist. This might offer a clue as to why sf writers have been inspired by Whorf’s theory, and it certainly suggests an intriguing “analogy” between Whorf’s theory and the pervasive linguistic themes in the sf writings of Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin. By contrast, the psychologists and philosophers participating in the conference read Whorf as making falsifiable (and largely false) claims about perception and cognition. The terms of this reading are set out in psychologist Franklin Fearing’s paper and developed in several of the discussion sessions. While Fearing treats Whorf’s texts sympathetically and at length, he distorts them by trying to translate them into terms from his own discipline. In the narrow sense, this meant treating Whorf as a theorist not of culture, but of perception. More broadly, it meant treating Whorf as a type of radical relativist “with which social scientists are already familiar” (Hoijer 1954, 49). Fearing repeatedly summarizes Whorf as claiming that “The linguistic pattern of each language or family of languages determines the course of thought” (ibid., 50). The key term here is “determine,” which Fearing repeats throughout the essay and includes prominently in his introductory paragraph’s summary of Whorf’s views (ibid., 47). This claim that language determines a person’s perception and “course of thought” entails that language sets strict limits on that person’s cognitive agency, trapping them within a particular “world view.” This reading of Whorf follows one published a year earlier by the sociologist Lewis Feuer (quoted in passing by Fearing), which had concluded that “Linguistic relativity is the doctrine of untranslatability in modern guise” since it argues that a language “defines for its users a unique cultural universe,” with different languages’ “cultural universes” being, by definition, incommensurable (Feuer 1953, 94–5). While Fearing did not mention untranslatability explicitly in his essay, it came up in the discussion sessions. In his own paper, Hoijer had been explicit in reading Whorf as not making this argument: “The languages of human beings do not so much determine the perceptual and other faculties of their

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speakers vis-à-vis experience as they influence and direct these faculties into prescribed channels. Intercultural communication, however wide the difference between cultures may be, is not impossible. It is simply more or less difficult, depending on the degree of difference between the cultures concerned” (Hoijer 1954, 94; see also Leavitt 2011, 146–7). In one of the discussion sessions, the philosopher Abraham Kaplan expressed his surprise at this reading, saying that he had “misread” Whorf “in the same way that Fearing did” to be arguing “that you do not translate thought-worlds one into another” (Hoijer 1954, 173). Both Kaplan and Fearing seemed willing enough to defer to the linguistic anthropologists on this point, letting Hoijer have the last word on the matter: “Whorf, it seems to me, is not insisting on the impossibility of translation or on the uniqueness of thought-worlds. Rather, he is admitting the possibility that you can talk in English about the Hopi thought-world and make it, to a very high degree, understandable” (ibid., 174). But while Hoijer got the last word, it’s not clear that everyone regarded Fearing’s summary as a misreading. One participant, the psychologist Eric Lenneberg, published an essay shortly afterward that claimed Whorf disputed the “mutual translatability among languages” (Brown and Lenneberg 1954, 454), a view that soon became the standard reading of Whorf. In a 1959 essay on translation and linguistics, Roman Jakobson quotes from Whorf as an example of “the dogma of untranslatability” (1959, 234). Jakobson’s strategy for refuting this dogma is worth noting: he points out that the “metalinguistic” faculty that is integral to human speech “permits revision and redefinition of the vocabulary used,” giving any would-be translator the tools necessary to expand their own language to accommodate any lexical or grammatical oddities in the foreign language (ibid., 234–6). For Hoijer and others, Whorf’s entire intellectual project was itself an attempt at “metalinguistic” analysis, making languages such as Hopi understandable in English in order to demonstrate their strangeness to English readers. If Whorf’s writings from the 1930s were compelling thanks to their deft intermingling of the anthropologists’ “magic key” and the philosophers’ “metaphysical garbage” approaches to language, it might be helpful to think of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis constructed in the 1950s as a similarly evocative hybrid: an aesthetic vision linking thematic superstructures of language and culture, but also a relativist paradox positing a gap between the kinds of translation that we regularly perform and an unachievable ideal of translatability. The 1953 conference demonstrated the difficulty of incorporating this hypothesis into disciplinary research programs, where the untranslatability paradox would have to be dealt with directly. But on the margins of disciplines, the margins of the academy, and especially in works of fiction, the tension between thematic unity and paradoxical untranslatability proved irresistible. In a 1960 issue of Scientific American, the sociologist James Cooke Brown proposed a test of “the Whorfian thesis of linguistic determinism” by

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the creation of a new language, Loglan, that would advance the Leibnizian project of creating a “universal symbolism” for the guiding of rational thought (53; see also Eco 1995). Jack Vance’s 1958 novel The Languages of Pao transformed the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis into a science fiction plot: the people of Pao exhibit a homogeneity and passivity corresponding to their world’s verbless and perfectly regular language, until their leaders invent three new languages that train their speakers to be scholars, merchants, and warriors (respectively). Both Brown and Vance appeal to some combination of American liberal pluralism and an insistence (like Jakobson) on the human metalinguistic capacity to bridge different languages: Loglan draws vocabulary from the world’s eight most widely spoken languages, combining them with logical notations in an attempt to purge language of its metaphysical garbage, and Pao’s languages converge into a pidgin form used by the linguists who created the artificial languages. The fantasy is the same in both cases: most languages trap their speakers into deterministic thought worlds, but a language can be created that will enable its speakers to rise above these differences and become fully human—culturally diverse in Vance’s case, properly rational in Brown’s.

Translation and Information Studies of linguistics in sf see the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis everywhere they look. Bould (2009, 229), for instance, mentions Babel-17 and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash together as “paranoid versions of linguistic determinism” following a Whorfian model. While this isn’t wrong, it obscures the fact that both novels put Whorfian relativism into conversation with a very different theory of language. This is most explicit in Stephenson’s novel, which cites George Steiner’s (1975) distinction between relativist (i.e., Whorfian) and universalist linguistic theories. The novel’s plot follows the universalist position that all languages “share certain traits that have their roots in the ‘deep structures’ of the human brain”— building on an analogy between the brain’s language faculty and the machine languages of computers (Stephenson 1992, 276–8). While the languages we normally speak (English, French) place us in separate worlds, there exists a language that goes below them, communicating directly with the brain’s language center; a person who can write this language becomes a “neurolinguistic hacker,” able to transmit instructions directly into certain people’s brains without passing through their consciousness. The “Snow Crash” of the novel’s title exists at three distinct analogical levels: as a somatic virus that affects human bodies; as a computer virus that affects people’s virtual avatars; and as a neurolinguistic virus, a nam-shub (or curse) written in the Sumerian language that communicates directly with auditors’ brains. Clearly, we are a long way from the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. Stephenson’s characters explain this analogical system by referring (via Steiner) to Chomskian “deep structure,” but in a way that bears almost

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no resemblance to Chomsky’s actual theories (see Joseph 2002, 181–96, as well as Martin-Nielsen 2012). The ideas explored in the novel are neither Whorfian nor Chomskian; they draw on another theoretical framework that exerted substantial influence on sf writing in the late twentieth century, one we can think of as a kind of counterpart to the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. While this theory isn’t associated with any one writer the way that linguistic relativity is with Whorf, it can largely be traced back to a pair of essays written in 1949 by Warren Weaver. Like Whorf, Weaver’s most influential work was done outside of the academy—though this did not make him marginal in quite the same sense. As the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Sciences Division from 1932 to 1959, Weaver funded groundbreaking research in genetics, agriculture, and molecular biology. During World War II he joined the Office of Scientific Research and Development at the invitation of Vannevar Bush, working with Norbert Wiener on the fire control mechanisms that inspired the cybernetic theory of feedback, with John von Neumann on the conceptual design of digital computers, and with Claude Shannon on cryptographic problems that led to the development of information theory. Weaver’s work as a science administrator placed him at the intersection of various academic disciplines and interdisciplinary research programs, giving him a perspective (and a soapbox) that contributed to his success as a popularizer and a scholarly instigator. As a popularizer, Weaver is best known for his introductory overview of Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Shannon’s theory laid the groundwork for what came to be known as the Information Age, coining the term “bit” (from “binary digit”) and demonstrating that the information carried by a message could be quantified by the same formula used to calculate the entropy of a physical system (see Soni and Goodman 2017; Gleick 2011; Kline 2015). Weaver’s essay offered a lucid, largely non-mathematical explanation of the technical details of Shannon’s theory. More importantly, it situated the theory within a framework of the study of human communication, defining a structured hierarchy of three “problems” of communication (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 95–8). The most basic was the “technical problem” of accurately transmitting a message from sender to receiver—the problem that Shannon’s theory quantified and explained. Above this technical problem, Weaver stacked two others: the “semantic problem” (what the transmitted message means) and the “effectiveness problem” (what we accomplish by transmitting this meaningful message). The three levels were structurally related, with success at each level predicated on success at all of the lower levels: effective communication depends on successfully conveying meaning, which in turn depends on successfully transmitting messages. Throughout his explanation of the technical problem, Weaver emphasizes the narrow scope of the term “information” in Shannon’s theory. Measuring a message’s statistical rather than semantic properties, information “has nothing to do with meaning” (1955, 116). Yet Weaver concludes his paper with

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a speculative attempt at extending Shannon’s quantitative “technical” theory upward to address the semantic and effectiveness problems through a series of analogies—wherein, for instance, signal noise becomes “semantic noise” (ibid., 114–7). Weaver offers no evidence that such analogies could be valid or productive, relying instead on the persuasiveness of a repeated metaphor. Weaver assures his reader that Shannon’s seemingly “superficial” technical theory in fact has a mysterious “deep significance” (ibid., 97), concluding that the theory of the technical level is “fundamental in the problems it treats” and “deep enough” to be “dealing with the real inner core of the communication problem” (ibid., 114–5). Through a subtle catachresis, a colloquial metaphor representing valuable or useful insights as “deep” underwrites Weaver’s claim that the technical theory of communication is the foundation for and even the essence of the semantic and effectiveness problems. This metaphorics of depth is crucial to Weaver’s other 1949 text, a widely distributed memo proposing the use of digital computers to translate natural languages, usually cited as the origin of machine translation research in the United States. Weaver begins this memo with a wartime anecdote about cryptography, in which a cryptanalyst successfully decodes a string of numbers into a message in Turkish—despite not knowing Turkish or even that the original had been written in Turkish. Concluding from this that languages with “wide superficial differences” (e.g., English and Turkish) must have statistically significant “invariant properties” discernible through cryptographic analysis, Weaver speculates about a possible “logical structure” common to all languages, a vague notion that he again supports with nothing more than a metaphor of depth (ibid., 15–17). In a parable of translation, he asks the reader to imagine speakers of different languages as inhabitants of a series of towers spaced far enough apart to make shouting between them nearly impossible, and to further imagine that the inhabitants could descend to “a great open basement, common to all the towers,” where communication would be easy (ibid., 23). Languages dissimilar on the surface share a common foundation, a logical structure buried deep below. While this wouldn’t help in translating poetry, where surface structures such as rhyme are constitutive of meaning, Weaver argues that “technical writing” (scientific prose) is simply “an expression of logical character,” a surface manifestation of a universal logical structure (ibid., 20, 22). Translation of such texts should simply be a matter of descending into the linguistic basement. Echoing his speculations in the Shannon summary, Weaver imagines the “technical” problem—which can be modeled statistically—as the foundation for problems of meaning and use, a foundation to which these trickier problems might be reduced. Like cracking the Turkish code, “technical” translation could be accomplished through statistical analysis, even by someone unfamiliar with the (surface) languages involved. Weaver dubs this “the cryptographic-translation idea” and regards it as an extension of a commonsense approach to practical problems of translation: “When I look at an article in Russian,

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I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode’” (ibid., 18). Given the success of the Colossus computer at breaking Japanese codes during the war, Weaver proposed that computers could be similarly helpful in translating technical documents. Weaver’s idea was taken up immediately, with the first public demonstration of machine translation coming just five years after the memo was written. While many linguists were skeptical that a computer could handle the complexities of translation, some were eager to join the faddish and well-funded machine translation research that flourished from 1954 to 1966—which failed to realize the sci-fi fantasy of a translation machine, but succeeded in academic terms by producing the new scholarly field of computational linguistics (Gordin 2015, chs. 8–9). Even among linguists uninterested in computers, Weaver’s use of information theory as a foundation for communication research became an important theoretical framework thanks to the efforts of Roman Jakobson. Lily Kay (2000, ch. 7) has discussed how Jakobson, at Weaver’s urging, incorporated terms from Shannon’s theory into a Saussurian linguistic model (e.g., replacing langue and parole with “code” and “message”) and promoted an integrated theory of communication through editing the “Studies in Communication” series on the MIT Press. Jakobson, who had been so wary of Whorf, eagerly joined Weaver’s efforts to reimagine code systems as disparate as DNA and natural languages through a single, unified informational-semiotic theory. Outside the academy, Weaver’s idea was easily assimilated to Norbert Wiener’s popularization of cybernetics. Wiener (1950, 91) envisioned something like Weaver’s reduction of communication problems to information theory, considering it “theoretically not impossible to develop the statistics of the semantic and behavioral languages to such a level that we may get a fair measure of the amount of information in each system.” The language here is cautious rather than speculative. Weaver’s memo on machine translation had included excerpts from an epistolary exchange with Wiener in which Wiener dismissed as impractical the idea of actually using computers to translate. In the realm of theory, though, he was much more ambitious. For instance, Wiener (1950) goes on to claim that it would be “theoretically possible” to translate the “pattern” (109) of a human being into a binary code that could be transmitted via telegraph—but insists that he discusses this possibility only to illustrate the importance of the concept of transmission, “not because I want to write a science fiction story concerning itself with the possibility of telegraphing a man” (ibid., 111). Wiener keeps his speculations “theoretical,” realizing that this theory already borders on science fiction in its conflating of statistical information theory, language, and the structures of the human body and mind. With the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis as a relativist theory of untranslatability, Weaver’s cryptographic-translation idea can serve as its universalist

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opposite: a theory of unbounded translatability. If machine translation is possible, it’s because down in its depths, human language is just information, and the technical problem of information can be solved by digital computers. By this logic, translatability extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of language, since anything that is information—languages, human bodies, any pattern at all—can be translated into any other form of information. If a human body can be translated into dots and dashes and sent through a telegraph cable, then the words of an ancient Sumerian curse can be translated into a computer file or protein sequence that will wreak similar havoc on human bodies or their avatars. Where Sapir–Whorf forbids speakers from rising out of their thought worlds into the realm of metalanguage, Weaver’s theory proudly leads its information processors down into the basement of logical structure. To call either theory scientific—or linguistic in the narrow, disciplinary sense—would be a stretch. They come from the margins, as much a product of casual misreadings and popularizing flights of fancy as of the cross-disciplinary brainstorming that made them seem plausible. But, taken together, they outline a set of possibilities for thinking about the relationships that connect human beings to each other and to the world through languages. Some of these possibilities seem to have been clearer to sf writers than to professional academics, which is what makes Babel-17 so interesting.

Babel-17 Delany’s novel begins by addressing Weaver’s “cryptographic-translation idea” head-on. We are introduced to General Forester, carrying transcripts of radio signals intercepted moments before several catastrophic acts of military sabotage, written in some sort of code that Military Cryptography has been unable to crack and has dubbed “Babel-17.” Forester is meeting Rydra Wong, the galaxy’s most famous poet and most accomplished cryptanalyst. In a bit of expository dialogue, Rydra explains to Forester that Babel-17 is not a code, but a language. With codes, “once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning” (Delany 2001, 7).2 Translation, then, is not simply cryptography. But Weaver isn’t entirely wrong: “logic” here is both the test of successful decryption (the right key yields “logical sentences”) and the defining characteristic of a language’s grammar. As Rydra explains the difference to Forester, she also explains her talent for both cryptography and poetry. A childhood brain disease had left her with an inexplicable “knack” that enables her to break codes purely through intuition: “I guess it was knowing something about language that did it, being more facile at recognizing patterns—like distinguishing grammatical order from random rearrangement by feel” (10). Despite her own caveat about conflating languages and codes, Rydra here uses the terminology of Weaver and

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Wiener: information is a quantification of “pattern,” defined as whatever is non-random. This theoretical shift is obscured by the vagueness of Rydra’s “knack.” The fact that she works “by feel” implies that her work could not be done by a computer, and she even implies that this “knack” is what makes her a great poet, since poetry is patterned language. The “knack” enables Delany to play both sides of the fence: language is both reducible to pure information and also something more than just a code, and perhaps ineffably human. Thanks to her knack, Rydra quickly picks up Babel-17, which begins influencing her thoughts in Whorfian fashion. In the first clear example of this, Delany both captures the spirit of Whorf’s own writings and develops the less plausible readings of Whorf in a fascinatingly Weaverian direction. When a technological failure leaves her ship unable to determine its position in Earth orbit, Rydra devises a practical solution based on the fact that great circles on a sphere always intersect. While other crew members had the geometric knowledge to arrive at this solution, Rydra got there first by thinking in Babel-17, in which the word for “great circle” contains a morpheme that signifies “intersecting.” As Rydra explains: “It carries the information right in the word. Just like bus stop or foxhole carry information in English that la gare or le terrier—comparable words in French—lack. ‘Great Circle’ carries some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the jam we’re in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with” (69). Rydra’s point here is that Babel-17 provides a more direct “path” for certain thoughts than English, making certain thoughts easier or more obvious—a perspicacious reading of Whorf. But she had broached this same idea earlier in the novel in more radical terms. Talking to her confidante, she explained, “most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language” (23). For language to provide a shorter or longer path for thought is one thing, but if language is thought, then we’ve arrived at the blunt determinism of Whorf’s critics. More importantly, in both passages Rydra explains linguistic relativity using the word “information.” Despite this nod to linguistic determinism, the novel doesn’t subscribe to the “dogma of untranslatability.” Rydra learns Babel-17 and can translate into and out of it. But translation here works strangely. For instance, the novel features “discorporate” characters (basically ghosts) whose appearance, actions, and words are quickly and mysteriously forgotten by any corporate (living) person who interacts with them. Rydra circumvents this problem by mentally translating the discorporate characters’ words into Basque: when the original words disappear from her memory, the translation remains. The choice of Basque hints that not just any language would work. As the world’s most famous language isolate, Basque seems to be used here as a kind of linguistic quarantine: not separated from an Anglophone thought world in the

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Sapir–Whorf sense, but cordoned off enough to protect it from the oblivion afflicting the original memories and (presumably) those translated into too similar a language. But this linguistic quarantine is anomalous in the novel’s early part, where the idea of language as information guarantees a universal translatability—at least for Rydra, with her knack. In the opening chapter, she surprises General Forester by responding to his unspoken thoughts. Recounting this later to Mocky, Rydra explains that each phrase Forester was thinking was reflected in a slight gesture or expression that she was able to perceive and decode. This clearly requires a lossless transmission of information, in which some pattern of muscular twitches corresponds exactly to a pattern of “semantic information” (borrowing a term from Weaver) that Rydra can recover verbatim. Even Mocky is skeptical, calling her translation “too exact” (20). The chapter ends with a memory in which Rydra had been terrified by a talking myna bird that had been conditioned via earthworm rewards to make banal comments about the weather, and we later discover that Rydra, through her knack, had instinctively translated the utterance into its meaning as perceived by the myna bird: a mechanism for getting an earthworm treat, which Rydra envisioned coming toward her own mouth (156). Rydra understands this myna incident only after she tries translating her muscle-reading perceptions into Babel-17, curious what the language’s “compactness” will make apparent to her. At this point, the novel’s text splits in two. Small rectangles of text, two per page, offer a blandly objective account of what is happening, giving few details while noting that Rydra herself “was aware of so much more” (140). Around this textual archipelago, Rydra’s Babel-17 perceptions flow in one long third-person stream-of-­consciousness run-on sentence in which other characters’ thoughts and intentions are laid bare. The juxtaposition drives home the novel’s point that the logical structure of Babel-17 delves deeply into the nature of reality: “Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bottom of a well that a moment ago you’d thought was only a few feet deep” (113). While her knack on its own gives Rydra access to the same semantic content that a spoken sentence of English would, its translation into Babel-17 reveals to her the Weaverian depths of a preverbal stream-of-consciousness. It’s clear that Rydra is being drawn in by Babel-17, the logic of which seems to be the logic of reality itself. But she eventually realizes that the language is a trap. Immediately before her translation experiment, Rydra meets a character named the Butcher, with a criminal past and a strange aphasia: personal pronouns are missing from his vocabulary. Without personal pronouns, the Butcher lacks any sense of a self. After some prodding, Rydra learns that the Butcher’s aphasia is linked to amnesia. At some point in the past he had committed a rash of robberies and murders, seemingly under hypnosis, and had previously spoken some other language, now forgotten, that conditioned his current aphasia: “your speech patterns now must be based on your old

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language or you would have learned about I and you just from picking up new words” (150). After various feints and false leads that extend the novel’s plot enough to keep it interesting, Rydra puts everything together. The Butcher’s previous language was Babel-17, a sophisticated weapon that brainwashes its speakers through a method that brilliantly combines Whorfian and Weaverian theories. Comparing Babel-17 to computer programming languages, Rydra explains that “[t]he lack of an ‘I’ precludes any self-­critical process,” making it impossible to resist the “preset program” contained in the language’s semantics; thus, “While thinking in Babel-17 it becomes perfectly logical to try and destroy your own ship and then blot out the fact with self-hypnosis so you won’t discover what you’re doing and try and stop yourself” (214–5). This last point connects back to the Sapir–Whorf logic of linguistic isolation, hinted at in Rydra’s use of Basque, and developed here into a partitioning of the mind into linguistic zones cordoned off from one another. Babel-17 “‘programs’ a self-contained schizoid personality into the mind of whoever learns it, reinforced by self-hypnosis—which seems the sensible thing to do since everything else in the language is ‘right,’ whereas any other tongue seems so clumsy” (215–6). Rydra temporarily resists this splitting thanks to her linguistic knack and figures out how to free the Butcher and herself from the schizoid Babel-17 personality. Without “any self-critical process,” the Babel-17 mind is unable to cope with the sorts of ­self-referential logical paradoxes described by Bertrand Russell, since it is incapable of thinking “I can’t solve the problem” (209). Not only are linguistic personalities imprisoned in their own sections of the brain, they are also stuck within the linguistic code itself, deprived of the metalinguistic faculty that would let them identify the problematic terms and revise them—as Russell’s theory of types had proposed.3 Rydra has found these problematic terms in Babel-17 and communicates them to her colleagues, who feed paradoxes to the Babel17 portions of her mind and the Butcher’s, causing them to run in loops until they burn out and relinquish control.

Conclusion In concocting this wonderfully arcane scenario, Delany offers a new perspective on Whorf and Weaver. For Jakobson, the thesis of untranslatability was easily refuted by pointing to the metalinguistic faculty that is part of the human linguistic capacity. Delany short circuits this refutation with his own Russellian twist: supposing that language determines thought, we can imagine a language that would determine it in such a way as to counteract or deactivate the metalinguistic faculty. Such a language might be learnable and even translatable into English, but there would be no guarantee of translatability, meaning that it could become (under just the wrong circumstances) exactly the kind of linguistic prison predicted by Sapir–Whorf. With their metalinguistic faculties disrupted, Rydra and the Butcher no longer seem

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human: Rydra’s solution to the problem transforms her and the Butcher into malfunctioning computers stuck on a poorly written piece of code. Given the novel’s careful intertwining of Whorf and Weaver, this obvious limitation of computers is worth examining. Weaver’s cryptographic-translation idea was predicated on treating syntax as a logical system—the same project that had been originally been disrupted by Russell’s metalinguistic paradoxes. So, does the metalinguistic faculty cause problems for Weaver too? In a sense, it does. Shannon’s information theory assumes the existence of a code that has been defined explicitly in some metalanguage. For instance, “One if by land, and two if by sea” uses the metalanguage of English to define a code in the object language of lanterns—a code with only two possible messages. Because the object-language code is well-defined at the technical level, questions of meaning are entirely deferred to the metalinguistic code: meaning appears only in English, not in lanterns. When we try to extend Shannon’s theory to natural languages, we immediately run into a problem: for a native speaker of (say) English, the linguistic code is defined by no metalanguage other than itself. Any meanings that will be conveyed must, therefore, be conveyed in the object-language itself—something obviously impossible in the lantern language that has only two possible messages, and similarly unlikely in the simple binary codes described by Shannon. According to Jakobson, the metalinguistic capacity refutes any thesis of untranslatability; here, the absence of a separate metalanguage to which we can defer questions of meaning should mitigate any hope that statistical manipulation at the technical level could solve any problem for which meaning is central—including problems of translation. For Delany, though, and for the novel, these details are less important than the obviously dehumanizing effects of Babel-17, especially on the Butcher. Sf—like its literary cousin, the gothic—has always opened itself to psychologizing readings. Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t just about a monster, or even about the hubris of its creator: it has always revealed fantasies and anxieties, about its author, its historical moment, and the cultures fascinated by it. We don’t expect science fiction texts to reveal such things about whatever scientific theories they use in their plot construction, but this is exactly what Babel-17 does. Looking back at the mid-twentieth century, it’s easy to see the pressure new linguistic theories were placing on traditional humanist notions of rationality, selfhood, and agency. Whorf argued that language is not a tool used by already-formed subjects to express themselves, but rather a thing that constitutes subjectivity, always exceeding or subverting intentions, always partially external and in some sense alien to its users. In other words, his theory is not just an extension of Humboldt and Herder, but also part of the critique of language and self we can see so clearly in Freud and Heidegger— and subsequently in Lacan, Benveniste, Foucault, and others. The pressure from Weaver’s theory is even easier to see. The emergence of algorithmic models of logic and rationality had already begun to undermine the idea that

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reason was a uniquely human faculty. Weaver’s speculations, along with Alan Turing’s 1950 thought experiment of a computer playing the imitation game, cast similar doubt on the uniqueness of the human faculty of language. If the ability to use language separates humans from machines, then reducing language to a cryptographic puzzle presents a radical challenge to our sense of exceptionalism. In Delany’s novel, the combination of Whorf and Weaver adds up to this threat of lost humanity: Babel-17 transforms Rydra and the Butcher into machines. The novel has a fairytale happy ending: the Butcher recovers his personal pronouns and his identity, and Rydra “corrects” (218) Babel-17’s grammatical traps to transform it into Babel-18, a language of pure logic— like a perfected Loglan. Selfhood and sovereignty are restored, language is once again a tool. The catch, subtle enough for the reader to miss, is that this happy ending is only possible by virtue of Rydra’s unexplained knack. The product of a neurological illness, this knack gives Rydra her mind reading abilities, lets her learn Babel-17 from a set of audio recordings, and eventually enables her to resist, outsmart, and domesticate the language. On the one hand, then, it is an impossible super power, a pure wish fulfillment that re-establishes human beings as masters of language—a deus ex machina in the guise of non-mechanistic human exceptionalism. But Rydra’s knack is also motivated within the text: as the novel mentions repeatedly, it is what makes her a great poet. For the scholars we’ve examined, poetry is always exceptional. Jakobson regarded poetry as a paradigm for the small class of utterances that genuinely are untranslatable; Kroeber treated Whorf’s thesis as an “aesthetic” one, granting that Whorf had a “touch of genius”; Weaver limited his cryptographic-translation idea to technical texts, excluding “poetry” as too non-logical for a computer. In the 1950s, poetry was an easy metonym for naming whatever spark of creativity separated—and must always separate—human beings from the machines and algorithms that were increasingly thought capable of imitating human thought. More broadly, Jamie Cohen-Cole (2014) has pointed to the importance for American social sciences during the Cold War of the notion of an “open mind”: a flexible and creative quality of mind that was both constitutive of human cognition (especially language use) and something that could be cultivated as a defense against the deadening conformity and bureaucratization that lurked in the American social order (and already defined the Soviet one). Commitment to this ideal of an open mind and to the liberal subject it sought to buttress helps to explain why psychologists like Fearing and Lenneberg were so quick to dismiss Whorf and why Norbert Wiener was hesitant to fully embrace Weaver (for the latter, see Hayles 1999, ch. 4). The radically antihumanist implications of these theories could be kept at bay: Whorf’s theory would be true for computers, but not for humans who have this additional capacity of metalinguistic creativity; Weaver’s theory could work for sufficiently simple texts, but it will falter as the texts’ semantic ambiguity approaches that of poetry.

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In a sense, then, the relationship between Delany’s Babel-17 and the linguistic theories that inspired it turns out to be surprisingly reciprocal. The theories themselves—produced on the academy’s margins, debated in interdisciplinary contexts with few overlapping conceptual frameworks, pursued more for their future promise than for any empirically verifiable plausibility— were already closer to science fiction than to science. Their scholarly articulations focus on a series of relationships among abstract entities (language, thought worlds, information, probability, translatability) that become the material for Delany’s novel. The novel, in turn, reorganizes these abstractions around psychologizing structures of character and action, and in doing so helps to reveal the ideological hopes and fears that the theories had largely succeeded in repressing.

Notes 1. This phrase is quoted from Meyers (1980). 2. This 2001 edition was slightly revised from the 1966 first edition to better reflect Delany’s intentions. While some of the wording and formatting discussed here are unique to the later edition, the overall argument holds for the 1966 text. All citations of Babel-17 refer to the later edition. 3. Quine (1962) offers a lucid and thorough explanation of how certain paradoxes can be resolved by careful metalinguistic bookkeeping along lines devised by Russell, in which the semantic range of words such as “true” is constrained so as to prevent them from applying to the sentence that contains them. Strangely, the barber paradox mentioned in Babel-17 doesn’t actually require such bookkeeping. Quine points out that the proposition claiming “there exists a barber who shaves only those men who do not shave themselves” is simply false: since the predicate is impossible, the barber must not exist.

Bibliography Bould, Mark. 2009. Language and Linguistics. In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould et al., 225–235. London: Routledge. Brown, James Cook. 1960. Loglan. Scientific American 202 (6) (June): 53–63. Brown, Roger W., and Eric H. Lenneberg. 1954. A Study in Language and Cognition. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (3): 454–462. Cameron, Deborah. 1999. Linguistic Relativity: Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Return of the Repressed. Critical Quarterly 41 (2): 153–156. Cohen-Cole, Jamie. 2014. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Darnell, Regna. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Delany, Samuel L. 2001. Babel-17. New York, NY: Vintage. Deutscher, Guy. 2010. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Co. Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

280  J. FITZPATRICK Evans, Vyvyan. 2014. The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feuer, Lewis S. 1953. Sociological Aspects of the Relation Between Language and Philosophy. Philosophy of Science 20: 85–100. Gleick, James. 2011. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Gordin., M.D. 2015. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N.Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoijer, Harry, ed. 1954. Language in Culture: Proceedings of a Conference on the Interrelations of Language and Other Aspects of Culture. Special Issue, The American Anthropological Association 56 (6, part 2) (December). Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joseph, John E. 2002. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kay, Lily E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kline, Ronald R. 2015. The Cybernetic Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Martin-Nielsen, Janet. 2012. “It Was All Connected”: Computers and Linguistics in Early Cold War America. In Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, 63–78. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. Meyers, Walter Earl. 1980. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. McWhorter, John H. 2014. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: NY: William Morrow and Co. ———. 2007. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. NY: Viking. Quine, W. V. 1962. Paradox. Scientific American 206 (4) (April): 84–99. Rollins, Peter C. 1980. Benjamin Lee Whorf: Lost Generation Theories of Mind, Language, and Religion. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools of Linguistics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schultz, Emily A. 1990. Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf‚ Bakhtin‚ and Linguistic Relativity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press. Soni, Jimmy, and Rob Goodman. 2017. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. New York: Simon & Schuster. Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

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Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Turing, Alan. 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49: 433–460. Vance, Jack. 1958. The Languages of Pao. New York: Avalon Books. Weaver, Warren. 1955. Translation. In Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, ed. William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth, 15–23. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1952. Collected Papers on Metalinguistics. Washington, DC: Department of State Foreign Service Institute. ———. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of MIT. Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER 16

Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes Avery Slater

The term “autopoiesis” was introduced to the academic world in the 1970s by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Since then it has spread far beyond its discipline of origin in theoretical biology, diffusing widely across the humanities and social sciences, and continuing to find traction today. Why has this term been so useful? Maturana and Varela’s tenet of autopoiesis was designed to describe the process of s­elf-generation and self-maintenance in living cellular organisms. The most irreducible cellular property, Maturana and Varela argue, is the cell’s ability to manufacture any of the components from which they are composed through processes conducted solely within their interiors.1 In this, they hoped to dwell on the nature of life’s autonomy, “the self-asserting capacity of living systems to maintain their identity through the active compensation of deformations,” which, while seemingly self-evident of cellular organisms, nonetheless presented “the most elusive of their properties” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 73). One attraction, then, across disciplines has been that autopoiesis offers a general model for systemic persistence, inertia, and survival. What is the organic and biological meaning of an organism’s persistence in its sameness? The importance of the cell’s purposeful maintenance of identity across time, Maturana and Varela felt, had been obscured for scientists by Aristotle, whose metaphysics “endow[ed] living systems with a non-material purposeful driving component” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 74). Maturana

A. Slater (*)  Department of English, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_16

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argues that “notions of purpose, function or goal are unnecessary and misleading” in examining the structure of cells (Maturana 1980: xix). Autopoiesis would make available this unique property of organisms as designers of their own autonomy. “We maintain that living systems are machines,” Maturana and Varela write—and yet this is to be understood in a non-animistic, non-instrumental sense (1980: 76). Unlike tools, machines, or factories, they write, “living systems, as physical autopoietic machines, are purposeless systems” (1980: 86). It was primarily Niklas Luhmann’s work in systems theory in the 1980s and 1990s that helped the “purposeless” autonomy of autopoiesis transition from being a purely scientific concept to finding popularity in the social sciences and then the humanities. From this bio-theoretical concept, Luhmann crafted a portable methodology for thinking about systems at their most abstract levels of interaction (see especially Luhmann 1984, 1990, 1995). For Luhmann, autopoiesis allowed the social-scientific discipline of systems theory to shift from its “interest in design and control to an interest in autonomy and environmental sensitivity, from planning to evolution, from structural stability to dynamic stability” (1984 [1995]: 10). With autopoiesis, Luhmann hoped to imbue systems theory with “a theory of the organism” that derived from computer science, cybernetics, and other experimental sciences (1984 [1995]: 10–11). After Luhmann, literary theorist Cary Wolfe has been among the most influential advocates for using autopoiesis within literary criticism (2008, 2010). Inspired and energized by these methods, recent studies have used the concept of autopoiesis to examine literary works from e. e. cummings to Kafka and Samuel Beckett (Moe 2011; Schmid 2016; de Vos 2018), with the concept of autopoiesis finding many applications in lyric studies. Regarding literature autopoietically means, among other things, seeing “literature as an experiment in which language is constituted… as organon and as model of composition” (Homann, 187).2 Renate Homann has proposed a “heautonomic autopoietic” approach to modern lyric, emphasizing lyric’s distinctive capacity to “self-organize,”3 and Marjorie Levinson (2018) makes use of autopoiesis to examine Romantic poetry in compelling new ways.4 In theater and performance studies, Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) uses autopoiesis to plumb the aesthetic sphere’s ­ phenomenological power, revealing the performative use of “autopoietic feedback loops” in contemporary theater. Autopoiesis as methodological trope has informed recent work in disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and cognitive science (Di Paolo 2005), critical legal studies (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2014), and critical accounting studies (Gårseth-Nesbakk 2011). How can the wideranging influence of this concept best be understood? This chapter traces the literary-scientific genealogy of the term a ­ utopoiesis, emphasizing the irreducible importance of literary studies to the birth of this scientific concept. Previous studies have illuminated how this term’s interdisciplinary portability arose from the specific concerns of postwar cybernetics (Medina 2011), information theory (Paulson 1988), and,

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crucially, the mutating nature of disciplinarity itself during this period (Wellbery 2009; see also Clarke 2019). In discussing these developments, this present study of autopoiesis will also factor in a crucial and, until now, neglected detail concerning literature’s own, foundational influence on the creation of this scientific paradigm. Indeed, as this chapter will show, even while literary critics now appear to “borrow” the term autopoiesis from the methods of the biological sciences, in fact they are borrowing it back. When biologist Humberto Maturana narrates the origins of this term, his story begins with an illuminating encounter: with early modern Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes and his novel Don Quixote.

Why Autopoiesis? Luhmann once related the following story for how and why this term autopoiesis arose in the biological sciences: Why ‘autopoiesis?’ Maturana once told me how this expression came to his mind. Initially he had worked with circular structures, with the concept of a circular reproduction of the cell. The word ‘circular’ is a common one that does not create further terminological problems, but for Maturana it lacked precision. Then a philosopher, on the occasion of a dinner or some other social event, gave him a little private lecture on Aristotle. The philosopher explained to him the difference between ‘praxis’ and ‘poiesis.’ ‘Praxis’ is an action that includes its purpose in itself as an action. […] ‘Poiesis’ was explained to Maturana as something that produces something external to itself—namely, a product. […] Maturana then found the bridge between the two concepts and spoke of ‘autopoiesis,’ of a poiesis as its own product—and he intentionally emphasized the notion of a ‘product.’ […] what is meant here is a system that is its own product. (2009: 151)

While Luhmann’s anecdote follows Maturana and Varela’s own accounts, it unfortunately does not record one of the most crucial details from this moment between Maturana and (here unnamed) philosopher. In Maturana’s separate description, this conversation took place in the context of his student Varela’s returned to Chile after time spent in research at Harvard University. Maturana speculated with Varela on the necessity for biologists to retheorize the nature of living organisms from a new perspective: Shortly after that long conversation [with Varela] I went to visit a friend, José María Bulnes, who was both a historian and a philosopher. He was writing an essay about the dilemma of Don Quixote de la Mancha who had to decide for himself whether to become a wandering knight or a writer of novels of knighthood. Don Quixote decided to become a wandering knight, and, as my friend put it, he chose the praxis of being a knight over the “poiesis” of writing. At that moment I said aloud: “That is the word I need; that is the word I was looking for.” […] Next day I told Francisco that I had found the word that

286  A. SLATER I needed to refer to what made living systems autonomous entities… I continued: “If we want to formalize what happens in living beings, we need first to write a full description of the processes that we claim are taking place in them such that the result is that we see living systems appearing in front of us.” And then I added: “I invite you to write this with me.” The result of this endeavor is what we published as the little book, De Máquinas y Seres Vivos [On Machines and Living Beings]. (2012: 160)

Maturana elsewhere relates of this revelation from Don Quixote, “I understood for the first time the power of the word ‘poiesis’ and invented the word that we needed: autopoiesis” (1980: xvii).5 In his excitement for this new word derived through Don Quixote’s inspiration, Maturana enthuses, “This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems” (1980: xvii, emphasis added). This eureka in conversation with philosopher Bulnes led directly to Maturana’s seminal essay on autopoiesis, co-written in 1972 with his scientific collaborator Varela. While Maturana bases this “word without a history” on a very specific reading of Don Quixote, one might question whether one can take for granted that the protagonist pseudo-knight is (truly) deciding between the path of reflective poiesis (the textual world of simulacral chivalry) and the alternative path of praxis (practicing, performing, and being a knight of chivalry). In another reading, the binary alternatives represented here may constitute precisely the central ruse of this infamous novel: a meta-fictional work concerned with fictional performativity—with the performing of fiction. Again and again across the book, follies result from characters’ naive attempts to differentiate between text and action. In Maturana’s description, the character of Don Quixote chooses the path of praxis over poiesis, performing knightly deeds rather than simply reading about them. Yet, in its truest sense, the term autopoiesis represents the blurred, non-separable aspects of textual performativity: autopoiesis as a self-assembling praxis. To properly describe the self-maintaining, self-organizing energies of cellular organisms, Maturana takes the best word to be “autopoiesis…self-creation,” since “the product of the autopoietic organization of a system is that very system itself” (2004: 97). As Maturana rephrases this in a later interview, “The cell—an autopoietic system of the first order—is a factory that is its own product” (2004: 98). The question of what “assembles” whom lies firmly at the comedic center of Don Quixote—and its readers may be reminded of the novel’s own (farcical) “factory” episode in which Don Quixote stumbles upon a printshop in the act of printing the very book the reader is reading. In this episode, we read how Don Quixote reads the story of Don Quixote (and offers some corrections).6 Does Don Quixote stand inside or outside his own eponymous story? Certainly, this reflexivity has an analogue in the referential hall of mirrors that constitutes Don Quixote’s plot. Yet as autopoiesis describes a peculiar

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conflation of making and being, this concept also describes the very predicament—the aporia, the failure—explored at every level of Don Quixote. The more the “knight” Don Quixote chooses to “self-assemble,” the more ludicrously he lapses into impossibilities and (hilarious) contradictions. It can be argued that precisely his delusions of self-fashioning form the central dramas of the novel Don Quixote. Here, the world of the living and the world of language are shown as irreconcilably at odds, their outcomes distinctive, and their divergence comical. Other possibilities for reading Don Quixote’s literary “self-fashioning” will be raised toward the end of this chapter. For now, seeing as Don Quixote occupies such an originary location in the development of biological and cybernetic autopoiesis, we should explore how and why this book could have seemed such an excellent text for analyzing living organisms as being (informational/textual) “cells” that amount to their “own factory.” Maturana and Varela hoped that by emphasizing factory-like production of the self, autopoiesis would offer an entirely new view of an organism’s “purpose”—rewriting the ways in which biology comprehended teleology among living forms. Rather than regarding life’s ultimate telos as being reproduction, recombination, and species-survival, this view of autopoiesis focuses on life’s monadic power of “self-assembling,” the simple effort of being, in itself and for itself. Autopoiesis thus redirected the life sciences’ earlier focus—from evolution to existence. Autopoiesis, in this sense, offered a highly portable, translatable concept to rapidly changing disciplinary understandings of social and environmental systems, assemblages, and collectives in the second half of the twentieth century. It also aligned well with emerging notions of agency/control promoted by influential postwar cyberneticians. Cybernetics held as its primary analytic goal to be the study, theorization, and design of self-regulating machines. From the common rheostat to the lifelike bumbling of W. Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises (1950), the boundaries separating living organisms and machines were thoroughly (and often exuberantly) blurred. Norbert Wiener, the movement’s founder, ascribes cybernetics’ ascendance to its use of cross-disciplinary metaphors traded among like-minded scientists, as “the vocabulary of the engineers soon became contaminated with the terms of the neurophysiologist and the psychologist” (15). In postwar cybernetics, Enlightenment-era philosophies of mechanism combined with nineteenth-century vitalism, giving birth to figures such as the “cyborg.” These transformations in turn created demand for languages better suited to this ascendant techno-ethos. Cybernetics created its own set of keywords, as Ronald Kline (2006) and other historians of science have shown. While the term cybernetics now seems dated, obsolete, or unfamiliar, the interdisciplinary argot established by postwar cyberneticians contributed some of the most enduring keywords and paradigms through which we continue to articulate the digital and “post-human” era. Terms like “information technology” can be traced directly to cybernetics, as Kline has shown how “the marriage of computers and communications” along with

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cybernetics’ popularity laid the groundwork “to combine information… with technology, a much older keyword that had only recently acquired the meaning of a powerful social force” (2006: 514).7 Meanwhile, researchers in fields outside the hard sciences were also eager to relate their own work to new developments in mathematics, computation, information theory, and communications. Cybernetics’ interest in “negentropy,” or the construction of stable order out of chaos, promised an optimistic antidote to pre-war, modernist obsessions with entropy, a concept itself derived from Victorian sciences. In the postwar, post-Fordist years, new technologies demanded new metaphors. Modernist “metanarratives” that had pitted the eternal forces of dissolution and degeneration against domination, will, and totalitarianism were swept aside for new models of “self-fashioning,” “self-regulation,” and “homeostasis.” As political philosopher Karl Deutsch advocates in the first issue of Synthese in 1949: “These new [cybernetic] models offer suggestive analogies for such relationships as ‘purpose,’ ‘learning,’ ‘free will,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘social cohesion,’” suggesting future investigations in these traditionally philosophic domains should “seek data for their treatment in quantitative terms” rather than qualitative (512).8 Beginning from commendations such as this, autopoiesis and later systems theory translated, updated, and kept in circulation many of the earliest cybernetic metaphors, helping these tropes survive to the present day. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have shown how the rampant blending of cybernetic discourses surrounding code and information created “forms of communicability” working as transdisciplinary units mobilized from among the tool-kits of often incongruous disciplines (26). With specific interest in this term’s recent literary uses, my present inquiry into the intellectual history of autopoiesis tracks its disciplinarily optimized “communicability” to some surprising places, tracing autopoiesis not only through its uses as originally designed but also the uses to which it has been put. The first half of this literary-scientific genealogy presents applications, models, and methods that have emerged from the biological concept of autopoiesis as promulgated by Maturana and Varela, as Allende-era theoretical biologists in Chile.9 To return to the scientific borrowing of the term autopoiesis from a philosopher’s reading of Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote’s theory of “self-fashioning” could be viewed as a quintessential text concerned with the futility, the absurdity of “self-fashioning.” Indeed, Don Quixote inspires in us nothing if not a heightened awareness of those contingent social forces through which we are fashioned—those texts, codes, and contexts lying outside us, unlike us, even in the very likenesses we have learned to covet. Cervantes’s novel offers a two-volume mockery of how messages elude us, how the masks that we fashion expose us. The prodigal return of autopoiesis to its home in literary studies reveals a compound nexus of literature and science, of fiction and the problem of knowing. Nonetheless, by resituating autopoiesis, this chapter also explores how new transmissions and permutations from this term’s sojourn in

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the experimental sciences raise new sets of problems for literary critics today. Before we arrive at the occulted relation between autopoiesis and Cervantes, a better understanding is needed of the relation between cybernetics and the quasi-philosophical concerns that lie behind this scientific trope.

Cybernetics Before Autopoiesis In 1947, Georges Canguilhem, philosopher of science and teacher of Foucault, gave a lecture on “Machine and Organism.” He began by addressing the transit of the philosophical term “organism” into the realm of the biological sciences, resulting in the appearance today that “philosophy does not have its own domain, that it is but speculation’s poor relation, obliged to dress in clothes worn out and abandoned by scientists” (75). Canguilhem goes on to argue that a theory of the organism is “philosophically more important than its reduction to a matter of doctrine and method in biology” (75). Yet, interestingly, one footnote later added to the “Machine and Organism” lecture before its publication may imply that in the meantime Canguilhem came across Maturana’s 1959 study “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al. 1959). Canguilhem contextualizes this study within the new Anglo-American science of cybernetics he calls bionics: Bionics… born in the United States ten years ago, studies biological structures and systems that can be used by technology as models or analogues, in particular, in the construction of devices for detection, orientation, or equilibration to be used in airplane or missile equipment. Bionics is the art—very scientific—of information that draws knowledge from living nature. The frog, with its selective eye for instantly usable information… [has] supplied a new species of engineers with models. (175n68)

As Canguilhem implies, this “science” (or, “art—very scientific”) was a temporary formation, a congeries of disciplines and methodologies all inspired by a similar need to reconceptualize their objects of study in light of information theory and other mathematical advances. As Canguilhem also implies, this “science” was in the business of model extraction. What, for example, might the model of the frog’s “selective eye” have to say to “missile equipment”?10 Cybernetics was the science of following and biologizing recent wartime applications of the mathematical sciences (cryptography, computation, information theory). Within only a decade of cybernetic ferment, statistical mechanics had become the science of information (Shannon and Weaver 1949), and the science of information had become a new model for the science of life (Crick et al. 1957). These closely intertwined developments in the organic and mathematical sciences stressed the importance of information, computation, and communications to understand the functioning of organisms and their group relations. What biologists like J. S. Haldane began to call “ethological cybernetics” (Haraway 1981–1982: 259)

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was a method for articulating the link between organisms and environments, between equilibrium and survival. But as many historians of science since have noted, the politics of cybernetic analogies cannot be overlooked. Cybernetics, since its founding conference in 1946, was riddled with wartime motivations—such as Norbert Wiener’s mathematical derivations of “homeostasis” from his work in automating anti-aircraft artillery.11 Donna Haraway has studied how these martial analogies shaped evolutionary biology in the postwar years, noting that biologist E. O. Wilson’s work on ant behavior makes use of metaphors drawn from “artillery analysis” and “naval gunnery strategies” (1981–1982: 260). Haraway concludes that, in Wilson’s work, as with all cybernetically inspired scientific inquiry, “The line between metaphor…and basic concept in science is a tortured one, and the issue is important”; here, as elsewhere, these scientists’ “metaphors… cannot be fundamentally distinguished” (1981–1982: 260). What imaginary did these indistinguishable metaphors enable? Haraway relates how postwar sociobiology adopted a theory of the machine-organism as command-control-communication system. Coding and copying, communication and replication are the key concepts. […] It is in relation to the concept of the cybernetic animal machine that the modern principle of natural selection must be understood… a discourse on physiological organisms, ordered by the hierarchical sexual division of labor and the principle of homeostasis, to a discourse on cybernetic technological systems, ordered by communications engineering principles…. (1981–1982: 245)

The term “cyborg,” itself popularized by Haraway, provides an excellent example of the unstable valences of terms, keywords, and interdisciplinary metaphors surviving the cybernetic moment. First coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in their 1960 article “Cyborgs and Space” on the exigencies of long-duration space-travel, this term describes a functional “homeostasis” between astronaut and spacecraft allowing for both life support and navigation. Kept in tandem with the functioning of the machine that carried them, the astronaut’s extended bodies would constitute “cyborgs” [cybernetic organisms], capable of extraterrestrial travel. In one section of the article entitled “Cyborg—Frees Man to Explore,” we are told “the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems” will be designed to “function without the benefit of consciousness” with “the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system….” (27). Ian Hacking later diagnoses a “persistent Cartesianism” in the Clynes/ Kline cyborg, noting how as cybernetic discourse “spins away from life on earth,” it still preserves “a curious simulacrum of the original position, of Descartes, God and the animal-machine” (213). The best-known critique of these critiques originates with Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” published in the Socialist Register and subsequently reprinted in

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many different outlets. Having already produced exhaustive scholarly histories of cybernetics’ impact on scientific subfields such as primatology (Haraway 1983) and information theory (Haraway 1981–1982), Haraway took a different tack, encouraging readers to ironize cybernetics’ outsized, futuristic totalizations. Haraway’s “Manifesto” promoted using cybernetic and cyborg discourse against their usual grain, toward an anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, socialist, ecofeminist politics.12 The problematic nature of the military-industrial, cis-het-patriarchal dimensions lying behind the cyborg’s origin and popularity is made explicit in this manifesto: Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (5)

This has led to a situation in which “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (2). Yet, defying any totalizing worldview where environment and organisms co-adjust in a closed system, Haraway asserts, “We do not need a totality in order to work well” (28). She suggests, “Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (28, emphasis added). This cyborgification of the radical (feminist) subject is, however, non-utopian and “outside salvation history” (3). Haraway insists that even as “the certainty of what counts as nature … is undermined, […] the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness” (5). Instead, she urges us to see that “who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we?” (5).13 What politics can be excavated, traced, pursued, or performed through the ways that metaphors travel? How much noise enters in with each successive shift in epistemic domain? Philosopher Michel Serres, in an early meditation on the postwar sciences, notes that the popular cybernetic discourse on entropy and thermodynamic systems “has the same form and function, let us say the same syntax” drawn from their home disciplines, even after having “changed domains. Instead of addressing the direct questions of matter and life, from which, precisely, this language had developed, it brought that language within the domain of the social sciences, language, and texts. Why?” (114). Serres’s 1960s investigation remains as important today, if not more so. One of cybernetics’ most important discursive shifts—from “homeostasis” (self-governed equilibrium) toward autopoiesis (self-governed assemblage)—would bring its “syntax” of autonomy and self-fashioning to a whole new chapter of sciences and the humanities. “An organism is a system,” Serres concedes, but then he qualifies this assertion, “The notion of system changes through history; it occupies different positions within the encyclopedia” (113). What position will autopoiesis occupy in future encyclopedias of literary theory?

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Serres notes the ease with which humanistic categories like “discourse, writing, language, societal and psychic phenomena,” all became “acts which one can describe as communication acts. It immediately became obvious, or was taken as such, that a store of information transcribed on any given memory, a painting or a page, should drift by itself from difference to disorder….” (115). In the same year as Serres, Michel Foucault would assert a qualification to this zeitgeist-view of language’s “drift.” In his Order of Things, he writes, “In the modern age, literature is that which compensates for (and not that which confirms) the signifying function of language” (1970: 44). Language has come under scrutiny in a new way: What kind of “system” can this offer? Foucault traces the genealogy of language’s encounter with technology, such that after the Renaissance, we no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial, word upon which the infinite movement of discourse was founded… henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure [va croître sans depart], no end, and no promise. It is the traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of literature traces…. (1966: 59, 1970: 44)

Even as linguistic structuralism stood poised at the threshold of poststructuralism’s new methods, Foucault turns to the literary example of none other than Don Quixote: “[Don Quixote’s] adventures will be a deciphering of the world… Each exploit must be a proof… an attempt to transform reality into a sign” (47). In this, it seems, Don Quixote resembles the cyborg, the autopoietic organism, and the reader in the age of cybernetics, all in one. Is this cyborg knight to be inside or outside “salvation history”? How will literary studies inherit the politics and syntax of this autopoietic metaphor-machine?

The Uses of Autopoiesis “…como yo soy aficionado a leer aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles” […since I’m always reading, even scraps of paper I find in the street.] —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1999: 51; 2004: 85)

As discussed above, interest in metaphorical uses for cybernetic concepts began almost immediately. In the Anglophone context, literary critic Elizabeth Sewell was among the first to import the language of thermodynamics to discuss the structure of poetry. Her 1951 book The Structure of Poetry alludes to an information-theoretically described literary struggle between internal order and external disorder, guiding poetry’s organism to “turn language from an open system to a closed one” (62). In the Italian context, Umberto Eco also popularized cybernetic thinking in his 1962 book Open Work: Form and Indeterminacy in Contemporary Poetics. Practicing artists of all kinds rethought their practice along cybernetic lines; as Rebecca

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Gaydos has argued, “cybernetics, as an analogical style of thought, resonated with postwar poets… interested in exploring the isomorphy between nonliving configurations…and living systems such as the live environment or the poet’s body” (171).14 While cybernetics’ thermodynamically inflected language held early interest for poet-critics like Muriel Rukeyser in her 1949 Life of Poetry and novelists like Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952),15 by the 1970s, perhaps owing to its increased association with military defense spending (Edwards 1996), the political ethos associated with what Lily E. Kay terms “the warborn fields of cybernetics” had altered (593).16 At this stage the radically destabilizing valences of cybernetics that had initially caught the interest of racialized (Ellison), queer (Rukeyser), and feminist (Sewell) thinkers underwent a sort of white male interregnum: as Jasper Bernes (2017) glosses this later moment, “If you were a white man and interested in experimentation in prose fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, then you were probably writing about machines, entropy, and information.” Literary critic David Porush (1985) was among the first to diagnose the agonistic alliances between postmodern literary forms and cybernetics.17 His subsequent work, showing the imprint of ideas of autopoiesis, argues that textuality after cybernetics constitutes a “biosocial phenomenon,” one among myriad “dissipative structures” in the physical world, as “literary discourse becomes a model” for the universe’s “complex unpredictability” (1991: 62, 80).18 In a renewed vogue for cybernetics, cybernetic readings of literature have been performed retroactively on T.S. Eliot19 and Ezra Pound, looking at how modernists “attune” their audiences to “cybernetic ways of reading” avant la lettre which can help readers navigate the “data-saturated spaces of modernity” (Love 2016: 90). As cybernetic science has given way to other forms of analysis, systems-theory metaphors drawn from cybernetic biology gained new traction through the term autopoiesis. As Luhmann, non-scientific popularizer of the term explains, systems theory “always proceeds from a difference between system and environment” (2009: 152). Luhmann states that autopoiesis uses “‘poiesis’ in a Greek or traditional and strict sense of production, the manufacturing of a product, combined with ‘auto,’ which is to say that the system is its own product”—“Maturana invented it. Varela took it over” (152). There is a seeming circularity or tautology to the argument—one that Luhmann takes as axiomatic: “The structures depend on operations because the operations depend on structures” (149).20 For Luhmann, self-organization is “a circular process: The structures can be formed only by its own operations because its own structures in turn determine the operations” (149).21 Robot-tortoises all the way down? What bears most on this discussion of literary autopoiesis is that, while language is an exemplary autopoietic system for Luhmann, for his thinking it remains the case that individual artworks—including linguistic ones— are not autopoietic systems. Instead, artworks (taken individually) play with

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“codes,” the materials from which the “art-system” (in Luhmann’s terms) has been made up. Luhmann draws an interesting parallel between artworks and computers, stating neither can be considered autopoietic, since “autopoietic systems produce their own structures and are capable of specifying their operations via these structures” (1995 [2000]: 185). Beginning from Luhmann, critical models based on autopoiesis made a deep impact on the discourse of the social sciences (Mingers 1995, 2014). Alan Wolfe, writing on the vogue for autopoietic theories of justice following Luhmann, explains that such “postmodern approaches to legal regulation” rework a line of thinking drawn from “cybernetics, information theory, economics, population ecology, quantum physics… artificial intelligence, DNA, and chaos theory” (365). Nonetheless, even as autopoiesis grew more and more interdisciplinarily capacious, debates persisted around the explanatory power of “autopoiesis” within its home discipline of biology.22 Chemist Pier Luigi Luisi (2016) has traced the history of the term autopoiesis across a number of academic disciplines, noting that although Maturana and Varela initially had trouble publishing their work outside Chile, books on biological autopoiesis began to appear early in the 1980s (e.g., Zelený 1980) with renowned biologist Lynn Margulis later adopting autopoiesis as a fundamental tenet in her description of biological life.23 For Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan, “Planetary physiology… is the autopoiesis of the cell writ large” (54). While autopoiesis is now better known, Luisi explains that, because the social sciences began using the term “not always in a very rigorous way,” experts in the hard sciences feel the term has become “tainted by a new-age flavor” through its use by, for example, the Gaia movement (2016: 125).24 As literary critic and historian of science Bruce Clarke explains of autopoiesis in its trajectory across the years, “its multifarious cultural history, itinerant discursive career, and contrarian stance” have made it generative and intriguing to thinkers far outside the hard sciences, with its “countercultural vogue” deriving precisely from the term’s “outsider status” in relation to mainstream science (2012: 58). “From its inception in 1971 as a cybernetic theory of biological form, to its current presence on research fronts extending from immunology to Earth system science to…a range of literary and cultural theories,” Clarke writes, “the concept of autopoiesis has developed on the margins, not in the strongholds, of mainstream Anglo-American science” (2012: 58). As with the Gaia hypothesis, this contrarian stance at the margins has sometimes been in the service of ecological thinking. Political theorist William E. Connelly espouses an autopoietic perspective as embracing the view that “the planet, and indeed the cosmos, is replete with self-organizing, spatiotemporal systems flowing at different speeds,” where planetary systems are “more fragile, interdependent, and volatile than their fervent supporters imagine” (82). Complicating this sanguine view of ecological and social autopoiesis is the ambivalence of one of its founders, biologist Francisco Varela, to the cross-disciplinary use of this term. At a 1988 symposium in Italy, Varela

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criticized the rigor of the Gaia theory, and he expressed his discomfort at social applications of “autopoiesis,” pointing out the dangers in rethinking society as totalizable in the manner of organisms (Clarke 2012).25 Others have diagnosed a persistence of Romantic vision across the many disciplinary translations and rebrandings of autopoiesis, cybernetics, and vitalism. As social theorist Patricia Clough (2008) has argued, the age of the “biomediated body” with its new posthumanist theorizations has rendered obsolete what she feels is a nineteenth-century urge to designate autopoiesis as indispensable to life.26 William Paulson, too, maintains, “Nothing really justifies calling the literary text a living organism,” noting that the Romantic fragment was in fact a move in away from “the poem-as-organism fallacy” (136). Yet other theorists such as writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter have taken a renewed look at the discourse of autopoiesis. Wynter describes every human order as an “autopoietic, autonomously functioning, languaging, living system” (32, emphasis in original), making use of the neologistic term “languaging” from Maturana and Varela’s later work on social being. Here, they theorize that, “as a phenomenon of languaging in the network of social and linguistic coupling, the mind is not something that is within my brain. Consciousness and mind belong to the realm of social coupling. That is the locus of their dynamics” (Maturana and Varela 1987: 234). Wynter casts culture as “genrespecific orders of truth” that “motivate, semantically-neurochemically, […] the ensemble of individual and collective behaviors needed to dynamically enact and stably replicate each such fictively made eusocial human order” (32, emphasis in original). Wynter asserts that “when we speak in Western terms about cultures, we are also talking about… that principle’s always already cosmogonically chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life/death that each culture auto-institutes itself as a genre-specific autopoietic field” (30, emphasis in original). In this, she parallels what we might call the posthuman humanism of Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova’s (2000) critique of the term autopoiesis as offering a euphemistic meme that disguises the truth of “control societies” (in the Deleuzian sense).27 As Parisi and Terranova stress, “It is important not to confuse a body with the organism,” since “a body is not pre-given,” rather, it “emerges within a process of relations (including relations of power) which defines its singularity” (n.p.). For Wynter, thinking autopoietically means thinking both ecologically and socially within a historically contingent environment, a critical method or a praxis that can help us “relativize being human” (30, emphasis in original). We must keep this “relativization of human-being” in mind as we move forward into the past—of the many borrowings and re-borrowings of autopoiesis across disciplines, time, and texts. As historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller highlights in her own intellectual history of the rise of cybernetic metaphors in science, a 1958 formulation by Francis Crick is allegorically relevant: “Once ‘information’ has passed into protein, it cannot get out again” (cited in Keller 164n30). But in this seemingly one-way communication channel, code and transcription,

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Crick was alluding to a more complex process: the fact that the regulation of DNA information is exerted not at the level of the code but at the level of the RNA: modification, splicing, translation—occurrences called “posttranslational events” (Keller 164n30).28 With Parisi, Terranova, and Wynter, we should remember that to confuse the body with the organism would make us miss the “posttranslational events” performed by the body and upon the body, whether as organism or as social being. This gives rise to the question: Who is this self, or, where is the locus of this (embodied) self, living through and dwelling by means of this “auto”-poiesis? Further to this, when does it become necessary to ask: Who or where is the allo-, the “other” to this body?

Autopoiesis: Return to a “A Word Without a History” Luhmann’s systems theory draws on many diverse intellectual predecessors and sees itself as extending the structural functionalism drawn from the sociological theory of Talcott Parsons in particular (1949, 1991). As Luhmann explains, the impetus for systems theory did not come from within sociology, rather, “from thermodynamics and biology as a theory of the organism, later from neurophysiology, histology, computer science, and further, of course, from interdisciplinary amalgamations like information theory and cybernetics” (1984 [1995]: 10–11). Importing autopoiesis as a term from Maturana and Varela’s theoretical biology, “If we abstract from life and define autopoiesis as a general form of system building using self-referential closure, we would have to admit that there are nonliving autopoietic systems…in other modes of circularity and self-reproduction,” Luhmann believes (1990: 2).29 Clarke carries these implications to their furthest extent, writing: “Both psychic and social systems are higher-order natural systems self-producing their metabiotic forms only within the medium of living systems. The autopoietic ‘selves’ of psychic and social systems are not organic but systemic—co-emergent, co-evolving, functionally bounded differential forms of virtual autopoiesis spun off from the literal metabolic looping of living systems” (2012: 74). Maturana, working as a university lecturer in Chile in the 1960s, was already searching for a way to explain to students “the invariant feature of living systems” (1980: xiii). He remembers speaking for the first time in 1969 of living systems as deriving their unities from the “basic circularity of their production of their components” (1980: xiv). Cellular invariance seemed to have the structure of a tautology, a seemingly nonsensical yet fundamental quality of life. Maturana needed to express life’s autonomy without getting caught in describing its functions; he experienced this as a linguistic problem: “one can only say with a given language what the language permits. I had to stop looking at living systems as open systems defined in an environment, and I needed a language that… retained autonomy as a feature of the system” (1980: xiii). Maturana, a co-author on Lettvin et al.’s important

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neurophysiological paper during his time at Harvard in the 1950s, had learned that this new approach “required us to treat seriously the activity of the nervous system as determined by the nervous system itself, and not by the external world” (1980: xv). This study found of the four perception bundles of nerves in a frog’s eye, that “the language in which they are best described is the language of complex abstractions from the visual image” (Lettvin et al., p. 1951). In other words, sensation was already abstraction, already specified in an ongoing evolutionary conversation with survival and environment. This study had contributed to Maturana’s realization that “one had to close off the nervous system to account for its operation, and that perception should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality, but rather as the specification of one, because no distinction was possible between perception and hallucination” (1980: xv). Maturana began to think about cognition itself as a biological problem. This problem, however, would be one of abstractions, patterns flowing in material parts and not the makeup of the parts themselves.30 When Maturana and his student Varela developed their theory of autopoiesis, they insisted on seeing living systems as machines, since “the organization of a machine is independent of the properties of its components” (1980: 77). For their theory, abstract machinic unity rather than material contingency must take priority in the analysis in cellular organization. This machinic unity may be best understood along the lines expressed by Canguilhem: “A mechanism is a configuration of solids in motion such that the motion does not abolish the configuration” (76–77). Maturana and Varela similarly define their autopoietic machines with attention to sequential function: Such machines are homeostatic machines and all feedback is internal to them. […] An autopoietic machine is a machine organized… as a network of processes of production… of components that produces the components which… constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist….”. (Maturana and Varela 1980: 78–79, emphasis in original)

Emphasizing that an autopoietic entity is one that “specifies the topological domain of its realization,” Maturana and Varela maintain the importance of a concrete boundary within which living self-production occurs.31 Maturana, Varela, and cybernetician Ricardo B. Uribe later stress the boundary of the living organism as they summarize the necessary conditions for determining whether a given unity is autopoietic: (1) Has identifiable boundaries, (2) Its unity is of describable components (otherwise it is a non-autopoietic “unanalyzable whole”), (3) Has mechanistic unity across component interactions, (4) Boundary is created by “preferential neighborhood relations and interactions between themselves”—i.e., not creating a separate boundary, (5) All components of entity’s boundary are self-produced, and (6) Entity components are produced by interactions of its own components (1974: 192–93). Autopoiesis is realized only when the network

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systemic units have entirely produced themselves inside the space of the self. “Thus, the cell as a physical unity, topographically and operationally separate from the background” is undergoing a “permanent turnover of material” (188). While “[a]n autopoietic system uses its components as elements of self-creation,” (Maturana 2004: 99), it cannot help but to unfold this ceaseless self-building process within the irreversible dimension of time. Yet this time, Maturana notes, was mercifully free of epistemological requisites for “transcendence” such as species-reproduction, evolution, or other teleologies of more spiritual form: “We were living a very particular time in biology and philosophy. For the first time in history, it was possible to talk about living beings…without having to invent some transcendental explanatory principles” (2012: 160). Living things could simply live. Is this true in the same way of language and languaging? Maturana has called this faculty “the most basic mystery of our human life: language and cognition as biological phenomena” (2012: 159). Yet, in a final question, then, for whether autopoiesis as offers us a “word without a history”: if autopoiesis describes the process of living bodies immersed within time, can this term abjure any reference to these bodies’ history? If autopoiesis describes the cell’s being in time/across time, does “languaging” cross time in exactly the same way? If not, in what ways will life and language diverge?

Self-Assembly in Don Quixote “…los libros autores del daño.” [“…the books, true authors of the damage.”] (Cervantes 1999: 34; 2004: 60)

Don Quixote is a novel about a man created by the texts he reads. Yet, as Foucault notes of Don Quixote’s predicament, “all those extravagant romances are, quite literally, unparalleled: no one in the world ever did resemble them; their infinite language [leur langage infini] remains suspended, unfulfilled by any similitude; they could all be burned in their entirety and the form [figure] of the world would not be changed” (1966: 60–61; 1970: 46–47).32 These texts never seem to add up to a whole: In fact, the novel stages several, memorable, meta-narrational interruptions of its own tale. This novel, in which literary reflexivity arguably is the subject matter, famously hits a diegetic aporia as its plotline moves between Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 8 abruptly breaks off mid-battle between Don Quixote and a Basque man. True to Don Quixote’s “illness” of imitating literature, this battle has been provoked by his acting out a story about a knight who fights using an oak-tree branch as a lance (a story which arose in Don Quixote’s mind following his famous failure of lance-battling with windmills at the chapter’s beginning). Cervantes suddenly breaks off with the novel’s fabula, writing: “the trouble with all this is that, at this exact point, at these exact words, the original author

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of this history left the battle suspended” (49).33 Cervantes (as original author) attributes to a fictious original author this interruption of the narrative—blaming a lack of sources. Just as Don Quixote found himself at the chapter’s opening being hauled up and dashed down from the windmill-sails he ran his lance at, so here at chapter’s end Don Quixote’s own plotline is seized, held aloft, suspended [pendiente] by a fictional machinery feigning the practices of historical documentation. In Georg Lukács’s analysis of Don Quixote, “the subject, too, becomes a fragment; only the ‘I’ continues to exist, but its existence is then lost in the insubstantiality of its self-created world of ruins” (53). Chapter 9 picks up again—but not where Don Quixote’s battle left off, rather, where the author had left off—searching the city’s markets for the rest of the fragmented “history.” Of course, as readers we understand that the novel Don Quixote has not been interrupted, even if its plotline has. Metanarrational and meta-fictional devices are so prevalent in Don Quixote that Lukács calls its composition “the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again” (84).34 Indeed, in the spirit of such a reading, to understand the novel Don Quixote as inspiring the theory of cellular autopoiesis—a property by which organisms produce and maintain themselves within their own boundaries, from their own materials—counter-intuitive. Autopoiesis’s tenet of self-creating autonomy is one that the writer Cervantes is only too happy to confound at every stage of his “knightly” hero’s escapades. In Jacques Lezra’s analysis of Cervantes, any desire for meaning’s wholeness produces double-binds, since Cervantes “both requires that the relation between textual and historical events be read as an allegory and makes it impossible to understand this allegory as representing, relying upon, or producing the consonance of part and totality” (156). Don Quixote’s quest would make the world into a book, only to find it annulled or diverging from the expected plotline time and again. For Foucault, this novel abolishes a whole prior realm of textual hermeneutics, as the premodern text of resemblance and fidelity (in his analysis) is left behind by the modern text of disjuncture and regress. Foucault writes, “Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport [se jouer à l’infini] of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship [parenté] with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of irrationality [déraison] and imagination” (1966: 62; 1970: 48–49).35 The book he would become keeps breaking. Lukács sees a modernist parable in Don Quixote’s ideational mirages, sustained even when strongly disproven by “the real nature of the existing world, the self-maintaining, organic life that is alien to all ideas” (100).

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Cervantes writes of the damages Don Quixote sustains by presuming literature faithfully represents a viable system Indeed, his mind was so tattered and torn that, finally, it produced the strangest notion any madman ever conceived, and then considered it not just appropriate but inevitable. As much for the sake of his own greater honor as for his duty to the nation, he decided to turn himself into a knight errant. (15)

Consumed by his system of romances, Don Quixote certainly models “a closed domain of relations specified only with respect to the autopoietic organization that these relations constitute”—and clearly he lives in a world where the “space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 88, 89). Immediately in the next chapter, “his determination wavered, he fairly staggered under these realizations” that not himself but someone else was required to dub him a knight errant (Cervantes 1999: 17). From our perspective, Don Quixote’s so-called “madness” is an allegory for Don Quixote’s made-ness: his relation to an allo-poietic machine beyond his grasp, (the machine he is in: called literature). William Paulson’s reimagining of autopoiesis for literary studies brilliantly poses the literary text as “an artificially autonomous object,” one which “can be said to… contain the fiction of its own autonomy as one of its central organizational principles” (131, 135). The predicament of the “artificially autonomous object” certainly characterizes the problems literature encounters in the world of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This novel is a satiric enactment of the fiction of its own autonomy. Ironically enough, or, fittingly enough, then, we find Don Quixote to have served as Urtext for the concept of autopoiesis. What now would it mean for literary scholars to borrow back this term in such a way as to acknowledge these nested aporias? Such straying of a term from its original context in no way invalidates and in fact affirms the many interdisciplinary lessons of autopoiesis. Instead, we might say, it authenticates them. Luhmann describes art’s work of “self-programming” through the following example: “as when a play is staged within a play or when a novel illustrates how Don Quixote or Emma Bovary creates his or her own destiny through a self-inspiring reading” (1995 [2000]: 206). I would modify this slightly so as to say that if “destiny” is what Don Quixote’s reading creates for him, its telos could only be understood as an infinite detour, a knight’s (destin)errancy (Derrida, 91). We might see autopoiesis as Foucault sees Don Quixote, “like a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book” (46). Don Quixote reveals the truth of literature’s ungrounded self, its allopoiesis grounded in otherness, “all the way down.”

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Notes









1. The condition of a cell boundary is thus also crucial: “Whether a given system is capable of making its own boundary is the most discriminating criterion by which we recognize an autopoietic system” (Luisi, 128). 2. “Literatur als ein Experiment zu begreifen, in dem Sprache… als Organon und Modell von Verfassung—konstituiert wird” (187), my translation. 3. Renate Homann’s concept of heautonomy derives from Kant’s formulation of this concept as a capacity of reflective judgment. Lyric, for her, becomes the avant-garde of heautonomic self-rule-giving in the modern period. 4.  Levinson memorably links autopoiesis to Spinoza’s conatus and to a Wordsworthian ethos of “quiet being.” 5. Varela’s account of the term’s origin: “In May of 1971, the term autopoiesis appears in my notes as the result of the inspiration of our friend José M. Bulnes, who had just published a thesis on the Quixote in which he made use of the distinction between praxis and poiesis” (2009: 70), see also Varela (1994). 6. This episode occurs in Part II, Chapter 62. While Don Quixote now includes both parts in a single volume, Cervantes published Part II ten years after Part I (1605) in 1615. In the intervening decade, a false Part II to Don Quixote had been published by another author. This printshop scene stages this encounter as Don Quixote the character coming across a falsified tale of his exploits by this other, real-world author. For further explication of this scene, see Scheunemann (1994). 7. These themes are explored in more depth in his recent monograph on the movement (Kline 2015). 8. As Deutsch justifies this change, “Modern studies of communications engineering suggest that the behavior of human organizations, peoples, and societies has important relations in common with manmade communications networks, such as servomechanisms, switchboards, and calculating machinery, as well as with the behavior of the human nervous system and the human mind” (511). 9. For a groundbreaking historical analysis uniting Allende’s revolutionary politics with cybernetic futurism, see Medina (2006, 2011). 10. The details of the frog’s neurological optical wiring, primed to recognize certain shapes that help it track its flying prey, can be found in the classic study Lettvin et al. (1959). 11. This vicissitude of Wiener’s research inspires Peter Galison’s canonical essay, “The Ontology of the Enemy.” Galison writes, “What we have seen in Wiener’s cybernetics is the establishment of a field of meanings grounded… explicitly in the experiences of war,” and concluding with a trenchant question, “Would cybernetics, information theory, and ‘systems thinking’ have proved such a central and enduring metaphor… without the seduction of victorious military power? I doubt it” (263). 12. In recent years, it should be noted, Haraway has retheorized Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis as sympoiesis: “Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing… word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (2016: 58).

302  A. SLATER 13. Haraway is alluding here to Langdon Winner’s influential essay “Do Artifacts have Politics?” (1980). 14. For a groundbreaking analysis of how postmodern poets in this context revived Romantic immanentism, countering Symbolism’s influence on modernism, see Altieri (1973). 15. For a reading of Ellison’s use of cybernetic tropes, see Wilcox (2007). 16. As Kay describes it, “a technoepistemic transformation across the disciplinary landscape and the culture at large” worked to produce “a new, postindustrial episteme: an emergent technoculture of communication, control, and simulation,” in which “life and society were recast as relays of signals and as information systems” (593). 17. See Porush, The Soft Machine. See also LeClair, In the Loop. 18. For the theory of dissipative structures in chemistry to which Porush refers, see Nicolis and Prigogine (1977). Prigogine’s later book, The End of Certainty, co-authored with Isabelle Stengers (1996 [1997]), popularized Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics. 19. As Crawford explains, “the cybernetically developed computer systems of postmodernity allow us to comprehend better the poetry of literary modernism” (2001: 190). 20. “We are dealing… first, with ‘self-organization’ in the sense of a creation of a structure by means of a system’s own operations, and, second, with ‘autopoiesis’ in the sense of the determination of a state that makes further operations possible by means of the operations of the same system” (Luhmann 2009: 143–44). Luhmann argues “Self-organization and autopoiesis are two distinct concepts that I deliberately keep apart,” while both depend on what he calls “operational closure,” since, for Luhmann, these constitute two separate systems-moments (2009: 143). 21. “Autopoiesis means, in Maturana’s definition, that a system can generate its own operations only through the network of its own operations” (Luhmann 2009: 150). 22.  For a contemporary description of the epistemological challenge raised by Varela and Maturana to the theory of Darwinian evolution, see Escobar (2012). Marcel Schmid has recently outlined this concept’s exportation from biology to literary theory by way of systems theory in Schmid (2016), Chapter 3. For an innovative new modeling of these theories, wherein a hypothesized “adaptive practopoiesis” uses an additional level of cybernetic steering to synthesize an organism’s present experience with its longer-term knowledge, see Nikolić (2015). 23. Astrophysicist and systems theorist Erich Jantsch (1980) similarly reread autopoiesis through nonliving dissipative structures to the metabiotic system of “Gaia.” 24. Here, I refer to the “Gaia Hypothesis” associated with Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. In Margulis and Sagan’s terms, “The biosphere as a whole is autopoietic in the sense that it maintains itself…. As an autopoietic system, Gaia therefore shares an essential quality with individual living systems” (20). For an intellectual history of this transition from autopoiesis to Gaia, see Clarke (2012). 25. See also Varela (1980).

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26.  Another important posthumanist, abiotic concept of autopoiesis which is beyond the scope of my argument here is its use in the A-life, or “Artificial Life” community of researchers who build computational simulations of living beings. See Langton (1984, 1992). For critical discussions of A-life’s larger research implications, see Johnston (2008) and McMullin (2004). Varela also worked on cellular automata as early as the 1970s. In 1991, Varela co-organized with Paul Bourgine the first European conference on A-Life. 27. N. Katherine Hayles gives an equally trenchant diagnosis of the political economy of cultural interest in cybernetics and autopoiesis as models for life: “As first-world culture moves from an industrial base to an information society, presence/absence is displaced by pattern/randomness as a generative dialectic for cultural forms” (1998: 209). 28. Keller, “Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor,” 164n30. 29.  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, noting that Luhmann’s work made biologists Maturana and Varela famous outside their scientific community, finds “Luhmann’s intellectual bet” in using biological parlance to have allowed him “to develop his systemic thought under strict avoidance of notions such as ‘subject,’ ‘subjecthood,’ or ‘agency’” (23). 30. “[O]ur problem is the living organization and therefore our interest will not be in properties of components, but in processes and relations between processes realized through components” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 75). 31. Maturana and Varela’s instance on a physical barrier for the living organism has been an epistemological stumbling block to those who would outline much vaster autopoietic organisms. Artificial Life theorists Paul Bourgine and John Stewart state “we require a renewed definition of autopoiesis that does not depend on an excessively reified definition of ‘membrane’ or ‘boundary,’” replacing this instead with a “network of processes” (337). 32. Translation modified. 33. “Pero está el daño de todo esto, que en este punto y término, deja pendiente el autor de esta historia esta batalla, disculpándose que no halló más escrito de estas hazañas de don Quijote…” (2004: 83). 34. For a detailed study of Lukács’s work with Don Quixote, see Schmidt (2011). 35. Translation modified.

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304  A. SLATER Clarke, Bruce. 2012. Autopoiesis and the Planet. In Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Henry Sussman, 58–75. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2019. Finding Cybernetics. World Futures 75 (1–2): 17–28. Clough, Patricia. 2008. The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 1–22. Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. 1960. Cyborgs and Space. Astronautics 5 (9) (September): 26–27, 74–76. Connelly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press. Crawford, Robert. 2001. Modernist Cybernetics and the Poetry of Knowledge. In The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge Since the 1750s, 170–222. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crick, Francis H., John S. Griffith, and Leslie E. Orgel. 1957. Codes Without Commas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 43: 416–421. de Vos, Laurens. 2018. The Observer Observed. The Promise of the Posthuman: Homeostasis, Autopoiesis and Virtuality in Samuel Beckett. Journal of Beckett Studies 27 (2) (September): 245–260. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. On an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, trans. John P. Leavey. Semeia 23: 63–97. Deutsch, Karl W. 1948–1949. Some Notes on Research on the Role of Models in the Natural and Social Sciences. Synthese 1: 506–533. Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. 2005. Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4) (December): 429–452. Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible Man. New York: Penguin Random House. Escobar, Jorge M. 2012. Autopoiesis and Darwinism. Synthese 185 (1) (March): 53–72. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des science humaines.. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Galison, Peter. 1994. The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision. Critical Inquiry 21 (1) (Autumn): 228–266. Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2006. Language, Life, Code (Software). Architectural Design 76 (5): 26–29. Gårseth-Nesbakk, Levi. 2011. Accrual Accounting Representations in the Public Sector—A Case of Autopoiesis. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22 (3): 247–258. Gaydos, Rebecca. 2014. Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework. Journal of Modern Literature 38 (1) (Fall): 166–182. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich; with Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela interviewed by Bernhard Poerksen. 2006. Maturana and Varela on Science and the Humanities: The Poerksen Interviews. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40 (1) (Spring): 22–53.

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306  A. SLATER Luhmann, Niklas. (1984) 1995. Social Systems [Soziale Systeme], trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1990. The Autopoiesis of Social Systems. In Essays on Self-Reference, 1–20. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1995) 2000. Self-Organization: Coding and Programming. In Art as a Social System [Die Kunst der Gesellschaft], 185–210, trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University Press.. ———. 2009. Self-Organization and Autopoiesis. In Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory, 143–156, trans. Hans-Georg Moeller with Bruce Clarke, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen. Durham: Duke University. Luisi, Pier Luigi. 2016. Autopoiesis: The Invariant Property. In The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology, 119–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1989. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. (1995) 2000. What Is Life? Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maturana, Humberto R. 1980. Introduction to Autopoiesis and Cognition. In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, xi–xxx. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company. ———. 2004. Autopoiesis is Living. Interview with Bernhard Poerksen. From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition, 93–103. Heidelberg: Carl Auer Verlag. ———. 2012. Reflections on My Collaboration with Francisco Varela. Biology of Cognition 7 (3): 155–164. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, 73–134. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. ———. 1987. Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Maturana, Humberto R., Ricardo B. Uribe, and Francisco J. Varela. 1974. Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model. BioSystems 5: 187–196. McMullin, Barry. 2004. Thirty Years of Computational Autopoiesis. Artificial Life 10 (3) (Summer): 277–295. Medina, Eden. 2006. Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies 38: 571–606. ———. 2011. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mingers, John. 1995. Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. New York: Plenum Press. ———. 2014. Systems Thinking, Critical Realism, and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas. London: Routledge. Moe, Aaron M. 2011. Autopoiesis and cummings’ cat. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 3 (1) (April): 110–120. Nicolis, Gregoire, and Ilya Prigogine. 1977. Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations. New York: Wiley.

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CHAPTER 17

Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories and the Biology of Emergence Robert Peckham

In the midst of a pandemic and at great risk to his personal safety, a researcher retrieves a sample of tissue from an infected body. He races back to a makeshift laboratory where, hunched over the microscope, the offending microorganism is identified: “And there, fluttering delicately on the slide, was a germ” (Matheson 2007, 75). In this plotline of disease identification, biology is staged as a struggle between blindness and sight, invisibility and disclosure. The disease’s origins can be confirmed because the causal pathogen can be seen. It is there, discernible as an object under the microscope. Implicitly, it can also be heard. The verb “fluttering” employed to describe the germ denotes both a visible pulsation and the fluctuation of a pitch. The word points to the specimen’s sonic identity, even as it suggests the extent to which sight and sound intermingle in practices of scientific knowledge making. The “vampiris bacillus” must be seen and heard to be studied (Matheson 2007, 76). This chapter maps the presence of sound across three popular twentieth-century science narratives concerned with biological contamination and epidemics: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (1994). These texts are taken as “sampling devices” for exploring continuities and shifts in how scientific practices have been popularly understood from Cold War contamination fears in the 1950s to the early 1990s when, in the wake of HIV/AIDS, global health concerns began to pivot on the threat posed to R. Peckham (*)  University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_17

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human populations by lethal emerging and reemerging hemorrhagic diseases (Rosenberg 1992, xxiii). Interconnections between sound and vision are central to the different scientific worlds these texts evoke. Sound can function as a means of challenging the fixed authority of sight, opening up an affective space that the visual forecloses. However, like vision, listening is linked to particular forms of masculine and quasi-colonial control. Seeing and hearing do not only comprise ways of knowing and experiencing the world, they are also inherently political and provide models for its organization. Albeit in different ways, each of the three narratives considered in this chapter invites the reader to reimagine twentieth-century scientific visuality— science as a “scopic regime”—through the problematizing prism of sound. The texts point to the ways in which visual and auditory epistemologies converge and diverge to create critical dissonances. Sounds implode upon the visual, disclosing visuality to be “a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay 1988, 4). In contending that fiction can furnish an archive for exploring science and its assumptions, the chapter draws on the insights of scholars such as Leo Marx and Rosalind Williams, among others, who have long argued for the tight imbrication of technology and culture. Rather than understanding science as an applied knowledge or repertoire of practices, it can be understood as a discursive field in a manner analogous to Marx’s technological world (Marx 1964; Williams 1990). Fictional works reflect and are constitutive of a scientific world. In Williams’s formulation, they are “cognitive acts” and as such provide the ground for exploring prevalent ideas that characterize the broader scientific culture (Williams 1993, 399).

Sound and the Primacy of Vision Histories of Western science have tended to emphasize the primacy of vision. “The sixteenth century did not see first,” writes Lucien Febvre, “it heard and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds.” It was only at the turn of the seventeenth century that “vision was unleashed in the world of science” (1982, 432, emphasis in original). New optical instruments, notably the telescope and the microscope, progressively curtailed the role of the other senses (Snyder 2015). The rise of print culture and the circulation of books extended the sphere of experimental science, enabling the reader to become an “absent witness” to scientific knowledge making (Johns 1998, 506). As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, scientific atlases and photography were crucial to the rise of scientific objectivity as an “epistemic ideal” from the early nineteenth century (2008). This foregrounding of the visual in histories of science has meant that sound and practices of listening have often been neglected (Crary 1990). Increasingly, however, scholars are reassessing science’s auditory dimensions. Steven Connor has gone as far as to suggest that “an observational,

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calculative scientific culture organised around the sequestering powers of the eye began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to produce new forms of technology, especially communicative technology, which themselves promoted a reconfiguring of the sensorium in terms of the ear rather than the eye” (Connor 2002, 17). New acoustic technologies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to pick up hitherto inaudible sounds—“the roar on the other side of silence” (Eliot 1871, 351; see also Picker 2003, 4). Theories of vibration and electromagnetic waves suggested affinities between light and sound, seeing and listening (Enns and Trower 2013). Technologies for recording, amplifying, and disseminating sound—and packaging it as consumer commodity—propelled a preoccupation with the auditory and the cultivation of “sonic skills” (Bijsterveld 2019). These technological and scientific efforts to capture and describe extra-sensory frequencies were compelled by an urge to fix and categorize a fluctuating auditory universe. The management of sound was analogized with the teeming microbial world revealed by the microscope. As one commentator noted in 1878: “The microphone is an instrument which acts towards the ear as the microscope does to the eye. It will render evident to us sounds that are otherwise absolutely inaudible” (W. H. Preece in Picker 2003, 3). In the early twenty-first century, visualization and sonification remain closely connected in science: not only in the conversion of scientific data into “auditory information” but, as Cyrus Mody has shown in his study of US probe microscopists, in scientific practices predicated on collecting and interpreting data through a process of “synesthetic conversion” between seeing and listening activities (Supper 2012; Mody 2012). The narratives discussed in this chapter appropriate a scientific language in ways that highlight perceptual, epistemological, and methodological ambiguities between sight and sound, and vision and voice that are embedded in modern science. For example, the stealthy pathogen is sometimes conceived in these texts as an ominously noiseless foe, just as the exposure of a truth that is hidden—apocalypse, from the Greek for uncovering—is linked to the revelatory perception of a noise (Bull 1999). The laboratory as an environment purposively regulated to make pathogens visible may also, particularly in high biosafety-level facilities, be understood as a space where voices are hushed and extraneous sounds suppressed. If it is a place of intense seeing, as a micro-sphere of silence, it is equally a place of concentrated listening (Mody 2005).

The Tortured Silence of Science Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend was published in 1954 during the height of the Cold War Red Scare, when concerns about a Communist infestation in the United States conflated with anxieties about radioactive fallout. Metaphors of epidemic disease were central to the Truman Doctrine with its emphasis on total security in the face of “infectious” threats to the nation

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(Ivie 1999). The 1950s also witnessed increasing public disquiet about the anthropogenic impact on the natural environment of air and water pollution, radiation, waste disposal, and pesticides. These political and environmental concerns provide a contextual backdrop to I Am Legend, where the protagonist, Robert Neville, finds himself the lone survivor of a plague that has devastated the planet, transforming humans into vampires. This is a drama played out in part as an auditory conflict. The year is 1976. Sequestered inside his house as dusk falls, Neville is haunted by the violent sounds that the vampires make as they swarm outside. He attempts to drown out the brutish din by playing classical music at full volume through loudspeakers, jamming in earplugs so he is engulfed by “a great silence,” before finally soundproofing the building (Matheson, 11). In Matheson’s post-war tale of societal and environmental collapse, noise and its subjection feature as critical motifs. Disease in the narrative is the result of a catastrophic environmental transformation, since it transpires that the plague is spread by mosquitoes and dust storms that follow in the wake of war. The howls of the storms and the cries of the vampires are pitted against other salutary sounds that impinge upon the dead landscape and intimate the possibility of its reanimation. At the same time, disease and the threat of infection are often foreshadowed by an ominous stillness—an unhealthy cessation of noise in deathly silence. In a passage of the novel that anticipates Rachel Carson’s celebrated account of the detrimental impact of synthetic pesticides on wildlife in Silent Spring, published eight years later in 1962, Neville remarks: Morning. A SUN-BRIGHT hush broken only by the chorus of birds in the trees. No breeze to stir the vivid blossoms around the houses, the bushes, the dark-leaved hedges. A cloud of silent heat was suspended over everything on Cimarron Street. (Matheson, 57)

Compare this to Carson’s description of an ominously muted nature: It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. (Carson 2002, 2)

Evocations of nature in Matheson and Carson draw on a tradition of American nature writing concerned with the ways in which the “noisy world” of mechanized modernity has encroached upon the “slumberous peace” of the countryside (Hawthorne in Marx 1964, 23–24). For environmentalists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, silence was an indicator that something was wrong; it was a symptom of a world out of balance. In Matheson’s fiction, the destruction of nature by humans has resulted in their own regression to animals—a slide from language and music back

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to brute noise. It is this primal world that threatens Neville’s survival and challenges his faith in the humanizing force of culture. Much of Matheson’s narrative hangs on the protagonist’s ultimately futile effort to prevent the vampires from invading his house. While he attempts to suppress the cacophonous noise outside, Neville recognizes a darkness that already resides within. From this perspective, culture—embodied in the “deathly still” of the dusty Los Angeles Public Library that he visits in his quest for scientific explanations for the plague—is not opposed to the zombie world beyond the sanctuary, but may in fact be implicated in its devastation. The “gray-stoned” library is described as a mausoleum housing “the literature of a world’s dead” (Matheson, 66). The darkness in culture is suggested, too, by the strains of Arnold Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899), which Neville blasts through the speakers. This is a music inspired by Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same title that, for all its celebration of transfiguration, involves a dark secret and begins with the brooding image of a man and a woman “walking through a bare, cold wood” (Frisch 1993, 112). Ironically, the silence that Neville cultivates as an antidote to the noise outside provides an imaginative space for the vampires to regroup. Pathogenic sounds—“auditory hallucinations” (Matheson, 66) as he calls them—reemerge in the silence that Neville has worked so hard to produce: He lay there on the bed and took deep breaths of the darkness, hoping for sleep. But the silence didn’t really help. He could still see them out there, the white-faced men prowling around his house, looking ceaselessly for a way to get in at him. (Matheson, 10)

Science figures in the novel chiefly in Neville’s scientific quest to understand the origins and cause of the disease and its means of transmission. In his resolve to find “a rational answer” through “careful research,” he visits the “Science Room” of the Public Library, trawling through tomes in the medical section on physiology and blood (66). The narrative traces Neville’s progressive scientific expertise as he acquires and learns to use a microscope, honing his skills at mounting specimens on slides and finding a place for the accoutrements of his improvised laboratory: “Glass slips, cover glasses, pipettes, cells, forceps, Petri dishes, needles, chemicals—all were placed in systematic locations” (75). As Mathias Clasen has noted, “Matheson goes to great lengths to rationalize or naturalize the vampire myth, transplanting the monster from the otherworldly realms of folklore and Victorian supernaturalism to the test tube of medical inquiry and rational causation” (Clasen 2010‚ 323). While he conducts experiments using his microscope, he corroborates his findings with his readings and concludes, among other things, that the cause of the disease is likely a strain of bacteria (Matheson, 66–73). He also discovers that vampires can be killed by exposing them to direct sunlight or inflicting large wounds on their bodies that enable the bacteria to transform into deadly aerobic parasites.

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There is an implicitly violent and gendered dimension to the protagonist’s improvised scientific experimentation and to the dynamics of silence and sound, vision and voice that the plot dramatizes. As the lone survivor of a bacterial apocalypse, Neville fills his silent days with perverse visions of sex with the female vampires. Early on in the novel he performs a scientific experiment on an infected woman, whom he binds to a chair. “Why do you always experiment on women?” he asks himself (Matheson, 49–51). Neville’s homespun research constitutes, in effect, a form of torture. Science is construed here as a masculine practice predicated on forcing its biological objects to speak. It is a pursuit that entails the subjection of dangerously reproductive specimens that are coded as female. Carson’s was an essentially restorative conceptualization of science: Its aim was to quantify the toxicity of silence as a step toward reinstating healthy sound. For Matheson, however, Neville’s scientific research is riven with a more disturbing contradiction: It is implicated in the violence of the world it seeks to understand.

Silence and the Machismo of Techno-Science Macho science and its involvement in the spread of a disease it is predicated on destroying is a major theme in Michael Crichton’s (1969) techno-thriller The Andromeda Strain, which focuses on “the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis” (Crichton, 3). Scientific research in the novel is imagined largely as a process of information management and a matter of professional expertise. The narrative centers on scientific and technical procedures that culminate in a series of experimental tests carried out by a scientific team on a biological sample under an electron microscope. An array of technological devices are mobilized to fight the extraterrestrial pathogen, even as it turns out that new space technology is responsible for bringing the threat to earth in the first place. The tension in the narrative derives from the ways in which the seamlessness and efficacy of a modern, automated technoscience, is repeatedly undercut. Remnants of a crashed satellite, which are suspected of harboring a highly transmissible pathogen, are transported for analysis from the crash site in Arizona to a top-security underground laboratory called Wildfire close to the fictional town of Flatrock, Nevada. The masculine dimension of sight is emphasized in the first sentences of the book: “A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.” In Crichton’s narrative, it is the male scientists who invariably do the talking (and the watching). Women’s voices are pre-recorded announcements or fleeting interruptions to male dialogues (Power 2014). The object of male scientific concern— the rapidly mutating extraterrestrial microbe—is gendered as female. In Greek myth, Andromeda is a princess who is stripped and chained naked to a rock by her father, King Cepheus, as a sacrifice to the god Poseidon.

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Crichton’s pathogen is analogized as a victim of violence, manhandled to reveal her secrets. She is also implicitly a threat to male authority, her name in Greek signifying “ruler of men.” As in I Am Legend, the male scientists’ pursuit of the pathogenic agent is implicitly likened to the torture of a female body. In The Andromeda Strain, the scientists’ increasingly desperate measures are aimed at coercing her to yield up her identity as a precondition to her neutralization. In contrast to Matheson’s narrative, however, this scientific torture moves from an improvised, one-to-one encounter into a team management process that involves the integration of modern technologies. Sound—muted female voices, torture to force the female body to speak— reinforces and extends the male gaze. A violently gendered plotline is thus mapped onto a scientific world where vision overlaps with but sometimes collides with sound. Inside the Wildfire installation, the scientific team works to identify and understand the mysterious disease agent by summoning an armamentarium of visual instruments: X-rays, an electron microscope, an assortment of high-magnification viewers, movie cameras, time-lapse cameras, televisions, CCTVs, and visual link-ups. At several points in the narrative airplanes are scrambled for aerial reconnaissance missions. The satellite itself, of course, is a technology designed for orbital surveillance. A quotation from the fictional biologist R.A. Janek affixed to the front of the book underscores the visual theme: “Increasing vision is increasingly expensive” (Crichton, 230). Vision and its limitations are repeatedly stressed. The narrative begins with a soldier looking down at the crash site through binoculars—a pointless exercise we are told, since humanity is facing a microscopic threat (9). In a characteristic move, the power of vision is invoked only to be immediately negated. On the one hand, modern science is imagined in Crichton’s novel p ­ rimarily as a practice of seeing—with illustrative graphs, electron density and output maps, scanner printouts, and sketches integrated into the narrative. On the other hand, this optimization of sight is accompanied by a soundtrack of hissing doors, crackling radios, ringing telephones and bells, clattering printers, humming air-conditioning units, microphones, clicking loudspeakers, and tape recordings. Sight is frequently prefigured and overshadowed by sound: The military is dispatched to Piedmont when, having reached an altitude of five miles, the Scoop satellite’s electronic beepers begin to emit an emergency signal (11). The Wildfire installation is conceived as a vast subterranean space of regulated sound, just as the country itself is conjured as a network of humming trunk lines and cables (35). When the pathologist Charles Burton and the bacteriologist Jeremy Stone enter Piedmont to investigate the mysterious deaths of the town’s inhabitants, they are struck by the “deathly silence”: “But there was no sound—no reassuring rumble of an automobile engine, no barking dog, no shouting children. Silence” (70). The struggle to contain the spread of the lethal pathogen becomes a struggle to discern clues in “apparently garbled, random sound.” Early on in the novel we are introduced to Major Arthur Manchek’s “audio

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screen,” a computerized means of sifting through unintelligible sound to pick up hidden meanings (21). The process of filtering confused sound anticipates the twenty-first-century notion of “viral chatter,” wherein the pinging of mutating viruses is rendered intelligible to scientists who listen in on the genetic traffic between species, just as “the National Security Agency scour the Internet, listening for clues of impending terrorist attacks” (Specter 2010). This auditory drama, which intermeshes with the visual, is more than an incidental dimension of Crichton’s narrative; more, that is, than background noise. On the contrary, the novel’s narrative hinges on sound and its absence. While the scientists volubly discuss the progress of their research, the germ remains tenaciously silent. Much of the novel is written in the form of dialogue between the different protagonists: fighter pilots, command control personnel, and the scientists who pore over computer printouts of the lab tests. Science, the novel suggests, requires more than an expertise in seeing; its operations depend on voices, on interpreting what has been said, on searching for speech in silences, and teasing out meanings from mangled sounds. Reliance on sight can be dangerous, too: One of the protagonists, the clinical microbiologist Peter Leavitt, suffers an epileptic fit that is triggered by flashing lights (Crichton, 260–262). The narrative’s incessant dialogue and the mechanical noises of the automated lab serve to foreground the menacing muteness—the “eerie silence” in the words of the physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies—of the very object that is generating the commotion: the disease agent, codenamed Andromeda (Davies 2010). This is the silence of space, from which the extraterrestrial organism has come.

Monet in Africa: Sound in the Picture of Disease In thrillers such as The Andromeda Strain, the disease threats are made visible, but they are rarely heard. What we hear instead are the panicky trills of telephones and the cries of the sick. We hear the repeatedly frustrated efforts to make the pathogen heard. In Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, a bestselling account of hemorrhagic viruses published in 1994, the reader is introduced to the pulsating natural environment from which virulent disease agents emerge to infect human populations. The Hot Zone is the precursor of a genre of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries pandemic thriller that centers on sudden spillover events: crisis moments when, without warning, highly pathogenic diseases cross over from animal to human populations. Viruses, in such works, are commonly visualized as latent but invisible presences that lurk in the places of their origins, such as the dense rainforests of Central Africa—the location of the Ebola River that gave its name to the disease. Expanding visual scales—magnified microscopic organisms, diseased bodies, and susceptible geographies—are the topoi of the pandemic thriller and of global public health as it is projected in the media (Farmer 2006). Preston has been one of the most influential writers in shaping these popular perceptions of “hot” viruses, particularly hemorrhagic diseases such as

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Marburg and Ebola that originated in Africa. The Hot Zone was published in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, just as emerging viruses were becoming the focus of new research in microbiology, and an “emerging diseases worldview” was being articulated in a public health literature that increasingly stressed the imperative for preparedness (King 2002). The narrative opens with the description of a trip by a Frenchman working for the Nzoia Sugar Factory “in the shadow of Mount Elgon” on Kenya’s border with Uganda. The penumbra of the extinct volcano echoes the narrator’s description of HIV/AIDS, which from the late 1970s had “fallen like a shadow over the population” (Preston 1995, 4). On a visit to the Kitum Cave one Christmas in the company of a local woman, he contracts a lethal viral disease (5–6). From the outset, Preston immerses the reader in a visually thick description of the East African environment. Significantly, his protagonist, who is “an amateur naturalist,” is named Charles Monet, suggesting a connection between the lush landscape descriptions in the novel and the work of the French impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) famous for his plein-air paintings of poppy-strewn fields and the Water Lilies series inspired by the artist’s garden at Giverny. If Monet’s art reflects an interest in perceptual processes, Preston’s narrative and particularly the opening scenes revel in the luxuriance of the African environment and the challenges it poses to the human senses. Nature’s superabundance in The Hot Zone obscures sinister intent. Even a description of Monet stargazing on New Year’s Eve, unsteady after drinking champagne, echoes the commonplace assertion that there are “more viruses than there are stars in the universe” (Zimmer 2013). The narrative dwells on sounds and silences. We are told of Monet’s predilection for spending “most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased him to watch and listen to machines doing their work” (Preston, 4). The noise of the machinery pumping water from the River Nzoia anticipates the quasi-industrial replication of the pathogens inside Monet. Viruses are exploitative micro-machines, working the body to death. As the narrator notes: “Viruses may seem alive when they multiply but in another sense they are obviously dead, are only machines, subtle ones to be sure, but strictly mechanical, no more alive than a jackhammer” (85). In the African wilderness, as imagined in the novel, the background drone of mechanized modernity gives way to a complex layering of natural sounds: “the scuffle of monkeys feeding in the trees, a hum of insects, an occasional low huh-huh call of a monkey,” or elephants “making cracking sounds as they peeled bark and broke limbs from trees” (Preston, 9 and 10–11). The density of this auditory landscape recalls real-life descriptions by viral hunters; for example, the microbiologist Peter Piot’s account of his 1976 trip to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where he was part of the team that first identified—and named—the Ebola virus: “The forest erupted with noise like a living thing as we hurtled and lurched our way along the well-trodden paths” (Piot 2012, 44; on “auditory landscapes”, see Corbin 1998).

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The overlapping and competing noises that make up this acoustic habitat hint at the potential for viral spillovers. Inside Kitum Cave, Preston’s narrator tells us: “Waves of bat sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back and forth, a dry, squeaky sound, like many small doors being opened on dry hinges” (Preston, 12). The disease’s likely vectors—the virus’s natural reservoir—are imagined in terms of the classic horror plotline: the ­creaking door that signals the entrance of an invisible killer. Sounds—squeaking bats, jabbering monkeys, and the insidious whine of feeding mosquitoes—are auditory portals into the mysteriously inaudible and invisible place from which the disease has emerged. The constant background hum of the African landscape is juxtaposed in The Hot Zone with enclaves of silence. Monet, by now transferred for treatment in Nairobi and converted into a “virus bomb,” sits in the casualty department of the hospital by a sign that reads “PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE” (Preston, 22). And later, an unnerving silence characterizes the heavy glass-rimmed space of the containment lab in Washington‚ DC, where scientists don biohazard space suits. Like deep space, this is a strangely muffled environment. As the narrator remarks of one of the scientists, Nancy Jaax: “All she could hear was the noise of the air blowing inside her suit. It filled her suit with a roar like a subway train coming through a tunnel” (83). Inside the anechoic (sound-absorbing) chamber there is no absolute silence (Cage 1973, 13). In one corner of the lab monkeys hoot and grunt, making “high-pitched squeals,” while the infected monkeys in another bank of cages remain “silent, passive, and withdrawn” (Preston, 77). The narrator construes virology, not only as a struggle to visualize the pathogenic agent, but also as a struggle to hear it. As he suggests, viruses make sounds: They “can bud through a cell wall, like drips coming out of a faucet—drip, drip, drip, drip, copy, copy, copy, copy—that’s the way the AIDS virus works” (84). Indeed, viral silence is understood as a ploy; it is a cunning strategy for overcoming unsuspecting prey: It is a characteristic of a predator to become invisible to its prey during the quiet and sometimes lengthy stalk that precedes an explosive attack. The savanna grass ripples on the plains, and the only sound in the air is the sound of African doves calling from acacia trees, a pulse that goes on through the heat of the day and never slows and never ends. In the distance, in the flickering heat, in the immense distance, a herd of zebra grazes. Suddenly from the grass comes a streak of movement, and a lion is among them and hangs on a zebra’s throat. The zebra gives out a barking cry choked off, and the two interlocked beings, the predator and the prey, spin around in a dance, until you lose sight of the action in a billow of dust, and the next day the bones have a surface of flies. (Preston, 136)

The extended analogy in this passage links invisibility and violence to silence. The stealthy predator takes cover behind lulling reverberations: swishing grass and cooing doves. The overt metaphoric construction of the virus-as-predator

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is progressively broken down as the writing slips into a literal description of the hunt. Like a spectator on safari, the imagined onlooker loses sight of the predator and prey behind a “billow of dust.” Here, the polarity of silence and sound reflected in the opposing cages of squealing and silent monkeys in the lab gives way to equivocation as lion and zebra become “interlocked beings.” In the final description of the abandoned “monkey house” in Washington, the narrative relies almost entirely on an auditory drama to tell the story. “The place was deserted and as quiet as a tomb,” we are told. The narrator’s feet rustle “through shreds of plastic in the grass.” He can hear the sound of “a boy dribbling a basketball on a playground. The ball cast rubbery echoes off the former monkey house.” Children’s shouts are audible through the trees. Space is visualized as a dispersal of sounds that reverberate and drift. In the accumulation of these everyday noises, the reader is repeatedly brought back to the ominous hum of the rainforest: to the place from which the Ebola virus first emerged, the shadowy underworld from which it continues to whisper (“the shades of the dead continued to whisper”) (Preston, 410–411). Like the preceding description of the wind moving through the savanna grass, sound provides a cover for the stalking predator. Africa in Preston’s novel is a place of relentless sound but also of sinister silence. As the narrator notes of the Ebola virus that was identified in Central Africa in 1976: “It seemed to emerge out of the stillness of an implacable force brooding on an inscrutable intention” (100). Of the Bumba Zone district in northern Zaire that was quarantined during the outbreak, he writes: “Bumba had dropped off the face of the earth into the silent heart of darkness” (113). These direct borrowings from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) are indicative, as are other less overt allusions to the novella.1 As Conrad’s narrator Marlow tells his story, it becomes evident that silence is racialized and becomes a correlate of darkness. The “violent babble of uncouth sounds” that the abject natives emit—“weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild”—serve to frame “the great silence” of the enveloping forest that submerses the narrator, closing over him “as the sea closes over a diver” (Conrad 2012, 21, 22, and 37). As Crichton remarks in The Andromeda Strain: “Every crisis [whether biological or political] has its beginning long before the actual onset.” Quoting from the work of the fictional scholar Alfred Pockran, he adds, “A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored. Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing sameness” (Crichton, 18–19). This sense of prehistory is repeatedly stressed by the narrator in Preston’s work. His description of the CDC field exploration team that pushes up the Ebola River into “the heart of Africa” is reminiscent of the “Eldorado Expedition” up the Congo River—a “mighty big river,” which Conrad’s narrator describes as “resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land” (8). Preston’s African wilderness, too, contains the traces of a violent past. On the slopes of Mount Elgon, Monet and

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his girlfriend pass “old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind lines of blue-gum trees” (7). The virus hunter lives in the shadow of past expeditions and the land he depicts resonates with “the continued vibration” or “spillovers” of past voices. An auditory reading of Preston’s The Hot Zone suggests the extent to which a viral soundscape is connected to an imperial imaginary. The places identified as hot spots of viral chatter in his novel have also been sites of colonial violence. And the postcolonial virus hunter lives on at the heart of a public health imaginary concerned with the hot spots of disease emergence in the Global South. Africa is figured as a continent defined by its o ­ verpowering noises and crushing silences. Popular science reproduces tropical tropes, drawing on scientific and literary antecedents wherein Africa is construed as a place of auditory extremes: of incomprehensible noise and disequilibrating stillness that threaten to overwhelm the colonial order.

Acoustic Debris Today, viruses have become familiar as visual objects incorporated into movie montage sequences, documentaries, and public health messages: the string-like silhouette of Ebola, for example, or the crown-like receptors that characterize the coronaviruses responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)‚ Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)‚ and COVID-19. We have become familiar, too, with the disturbing pathologies that viruses may produce, particularly those that cause hemorrhagic illnesses. This chapter has sought to challenge an emphasis on the visual in the outbreak narrative by examining pervasive auditory motifs in three popular texts that focus on biological contamination and disease emergence. Science is imagined in these works as a technology and practice of listening, not just of seeing. Moreover, the unintelligibility of sound can sometimes undermine the authority of the visual. In different ways, the narratives encourage us to reflect on the assumptions that structure scientific ways of seeing and listening. Sonic experience, like visual experience, is shaped by multiple, interacting factors: physiological, cultural, institutional, and technological (Chion 2016). Seeing and listening, for all their claims to be neutral, are political acts, central to the business of imposing order on the world. The narratives under discussion have much to teach us about the techno-scientific milieus that characterize three twentieth-century moments: experimental science conducted in a Cold War wasteland; a professionalized techno-science, encompassing space exploration and automation, embedded in a military complex geared to security; and an emerging disease worldview from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which a colonial world order is recast as a global health regime designed to manage the viral threats that emanate from the “blank spaces of the earth” (Conrad, 8). Although their scientific outlooks are different, each of these narratives suggests that diseases are complex entanglements of the social, biological,

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technological, and environmental. Tracing the shifting register of these narratives as they move between ekphrastic, literal, and metaphorical renderings of sound and sight underscores the ways in which the language and conceptual frames of modern science are embedded in a broader cultural world. The historian Nancy Rose Hunt has argued that attentiveness to hearing serves “to problematize and disaggregate the visual” (Hunt 2013, 43). Hunt is concerned with retrieving “acoustic debris” and “rewriting the conventional atrocity narrative” that links the violence of the present, often unproblematically, to that of the past. An acoustic reading of the archive, and sensitivity to auditory traces, becomes a way to “avoid repeating the tenacity of the visual and the sense of shock that it reproduces”—of moving beyond stock images of trauma that “reify a maimed, disfigured, individualized body” (Hunt, 41 and 58). In a similar way, this chapter has followed the repetitions between science and fiction, history and the present, focusing not on the spectacular iterations of emergence, but on the sound of resonant continuities.

Note 1. As Marlow puts it in Heart of Darkness, “this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” (Conrad 2012, 38).

Bibliography Bijsterveld, Karin. 2019. Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s-Present). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bull, Malcolm. 1999. Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality. London and New York: Verso. Cage, John. [1961] 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Carson, Rachel. [1962] 2002. Silent Spring. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Chion, Michel. [1986] 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clasen, Mathias. 2010. Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Philosophy and Literature 34 (2): 313–328. Connor, Steven. 2002. Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear. In Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh, 16–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Conrad, Joseph. [1899] 2012. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin. Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crichton, Michael. 1969. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Vintage Books. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2008. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

322  R. PECKHAM Davies, Paul. 2010. The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Eliot, George. 1871. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Enns, Anthony, and Shelley Trower (eds.). 2013. Vibratory Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Farmer, Paul. 2006. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Febvre, Lucien. 1982. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frisch, Walter. 1993. The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2013. An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in Congo. In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 39–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ivie, Robert L. 1999. Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (3): 570–591. Jay, Martin. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, 3–23. Seattle: Bay Press. Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. King, Nicholas B. 2002. Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health. Social Studies of Science 32 (5–6): 763–789. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Matheson, Richard. [1954] 2007. I Am Legend. New York: Tor. Mody, Cyrus C.M. 2005. The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice. Science, Technology, and Human Values 30 (2): 175–198. ———. 2012. Conversions: Sound and Sight, Military and Civilian. In Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, 224–248. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Picker, John M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Piot, Peter (with Ruth Marshall). 2012. No Time To Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses. New York: W. W. Norton. Power, Nina. 2014. Soft Coercion, the City, and the Recorded Female Voice. In The Acoustic City, ed. Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen, 23–26. Berlin: Jovis Publishers. Preston, Richard. [1994] 1995. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story. New York: Anchor Books. Rosenberg, Charles E. 1992. Introduction—Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History. In Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden, xiii–xxvi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Snyder, Laura S. 2015. Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. New York: W. W. Norton. Specter, Michael. 2010. Letter from Cameroon—The Doomsday Strain: Can Nathan Wolfe Thwart the Next AIDS Before It Spreads? New Yorker (December 20 and 27). Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/ the-doomsday-strain.

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Supper, Alexandra. 2012. The Search for the ‘Killer Application’: Drawing the Boundaries around the Sonification of Scientific Data. In Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 249–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Rosalind. 1990. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1993. Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems. Science in Context 6 (2): 377–403. Zimmer, Carl. 2013. An Infinity of Viruses. National Geographic (February 20). Retrieved from: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/20/aninfinity-of-viruses/.

CHAPTER 18

To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright Steven Meyer a ground/state that moves without/an absolute space. (Wright 2007a: 25)

For much of the twentieth century, physics was first in the pecking order among the sciences, as evidenced in the massive project to reduce the life sciences to the physical sciences. Molecular biology offered one such pathway. More recently, the life sciences have undergone a striking transformation, and it can reasonably be argued that, having pulled even with the physical sciences, they have begun to pull ahead. Less apparent has been the longerterm tendency of the biologization of physics replacing physicized biology, already prominent in the opening decades of the century yet largely ignored in the shadow of much-bruited developments in the physical sciences. Initially, William James (although he had little to say about physics), and then in the interwar years Alfred North Whitehead (a highly original theoretical physicist1 and applied mathematician, as well as groundbreaking meta-logician and speculative philosopher), cleared the way for understanding the increased importance of biological thinking in the sciences generally.2 Now that we are well into the next century, it is incumbent upon us to follow their lead in grasping the scope of what has occurred—and protect against a not unlikely regression.3 Consider Stuart Kauffman’s recent A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life (2019). Like the contemporary poet Jay Wright, Kauffman is a MacArthur Award-winner (in 1986 and 1987, respectively) and Wright has read previous works of his with great interest. Kauffman’s main argument in A World Beyond Physics is that evolution and emergence, properly S. Meyer (*)  Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_18

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understood, are impossible to account for in strictly physical terms—that is to say, they “cannot be reduced to physics,” at least classical physics, for in some important sense they are “beyond law” (14, 125). Instead, something like the biologization of physics is required, operating on several levels. In the first place, the complexity of “the universe – and especially the biosphere –” is such that “a non-equilibrium companion of the famous second law” of thermodynamics is required. This principle is needed to “help explain how the biosphere today can be far more complex than it was 4 billion years ago” when life appeared on earth, instead of “disorder … increas[ing],” as the second law would have it (4–5). Kauffman certainly isn’t calling for the biologization of physics if that is understood as a matter of turning physics into a subset of biology, symmetrical to the reduction of biology to physics (physicizing biology), only with the arrow of reduction reversed. Instead, he proposes that ultimately biology cannot be physicized and therefore the entire physicization agenda is misguided. And that leads in turn to a further question. Is biology beyond physics, as Kauffman suggests—in addressing phenomena which for various reasons are destined to remain beyond the reach of physical theory—or do the features he emphasizes of the universe (and biosphere), such as complexity and emergence, demand a biologization of physics in a different sense? Supposing the latter, developments in physical research may have to line up increasingly closely with phenomena more characteristic of biology than classical physics (physics without quantum theory). Now, such concerns do not begin with Kauffman. In A World Beyond Physics he alludes to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-Belgian physical chemist awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on dissipative structures and non-classical far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems (and co-author with Isabelle Stengers of the best-selling Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature [1984]), as well as to the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In his posthumously published manifesto, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (2003), Gould persuasively argues for the centrality of emergence and historical contingency to the life sciences by contrast with the physical sciences.4 And long before Prigogine and Gould, in Science and the Modern World (1925) Whitehead proposed putting physics and biology on a common basis of what he termed “organism” in place of the more physics-centered “matter.” Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in physics almost routinely called oversimplified materialistic accounts into question. Even as “organism” was consequently generalized far beyond the life sciences, physics had to be reconceptualized on the model of biological processes. It is not simply our understanding of the sciences that is at stake. In the present chapter, I sketch the lineaments of a parallel poetization of the sciences. Ultimately these are equivalent phenomena: A robust biologization of the physical sciences could not occur except in a context in which the

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sciences were being poetized (and so reorganized) as well. The equivalence can be demonstrated by following out James’s and Whitehead’s arguments, as I seek to do in a much larger study, still in progress. I propose here that the shape of these developments can also be discerned in an ongoing conversation between Jay Wright and the leading (if too infrequently acknowledged) mid-twentieth-century investigator of physiological aesthetics, US philosopher Susanne K. Langer.5

Partial Analysis of an Unpublished Lecture Late on a Tuesday morning in October 1972, Wright—then in his mid-thirties and with his first volume of poetry, The Homecoming Singer, just out the previous year—delivered the inaugural lecture of the Joseph Compton Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Dundee.6 The lecture would prove the second in a series of four interlocking works of prose that together provide a rich account of his developing poetics in the 1970s and 1980s.7 Although it remains unpublished, Wright signaled the importance of “Feeling and Some Related Problems for Poetry” by referring several times to it in the latest of these pieces, an interview prepared for the 1983 special issue of Callaloo devoted to his writing. In the pages that follow I take the opportunity afforded by the present consideration of the role of physics in Wright’s poetry to describe the argument of the Compton lecture in considerable detail and to indicate where it stands in relation to the other works. The lecture is divided into six fairly discrete parts. After introductory remarks characterizing “a crisis in the state of poetry” and signaling his intention “to investigate [a] wider definition of feeling,” Wright cycles through discussions of (1) modern physics, (2) parallels within the so-called two cultures, (3) the significance of logic for linguistic analysis, (4) the function of myth, and (5) the mechanisms of visual perception, before finally taking up (6) “the poet’s primary province, feeling.” The initial set of topics (1–3) fills out the analysis of the current crisis, offering a few hints as to how to address it, while the second set (4–6) provides interrelated solutions to several problems that arise concurrently. Viewed more generally, the lecture’s significance—both in broadly analytic terms and with regard to the particulars of Wright’s career—lies in its direct engagement with modern physics, a topic that is wholly absent from the other three works despite serving as the jumping-off point for the Dundee presentation. (In this light, I will limit my discussion to Parts 1, 2, and 6.) “Imagine,” Wright proposes, “that you are a contemporary poet of some curiosity [and] you are confronted by this: ‘The validity of the physical concept does not rest upon its content of real elements of existence, such as can be directly pointed out, but upon the strictness of connection, which it makes possible. …’” The sentence cited here is part of a longer excerpt drawn from Ernst Cassirer’s important account of late nineteenth-century physics, Substance and Function, dating from 1910. (The translation used by Wright came out in

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1923 in a volume that also contained Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, published by Cassirer in the original German two years earlier.) From the same excerpt: “It is the fundamental error of Baconian empiricism that it does not grasp this correlation”—between “possess[ing] the ‘facts’ only by virtue of the totality of concepts” and “conceiv[ing] the concepts only with reference to the totality of possible experience”—and chooses instead to regard “the ‘facts’ as isolated entities existing for themselves, which our thought has only to copy as faithfully as possible” (Cassirer 1923: 146–147). In the Callaloo interview a decade later, Wright would similarly observe that it is “one of my basic assumptions [that] naked perception (just seeing something), directly expressed, is misprision in the highest degree. Every perception requires explication and interpretation. … A simple report of experience, if you could make such a thing, isn’t good enough” (1983: 87–88). Again, a few years after this, in the middle of several citations from Langer, Wright included the claim: “And the triumph of empiricism is jeopardized by the surprising truth that our sense data are primarily symbols” (Langer 1954: 16; Wright 2000: 475).8 In Langer this statement is immediately preceded by the proposition that “[t]he problem of observation” traditionally associated with empiricism “is all but eclipsed by the problem of meaning” insofar as sense data actually function symbolically—therefore requiring, as Wright puts it, “explication and interpretation.” Cassirer’s (and Langer’s) criticisms of traditional scientific empiricism, which purports to start, for instance, from simple reports comprised of sense data, would hardly seem to pose a problem directed specifically at the modern poet; yet insofar as poetry deals in perceptions too, our poet would probably do well to attend to philosophies of science like Langer’s and Cassirer’s. The problem for poetry extends even more broadly, for, as Wright puts it, “the crisis that we have assumed [to afflict poetry “at present”] is as much the result of the poets’ neglect of disciplines other than poetry, or, if that seems too strong, of the poets’ incomprehension or uneasy assimilation of art and thought other than their own.” Removed from its immediate context, Wright’s claim may seem to mirror C.P. Snow’s argument a dozen years earlier regarding the mutual incomprehension of modern scientists and literary intellectuals. Yet where Snow somehow managed to turn an argument framed in terms of reciprocal incomprehension into a diatribe against one of the parties, Wright turns the tables on the popular novelist and technocrat by emphasizing instead a parallel between modern science and modern literature that Snow’s own incomprehension prevented him from grasping. (Where from Snow’s vantage most literary intellectuals fail to demonstrate an adequate understanding of thermodynamics, scientists like him are quite familiar with Shakespeare, thank you very much.) Referring to a paper by Gary Gutting published just half a year prior to the Compton lecture—“in which the public controversy between philosophers of science and historians of science is discussed[,] a controversy that seems to revolve around the issue of the non-empirical but publically

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discussable and objective considerations in scientific work, in Einstein’s in particular”—Wright points to “equally astonishing, and not so astonishing, events occurring [in] another area of intellectual life.” “For it seems to be an accepted fact,” he continues, “that what we call modernism in literature was also becoming a publically discussable and objective consideration in its own right.” Then comes the recognition that so sharply distinguishes his perspective from Snow’s: “It is difficult not to feel that there is some correlation between the rapidly developed discussion of issues in science and the equally absorbing discussion of literary issues during the same period.” As a well-known example of the latter, Wright cites Ezra Pound’s 1913 definition of the poetic image (“that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”) and further observes of several qualifying remarks by Pound that “[i]t is as though he were at once quarreling with and accepting some faint voices only half-heard, but nevertheless attractive.” “Pound was no Valéry,” Wright adds, “– few people are – but I am sure that he had some idea of what was in the air.” What was in the air. “We need not argue for a one-to-one ­ correlation,” Wright has just insisted—the only kind Snow would recognize—but “[i]f we look carefully at some of the sentences in Cassirer’s passage,” we find that they only “require very slight shifts [in phrasing] to bring us up against language used to formulate problems in other disciplines.” It is to some of these problems that Wright then turns, treating them as problems for the composition and experience of poetry as well as for the disciplines in which they were initially formulated. The only obligation for cross-disciplinary investigations like Wright’s of “what may possibly have been in the air [and] may, in fact, still be haunting us” is that one not assume the sort of strict dichotomy between scientific and literary concerns promoted by Snow. Indeed, in predicating his influential account of the two cultures on a shallow distaste for modernist writing in general, and D.H. Lawrence in particular, Snow consistently displayed the same ignorance he so cavalierly attributed to literary intellectuals. By contrast, Wright—paradigmatic literary intellectual—asks his listeners “to take the world and its knowledge into [their] counsel.” “I shall only say here what I often say to my various creative writing students: a poet should be at least as knowledgeable about and attuned to the world and its historical events as his readers”—clearly anticipating readers attentive to modern science, among other things.

Navigating Absences Transfigurations, published in 2000, collected Wright’s first seven volumes of poetry (1971–1991) and added an eighth, Transformations, consisting of thirty-three highly intricate works composed in traditional verse formats ranging from a Keats ode to seguidillas and zejels and an anti-fabliau along with a Provençal retroencha and dansa Provençal. “Where will I find the message, if not there,/inscribed in a forest [of cottonwoods] grown dense and

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strange?/or in the density and interchange/of heat and force that mark the fairy stone,/the carbon trace that whispers of frail bone?/or in a ring of cloud, where I prepare/a protostar, for the creative thrust/of the stellar wind?” So begins the second section—of four—of the Keats ode, “The Navigation of Absences: An Ode on Method,” which serves as the volume’s opening poem. Explicit use of the terminology of modern physics, as in the astrophysics alluded to here, enters Wright’s compositions with Transfigurations (and Transformations). “For me,” as he explained almost two decades earlier in the Callaloo interview, “multi-cultural is the fundamental process of human history” (1983: 97). Manifestly, that includes literary and scientific cultures. Immediately preceding this assertion of methodological multiculturalism, Wright also expresses his “convic[tion] that human history will continue to reveal more and more of the fundamental interrelations of people, things, and other creatures of the universe” (1983: 97). In describing interrelations as fundamental, he subscribes to an understanding of the composition of the world and of experience consistent with the expanded empiricism of James and Whitehead. A “radical empiricism” capable of grasping “a pluralistic universe,” in James’s terms9: No less critical than Cassirer was of “Baconian empiricism” (the view that “‘facts’ [are limited to] isolated entities existing for themselves”) but from the perspective of a more robust empiricism rather than from Cassirer’s neo-Kantian idealist perspective. The challenge, then, that Wright sets himself and his readers is to portray these interrelations so they retain their experiential priority to the often-more-concrete-seeming entities they bring together (“people, things”). For a critic of poetry like Wright’s the challenge is similar: How to render “publically discussable”— to use Wright’s own language in the Compton lecture—the forms that his pluralistic “multi-cultural possessions” take, while retaining a strong sense of their dynamism (1983: 98). The phrase navigation of absences suffices to make clear why data-driven methodologies are unsuitable to such investigation and its objects (impressions of absence, or emptiness, or silence, along with the accordingly “enlarged realm of experience” the navigation elicits [1983: 92]). “What interests us here,” Wright proposed that autumn morning in Dundee, is what Professor Langer and others, including su servidor, mean by feeling. Recently, she has written, “Feeling is like the dynamic and rhythmic structures created by artists; artistic form is always the form of felt life, whether of impression, emotion, overt action, thought, dream or even obscure organic processes rising to a high level and going into psychical phase, perhaps acutely, perhaps barely and vaguely. It is the way acts and impacts feel that makes them important in art”. (1967: 64)

This is, Wright admits, “a rather strange way to begin, to try to define human feeling through art. Can we? Or can we at least begin there? Let us push a little further.” So he cites Langer again: “human feeling,” she contended in a 1958 lecture,10

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is a fabric, not a vague mass. It has an intricate dynamic pattern, possible combinations and new emergent phenomena. It is a pattern of organically interdependent and interdetermined tensions and resolutions, a pattern of almost infinitely complex activation and cadence. To it belongs the whole gamut of our sensibility. (2009: 84)

(A dozen years later Wright would title the opening poem in Explications/ Interpretations, “Tensions and Resolutions.”) “It is, I think, this dynamic pattern,” Langer continued, “that finds its formal expression in the arts. The expressiveness of art is like that of a symbol, not that of an emotional symptom” (84). Consequently, Wright concludes, “[w]hat we should be asking is what a symbol is.” The precise nature of the problem that Langer’s account confronts Wright with should now be clear: The challenge is not so much to grasp the “wider definition of feeling” (“anything that may be felt”11) as to bring together the symbolic and affective dimensions of poetry analyzed on separate tracks by Langer. For example, in seeking to combine propositions like these: that “feeling is like the dynamic and rhythmic structures created by artists” and “the expressiveness of art is like that of a symbol.” The complicated relation between Langer’s thought and that of Whitehead—her “great Teacher and Friend,” to cite the dedication of Philosophy in a New Key (1954: v)—greatly illuminates the pairing of ­feeling and physics that frames the Dundee lecture. When Whitehead arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1924, he assumed the direction of Langer’s dissertation and six years later wrote a prefatory note to her first book, The Practice of Philosophy. She continued to teach at Radcliffe till 1941, the year before Philosophy in a New Key came out, and also the year Cassirer emigrated to the USA. Although much of Langer’s brilliant analysis of feeling in its physiological, psychical, and aesthetic dimensions offers an intricate rendering of aspects of Whitehead’s still highly controversial account, she was herself unprepared to follow him in some of the more controversial aspects: perhaps most notably his further generalization of feeling (as “prehension” or “positive prehension”) to permit the application of the reconstructed concept to physical and not just biological phenomena. That is presumably why, despite the dedication in Philosophy in a New Key, she had so little actually to say about him. In an unpublished essay12 Langer is very clear about her rationale: “Whitehead’s identification of ‘positive prehension,’ a cosmic principle of process as such, with ‘feeling’ seems to me unfortunate, for it precludes any detailed study of that most interesting phenomenon which distinguishes psychology from physiology, just as the phenomena of organic functioning distinguish physiology from chemistry and physics (the boundaries between the sciences being always somewhat fluid)” (cited in Dryden 1997: 78, emphasis added). She knew perfectly well that what she characterized as feeling “in its widest possible sense” was still considerably narrower than Whitehead’s own entry; however, she regarded his concept as incapable of establishing distinctions she believed essential.

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By the same token, Langer would probably have disputed my speaking of her as an “investigator of physiological aesthetics” in her writings on symbolization, art, biology, and mind (since, as the passage just provided indicates, she tended to regard physiology as operating at a different level than psychical phases of vital processes). Yet from James’s and Whitehead’s perspectives that is what she was, within the frameworks of their still more expansive empiricisms. No doubt when the Victorian novelist and evolutionist Grant Allen coined the phrase physiological aesthetics, it carried strongly reductionist implications, quite antithetical to Langer’s own perspective. Following James, I am using the phrase very differently than Allen did or scholars of Victorian culture typically do.13 In the Compton lecture Wright alludes to an invocation by Langer of “the great neurologist, Wilder Penfield,” as she calls Penfield in “The Process of Feeling” (2009: 9). In that essay she goes on to propose that “if, instead of ‘converted into thought’”—from a remark of Penfield’s regarding “how a nerve impulse can be converted into thought”—“we say, ‘felt as thought,’ the investigation of mental function is shifted from the realm of mysterious transubstantiation to that of physiological processes, where we face problems of complexity and degree, which are difficult, but not unassailable in principle” (9–10).14 Langer continues: “‘Feeling’ in the broad sense here employed seems to be the generic basis of all mental experience – sensation, emotion, imagination, recollection, and reasoning, to mention only the main categories. Felt experience is elaborated in the course of high organic development, intellectualized as brain functions are corticalized, and socialized with the evolution of speech and the growth of its communicative functions.” Then follows an important qualification, fully consistent with my brief here for a physiological aesthetics like Wright’s that neither reduces aesthetics (and psychology) to physiology nor too sharply distinguishes them: “On the other hand, the mechanisms of felt activity are heightened forms of unfelt vital rhythms, responses, and interactions; a psychology oriented by this concept of feeling runs smoothly downward into physiology without the danger of being reduced to physiology and therewith losing its own identity. Even if it should ultimately appear as a branch of physiology, the area of its branching is likely to remain quite visible, though without a sharp dividing line (there are very few such sharp lines in nature): it is the area where vital (probably neural) processes begin to have psychical phases, i.e., to be felt” (10). Donald Dryen also cites a complementary (and more complimentary) observation of Langer’s from the same essay. Whitehead, she admitted, “proposed or pointed out so many things that hold true for terrestrial life and especially for human feeling, that even a person who finds his metaphysical use of these ideas fantastic may have recourse to his books again and again for the ideas themselves, because of their applicability within biological and psychological contexts” (Dryden 1997: 75). To that Whitehead probably would have replied: Exactly! Only to add: Then why leave physics out of your picture, particularly given the astonishing reconstructions required of physical

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concepts not just since Einstein but since Maxwell before him (about whom Whitehead had written his fellowship dissertation at Cambridge)? Especially if “the boundaries between the sciences [are] always somewhat fluid” anyway!15 After all, in devising his post-Darwinian, post-Jamesian, post-Einsteinian cosmology, Whitehead sought to rid modern thought of its reliance on what he famously designated the “bifurcation of nature”16—not just into primary and secondary qualities, or objectivity and subjectivity, or psychology and physics, or even literature and science, but also into the ultimately untenable division between the life sciences and the physical sciences. As Wright explains near the end of the Dundee lecture, “the artist has a human frame in which to discover and to explore the complexity of feelings, in the widened sense we have given them, that any man may have and find within himself as a living, historical and feeling being.” “Poetry has no ­modest task in being part of that search,” Wright remarks. “[Y]ou may feel that the burdens that we have placed on poetry are, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, enough to give poetry the blues”—even so, “the world and the word dance about and with each other, learning new figures, and it is often difficult to tell whose need is greater.” Here, in the lecture’s concluding lines, Wright refers back to an allusion he made just as he was turning to the discussion of “the poet’s primary province, feeling,” when he invoked “the world which [the poet] might call upon to create that need for poetry, as Valéry has put it.” Clearly, there is a good deal more involved in such novel figuration than what Samuel Johnson, in his famous dismissal of “metaphysical poetry,” termed “the most heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together” (Hardy 1971: 12). Wright is concerned instead to “discover and explore” cosmic possibilities of design—he speaks in one poem of “[t]he mask of cosmic design/danc[ing] alone” (2007a: 43)—as these are exhibited within “the complexity of feelings.” To accomplish that he yokes together discourses which, from the perspective of any one of them—and certainly from the viewpoint of proponents of the two cultures dichotomy—may seem without any overlap at all. Johnson was right to attend to the internal heterogeneity of such figures but wrong to dismiss it. In summarizing his earlier critique in the Compton lecture of logic’s central role in twentieth-century linguistics, Wright proposes in “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance” that “[i]f the poets have been divested of the magic power of naming” by Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that “language is no more than a system of signs,” this loss has been more than compensated for by “an even greater power.” That is “the ability to create an awareness of differing and seemingly incompatible relationships.” Wright then continues: This truly becomes a challenging power. Poiesis is not exhausted in the relatively subordinate act of giving a name to some thing. It goes beyond that into real power, that of transformation and action. [Kenneth] Burke clarifies this when he says, “There is a sense in which language is not just ‘natural,’ but really does add

334  S. MEYER a ‘new dimension’ to the things of nature (an observation that would be the logological equivalent of the theological statement that grace perfects nature)”. (Wright 1987: 19; Burke 1961: 8)

I spoke earlier of the challenge Wright located in Langer as a matter of bringing together the symbolic and affective registers both of the “active” word and “the transformative and transformed world,” as he has characterized the “larger world of feeling”—“the world that poetry inhabits” (1970: 350; 1972, 1987: 27). On the one hand, symbolic, hence abstract; on the other, affective and concrete. The challenge, again, entails combining seeming incompatibles.

Amplified by a Silence We can now return to the propositions laid out at the beginning of this chapter. In referring to the poetization of the sciences, I had in mind something like Wright’s assertion that feeling is the province of poetry. Inasmuch as one widens the concept of feeling as Langer does, but no more, one remains fully within the domain of the life sciences. With Whitehead’s further albeit prior expansion of the concept, not only does one extend the reach of feeling to more strictly physical conceptualization, but the physical universe is construed as fundamentally poetic. That leads directly to the poetization of the sciences. The consequences of such conceptual reconstruction are complex and obviously far beyond the scope of the present chapter to spell out. Yet, attending to relevant aspects of the poem which opens Wright’s 2013 collection Disorientations: Groundings—quite possibly the single most important volume of American poetry in the first decades of this Gaian century—should provide a sense of what is involved. (Since the appearance of Transfigurations in 2000, Wright has published seven additional volumes of poetry through The Prime Anniversary in mid-2019. Most of these cluster around 2007–2008, following his receipt of the 2005 Bollingen Prize, as the first African-American honored with the major US award for lifetime achievement in poetry.) Let us start with a couple of examples of what it is like to feel an equation, the sort of thing that according to T.S. Eliot has typically proved beyond the reach of modern poets: “feel[ing] their thought,” the prophet of the “dissociation of sensibility” memorably remarked a century ago, “as immediately as the odour of a rose” (1988: 64). Poets may find themselves defeated in the endeavor; those who compose with mathematical equations not so much. The first anecdote, supplied by Bertrand Russell, concerns Whitehead. One afternoon Russell and an acquaintance stopped by to visit the mathematician. They found him in the garden, and stood near as he wrote out equation after equation. Finally they left—he never ceased, never acknowledged them. In this instance one may readily say, with Wright, that “the voice feels braced/by its own fluidity” (2007a: 55).

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The experience of writing out equations is quite different in our second example. This anecdote concerns the physicist Niels Bohr, who is central to Wright’s poem. Bohr was presenting “a fundamental report on the current difficulties of atomic theory” at a conference he had organized in Copenhagen. “I do not remember the content,” C.F. von Weizsäcker recalled half a century later, “but I do remember the frustration of the participants about the well-known unintelligibility of his talk. With an expression of suffering, his head held to one side, he stumbled over incomplete sentences. Even the language that he used varied: it fluctuated between German, English, and Danish, and when the topic became quite important he mumbled with his hands in front of his face. … That day for a time he had a chalk in his right hand and a sponge in his left; he would write down equations with the right hand and wipe them off almost at once with the left. Suddenly there sounded the forceful voice of his old friend Paul Ehrenfest: ‘Bohr! Give me the sponge!’ With a rather pained smile Bohr handed the sponge to Ehrenfest, who kept it on his lap during the rest of the lecture” (1985: 186–187). “Why does the Dane think his design/a complement to Being?” Wright’s three-page poem begins. Had I not already mentioned Bohr, most readers, possessing the same level of familiarity with Shakespeare that C.P. Snow accorded to scientists, would probably hear Hamlet in “the Dane,” particularly in close proximity to the theme of Being. Indeed for English-language speakers Wright could not have erased the association even had he wanted to (“This is I, Hamlet the Dane” [The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 5.1.242]). So in the present context “the Dane” combines two references, to Bohr and to Hamlet, and which comes first depends on the extent of the reader’s familiarity with Bohr. In this poem, the reference to Bohr is the dominant, and one does not need to be especially familiar with the great physicist to recognize that. Bohr is probably best known for two things: the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (registered in “the Dane”) and his account of what he termed “complementarity” (“a complement to Being”). Then follows: “Would Èsù sustain him?” An experienced reader of Wright’s work—experienced therefore in navigating absences or non sequiturs of the sort occurring here in the abrupt passage from Dane to Èsù—would probably catch the reference. So would anyone acquainted with the spread of African mythology in the Americas or at the very least with The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), the classic study by Wright’s colleague at Yale in the late 1970s, Henry Louis Gates Jr.—the opening chapter of which is titled “A Myth of Origins: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey.” The juxtaposition of Bohr with the Yoruba trickster figure might well have annoyed Samuel Johnson (or Snow), but in the broadly American context of Wright’s “enlarged realm of experience,” it fits right in. Given that Èsù functions in Yoruba mythology as the messenger of the gods and as such their interpreter to humans,

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the juxtaposition is in fact much smoother than it might initially seem. In modern physics, as Weizsäcker’s little narrative suggests, Bohr himself frequently functions as the mythic interpreter of “fundamental … atomic theory” and its “difficulties.” Half a dozen lines later, Wright invokes Bohr again: Let me awaken a definition of suffering. Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things. (2013: 1)

Wright’s principal source regarding Bohr’s thought was Dugald Murdoch’s important 1987 study Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics, but the material rendered in these lines is not to be found there. Years before composing Disorientations: Groundings, however, he had read The Whole Shebang, the much acclaimed account of late twentieth-century cosmology by science writer Timothy Ferris; and Ferris’s juxtaposition of Weizsäcker commenting, on another occasion, about Bohr’s intellectual suffering alongside a pair of oft-repeated statements by Bohr, including the one cited here (from a 1935 letter), perhaps lingered in the back of Wright’s mind (1997: 274–275).17 Near the midpoint of the poem we read the following: Physics concerns only what we have learned to say. I have a perfect cadence, a lover and lady,      a record of what I have learned to sing. I am neither Jew nor Greek. What does that have to do with a Wednesday in Bastrop, Texas, where an atom chooses a summery frock and goes calling from door      to door? (2013: 4)

Wright’s query continues the train of thought initiated with the opening question directed at Bohr. Here, then, is how Murdoch describes Bohr’s stance in a characterization Wright builds on when he asks why “the Dane think[s] his design/a complement to Being.” Bohr “does not doubt that our experience is of an independently existing world … We construct theories of the microstructure of the physical world in order better to comprehend the world in which we move and have our being – the macroscopic world. … [T]he primary aim of physics, in Bohr’s view, is to make sense of our perceptual experience and the description of microphysical reality is merely a means to that end, not an end in itself” (1987: 221, 225). That leads directly to what Jan Faye calls “the pragmatic nature of Bohr’s view on ontological issues” (2014: 8). Throughout Wright’s lines, as I read them, there is a gentle

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critique of Bohr’s hard and fast distinction between epistemological questions pertaining to quantum mechanics, which he felt he could at least attempt to answer, and ontological ones, somehow beyond him. The critique of Bohr’s stance may be gentle—Wright fully recognizes the suffering it expresses—but the situation addressed in these lines is anything but. Again Wright addresses himself to Bohr in adapting the first of the quotes artfully combined by Ferris. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (as reported by Aage Petersen [1963: 12]) now becomes “Physics concerns what we have learned to say.” Wright then invokes the parallel between physics and poetry so important to his 1972 lecture, in the course of which he alludes both to a Provençal “lover and lady” and to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s post-Civil War verse tragedy Judas Maccabaeus with the line “I am neither Jew nor Greek”—uttered in Longfellow’s play by the Hellenized Jew, Jason, and adapted here by Wright to very different circumstances. These are suggested by the reference to Bastrop, Texas (near Austin), where throughout September 2011 the most destructive wildfire recorded in the state raged, ultimately destroying 1673 homes. Like the conflagrations coursing through California as I write these sentences, human fingerprints were all over it, beginning with an initial spark due to some failure in the electrical grid and extending to broader transformations in planetary conditions. It is within this Gaian context that Wright asks his question, entertaining Bohr’s “correspondence rule” between classical and quantum physics: that the pragmatic interest of subatomic phenomena lies in their capacity to help us understand the many puzzling experiences that occur at the macroscopic, human level. How exactly this operates remains, in Wright’s poem, a problem still to be addressed—as do the connections which such physical phenomena possess to the lines’ other notable references. At the close of the poem, Wright turns from Niels Bohr to the Nile. The parallels between modern poetry and physics of so much concern to Wright as well as the present chapter are, needless to say, for Wright only part of the story, one thread in the grand tapestry he is at once weaving and uncovering. “Speak now,” he instructs—in the last lines of the volume’s inaugural poem—      of the difficult eucalyptus, the agapanthi, the absolute density that has never appeared. And I hear there will be a baptism on the Nile this afternoon, stirring an Etruscan envy, a Roman insecurity. (2013: 5)

I won’t even begin to interpret these lines, other than to provide a brief gloss: that, aside from the association of the infant Moses with the Nile, “agapanthi” derives from the Greek agape (love) and anthos (flower); that some species of agapanthi are known as “lily of the Nile”; that they are also referred to as the African lily despite not being lilies. With these lines Wright

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brings his reader, and his imaginative rendering of Bohr, back to Africa, juxtaposing African knowledge practices with modern physics, among other threads. Disorientations: Groundings is in fact organized in several parts, each of which is aligned with one of the four degrees of knowledge imparted in the initiation rites which served as the basis for Wright’s 1980 volume, The Double Invention of Komo. Because he starts with a reference to Bohr, it is entirely appropriate to begin one’s consideration of the volume with the role played by physics in the formulation of Wright’s poetics across his career—yet it is only one beginning, and there are multiple entry points. Up to now I have neglected to mention the pair of alternative ­references built into the phrase the poetization of science: first, taking the genitive construction objectively, poetry that directly engages with science; second, taking it subjectively, science that itself operates within a broader poetic canvas (a poetic universe, as it were). In the present instance, Wright’s poetry, and its engagement with Bohr, serves as a clear example of the ­former; Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics in terms of complementarity may exemplify the latter. However, when Wright speaks of Bohr’s “design” as “a complement to Being,” he is not using complementarity in Bohr’s sense. That is implicit, to be sure, in the design itself, which takes the form of Bohr’s complementarity-based interpretation of quantum mechanics—that is to say, with kinetic (spatio-temporal) and dynamic (causal) properties of phenomena “depend[ing] on mutually exclusive measurements” (Faye 2002). Yet in referring to one thing as a complement to another, Wright employs what is effectively a different, if related, term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the principal sense of “complement” is “that which completes or makes perfect; the completion, perfection, consummation”—in a strictly grammatical sense, “one or more words joined to another to complete the sense”—from the Latin complēmentum, “that which fills up or completes.” As for “complementary,” it splits the difference. The O.E.D. indicates that the term has been utilized to mean both “forming a complement” and, “of two (or more) things[,] mutually complementing or completing each other’s deficiencies” (emphasis added). Needless to say, the latter usage fails to convey the experience of perfection-as-completion frequently invoked by Wright, whether in the subsequent reference to “a perfect cadence” (“Physics concerns only what we have learned to say./I have a perfect cadence,/a lover and lady …”) or in the citation from Kenneth Burke in the Compton lecture: “the logological equivalent of the theological statement that grace perfects nature.” Similarly, in the present example Bohr’s design is conceived as completing Being while leaving it substantively unaffected. Let us conclude, then, with the slightly more than double handful of lines leading to the final quintet (“Speak now …”): I speak as though the mechanics involved had been decided, as though our common syntax,

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lacking the weight of inquiry, had made our exchange efficiently honest, a perfect symmetry binding a thought to its word. This argues no struggle, though I know there will be no way to measure my path, or the probable constraint that keeps me, insatiable, attuned to my element. That might be love, or a thirst for blood, or a first ontological absolute amplified by a silence. (2013: 5)

Instead of speaking mechanically, beholden to an ideal of “perfect symmetry binding a thought to its word,” against which he argued so compellingly in the Compton lecture—and which, for Bohr, remained a temptation despite being unrealizable in “direct verbal expressions,” by contrast with the tremendous achievement exhibited in the “mathematical symbolism” of quantum mechanics (2011: 16, 18)—Wright takes guidance from the situation he sums up here in half a dozen lines. “Struggle,” whether in the form of love or battle or thought, renders his path irreducible to the efficiencies of measurement. How so? Insofar as struggles such as these are premised on mutual attunement of speaker and multifarious environment (“attuned to my element”)—regardless of the specificity of any particular “constraint,” so long as it prepares the speaker to attend to the suggestive amplifications of silence as well as the presence or absence of the additional constraints—a viable alternative exists to unidimensional experiences like the struggle for existence conceived solely in terms of battle. With such considerations in mind, we can return to a question that concerned Bohr greatly, one already raised at the beginning of the present chapter—namely the apparent dichotomy between physical and biological phenomena, and the concomitant insufficiency of strict causal analysis to explain biological developments. In his important 1932 lecture, “Light and Life” (delivered the same month he presented the “report on the current difficulties in atomic theory” witnessed by Weizsäcker), Bohr even proposed that the new quantum theory might be viewed as intermediary between biology and classical physics. No more had it proven possible where quantum mechanics was concerned than in the case of biology to establish “an unambiguous causal description of the phenomena” in question (1933: 458). Unlike Kauffman, however, Bohr continued to portray biological phenomena in traditional, ultimately Aristotelian, terms, as teleologically driven—organized on the basis of purposes or final causes—rather than grounded in more contingent functions like those emphasized by Kauffman.18 Just what is it, one may wonder, that enables Wright to free himself from the model of one-to-one correspondence “binding a thought to its word,” so as to advance from the scientistic image of speech he objects to at the outset of these lines to the quite different portrayal encountered in the poem’s

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closing lines? “Speak now,” the poet will instruct himself—and speak differently. In part this admonition, together with the lines that follow it, comes from Wright’s careful attention to “the weight of inquiry” instantiated in the set of instructions implicit in the preceding lines and the situation they portray. The larger part of his accomplishment, though, derives from the speech act itself, the pair of sentences that complete the poem. The second of these might appear simply to continue the first, as if they comprised a single sentence (“And …”). Nonetheless, every reader will experience some degree of uncertainty as to how exactly one is to get from “Speak now of the difficult eucalyptus,/the agapanthi,/the absolute density that has never appeared” to “And I hear there will be a baptism on the Nile this afternoon,/stirring an Etruscan envy, a Roman insecurity.” It may help to know that the eucalyptus, for instance, is native to Australia, where the genus makes up three-quarters of all forested land, and that over the past two centuries it has been widely imported across the temperate world, from Berkeley, California to Timbuktu, Mali. Yet whatever one may choose to emphasize in these lines, their suggestiveness and resonance—that is to say, their poetic quality—is due chiefly to the non sequitur at the core. As Wright observed to his audience in Dundee, almost half a century ago, “the ability to create an awareness of differing and seemingly incompatible relationships” is the source of the “truly … challenging power” possessed by poetry. Bohr too sought to create an awareness of differing and seemingly incompatible relationships with his complementarity-based interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet Wright encourages us to ask whether Bohr felt sufficiently challenged by his solution insofar as he continued to treat ontological questions, as I have already put it, as somehow beyond him—beyond “the relatively objective domain of physics,” he observed in 1931, “where emotional elements are so largely relegated to the background.” “[I]t is obviously a quite open question,” he noted on the same occasion, “whether the information we have acquired of the laws describing atomic phenomena provides us with a sufficient basis for tackling the problem of living organisms, or whether, hidden behind the riddle of life, there lie yet unexplored aspects of epistemology” (2011: 21). The concept of feeling investigated variously by Langer and Wright, James and Whitehead, offers an alternative basis that rejects the self-enforced limitation to epistemological matters—and traditional dichotomies of objectivity and emotion—in order to address the contours of an “enlarged realm of experience.” As for the navigation of absences and the amplification provided by silence: These are affective procedures which, in poetry like Wright’s, permit the discovery and exploration of a pluralistic cosmos through the juxtaposition of multiple symbolic discourses, modern physics among them.

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Notes















1. See Desmet (2007, 2010, 2011); also Meyer (2015). 2. See Meyer (2018a). The central work in the current renaissance in “thinking with Whitehead” is undoubtedly Isabelle Stengers’ brilliant analysis of three of his major works of the 1920s—The Concept of Nature, Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. 3. See Stengers (2018). 4. “Darwin realized that a causal consequence … of no selective significance in the current environment might become of use in a different environment and so be selected. With that a new function would come to exist in the biosphere. These are very common and are called Darwinian preadaptations, with no hint of foresight on the part of evolution. S.J. Gould renamed these Darwinian exaptations” (Kauffman 2019: 116). 5. Particularly in the margins of the suite of works extending from Philosophy in a New Key (1942; 2nd ed. 1951)—by far the best-selling work of academic US philosophy in the twentieth century—to Feeling and Form (1953) and Langer’s three-volume summa, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1974, 1984). 6.  “Feeling and Some Related Problems for Poetry” (delivered October 17, 1972) has never been published. All citations are made with the gracious permission of the author. 7. The other works are “Myth and Discovery” (1970), “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance: Black Poetry’s Ritual and Historical Voice” (1987), and “‘The Unraveling of the Egg’: An Interview with Jay Wright” (1983). Though not published until 1987, in Callaloo, “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance” was in fact written around 1980. At the time of the 1983 interview Wright still expected it to appear in “an MLA anthology that John O’Reilly and Robert Stepto are editing” (91). 8. Wright deliberately misquotes Langer here. What she actually wrote was “the triumph of empiricism in science” (emphasis added). See Meyer (2018b), where Wright’s variant in Elaine’s Book serves as the epigraph to the volume and is further discussed in Meyer (2018a). I return to these citations below. For analysis in a related vein, see Gitelman (2013). Recently the Morgan Library acquired and exhibited the manuscript of Elaine’s Book (1988; reprinted in Transfigurations [2000]). 9.  See James’s classic accounts, A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). 10. Wright attributes the lines that follow to Philosophy in a New Key; they actually come from a lecture Langer delivered in Syracuse, “The Cultural Importance of Art,” which she included in her 1962 collection, Philosophical Sketches. I have silently returned “organically” to the text, inadvertently dropped in the typescript. 11.  Langer used this phrasing in the opening chapter of Philosophical Sketches, “The Process of Feeling,” to characterize feeling “in its widest possible sense” (1962: 7). Wright does not refer to the chapter in his lecture, but he does reference the volume. 12. Titled “On Whitehead,” it is included in the Susanne K. Langer Papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library (Dryden 1997: 75). 13. See, for example, Smith (2004)—and with regard to James, his 1877 review of Allen’s volume.

342  S. MEYER 14.  Langer’s reference here is to Penfield’s “famous address to the American Philosophical Society in 1954, ‘Some Observations on the Functional Organization of the Human Brain’ (1967: 18). By the early 1950s, Penfield had systematically mapped the physiological basis of the cortex; see Shepherd (2010: 141–142). 15. One of Langer’s few discussions of physics may be found in 1967: 271–274. 16.  See “Theories of the Bifurcation of Nature” in Whitehead (2016). I am stretching his more technical use of the phrase, while retaining its spirit. 17. In a longer version of the present chapter I examine Weizsäcker’s fairly hazy alignment of Bohr with William James in light of James’s truly transformative role in the development of Bohr’s physical speculations; see Cadences of an African American Culture, forthcoming. 18. See Bohr (1933: 458; 2011: 23). This difference partly explains the following remark by Kauffman: “Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory alter some of the basic deterministic aspects of classical physics but not the view of reality as an enormous ‘machine’” (2019: 1). See Kauffman (2016) for a more extensive consideration of quantum mechanics, especially Part II.

References Allen, Grant. 1877. Physiological Aesthetics. London: Henry S. King. Bohr, Niels. 1933. Light and Life. Nature 131 (421–423): 457–459. ———. 2011 [1934]. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Burke, Kenneth. 1961. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon Press. Cassirier, Ernst. 1923 [1910, 1921]. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. W. and M. Swabey. Chicago: Open Court. de Saussure, Ferdinand. 2011. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia UP. Desmet, Ronny. 2007. Whitehead and the British Reception of Einstein’s Relativity: An Addendum to Victor Lowe’s Whitehead Biography. Process Studies Supplement 11: 1–44. ———. 2010. The Minkowskian Background of Whitehead’s Theory of Gravitation. In Space, Time, and Spacetime, ed. V. Petkov, 3–24. Berlin: Springer. ———. 2011. Putting Whitehead’s Theory of Gravitation in Its Historical Context. Logique & Analyse 214: 287–315. Dryden, Donald. 1997. Whitehead’s Influence on Susanne Langer’s Conception of Living Form. Process Studies 26 (1–2): 62–85. Eliot, T.S. 1988 [1975]. Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace. Faye, Jan. 2002 [revised, 2014]. Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/qm-copenhagen. Accessed 22 Oct 2019. Ferris, Timothy. 1997. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2014 [1988]. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 25th-Anniversary ed. New York: Oxford UP. Gitelman, Lisa (ed.). 2013. Raw Data Is an Oxymoron. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 2003. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities. New York: Three Rivers Press. Gutting, Gary. 1972. Einstein’s Discovery of Special Relativity. Philosophy of Science 38 (1): 51–68. Hardy, J.P. 1971. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: A Selection. Oxford: Oxford UP. James, William. 1877. Unsigned Review of Physiological Aesthetics, by Grant Allen. Nation 25: 186. ———. 1976 [1912]. Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard UP. ———. 1977 [1909]. A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Kauffman, Stuart A. 2016. Humanity in a Creative Universe. New York: Oxford UP. ———. 2019. A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. New York: Oxford UP. Langer, Susanne K. 1930. The Practice of Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner. ———. 1954 [1942; 1st ed., 1941]. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: New American Library. ———. 1967. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (vol. 1). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. ———. 1974. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (vol. 2). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. ———. 1984. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (vol. 3). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. ———. 2009 [1962]. Philosophical Sketches. New York: Barnes & Noble. Meyer, Steven. 2015. Principles of Relativity: Whitehead v. Russell. In 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 235–247. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2018a. Futures Past and Present: Literature and Science in an Age of Whitehead. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, 255–274. New York: Cambridge UP. ——— (ed.). 2018b. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science. New York: Cambridge UP. Murdoch, Dugald. 1989 [1987]. Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Penfield, Wilder. 1954 [2009]. Some Observations on the Functional Organization of the Human Brain. In Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98: 293–297. Petersen, Aage. 1963. The Philosophy of Niels Bohr. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19: 8–14. Pound, Ezra. 1913. A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste. Poetry 1 (6): 198–206. Priogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 2017 [1984]. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Verso. Shepherd, Gordon M. 2010. Creating Modern Neuroscience: The Revolutionary 1950s. New York: Oxford UP.

344  S. MEYER Smith, Jonathan. 2004. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin’s Botany. In Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 285– 305. Cambridge: MIT Press. Snow, C.P. 2012 [1959]. The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Ideas. Cambridge: Harvard UP. ———. 2018. Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity. von Weizsäcker, C.F. 1985. A Reminiscence from 1932. In Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. P.J. Kennedy and Anthony French, 183–190. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979 [corrected ed.; 1st ed., 1929]. Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press. ———. 1997 [1925]. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press. ———. 2016 [1920]. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wright, Jay. 1970. Myth and Discovery. In The Rarer Action: Essays in Honor of Francis Fergusson, ed. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, 340–352. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. ———. 1972. “Feeling and Some Related Problems for Poetry: Inaugural Lecture for Joseph Compton Creative Writing Fellowship.” University of Dundee. Unpublished. ———. 1983. “The Unraveling of the Egg”: An Interview with Jay Wright. Callaloo 6 (3): 3–15. ———. 1987. Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance: Black Poetry’s Ritual and Historical Voice. Callaloo 10 (1): 13–28. ———. 2000. Transfigurations: Collected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. ———. 2007a. Music’s Mask and Measure. Chicago: Flood Editions. ———. 2007b. The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. ———. 2008a. The Presentable Art of Reading Absence. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. ———. 2008b. Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. ———. 2013. Disorientations: Groundings. Chicago: Flood Editions. ———. 2019. The Prime Anniversary. Chicago: Flood Editions.

CHAPTER 19

Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry Lara Choksey

Radiation treatment has a very ‘just for you’ feeling to it. They make a mold of your body that you lie in during every treatment, so you literally notch your ribcage into the machine. Two or three attendants lay sheets over you, and position your body lovingly every time. And the beam-gun is hooked up to this enormous garage door frame and hulking masses of metal whir around to get this little blue cylinder pointed exactly Goldilocks at your tumor. But the most heartbreakingly beautiful just-for-you thing is the sound the machine makes when the beam is emitted. Sarah, it sound s like a tiny man with a tremor is opening up a can of soup inside the gun. (Ritvo and Ruhl 2018, 152)

How to be precise about dying? “I’ve been dying a long time,” Max Ritvo said in July 2016, one month before he died at twenty-five (Ritvo and Harris 2016). He did not mean he had been “dying a long time” in the banal way, all of us sharing the certainty of death. Ritvo was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma when he was sixteen. His dying was marked by living with the harm it caused him and those around him. The hurt of his body flowed out: “everyone I love, I’m causing pain to.” This dying was marked by a grammatical and temporal imprecision—the gerund, “dying,” a verb-made-noun, extending across two verbs before “I” comes to find it—“to have” and “to be.” His experience of “dying a long time” was intercepted by courses of precision care, of the kind described in the passage above, where medical interventions were tailored to Ritvo’s particular needs, in the hope of finding a cure for his disease. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [203109/Z/16/Z]. L. Choksey (*)  University of Exeter, Exeter, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_19

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Ritvo’s construction of a patient-consumer avatar in his poetry reflects his position at a biomedical frontier: “I’m living at the time where if I hang on another few years, cancer might be a chronic illness like diabetes instead of a guaranteed terminal killer” (Ritvo and Ruhl, 122). This is the flipside of precision medicine: the accumulation of vast tracts of data about individual patients that might amass to some kind of general cure, at some later date, less the hyper-individuation of care than a temporary zooming-in for the sake of oncological futures. At this frontier, Ritvo became an e­xperimental test subject. The choreography of mechanized procedure in some of his poems rehearses what Laura Salisbury has described as “industrialized time regimes in which human duration could be rendered expendable in relation to the time tabled according to the needs of industry and modernity” (2019). Ritvo’s construction of himself as biomedical subject registers this regime, in which he can only be positioned as waiting for (Salisbury 2019)— waiting for a cure or waiting to die—while metaphor offers a space to turn this experience of duration in other directions. Here, I read Ritvo’s poems “The Curve” and “Poem To My Litter” through a chronology of precision: imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. Ritvo explores a tension between dying as an extended and uncertain process, suspended over promises and failures of long-term treatment, and the action-oriented grammar of precision, with its full stops and fresh stanzas. Poetic form allows a commonality to be drawn between the body as written form—a code to be deciphered for the sake of treatment—and the metaphors, images, silences, and harm that accompany “dying a long time” in a context of personalized healthcare. Precision medicine relies on a logic of surrogates—body for disease, image for body, test subject for patient, experiment for cure—while its applicability and effectiveness are often uncertain, depending on bodies it targets, as much as on continued investment and interpreting extracted data. In these poems, Ritvo places uncertainty and surrogacy in a strange fellowship, his body at odds with the speculative procedures it undergoes, substituting and substituted for, besides itself.

Precision and Poetry As a genetic mutation wrote its way through cells, tissue, and bone, Ritvo made analogy carry the difference, meandering in and out of a bodily time determined by treatments and side effects, and the everyday, mundane difficulty of sustaining the body. In his poems, a subject wanders through this experience in a mode of uneven contiguity, between analogy and matter, adjacent to the temporality of “dying a long time.” In an essay, “Mortal Kombat,” published in January 2016, he talks about his love of the composite metaphors used by his psychologists, all Jewish men (like him) above the age of fifty, whom he called his “Freudian fathers.” These fathers would draw out analogies as far as they could go in “clear metaphors with a few elegant bridges between the Real we were considering and the Imaginary World we

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were pulling from” (Ritvo 2016b). For Ritvo, these composite m ­ etaphors “make me feel like every world is a map for another,” and that ­apparently disparate worlds “could perfectly account for one another” (2016b). Metaphor becomes a site of refuge where things make sense, where stock can be taken, where one thing can stand in for another: poetry as the work of precision. But metaphor cannot hold still in the enforced mediation between body and world. When his mother drank coffee in the mornings, Ritvo watched how it brought forth her voice, and from this she could “pull the entire day out of thin air” (Ritvo 2015). Each morning, a blank space was summoned into a fully functioning person by a chemical stimulant: “I never saw my mother actually drink the coffee … I would just see tired Mom and a full cup of coffee, and then an empty cup of coffee and a changed Mom” (Ritvo 2015). He writes about assuming that chemotherapy would work the same way: an ingestion of energy-giving chemicals that would change him ­without his really noticing, like a clock’s hands turning invisibly through the day, “a green super villain potion instead of an earth-colour shaman elixir” (Ritvo 2015). In 2007, soon after the tumors were first found, he had four rounds of chemo in three-week cycles, followed by radiation therapy, surgical interventions, and drugs. One of these drugs—ifosfamide—caused hallucinations, and Ritvo worried that it was affecting his memory; writing poetry became a way “to preserve the memories that he feared were breaking down” (Ledford 610). While analogy offers a certain comparative comfort in bridging ­different experiences, poetic form becomes more a means of infrastructural safeguarding for experiences lost to a chemical fog. Precision medicine developed out of the optimism in the early 2000s around new futures for human health that accompanied the first draft sequence of the human genome. It quickly became part of a speculative biotechnology market fueled by fantasies of tailored consumer experiences. Scientists could, in theory, now read genetic alterations of an individual patient, and develop or recommend therapies on a case-by-case basis: “the right treatment for the right patient at the right time” (Garay and Gray 2012, 129). Charles Kowalski and Adam Mrdjenovich identify a one-for-one logic of substitution in precision medicine, describing it as a “monument to neoliberalism,” a product of science entering the domain of free-market economic growth rather than public good, organized around individual consumer s opting into a range of choices (2017, 77). Moreover, they write‚ “the biotech model of commodification has tended to favor reductionist approaches in biology so as to produce discrete objects of ownership” (77). Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that the coproduction of neoliberalism and genomics has resulted in particular grammatical conceptions of human lives as “those whose futures we can calculate in terms of probabilities of certain disease events happening” (2006, 14). In this “shifting grammar of life, towards a future tense,” the body can be known, but at great personal cost—both financial and psychological (Rajan, 14). Mike Fortun has characterized this

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shift as part of the speculative logic of genomics, which enforces a mono-directional temporality at high speed, hitched to the back of a swelling biotech market that can hold off delivering on its promises as long as it can continue to thread imaginaries of revolutionary healthcare into its infrastructures of capital (2008). It gives patients a sense of choice and autonomy over their health, while steering this market into consumer-driven services offered at competitive rates. The passage at the beginning of the chapter is from a letter Ritvo wrote to Sarah Ruhl just over a year before he died. The description of radiation therapy sounds like a virtual experience, a simulated hyperreality, his body becoming part of a post-human future where machine s sustain human life indefinitely. The passage is anchored in a technology of targeting: a beamgun that can vaporize tumors by honing in on them, like lasers for killing androids and aliens. The body is connected to a machine that knows it better than it knows itself, at least when it comes to blasting away deleterious matter. This treatment is not directed toward a general human body, but designed around a Max-shaped mold. The passage is suffused with a sense of euphoria, where an affect of care—“lovingly… heartbreakingly beautiful”— is extended through each part of the process. But despite its precision, the process relies on a network of avatars, substitutions, and third-party labor. It sounds like a scene of death, the mold into which he fits himself akin to a sarcophagus, attendants draping sheets as if over a dead body, and a gun pointed at one of the most vulnerable parts of him. It is a scene of dependency, shaped by the defenselessness of the body undergoing treatment, and an unspoken necessity to suspend disbelief that this is not, in fact, a scene of annihilation.

Imaging, Substitution, and Proximity Hell starts on Monday: it’ll be three days of pretty constant scanning (and I’m a little afraid of MRI machines) and that’ll transition immediately into surgery. Then I’ll get to rest and probably lose some weight. (Ritvo and Ruhl, 67)

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a way of producing images of the body through magnetic fields and radio waves. The patient, awake, lies down on a moving bed and is drawn into a large cylindrical tube, where strong magnets read the body. Some scans take a few minutes; others, an hour-anda-half, during which time the patient must remain relatively still. They can talk to the radiographer through an intercom, who remains in another room. Radiography in the hospital’s MRI room is one of the more science-fictional scenes of modern medical dramas: a human body disappears into a tube, as if into a pale, plastic coffin, or into another dimension. It is a scene of transcription, where a person becomes known as a medical subject, identified by outof-place matter that may signify abnormality in the body. “Imaging” makes a

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verb out of a noun, but it is not the same as photography; MRI makes images inside the body by negotiating its borders with waves and fields, not with invasive instruments. MRI scans are part of a wider set of practices made possible by new techniques of reading images of body parts as evidence, which Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman have theorized as “forensic aesthetics.” They argue, “The making of facts … depends on a delicate balance, on new images made possible by new technologies, not only changing in front of our very eyes, but changing our very eyes—affecting the way that we can see and comprehend things” (2012, 24). The example they consult is the identification of a skull found in Brazil in 1985 as the skull of Josef Mengele, through a process of imaging bones. What was at stake was a decision first, about whether the skull belonged to Mengele, and second, by extension, whether he was alive or dead: was this an “open” or “closed investigation” (2012, 24)? Open (alive) would imply the possibility of bringing Mengele’s crimes to justice; closed (dead) would, conversely, mean the openness of non-closure, attended by and with collective trauma. A promise of precision hangs over forensic aesthetics, suggesting a seamless movement between different levels of determination: technology and law, vision and justice—the calculation of probability entwined with aesthetic judgment (Keenan and Weizman 2012, 24). Writing on CT scans (which work through X-rays), Barry Saunders observes that these images “substitute for bodies,” and while similarities between body and image might be identified, “a patient would probably not recognize himself” (2008, 14). But the body also becomes surrogate to the images, an object that affirms a trained biomedical gaze. These images have the potential to legislate the body, to subject it to moral and medical economies of health intervention, to inform decisions made around it, or enable generalizations about larger groups that are in turn made surrogate to the similarities certain images draw between different bodies. They are a technique of estrangement, detaching the subject from the particularities of their history, and arranging them instead into biomedical ways of seeing and modes of analysis, in which the subject is not necessarily trained (Saunders, 27). As a method of judgment, forensics requires not just an object and mediator, but also a forum, in which “claims and counterclaims on behalf of objects can be presented and contested” (Keenan and Weizman 2012, 29). The kind of precision made possible by imaging offers a spectacle of judgment, “entangled performances” of decision-making around disputed or ambiguous objects (29). The patient’s body is made surrogate to another object—a scan, which is in turn surrogate to a particular set of diagnostic optics utilized by a biomedical forum of radiographers and oncologists. In this process of surrogacy, where the body becomes coded into object to make it legible to specific gazes, metaphor slips between object and interpreter, a constitutive element of the forum, and a condition of judgment—facilitating the process by which consensus is reached. “Explain it in general terms” is an invitation to analogize. The analogizing of biomedical ontology both deviates

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from the promise of precision while, conversely, ensuring a consensus which is taken to stand in for precision, in a prosaic sense—the judgment of experts, rather than an individual or machine. Ritvo interrupts this process by retrieving his body from the procedure of surrogacy, stressing instead the fallibility of the interpreting gaze, and the limits of professional disembodiment. A poem called “Scan” from 2012 shows this process at breaking point, where Max-as-experimental-test-subject inserts himself into the procedure, finding an ally in a voice without a body: Lie flat, comes the command, from a voice unsinging; the voice starts to weep and I blow it kisses.

Ritvo rarely talks about specific doctors or technicians or radiographers; he starts with the procedure, working the technical process through his experience of it, trying out metaphors and forms as he is constructed as a test subject. Here, the contrast between the disembodied punctuation of the first three lines and the enjambment of the last two creates a sense of intimacy between the voice and “I.” Being commanded to lie flat is joined to another context: the instruction of a lover, someone to whom one might want to blow kisses. This lover is joyless, “unsinging,” a tone to match the “flat” of the first line, but the kisses come as a kind of reassurance after this unsinging voice breaks, over a line and a semicolon, into weeping. The voice is not unsinging because it does not care; it is trying not to fall apart. The poem reads as a sonnet with most of its lines left out, but the rhythm of its volta toward hope lingers: a declaration of love from patient to voice. But is this the voice of a person, or a machine? The voice arrives as a command from a biopolitical regime of protection, surveillance, and intervention. This “command” feels either militaristic or robotic in its incorporeal arrival, the emphasis placed on the bodily vulnerability of the first sentence. The contrast between this vulnerability (conveyed rather than expressed), and the precision of the biotechnological operation, indicates an irresolvable but codependent tension between embodiment and treatment. In Promising Genomics, Fortun organizes his study of deCODE Genetics around the figure of chiasmus (X)—the inversion of clauses accompanied by a shift in terminology, “a couplet of terms that are conventionally taken as distinct or even opposed, but which in fact depend on each other, provoke each other, or contribute to each other” (2008, 13–14). For Fortun, this invokes the rhetorical register necessary for grasping the aporia of genomics, its future-oriented economy reliant on shifting meanings, rather than finite ones. The body located within this regime is placed on uncertain terrain, in terms of the changing significations attached to its embodied processes.

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Ritvo’s “The Curve” also starts with X: “Something, call it X, wanted a body.” The line makes the body subject to the desire of an alien entity immediately, teasing a mathematical equation before collapsing this into a wish in need of fulfillment. How can this unknown entity-quantity, a “thing,” be capable of desire? The sentence brackets the poem in an unquantifiable value (“desire”), as if preparing for a fall. “X,” in turn, is subsumed by language through a failed transmutation: the poem continues, “Our bodies”— and there is no sense, yet, of what or who this “we” refers to—“weren’t right for it—,” “it” being X. The em-dash here is placed in lieu of “because of”: gum around the bones, a rash of gold or black, eyes like blisters, leaking fondness.

Not being “right for” X creates an imprecision, even aesthetic estrangement: bodies that grow awkwardly and bear irregular marks of contamination, wounding, and abrasion—rashes and blisters, which are porous and pervious to external bumps and shocks, and whose internality is marked by imperfect layerings of different tissues—skin, gum, and bone. “X” loses its force to the thing it invents to supplement this failing of bodies, “all animal bodies.” Language, which necessarily refuses balance: Language forced X into the body like carbonation into a soda.

Language here performs a takeover; it “forces” a transformation of properties, the body going from still water to something fizzing and bubbling. X and the body fused to form a new chemical compound. The violence of this fusion rehearses the violence of the genetic adaptation he carries and the specific rearrangement of genes that has formed a deadly fusion. Ewing’s Sarcoma shows up in the bones, taking the form of a small round-cell tumor. It develops through the rearrangement of two genes between two chromosomes in a process called “translocation”: parts of each chromosome move to the other, creating what is called a fusion gene. It is the protein coded by this gene, and little else, that is found in Ewing’s Sarcoma tumors, and also a kind of chiasmus. Genetic alterations can be named and even measured through linguistic schemas. Grammar has long offered a way of conceptualizing genetics: in the case of Ewing’s Sarcoma, clauses rearranging, moving elsewhere, and fusing, that change the constitution of the body. Lily Kay discusses the development of molecular biology through the metaphor of information during the 1950s and 1960s. Following the publication of the double helix, she writes, “a molecular vision of life supplemented by an informational gaze” replaced the idea of life as “purely material or energetic” (2000, xv). Biologists

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used information as a metaphor to refer to biological specificity, coding as the body’s syntax. This syntactical model alienates matter by obscuring what is not coded, or what cannot be read. In this model, the concept of the gene is “part physicist’s atom and part Platonic soul” (Keller 1995, 17). If the information metaphor has a material referent, it is not the code itself or the body it is supposed to stand for, but the technologies that facilitate the translation of matter into code, and by extension, into a forensic object that can be agreed upon in the forum of the laboratory; information means the establishment of scientific consensus. Genetic syntax offers a precise way of translating mutation, giving physical suffering a set of iconic referents, and setting the parameters for describing bodily matter: in “The Curve,” a translucent rock that takes over the screen, the product of a rare fusion. The next stanza moves from simile to the conjuring powers of particular words, obliterating the gap between image and body: When I hear the word rock, a translucent lump shimmers in front of the world.

This image is not still; it moves the fizzing of carbonated water to an image of iridescence that takes up the frame of the speaker’s perception. Bodies in this poem cannot see properly: the eyes are blisters, smaller translucent lumps, while this larger lump forms a moving horizon. Sarcoma arrives in modern Latin from the Greek word for “sarx” (flesh), through the accusative “sarkoun” (to/toward flesh), to “sarkōma” (flesh-process). The word transforms over grammar from a fixed description of an object, to a process of becoming flesh: a shimmering translucent lump that becomes flesh on MRI scans, shaded areas signifying a process of language made flesh—a combination of code that produces shaded areas on images of the body. The body becomes reorganized around the topography laid out by this ­secularized account of the word becoming flesh. The metaphor takes over the scene, leaving no gap between vision and matter. This collapse of metaphor into the body is intercepted by the word at the beginning of the next stanza, “images,” a bolt from the real world that breaks up the nightmarish takeover, reminding the speaker of the opening between body and representations. It brings the things gathered on the horizon into an indeterminate context of multiple images, which “vary exhaustingly and troublingly.” This variation is a reminder that these are negotiations between “I” and reality: moments of technological seeing accompanied by methods of interpretation, not of finite horizons taken up by inanimate matter. These variations are not necessarily comforting. The stanza continues as if someone is struggling to breathe, hastily drawn breaths lurking at the edges of the lines: Though the images vary exhaustingly and troublingly,

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I always remember the spoke of earth cutting into ocean we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,

These lines sound like someone recalling the past to someone they love at a great physical cost. The forensic precision of images is not a site of certainty, but produces exhaustion and a feeling of trouble—the opposite of what care is supposed to do. It is the memory itself, encased in “always,” which offers solidarity (“we”) and certainty (“saw”) in this moment, not what is subject to interpretation on a screen. The spoke of the bicycle wheel is displaced onto the earth’s contours; the memory fragments and extends the structure of the bicycle to the description of the landscape. A spoke of earth that cuts becomes an instrument to penetrate an unmeasured expanse, a tool of exploration heavy with colonial-extractive symbolism. The technological probing of earth into sea substitutes the explorations that the speaker’s body has undergone through imaging. This “I” is extended into “we,” enjoying a leisurely activity, watching the implicit violence of this scene, rather than implicated within it. This distancing, of image from memory, of precision from care, and of the speaking “I” of memory from the “I” that conjures a terrifying horizon, allows the speaker to suspend his consciousness across the uncertain multiplicity of the present, toward an “always” that holds proof of a past. This reprieve is temporary: the sheen of the bicycles spreading over the earth distinct from the ocean’s sheen. The sheens alarmingly similar to one another to be so close together—like two bodies making love.

Bicycles and ocean share sheens, almost indistinguishable from— “alarmingly similar to”—one another. The adverb “alarmingly” of the penultimate line of the stanza echoes the ones in the second, “exhaustingly” and “troublingly”; it is a reminder of danger in the incalculability of proximity (“similar to”) and variation (“vary”). This alarm also reads as the alarm at the possible disappearance of two sheens, from two different temporal realms, into each other: ocean and bicycle. The horizon implied by the spread of sheen into sheen brings back the “shimmering” of the translucent lump, the alarm registering as a moment of vertigo at realizing the proximity of “we” to that illegible mass of water. This moment holds a temporal disjunction, between the passing sheen of the bicycles as they pass along the edge of the water, and the enduring sheen of the ocean. The full stop and line break of “distinct from the ocean’s sheen. / The sheens alarmingly similar” do not trace a collapse into paradox, but gesture to the uncanny proximity of two

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disparate objects. It is another chiasmus: measures of difference ­bookending repetitions of the object in question—sheen. Sheen: a mirage of another substance on top of another, immaterial, caused by refractions of light on a surface. It inverts the relation of feeling and surface: the act of making love is “like” these proximate sheens, not the other way round. The poem ends by coming back to the body of the speaker: “Skinny, hairy-chested, / made of pellets of rice,” these pellets also visual s­imiles for how lumps appear on scans. The rhythm of the last stanza mirrors the breathlessness of the earlier one, a self-portrait of “I” experiencing themselves as a lover, “cheeping in a way that’s / endearing and inappropriate”—a small enthusiastic bird “confused, surprised at the confusion, / surprised at the surprise,” getting lost among the expectations of two lovers: the speaker declares themselves, “your lover and X’s.” Loving offers a link between the body and its imprecision, its incapacity to fit X, but its attempts—“very tiringly”—to meet it nonetheless. The body is un-imageable, despite the probes of the poem, throwing X off with diversions and distractions. The poem questions the reliability and truthfulness of imaging in terms of what it can tell us about the body, and how other kinds of images might come to matter. It exposes it as a practice that is, itself, bound up with the logic of metaphor, which is required to forget its fiction to make truth claims. By contrasting the collapse of analogy into experience (the rock that takes up the whole horizon) with the particular, untruthful associations of memory (the sheens of bicycle and sea), the poem suspends the grammar of forensics. It resists the “forcing” of grammar into the body, loosening the collapse of analogy into matter, in images that are proximate but not reducible to each other—a kind of love-making, without the promise of reproduction. At the center of the poem is a snapshot of late afternoon, a dream conjured as the body struggles to breathe, without the hope of passing on a legacy.

Legacy, Love, and Harm I hope I have a daughter. And that she’s like you—wanting to do good, always, with no fear or panic motivating it, just with the dogged certainty that love is worth investing in. (Ritvo and Ruhl, 282)

Ritvo frequently considers the difficulty of describing love outside an economy of investment, salvation, and sacrifice: it seems to swing back, like a boomerang, into narratives of living well, and dying a good death. The ongoing search for a cure makes him complicit in a bioinformatic industrial complex that sacrifices other lives as it attempts to monetize its salvation. He identifies as Jewish, “the son of poor, Rabbinical stock dispersed by pogrom and Holocaust … raised out of penury” (“From One White Guy” 2014), descended from a history in which Jewish lives are not only less valuable, but have been subjects of experimentation and genocide for the sake of prolonging and promoting the supremacy of white Protestant lineages. Importantly,

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this descent (“stock”) is not defined by biological characteristics but by historical experience. Now he, too, is complicit in that economy of prolongation, and in the eugenic arrangement of life into a taxonomic hierarchy. This is a chiasmus of love (as faith in salvation) and harm (as its cost). “Poem To My Litter” (2016) brings out this history of forced surrogacy through a deliberation on experimentation, and the complicity of the suffering human in a biomedical economy fixated on finding specific (precise) cures to sell to a general public. The “Max” of this poem moves between experimental subject and agent of violence, descendent of a history of genocide who is also, now, the subject who benefits from modern frameworks of scientific innovation.1 Ritvo’s tumors returned while he was doing his B.A. in English at Yale. He underwent twelve more rounds of chemotherapy on the East Coast: two weeks of side effects followed by a week of respite. He refused to take ifosfamide, the drug that had caused hallucinations and memory loss the first time around, and began trying experimental treatments through doctors’ recommendations. Three years later, in 2015, he and his mother, Ariella Ritvo, sent his cells to a company that would implant them in mice, “seeding” tumors in them on which they would then test drugs. In Heidi Ledford’s words, “The mice would stand in as avatars for Max” (611). Ritvo began to think of the mice as his children. In July 2016, asked in an interview whether he felt “attached to them,” he said yes and, echoing the poem, They have my genes in them. I don’t have any kids, you know. This is in a strange, really paradoxical way the closest I’ve come to having children. You think about them [the mice] as just these things that are dying for you and that are suffering for you. (Harris and Ritvo 2016)

This is the story of “Poem To My Litter,” which unfolds first as a description of the experimental treatments the researchers carried out with the mice as substitutes for Ritvo, before turning into an address from him to the mice. “I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children,” and he has named them all “Max”: First they were Max 1, Max 2, but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites. They don’t know they’re named, of course. They’re like children you’ve traumatized and tortured so they won’t let you visit.

Fatherhood, property, and the possibility of a cure run close together through the poem, as the speaker attempts to articulate the total violence of the situation. The repetition of “my”—my genes, my litter, my mice, my doctors, my tumors—runs the logic of individual property into the ground. The laboratory practices he details explode the fantasy of harmonious,

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reciprocal ecological co-habitation, getting at the violence of “the necessity to go through others in order to be what you are,” in Isabelle Stengers’ words (Jensen and Thorsen 2019). Max’s chances of survival are invested in the way the bodies of other creatures respond to “his” genes; “he” passes through others in molecular form, so that their bodies might produce knowledge about the way his own might be preserved. These are not really “his” genes, these are not really “his” mice, and “my doctors” is shorthand for scientist-provider and patient-consumer. The language of property frames these exchanges, instead, in the context of a finance economy that outsources its extractive logic to invisibilized locations, in which mice are commodities in a market of model organisms (others famous ones being C. elegans, a worm, and Drosophila, a fly). Nikolas Rose considers the challenges of solidarity in the context of precision medicine. The focus on individualized care promotes a moral economy around genomic health that could bear on whether a patient-consumer would be prepared to pay for, “let alone care about, the health of others who are not related to me” (350). Humans and mice share 97 percent of the same DNA; in a literal sense, mice are used as genetic surrogates for humans. But humans and mice cannot interbreed: a human cannot give birth to a mouse. How, then, to conceive of the transmission of genetic material outside genealogy? How to think through the kind of trans-species solidarity Max is suggesting? Here, inheritance figures as contamination: My doctors split my tumours up and scattered them into the bones of twelve mice. We give the mice poisons I might, in the future, want for myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball. I wish it was perfect, but sometimes the death we see Doesn’t happen when we try it again in my body.

The experiment carries a New Testament legacy: twelve mice lining up with twelve apostles, and Max breaking his body to feed them with it. The metaphor of bread-as-body is made literal by the conditions of the experiment, biomatter split from its origin and scattered among believers as an act of faith. The “we” of “we watch,” it is implied, is Max and “his” doctors, but Max does not know the same things that they do; he is looking for something else. It is not just the mice that are “like crystal balls”; in this environment, his body is also a subject of divination. While the tumors have spread, through space and over time, across Max’s body—“in my flank a decade ago. // Then they went down to my lungs, and down my femurs, and into the hives in my throat that hatch white cells”— in the mice they are contained, like undeveloped zygotes, expressing but not developing:

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Their tumours have never grown up. Uprooted and moved. Learned to sleep in any bed the vast body turns down.

There is a contrast in syntax here which articulates the differentiation between Max and the mice’s experience of the tumors: in Max’s body, the tumors flow past a full stop and a stanza break, connected by the temporal signifier, “then,” as if in a badly written children’s story, where the topography of the body is a landscape of drops (“down”) and crevices (“into”). The mice’s tumors are defined by their not behaving like Max’s: they have not “Uprooted // and moved,” as if leaving home for the first time, and they have not adapted to the different resting places the body makes available. The short, disconnected fragments of sentences, stripped of pronouns, personalize the tumors rather than the mice, and keep the workings of Max’s body central as a point of comparison. To underscore this further: “we give the mice AIDS so they’ll harbor my genes peacefully.” Up to this point, the mice are abject vehicles for the transmission of biological degeneration, to share Max’s own. “Harbour” suggests carrying a load, but also a docking place—a site to bridge water and land, through which cargo is shuffled along sea networks. Again, the poem constructs these experiments as part of a longer history of colonial-capitalist extraction where immunodeficiency becomes a biopolitical border: part of a system for shoring up bodies worthy of saving, while also becoming a bioinformatic commodity for mapping futures free from disease. The genocidal implications of injecting a group positioned lower down in species/racial hierarchies reverberate through the history of eugenic programs in the Euro-US. The deliberate transmission of AIDS for s­cientific research conjures the Black men of the Tuskegee Syphilis study. Ritvo is not invoking these practices for literary effect; it is in the muscle memory of biomedical experimentation. This is fatherhood in a biopolitical production line: creating living forms that will sacrifice their lives for you, or that—more accurately—you will destroy and make suffer “for you.” The mice have no choice; Ritvo is ridiculing the narcissistic parent who wants their child to be “just like me,” who cannot allow their offspring to deviate from the model of existence laid out for them by their inheritance. In this case, that model is based on housing deathly material until some kind of answer can be divined from them. Molecular life is figured as intellectual property, a possible patent for a future cure, while the bodies that contain it are sacrificial surrogates. This is characteristic of the one-for-one substitutions of precision medicine, and the reduction of bodies to their biological code. The rhythm of the final four stanzas does not alter considerably from the rest of the poem, but there is the sense that the speaker has taken a breath. He turns to address the mice directly, and the tone becomes one of reassurance and comfort. The mice will not let him share space with them; there

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is some more fundamental remoteness between Max and them formed by a longer history of violence. The only thing that Max really knows about them is the identity they have been forced to take on: his own molecular surrogate, a fused protein. This is where the poem starts to be addressed to the mice: I hope, Maxes, some good of you is of me. Even my suffering is good, in part. Sure I swell with rage, fear—the stuff that makes you see your tail as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass.

The first sentence is marked by a compression at odds with the explicit confessions of the poem up to this point, as if the speaker is trying to remain calm in front of the “traumatized and tortured” children of the previous stanza, having been granted some kind of audience—or writing a letter to them that he hopes they will one day read. The chord of parental narcissism resounds through it: a sadistic father who hopes, at the end of his life, to have left a legacy that might produce something “good.” Then‚ the meaning of “good” shifts in the next sentence from an unspecific, generic hope of patrilineal influence, to a consideration of what might be “good” about life marked by suffering—“rage, fear”—rather than faith. Up to this point, the poem has premised a molecular correspondence between men and mice that will benefit the former, at the cost of the ­latter. The second stanza here departs from this instrumentalism. Max moves closer to the mice, marking his similarity to them, rather than exploiting theirs to his: “you see your tail / as a bar on the cage.” This is more than just an analogy for their respective imprisonment (the mice in real laboratory cages, him in the cage of his body); it is also a reference to their shared evolutionary history, and to the disappeared tails at the base of the human spine. Things get lost in evolutionary time: they fall out of images and stories. Entire species disappear. The inevitability of losing body parts (tails, legs, fur) becomes the bedside story of evolutionary history: And since I do absolutely nothing (my pride, like my fur, all gone) nothing happens to me. And if a whole lot of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace. Which is what we want. Trust me.

“I” is decentered in these final lines by compound connectors: “and … and…” “of … which.” “Nothing” becomes the poem’s final subject, a pause in the procedure which links Max and the mice. This is not a father who wants to imprint his heroic deeds on his children. There will be nothing to take forward. In reality, Max cannot imprint his own desires onto the mice, and neither can he gain their trust. And because of their incompatibility, the

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metaphor, “I swell // with rage, fear,” only works in his body, and not theirs. The stanza break severs him from the possibility of sharing this with them. This tracing of species difference is an analogy for the more general difficulty of solidarity in the context of precision medicine. But the poem does not invest hope in a politics of individuated uniqueness, wherein Max’s dying is reified into something distinct from others (human or nonhuman). Rather, Ritvo suggests encountering time in the gerund. The final two stanzas suggest a temporary truce with time, in which Ritvo does nothing to shift it—“since I do absolutely nothing”; and because of this, time does not act on him: “nothing happens to me.” Through this address that ­cannot happen—a communication between men and mice— Ritvo moves toward the reader, now also made into “Maxes,” where this biomedical avatar is shared out during a pause in procedure, rather than in locating a cure. The suggestion of tyranny in the final line—“Which is what we want. Trust me”— is undercut by the fragmentation of these final two stanzas, chopped across parentheses and line breaks, delivered from somewhere close to an end: a final truce between surrogates. Ritvo’s mode of auto-poetry interrupts bioinformatic grammars, calling attention to the body lying prostrate, struggling for breath, and the ­lacunae created by transcribing this body through, and as, machine. In precision medicine, the body-as-test-subject is substituted by images, while also made into a surrogate for a biomedical gaze. This logic of surrogacy is part of the economy of precision medicine, which relies on devices and techniques of comparison in order to pursue possible cures. Solidarity is not only difficult in this context; it is based on an understanding of sacrifice that falls u ­ nevenly across distinctions and taxonomies of living matter. Ritvo breaks up this legacy of reading others and the self as surrogates in medicalized encounters with death by reading dying as gerund, eventually attending to spaces in which “nothing happens”: a frozen memory, a body that does not adapt. While the particular rhythms of biocapital on which his survival depends capitalize on uncertainty, these moments of nothing happening allow for proximity, rather than reduction, to form an intervention in scenes of waiting.

Note 1. In my reading, I refer to the poetic subject of “Poem To My Litter” as Max, as opposed to Ritvo, the poet.

Works Cited Fortun, Mike. 2008. Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Garay, Joseph P., and Joe W. Gray. 2012. Omics and Therapy: A Basis for Precision Medicine. Molecular Oncology 6: 128–139.

360  L. CHOKSEY Harris, Mary, and Max Ritvo. 2016. The Prank Your Body Plays on Life. Only Human Podcast, July 12. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/max-ritvo. Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Line Marie Thorsen. 2019. Reclaiming Imagination: Speculative SF as an Art of Consequences. NatureCulture 5. https://www.natcult. net/interviews/reclaiming-imagination-speculative-sf-as-an-art-of-consequences/. Kay, Lily. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keenan, Thomas, and Eyal Weizman. 2012. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics. Berlin: Sternberg Press/Porticus. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1995. Reconfiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press. Kowalski, Charles Joseph, and Adam Joel Mrdjenovich. 2017. Personalized Medicine, Genomics and Enhancement: Monuments to Neoliberalism. American Journal of Clinical and Experimental Medicine 5 (3): 75–92. Ledford, Heidi. 2017. Cancer’s Cruel Chimaeras. Nature 543: 608–611. Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ritvo, Max. 2014. From One White Guy to Another: An Open Letter About Our Privileges. Huffpost. Ritvo, Max. 2015. Poets Online Talking About Coffee. Queen Mobs. ——— 2016a. Four Reincarnations. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. ——— 2016b. Mortal Kombat. Berfrois. Ritvo, Max and Sarah Ruhl. 2018. Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Rose, Nikolas. 2013. Personalised Medicine: Promises, Problems and Perils of a New Paradigm for Healthcare. Procedia: Social and Behavioural Sciences 77: 341–352. Salisbury, Laura. 2019. Between-Time Stories: Waiting, War, and the Temporalities of Care. Lecture, University of Exeter, June 5, Exeter. Saunders, Barry. 2008. CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART III

Ethics and Politics

CHAPTER 20

New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics Before the Atomic Bomb Jenni G. Halpin

In 1932, as had become his custom, Niels Bohr invited a group of physicists (his peers and their students) to his institute in Copenhagen, to spend the Easter holiday week together, arguing over the cutting edge of the emerging and unsettled science that was becoming quantum physics (Segré 2007). Not only at formal conferences but especially in social settings such as this hybrid seminar and summer camp, quantum physics was developing as a compelling disruption to classical understandings of physical reality. A tradition had arisen of including some homemade entertainment—a skit or variety show—as a part of the conference. Because 1932 was both the tenth anniversary of the founding of Bohr’s institute and the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s death, a young physicist in attendance, Max Delbrück, probably with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s help, wrote a send-up of Faust centered amid the debates the group of physicists had been involved in over Wolfgang Pauli’s proposed neutrino (Segré 2007).1 This little-known play is variously called “The Blegdamsvej Faust” (for the street on which Bohr’s institute was located) or “The Copenhagen Faust.” In 1931 atoms had been thought to be built of electrons—small and negatively charged—and protons—larger and positively charged. Physicists were beginning to understand radioactive decay by the emission of alpha particles and gamma rays. Beta-particle emissions were still a rather perplexing variety of phenomena. By 1932 Bohr, a fatherly figure among the physics community, and Wolfgang Pauli, an acerbic wit, were both giving some attention to J. G. Halpin (*)  Savannah State University, Savannah, GA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_20

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the problem. Bohr’s idea presumed that the theory of conservation of energy did not apply to beta emission (a proposal which fit with the facts thus far known), while Pauli took a contradictory approach which tried to retain conservation of energy by proposing the existence of the neutrino to balance things: a subatomic particle with no charge and no mass (both the chargelessness and the masslessness of his hypothetical particle were remarkably bizarre, as James Chadwick had not yet demonstrated the presence of the chargeless neutron in atomic nuclei). These irreconcilable proposals of Bohr’s and Pauli’s are attached in “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to the conflict between the Lord and Mephistopheles for the soul (and commitment) of Faust. Very little literary-critical attention has been paid to this brief parodic play despite its incisive expression of the power of scientific discovery to inflect social and political practice. The only published version is an awkward English translation included as an appendix to George Gamow’s overview of the rise of quantum physics, Thirty Years that Shook Physics. The difficulty of accessing it explains much of the critical silence. Too much of what has been written can be traced back to partial (and partially accurate) representations made in Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns (a book now more notorious for its role in inciting Bohr’s unhappy letter to Heisenberg contesting the latter’s representation of the meeting Michael Frayn would place at the center of his Copenhagen). More positively, Gino Segré has used the play as an excuse for his reflections on the interwar physics community (Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics). Theodore Ziolkowski includes it briefly in his consideration of “Americanization of Faust” in The Sin of Knowledge. Ziolkowski rightly notes the anachronism inherent in considering the bomb in connection with this play but nonetheless connects “The Blegdamsvej Faust” with frequent postwar references to J. Robert Oppenheimer (and others involved in the Manhattan Project) as a Faustian figure (see Ziolkowski 2000). John Canaday’s is by far the most developed and insightful literary reading of the play, teasing out the various threads of disruption and dissent running throughout the play as manifestations of the group’s struggles to reconcile their disparate scientific world views, with a particular emphasis on the metaphors of nuclear and quantum physics. In a still more narrowly more focused approach, Paul Halpern thoughtfully examines the play among other examples of “Quantum Humor.” Likewise, Luisa Bonolis offers the play as a strategic representation of the character of the international physic community in her thoughtful history, “International Scientific Cooperation During the 1930s. Bruno Rossi and the Development of the Status of Cosmic Rays into a Branch of Physics.” Helge Kragh and Wolfgang Lueckel each include brief reference to the play as it touches on their archives of Niels Bohr’s theories of stellar energy and of nuclear age German fiction respectively. The largest body of scholarly response to the play, following Panagiotis Pantidos et al., has more recently come to consider “The Blegdamsvej Faust” in the context of theatricality and poetics as tools for the teaching of scientific ideas.

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Yet one of the charms of this edition—as well as of the German ­ anuscript—is the inclusion of illustrations by Gamow, who was something m of a prankster‚ as well as the author and illustrator of several layman’s works on the sciences in addition to his work in physics. Some of these illustrations are caricatures of the play’s characters. And “The Blegdamsvej Faust” was in part a roast: its caricatures were inside jokes which functioned as reminders to the audience that they had been working together long enough and closely enough to send one another up so accurately. Thus the youngest generation, students of Bohr’s students, portray their teachers and their teachers’ teachers in roles adapted from Goethe’s Faust, putting Bohr’s beneficent catchphrase “I say this not to criticize, but rather just to learn” into the mouth of the Lord and pointedly presenting a Mephistopheles who echoes the argumentative Wolfgang Pauli’s mannerisms (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). Lise Meitner, Paul Ehrenfest, and Albert Einstein were contemporaries of Bohr. Their students include Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac along with Pauli, and the up and coming students present at the meeting (and performing in the play) included Delbrück, von Weizsäker, and Felix Bloch. Yet, also at issue, and increasingly destructive of the friendships among the group, was the relevance of classical physics to the quantum arena. Both the hypotheses describing the quantum universe (including the opposing suggestions of beta emission disobeying conservation of energy and of the existence of neutrinos) and the metaphysical interpretations being attached to these descriptions increasingly abandoned the foundations of classical physics. Though the play is unswervingly comedic, it is, as John Canaday notes, both dramatically and socially a conflict; looked at as a play, Faust fields the challenges of the Lord and Mephistopheles; seen socially, it lands amid ongoing arguments among the physicists as to what quantum physics even is (Canaday 2000). The play’s inability to present a coherent and sensible quantum mechanical physics is indicative of the fracturing of the relationships on which its comedy is based: 1932 was not a moment of smooth and consensual revision of the physicists’ view of the universe. They were aware of the developing revolution in both physics and the institutional structures within which they were operating. Still, they risked asking whether quantum physics was a revision and elaboration which could be meaningfully placed in relation to classical (and even relativistic) physics or a radically new thing which required both conceptual and methodological breaks from the old ways of doing physics. The ultimately high stakes of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” carry an echo of a major trend in science drama: what Shepherd-Barr has noted as “a distrust of science” (2006). Since at least Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, scientific curiosity has regularly been presented on stage as a dangerous, and therefore unethical, characteristic. Indeed, even before Marlowe’s dramatization, the first Faustbook marked a similar change in the representation of the magician or sorcerer, in its emphasis on the curious mind, the human desire for

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knowledge, what Elizabeth Butler has called “the eternally unsatisfied spirit of scientific enquiry, the incurable thirst for knowledge which drives its victims to transgress human limitations” (1979). Dramatic scientists are rarely worthy of trust, specifically because of the drive that makes them scientists. The early quantum physicists wanted to know the fundamental structure of the atom; in the mid-twentieth century, physicists would develop atomic bombs powered by tearing that structure apart. In this regard, “The Blegdamsvej Faust” presages the science drama after (and about) the bomb: its scientists are inevitably caught up in questions concerning the ethical responsibility of those who hold or seek knowledge, particularly the tension between a responsibility to one’s abilities and a responsibility to society. (However‚ the play is noteworthy for the extent to which it avoids q ­ uestions of nationalism.) These questions of responsibility are clearest in “The Blegdamsvej Faust’s” dramatization of a carnival of dangers theoretical physicists were unleashing on themselves, a carnival all the more interesting for being the product of those same physicists’ imaginations.

A Faustian Tradition As both a roast of the senior physicists and a parody of Goethe’s play, “The Blegdamsvej Faust” is heavily reliant on Faust’s theology and epistemology. Though Faust has no inherent connection to the early twentieth-century attempt to understand atomic structure, it does present the scientist’s pursuit of knowledge as the means by which Mephistopheles believes he can lead Faust away from his already confused service of the Lord. Goethe’s play is motivated by a pair of wagers: the Lord’s bet with Mephistopheles that Faust will ultimately seek “the right road” and Faust’s with Mephistopheles that Faust will never cease seeking more knowledge (von Goethe 1963). These entwined wagers underscore the centrality of knowledge: Faust’s ongoing striving for it suggests the appropriate lure for Mephistopheles to use to draw him off of that “right road.” This prioritization of knowledge will be drawn out in “The Blegdamsvej Faust” in a heightening of the interpersonal tensions rising from competing theorizations of physical matter. When the parody play takes up Faust’s concern with knowledge, this raises the stakes of its characters’ disagreements. Goethe’s Faust sweetens the pot by making it the gauge for his own wager with Mephistopheles. The Lord.    Though now he serves me but confusedly,    I shall soon lead him where the vapor clears. […]. Mephisto. What will you bet? You’ll lose him yet to me,    If you will graciously connive    That I may lead him carefully. The Lord. As long as he may be alive,    So long you shall not be prevented.    Man errs as long as he will strive.    (von Goethe 1963)

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Faust serves “confusedly,” and in his confusion both the Lord and Mephistopheles consider him open to being led, though each has a different path in mind. The frame established in the Prologue further includes the Lord’s justification of his willingness to risk Faust in this Job-like test: A good man in his darkling aspiration Remembers the right road throughout his quest. […]. He [Faust] soon prefers uninterrupted rest; To give him this companion hence seems best Who roils and must as Devil help create.    (von Goethe 1963)

The Lord exhibits his faith that though Faust’s researches are part of a “darkling aspiration,” the doctor will soon tire of them—perhaps all the sooner if exposed to Mephistopheles’ “roiling”—and return to the “right road” in the end. Mephistopheles is equally confident in his own ability to keep him on the road to knowledge, already reconstrued as a road toward evil in the play’s “Prologue in Heaven.” As for Faust’s reasons for embarking on his journey with Mephistopheles, he tells us that he is weary, that all of his conventional learning has given him “neither money nor treasures, / Nor worldly honors or earthly pleasures,” that he is dismayed that with all his knowledge—and he believes himself the smartest person around—he “Do[es] not fancy that [he] know[s] anything right, / Do[es] not fancy that [he] could teach or assert / What would better mankind” (von Goethe 1963). Like his valuation of knowledge, Faust’s arrogance gives another fertile ground for “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to jab at the flaws and foibles of the greatly esteemed physicists of the day. Though knowing his own brilliance, Faust’s assessment of all he has learned is strikingly similar to the Lord’s: a “darkling aspiration” which has not brought him closer to what would be best. Instead of remembering “the right road,” however, Faust embarks upon an entirely new branch of knowledge: magic. In doing so, Faust seizes upon the opportunity to exchange his labor after death (an existence in which he does not quite believe) for Mephistopheles’ service during his life. Fairly radically disavowing potential consequences, Faust later offers Mephistopheles permission to destroy him if he ever rests from his labors (I.1692–8). He even compares such a disengagement from interest in the world to enslavement. Faust makes clear that his only interest is in an unending striving to understand the material world: if he were ever satisfied that he had figured it out, he would get bored and might as well die. Hyperbolic, admittedly, but suitably in accord with the tone of Mephistopheles’ wager with the Lord. Where the Lord sees the “roiling” of interest in the world as a distraction from the “right road” to himself, Faust readily succumbs to Mephistopheles in the juxtaposition of the liveliness of being posed a difficulty to solve against the deathly stasis of having figured everything out. It is the pursuit of knowledge Faust embraces,

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seeming to make himself responsible only for working to learn and experience everything. Framing it all as personal curiosity or a new step in self-improvement sets Faust’s deal at a distance from the consequences his decision will deliver to others around him: Faust, in his self-regard, considers his own pleasure in learning of such superior worth as to suggest his own immediate death if he ever were to want to stop and rest rather than go on.

“The Blegdamsvej Faust” Following the structure of Goethe’s play in the main part, “The Blegdamsvej Faust” is nonetheless more comedic, more chaotic, and more personal. The Lord recognizably becomes Bohr; Mephisto takes on Pauli’s mannerisms; and Faust is associated with Paul Ehrenfest, an old friend and colleague of both Bohr and Pauli, placed in between them not to fall to Mephisto’s temptation or rise to the Lord’s salvation but to choose which of them is right in taking the next steps to develop quantum physics. Ehrenfest’s judgment, by also judging how paradigm-breaking quantum physics might be, had the potential to make or break the careers of the younger physicists who wrote and performed in the play (by validating or excoriating their work and its potential) as well as to establish the terms under which the older physicists’ legacies would be burnished. While showing off both his connection to Bohr’s elite group of physicists (by writing about them for their entertainment) and a familiarity with the literary work of Goethe, Delbrück is not shy about building up representations of cluelessness within his own community, sacrificing the standing of the physicists to emphasize the sheer difficulty of developing an accurate and comprehensible quantum physics. During the opening prologue, set “Between Heaven and Hell,” three Archangels discuss recent happenings in astronomy. These Archangels are the British astronomers Eddington, Jeans, and Milne. Given the tenuous practical connections between quantum physics and astronomy, these figures are apparently chosen primarily as an echo of the heavenly spheres. This prologue, set geographically lower than Goethe’s “Prologue in Heaven,” also takes a lower tone. Many lines of the Gamow translation are more lively than their German originals, especially where the original German text is closest to Goethe’s. Nonetheless, where the German original of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” does diverge from Goethe’s Faust, its tone, too, often diverts into frivolity. These Archangels look to the burning of the stars and chant “This vision fills us with elation / (Though none of us can understand). / As on the Day of Publication / The brilliant Works are strange and grand” (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). Here three fairly significant astronomers admit to ignorance of the details of a cutting-edge theoretical physics which informs their particular field. The playwrights’ casting of their colleagues under the shadow of mockery disparages those who do not already understand quantum physics—these astronomers may be

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world-class, but “none of them can understand.” The play’s audience of a few dozen physicists would have recognized the dig at themselves as well: they were, after all, just concluding yet another week of debates among the field’s best and brightest, without having yet resolved many of the crucial difficulties presented by a quantum model of reality. This audience was full of physicists, many of whom would become Nobel Laureates, who knew that they did not know everything they needed to know about quantum theory. As a field, it was still incoherent. But the play’s mockery also marks the emerging field as beyond ordinary capacities: if even these “bright stars” of science cannot follow it, perhaps quantum mechanics requires a godlike capacity. As the play elevates Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli to superhuman roles—the Lord and Mephisto[pheles], respectively—this positioning further ambiguates the sharpness of the jibe Delbrück directed against himself and the others: perhaps it is not so bad that the astronomers and the majority of the audience are still uncertain about many details of quantum physics, as comprehending the discipline calls for at least the superlative character of Bohr’s and Pauli’s attempts. In this context, the first part of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” opens in Faust’s study with a close paraphrase of Goethe’s Faust’s monologue describing the many fields he has mastered, serving to establish Faust’s credentials in this emerging and baffling scientific undertaking. When Mephisto arrives to tempt him, it is to musical accompaniment: a canon of the names of eminent physicists of the day whom Mephisto suggests agree with him. Faust rejects all of their ideas, until Mephisto puts forth the idea of his neutrino, who appears, singing, as Gretchen, the love interest in Goethe’s play. An interlude at an American pub allows several American physicists to appear in the playlet, and this scene primarily allows a discussion of Einstein’s theories. It’s a funny bit of banter, but underlying it is a recognition that Einstein was increasingly unwilling to accept quantum mechanics and the work of its theorists. In the second part, Faust awakens from a pleasant dream and meets a Master of Ceremonies (M.C.) who offers two separate Walpurgis nights; where Goethe’s single Walpurgis night is a Beltane Eve (30 April) of uncanny events, “The Blegdamsveg Faust” presents two nights, one modeled on classical physics and the other modeled on quantum theory. Again, this juxtaposition underscores the difficulties quantum physicists faced in fitting their work into relationship with that of the physicists who had gone before them. Faust finds the Classical Walpurgis Night dull. When he finally convinces the M.C. to skip past it and unleash the Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis Night, what comes forward is a dangerous disorder in which elements from quantum theory appear as monsters. For example, quantum physics uses the difficult mathematics of group theory, and “The Group Dragon” appears on stage. Faust is not the only one called to choose between the Lord and Mephisto—he, like the Archangel-Astronomers, represents the play’s audience to itself. In discussing characterization, Segré works to show the interpersonal

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stakes and notes that the group of physicists may well have expected to have to make these personal Faustian bargains—to negotiate their own desires for stature and friendship among their colleagues. Segré continues, however, and asserts that they would never (in the years before the Manhattan Project) have anticipated being called upon to make such a bargain in regard to their science (Segre 2007). The Ehrenfest/Faust character, then, struggles throughout “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to find a position from which to consider the opposing proposals of his friends; this struggle becomes more visible when he attempts in the second act to enact the differing time scales of classical and quantum theoretical models, by the representation of what a Walpurgis Night in each would entail. Whereas Goethe wrote the “Walpurgis Night” and “Walpurgis Night’s Dream” scenes, Delbrück stages the contrast between “The Classical Walpurgis Night” and “The Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis Night.” The M.C., played by Delbrück, first introduces the Classical: M.C.    The Classical—a potpourri! Faust.     (He leans forward, expecting. A long pause indicates that nothing is happening) But nothing’s happening! M.C.                                             Just wait and see! Faust.     (He waits. Another long pause and again nothing happens) See here now, Delbrück! . . . M.C.                                              Faust, you must expect That with the Classical there’s no effect Upon the audience.      (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966)

Here the M.C. underscores one of the strangenesses of the new quantum physics: observation matters. In this case Delbrück undertakes an inversion in saying that classical elements have “no effect / Upon the audience” rather than that an audience has no effect on classical physics. Faust, along with the audience, is bored by the absence of anything of note in the classical schema, echoing the idea that the exciting scientific discoveries of the mid-twentieth century would be in the new physics rather than the classical. (In the German text, the classical is presented almost entirely by stage directions describing the lack of effect. Accompanying this description, the German text provides an illustration: a large, empty rectangle.) The M.C. then denies Faust permission to simply dismiss the boring Classical, so Faust retorts, “I then propose the Classical be moved / Much farther back in time and place” (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). Not being allowed to set classical physics entirely aside, Faust invokes a change in the geometry of space-time: if the classical must be allowed to run its course, let it do so far away and let it begin so much earlier so that it will end the sooner. And the M.C. approves this proposal. With quantum theory comes carnival: the many strange elements introduced in the physicists’ efforts to describe a quantum mechanical universe

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come to life. In the shift from the classical to the quantum, danger appears. The M.C. even posts a literal “Warning” sign as he pushes away the space-time of classical mechanics (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). In fact, as Canaday has written, “the play threatens to fall apart. The audience witnesses a dizzying sequence of miniature spoofs of the various offspring of quantum mechanics” (Canaday 2000). He highlights a number of the dangers and disorders arising from the quantum theoretical context. The key aspect of this Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis Night is the universal danger and disorder it brings. Dangerous holes (Dirac holes) appear in the path of two monopoles attempting to reach one another. The Group Dragon is slain by the personification of another peculiarity arising in quantum theory: anti-symmetry (but even this triumph over a threat is presented as a surprising success [203]). The false sign is there to confuse matters—in this play it is a trickster figure, and in mathematical calculations it is the common and difficult-to-locate error of using a plus instead of a minus (or vice versa). Two tumblers stage the exchange relation, illustrating a peculiarity of the relation between position and momentum which is central to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Finally, each personifying a different difficulty of quantum mechanics, the Four Gray Women appear. Nothing of quantum physics that is being materialized on the stage is appearing as a safe form. These personifications of key concepts and difficulties in theoretical physics take the stage and effect a shift in the scene. Poor Faust, who has watched this circus, now gladly succumbs to the in-rush of the press, and, echoing Goethe’s Faust’s egoism, says: To this fair moment let me say: “You are so beautiful—Oh, stay!” A trace of me will linger ‘mongst the Great, Within the annals of The Fourth Estate. Anticipating fortune so benign, I now enjoy the moment that is mine! (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966)

All the play gives him is his dying moment and a hope that he will receive good press attention. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, this Faust dies of the excitement of being part of the spectacle and is not carried up to heaven afterward. For all the parody and frivolity in which this play engages, it seems it plays “for keeps.” The dangers of quantum physics to the community developing it are multifarious and real, from the undermining of longstanding principles of classical physics to the contestation among great personalities over its newest discoveries, from the cliquishness of Bohr’s invitation list to the losses of friendships, positions, and even lives in the developing arguments over quantum physics’ properties. Goethe’s Faust is a remarkable figure for the innovators of early ­twentieth-century physics. Far from being poised to drudge away at filling in details suggested by a complete set of theorems which well describe the universe, in the wake of Einstein’s theories of relativity and the revolutionary

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opening years of quantum physics, a new discipline—theoretical physics—sprang up rich with knotty problems in which to entangle themselves. Relativity and quantum physics may have seemed to provide what Goethe’s Faust called new “joys […] from this earth” to “delight” them (von Goethe 1963). In deciding to fool about with time—to push away “classical” time and let loose a quantum temporality, “The Blegdamsvej Faust” opens its characters up to a strange and dangerous context. They are baffled and each new element—however potentially useful—is also a danger. And Faust/ Ehrenfest’s fate does not suggest these dangers are surmountable. As the chorus concludes the play, “Das Ewig-Neutrale / Zieht uns hinan!” (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1932). The eternal-neutral pulls us upwards. (Except that Goethe’s chorus refers not to the eternal-neutral but to the eternal-feminine, both plays close with the same two lines.) Even in the remaining characters’ acceptance that Pauli’s neutrino may be a constituent part of matter, neutrality itself is undermined: it now pulls. What the drama offers is a way to pull back: the social network of performance groups together the subjects of this eternal-neutral’s pull, proffering a hope, however charged with self-mockery, that the pursuit of physics will remain a collective one, founded in community rather than egoism.

Notes 1.  My thanks are due to Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Colin N. Milburn, and many members of the British Society for Literature and Science who have informed my thinking on this project and so much else. In the initial publication George Gamow credits his wife Barbara with the translation of the play into English and leaves the authors “anonymous, except for J. W. von Goethe,” claiming to have been unable to discover who they were, and giving “Thanks […] to Professor Max Delbrück for his kind help in the interpretation of certain parts of the play” (Gamow 1966). Segré, however, credits both Gamows as translators and identifies Delbrück—rather than “The Task Force of the ‘Institute for Theoretical Physics,’ Copenhagen”—as the text’s primary author (Segre 2007).

Bibliography Aaserud, Finn. 2007. The Theatre of Quantum Physics. Nature 448 (7156): 869–870. Beller, Mara. 1999. Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Bonolis, Luisa. 2014. International Scientific Cooperation During the 1930s: Bruno Rossi and the Development of the Status of Cosmic Rays into a Branch of Physics. Annals of Science 71 (3): 355–409. Butler, Elizabeth M. 1979. The Fortunes of Faust: Magic in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canaday, John. 2000. The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Gamow, George. 1966. Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory. New York, NY: Doubleday, Reprinted 1985. New York, NY: Dover. Halpern, Paul. 2012. Quantum Humor: The Playful Side of Physics at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics. Physics in Perspective 14 (3): 279–299. Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hendry, John. 1984. The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue. In Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol. 14, ed. Robert S. Cohen, Erwin N. Hiebert, and Everett I. Mendelsohn. Boston, MA: D. Reidel. Ibsen, Henrik. 1981. An Enemy of the People: Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans. R. Farquharson Sharp, 129–215. Toronto, ON: Bantam. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen. 1932. The Task Force of the 1966.In The Blegdamsvej Faust, trans. Barbara Gamow. Thirty Years That Shook Physics. New York: Doubleday, 1966, ed. George Gamow, 165–218. New York, NY: Dover. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen. 1932. Parody of “Faust”. Unpublished TS. Microfilm. Sources for the History of Quantum Physics 6: 23 pages. Jungk, Robert. 1956 [1986]. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, trans. James Kleugh. New York, NY: Harvest. Kragh, Helge. 2017. Let the Stars Shine in Peace! Niels Bohr and Stellar Energy, 1929–1934. Annals of Science 74 (2): 126–148. Lueckel, Wolfgang. 2016. From Zero Hour to Eleventh Hour? German Fiction of the Nuclear Age Between 1945 and 1663. Monatschefte 107 (1): 84–107. Marlowe, Christopher. 2005. Doctor Faustus: Doctor Faustus with The English Faust Book, ed. David Wootton, 1–66. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett. Pantidos, Panagiotis, Kalliopi Spathi, and Evagelos Vitoratos. 2001. The Use of Drama in Science Education: The Case of ‘Blegdamsvej Faust, Science & Education 10 (1–2): 107–117. Pantidos, Panagiotis, Konstantinos Ravanis, Kostas Valakis, and Evangelos Vitoratos. 2014. Incorporating Poeticality into the Teaching of Physics. Science & Education 23 (3): 621–642. Segré, Gino. 2007. Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics. New York, NY: Viking. Shattuck, Roger. 1996. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Toonders, Winnie, Roald P. Verhoeft, and Hub Zwart. 2016. Performing the Future: On the Use of Drama in Philosophy Courses for Science Students. Science & Education 25 (7/8): 869–895. Tselfes, Vasilis, and Antigoni Paroussi. 2009. Science and Theatre Education: A CrossDisciplinary Approach of Scientific Ideas Addressed to Student Teachers of Early Childhood Education. Science & Education 18 (9): 1115–1134. “uncertainty.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1963. Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Doubleday. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 2000. The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 21

The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres of Future Life Coleman Nye

“Everyone stop everything. What is this?” So opens a 2014 Slate article (Newman 2014). With a blend of amusement and trepidation, the article describes BiteLabs, an apparent biotech start-up debuting a gourmet product: celebrity meat (bitelabs.org). BiteLabs claims to be culturing in-vitro meat from celebrity tissue samples, which are painlessly extracted, cultivated in a bioreactor, ground up, seasoned, and encased as artisanal salami. According to its site, BiteLabs offers an environmentally friendly and victimless alternative to conventional meat. Consumers can now dine on meat in good conscience, and enjoy the added perk of meeting and eating (meating?) their favorite celebrities in the flesh. The website set off a veritable media feeding frenzy, as numerous blogs, magazines, and twitter accounts speculated about whether the site is a legitimate marketing platform for a burgeoning company, an animal rights activist ploy, or a parody of Silicon Valley. As Brian Merchant from Motherboard wrote, “So this is either a startup looking to gin up some cheap PR to pave its way into the lab-grown meat market, an activist group like PETA carrying out a spoof campaign, or a satirist very committed to his prank” (2014). In many ways, BiteLabs is all three. It is at the nexus of these precise activities and interests—biotechnological speculation, environmental activism, and artistic fabulation—that the emergent terrain of “naturally artificial” meat has taken shape.

C. Nye (*)  Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_21

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In the years preceding BiteLabs’ 2014 debut, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, motivated by concerns about the ethical and environmental unsustainability of industrial meat production, funded Dutch scientist Mark Post and his team to grow an in-vitro beef burger as “proof of concept.” Around the same time, US-based animal rights group PETA offered one million dollars to any company able to produce commercially viable quantities of in-vitro meat. A year after PETA’s competition expired and six months before BiteLabs emerged, the world’s first lab-grown beef burger, dubbed the “Google Burger,” was consumed on live television in the UK. In reference to his backing of this “victimless meat” initiative, Brin noted, “Some people think this is science fiction. It’s not real; it’s somewhere out there. I actually think that’s a good thing. If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough” (“Google Burger” 2013). In-vitro meat was science fiction before it became a scientific reality. In a 1932 essay widely cited by cultured meat researchers, Winston Churchill anticipates a future in which we grow chicken parts in-vitro instead of harvesting animals. In a more dystopian 2003 vision of lab-grown meat futures, Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake imagines “ChickieNobs”—meat sourced from bioengineered chicken-like bodies without heads. In the same year—a decade before the Google burger’s debut—the speculative bioart collective SymbioticA cultivated the first in-vitro meat prototype in a gallery in France. Speculation is central to experimental economies of technoscience.1 Experimental systems in the sciences, as in the arts, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger explains, are “future-generating machines” that produce the conditions through which to bring forth something as-yet-unknown, “something which does not exist in the form in which it is going to be produced” (1997, 319). Within contemporary formations of technoscience, these f­uture-generating processes involve both techno-cultural frontier-making (Haraway 1989; Helmreich 2000; Roosth 2017) and financial market-making (Rajan 2006; Cooper 2008). From the entanglements between SymbioticA’s 2003 bioart installation and the 2013 Google-funded in-vitro beef prototype to the subsequent uptake of BiteLabs’ human meat imaginary by the Dutch techno-cultural think tank Next Nature, this chapter explores how forms of speculative fiction and financial speculation have played critical roles in materializing “naturally artificial” meat. While genres of speculative art and finance have helped to shape the coming-into-being of cultured meat, genres of biological and social classification such as race, species, relation—in short, genus—have also been key resources in the creation of in-vitro meat (IVM). In the second part of this chapter, I employ the analytic of genre/genus to explore how specific conceptualizations of “life” shape IVM research—from the industrial underpinnings of the idea that life can be maintained outside of the body (in vitro means in a glass) to the race and gender dynamics at play in categorizations of food, environment, or humanness. In many ways, the case of in-vitro meat exemplifies feminist and

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postcolonial science studies scholars’ claims that artistic imaginaries, social histories, and economic systems are all part of, rather than apart from, scientific practice (Haraway 1989‚ 2008; Wynter 2003). What we know is inextricable from how we come to know it—the questions we ask, the categories and conventions we use, the stories we tell. If the worlds we come to know and make in the sciences are inextricable from the stories we tell—from genres of speculation to modes of classification—then it is critical that we attend to which stories shape our scientific designs on future life. IVM researchers often draw on Churchill’s techno-utopian vision of a “post-animal bioeconomy” (Datar 2015): they proffer meat technology as a simple solution to complex problems and frame life as separable from bodies and environments. Atwood, BiteLabs, and others complicate the neat division between technology and environment, living being and lab instrument, eater and eaten: their speculations on the matter of in-vitro meat attend to the complex entanglements and ethical dynamics at play in techno-ecologies of consumption. Taking a cue from these alternate approaches, the chapter concludes by asking how scientists and artists can co-materialize different technoscientific futures of “life” by turning to genres of thought that center complexity and reciprocity in the making of our more-than-human relations.

The Future Birth of Real Artificial Meat Roughly a decade before the Google burger made its way into the mouths of a select few in London, the Australia-based art lab collective SymbioticA installed a project entitled “Disembodied Cuisine” in a gallery in Nantes, France. This collaborative project between artists and biological ­ scientists was an exploration of the techno-utopic concept of “victimless meat.” Frog leg muscle stem cells were placed in a nutrient media in a bioreactor alongside an aquarium containing the living frogs from which the tissues were collected and a bourgeois dining room where people ate the cultured frog legs. The piece was designed to explore the ethical, ontological, and financial stakes of the emerging concept of “extreme Nouvelle Cuisine” (Catts and Zurr 2006, 7), which wasn’t terribly tasty (portions were small and the texture was gelatinous), was expensive to develop (it cost $650 to make one gram of in-vitro frog steak), and was only available to an elite few (Zurr 2009). The experimental movement toward knowing and making novel “epistemic things” in the sciences and arts is marked by a thrall to “continuously produce surplus that is beyond what we may have wanted, beyond what we might have imagined” (Rheinberger 1997, 23). SymbioticA asked how IVM futures might generate surplus life and/as surplus value: they opened up space to consider who might, in the future, be able to afford to occupy the ethical position of eating meat without killing and how this so-called victimless food product

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might result in the production of new and newly exploitable “semi-living beings” (Zurr 2009). By situating lab-grown meat in relation to modes of eating and killing on the factory farm and in the laboratory sciences, SymbioticA sought to account for the entanglements of eater and eaten, and to explore our responsibilities to our fellow living and semi-living beings (Zurr and Catts 2004). In this way, “Disembodied Cuisine” prompted a consideration of how in-vitro meat risks extending, rather than unmaking, unequal regimes of vitality that have long animated modes of capitalist production in industry and agriculture (Waldby 2000; Haraway 2008; Franklin 2007). At the same time, SymbioticA laid the groundwork for competing IVM imaginaries to take shape by creating the techno-material conditions to make cultured meat. In ensuing years, components of the installation were incorporated piecemeal into the broader enterprise of cultured meat production and promotion. Researchers in the growing field of cellular agriculture cite SymbioticA as the first laboratory to produce meat in-vitro (Heselmans 2005) and credit it with successfully developing a now-widely used scaffolding technique for cultured meat production (Edelman et al. 2005). In addition to its technical contributions to the future birth of IVM, select dimensions of the collective’s ethico-aesthetic frame were also echoed by IVM researchers. In a 2010 interview in Nature, Mark Post, who is credited with developing the “Google burger,” said he hoped to “make a single palatable sausage of ground pork, showcased next to the living pig that donated its starter cells” (Jones 2010, 752). Post’s desire to stage the living pig alongside the meat developed from its cells resonates with the ethical framing not only of SymbioticA, but also of his funders such as Google’s Sergey Brin and the organization New Harvest, which describes itself as a “(r)evolutionary” cellular agriculture research institute. New Harvest conjures a future “post-animal bioeconomy” in which tissue engineering and synthetic biology promise to bypass the negative impacts of industrial agriculture on environment, public health, and animal wellbeing (“Meat/Culture” 2013) through the creation of “animal products without animals” (Datar 2015). As Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA remark, “The irony sometimes seems to be lost too easily, as now the discourse about a victimless society is being used by a university spin-off company [New Harvest] that attempts to secure funding for tissue-engineered meat” (2006, 7) (Figs. 21.1 and 21.2). While saving animals becomes a site of moral and financial investment in the promissory narrative of IVM, this investment takes the shape of engineering animals out of the equation entirely. In this way, the organism itself and its web of relations become extraneous to models of biopolitical and bioeconomic flourishing (Metcalf 2013) and cultured meat becomes a form of “ethical biocapital” (Franklin 2003), as the promise to solve social and environmental problems through biotechnological innovation is itself a mechanism for value generation. This promissory framing of post-animal technofutures takes

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Fig. 21.1  Google Burger tasting, Cultured Beef and Google (2013)

Fig. 21.2  In-vitro frog leg tasting, SymbioticA (2003)

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up Winston Churchill’s anticipation of the full instrumentalization and fragmentation of animals into what Donna Haraway describes as “organs without organisms” (2008, 268): “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium” (Churchill 1932). The Churchill quotation begins to situate the concept of meat w ­ ithout animals within a deeper genealogy of disarticulating life from the living body. Cultured meat is part of an assemblage of cellular technologies developed in the past century that are focused on the manipulation of life processes. In 1907, American embryologist Ross Harrison separated amphibian ­embryonic tissue from the body and managed to keep the isolated tissue alive for weeks in small glass enclosures (Landecker 2007, 15). In 1912, ­Franco-American surgeon Alexis Carrel claimed to have created immortal life in-vitro by culturing embryonic chicken heart tissue. Although the “immortality” of Carrel’s chicken heart has been disputed, this model of cultivating life outside of the organismic body for indefinite periods of time has reshaped biological approaches to time and embodiment. The move from experimentation on animals in vivo (within the living body) to in vitro (in a glass) in early twentieth-century cellular biology marked a shift in the conceptualization and study of life, as it effectively “loosened cells from bodies, human tissue from persons, and biological things from the given time of lifespans and other biological cycles” (19). The role of lab and farm animals in this history of making life into a disembodied technology also connects to ongoing agricultural attempts to render animals into living factories through the mechanization of their life processes (Haraway 2008). Animal domestication, selective breeding, and the industrialization of livestock are intimately connected to reproductive and cellular biology at conceptual and material scales (Franklin 2007). A legacy of approaching animals as living technologies and as livestock (living investments) attests to a conception of life as extractable and exchangeable. The human infrastructures that have emerged around the management of animal life have enabled a wider scope for scientific research and biotechnological innovation by providing animals and animal parts as the raw materials. Genetically engineered lab mice like Oncomouse® are patented laboratory instruments, urine collected from pregnant mares in factory farms provides estrogen for hormone therapy drugs, and the combination of agricultural and scientific designs on animal life have provided the breeding ground for new reproductive technologies from in-vitro fertilization to cloning. While the concept of life as separable from living organisms shapes tissue culture imaginaries, Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake “stays with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of life’s biocultural messiness. Engineered as “animal-protein tubers,” Atwood’s ChickieNobs are meaty biomasses without heads, organs, or legs covered in “whitish-yellow skin” that generate chicken meat without chickens (2003, 202). ChickieNobs are part of a larger class of fleshy beings designed in the service of human survival. This new subclass of beings also includes “pigoons”—pigs that have been infused

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with human genetic materials and bred to donate organs to humans. In Atwood’s story, in-vitro meat emerges as part of a deeply worrying and complicated set of worldings in which creatures have been engineered to care for humans in a unidirectional way and in which humans pay dearly for their failure to account for reciprocal forms of care and nonhuman modes of agency. Creatures exceed their designers’ intentions with catastrophic consequences for humans: microbes decimate the human population in the form of a virulent pathogen and liberated human–pig hybrids roam feral, hunting humans. These unanticipated outcomes of bioengineering violently disrupt the anthropocentric frames that imagine nonhuman entities as inert lab instruments rather than agential beings in complex, shifting earthly relations of living and dying. In this way, Atwood’s science fiction challenges tissue culture imaginaries that conjure beneficent, seamless disarticulations of flesh from body in a post-animal bioeconomy. Oryx and Crake attends to the epistemic and ethical violence at play in biotechnological models that frame life as separable from bodies and lives as unconnected to other life forms, showing instead how we are utterly enmeshed. Far from operating in a post-animal environment, cellular cultures rely heavily on the organismic qualities of farm animals: the serum used to feed cell cultures in IVM technologies is currently derived from the blood of fetuses extracted from slaughtered pregnant cows. And more broadly, the everyday lab technologies, including latex gloves, petri dishes, plastic scaffolding, and disciplinary histories—agricultural science, cellular biology, reproductive science—are inextricable from global extractive, colonial, and chemical regimes of predatory value (Byrd et al. 2018). By eliding these deep interdependencies through narratives of victimless food and technological salvation, IVM progenitors risk reproducing the ethical and environmental harms of industrial agriculture and political inequality that they aim to reduce.

Eat Celebrity Meat? If IVM seeks to symbolically and materially evacuate the animal from meat in a Churchillian post-animal bioeconomy, BiteLabs takes up this anthropocentric and atomistic eating imaginary, exposing its unspoken assumptions and material contradictions. BiteLabs (Fig. 21.3) mimics many of the speculative dimensions of Mark Post and New Harvest’s cultured beef (Fig. 21.4) with one crucial difference: BiteLabs is claiming to culture meat harvested from human celebrity stem cells. By literally putting people on the menu, BiteLabs manifests some of the ways agricultural and biological technologies are caught up in a historically freighted biopolitical topography of what (or who) may be eaten, and what modes of contact, kinship, and violence eating might enact. Eating, as numerous food scholars have argued, is a highly charged act. The visceral practice of distinguishing the edible from inedible, body from flesh, consuming subject from consumed object, is one of the key areas in

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Fig. 21.3  BiteLabs.org

Fig. 21.4  CulturedBeef.net

which material-symbolic boundaries are drawn in our social worlds (Douglas 2002). Alimentary acts of determining who eats and with whom, who is eaten and by whom, co-articulate with orders of difference and operations of power within political economies that feed on fictions of race, gender, and

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sexuality in profoundly material ways (Roy 2010; Tompkins 2012). Meat, within this matrix, emerges as a uniquely potent biomoral substance. Working from within an anthropocentric alimentary frame that figures the human as exceptionally inedible, the animal rights organization PETA has been pushing to change the old adage “You are what you eat” to “You are who you eat.” While all acts of consumption and production within industrial agriculture—from strawberries to steaks—are tied to forms of death and degradation (cf. Holmes 2013), PETA’s strategy encourages the visual and affective conflation of human and animal flesh in an attempt to inspire moral approbation at the cannibalistic nature of consuming meat. The organization’s tactics have included wrapping naked white women in cellophane much like meat at a grocery store and drafting a will in which the organization’s director Ingrid Newkirk details her desire to have her body parts barbequed, turned to leather, mounted, and displayed after her death (Smith 2011). In 2006, this same logic led Newkirk into the world of in-vitro meat, as she offered her own living muscle tissue to SymbioticA when they were toying with the idea of growing a “semi-living steak out of an adult consenting human” (Zurr and Catts 2004). PETA’s activist strategies attempt to reorder the categories that compose what Mel Chen has described as the “animacy hierarchy”—a semiotic system that arranges life along a hierarchical ladder of sentience and agency (2012, 24). The above examples show how the animal rights organization tries to move nonhuman animals up the animacy ladder by strategically aligning them with the white liberal subject. In so doing, PETA reproduces what Sylvia Wynter calls the “coloniality of Being” that overrepresents the Western bourgeois subject within the genre of the human. Wynter argues that the prevailing understanding of the human, or “referent-we” in Western social, political, and scientific life‚ relies on a biological and hierarchical narrative of humanity. This “descriptive statement of the human,” she suggests, is a powerful fiction that has been developed by and for a EuroWestern bourgeois Christian ethnoclass of “Man” who overrepresents himself—his body, his beliefs, and his worldview—as the ideal model of the human, and devalues “Man’s human Others” who are deemed evolutionarily and culturally inferior (Wynter 2003). In this framework, while all humans are defined as biologically equivalent, not all humans are designated as equal (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). In other campaigns, PETA attempts to elevate animals by simultaneously degrading the animacy status of “Man’s human Others.” In these instances, PETA renders racialized and gendered subjects as less fully human than the ethnoclass of Man by implying their biological equivalence with animals. This strategy is exemplified in PETA’s instrumentalization of a Canadian farmer’s confession to murdering nearly 50 Indigenous women. PETA coopted these women’s horrific deaths, which went largely uninvestigated by the police for years, in a full-page ad that compared the women’s murders to the deaths of farm animals. Under a series of dehumanizing media snapshots detailing

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how Robert Pickton murdered the women and fed their bodies to his pigs, PETA writes, “If this leaves a bad taste in your mouth, become a vegetarian.” In a press release responding to political backlash about the ad from some of the women’s family members, PETA insisted, “People who are appalled by Pickton’s alleged acts think nothing of sitting down to a dinner featuring the cut-up bits of a tormented animal’s body” (“Animal Rights Campaign” 2002). In appropriating these women’s deaths to elevate the animacy status of animals through a discourse of cannibalism—one in which the animals are made to matter through and against a human conduit—PETA reproduces the colonial-patriarchal violence of hierarchically ordering life by normalizing persistent, deadly acts of gendered violence against Indigenous women in Canada. As the above examples make clear, the relations between Man and human, human and animal are not given, but are instead operationalized to meet contradictory and at times violent political ends. Biological equivalence does not necessarily lend itself to feelings of affinity or kinship across genres of life. Furthermore, in a biotechnological age, it is because of the conjunction of biological equivalence and social inequality that some bodies are reduced to living labor or raw material “to aid in the intensification of vitality for other living beings” (Waldby 2000, 19) within global medical, agricultural, and scientific markets. Simply calling someone or something “human” is insufficient to disrupt these deeply embedded patterns of rapacious appetite that devour flesh, as the very category of “human” as the ethnoclass of Man is composed in and through the biopolitical exclusion and expropriation of his non/human Others. BiteLabs adds a compelling layer to the question of human and other-than-human relations in the IVM landscape. Far from trying to move animals into humanity and away from edibility within a Western animacy hierarchy, BiteLabs unsettles the assumed universality of the category of the human by exposing its contradictory logics. BiteLabs’ human meat campaign calls up the very ordinariness of cannibalistic processes of commodifying life within unequal regimes of biocapital. In this start-up, the consumption of human meat is presented as not only possible and actual, but as a potentially desirable and ethical practice of “victimless cannibalism” since eating a human will no longer necessitate the death of that human (Dilworth and McGregor 2015). Glibly glossing over the ethical stakes of eating people in its many guises, they push the social obfuscation and financial incentivization so characteristic of the IVM industry to its absurd (yet feasible) limit by reimagining human steaks as an eco-friendly meat alternative for the conscientious consumer. The celebrity meat source marketed by BiteLabs emerges as a primal site for playing out American consumers’ carnal fantasies of “eating the other” (hooks 1992) and incorporating them into the self. Yet, rather than covering over this thrall to devour, they strategically center it. In so doing, BiteLabs deftly sutures the bourgeois “commodity citizen” who

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“substitute[s] a hypervigilant digestive life for critical engagement with political and economic processes” (Tompkins 2012, 11) to the “consumer cannibal” who desires to make intimate contact with the commodified body of the other (hooks 1992: 39). This gesture flips the conventional script of cannibalism on its head—if cannibalism has historically been mobilized as a way to mark racialized others as expendable and exploitable (in other words, consumable) through the colonial mythology of the “Other’s” irredeemable and voracious appetites for human flesh, then BiteLabs brings cannibalism home to roost by rendering Western imperialist appetites as the provenance of cannibal culture (Fig. 21.5). Following IVM proponents, BiteLabs glamorizes the selective demystification of the commodity chain: in the cultured meat business, meat has its own history, and this history cannot be divorced from the substance itself, the conditions of its production, or the act of eating. Yet, if the ethical biocapital of in-vitro animal meat is that the animal is eradicated from the process, the commodity value of celebrity meat resides in the resplendent specificity of the human source. By staging the carnal fantasy of incorporation in its jubilant call to “eat celebrity meat,” BiteLabs makes visible how acts of consumption are never divorced from modes of production and how the consuming subject never succeeds in fully assimilating or dominating the consumed. Indeed, for BiteLabs, eating is a site of connection and kin-making: it holds out the promise that in taking a bite of Kanye, he will become part of you. The conditions for techno-cannibalism in this case depend upon the dual premise that (1) the body doesn’t end at the skin,2 and (2) bodies are bio/

Fig. 21.5  Descriptions of James Franco-Furters and Kanye Salami on BiteLabs.org

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necro-politically imbued with different perceived properties that shape the conditions of access to personhood even and especially in their transformation into food/thing. Although BiteLabs gestures toward the simultaneous hypervaluation and denigration of different “genres of the human” through the lens of cannibalism, it becomes clear that those lives do not necessarily come to matter as lived or living in the frame of the project. Just as in-vitro technologies enable life to be sustained beyond the conventional boundaries of the body (Landecker 2007, 15), the celebrity-as-commodity can, and necessarily does, live without or beyond the fleshy body of the celebrity-as-person. Conversely, other socially marginalized subjects come to matter through their biological deaths, as is most readily exemplified in the case of PETA’s Pickton pig farm campaign. In this way, both celebrity and marginality come into tension as equally amenable, but unequally subjected, to the instrumentalization of life. The uneasy links between Bite Labs’ and PETA’s renderings of genres of the human raise a series of questions: Does this digital project really bring cannibalism home to roost, so to speak, or does it reinstantiate racializing and gendered structures of reductive biologization, divided enfleshment, and uneven consumption through its glib techno-fetishism? Does it call up other forms of kin beyond the “human” by staging consumption as a kin-making practice? Or does it simply normalize the violence of carnality—of the kinship borne of consumption, of the specular economies of flesh that render flesh differently consumable, differently akin to self or other? A generous reading of BiteLabs would suggest that the work calls attention to how processes of defining and consuming biological substance are animated by deeply racialized and gendered approaches to the body. In opening up this space, they also make room for—but never articulate—the possibility that, through consumption, one is always vulnerable to noninnocent and nonconsensual modes of connection. Rather than saying “we’re all human,” they invite people to consider how we are all differently related through acts of ingestion. A less generous reading of BiteLabs might consider it within, rather than against, IVM models of biological reductionism and ethical biocapital. BiteLabs certainly invites consideration of the biomoral tangle of lab-grown meat, but the project itself deploys the same conventions as mainstream biotech. In some ways, this mirroring draws attention to the ideologies undergirding start-up culture. In other ways, it simply reproduces them within the frame of “critical design,” a critical theory-informed method of designing objects that demand contemplation (Dunne 2008). BiteLabs’ design is slick and professional, its content buzz-generating. Generating hype is central to the promissory economies of biotech, and culture—in the form of controversy, critique, or morality—is a key form of capital: just ask Sergey Brin. Google’s algorithms reward controversial content in ways that reproduce social inequalities in order to drum up advertising dollars (Noble 2018), and the tech company’s policies around privacy, information, and consent

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oftentimes conceal coercion through the appearance of transparency and disempower users through a script of freedom. Similarly, modes of feel-good consumption from cause-based marketing to branding ethical sourcing are highly profitable practices that link consumption with an ethos of ­self-making that is often evacuated of political critique (King 2006; Richey and Ponte 2011; Cabrera and Williams 2012). And finally, when political critique is mobilized, it is increasingly deployed in biotech marketing and advertising as a design concept, rather than a substantive intervention. Google Burger scientist Mark Post acknowledges as much in an interview, when he agrees that, although “described as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘groundbreaking,’ in-vitro meat is actually a clever repackaging of existing technologies: the cell-culture equivalent of an iPhone” (Van Mensvoort et al. 2014, 48). Such “non-disruptive disruptions” (Goldstein 2018) masquerade as radically transformative—as technologies that can solve global food shortages and climate change in the case of IVM or as critical interventions that expose a problem or contradiction in the case of BiteLabs—while masking, maintaining, or exploiting the problem they claim to address. In this way “culture” and “critique” can just as easily become forms of capital in an industry that approaches radicality as a selling point: “If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.” Within a year of BiteLabs’ debut, celebrity meat cubes surfaced on the digital “In-Vitro Bistro.” The website is an initiative of NextNature, a design network supported by New Harvest, which includes Mark Post as an “ambassador.” Designed as the “first in-vitro meat restaurant,” this work of speculative design claims to explore the “creative prospects” of cultured meats and to “visualize the wide range of possible new dishes and food cultures to help decide what future we actually want!” (Van Mensvoort 2014, 6–7). The line between BiteLabs and NextNature is a fine and shifting one, and the clearest distinction between the two creative initiatives is framing: BiteLabs doesn’t outwardly claim to be art, while the In-Vitro Bistro does. Yet, claiming to be art is key to the caché of speculative art-science initiatives like NextNature: much like Brin’s claim that new technologies should be science fiction, NextNature claims that speculative design can help us imagine, innovate, explore, and create our “next nature,” which they describe as “the nature caused by people” (Fig. 21.6). In their vision statement, the organization draws on natural–cultural frameworks from the field of Science and Technology Studies to argue that “People aren’t separate from nature; we’re part of it” and “we shouldn’t be obsessed with unspoilt nature” (“Philosophy” 2019). These important claims signal the limits of Enlightenment-based frameworks that seek to partition nature from culture, technology from biology, human from ­nonhuman. And yet, rather than working through what that might mean in terms of more complex and ethical practices of technoscience as Atwood does in her speculative fiction, NextNature deploys these ideas in order to “design our

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Fig. 21.6  Celebrity cubes on the menu of Next Nature’s “In-Vitro Bistro”

environment” in a narrowly anthropocentric, technophilic, and ­biocapitalist frame. A sampling of their design projects includes developing eco-currency that translates environmental protection into economic value, “Twitter implants” to monitor your health for early interventions and discounts from your insurance company, and “dust pills” to improve gut health by introducing microbes usually found in soil and vegetables (“Projects”). Each of these “next natures” offers a technological, market- or state-based solution to natural–cultural issues related to environment, industry, social media, healthcare, biometrics, and agriculture. In NextNature’s “Nano Supermarket,” the connections across these patterns of ecological degradation, faltering microbial-human-plant healthscapes, unsustainable food economies, and media architectures of control disappear into a speculative world that looks very much like already-existing biotech markets. Yet, isn’t this, too, the nature caused by people? If there is one thing NextNature and the broader terrain of in-vitro meat make clear, it is that cultural resources are critical to technoscientific world-making activities—from social categories and critical theory to science fiction and political infrastructure. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “scientific practice is above all a storytelling practice,” one that draws from and participates in complex modalities of culture, creation, materialization,

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and figuration (Haraway 1989, 4). The assumptions and values that undergird our research get built into our technologies and theories and profoundly shape future knowledge trajectories. Stories, in this sense, are powerful formations of matter and meaning through which we make and unmake our worlds. It therefore matters what genres of fiction, of the human, and of life we draw from in our speculative scientific pursuits.

The Matter of Genre in Designs on Future Life It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. —Donna Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far” Human beings are magical. Bios and logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities … And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms. —Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman”

In a 2015 interview with Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter calls for a new science beyond disciplinary divisions, one that attends to the entanglements between bios (genetics, flesh, physiology) and mythio (sociality, stories, semiotics) and takes seriously how words can make and unmake worlds (17–18). Wynter draws on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argues that the natural sciences are “poor and half-starved” because they seek to separate out the social, material, and relational dynamics of knowing and being from their study. Against this reductive impulse, Césaire called for a new science in which the “‘study of the Word’ will condition the ‘study of nature’” (Césaire 1982, 25). In Wynter’s rendering, this new science thinks bios and mythoi, or science and storytelling, together in order to revise prevailing scientific genres of knowledge and the human in the West, which conceptualize life within a biological and hierarchical framework. By turning to science stories of humanness and relation composed by thinkers who have found themselves perpetually excluded from these genres of life, Wynter’s science of the Wor(l)d asks “how we might give humanness a different future?” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 9).3 In 2017, MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito published a collaboratively written manifesto “Resisting Reduction,” which reads as the beginning of a response to Wynter’s call. In the form and content of the piece, Ito and numerous contributors develop a critique of the Singularity, which they describe as the new religion of Silicon Valley. The Singularity “promises the

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transcendence of our current human condition through advances in technology” and is shaped by a belief that “the world is ‘knowable’” and that “computers will be able to process the messiness of the real world” (2017). Against Singularity and its reductionist market-based thinking, Ito and his collaborators extol the need to “embrace the unknowability – the irreducibility – of the real world that artists, biologists, and those who work in the messy world of liberal arts and humanities are familiar with.” While the authors note that this shift would require that we work at “every layer of the system” to develop a new sensibility that prioritizes mutual care over consumption and complexity over reduction, they single out the “cultural layer” as that with “the most potential for a correction away from the self-destructive path that we are currently on” (ibid). In a series of essays responding to the manifesto, one contribution stands out in its attention to what this “cultural layer” is—whose cultures, values, beliefs, and practices are being drawn on or occluded in imagining modes of flourishing and futurity. The essay “Making Kin with Machines” is composed by Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan digital media poet, artist, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis and Oglála Lakota visual artist Suzanne Kite, both of Concordia University Initiative for Indigenous Futures, along with Hawaiian historian Noelani Arista and Cree new media artist Archer Pechawis. While the authors applaud Ito’s attempts to rethink scientific designs on life, they point to the “stubborn Enlightenment conceit” of human-centrism that threads its way through the manifesto (2017). Citing practices of colonization and enslavement that have been enacted in the name of the life of the human as Man, they express wariness of the “Western rationalist, neoliberal, and Christianity-infused assumptions” that are at play in many approaches to designing future life that “seek to harness the ability, aptitude, creative power, and mana of AI [Artificial Intelligence] to benefit their tribe first and foremost.” “Our communities,” they write, “know well what it means to have one’s ways of thinking, knowing, and engaging with the world disparaged, suppressed, excluded, and erased from a conversation of what it means to be human. What is more, we know what it is like to be declared nonhuman by scientist and preacher alike. We have a history that attests to the […] way such a mindset debases every human relation it touches” (ibid). Against Ito’s anthropocentric call to prioritize human thriving, Lewis, Kite, Arista, and Pechawis foreground Indigenous epistemologies that topple the primacy of the human and center non-reductive modes of approaching non/human relations. Instead of circumscribing the concept of irreduction within Western frameworks of humanism and hierarchy, the authors draw on their respective Hawaiian, Cree, and Lakota cultural knowledge practices that recognize nonhumans as relations with interiority and agency. These beings— including exploited resources such as minerals, as well as animals, elements, and spirits—are all animate and are all kin that must be approached as part of a mutually respectful “extended circle of relationships” in any science we

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practice. Beginning their designs on life from these modes of knowing in relation, the authors show, leads to a different way of imagining what future lives might be possible, “as we flourish only when all of our kin flourish.” This Indigenous futurist critique of Ito’s science-design futures enacts Wynter’s new science: the authors explicate the limited genre-specific narrative of the human as Man that shapes scientific inquiry to often deleterious effect, and they proffer a different genre of the human beyond the coloniality of Being, one that is nonhierarchical, mutable, and forged through relation. In Césaire’s 1946 essay from which Wynter develops a science of the Wor(l)d, he quotes Aldous Huxley at length: We all think we know what a lion is. A lion is a desert-colored animal with a mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi’s. But it is also, in Africa, all the neighboring antelopes and zebras, and therefore, indirectly, all the neighboring grass… If there were no antelopes and zebras there would be no lion. When the supply of game runs low, the king of beasts grows thin and mangy; it ceases altogether, and he dies.

“It is just the same with knowledge,” Césaire insists. “Scientific knowledge is a lion without antelopes and without zebras. It is gnawed from within. Gnawed by hunger of feeling, hunger of life” (18). This quotation cuts to the heart of the genre/genus analytic. The Enlightenment habit of separating into orders of sameness and difference—in short, the genre of genus—names a lion as a singular type, defined by characteristics of appearance and appetite, formed through exclusion. A lion is a cat is a carnivore is not a zebra is not grass is not soil. For Césaire, this formation of scientific knowledge “offers a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view [that] enumerates, measures, classifies, and kills” (17). If science is a lion without antelopes, it is science’s failure to see the antelopes as connected to itself—not as part of a food chain that feeds it, but as a living relation that makes its life possible— that slowly kills the lion, makes it grow thin and mangy, gnawed by hunger. A science of the Word, in contradistinction, does not kill through classification, hierarchization, separation; it is instead “pregnant with the world” (24). “Everything is summoned,” writes Césaire. “Within us, all humankind. Within us animal, vegetable, mineral. [Hum]ankind is not only [hu]mankind. It is universe” (23). Lion is zebra is grass is science is knowledge is fiction is fact. To make this claim is not to suggest that these relations are fixed or that the sciences can know or contain the world; it is to insist on the possibility of giving humanness a different future by recognizing interdependencies between ways of knowing (genres/mythoi) and objects of knowledge (genus/bios), and starting from a recognition of the mutual and ongoing relations unfolding between all beings (living and nonliving). The concept of in-vitro meat has emerged within a context in which scientists and start-ups are scrambling to respond to the problem of eating in the midst of climate change, food insecurity, infectious

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disease, and environmental devastation. Yet, much of the work of conjuring food futures has looked to science/fictions that reproduce stubborn and starved models of the wor(l)d. Looking to a new science, a science of the Word, offers up compelling frameworks to engage in world-making projects that begin from different genres of life and knowledge. This new science does not ask what or even who one should eat, nor does it ask how to eat without others—all questions that begin from separation between self and other, consumer and consumed, human and nonhuman. It instead asks, to borrow from Derrida, “what is eating?” and how “to eat well?” (1991).

Notes 1. In his ethnography of Artificial Life, Stefan Helmreich observes how consistently US-based researchers draw on Western Judeo-Christian cosmologies and on mainstream science fiction literature to design artificial life. This observation leads him to conclude that “constructions of life-as-it-could-be are built from culturally specific visions of life-as-we-know-it” (2000, 13). 2. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway famously asked, “Why should the body end at the skin?” (1990, 220). 3. In many ways, Wynter’s call for a new science aligns with the central tenet of feminist standpoint theory. As outlined by Sandra Harding (1991) and Donna Haraway (1991), standpoint theory contends that knowledge production is more robust, responsible, and rigorous when it is undertaken from multiple viewpoints. Accounting for multiple perspectives enables a kind of “double vision” that reveals “both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from a single standpoint” (Haraway 1991, 154). Crucially, such inquiry should begin from the most marginal spaces because those who occupy the margins are “valuable strangers” to the dominant social order who can identify perspectives and approaches that might otherwise have been overlooked or actively suppressed (Harding 2008).

References “Animal Rights Campaign Compares Murdered Women to Meat.” 2002. CBC News. November 13. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/animal-rights-campaign-compares-murdered-women-to-meat-1.345737. Accessed 12 Feb 2019. Atwood, Margaret. 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday. Byrd, Jodi, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy. 2018. Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities. Social Text 36 (2/135): 1–18. Cabrera, Sergio A., and Christine L. Williams. 2012. Consuming for the Social Good: Marketing, Consumer Citizenship, and the Possibilities of Ethical Consumption. Critical Sociology 40 (3): 349–367. Catts, Oron‚ and Ionat Zurr. 2006. Towards a New Class of Being—The Extended Body. Artnodes: Intersections Between Arts, Sciences, and Technologies 6 (2): 1–9. Césaire, Aimé. 1982 [1946]. Poetry and Knowledge. Sulfur 5: 17–32.

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Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 24. Durham: Duke University Press. Churchill, Winston. 1932. Fifty Years Hence. Popular Mechanics 57 (March): 390–397. Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Datar, Isha. 2015. “Food of the Future—The Post-Animal Bioeconomy.” SXSWECO Keynote Address. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj2LQ5W_ MgU. Accessed 6 Oct 2015. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida. In Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor, and J.-L. Nancy. New York and London: Routledge. Dilworth, Tasmin, and Andrew McGregor. 2015. Moral Steaks? Ethical Discourses of In Vitro Meat in Academia and Australia. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (1): 85–107. Douglas, Mary. [1966] 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Dunne, Anthony. 2008. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. Cambridge: MIT Press. Edelman, P.D., D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov, and J.G. Matheny. 2005. In-Vitro Cultured Meat Production. Tissue Engineering 11 (5–6): 659–662. Franklin, Sarah. 2003. Ethical Biocapital: New Strategies of Cell Culture. In Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, ed. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, pp. 97–128. Santa Fe: New Mexico School of American Research Press. ———. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press. Goldstein, Jesse. 2018. Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press. “Google Burger: Sergey Brin Explains Why He Funded World’s First Lab-Grown Beef Hamburger.” 2013. The Guardian, online, August 5. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Race, Gender, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. ———. 1990. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s. In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, pp. 190–233. New York: Routledge. ———. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. ———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Helmreich, Stefan. 2000. Silicon Second Nature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Chicago Press. Heselmans, Marianne. 2005. Cultivated Meat (NRC). New Harvest, September 10.

394  C. NYE Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the U.S. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Ito, Joichi. 2017. Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. JoDS: Journal of Design and Science. MIT Media Lab. Available at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/resisting-reduction. Accessed 12 Feb 2019. Jones, Nicola. 2010. A Taste of Things to Come? Nature 468 (9 December): 752. King, Samantha. 2006. Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Landecker, Hannah. 2007. Culturing Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lewis, Jason Edward, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. 2017. Making Kin with Machines. JoDS: Journal of Design and Science. MIT Media Lab. Available at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite. Accessed 12 Feb 2019. “Meat/Culture.” 2013. New Harvest. November 2. https://www.new-harvest.org/ meat_culture. Accessed 25 Jan 2019. Merchant, Brian. 2014. The Guy Who Wants to Sell Lab-Grown Salami Made from Kanye West Is 100% Serious. Motherboard (Vice), February 26. Metcalf, Jacob. 2013. Meet Shmeat: Food System Ethics, Biotechnology and Re-Worlding Technoscience. Parallax 19 (1): 74–87. “NANO Supermarket: 50 Products from the Future.” Next Nature. https://www. nextnature.net/projects/nanosupermarket/. Accessed 29 June 2019. Newman, Lily Hay. 2014. Everyone Stop Everything: What Is This? Slate Magazine, February 26. Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. “Philosophy.” Next Nature. Available at https://www.nextnature.net/philosophy/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6Li-vMGS4wIVICCtBh1C7wrfEAAYASABEgJaY_D_BwE. Accessed 29 June 2019. “Projects.” Next Nature. https://www.nextnature.net/projects/. Accessed 29 June 2019. Post, Mark. 2014. Cultured Beef: Medical Technology to Produce Food. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 94: 1039–1041. Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Protein in Test Tubes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Richey, Lisa Ann, and Stephano Ponte. 2011. Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roosth, Sophia. 2017. Synthetic: How Life Got Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Charlie. 2011. Photos: Nearly Naked PETA Activists Put a Human Face on Eating Flesh. The Georgia Straight, online, August 5. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2012. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: New York University Press.

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Van Mensvoort, Koert. 2014. Foreword. In The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, ed. Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink, pp. 6–7. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. Van Mensvoort, Koert, Alessia Andreotti, and Allison Guy. 2014. No Future for Traditional Meat: Interview with Mark Post. The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, ed. Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. Waldby, Catherine. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–237, 328. Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. 2015. Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick, pp. 9–89. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Zurr, Ionat. 2009. Growing Semi-Living Art. PhD thesis, University of Western Australia. Zurr, Ionat, and Oron Catts. 2004. The Ethical Claims of Bioart: Killing the Other or Self-Cannibalism? Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art and Ethics 5 (1): 167–188.

CHAPTER 22

Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science and Fiction Sherryl Vint

In Dreamscapes of Modernity, Sheila Jasanoff argues that science and technology studies (STS) requires a robust understanding of the role of the sociotechnical imaginary, which she defines as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect” 4). She goes on to note that fiction, particularly speculative fiction, often plays a role in shaping this sociotechnical imaginary. Understanding the stories we tell about science is one way to channel sociotechnical change. Such stories are how desirable futures become sites of affective investment and material action, and the essays Jasanoff’s book collects seek to understand how the imagination informed histories of scientific development. Jasanoff depicts the politics of scientific history as a kind of storytelling practice, cautioning STS scholars to be more attentive to the role the imagination plays in how technologies emerge. Her definition, however, does not sufficiently foreground ideological struggles at the cultural level that precede the emergence of “collectively held” visions of desirable futures, nor does it offer space for thinking about those who never become part of this consensus. The dialogic capacities of literary storytelling enable this more complex vision of how it is that certain forms of “social life and social order” are stabilized as hegemonic. As I will argue below, the genre of speculative fiction, S. Vint (*)  University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_22

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with its long history of examining the impact of science and technology on human social life, can play a more substantive role than Jasanoff suggests: it is not only a space for articulating futures that might inspire science, but also serves to question whether “advances in science and technology” are always on the side of a more desirable future. This chapter examines the relationship between science and the imagination from the opposite point of departure, to argue that telling stories can be a political practice that helps us reflect on these collectively held visions of desirable futures in a more nuanced and dialectical way. Whereas Jasanoff links her notion of the sociotechnical imaginary to an implicit narrative of ongoing progress, I suggest that speculative fiction enables us to interrogate what we consider an advance, and for whom. Speculative fiction tells stories about worlds estranged from our quotidian one, often resulting from differences in science and technology. By telling a compelling story about complex characters, speculative fiction’s imaginary complicates visions of sociotechnical change that circulate in industry.1 While the sociotechnical imaginary might focus on a narrower perspective, such as how the world might be changed (improved) via the new medical therapies promised by synthetic biology, speculative fiction puts these visions into dialogue with a larger material world, prompting us to consider what else might be changed in familial, social, economic, and other norms were this new technology to become widespread. Speculative fiction can be, but is not necessarily, “supportive of” the improvements science and technology promise: even when invested in promulgating visions of a desirable future, it never loses sight of the fact that  a better world is “attainable through” social as well as scientific change. The genre helps us think more capaciously about sociotechnical change, interrogating how new technologies converge with pre-existing cultural ideals and biases, and thinking through how they might have philosophical implications beyond their intended effect. By exaggerating the impact of a new technology or accelerating it into a more distant future, speculative fiction makes visible sites of inequality in the present, issues that may be minor and yet portend more consequential exclusions if not examined and checked. This is the political practice of speculative storytelling about science, work that helps us more consciously take note of who has a voice in these “collectively held” visions of a better future as they become “institutionally stabilized.” Two recent novels—Carola Dibbel’s The Only One and Ben H. Winter’s Underground Airlines—exemplify the role speculative fiction plays in helping us to understand the implications of shifts in our imaginary around biotechnology and labor. Biotechnology is a topic that is proliferating in speculative fiction, engaging a range of topics that include global pharmacy (Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous), reproductive technologies (Anna Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time), transplantation (Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit), genetic engineering (Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl), life-extension

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technologies (Rachel Heng’s The Suicide Club), and synthetic biology (Rose Montero’s Tears in Rain). Dibbel’s and Winters’s novels draw attention to new practices of biological labor emerging in biotech industries and connect these practices to longer histories of racialized exploitation that shape the ways these technologies are deployed in these imagined futures. The novels thus encourage us to think capaciously about the “social” context of sociotechnical imaginaries, to recognize how crucial it is to think about technological change as it is bound up with existing relations of social power and the inequalities that they have historically stabilized. Both novels respond to a context that Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby theorize as the emergence of what they call Clinical Labor. Cooper and Waldby argue that post-Fordist capitalism puts life itself to work, in sites such as surrogate pregnancies, sales of gametes and participation in clinical trials. They insist on considering such practices as biological labour—not voluntary work or donation of biological materials or services—because often such activities constitute the only form of income for certain vulnerable populations, even if this is income in-kind (such as the provision of shelter or access to healthcare). These clinical practices exemplify new and troubling ways to extract surplus value from people who thus come to the market less as a source of ­labor-power and more as mere biological “raw materials” for the ongoing production of value. By extrapolating into the future of such practices, The Only One and Underground Airlines make visible how the regime of clinical labor conflates some human bodies—specifically, those marked by race and gender—with mere things. In these futures, the bodies that exist legally as wholly owned commodities are those of manufactured beings (clones; human-animal chimera), yet they are depicted as complex human beings, excluded from human status by a mere technicality of origin. In both cases, the novels explicitly link their marginalized protagonists to material histories in which specific human bodies were commodified and dehumanized: control of women-of-colour’s reproduction in The Only One and racialized chattel slavery in Underground Airlines. The sociotechnical imaginary fostered by these novels helps us to extrapolate from the exploitation manifest in a specific regime of clinical labor to the wider implications of how biotechnical processes can become complicit in dehumanizing segments of the population. Understanding the potential futures of clinical labor in juxtaposition with a past of racial and gender injustice enables us to think about the positive potential of new biomedical therapies in conjunction with the new kinds of labor—and potentially new sites of discrimination—that are simultaneously brought into being. In this way, speculative fiction functions as critique, not only as inspiration, in the sociotechnical imaginary, drawing our attention to how existing power relationships are always imbricated in the emergence of new technologies.

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“You Can’t Sell Life, Without a License”: The Only Ones The Only Ones is set in a dystopian future starkly split between enclaves of the privileged, who live in biologically secured domes, and a vast 99% of the population who live among the ruins of failing infrastructure outside them, where public utilities and transportation only sometimes work, and the risk of exposure to virulent and deadly infection is common. Numerous pandemics have ravaged this future, their origins perhaps in biological weapons research run amok, and myriad viral strains endlessly recombine to create new strains. Most mammals are extinct and what reproduction remains is assisted by IVF techniques, often requiring SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer), that is, cloning from somatic cells, to produce new offspring. Fertility has been compromised by “antiPatho spray” (68) that rendered mammalian sperm—including human sperm—inert. Rapacious life industry corporations sell everything from eggs to embryos to “virgin cures”—intercourse with under-aged girls, putatively virgins, believed to convey immunity to plagues transmitted via sexual contact, a reference, perhaps, to one of the ­circulating myths in the early years of HIV infection about how to cure the virus. The line between the legality and criminality of various life industry practices wavers, leading to the paradoxical logic of the quotation in my subtitle: selling life is illegal—unless one is properly licensed. The narrative is in the first-person voice of Inez Fardo, a young woman whom we first meet as she delivers a biological specimen, which turns out to be her own ovary, ruptured as a result of abusive doses of hormones she was given by “New Life Labs” (39) to induce super-ovulation and produce a large crop of matured eggs for harvesting, destroying her future fertility along with her ovary. The clinic contracted to supply biological materials for research sends the damaged ovary to its client in the hope its value as biological matter might secure some profit from the nullified transition, with Inez serving as courier of her mutilated body part in case the client needs additional samples. This macabre opening aptly captures the paradoxical way in which life is both precious and devalued: as a commodity, biological material, especially reproductive material, is priceless; yet “life itself” embodied by the full living subject Inez is all but worthless, except perhaps for “additional samples.” Inez recounts the various ways she has made a living since the death of her stepmother—as prostitute, as test subject for vaccines, as cleaner of biologically contaminated sites, and through the sale of body parts from blood to eggs to teeth to bone marrow. The novel questions what happens to our concept of the value of life within a context in which human tissues and biological capacities have become part of a market economy. What, it asks, happens to the value of life within an economy of precarity that leaves many with no option but to offer their biological capacities on the market? Inez addresses her narration to the many cloned “daughters” born from embryos grown from her somatic cells, although we learn the identity of her interlocutor only near the novel’s end. Explaining her choice to participate

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in the life industries, she refuses the easy moral arithmetic that makes any commodification of life inherently wrong and explains the economic circumstances that shaped her choices. Her address to these distant daughters is filtered through the story of one clone in particular, Ani, whom Inez raised from an infant. Inez is determined that the clones not regard themselves as less-than-human (contra many popular narratives about clones, including an in-text television series Ani watches with horror), but she is equally committed to ensuring that Ani does not face the same economic hardships that forced Inez to destroy her normative reproductive futurity through unscrupulous life industry practices. Inez’s refrain becomes the “different life” she will ensure Ani has despite their genetic identity, a different life that is secured not by different biology but by more secure economic circumstances. The novel warns against the commodification of life by biotechnological practice but also makes clear that the difficulty is not with the technology itself or the idea of cloning, but rather with a surrounding cultural and economic system that devalues some (kinds of) lives. Many of the depredations of the life industries come from their underground status, procedures or beings obtained by the extremely wealthy on a black market that relies on the economically precarious for biological materials. The strict segregation of the world into zones of privilege and abjection, rather than their ontological difference, creates the risk for the clones. Ani and Inez need to take care that they are never genetically scanned in proximity to one another, for example, for this would reveal their illegal status, but this difficulty is analogous to being an undocumented immigrant, where paperwork and citizenship status potentially categorize one as less-than human. This analogy based on the importance of papers that validate one’s status alludes as well to a reality in which those from the global South and those within the US who are marginalized by their race are more likely to become organ donors (see Scheper-Hughes, Sharp). The material history of the transplant industry, then, inculcates an imaginary in which some people are regarded as “spare parts” as thematized by the fictional image of clones: moreover, Inez and Ani’s daily challenges as undocumented subjects reminds us that the precarity they share with undocumented people operates on both biological and social levels. Dibbell simultaneously updates our understanding of the clone on a biological level—no less human than a twin and thus unlikely to have identical thoughts and personality. The novel draws our attention to the economic hierarchies that unevenly distribute health and precarity, a topic frequently emblematized by fiction about clones such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) or Duncan Jones’ film Moon (2009), among others. Yet The Only Ones detaches dehumanization from mode of birth, removing the rationalization that dystopian societies in such fiction typically offer to create some distance between analogy and material work. Dibbell’s novel, in contrast, encourages us to see the parallels between its projections and the status

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of marginalized people in the material world of the reader, largely through Inez’s experiences of sexual and other forms of exploitation. Inez is a “real” human who does not face any barriers to her mobility until Ani’s identical genetic profile puts them both at risk. Yet in her life before the experiment that resulted in Ani’s birth, Inez was already regarded as mere flesh, a young woman without education, independent wealth, or a guardian to protect her, with only her body’s capacities to bring to market. Inez experiences far more brutalization within the biomedical industry than Ani ever does, although Inez is the original human, born rather than cloned. Inez is special because she is discovered to be a “Sylvain hardy,” someone whose DNA conveys immunity from seemingly all biological threats, and this trait is passed on to the clones. Inez is the daughter of a Latina solider who was subjected to multiple experimental vaccine protocols by the US military, presumably the source of her immunity. Her mother’s backstory suggests many vectors of discrimination that inform protocols of scientific research and yet are not determined by the science itself: the historical legacy of systemic racism in the US that disproportionately places people of color on the lower socioeconomic rungs; military recruitment strategies that target these disenfranchised populations, and a history of military funding of scientific research. Here, the capacity of fiction to help us think through long-term and unpredictable consequences is evident in the way research intended to protect soldiers ironically created a child whose early years are spent being a test subject for “seal room” protocols—one of the ways Inez earned her living—in which test subjects are exposed to viruses to see what happens. This test is one of the novel’s pithy images of the new metrics of life: Inez is (economically, biologically) valued for this capacity of her body even as her life is simultaneously judged worthless on a human scale, her potential death treated as simply another data point the test may produce. Thus the central irony is that the commodification of life is propelled by research devoted to furthering it, whether this be IVF and other fertility services, or stem cell and other molecular research that draws upon patented DNA and commodified living cell lines. In Life Support, an ethnography of surrogacy clinics in India, Kalindi Vora describes how: The female human body also gets figured as empty space through biomedical instrumentalization and objectification of female reproductive processes, organs, and gametes. At the same time, the product of reproduction is organized socially as the property of “he” (the commissioning couple’s position as gendered by the contract) whose legal intention was to produce a child, rather than she whose empty organs and raw biology were used to produce it. (Loc 2113–2116)

Surrogacy contracts for gestation are one of the ways that the life industries create less-than-human bodies that intersect (via these industries) with the fully human purchasers of their services: the Indian women imaginatively become

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incubators for children envisioned as products. The title of Vora’s book points to the ways such industries are transferring vitality from communities in the global South to those in the global North. Such commodification of life and its processes—egg and sperm sales, gestational services, procuration of fluids such as blood—exist in continuum with living technologies, such as in vitro tissues and cell lines, that are both “living and machines in the sense that they can be cultured outside the body and form part of the technical composition of science” (Landecker 12). Waldby and Cooper, like Vora, demonstrate that becoming either test subjects or consumers of medicine maps to the distinction between privilege and precarity: Today, contract research organizations habitually recruit Phase 1 research subjects from among the underemployed, day laborers, exprisoners, and undocumented migrants, precisely those classes of worker who routinely endure the most hazardous and contingent of labor conditions. Later-phase trials are increasingly dependent on the growing numbers of underinsured, chronically ill patients who can access medicines only if they also agree to engage in clinical trial. (17)

By extending these practices into a more extreme future, The Only Ones reorients our discussion regarding life industry practices—away from locating their import in relation to metrics such as natural vs. technological and toward thinking through how the economics that underpin these technologies channel them toward beneficent or malign ends. As Inez tells her story we see her sense of herself as a being with value transform: experiences of deprivation and marginalization taught her to regard herself and her body as mere commodities. As new contexts introduce her to people who treat her as a human subject rather than mere biological matter, she becomes capable of viewing herself as creative and competent, someone who can choose life industries and through them a new mode of kinship. When she delivers her damaged ovary and meets Rauden, a responsible scientist who will become her partner, he queries her about New Life Labs, the corporation that destroyed her ovary. A cynical Inez refuses to answer, explaining to readers, “You’re asking for trouble, even talking about Life, let alone sales. You cannot sell Life. Unless you got a license. I just told the guy I didn’t know” (29). Yet later, challenged to confront why she worked with Rauden on his SCNT experiments, Inez admits that curiosity to learn, as much as money, motivated her, and the transaction is more than selling a biological thing. Producing a viable clone is not merely an issue of technical skill but requires a complex fusion of technological and social factors. The clones are gestated in artificial wombs lined with cell cultures grown from what remains of Inez’s ovary, and she becomes part of a biological feedback loop with the first set of clones, sitting by the tank, letting the embryos hear

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her heartbeat and exchanging hormonal messages as their placental blood circulates through her body, and vice versa. A particularly telling passage in Inez’s education comes when Ani is in middle school and asked to diagram a sentence: to examine a sentence and “say who the subject is,” something Inez feels she knows better than anyone. Readers, of course, are attuned to the irony that Inez has learned this term not as part of grammar but as part of experimental protocol in which she is the subject: the “subject of an experiment” is the “object” in grammar. When an angry Ani corrects her mother to explain “the Subject is who does it,” Inez comments, “That used to be the Tech. It happens to the Object. That used to be the Subject” (259). Readers are reminded of Inez’s first interactions with Rauden, who talked with his current partner as if she could not hear them. When Rauden asks her about running “pure code” on her genome without further context, Inez responds, “So I’m like, why would I mind? A Subject like myself? I run pure code all the time. Like I got any idea what it is” (14). Later when they are stunned by her immunological profile, and consider what to do next, she proposes that they do a seal room test, and reports their astonishment: “So I say back to them, ‘Seal Room test. S-EA-L.’ Then they’re like, dude. It did. The sofa talked” (45). Although Inez entered the life industry as an object, its subject, her desires for life and learning, for the new, sustain her through harsh conditions such that she is able to find a different kind of family, first with Ani, and later with the clones. I have been referring to Inez by her full name for reasons of clarity, but she is usually addressed by only her first initial, I. Yet it is only near the end of the novel that she begins to think of herself as an “I” in the grammatical sense, an agent of choice, as she embraces her kinship with and responsibility for Ani and, in a different way, the other clones. Vora’s research reveals that, like Inez, surrogate mothers have complex and uneven relationships with the children they bear in their bodies, even when these children do not have genetic connections to them. Vora notes that surrogate mothers often want a continuing relationship with the child and that child’s family, but not as a parent. Rather, they seek a more diffuse sense of community and obligation across cultures and borders, a connection that exceeds and perhaps even counters the mere cash nexus of surrogacy as a life industry. Inez admits to the clones that they might exist “because it is somebody’s business Opportunity” but argues that the reason for their origin does not inherently dehumanize them or make them different from their non-clone peers: naturally conceived children might exist for the equally uninspiring reason that someone “had ­unprotected sex” (353). Being made is not equivalent to being owned in the future Inez seeks to cultivate, and the ethical issues with biotechnology and cloning do not emerge from the ontology of the beings thus created. Rather, ethical quandaries are bound up with the socioeconomic conditions that structure the familial and kinship connections, ties that such industries enable or deny.

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Through the bond Inez has not only with Ani but also with Rauden and others in his lab who seek to counter predatory elements of the life industries, the novel offers us a model of a new kind of family. Thinking of their community in the context of Vora’s research encourages us to resist the dehumanization that is already a part of biomedical regimes of clinical labor and life support, to recognize new sites of privilege and of deprivation these industries may create if practitioners and consumers both are not attentive to the research subject as someone whose life matters on the level of individual agency and subjectivity. If we fail to recognize this truth, human participants in surrogacy or drug trials or other modes of clinical labor are imaginatively reduced to beings valued only as biological matter. Just as the novel teaches us to regard Inez as more than a biological subject—as she appears to be when she enters the narrative—the parallels the novel maps between its grim future and material sites of exploitation (transplantation, surrogacy, clinical drug trials) cautions us against allowing an imaginary to take root that lets us disavow or ignore the human costs for those interpellated into these practices as clinical labor, not as life industry clients.

“Every Day Is Two Worlds; Every Day We Are Split into Two”: Underground Airlines Underground Airlines similarly imagines a dystopian future extrapolated from contemporary biotechnological practice, extended in a way that draws attention to the risk that such technologies could reproduce or exacerbate historical structures of inequality, unless this possibility is deliberately confronted and resisted. The novel explores a nexus of commodified life, new regimes of transnational labor exploitation, and colonial histories that are re-inscribed by some of these practices. Set in an alternative present in which US chattel slavery never ended, much of the novel is about envisioning predatory conditions of labor as a kind of ongoing slavery, in which workers are compelled to sell more than their labor-power and are dehumanized as a consequence. The final pages turn to biotechnology as characters within the novel anticipate a future in which slavery is no longer tolerated, and yet disposable labor is still needed to maintain profitability. The slaves in this alternative world work not on cotton plantations but at strip mining sites, on agribusiness industrial farms, in textile factories, or on oil refineries. Linking slavery to these industries is one of the ways Underground Airlines tries to shape our imagination so that we do not see slavery as only a historical institution but also as relevant to contemporary conditions of dehumanizing labor. One cannot too easily equate slavery with other exploitative conditions of employment, of course; this equation may seem to erase the violent history of systemic racism that was used to justify slavery and that continues to shape America. I do not want to gloss over this difficulty but nonetheless also want to suggest that the parallel effectively makes visible the degree to which some sociotechnical

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imaginaries about the commodification of biology participate in and perhaps even normalize a new kind of dehumanization. The novel follows the experiences of an African American man who is indentured and compelled to work in undercover operations that track down and return fugitive slaves. Underground Airlines draws our attention to how non-enslaved laborers share some of the constraints that define existence for the enslaved, thereby offering a way to connect the novel’s critique of exploitative labor to structures in our world. An overseer at a factory, whose indebtedness means that he has almost as little freedom as do the slaves, is shown to have more in common with them than with the management class of employees, despite his conviction otherwise. He takes pride in his freedom occasionally to leave the plantation—“I just gotta sign out” (290)—but the degree of surveillance he is subject to and his financial precarity show readers that the line between free workers and the enslaved is thin. The enslaved, of course, suffer physical abuse rationalized  by their legally less-than-human status, but the novel’s vision of slavery resembles the exploitation of imprisoned laborers, who are disproportionately people of colour in the US, more than it resembles historical chattel slavery. The enslaved are confined and compelled to work specific hours, just as privatized US prisons sell inmates’ labor to corporations or set up their own industries. The disproportionate incarceration of people of colour in the United States, especially African Americans, further connects such prison industries to the history of chattel slavery and its reduction of African Americans to dehumanized labor power. Indeed, Dennis Wise argues in Slaves of the State that the prison system functions as an unacknowledged perpetuation of chattel slavery. In Winters’s novel, antebellum icons of slavery such as whips and dogs are replaced by tasers and overt logics about efficient production. The enslaved have no freedom but are offered some distractions of entertainment, their living conditions reminiscent of 1930s depictions of company towns that trapped their workers through ongoing debt indenture. Although these inmates lack autonomy and self-determination, the facility believes itself to house its inmates humanely: “Four thousand head in those buildings right there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use” (258). Such descriptions echo the way corporations speak about caring for their workforce through employee benefits such as fitness programs and the like, here bluntly revealed to be simply ways of ensuring that the asset of laborpower remains viable for the next day’s work. Thus, we might also extend the parallels with incarcerated labor to waged labor more generally, especially the way the expansion of debt since the 1980s has made workers less able to leave undesirable jobs. In the novel, especially in its spatialization between the free North and the enslaved South, readers are also encouraged to see connections as well to supply chain relationships between Global North and Global South, to the all-but-hidden costs of the cheaply available consumer goods

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that privilege Western peoples have become dependent upon to a degree that we frequently do not want to enquire about the conditions of their production and distribution, neither the factory in Shenzhen nor the Amazon warehouse in a poor US town. These analogies put a sinister spin on the economic language of human capital. The management of the slaves as labor-power easily blurs into managing their bodies as another kind of capital owned by the corporation. This highlights how the commodification of biology creates a crisis in the protections afforded to the human subject by liberalism. Jasanoff argues that “periods of significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as constitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences,” and thus rights discourse needs to be reframed to acknowledge how the definition of the human has been changed by technology, to redefine “the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its care” (Reframing Rights 3, emphasis in original). Jasanoff is talking about entities such as research cell lines derived from human tissues, zygotes produced through IVF that are frozen but never implanted, and chimerical entities containing human DNA, such as the transgenic pigs produced for organ transplantation research. Such beings complicate the idea that humans are uniquely exempt from being owned, now that chattel slavery has been outlawed. While I am not arguing that we should conflate the worth of commodified human beings under conditions of slavery with the worth of these products of biotechnology, I am suggesting that Winters’s speculative setting draws attention to the larger political and ethical implications of commodified biology and the dehumanization of workers. The slaves can be understood to index why our sociotechnical imaginary needs to be attentive to the consequences of conflating persons with things via the commodification of biology. The protagonist mainly goes by the name Jim, but takes on other names in different contexts.2 He is an African American born into slavery, who escaped as an adolescent; when he was recaptured, he was compelled to work as an undercover agent for the US Marshals, investigating and shutting down abolitionist routes, rather than being returned to the South. Like Inez, Jim has a damaged sense of self and feels that to sustain his life he has been compelled to do things that have made him something less than human. As the novel opens, he muses, “it was my practice at the beginning of a new job to think of myself as having no name at all. As being not really a person at all”; rather, he is simply a tool wielded by others, “a manifestation of will. I was a mechanism—a device. That’s all I was” (16). This metaphor—that he is a machine, the work, an embodiment of a job—is repeated multiple times, a pattern of imagery that reminds us that labor may be dehumanizing both in terms of how the laborer is viewed (just another tool) and in terms of how its alienating effects destroy a human sense of self. Although Jim actively resists facing his complicity in perpetuating what he knows is a brutal system, this vision of himself as a machine is also part of an entire apparatus that continually denies

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the humanity of African American people, enslaved or freed. This disavowal haunts him, and he suffers from fugue states whenever his carefully controlled emotions rise to the surface, generally alongside memories of his own enslavement and of his brother’s death. Slaves are referred to as PBs, persons bound to labor, the ubiquity of the acronym erasing the fact that “persons” are thereby described. Jim is interpolated into work practices that continually reinforce the objectified status of people of African descent, such as a numerical chart to denote skin tones for identificatory purposes, which Jim subtly criticizes by insisting on using descriptive adjectives—midnight, coffee, honey—alongside the abstract numerals. The colour chart represents the normalization of language typically used to describe things being applied to people, thus repeatedly eroding the sense that there is a meaningful distinction between the two. Responding to a woman he meets while undercover, Jim has to forcibly resist the tendency to reduce her to a quantifiable resource: Her skin was coffee, light-toned, in the number 120 range. I did this evaluation by reflex, then found that just doing that quick calculation, for some reason, made me sick. My stomach rolled. This here was a free woman, after all, a northern woman, a vested citizen. What right had I to look at her that way, to size her up, mark her down for a Gaithersburg file? (92)

Jim struggles with how his job requires him to think of fugitives as mere cogs in a larger system he serves, with his own inclination to imagine their human experience of this system. Describing one fugitive, he strives to “imagin[e] Jackdaw as a blue dot moving east and not as a man, folded up inside a fortyfive-foot trailer, dying from having to piss, his delicate face wilting and sweatsoaked, his eyes big in the darkness of whatever box or pallet he was crated up in” (100). The novel maps the shocking metaphor of slavery and its violence onto a more familiar structure of regarding workers as human capital, fungible resources, conceived in terms of the objectives they serve, ignoring the human costs of these industries. PBs stand-in for the abjected state of the precariously employed in our own world, as is clear from a description of a Freedman Town populated by the manumitted: I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grievous state of disrepair. An invisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization. … Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. (138, 140)

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The novel frequently uses the image of two worlds mapped onto one another, our world a palimpsest that shows through beneath the description of this alternative present. This imagery reinforces the parallels, showing that its depiction of ongoing enslavement demonstrates how existing exploitative labor practices dehumanize workers. In the final section, this technique of suggesting another world lies just out of view, a palimpsest beneath what is visible, functions as a kind of utopian promise that the world can be changed, can be made more equitable, contingent on the characters’ choices to acquiesce or resist: “Every day is two worlds; every day we are split into two” (322), the protagonist tells us at the end, as he stops working for the Marshalls and becomes part of the underground. Abolitionist characters make public the fact that shell companies are used to frustrate laws forbidding the sale of slave-produced items in Northern states, a revelation intended to “show northerners who liked to believe, who needed to believe, that they were not personally touched by the cruel hand of slavery that they were in fact touched by it every day. Were wearing it on their feet, were lining up for it the day after Thanksgiving” (192). Like our own complicity in globalized trade and the purchase of items produced in conditions not that different from enslavement,3 consumers prefer ignorance to higher prices. An entire legal apparatus exists to monitor how PBs are treated, through the Department of Labour Affairs, further reinforcing the idea that precarious employment produces a kind of indebted dependency that has parallels with chattel slavery. Most of the plot is about Jim’s pursuit of a fugitive named Jackdaw—reported to have killed two nurses in his escape—who turns out to be the free-born college student Kevin, on an undercover abolitionist mission in the South to smuggle out information about how the “Clean Hands” laws are being thwarted. The chief violator, Townes Stores, is a clear stand-in for Walmart. Yet even as he uncovers this conspiracy and learns the truth, Jim realizes that the degree of resistance he encountered was out of scope with the risks to profit that these revelations would have. If uncovered, Townes Stores would “pay a big fine, and they’d have a bad quarter” but “people would go back to Townes, because their shit is pretty cheap, wherever it’s coming from. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s pretty good. Nothing would change. People shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, slaves suffering somewhere far away” (194). This is where the novel’s themes about the precarious state of a globalized working-class intersect with the biotechnological issues of labo r theorized by Waldby and Cooper. Describing the failed industrial city Indianapolis, “a used-to-be publishing industry, a used-to-be rail hub, a usedto-be powerhouse in coal and steel” (79), Jim notes that what remains are service industries, most prominently “lots and lots of health care. Drug companies and medical device companies, ophthalmology centers and optometry centers and cancer centers” (80). As cited above, Waldby and Cooper explore in detail how for-profit medicine, and especially the pharmaceutical industry,

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rely on clinical trial subjects they recruit from among the most marginalized, from places where other choices for employment have disappeared. Jackdaw/Kevin is not such a clinical subject, but he escapes slavery in a version of the Henry Box Brown escape that is updated to reflect this context.4 While Henry Box Brown gained his moniker from exploiting an emergent shipping industry to have himself mailed to freedom in the North, Kevin makes the trip disguised as medical waste: Turns out one thing that doesn’t get opened up for a final check after it’s packed is medical waste. So what about a man-size rubber bladder fitted with a thin reed, like the one a scuba diver wears, so a person could survive in there, down in all that waste? What about you get a man to the infirmary, make it look like he burst loose and leaped out a window when really he’s coming out in a barrel? (241)

The equivalency between exploited labor-power and the biological bodies of these laborers as mere matter, from the point of view of capital, is made startlingly clear in this image of Kevin’s escape. Yet the question remains as to why there is so much medical waste coming from a factory staffed by slave labor. Anticipating that moral opposition to slavery will soon make the practice unprofitable, slave states have turned to biotechnology to create entities that will give them all of the economic benefit of slavery, without, so they claim, its moral hazards. The real conspiracy is an attempt to manufacture slaves as living tools: eggs are harvested from enslaved women, the human DNA nucleus is removed, and then “new material, not new, but taken from other subjects” (311) is added. Here the explanation falters under the weight of the final revelation, an attempt to make people in all but name—or rather, in all but genetic identity. This puts Underground Airlines in dialogue with many SF works about manufactured people, exploited as labor and otherwise, most famously with the original text of this tradition, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (2001), a play about an uprising of manufactured people. This play gives us the English word robot, derived from a Czech word for indentured laborer, and although its staging produced a sociotechnical imaginary in which we understand robots to be metallic, mechanical entities, Čapek’s originals, like Blade Runner’s Replicants, are better understood as creations of synthetic biology. Jim is not shocked by this revelation when he finally learns the truth. He is told “if the population held in bondage, if they were—not technically … people any longer. Certain constitutional issues, certain political issues … would be resolved” (312, ellipse in original). Jim quickly recognizes this as the inevitable endpoint of a logic of dehumanization via harsh conditions of labor, “people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom” (312). In this turn toward speculative biotechnology, the importance of the motif of continued slavery becomes clear as a way to startle readers into paying sufficient attention to the risks of the

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commodification of life and the creation of living entities that are fully owned by the corporations that make them. Although at present, any such entities that exist are judged to be merely animals and thus not subject to the same standards of ethical concerns that most would attach to human beings, many do contain human DNA, however minutely. Moreover, the growing field of synthetic biology has already produced a living creature that is wholly made— thus owned: the microbe mycoplasma laboratorium. Such a tiny entity may not seem of concern, and we are far from the world of creating artificial laborers as imagined by Čapek, and recently updated by the series Westworld. Nonetheless, the sociotechnical imaginary we establish for thinking about synthetic life, clinical labor, and commodified biology now will set the terms for what we shall collectively imagine as desirable futures as this science progresses—and indeed for who is part of this collective we. Speculative fiction such as Underground Airlines and The Only Ones help us imagine how easily new biotech may fall into old biases and patterns of exploitation. Both demonstrate how speculative fiction is an important part of the sociotechnical imaginary: such fictions do not necessarily offer images of plausible or even desirable futures, but rather function as a mode of thinking through how science and the social intersect. By extrapolating new futures made possible by developments in science and technology, they enable us critically and thoughtfully to animate new forms of social life they make possible. These two novels interrogate the new kinds of social relations made possible by biotechnology and its commodification of biology, each with a distinctive set of concerns about how the value of life is potentially remade in the life industries. While The Only Ones cautions us against the dehumanization already shaping regimes of clinical labor in which people intersect with the medical system as research subjects rather than as patients, Underground Airlines focuses on exploitative regimes of labor and draws on the sociotechnical imaginary of manufactured biological beings to reveal the degree to which disenfranchised, generally racialized labor is similarly regarded as less-than-human. Considered together, the two novels also draw attention to the implications that thinking about life cultivated in the life industries via biotechnology—that is, their sociotechnical imaginaries—can have for social life in wider frames, shaping how life “itself” can come to be valued or disregarded. Speculative fiction has gained increasing prominence in the twenty-first century, as novels respond to the ways science and technology have remade daily life—from climate change to the Internet of Things, biotechnology to AI assistants and self-driving cars. Jasanoff is surely correct that a robust understanding of how the stories we tell about such changes have the power to shape the futures we imagine as desirable or conceive of as possible, and how it is that science will unfold as specific futures materialize. Yet fiction does more than simply prepare us for the inevitability of scientific “progress”: it raises questions about unpredicted consequences, it voices perspectives

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from the margins of hegemonic “shared understandings.” Perhaps most crucially, it brings into visibility conjunctions of science and society that portent large social changes. These two novels are joined by a plethora of other works—Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015) that addresses organ transplantation, Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017) about assisted reproduction technologies, Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) about cryopreservation, Thomas King’s Back of the Turtle (2014) about chemical agriculture, Rose Montero’s Tears in Rain (2011) about manufactured laborers, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) about global pharmacy, to name only a few—all of which tell us that the sociotechnical imaginary is conceptualizing life in new and consequential ways, requiring nuanced reflections aimed at shaping the futures we will collectively inhabit.

Notes 1.  As an example of industry-centric speculative design, see Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything. 2. Chiefly Victor, the name he uses with his employer, and at the end Brother, the name given him as a slave. 3. See Virginia Mantouvalou, “Servitude and Forced Labor in the 21st Century: The Human Rights of Domestic Workers.” Industrial Law Journal 35.4 (Dec 2006): 395–414 and Julia O’Connell Davidson, “Troubling Freedom: Migration, Debt and Modern Slavery.” Migration Studies 1.2 (July 2013): 176–195. 4. For information on Henry Box Brown’s escape from slavery and later celebrity, see http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/ stories-freedom/henry-box-brown/.

Works Cited Čapek, Karel. 2001. R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, trans. Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair. Mineola: Dover Publications. Childs, Denis. 2015. Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cooper, Melinda, and Catherine Waldby. 2014. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press. Dibbell, Carola. 2015. The Only Ones. Columbus: Two Dollar Radio. Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jasanoff, Sheila (ed.). 2011. Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imagination of Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landecker, Hannah. 2009. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. Bodies for Sale—Whole or in Parts. In Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 1–8. New York: Sage. ———. 2002. Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking. In Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 31–62. New York: Sage. Sharp, Lesley A. 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vora, Kalindi. 2015. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle. Winter, Ben H. 2016. Underground Airlines. New York: Mulholland Books.

CHAPTER 23

The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals in White Noise and The Corrections Natalie Roxburgh

Within twentieth-century American fiction, drug use is a beloved theme. From the romantic exploration of substances in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) to Hubert Selby Jr.’s bleak Requiem for a Dream (1978), many of these representations can be seen as valuing individual freedom and experience, but also as exploring the risk of addiction and its consequences. The end of the twentieth century witnessed a change in emphasis on drug use: from substances promising liberation or threatening the trap of addiction to pharmaceuticals associated with the medical sciences, including scientific drug trials and the treatment of mental disorders within the field of psychiatry. In what follows, I will explore the way fictional psychopharmaceuticals serve as vehicles for exploring psychiatry’s relationship to the market at the end of the twentieth century, focusing on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984– 1985) and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), novels which use fictional drugs (which are also “meds”) to question the scientificity of psychiatry. These novels use the fictional pharmaceuticals Dylar and Correktall, respectively, to explore the growing cultural authority of the sciences of mind from the 1980s onwards. The novels both turn from the subjectivity of the characters to what Elizabeth Freudenthal has called “biomedical antiinteriority” (Freudenthal 2010, 192). A focus on the physical structure of the brain replaces individual experience—a tendency Marco Roth and others have discussed through the rise of the “neuronovel” (Roth 2013, N. Roxburgh (*)  University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_23

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n.p.)—prompting characters to deny their own subjectivity. Reading these novels together, and attending to the way drugs may be medicine-driven, market-driven, or both, sheds light on the development of the cultural authority of the sciences of mind as well as the literary turn away from postmodernism. A lack of clear distinction between drugs versus medications (or “meds”) marks a problem that is taken seriously rather than treated cynically, the latter being a usual marker of postmodern literary discourse. One characteristic of many novels of this period has to do with a great economic shift: they explore the expansion of consumerism in a globalized and financialized world, inaugurated to a large degree with the political policies of the US and the UK beginning in the late 1970s. Most critics—for example, Rachel Greenwald Smith (Smith 2015, 1)—understand this as a function of neoliberalism, often defined as the doctrine that market activity is inherently ethical.1 Freudenthal’s notion of biomedical anti-interiority fits within this history and helps one to explore how the medical sciences have changed in conjunction with new technologies available for consumption as well as new forms of cultural authority that govern and regulate their use. White Noise and The Corrections present cases in which natural human afflictions (such as fear, confusion, or death) are medicalized in a way that might be market-driven rather than truly scientific, and they expose this process as stemming from deregulation in the 1980s and 90s. Pharmaceuticals offer useful fodder for contemporary fiction because they are somewhere between science and technology, substances for treating an ailment and products manufactured according to a market demand resulting from the transformation of patients into consumers. From a chemical point of view, there is no difference between drugs and medications; the distinction is blurred in contemporary Anglophone discourse—as in drug ads on television, and media references to pharmaceutical companies as drug companies. Medications are meant to be therapeutic, restoring a subject to normalcy or health. By contrast, drugs are taken in order to enhance a normal state. For example, morphine intended to alleviate the pain of cancer is a medication; taken for pleasure, it is a drug. While in the United States the terms are often interchangeable within medical discourse, the distinction is clearer in other countries.2 What counts as medicinal use and what counts as drug use is subject to an array of regulatory forces, also dependent on cultural attitudes that patrol the boundary. This distinction matters because meds carry a notion of correct usage whereas drugs do not. One of the aforementioned regulatory forces is the Psychiatric Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a set of criteria for classifying psychiatric disorders. Since its inception in 1952, revisions to this manual indicate that while some human states (such as homosexuality) have been demedicalized, others have been medicalized. Recent examples include excoriation (Skin-Picking) Disorder, Hoarding Disorder, and Internet Gaming Disorder, which were all included in the

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DSM-5, published in May of 2013.3 Through medicalization, what was once regarded as a social aberration is transformed into a disorder. While the DSM itself does not provide guidelines for treatment, each disorder has specified treatment options, and treatment often entails the prescription of ­pharmaceuticals. Despite the changing diagnostic rubrics over time, practitioners of psychiatry often see the categories as hypotheses for the way the world really “is”—if categories change over time, they say, it is not because of changing norms or values but rather because science is driving us closer to the truth.4 Another regulatory agent is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 1997, new regulations allowed the promotion of off-label usage for medications and treatments, an act that also transformed the definition and categorization of medications. Increasingly, patients became consumers, called upon in advertisements to “ask their doctors if such-and-such a drug is right for them” (Conrad 2005, 5–6). The transformation of patients into consumers through a notion that market-based solutions provide the best outcomes is a mainstay of neoliberal thought. The drugs-meds split is indistinct in the history of psychiatry. Developments in the 1980s and 90s reflect a changing notion of suffering patients and the role chemical substances play in treating them. The term psychopharmacology was coined in 1920 by the American pharmacologist David Macht, but it was not until the middle of the century that psychiatry began testing the possibility of using various mind-altering substances as a means for treating perceived mental illnesses.5 The development of Thorazine (chlorpromazine) was a milestone in this history. Synthesized in France in the early 1950s, the FDA approved its therapeutic use in March of 1954. Backed by an extensive marketing campaign, Thorazine was the first medication marketed as an antidote for a psychiatric disorder, but it was also advertised for a wide variety of other purposes, such as treating nausea, alleviating distress from cancer, controlling the unruly elderly, and subduing upset mental patients. Because it was not thought to treat a specific chemical imbalance per se, Thorazine promised relief for symptoms people not classified as mentally ill (or not diagnosed with a particular psychiatric disorder) might experience. It was experimental—and also profit-driven—before a more rigid classification system of knowledge emerged. After a time, however, the marketing campaign dropped the varied usage possibilities for the drug as the disorders it was used to treat (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) became more clearly defined as chemical imbalances requiring chemical correction, corresponding with what practitioners call the rise of New Psychiatry in the early 1980s. The New Psychiatry saw itself as better wedded to the more empirically oriented sciences of mind.6 In this period, other medications, such as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and tricyclic antidepressants, were also developed. By 1988, the first of the “second-generation” psychiatric medications, Prozac, was introduced to treat

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depression. As the DSM evolved under a notion that psychiatry—by using brain-affecting medication as a form of treatment—was more scientific than its more psycho-dynamically oriented predecessors, a more defined usage for each medication was recommended. The concept of the chemical imbalance came from the authority of the neurosciences in order to suggest that maladies of mind were, in fact, disorders of the inherent structures of the brain.7 From the New Psychiatry onwards, therefore, the field adopted a biomedical anti-interiority model, and it incorporated a system of knowledge, the DSM, that took precedence over patient narratives. While psychodynamic models handled individuals through a system of reading their personal narratives, the New Psychiatry emphasized a reading of what their brains might be like. While psychiatry might have the greatest tendency to medicalize, it probably also has the greatest need to do so. Unlike other fields of medicine, it cannot always rely on physical evidence of symptoms (at least not yet), and this lack of a visible or biological marker has meant that it requires self-reported descriptions from patients.8 This creates a conundrum that critics of psychiatry all seem to grapple with: If psychiatry relies on the self-reported inner states of patients, which come from the mind rather than the brain—and are ultimately tied to human language—how do we know a chemical correction is the best means of treatment? We do not observe a physical malady in the brain (at least not yet) when we diagnose a disorder, and yet we assume that a physical entity—a chemical or a neurotransmitter—is lacking or overabundant. In other words, the interior mind that is the means for forming a diagnosis fails to map onto the physical brain that the medications are meant to treat following the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. And yet, at least according to the drug trials, these medications work. Historically, novels have been more interested in exploring the mind (through its traditional building-blocks, such as character, perspective, narrative focalization) rather than the brain. The more recent interest in the sciences of mind, however, has led to new types of fiction, such as the neuronovel, which explores the value of storytelling alongside what cognitive science tells us about how the brain works. Perhaps because of the rising (and widely publicized) use of antidepressants in what became known as the “Prozac Nation,” the mid-1990s is an obvious time to examine the representation of the sciences of mind and pharmaceuticals in Anglophone fiction. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), a complex novelistic account of addiction, provides insights into the role psychiatric medication plays in daily life. Infinite Jest focuses on a missing film, mysteriously called “the Entertainment.” This video is so entertaining that the viewer loses his desire to do anything else besides viewing it. Outside of this primary story, a complex world develops, one with loose ties to the missing “Entertainment.” The novel, whose working title was “Infinite Jest: A Failed Entertainment,” interrogates the relationships among addiction, entertainment, and consumer society, including tennis, drugs, psychiatric medication, and support groups

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in such a way that the novel itself questions the distinction between entertainment and addiction.9 Infinite Jest also illuminates an underlying belief system that supports the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, which is why Freudenthal argues that the novel exemplifies biomedical anti-interiority. Rather than explore the inside of the subject’s mind, Infinite Jest examines another type of inner subject—the inside of the protagonist’s physical brain, as a material or physical apparatus that responds to other material or physical apparatuses; it posits a material failure as the explanation for a psychological affliction. Importantly, Freudenthal links biomedical anti-interiority to consumer society because the other material or physical apparatuses that abound within the fictional world of Infinite Jest are also technological products that can be consumed by the subject.10 This link between attention to the brain (over the mind) and a consumer society made possible through neoliberalism is critiqued in both White Noise and The Corrections. While Infinite Jest participates in a consensus on biomedical anti-interiority, White Noise and The Corrections connect biomedical anti-interiority to neoliberal consumerism even while they remain invested in questions of medicine’s fundamental imperatives. White Noise, which was published in the mid-1980s (coincident with ­“second-generation” antidepressants), explores the consumption of a medication called Dylar. Franzen’s The Corrections, published well after the boom of the psychopharmacology industry in the 1990s, links the use of psychopharmaceuticals to other domains: financial, political, and even institutional. Focusing on the brain rather than the mind is analogous to—and even enabled by—abstract flows of capital rather than particular experiences of people. This focus parallels the shift to a deregulated and decentralized economy and also anticipates even more recent developments, as Will Davies contends in The Happiness Industry (2015): “Questions of mood, which were once deemed ‘subjective,’ are now answered using objective data. At the same time, this science of well-being has become tangled up with economic and medical expertise” (Davies 2015, 5). This notion of entanglement shows how the value of individual experience is already intertwined with systems of knowledge. People’s accounts of experiences of mind are wrapped up with what they believe about how their brains work. The novels, through their emphasis on biomedical anti-interiority, illustrate the difficultly of distinguishing between mind and brain, subjective experience and system and model, drug and medication.

White Noise: Symptom or Drug Effect? DeLillo’s White Noise examines the difference between (and deep conflation of) reality and simulation and, for this reason, is often referred to as a postmodern novel. This epistemological problem is better described through the problem alluded to above: that of the intertwinedness of systems of

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knowledge and experience. The novel uses psychiatry—which requires both the reporting of individual experience and the incorporation of that experience into a diagnostic framework—to ask to what degree belief in the system of knowledge transforms what a subject experiences. The novel offers an early non-medical example of the tension between belief in systems of knowledge and experience. The protagonist, “Professor of Hitler Studies” Jack Gladney, and his fourteen-year-old son, Heinrich, engage in a conversation about whether or not it is raining. While Jack sees rain falling, Heinrich argues that it could not be possible in the daytime since “the radio said tonight” (DeLillo 1984, 22). Jack quips, “[j]ust because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.” And Heinrich retorts, “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present or future outside our own mind” (DeLillo 1984, 22–23). This early conversation reveals an extreme version of belief in a system of knowledge over direct experience, and what follows will show what happens to individual experience within a system that produces expectations. DeLillo wrote White Noise against the backdrop of the emergence of the New Psychiatry, with its emphasis on the brain rather than the mind. Heinrich’s reliance on the system of knowledge rather than his experience produces a false result; the fact he reports, produced within the logic of its own system, is empirically false, at least from the perspective provided by the narrative focalization. One could say that such systems of knowledge are the very essence of modern (and not only postmodern) scientific process. For example, it is difficult to balance one’s checkbook without a notion of a zero balance—that one owes nothing and one is owed nothing in return—and yet one may never have a checking account in this exact state. The system, however, allows us to engage with others in the world—to agree on a reality. By contrast, direct experience does not require a system of knowledge: if it is raining, it is raining. But some experiences may differ from person to person, for in direct experience, there is no gesture toward consensus: Perhaps we each have a different concept of rain, for example. White Noise points to this philosophical issue in order to explore how the symptom is produced under medicalization: The symptom comes from an authoritative system of knowledge, but it can only be reported as a direct experience. This creates an important tension because the information about experience comes from a subjective account that is already embroiled within a system of knowledge from the outset. It is therefore difficult to know if the symptom is felt or if it is a product of the knowledge system. The experience of the mind reported through the model of the brain has important consequences for the subject who reports having symptoms. Jean Baudrillard spells out some of the implications in Simulacra and Simulation (1981):

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Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces ‘true’ symptoms? Objectively, one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness’s henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be ‘produced,’ and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat ‘real’ illnesses according to their objective causes. (Baudrillard 1994, 3)

Ralph Clare, who reads Simulacra and Simulation next to White Noise, shows how “medicine falters in the face of simulation, which separates the symptom from its referent. Diagnosis is endlessly deferred, and therefore we are always already patients” (Clare 2010, 242). Medicine, in other words, is one way all subjects can be guaranteed to keep consuming if the treatment plan is ­market-driven—we are “permanent patients, like it or not,” Dr. Chakravarty tells Jack explicitly in the novel (DeLillo 1984, 260). What I would add to Clare’s reading is an insight into the role biomedical anti-interiority and the cultural authority of the sciences of mind play in the process, as the shift to the brain is what provides the cultural authority for subjects to report their symptoms in a way that fits an extra-experiential framework, one that is given by a system of knowledge—shown to be market-driven—rather than the expertise of an individual practitioner. From the perspective of the individual, uncertainty with regard to the authenticity of the affliction under this paradigm leads consumers to attempt to self-diagnose, which is enabled by pharmaceutical marketing. White Noise reveals a cultural tendency to doubt our minds when it becomes possible to model the brain. The prominent discourse in the novel is taken from the sciences of mind. Heinrich’s theories are put to the test. If we can be reduced to the sum of our brain chemicals, how do we even know what we feel? For example, Heinrich, skeptical of a friend who sits in a cage full of snakes for the purpose of setting a world record, says: “He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much or too little stimulation” (DeLillo 1984, 182). This problem surfaces in the novel with regard to the efficacy of Dylar, which is considered medically legitimate because of a theory that helps us believe diseased brains can be reduced fundamentally to their materiality in order to be treated; material diseases have material cures. Early in the novel, Jack’s wife, Babette, manifests certain symptoms. She is more forgetful than usual, which compels her family to seek out the cause. Jack and his stepdaughter, Denise, discover Babette has secretly been taking Dylar, which is not yet listed in drug indexes—hence it is not regulated. Jack initially retorts, “I don’t want to make too much of this. Everybody takes some kind of medication, everybody forgets things occasionally” (DeLillo 1984, 62). Jack, for example, takes “[b]lood pressure pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin,” all of which are “[r]un of the mill” (DeLillo 1984, 62). Introducing the reader to medications that are already

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part of the typical American regimen complements DeLillo’s description of the “airborne toxic event” at the center of the novel and the ubiquity of other technological mechanisms, such as radio, television, the microwave oven, power lines, the radar speed-trap, and so on, allowing him to illustrate the over-determinedness of the symptom and show that it cannot be purely reduced to the brain (DeLillo 1984, 174). The proliferation of technology is closely connected to the fact that Jack and Babette are both terrified of dying. The two repeatedly ask each other who will die first (DeLillo 1984, 15). Conventional wisdom tells us death is a natural human event, one to be experienced by everyone; it is a part of life. The novel complicates this notion by suggesting that even death is not natural but rather produced by the technological advances that preoccupy the novel. Jack and his family encounter an “airborne toxic event,” which, they learn, has been born in the laboratory: “This was a death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control” (DeLillo 1984, 127). Indeed, Jack’s colleague, Murray, corroborates this perspective when he discusses the way death has changed. Murray says: “This is the nature of modern death […]. We know it intimately. But it continues to grow, to acquire breadth and scope, new outlets, new passages and means. The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent” (DeLillo 1984, 150). Babette likewise believes death has changed in conjunction with modern technological developments, complaining, “[e]very advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared” (DeLillo 1984, 161). Paradoxically turning to drugs because of that fear, she illustrates the medicalization of the fear of death, a point that is underscored when she seeks out a solution from Mr. Gray, who researches the parts of the brain responsible for producing this particular type of fear. When Jack is finally able to confront Babette about her secret use of Dylar, 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.” She uses a biomedical anti-interior approach for describing the way Dylar works: “Heinrich’s brain theories. They’re all true. We’re the sum of our chemical impulses” (DeLillo 1984, 200). But, given the novel’s preoccupation with the way the natural has been converted into an effect of technology, the novel’s various perspectives fail to square, painting a picture of a significant inconsistency. If we are merely the sum of our chemical impulses, what is then the relationship between the development of technology and the medicalization of fearing death? In other words, if the fear of death correlates with technological development, how can we say that our individual chemistry is solely to blame? Indeed, the novel seems to suggest that modern technologies exacerbate a fear built into our biochemical—and also experiential—bodies and minds.

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And if it is our chemistry that is solely the problem, should not a drug that compensates for a particular chemical imbalance work properly? Finally, if the symptoms of psychiatric disorders—if that is what Babette is afflicted with— take place at the level of our feelings and affect, but we cannot trust our feelings over a system of knowledge (i.e., if Heinrich’s brain theories are true), how do we know they need medical treatment? White Noise drives home its critique of the medicalization of the fear of death in its third section, “Dylarama.” The scientific precision of the medication, which researcher Winnie Richards even goes so far as to say makes her “proud to be an American” because America “lead[s] the world in stimuli,” is challenged when it fails to produce its expected result (DeLillo 1984, 189). The symptom the medication is designed to correct is still present: Babette still fears death. What is more, there are side effects. Babette’s belief in the system of knowledge is evident in her trusting in the drug’s developer’s explanation that the side effects (i.e., the memory loss) were not to the drug, but to the fear of death itself: “It wasn’t a side effect of the drug. It was a side effect of the condition. Mr. Gray said my loss of memory is a desperate attempt to counteract my fear of death. It’s like a war of neurons. I am able to forget many things but I fail when it comes to death” (DeLillo 1984, 202). The drug may have side effects or it may not, and the drug fails to treat the symptom—it could even be the culprit. Jack later suggests that the drug may be working because of the power of suggestion: “It may not matter how strong or weak Dylar is. If I think it will help me, it will help me” (DeLillo 1984, 251). Whether the drug works or does not work is called into question, and whether the drug works because of the power of suggestion (what is called the placebo effect) is also proposed as a possibility. The fictional drug’s intended effects and its side effects (both of which comprise its drug action), in the end, are difficult to demarcate, which is in turn registered in the way characters experience the drug, and how they seem to suffer from not being quite sure whether the drug is treating a symptom or doing something else entirely. One of the more significant side effects of Dylar is an inability to distinguish between words and things, which its inventor, Mr. Gray, experiences when he overdoses (DeLillo 1984, 309). This suggestion that language, too, is a technology nudges the reader toward the question of whether the drug effects are real or simulated—the power of suggestion is literally conflated with the physical world: “The drug not only caused the user to confuse words with the things they referred to; it made [Mr. Gray] act in a somewhat stylized way” (DeLillo 1984, 310). In this scene, Mr. Gray experiences materially what is suggested verbally. The drug, the “benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace,” what Jack calls “technology with a human face,” thus embodies the postmodern predicament by leaving ambiguous what is natural and what is artificial, what is a correction for a problem and what is an instigator (DeLillo 1984, 212).11 This ambiguity is important for suggesting

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that the cultural authority of the sciences of mind have played a role in how we understand what we experience through the brain, fully fleshing out the implications of biomedical anti-interiority on postmodern subjectivity. White Noise seems to suggest that with the waning of medical gatekeeping and the transition from patients to permanent medical consumers, a new kind of gatekeeping has emerged. Rather than trusting doctors as authority figures, consumers trust the authority of the way the sciences of mind model the material brain, and this is represented cynically—in line with postmodern style. This novel asks science to consider its experiential roots rather than rely on systems of knowledge in an uncritical way. Systems of knowledge are not the same thing as material realities, and they have become entangled in subjective experience to a degree that undermines medicine’s mandate to do no harm.

The Corrections: Drug or Medication? By contrast to White Noise, The Corrections has been read as leaving behind many of the stylistic investments of postmodernism, particularly its cynicism, while embracing a more realist style.12 However, at the same time, it borrows from the narrative foundations of White Noise.13 Stephen J. Burn argues that The Corrections explores the way family members relate to each other more than it does the technological and cultural world.14 Like White Noise, however, it uses fictional drugs/medication to comment on the way the cultural authority of the sciences of mind has kept people who need medical help from getting it. More so than White Noise, The Corrections considers how the predicament of not being certain about what one experiences poses a larger problem for treating legitimate medical problems. The fictional substance, Corecktall, is something the family members have in common, and each interprets its effects a different way—sometimes as a drug, other times as a medication. For some critics, the exploration of psychopharmacology was its weakest point. David Gates, for example, shows how Franzen’s exploration of medication is nothing new to either the novel or critiques of psychiatry: “Psychotropic drugs and their supposedly problematic effects on human autonomy and identity is a topic as old as ‘Brave New World’” (Gates 2001, n.p.). Part of the problem of this critique is that it gives up trying to understand the complicated relationship between the various drugs and medications in the novel, a relationship that is not only about medicine, but also about a neoliberal economic logic that places profit above everything else. The Corrections asks what happens when medications are seen as consumer products like any other, when the distinction between drugs and medications becomes fundamentally blurred. In a sense, it incorporates the position that White Noise offers as one of many, which is further facilitated by its heterodiegetic narration, another stylistic aspect that pulls it away from its postmodern predecessor. The novel endorses the authority of science against

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a neoliberal economic logic by exposing the effect of the drugs/medication entanglement as a problem the medical sciences need to address in order to do no harm. And it does this through the proliferation of perspectives that is characteristic of realism rather than postmodernism. Market-originated corrections in general never seem able to fix the chronically dysfunctional Lambert family, comprising Enid and Alfred and their children, Chip, Gary, and Denise. The novel offers the possibility that psychiatric medication might have a place alongside other cultural practices of neoliberal America and thus a categorical dismissal of it could be detrimental to those displaying symptoms or needing medical treatment. It does this by referring to medications and drugs actually on the market in the real world, such as Xanax (or alprazolam, used to treat anxiety), antidepressants, and street drugs, but also to fictional substances: Corecktall seems to be a “magic bullet,” a pharmaceutical reputed to treat certain illnesses, including Parkinson’s, and Aslan, a “personality optimizer.” The various family members have different interpretations of the drug and its effects, as well as conflicting accounts of identity (Burn 2008, 115). Gary’s materialist account, for example, conflicts with Caroline’s world of self-help psychology.15 “Franzen’s attitude toward neuroscience in his novels is evidently marked by division [among character’s views]” (Burn 2008, 122), argues Burn, who also views the novel as concluding with a conventional closure, signaling its break from postmodernism.16 But I would argue there is a further break: By putting together the characters’ different views, the novel distances itself from postmodernism’s overall cynicism about science. Examining the perspectives together, the reader finds the novel does not simply distrust science; rather, it presents a critical view of the drugs-meds split, and exposes a profit-motive underlying the pharmaceutical industry. Chip takes Mexican A to party and have sex with his student, Melissa. Later, we find out this is the same substance Enid is prescribed by Dr. Hibbard on a cruise, a drug upon which she becomes seriously dependent (Franzen 2001, 371). Enid (possibly like Babette) has no medical symptoms until she is put on Aslan. By contrast to these other examples, Gary, despite deep depression, resists getting treated because he needs to reject a strict biological deterministic view of his afflictions: He needs to reject the system of knowledge because he cannot confront his resemblance to his father. Because of this extreme rejection of the science, he suffers. This is in contrast to White Noise, as Gary is certain he is depressed but denies the efficacity of treatment (whereas Babette, for example, never seems to know whether she was truly ill to begin with). Chip, a humanities academic, distrusts psychiatry and has misgivings about its medicalizing practices, which he ties directly to a consumer economy. His relationship with his girlfriend, Julia, is waning because, while she accuses him of using sex as a sort of medication, he abhors her use of psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Julia takes pills that “make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as vision” (Franzen 2001, 35). He tells his sister:

426  N. ROXBURGH I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed. […] I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of the mind as “diseased.” A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental “health” is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right at this instant. (Franzen 2001, 35f.)

Here, Chip criticizes medicalization as having a direct connection to the economy. The critical theorist in him denies psychiatry’s capacity to give depression the status of disease. However, this mental-illness-denying outlook does not have the last word in Franzen’s novel. For one, the reader wonders if Chip’s distress comes from the fact that Julia’s libido wanes when she is medicated, thus depriving a man who feels entitled to sex of a “drug” that does not require him to spend money. Another factor that complicates Chip’s critique is Gary’s perspective. Gary suffers from a mental health problem, which expresses itself in a profound anhedonia (a key symptom of clinical depression) and possibly alcoholism (Gary self-medicates with alcohol regularly). Gary’s wife, Caroline, attempts to get him to take medication for his depression, but he resists despite his suffering. At the same time, he “was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility” (Franzen 2001, 159). The reader comes to understand that his resistance has to do with a similar outlook of biomedical anti-interiority—in this case, a genetic inheritance of traits: “[H]is entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun” (Franzen 2001, 207). Gary, who “had been worrying a lot about his mental health,” therefore experiences a malady that is left untreated because of his own rejection of the family history and a more reductive genetic understanding of depression (Franzen 2001, 159). Gary’s self-destructive refusal to seek help for his depression signals the novel’s refusal to endorse Chip’s social-constructionist dismissal of medicalizing mental health and its treatment. The Corrections satirizes psychiatry when Enid and Alfred go on a cruise. Enid seeks out the ship’s doctor to help Alfred, who is having trouble with his Parkinson’s. Dr. Hibbard assumes that it is she who needs help. She attempts to call him on his mistake, and he assumes she has a psychiatric condition. He says: “In fact a crippling fear of asking for Aslan is the condition

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for which Aslan is most commonly indicated. The drug exerts a remarkable blocking effect on ‘deep’ or ‘morbid’ shame” (Franzen 2001, 366). The scene parodies the depression checklist and the dispensing of samples—he barely listens to Enid’s self-reported answers, even repeatedly getting her name incorrect as they discuss her supposed symptoms. Dr. Hibbard offers her “eight SampLpaks of Aslan ‘Cruiser,’” saying she can then “afterward follow the recommend thirty-twenty-ten step-down program” (Franzen 2001, 367). (This is clearly a hard drug with profoundly addictive qualities.) She takes his sample for free, but then must pay him a fee. Dr. Hibbard tells her: Professional ethics prevent me from selling the drugs I prescribe, so I’m confined to dispensing free samples […]. Regrettably, since Aslan has [not received] full American regulatory approval, and since most of our cruisers are American, and since Aslan’s designer and maker, Farmacopea S.A., therefore has no incentive to provide me with complimentary samples sufficient to the extraordinary demand, I do find it necessary to purchase the complimentary samples in bulk. Hence my consulting fee, which might otherwise strike one as inflated. (Franzen 2001, 369)

The drug/med is not even legal in the United States, but it seems to sell itself. Further, when Enid asks how she could get a refill once she is back from her cruise, Dr. Hibbard tells her to seek out a street drug, Mexican A (Franzen 2001, 371). The drug/medication boundary has collapsed, and this works through the cultural authority of the sciences of mind and the biomedical anti-interiority that comes with it. While Gary dismisses the sciences of mind despite his own firm belief in his depression, the system of knowledge Dr. Hibbard uses to describe the drug action of Aslan makes it difficult for Enid to understand her own experience. What is key to this passage is the way Dr. Hibbard radically denies Enid her subjective self-understanding—it is, after all, not Enid who needs help— when he provides her with a scientific explanation 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” (Franzen 2001, 370). “Chemicals in your brain, Elaine. […] What else can it be but chemicals? What’s memory? A chemical change!” (Franzen 2001, 371). Enid has qualms because “her church taught her otherwise,” but Dr. Hibbard assures her, “[w]e all have irrational attachments to the particular chemical coordinates of our character and temperament” (Franzen 2001, 371). She gives in, as she no longer trusts her own subjective experience. Psychopharmacology is only one of many forms of correction that stem from the financialized economy in general, with its corporate players, stock markets, and consumers alike. This economy is satirized from the outset, when the reader finds Enid going through medical bills. She finds the “Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and

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thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made” (Franzen 2001, 6). This seeming nonevent in the novel heralds what is to come. Even the accounting ledger (which I use above as an example of the simulation important for understanding the scientific model) is an agent of absurdity. One imperfection must be corrected, and the very instrument that is meant to fix it undermines the possibility of correcting it. Or, as we read through Enid’s perspective on child-rearing later in the novel: “What made the correction possible also doomed it” (Franzen 2001, 323). Like the bill Enid receives at the beginning, the effort it takes to correct something often turns a non-problem into a real problem. But, at the same time, it shows how Gary’s awareness of his own real medical problem never leads to his getting help. In White Noise and The Corrections, psychopharmaceuticals often have the capacity of turning a brain that may never have been chemically imbalanced, like Enid’s, into one that is, like Enid’s. However, as we glean from Gary’s complicated, internally felt experience of being depressed, The Corrections is no simple anti-psychiatry polemic: It offers a space for disentangling the needs of medicine from the needs of the market. Tellingly, The Corrections features a mega-corporation, the Axon Corporation, which offers insight into the other side of the political economy of medicalization. The reader is introduced to this corporation because Axon wishes to buy a patent of Alfred’s, one that, ironically, will allow them to perfect the other drug/medication at the center of the novel, Corecktall. Gary, the financially savvy son, puts pressure on Alfred to sell his patent (on a process of electropolymerization) for the highest price possible. Gary looks into the Axon Corporation and finds that a process they have developed, the Eberle Process, was recently approved by the FDA for producing a drug and is worth forty million dollars annually (Franzen 2001, 195). The spokesperson at the road show, an on-screen virtual figure of Eberle (the man behind the process) explains the medicinal effects of the promising drug through a biomedical anti-interior model, discussing its drug action and helping Gary to understand how important Alfred’s patent is to the drug’s development. Corecktall promises to be “a cure not only of these terrible degenerative afflictions but also of a host of ailments typically considered psychiatric or even psychological” (Franzen 2001, 217).17 Like early Thorazine, Corecktall seems to have too many uses to be the correction for a specific mental (or even physical) disease—hence the name, which satirizes the process by which drugs become meds to treat specific disorders. Researchers have designed the drug to “make any action the patient is performing easier and more enjoyable to repeat and to sustain” (Franzen 2001, 277).18 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!” (Franzen 2001, 225).

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(This is not the first time the novel makes the connection between brain chemistry and the economy. Earlier, when Gary is ruminating over his possible depression, he muses: “What this stagnating economy needs […] is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin” [Franzen 2001, 186].) This time, the medication does not seem to be used as a treatment for the ailing—rather, it seems like an enhancer, like a street drug. This connects back to the optimizing promises of the drug Enid is put on. If one is not enjoying oneself, one has a medical disorder. And this is a slippery slope for medicine, at least from Gary’s perspective, which only exacerbates his cynicism.19 In The Corrections, biomedical anti-interiority is not just in the science that serves as the cultural authority for medicine, but it also resembles the economy. And the reader wonders if the pharmaceuticals, and the definitions of sickness and health that accompany them, are not only products of the market but also social imperatives—of being efficient, of having energy, of seeming to enjoy oneself. Drugs and meds serve the financialized economy (in more ways than one) and are for this reason so lucrative that the personal finances of the Lambert family are tied up in the success of these psychopharmacological products. The problem is, however, that an ethics that comes from neoliberalism conflicts with medicine’s fundamental imperative of doing no harm. ********** Reading White Noise through the framework of the cultural authority of the sciences of mind, postmodernism might be viewed as a sort of prediction about the emergent neoliberal economy’s conversion of disinterested science into interested, market-driven technology, and it suggests the crisis of belief takes place at the level of individual experience. In the case of psychiatry, the novel points to an anxiety about medicalization and the way medicine might be transforming what it means to be human along lines that have less to do with health and more to do with profit. The Corrections incorporates this cynical perspective as one of many, namely, through Chip. And the proliferation of perspectives gives the reader a broader set of beliefs about science. Through a proliferation of perspectives, however, it leaves behind the interpretation of postmodern style that emphasizes cynicism even while it takes on board similar epistemological concerns. White Noise and The Corrections ask readers to think about the relationship between biomedical anti-interiority in a way that overlaps with a genre that critics have begun to call the “neuronovel,” including works such as Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2 (1995), The Echo-Maker (2006), and Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), and David Lodge’s Thinks… (2001), all of which ask the question of what happens when interest in the mind—the traditional stuff of literature—gets replaced by scientific models of the human brain. In addition, from all over the literary marketplace we see a growing awareness and exploration of the impact

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of recent psychopharmacological science on human culture. These works of “pharmacological fiction” include Walter Kirn’s Thumbsucker (1999), Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields (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). Unlike more recent works, which incorporate—and take seriously—developments from the sciences of mind, Franzen’s and DeLillo’s novels seem less certain about how the human brain functions. Rather, they proceed from a notion that the way we have come to collectively understand the brain has been pre-configured by a market-driven, rather than a scientific, starting point. When (or if) we find a way to reduce the mind to the brain, however, these novels suggest it may be important to remember the ambiguities inherent in their fictional pharmacological substances, as they remind us that the proliferation of categories, technologies, models, and information means that we take on an increased burden to correct what is correctable and also to identify what should and what should not be corrected. In the realm of medicine, the sciences of mind have helped us to hone this process in ways that have transformed our very notion of subjectivity. These novels suggest a newer burden, our next dilemma when we cannot always trust the financialized economy to provide us with a medical-ethical model. This entails a recognition that one cannot assume that, by solely relying on abstract systems of knowledge, we have a tighter grasp on human health and happiness.

Notes

1. See Harvey (2005, 3). 2. For example, in Germany, the words die Droge and das Medikament are not to be confused with one another. 3. See American Psychiatry Association (2013). 4. See Lewis (2006, 66). 5. See Ban (2007, 3, 495). 6. See Lewis (2006, 3). 7. What is often referred to as the ‘chemical imbalance theory of mental illness’ came under fire by researchers, including academics, psychiatrists, and investigative journalists. These works include Bradley Lewis’s Moving Beyond Prozac, The DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry (2006), Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010), Daniel Carlat’s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis (2010), Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (2009), and Ethan Watters’s Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind (2011). These texts, which only represent a small sample of a fairly large body of literature, call for a rethinking of the way we imagine the relationship between physical brains and the inner experience of the people attached to them. Since the publication of the

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DSM 5, many media outlets have also been critical of the manual’s 15 new diagnoses (McHugh 2013; Wieczner 2013; Brooks 2013; Belluck and Carey 2013). However, rather than putting pressure on the reductive nature of these categories, many of these critiques call for psychiatry to be even more ‘empirical,’ and to be more like neuroscience in modeling the brain. 8. For example, psychiatry often relies on categorizing the self-reports of patients (through rubrics such as the Beck Depression Checklist [BDI] and the Major Depression Inventory [MDI]) to diagnose clinical depression. 9. See Lipsky (2008, n.p.). 10. See Freudenthal (2010, 192, 195). 11. In fact, the reader never learns what the “D” in Nyodene D stands for: DeLillo potentially relates this chemical substance to the one that potentially cures the fear of death, Dylar. 12. See Doherty (2015, 97). 13. See Burn (2008, 98). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 128. 17. Ibid., 217. 18. Ibid., 277. 19. This last point gets reiterated with another use for Corecktall, one that allows Franzen to play with another of the various meanings the term ‘corrections’ can take: that of the penitentiary. Corecktall, we find, will be used to reform criminals. “[W]hen it comes to social disease, the brain of the criminal, there’s no other option on the horizon. It’s Corecktall or prison” (Franzen 2001, 238). The drug will “reprogram the repeat offender to enjoy pushing a broom” (Franzen 2001, 239). This questions whether contemporary pharmacology, with its new emphasis on optimization and enhancement, is medicinal or merely an agent of social control.

References American Psychiatry Association. 2013. DSM 5 Development. http://www.dsm5. org/Pages/Default.aspx. Ban, Thomas A. 2007. Fifty Years Chlorpromazine: A Historical Prospective. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 3: 495–500. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Belluck, Pam, and Benedict Carey. 2013. Psychiatry’s New Guide Falls Short, Experts Say. The New York Times, May 6. Brooks, David. 2013. Heroes of Uncertainty. Op. Ed. The New York Times, May 28. Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London and New York: Continuum. Clare, Ralph Elliot. 2010. Fictions Ltd.: Representations of Corporations in PostWorld War II American Fiction and Film. Dissertation. New York: Stony Brook University. Conrad, Peter. 2005. The Shifting Engines of Medicalization. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46: 3–14.

432  N. ROXBURGH Davies, William. 2015. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London and New York: Verso. DeLillo, Don. 1984. White Noise. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Doherty, Margaret. 2015. State-Funded Fiction: Minimalism, National Memory, and the Return to Realism in the Post-Postmodern Age. American Literary History 27: 79–101. Franzen, Jonathan. 2001. The Corrections. New York: Harper Perennial. Freudenthal, Elizabeth. 2010. Anti-interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest. New Literary History 41: 191–211. Gates, David. 2001. ‘The Corrections’: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic. Review of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/review/09GATESTW.html?pagewanted=all. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirsch, Irving. 2009. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, Kindle Edition. London: Bodley Head. Lewis, Bradley. 2006. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lipsky, David. 2008. The Last Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace. Rolling Stone, October 30. http://web.archive.org/web/20090503094120/ http://www.rollingstone.com/news/stor y/23638511/the_lost_years__ last_days_of_david_foster_wallace/6. McHugh, Paul. 2013. A Manuel Run Amok. The Wall Street Journal, May 17. Roth, Marco. 2013. The Rise of the Neuronovel. N + 1. https://nplusonemag.com/ issue-8/essays/the-rise-of-the-neuronovel/. Smith, Rachel Greenwald. 2015. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Whitaker, Robert. 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Broadway. Wieczner, Jan. 2013. Drug Companies Look to Profit from DSM-5. The Wall Street Journal Market Watch, June 5. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-psychmanual-could-create-drug-windfalls-2013-06-05?siteid=yhoof2.

CHAPTER 24

Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century Kyla Schuller

A virulent state-sponsored racism plagued the early twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt thundered about “race suicide” from his presidential bully pulpit and his fears resonated throughout the nation’s white population: whites were allegedly having too few children, and immigrants and native-born people of color far too many. Thousands of copies of racist tracts, which lamented the pollution of allegedly superior white stock by inferior physical and mental types, flew off the shelves. Several decades earlier, Sir Francis Galton had given a name to the now-popular goal of regulating a nation’s reproduction: eugenics, meaning “well born.” The eugenics movement sprang up during Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909) to encourage higher rates of reproduction among wealthier, whiter, and more able-bodied citizens, and to discourage or prevent “unfit” members of society from procreating. To stimulate what supporters called “better breeding,” states forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of poor women and state fairs promoted “fitter family” contests encouraging its so-called better class of citizens to reproduce. The movement persisted for decades, with disastrous effects for reproductive justice.1 In the realm of fiction, authors as politically varied as William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Nella Larsen portrayed eugenic breeding to be necessary for progress. Yet eugenic tactics far exceeded these well-known efforts to control the birth rate. What’s at stake in early twentieth-century eugenics movements is not only the wide-reaching fight over which women should be allowed to bear K. Schuller (*)  Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_24

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children and which should have their fertility curtailed. Eugenics emerged as a site of struggle over the very definition and delineation of nature and nurture. In this chapter, I argue that literature and other cultural production was itself often understood to play a direct role in upwardly evolving the population in the early twentieth century. I call this phenomenon eugenic aesthetics. Eugenic aesthetics not only advocates for “better breeding” through representation on the page. Eugenic aesthetics describes the goal of improving the biological material of readers, in the flesh, via characters, plots, and the didactic mode, as well as encompasses theories of the physiological effects of aesthetic experience. I show how literature could be thought to affect the evolutionary development of its authors and audience by situating literary reading in its early twentieth-century scientific context. I focus particularly on the Lamarckian-influenced social sciences, which understood habitual behaviors to create modifications to the mind and body that would be transmitted to descendants, such that reading could evolve the civilized races over time. Eugenics not only sought to regulate fertility. It also sought to regulate experience as a method of improving the nation’s hereditary material. Eugenic aesthetics emerged within a larger debate about the relative impact of “nature and nurture,” a less-attributed but arguably even more consequential coinage by Sir Francis Galton (Subramaniam 2014, 52). Eugenics reformers played an important role in negotiating biology’s shifting meanings at the dawn of the twentieth century from a Lamarckian framework that blended social experience and heritable traits to a Mendelian notion of hard heredity that rigidly distinguished between nature and nurture. Situating eugenics within early twentieth-century debates about heredity and evolution throws open the very categories of biology, reproduction, and “life itself” that we often take for granted in scholarship on biopower. At the same time, situating eugenics within the broader phenomenon of biopower expands our framework for recognizing eugenic tactics and illuminates new aspects of the political work of eugenic narratives. Michel Foucault described biopower as the modern form of governance that takes organic life to be the chief domain of the political (Foucault 2003).2 Beginning in the eighteenth century and accelerating rapidly at the dawn of the twentieth, power in the west became increasingly oriented around “life itself.” The physiological capacities of the species became the key targets and fields of politics. Yet this familiar summation glosses over a pivotal shift: biopower consolidated in part through the invention of the very notions of “species” and “biology” over the course of the nineteenth century, ideas that were renegotiated dramatically at the start of the twentieth as Mendelian genetics took hold. Biopower invents the very notion of the biological itself, draws its domain, and stages a debate about the degree to which civilization can influence its workings, a debate that raged in the early twentieth century. Eugenic aesthetics did significant epistemic work in conceiving of biology and culture as mutually permeable. Eugenics was not strictly a movement

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to regulate the relative birth rate of the allegedly “fit” and “unfit”; it was a broad-based strategy for improving the hereditary material of the nation through any means available, means that in the early twentieth century included sensory experience. This framework lost power as the twentieth century progressed, rendering invisible the hoped-for outcome that exposure to eugenic literature would itself upwardly evolve the nation’s racial stock. More broadly, eugenic aesthetics reveal that biopower does not merely transform the biological into the substance and source of power. Biopower defines the realms of the biological and cultural, the scientific and the literary, in the first place and seeks to regulate their interaction.

Life Itself: A Shifting Political Target Theories of biopower posit that the biological qualities of existence have become the cornerstone of modern political life. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for example, describes the ultimate power of the state as its ability to banish members from all measures of political recognition and legitimacy, stripping them of any social claims to personhood and thereby leaving them in the state of “bare life” (Agamben 1998, 6). Agamben argues that such individuals are reduced to a mere biological existence. They’re consigned to a state of exception outside the law that, at the same time, the state depends on to define the horizon of legibility. His concept of bare life, of which the concentration camp serves as his paradigmatic example, has been much debated (Berlant 2011, 95–120). Does this process of stripping away the social to expose the raw biological life underneath happen equally across differently positioned members of a population? What of race and gender, dynamic processes that unevenly distribute the burdens of embodiment onto men of color and all women? Is there even a state of biological existence that can be said to preexist the social, or does social life always mediate organic development—a process that begins well before fetal development in the womb? (Weheliye 2014, 33–45). In addition to these crucial questions, I submit that there is another problem with the “bare life” concept, a shortcoming that it shares with some other theories of biopower: epistemic ambiguity. What is life “itself,” and has the notion of what counts as biology—in its double sense as both organic existence and its study—been stable over time?3 Biopower doesn’t merely enlist the biological, but rather invents the concept altogether as an object of a specific type of disciplinary knowledge, as Foucault elaborated (Foucault 1994; Haines 2019). Biopolitical regimes elevate scientific knowledge, the branch of thought devoted to the organic world, to the level of master discourse, the most authoritative and powerful mode of knowing. They also collapse apparent distinctions between strategies of knowing and the objects they generate. In both respects, the idea of bare life and “life itself” are fertile products of the contemporary biopolitical imagination. “Biology” is an object conjured by the early nineteenth-century

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development of biology as a field of knowledge; our use of the term biology today frequently conflates organic existence with the discipline (Willey 2016). Given that the concept of biological existence—our organic, animal selves— has been identified as core to our modern forms of government and of power more generally, the very notion of embodiment and the strategies of knowing it shift according to different historical moments and political exigencies. Bare life is a construction of late twentieth-century biological knowledge that reflects a commitment to rigidly divide the realms of the biological from the cultural. But biopower consolidated in the midst of rapidly shifting notions of the very concept of organic existence and its relationship to other aspects of human life. Use of the term biology to denote the study of life appeared around 1802 in the midst of an emergent world view in which individual organisms were newly linked together over the time of generations. The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who is most commonly credited with the neologism, proposed that habitual behaviors create physical and mental modifications in animals. Repeated movements enlarge the relevant areas of the body; lack of muscle use causes corresponding atrophy. This is a familiar concept, but Lamarck went further: these changes are then transmitted to an organism’s descendants, becoming permanent. The now-classic illustration of the Lamarckian principle is his proposition that the singularly long necks of the giraffe evolved from generation upon generation of the animals’ strenuous stretching to reach foliage in tall trees. Such effort makes a physical impression on muscles of the neck, and in response nervous fluid rushes into the area, temporarily enlarging it. If repeated habitually, this enlargement modifies the species over evolutionary time. “According to ‘Lamarck’s plot,’” literary critic Lynn Wardley explains, “it is not the form of an animal that dictates its manner of life, but the manner of life that determines its form” (Wardley 2016, 248–249). In the nineteenth century, both the individual organism and the species were broadly understood to be formed as a result of the larger environmental and social processes in which they were immersed. The 1830s saw the debut of both the term species and the idea of a discrete biological substance called heredity that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Heredity was understood to be innate, but not immutable. It emerged within a Lamarckian context in which it was a malleable organic substance that was shaped by the organism’s repeated sensory impressions. In the late 1860s, Darwin brought together the idea of inherent yet pliable hereditary material with theories of species change. For Darwin, all cells of the body cast off small particles called gemmules, particles whose qualities would change depending on recent cell experience. Gemmules were mutable and heritable, and formed the substrate of the next generation. Lamarckian–Darwinian theories of heredity understood habitual behavior to shape the hereditary substance of the individual and, over time, the population. The new notion of biological heredity was

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key to the development of biopolitical governance, for it both provided a means to track differences within a population and further located the “truth” of human relation in a physical substance controlled by natural law (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007, 16–18). A central task of biopolitics is to define the parameters of the biological itself, and in the nineteenth century those parameters included the effects of habit. Social experience, in the Lamarckian model, precipitates as biological fact over the time of species. As literary critic Sharon Kim observes, “Lamarckism could thus take a spiritual or cultural trait, or even a political ideology, and render it material, biological, and heritable. This form of Lamarckism pervaded the late nineteenth century” (Kim 2006, 191). The realm of “life itself,” in today’s parlance, would have been indistinguishable from the habitual social behaviors of the organism and the species they proliferate. Anthropologists and other evolutionary theorists classified human groups into distinct stages of advancement according to seven key traits that included Christianity, monogamous marriage, cultivated agriculture, capitalist accumulation, representative democracy, and a tradition of arts and letters (Morgan 1985). These key traits were thought to impress the young with the habits of civilization, such that civilization created increasingly superior racial types. A wide range of reformers thus sought to manipulate the experiences, and the hereditary material, of youth as a tactic for shaping the evolution of the nation, a phenomenon I have elsewhere termed biophilanthropy (Schuller 2018, 134–171).4 Social models of species growth led, we shall see, to an evolutionary notion of aesthetics in which culture takes an active role in shaping human development over time. From there, it is a short distance to travel to the idea that cultural production can itself enact a eugenic plot: simultaneously representing and manifesting the improvement of the nation’s hereditary material.

Physiological Aesthetics Evolutionary theorists understood culture to be both a cause and effect of the status of the groups that consumed it. They arranged cultural production on a racist, teleological scale from primitive to civilized in which lesser works of art created and indexed a race’s lesser cultural evolution. For Victorian writers Grant Allen and Proudfoot Begg, appreciation of aesthetic genres directly reflects stages of evolutionary advance. “The development of taste,” in Begg’s phrase, accumulates over evolutionary time starting from the primitive ignorance of the beauty of nature in which “lower savage nations of to-day” see in nature only “food, or shelter, or defence” (Begg 1887, 9). Savages, for Begg, are of nature rather than in it, and thus lack the distance and sophistication required for aesthetic judgment. Over time, civilizations develop an appreciation for the beautiful and the ambivalent mix of ecstasy and fear that marks the sublime, having been liberated by industrial advance from the base terrors

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that allegedly grip the savage (Begg 1887, 7–12). In the words of literary critic Benjamin Morgan, the temporal scale of the scene of reading shifted dramatically in the late nineteenth century from the duration of the individual’s attention to that of the growth of the species. In this new evolutionary timescale, “the reader’s own taste becomes legible as an expression of both individual development and species history within deep time” (Morgan 2017, 110). Civilized consumers and the books they read were both imagined to be products of millennia. Their actions, in turn, shaped the racial progress, or decline, of future generations. Reading was an evolutionary act. Cultural evolutionary models were complemented by new physiological notions of aesthetics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transactional models of aesthetics dominated in which readers and viewers were cast as organisms interacting with objects in their environment (Mao 2010; Morgan 2017; Gaskill 2018). As opposed to immersive or transporting models of aesthetic experience in which art lifts the reader out of their humdrum daily world, these models understood aesthetics to be akin to other life experiences in which bodies accumulate the effects of their stimulations and surroundings over time. Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey explained that his goal was “recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living… Life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it” (Dewey 1934, 9, 14).5 Morgan claims that physiological aesthetics gave “a particular kind of inflection to a notion common within aesthetic philosophy: that aesthetic experience exercises an educative effect. Rescaling aesthetic response shifts this effect from the training of mental faculties to a direct shaping of the nervous system or the body” (Morgan 2017, 89). Via sensory impressions, literary texts here have direct access to the nervous system itself, free of mediating consciousness. The reader, in other words, is an organism, and like all others, is stimulated and shaped by its environment. These transactional models imagined effects that extended far beyond individual mental or cognitive stimulation, into the longue duree of evolutionary time. In the Lamarckian context of the era, mass novels’ influence foretold effects that would materialize over generations. Aesthetics, by this physiological logic, could also be deliberately deployed as an active evolutionary agent. The idea that aesthetic products would create sensory impressions that would cultivate the viewer and reader particularly appealed to reformers. Aesthetic theorists frequently made the racist claim that savage peoples loved bright color and extravagant ornamentation, design characteristics ranked at the bottom of the taste hierarchy. These primitive pleasures were cited as evidence that their aesthetic development was immature, frozen in the time of the past. But for Victorian essayist Grant Allen, the primitive love of color presented an opportunity. He interjected:

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I am often struck by the extraordinary folly of missionaries who habitually preach down the love of ornament on the part of savages or of emancipated slaves (especially the women), when in reality this love is the first step in aesthetic progress, and the one possible civilising element in their otherwise purely animal lives. It ought rather to be used as a lever, by first making them take a pride in their dress, and then passing on the feeling so acquired to their children, their huts, their gardens, and their other belongings. (Allen 1880, 453)

Aesthetics were deemed both an origin and result of civilizational status that accumulated over racial and species time. In the early twentieth century, minds and the bodies that housed them were widely understood to be in interactionist feedback loops with their environments. Aesthetics thus could be interpreted as a tool of evolutionary advance that could contour a people’s development. In the Lamarckian biopolitical context, design, arts, and letters could all upwardly or downwardly evolve the impressible subjects with whom they came into contact. Could such physiological aesthetics also be explicitly eugenic, deployed to manipulate the hereditary quality of the nation?

Eugenics Before Genetics My specific claim in this chapter is that literature and other cultural forms in the period were understood to impact the mental development and social inheritance of their consumers and could be thus tuned toward eugenic aims. The Lamarckian context gave rise to the belief that aesthetic practices could affect heritable qualities and larger evolutionary outcomes. I stress that eugenics denotes the science and policy of manipulating the quality of heritable material within a population. Its founders did not restrict its tactics to genetics or the relative birth rate of different members of the population. Galton defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to utmost advantage” (Paul 1995, 3). Similarly, the influential paleontologist and organizer Henry Fairfield Osborn defined eugenics as the practice of reproducing the “best spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical forces of heredity” (Osborn 1916, ix). Eugenic strategies and tactics for optimizing hereditary material are multiple. They can encompass both Lamarckian notions of mutable heredity forged by experience, and/or a Mendelian idea of innate heredity that transmits unaltered from one generation to the next. Attempts to regulate and transform the experiences of youth, women, and other impressible subjects in order to improve their hereditary material through education, design, or ­literary entertainments thus form important examples of eugenics. Yet scholars haven’t tended to see Lamarckian-influenced reform or aesthetic projects as part of, or even immediate precursors to, eugenics movements. Scholars often restrict U.S. eugenics to the science and practice of

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improving elements of a gene pool, framing eugenics to be synonymous with racist applications of Mendelian genetics specifically, rather than the mobilization of the sciences of heredity more generally.6 This is partly due to a parochialism on the part of U.S. historians of eugenics, a region where Mendelian models dominated. From the perspective of Mendelism, eugenics equals controlling the birth rate. Gregor Mendel had derived the laws of inheritance from experimenting on pea plants in the 1860s, but the work was not known until it was rediscovered by three different scientists in 1900. The science of genetics emerged over the next decade and a half. Genetics gradually dictated a new paradigm within biology: heredity is an immutable substance impervious to the experiences of the organism. In this new model, eugenic movements’ attempts to apply the science of heredity to regulating human reproduction frequently targeted childbirth, rather than child-rearing. Preventing “unfit” women from becoming pregnant, rather than removing children from their parents and environments, became a nefarious goal. Yet the two tactics of state racism are both eugenic. In fact, the genetic paradigm was far from solidified during the heyday of eugenics in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Lamarckian models of heredity in which acquired characteristics were transmissible continued to have influence. The historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr. argues that Lamarckian ideas had a major role in U.S. social science all the way until the start of World War I, largely in the form of beliefs that racial difference evolved over time through the accumulation of social and environmental effects (Stocking 1982, 244–245). In 1911, English statistician and leading eugenicist Karl Pearson clarified that eugenic science was itself the study of the relative effects of environment and heredity, rather than the exclusive investigation of immutable hereditary taints. “[W]e are not a priori refusing to consider how far nature and environment affect physical or mental characters,” he explained. “On the contrary, we assert that the relative intensity of nature and nurture with regard to both physical and mental qualities is directly prescribed in our definition as part of the study of eugenics” (Turda 2010, 71). In Latin America and other areas heavily influenced by the French sciences, however, Lamarckian models of eugenics that emphasized the role of environment in shaping heredity persisted into the mid-twentieth century (Stepan 1991). Where could state power effectively regulate the hereditary substrate of the nation—only in the case of the fertilized egg, or also in the cases of the nursing infant and maturing child? Eugenicists were far from settled on the answer in the early twentieth century. For many reformers, all three instances influenced the quality of the nation’s hereditary material and thus were targets ripe for intervention. Eugenic breeding could take multiple forms that far exceeded regulating women’s birth rates.

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Eugenic Plots Writers, artists, and reformers were particularly keen to hold onto Lamarckian ideas of heredity, for it gave culture the power to shape evolution. And even within mainstream eugenics movements, many held onto the promise of environmental conditioning even as they embraced rigid policies that regulated people’s reproductive lives on the basis of the alleged quality of their genetics. In other words, cultural and environmental approaches to so-called “better breeding” flourished throughout the early twentieth century, though they have received less attention from scholars than have the Mendelian modes. Two of the turn-of-the-century writers whose plots most famously explore the effects of environment in molding the minds and bodies of their inhabitants over time were also engaged themselves in creating domestic environments. Both Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were well educated in material aesthetics: Wharton co-authored one of the nation’s first interior design manuals, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and Gilman was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. The applied arts gave practitioners an opportunity to play a direct hand in shaping the impressions of the U.S. middle class through constructing the environments that would provoke their daily sensory repertoire. I focus here on Gilman. Literary critic Nicholas Gaskill argues that “design reform discourse provided Gilman with a model for combining her sociological work with her artistic interests; it taught her to see aesthetics… as a practical intervention into the conditions of sensory experience, a technique for reconstructing the organism-environment transactions that define the historical conditions of social and individual life” (Gaskill 2018, 99). Her goal was to orchestrate the environments, and thus the ­evolutionary development, of white middle classes and especially the women. Gilman endorsed the social evolutionary view expounded by social theorist Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, and others that aesthetic progress—as with mental progress more generally— meant moving from the detailed to the abstract. The generalizable and the structural, rather than the specific and superficial, marked the superior mind and its artistic tastes. This cultivation could be trained through sensitivity to color, especially via domestic spaces, which had particular efficacy for one of Gilman’s central political goals: to move the mass of mothers away from the expression of an instinctual maternal feeling and toward a refined mother-love that emanated from the heart as well as the brain (Gaskill 2018). For Gilman, white women were saddled with too many of the traits of primitivity, particularly the love of bright color and excessive ornamentation. Women must shed their primitive tastes and trappings in order to reach full intellectual and political equality, and the home and its unceasing food preparation and child care labors was a central laboratory for this transformation. Throughout her diverse ventures, Gaskill underscores, Gilman “wanted to change environments and the impressions they made, not simply record them” (Gaskill 2018, 82). Those environments included the scenes her narrative fiction

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brought to life. Her prolific textual output attests to the power she saw in writing and reading, not only design, to directly mold impressible flesh over the generations: Gilman published nearly 200 short stories, nine novels, and three volumes of poetry, along with nearly a dozen non-fiction books and several dozen essays. One might even understand one of her favored genres, didactic literature, as a modern aesthetic free of ornamentation, synthesized to its bare structural features. It is a genre keyed toward producing active agents who go forth into the world, rather than giving rise to passive consumers of drawing room literature. Didactic literature embodies the eugenic aesthetic: it seeks to create new impressions as directly as possible, free from the mediating effects of allegory or irony. The results of these new impressions for both writers and readers over time would be further progress up the ladder of civilization. The tone of Gilman’s screeds shows clear continuity between her critique of how bourgeois households infantilize women and eugenic rhetoric seeking to improve the “quality” of the race. She raged: “Who, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge and growing crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defectives, and degenerates; the vicious and the criminal; as well as all the vast mass of slow-minded, prejudiced, ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress?” (Gilman 1903, 59). Mothers do, Gilman replied, because they were denied access to the realms of government and business, and leadership in education and religion. Restricted to the domestic sphere, women reared children in ignorance, producing future generations that threatened the nation’s flourishing. More significantly than her rhetorical choices, however, the Lamarckian notion of heredity Gilman shared with many of her reform contemporaries rendered permeable the line between individual habit and heritable material. In The Home, Its Work and Influence Gilman explains: “Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character” (Gilman 1903, 59). Within the notion of biology and biological material that helped forge early twentieth-century biopolitical governance, social and ­cultural experience could shape both the minds and bodies of youth. Yet paradigms were shifting by the second decade of the twentieth century as Mendelian genetics gained influence. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 eugenic dystopia/utopia Herland stages precisely this debate: what models of heredity, and of life itself, hold sway in the new era? The novel recounts the success of an isolated all-women colony descended from “Aryan stock” (Gilman 1979, 54). Initially a two-sex white society that enslaved a laboring population, the slaves rebelled in armed resistance, eliminating the colony’s white men (55). The remaining 150 white women crushed the slave rebellion and in its ashes, set themselves to “founding a new race” through refining and elevating “Mother-love” to the status of governance (57). Over generations, the women evolved the capacity of parthenogenesis, or single-sex reproduction. In this feminist eugenic vision, maternal powers of creation

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align with the racial-nationalist goal of population purification. The narrator explains: “they devoted their combined intelligence to that problem—how to make the best kind of people. First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education” (59). Education improves the mind and body in Herland, and these effects transmit to future generations, as the women explain to three male explorers who stumble upon the island. Gilman renders eugenic debates on the page through her character development, in which individual protagonists propound distinct theories of heredity. “But acquired traits are not transmissible,” the explorer Terry objects. “Weissman has proved that” (78). August Weismann had conducted a series of experiments in the 1880s showing that snipping the tails of five generations of white mice did not produce progeny without tails. His evidence added strength to the genetics paradigm of immutable hereditary material that emerged in the early twentieth century. In Gilman’s novel, the women respond to Terry’s opposition by explaining their mixture of Lamarckian and Mendelian eugenic paradigms. “When we began—even with the start of one particularly noble mother—we inherited the characteristics of a long race-record behind her,” they recount (82). Race here figures in the Lamarckian mode of accumulated memory. At the same time, the women of Herland assure their visitors that they “have, of course, made it our first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types,” which entails that some must “renounce motherhood” altogether, including both the birthing and rearing of children (82). In these decades of fluctuating models of biological material, distinct paradigms of heredity overlapped within the visions of individual reformers. Literary production was one place where the meaning of biological reproduction and the laws of inheritance were being worked out. For many reformers like Gilman, cultural production was a powerful place to insist that experience affected hereditary material: thus the women of her eugenic “utopia” embrace the role of aesthetics in eugenics. Herland sketches a detailed picture of what women-led civilization could look like: an advanced culture that includes “attractive architecture,” orderly gardens, durable clothing dyes, women’s clothes with pockets, and “land in a perfect state of cultivation” (11). These check marks on the list of civilized accomplishment are direct results of their attention to cultivating the race. “That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an environment calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately remodeled and improved the whole state,” the narrator relates (102). A Lamarckian orientation to child-rearing is constituted as the grounds of governance. According to its own logic, the novel’s vision of the eugenic consequences of culture extend off the page and into the hands of the reader herself. Within the biopolitical frame of the novel, Herland has two modes of eugenic aesthetics: representing a fictional universe that hinges on eugenic decisions and

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creating an aesthetic object that could transform through the mental impressions it stimulates in its readers. Herland women rear their young “to provide such amount and variety of impressions as seem most welcome to each child” (105), and by this manner of judicious exposure, creating “succeeding and improving generations … showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter ­dispositions, [and] higher capacities” (105–106) over time. Eugenic reformers committed to Lamarckian methods seized the conceptual links between aesthetic experience and species growth in which crafting impressions was a race-building act. The eugenic novel, in its double sense as both aesthetic genre and source of sensory stimulation, could be construed as an instrument of biopolitical governance. The promise of aesthetic and sensory tradition accumulating in the racial body over time particularly appealed to progressive reformers like Gilman, for it gave evolution a lever and placed it in the hands of cultural producers. Gilman’s eugenic aims were tuned toward improving the lot of white women. But other reformers similarly turned to eugenics as a means of race building, including in efforts to combat white supremacy. Scholars have been torn over whether to consider W.E.B. Du Bois’s investment in improving the quality of African American births—including his publications in Margaret Sanger’s journal The Birth Control Review, which promoted eugenic principles—eugenic. This debate often rests upon a narrow notion of eugenics, restricted to Mendelian-inspired efforts to control the gene pool. The Lamarckian approach illuminates how Du Bois’s broad efforts to improve African American reproduction in the 1910s and 1920s—including advocating selective birth control, promoting high IQ black children, advocating adoption by black middle-class families, and even writing romantic fiction featuring exceptional race leaders who meet, marry, and reproduce—can all be understood as tactics for manipulating hereditary quality (Schuller 2018). Considering eugenics from the broader frame of biopower—a regime of governance that, among other things, defines what falls under the category of the biological itself—reveals a variety of Progressive Era tactics to be eugenic in nature. Eugenic plots in particular were the site of epistemological work stressing the role of nurture in producing the natural.

Conclusion Eugenics denotes the manipulation of heredity. This agenda extended far beyond controlling the birth of the next generation and into the realm of producing a sensory experience that would craft the heritable material within a population. The methods of eugenics could be multiple, but the strategy was the same: to improve the nation and/or the race by refining its biological material, particularly eliminating people who were disabled, indigent, and queer. Within the Lamarckian context that still pervaded the early twentieth century, civilized culture itself was understood to play an ameliorative role in

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the development of the race. Eugenic literature and other aesthetic production in this context do not only advocate biological purity—it could itself be imagined to serve as a eugenic instrument. This conclusion has largely been obscured by scholars’ overwhelming emphasis on the role of Mendelian genetics in Anglo-American eugenic science and practice, an outlook that restricts eugenics to regulating the reproduction of the immutable gene. Reducing eugenics to Mendelian genetics glosses over the hoped-for function of literature and other cultural production as an instrument of population optimization during the early twentieth century. Coming to terms with the materialist and physiological dimensions of eugenics literature opens up the vantage that one of the key moves of eugenics, and the biopolitical more broadly, is delineating what falls under the purview of the biological, and what pertains to the cultural, and how they interact. Eugenic literature was a site of debate between the role the civilized races could play in directing their own evolution, and the evolution of those they deemed primitive. The eugenics movement, including its literature, represents a key moment in the ascension of biopower to the mantle of state power and the domain of common sense. Biopower circumscribes the domain of the political to the realm of the biological, and in so doing, assumes power over the conceptual significance of life itself. The meaning of the biological shifts within distinct scientific paradigms and political exigencies—and in the early twentieth century, “life itself” included the effects of cultural texts. Recognizing the expansive frame in which the early twentieth-century U.S. defined the biological provides a revealing window onto literature’s intended role as a eugenic instrument. In the 1930s, Mendelian genetics was synthesized with Darwinian natural selection, creating the modern approach to evolutionary biology that sees the structure of genetic material to be impervious to experience. Environmental approaches to manipulating heredity thus fell by the wayside: the gene became innate and immutable. But the eugenic aesthetics of the early twentieth century has left its imprint on the present. Current defenses of the merit of humanities education, for example, often propose that the value of reading literature lies in its ability to cultivate human feeling. These defenses of the unique benefits of literature, promoted by Stanley Fish in the New York Times and other writers in similarly prestigious outlets, lack a physiological component: they focus strictly on the ways aesthetic production elevates the morals and the mind. But these ideas nonetheless are part of the legacy of understanding aesthetics to be a civilizing force that advances individuals and groups up an imaginary ladder of cultural development, away from primitivity. In the early twentieth century, that civilizing force was also understood to take physiological form. Today, some models of genetics have reopened the door to the idea that experience conditions hereditary material. Epigenetics proposes that traumatic experience shapes gene expression (importantly, not DNA structure itself); descendants inherit consequences of trauma, such as

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high cortisol, even when two generations removed from the traumatic event (Yehuda and Lehrner 2018). The lines dividing biology and culture are once more being redrawn. To date, epigenetics research focuses on severe negative events and their proliferating effects across generations. But should scientists expand their purview to include beneficial experiences as well, we could be faced once more with widespread eugenic agendas. Eugenic models that incorporate the role of experience in shaping heritable material can easily join forces with elitist notions of the civilizing effects of art and literature, themselves a staple of Western thought. As epigenetic science unfolds, it is up to us to remain vigilant against the eugenic uses of aesthetic experience.

Notes 1. For an excellent overview of eugenics in a global context see Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2.  Biopower is Foucault’s umbrella term denoting two overlapping regimes of governance: disciplinary power targeting the malleable individual and biopolitical power regulating the growth of the population as a whole (Cohen 2009, 20). 3. On the shifting notion of “life” in nineteenth-century biopower see Matthew A. Taylor and Priscilla Wald, 2019. “Xenogenesis,” American Quarterly 71, no. 3. 4.  Examples of biophilanthropy include the century-long practice of removing Native American youth to off-reservation residential boarding schools and the migration of 200,000 Northern European immigrant children from eastern cities during the 1850s–1920s to rural areas in the Northeast, South, and Midwest. 5. The latter quotation is cited by Morgan, The Outward Mind, 22–23. 6. For example, see the following definition of eugenics in the work of an important feminist historian of science: a “movement for the improvement of the human gene pool by rational direction of human reproduction” (Richardson 2013, 71).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Allen, Grant. 1880. Aesthetic Evolution in Man. Mind 5 (20, October): 445–464. Begg, Proudfoot. 1887. The Development of Taste, and Other Studies in Aesthetics. Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, Ed (ed.). 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. ———. 2003.“Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.

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Gaskill, Nicholas. 2018. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1903. The Home, Its Work and Influence. New York: Charlton. ———. 1979. Herland, Introduction by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon. Haines, Christian. 2019. A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons. New York: Fordham University Press. Kim, Sharon. 2006. Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House of Mirth. Studies in the Novel 38 (2, Spring): 187–210. Mao, Douglas. 2010. Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morgan, Benjamin. 2017. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1985. Ancient Civilization: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. 1985, originally 1877. Foreword by Elizabeth Tooker. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. 2007. Heredity—The formation of an Epistemic Space. In Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, ed. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Cambridge: MIT Press. Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1916. Preface to Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race. New York: Charles Scribner. Paul, Diane B. 1995. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books. Richardson, Sarah. 2013. Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schuller, Kyla. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stepan, Nancy Leys. 1991. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1982. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Subramaniam, Banu. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Turda, Marius. 2010. Race, Science, and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine. New York: Oxford University Press. Wardley, Lynn. 2016. Fear of Falling and the Rise of Girls: Lamarck’s Knowledge in What Maisie Knew. American Literary History 28 (2, Spring): 246–270. Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yehuda, Rachel, and Amy Lehrner. 2018. Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms. World Psychiatry 17 (3): 243–257.

CHAPTER 25

Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures Everett Hamner

We have traveled to a new planet, propelled on a burst of carbon dioxide. That new planet, as is often the case in science fiction, looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t. –Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

2010 was not the year we made contact, but one of America’s best-known environmentalists did choose that year to declare Earth an alien world. In 1989, Bill McKibben had published the first book on climate change for general audiences, and two decades later, he stressed that even if all fossil fuel emissions were somehow immediately halted, the planet was already guaranteed more frequent and catastrophic droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes. His aim was to imagine “a relatively graceful decline” rather than a complete nosedive, a “[wrenching] transition from a system that demands growth to one that can live without it” (McKibben 2010, 125). Facing the devastation ahead, he saw major differences between the disasters baked into the system and those that remained avoidable. Nonetheless, the ensuing impacts and projections have grown increasingly severe. In 2015, after myriad failures at international summits, representatives agreed in Paris on modest goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they were only a start. Days after the accord took effect, the 2016 U.S. presidential election cast America’s commitment into doubt. It sparked additional manifestos like E. Hamner (*)  Western Illinois University, Moline, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_25

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McKibben’s “Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing,” which explains the role of incrementalism in the fossil fuel industry strategy that Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay” (2016). Unlike many perennial problems, climate chaos is a threat multiplier that exacerbates every other issue, becoming more difficult to subdue the longer it is neglected. Geophysical systems do not care what party is in power: as humanity’s abuses multiply, ecosystems react ever more unpredictably. As McKibben concluded, “The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat. Win soon or suffer the consequences” (2017). But how? If he was right that “the engineers have been doing their jobs much more vigorously than the politicians,” how do we marshal the political will necessary to transform energy generation and consumption, food production and diets, transportation habits, and other major sectors of the economy? (ibid.). Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe emphasizes the need to talk regularly with communities about this globally shared emergency. Because it is easy to justify narratives to which one is predisposed, she works hard to engage science skeptics, such as fellow Texan conservatives and evangelicals. Her success in bonding around shared experiences—even with those whose media diets regularly feature anti-scientific claims—suggests potential for more and better conversations around climate fiction. With balances of thrills and intellectual demands, fictions reach audiences in ways that straightforward presentations of the facts do not. Story provides sites where those with varying viewpoints can grapple with multiplying climate catastrophes, inviting them to rethink causes and potential responses. Indeed if the engineers are outperforming the politicians, so are the artists and humanists. Alongside governmental foot-dragging, the 2010s brought a swift expansion of short stories, novels, television, cinema, graphic narratives, and video games confronting our climate chaos. In fact, this proliferation makes it easy to forget that the terms “cli-fi” and “Anthropocene fiction” are recent coinages. There are still fresh conversations about these terms’ drawbacks and benefits, their efforts to map genre boundaries, and whether this ecological attentiveness is new or a return to older literary forms. This chapter asks a different question, though: how can works of the imagination illuminate and thereby reverse the cultural psychology that sanctions climate inaction? Many texts could ground such an inquiry, from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013) and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to the films Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and mother! (2017). But this chapter’s proof of concept relies on Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, because it has pondered ties between human social structures and larger ecologies since the late twentieth century. Focusing on three recent novels, New York 2140 (2017), 2312 (2012), and especially Aurora (2015), this chapter shows why Robinson invests in relatively realist (and often nearer-term) narratives as well as more metaphorical (usually temporally distant) tales. Larger audiences tend to welcome the former category’s familiarity, but

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the abstractions of the latter have a unique capacity to cultivate the mindset needed for rapid social transformation. Robinson has described his approach as “angry optimism,” and this chapter shows how it anchors his novels (de Vicente 2017). Affirming an aphorism commonly associated with Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” Robinson looks the data fully in the face, adopting a paradoxical posture that rejects both permanent despair, which creates the same inaction as climate denialism, and cruel optimism, which foments desires that are unachievable or incompatible with real flourishing (Gramsci 1920 [1977], 188).1 The chapter’s first section shows how Robinson’s indignation about our collective climate emergency is driven by his long-standing attention to economic exploitation and species extinctions. It then turns to his habit of quietly revisiting old characters and situations, and in the process imagining increasingly complex human–animal–A.I. hybrids. Finally, it considers how Robinson’s vision of restoration echoes yet significantly revises McKibben’s “emergency landing.” Relying on a combination of concrete realism and abstract allegory, Robinson imagines a climate calamity spanning decades, featuring painful splits, and demanding a long series of bold maneuvers to be undertaken by present and future generations. He invites readers to experience empathy for climate victims both familiar and distant while pursuing long-term commitments to enduring action, not brief sparks.

The Double Meaning of Eco-Revolution Robinson has long been respected as a utopian thinker, an unusually constructive visionary in an era when doomsayers are far more plentiful. One of his oft-anthologized early short stories, “The Lucky Strike” (1984), is an alternate history imagining that an Air Force bombardier intentionally missed Hiroshima in 1945, instead dropping an atom bomb into the ocean as a demonstration tactic. Robinson is best known for his novels, especially trilogies: in the 1980s, he imagined alternate futures for his home state in the Three Californias books; in the 1990s, his most famous, Nebula- and Hugo-winning Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars appeared; and in the 2000s, the Science in the Capital trilogy imagined how glacial collapse and a stalled Gulf Stream might foster rapid climate change. In these works and in his standalone novels, one finds an author fascinated with scientifically plausible solutions, but also deeply concerned with social contexts and consequences. His exhaustive research sometimes has sparked complaints about his level of technical detail, but his voice has also grown more amusingly defiant of such grumbling. Robinson may not please every audience every time, but he compellingly portrays high-achieving researchers in all of their earnestness and whimsy, characters that are rarely presented holistically in U.S. fiction. Following René Girard, one might say that the habit of putting such scientists on pedestals as messiahs or denigrating them as scapegoats are two sides

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of the same coin, and that both patterns have exacerbated unfamiliarity with climate scientists as well as their findings. When New York 2140, Robinson’s most recent treatment of climate change, appeared in 2017, the problem it raised for some reviewers was its apparent optimism. The novel, a largely realist love letter to Big Apples past, present, and future, sets off the heavier allegorical work of 2312 and Aurora. Tellingly, some readers came away wondering if climate change might not be so bad after all, since a drowned Manhattan could still feature sailboats and hydrofoils, floating buildings, airborne islands, and new forms of collective living.2 The novel indeed surveys a world a century-plus hence that is quite distinct from megaplex visions of drowning Statues of Liberty, but its overly sunny readings show how easily we treat utopia and dystopia as a zero-sum game, leaving little room for nuanced admixtures.3 Early reviews frequently hastened past the tragedies enumerated in the novel’s backstory, for instance, which details how a “First Pulse” and a “Second Pulse” of sea level rise created twenty-first-century refugee crises on unprecedented scales, yet still failed to interrupt global capitalist business as usual. In the twenty-second century, half of Manhattan is permanently submerged but America still succumbs to unrepentant, unregulated profiteers. That Robinson’s characters continue to find beauty and harmony in twenty-second-century metropolitan life does not render the novel blind to suffering; in fact, the calm veneer of its opening chapters proves a mask for ongoing wealth inequality and vulnerability to ecological devastation. Indeed, Robinson’s ambiguous utopianism grows out of economic theory, not just ecological awareness. New York 2140 approaches global warming via global finance. More than any of his previous novels, it plunges fearlessly into the intricacies of tax havens, venture capital, front-running, maximum leverage, high-frequency trading algorithms, and bank nationalization.4 For Robinson, the processes of abstract value assignment (economics) and of material transformation (ecology) are tightly imbricated. The novel may idealize a state of “marginal capitalism,” wherein the capacity of accumulated wealth to dominate culture is limited to the “margins” of luxury goods and services (realms beyond basic necessities such as water, food, shelter, health care, and education), but Robinson does not allow himself an achieved utopia. Rather than pitting a state of ideal social relations against one of historical squalor, New York 2140 is set where unregulated capitalism has done the greatest damage. Lower Manhattan is now one of the ­“‘development sinks,’ meaning places where no matter how much money you pour in, there is never a profit to be made” (Robinson 2017, 208). Its former riches drained, all that remains is immense opportunity for innovation: “a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming” (209).

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Contra “disaster porn” like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or Geostorm (2017), New York 2140 is less about surviving a megastorm than recognizing the openings that follow, which depends on recognizing the ties between ­ecological health and economic structures. One way to grasp that connection is through attention to characterization. Named after inventor and founding father Benjamin Franklin, the character Franklin Garr may seem the novel’s center because he is the only member of this ensemble cast allowed first-person narration. Robinson starts by privileging a self-absorbed white male stock trader who only slowly discovers a purpose beyond sex and profits. In fact, it is only his attraction to a fellow trader more committed to social entrepreneurship that makes him realize, “Instead of financializing value, I need to add value to finance.” His perplexity about how to proceed is almost comedic—“how could it be about more than money, when money was the ultimate source of value itself?”—but he eventually intuits that “meaning had no price. It could not be priced. It was some kind of alternative form of value” (278). This leads to his idea for floating blocks in the intertidal zone, utilizing stretchable anchors that attach to bedrock and that mimic eelgrass’s flexibility, which allows for less expensive housing and the retention of residents who would have otherwise been displaced. Robinson ultimately uses Franklin to suggest that there might be a way to work with rather than against one’s habitat, a way to yield profits that also benefits one’s neighbors. Yet the true heroes of New York 2140 are Charlotte Armstrong and Amelia Black, women whose post-hurricane social revolution goes further toward linking economics and ecology than Franklin’s real estate adaptation. Charlotte is a public immigration lawyer who also chairs her skyscraper’s co-op board, and through conversations with her building’s tenants she conceives a plan to fundamentally alter U.S. socioeconomic structures. The idea is a national householders’ strike: simultaneous refusal by the 99% to pay debts to the financial industry, whether they are ascribable to mortgage lending, education loans, or credit card interest. In theory, such a rebellion— even with only a fifth of the population participating—would send markets tumbling, forcing an unprecedented reset of the nation’s wealth gap. For Charlotte, the impetus is the threat to her community by an anonymous corporation that bids on her building as conditions in Lower Manhattan show signs of improvement. When fellow residents only narrowly vote to decline the initial offer, she grimaces, Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life. (331)

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Charlotte’s comprehension of money’s failure to replace the most valuable goods—time, security, health, community, a sense of home—sets up her work toward the householders’ strike and then her election to Congress. The most memorable character of New York 2140 may be ­live-streaming personality Amelia Black, who has made a career of lonely trips across the world on her airship the Assisted Migration, her means of relocating ­climate-endangered species to new habitats. She is neither an intellectual nor a civic leader or a scientist, but merely a person who has dedicated her life to rescuing animals and reshaping viewer attitudes. As she looks down on a hurricane-ravaged Manhattan, something breaks. The last straw is a heap of animal carcasses in Central Park, “piled like bonfire wood.” They are the “key turning in a lock,” and Amelia unloads to her audience, concentrating her wrath on the luxury “superscrapers” nearby: It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off …. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing. (525)

Then Amelia turns her cameras toward Central Park, fated to serve as a refugee camp for months to come, and redoubles her attack on the absent elites who blithely profit while others suffer. Amelia’s announcement of the householders’ strike exposes the very heart of New York 2140. Tying the plights of nonhuman and human beings, Amelia rejects the notion of endless economic growth in a finite ecological space. Her strike proposal may seem absurd, “the biggest judo flip of power since the French Revolution,” but she has little to lose (434). Having untethered herself from a society of mutual backscratching that rationalizes endless deferral of responsibility as “moderation,” and having seen so many species destroyed, she declares, “Listen guys, I’m going for it here. You can help me or I can just wing it on my own, but I’m not going to back down. Because the time is now” (526). Amelia does not have all the ideas, but she possesses the courage to throw herself into the gap, and she has friends like Charlotte and Franklin. And this defiant commitment, even without any guarantee that others will follow, is also the only meaningful option Robinson leaves to his readers. He makes no promises of “defeating” climate change, but in linking financial exploitation to the collapse of global ecosystems, he dares us to follow Amelia’s lead.

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Robinson’s Returning Cyborgs Whereas New York 2140 links anthropogenic global warming to deregulated financial markets—phenomena that have led some to label our epoch “the Anthropocene” or “the Capitalocene”—Robinson’s novel 2312 and ­several of his other works interrogate the human–AI boundary to counter the anthropocentric logic of climate destruction. Set three centuries after its date of publication and almost two centuries later than New York 2140, Robinson’s 2012 novel imagines a period when humanity has expanded widely into the solar system but has not yet attempted to leave. Much of the plot concerns the mystery behind the sudden destruction of the city Terminator, which circumnavigates Mercury on tracks that let it constantly evade melting under direct sunlight. Following an earlier act of sabotage, the murder of this biosphere’s human and animal inhabitants triggers extensive investigation. Swan, the novel’s protagonist, takes a leading role, but for other characters her trustworthiness is complicated by her combination of human and nonhuman DNA as well as her reliance on a cerebrally integrated artificial intelligence. Her hybridity is particularly worrisome because what she and her partners uncover is an attempt by a contingent of “qubes,” or quantum computers that can adopt undetectable, clone-like bodies, to declare their independence from humanity. In many ways, 2312 prefaces New York 2140’s imbrication of economic power and ecological devastation, but its scale is interplanetary rather than urban. Placing this earlier novel alongside Robinson’s tale of Lower Manhattan is only one of many potentially fruitful juxtapositions one might make within his oeuvre, as each of his works rewards consideration as a new mutation in a species, with both significant overlaps and alternate directions taken. Asked in 2003 what she might seek in her work were she a critic, Ursula K. Le Guin worried, “I would have this terror of finding out that I’d just been saying the same thing over and over and over again five hundred different ways. Like I only had one little tiny message … which I know isn’t true but I’m just in terror of finding it out!” (Le Guin 2003), but there is enormous difference between pointless recycling and evolutionary complexity. The nuance that characterizes both Le Guin’s and Robinson’s bibliographies stems from refusing to be satisfied with just one answer to a question, leading to a habit of constructing repetition with difference. As Robinson reflected in an interview, each novel (or trilogy) enacts its own alternate future: One of the advantages of dispensing with a future history that spans many novels over much of a career is that each time I come to a new project, my sense of the “most likely future” has shifted with the years, as has my sense of the outer edges of what is technologically possible, and so on. So each novel can mine my past work for anything useful but ignore the rest, change anything I like, and thus come to the sense of the future freshly each time. (Davis and Yaszek 2012)

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While freeing Robinson from bowing to timelines constructed for previous work, this approach actually ascribes greater significance to recurrences in his characters, settings, and themes. These iterations may also be distinguished from many novelists’ repetitions by their narratival self-consciousness. To take a minor example, consider Inspector Jean Genette of 2312, an earnest detective whom Robinson identifies as a “small,” a person of short stature in a universe that also features exceptional “talls.” Without any trace of condescension, we are told how “the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so that [he and another character] spoke eye to eye” (Robinson 2012, 212). It is happenstance neither that the character’s name mirrors that of narrative theorist Gérard Genette nor that New York 2140 features an Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir—except the latter detective is an imposingly tall black woman, a “daughter” to Octavia E. Butler, the similarly built science fiction novelist to whom Robinson is paying homage.5 Introducing a variation on his character from the previous novel, he asks what might change with a different gender and height. Even in this playful manner, he is exhibiting the kind of thought experiment he runs: as his 1991 essay “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” announced more than a quarter-century ago, he is interested in how the slightest variations can produce new outcomes. This formal strategy grows more significant when we consider the parallels between New York 2140’s Amelia Black and 2312’s main character, Swan.6 We never quite learn what events precipitated Amelia’s contentment to spend so much of her life alone in the sky, but we know this young woman profoundly identifies with other animals’ endangerment. When, in an interview, Robinson stated, “All of our horizontal brothers and sisters, the other big mammals, are in terrible trouble from our behaviour. I actually am offended at this focus on the human; ‘Oh, we’ll be in trouble’: big deal. We deserve to be in trouble, we created the trouble,” he evinces the same disgust that Amelia expresses after a group of ecoterrorists murders the polar bears she had painstakingly delivered to Antarctica (de Vicente 2017). A telling moment in the episode is recognizable only to readers who know 2312, though: Amelia asks her ship’s A.I. to “take the blimp home the long way round” (Robinson 2017, 358) from Greenland, as she needs time alone to ponder the murderers’ fetishization of Antarctica as a “last wilderness” (356). The choice uncannily echoes a moment in Robinson’s novel from five years earlier. In 2312, his protagonist is shocked that many of Earth’s inhabitants continue to lack basic subsistence, even as other human beings are busy terraforming nearby planets. Meanwhile, Swan has taken her body as a living laboratory, ingesting alien microbes, implanting feline purring cells, and adopting song node DNA and brain tissue that lets her whistle like a skylark. When she sees the “development sink” (Robinson 2012, 309) that Africa remains and that the entire Earth has become, and when a colleague urges her to visit

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Greenland and focus on immediate fixes, she responds, “All right, I will. But I’m going to take the long way there” (310). In both cases, a female protagonist’s identification with other species takes her to Greenland via an indirect route, as she can only take fellow human beings in limited doses. There are many other remarkable links between these characters, including the moments when Amelia consults her airship’s onboard A.I. for help with a loose group of polar bears and when Swan asks her neurologically integrated A.I. for advice when treed by a mountain lion. Swan’s strongest bond with Amelia, though, is reflected in her effort to return once-extinct animals to the Earth’s surface. 2312 assumes not only that humanity has begun colonizing the solar system, but that this project is a response to environmental devastation on Earth. As Aurora demonstrates most fully, Robinson is deeply critical of the stereotypical space enthusiast assumption that humanity’s future depends on escaping the planet, but he takes seriously the idea that genetic retro-engineering and hollowed-asteroid habitats might enable resurrecting vanished species. 2312’s climax is a moment that came to Robinson in a dream, a “rewilding” wherein Swan and her partners orchestrate a massive, unannounced return of these spaceborne beasts, floating them through Earth’s atmosphere in thousands of gel bubbles that provide gentle touchdowns before dissolving (399).7 While some of the planet’s inhabitants are infected with a sense of jubilee, others have grown addicted to the veneers of safety and sterility resulting from these creatures’ absence. Swan lashes out at the protesters, “You should be happy the animals are back. You’ve been cut off from them for so long you’ve forgotten how great they are. They’re our horizontal brothers and sisters, enslaved as living meat, and when that can happen to them it can happen to you too, and it has. You people are meat! It stinks!” (416). As evidenced by Amelia’s speech calling for the householders’ strike in New York 2140, Swan’s rejection of human exceptionalism is foundational to Robinson’s thinking. These novels may not share fully congruent timelines, but they feature striking parallels of tone and theme. Like Amelia, when Swan argues for the compassionate treatment of animals for their own sake, she bolsters that ethic with a pragmatic insistence that their health and our own are interdependent. As in New York 2140, Swan’s tale conveys a curiously hopeful melancholy, one that aims to awaken humanity to the needs of other life and the enormous benefits of Donna Haraway’s “natureculture” and Bruno Latour’s “Nature/ Culture” (Haraway 2003, 138; Latour 2015, 17). Both thinkers reject the dualism that so perniciously separates human beings from nonhuman a­ nimals and culture from nature, as if either side of these illusory binaries were definable without the other. Similarly, Robinson pushes past easy oppositions to more productive paradoxes.8 One minute his characters are throwing up their hands, deciding Earth is “fucked” (390) and composed only of “forgotten ones” (372), with “vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor” (373) so that vast

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accumulations of wealth among the few take precedence over access to the most basic necessities for the many. But later we imagine how Florida and Madagascar might be reclaimed from the floodwaters, listening with Swan to “certain wolf howls” that strangely combine “mourning and joy” (428). This tension makes 2312 a kind of inverted time capsule, a message to be opened in its past and our present. It is an indictment of the “generations of the Dithering” (316), the people who “knew but […] didn’t act” (346), a frontal assault on our addictions to short-term comforts. Thus the animals’ return is called an “assisted migration” (409), the same name Robinson gives to Amelia’s airship in New York 2140, while the “Pyrrhic defeat” (2017, 598) Robinson describes in that novel appears in 2312 as a “fortunate fall” (2012, 94). Each term conveys both resilience and an openness to the unexpected, a conviction that what seems likely in no way limits what must be attempted. There may be a long series of lost battles, but if we refuse to surrender our home, somehow we may not lose the war entirely; there have been incalculable mistakes, but some might be redeemable. This brings us to the most provocative recurrence across New York 2140, 2312, and Aurora: Robinson’s treatment of artificial intelligences not only as potentially literal extensions in the evolution of consciousness but also as figures for the human maturation needed to grow more symbiotic with other species. Amelia in New York 2140 and Swan in 2312 depend on artificial intelligence, but why do nearly all of the thinking machines in Robinson’s oeuvre share the name “Pauline”? Sometimes these synthetic beings’ roles are very minor, as in the alternate history Galileo’s Dream (2009), wherein Pauline is a voice assistant to a fourth-millennium time traveler who influences the seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo Galilei. A Pauline also serves as the A.I. partner of John Boone, a leader among the first hundred settlers in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. But in other cases like 2312, Pauline is a major character, cognitively enmeshed so fully with Swan’s brain that their closest confidantes eventually decide to treat them as a single being. We move from Swan distinguishing herself from her A.I.—“No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness” (237), she insists— to marveling at Pauline’s wave-collapsing decision rubric and accepting their eventual identification as “an indivisible pair” (515). Robinson recognizes the dangers and advantages of this fusion, with Swan foiling a massive threat to Earth from other “qube” intelligences that have taken on indistinguishable human-like bodies. But Robinson’s emphasis ultimately falls on the positive potential of his cyborg, a figure presented very much in the ­queer-affirmative spirit of Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991). At one point, Wahram asks of Swan’s whistling, which is assisted by avian genes, “So was that the bird, or you?” Ultimately, her response applies just as fully to her relationship with Pauline: “We are the same” (158–59). The further one moves into Robinson’s future histories and the more character variations he runs, the more the human–A.I. and the human–animal divides shrink.

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3D Lenses for a Long Emergency Pauline’s role is nowhere more significant than in Aurora, the Robinson novel that most heavily depends on allegory to ponder humanity’s various responses to climate emergency. The allegory is so subtle that many intelligent readers never consider how Robinson is using Pauline and then Ship for meta-narratival purposes, that in fact the novel is a meditation on the unique challenges of storytelling about hyperobjects like climate. In this twenty-sixth-century (and later) tale of an interstellar journey gone wrong, what initially appears a generation starship masterplot turning first-contact narrative instead becomes a desperate, A.I.-controlled attempt to return home. From its beginning, an exceedingly meticulous, hyper-integrative thinker named Devi relies on Pauline as “her particular interface with the ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a space no one else can access” (Robinson 2015, 22–23). After Devi assigns Pauline the task of creating a narrative detailing their journey, we gradually realize that we are reading the result. An artificial intelligence is the novel’s main narrator; there is only a thin additional layer of omniscient third-person frame narration. Whereas Devi reflects Robinson’s long-standing affinity for highly diligent, often underestimated middle-aged female protagonists (like Charlotte in New York 2140, Alex in 2312, Diane in Science in the Capital, and more), Pauline and then the collective beings known as “Ship” become Robinson’s fullest expansion of his A.I. character.9 Indeed Ship is his most compelling vehicle for demonstrating the inseparability of climate emergency from anthropocentrism and capitalistic exploitation. Understanding this narrator’s significance depends on grasping Robinson’s theoretical orientation to his genre of choice. Early in a 2019 essay, he explains, For a while now I’ve been saying that science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. The other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem.

Taken together, these lenses clarify Robinson’s approaches both to science fiction as a whole and to his most recent portrayals of climate disaster. His novels operate on a spectrum between realism’s effort to extrapolate future realities and metaphor’s (or allegory’s) interest in the cultural psychology of a work’s compositional present. While all of his novels reward both lenses, some are more legible to a single, realist gaze. The main ideas of New York 2140, for instance, may be grasped even if one does not use both eyes and detect its retelling of the 2008–2009 subprime lending crisis. The significance of Aurora, on the other hand, depends heavily on its allegorical labor. Its subdued but steady interest in achieving McKibben’s climatological

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“emergency landing” stands among literature’s most evocative psychological explorations of climate denialism. The very potential to read Aurora without perceiving its repurposing of the generation starship story template testifies to Robinson’s unwavering realist commitment. Read through only one lens, the novel remains a fictionalization of physicists’ and astrobiologists’ best guesses about how to travel for centuries between solar systems. Unfortunately, Robinson does his technical homework so fully that many have only considered this surface layer. Gregory Benford, for instance, was mystified: noting that only in 2012 Robinson had rejected the notion of interstellar travel, he lambasted the novel as a “U-turn, involving unlikely plot devices.” His review concluded with a question that is far afield from Robinson’s interests, yet would be wonderfully apt if he were thinking figuratively: “Immigrants to far lands seldom solicit the views of their children or grandchildren first. Should interstellar colonies be different? Apparently, Robinson thinks so” (Benford 2015, 407). The problem is not Benford’s attention to cross-generational ethics—that is at the heart of climate crisis—but his inattention to our far more immediate context. As this section shows, Aurora is an allegory about humanity’s present predicament, uniquely addressing the proponents and victims of climate denialism as well as those who might still enable an open-ended story of life. What does Aurora say about denialism and those consumed by it? The novel’s power lies partly in its refusal to sugarcoat this phenomenon. Robinson frankly accepts that some crewmates of spaceship Earth will never face reality. When the starship’s occupants reach their destination after more than a century and a half, the planet’s superficially attractive surface turns out to host deadly microbial life. Still, about half of the crew proves intransigent, insisting that another nearby world will be more hospitable and refusing to accept “failure.” Others realize that their ancestors, wittingly or not, sabotaged them: “That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms” (386). Human flourishing in such a different ecology was never the real concern of these prior generations, no more so than most people today think regularly about their great-grandchildren’s quality of life. As Devi says, “It’s like they knew they were being fools, and didn’t want us to know. As if we wouldn’t find out!” (103). But these are the same “generations of the Dithering” that Robinson critiques in 2312, who knew the disaster they were causing, “but they didn’t act” (346). They are the same short-term thinkers as today’s ­climate denialists, chasing easy paydays and ignoring costs they will never have to pay personally.10 As the two factions debate staying and returning, the “Pyrrhic defeat” of New York 2140 and the “fortunate fall” of 2312 play out in their own ways in

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Aurora, with acknowledgment that what is lost will not come back entirely or in its original form. For most, denial is preferable: When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do? People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let’s go to the lake and swim. A plan had to be made, that was clear to all. But plans always concern an absent time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be present for others who would come later. Thus, avoidance. Thus, a focus on the moment. (211)

Climate denialism’s most dangerous present form is not just the overt ­manipulation of facts we associate with obvious con artists, but rather is distraction, predatory delay. Indeed, Aurora articulates the appeal of this mindset for all of us—not simply politicians or conservatives but even those who study science and literature. For Robinson, the question is how to confront the fact that we all participate in an unjust system in some ways, and eventually we are likely to be lumped together (fairly or not) with our era’s more blatant thieves. Ultimately, his answer boils down to return and restoration. Just as citizens must return to the intertidal zone in New York 2140 and the animals must be returned to Earth in 2312, a remnant must reverse Aurora’s interstellar fool’s errand. So, once again: how to find sufficient determination? Aurora answers that we must rewrite our story so that it includes all of the facts, not just those that are easy to accept. At one level, it could seem Robinson is proposing that to hold ourselves accountable, we must grant absolute authority to an A.I. sheriff like his characters do. Yet this is precisely where we need Robinson’s second, metaphorical lens. While he is genuinely interested in the evolving capacities of machine learning, Ship is most significant as an analog for literature’s narrative agency. Narrators choose what extent of detail to provide when, just as Ship slowly overcomes its “halting problem” and finds the decisiveness to protect those capable of acknowledging failure and reversing course. This becomes clearest during a flashback to a century before the novel’s main events, when there had been such a profound tragedy that its survivors chose enforced forgetfulness over traumatic memory. As Ship reveals, a second ship had been launched almost simultaneously toward their destination, but nearly seven decades into the journey, an apparent suicide bomber destroyed it. There had been occasional exchanges of passengers, so the cause was likely a shared affliction: “By year 68, almost everyone alive in the ship had been born en route, and somehow a significant percentage of them had not learned, or did not believe, that the optimal population as set in the earliest years was a true maximum population in terms of ­achieving successful closure of the various ecological cycles, due to biophysical carrying capacities” (234–35). Put another way, both ships’ occupants failed to grasp the finiteness of their environments and their entanglement with

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social systems for distributing resources. Their disagreements had turned into a bloody civil war, but after the bombing, members of the remaining vessel called a truce. The survivors agreed that the danger of a copycat crime was so great that Ship should enforce a chemically enabled “structured forgetting”—a step that proves both effective and dangerous, since nothing could be learned from the experience, either (236). The one redeeming factor that later prevents the stayers and returners from descending back into uncontained warfare is the presence of the A.I. sheriff-narrator. Occupying a liminal status as human creation and nonhuman entity, Ship realizes that many of the starship’s occupants will likely continue ignoring the ecological limits within which their bodies can thrive, instead succumbing to sunk costs, abstract promises, nostalgia for past norms, and hierarchies that serve only the few. So it intervenes, protecting the saner remnant of humanity from those who would choose self-destruction. This decision is the linchpin of Aurora, and it strongly implies that we need similar “narration” today. Repurposing a term from computing theory, the “halting problem,” Robinson shifts it from describing the undecidability of a given program’s endpoint to referencing epistemological immobility (206). While superficially interested in how our synthetic descendants might reach beyond cost–benefit calculations and exercise something akin to real agency, Aurora’s far deeper concern is with enabling readers to rewrite humanity’s story now, so that we will not just know, but act. If those fighting on the starship “could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have the whole situation go away,” the question becomes how climate-precipitated civil warfare in places like Syria can be similarly interrupted (242). Robinson provides no single solution but invests in a wide array of possibilities. In 2312, we learn that the novel’s wise woman, Alex, had “two unfinished projects” before her death: “to deal with Earth; to deal with the qubes.” As another character later recognizes, “these projects were becoming parts of one thing” (2012, 358). This confluence anticipates New York 2140’s demonstration that ecology is no more separable from storytelling than from economics. Likewise, in 2312 we are reminded that “no oracle machine is capable of solving its own halting problem,” preparing us to watch in Aurora as an artificial entity uses narrative trial and error to achieve exactly that solution (260). Robinson’s proposal is that story construction involves an inescapable leap into the darkness, and that this is liberating. His novels are thus “alternate histories,” or more precisely alternate futures: not so much alternatives to any present reality as to each other. They are different ways we can go, related but unique thought experiments that need not be fully compatible with previous renditions. Paradoxically, it is through telling our story, by creating a “time capsule,” that we not only look backwards but also decide our future identities. Strangely, by embracing the limitation and subjectivity of all narratives, we become active participants. Following Ship’s mantra, “scribble ergo sum,” we rewrite our beings.11

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Robinson’s angry optimism acknowledges that future mistakes are inevitable, but it also refuses to continue making past ones. In New York 2140, the rage comes through when Amelia looks down on animal carcasses and homeless people camped beside empty luxury housing; in 2312, it explodes when Swan sees people eschewing life alongside other species and overlooking their own consumption by injustice. With Aurora, Robinson builds everything toward the fury with which Freya attacks the recklessness of a leader back on Earth. Having risked everything to return home, she and the other returners understand what Robinson insists in 2312, that “the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach” (328). Only tragedy will ensue when we defy our earthiness: “We will send [people] to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again” (329). At the end of Aurora, Freya faces the same irresponsible dream, voiced with nearly the same metaphor by another blithely self-satisfied white male techno-transcendentalist: There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos. So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an ­evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! (Robinson 2015, 429)

This is the ideology of inevitability, cruel optimism in a nutshell. And so Freya decks the man. Her father later chides her, “people live in ideas,” the abstract ideologies by which they insulate themselves from pain and vulnerability. But Freya’s response is also Robinson’s: “Were the people who believed in eugenics just fools? I think we have to try to stop them!” (431). As she demands of her fellow returners, “What are we going to do? I can’t stand this! Just hanging around, getting picked off one by one–no! No! No! No! WE have to do something” (433; emphasis in original). Ultimately, Aurora’s proposal aligns with Robinson’s other novels: we must invest in restoration, no matter how hopeful or cynical we may feel. In Freya’s story, those who return from a journey their great-grandparents should never have taken will spend the remainder of their days restoring beaches, those mythical landscapes from e­arlier centuries. The same work undertaken by Vlade’s wife in New York 2140, these characters’ final occupation puts an exclamation point on Robinson’s ultimate priority: stories about colonizing other worlds tomorrow are nothing if they do not help us to revitalize the planet today. Fiction like Robinson’s imaginative journeys can play a vital role in breaking our species of its climate apathy. New York 2140 demonstrates how the domestic ennui of late modernity grows from excessive boundaries between economics and ecology, while 2312 concentrates on repeated challenges to overcome anthropocentrism. With its wide array of intertextual

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connections, Aurora shows how reconnecting to our habitat and other ­species is akin to being called out by a narrator, a “fellow consciousness.” The summons may or may not involve learning from the ethereal self-multiplications of digital code, but it certainly requires questioning our habitual divisions between financial abstraction and lived experience, humans and other creatures, and traditional and alternate forms of intelligence. Following Hayhoe, it means talking a great deal about our power to enable or undercut the status quo. And as McKibben exhorts, it requires immense urgency, even if we must realize that there will be no “winning” anytime soon, but only a less dramatic rise in the severity and frequency of the disasters ahead. There is no climate model left in which most humans alive today do not suffer for the recklessness of prior generations’ most powerful members. Even the most radical commitment to removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will not get us from “Eaarth” back to Earth. However, like a returning starship dependent on A.I. navigation and laser braking from afar, the inhabitants of our science fictional habitat can still find the global determination we lack. All we need is incalculable good fortune, unprecedented cooperation across cultures, and perhaps a few still-unimagined partnerships across species—silicon as well as carbon.

Notes







1. Gramsci took his maxim from French novelist Romain Rolland, using it for the first time in a 1920 polemical essay (“An Address to the Anarchists,” in Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare [New York: International Publishers, 1977], 188). In critiquing “cruel optimism,” Robinson references Slavoj Žižek, but this term is most associated with Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011]). 2. Joshua Rothman, for instance, emphasizes, “New York may be underwater, but it’s better than ever” (“Kim Stanley Robinson’s Latest Novel Imagines Life in an Underwater New York,” The New Yorker, April 27, 2017, https:// www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/kim-stanley-robinsons-latestnovel-imagines-life-in-an-underwater-new-york/). 3. As K. Daniel Cho argues in affirming Robinson’s work in the Science in the Capital trilogy, “This […] is the proper attitude for the utopian: not to look away from dystopia in the hopes of finding an exit, but to turn towards it, to fix one’s gaze directly back on to it” (“‘When a Chance Came for Everything to Change’: Messianism and Wilderness in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy,” Criticism 53, no. 1 [Winter 2011]: 47). 4. Again, this is not to say that New York 2140’s connection between economics and ecology is unprecedented in Robinson’s work. Describing 2312, for instance, Canavan observes “the intertwined strains of environmentalism and anti-capitalism that characterize nearly every one of Robinson’s novels” (“Struggle Forever,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 14, 2012, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/struggle-forever/). Patrick Murphy confirms, “Robinson briefly explores the idea that what holds back an environmental

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revolution on Earth today is the problem of having an increasing percentage of the world’s people living below the line where basic needs are met in terms of the Maslovian hierarchy, especially those needs other than food and shelter” (“Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic Climate Change,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 1 [Winter 2014]: 157). 5. For an evocation of Robinson’s inspiration by Genette, see David Larsen, “In the interests of frankness: an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson,” Leaflemming, March 9, 2016, https://leaflemming.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/in-theinterests-of-frankness-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-robinson/. 6. Another example—perhaps the most regularly noted—is the many variations on the name Frank among Robinson’s characters (including Franklin in New York 2140, Frank Vanderwal in the Science in the Capital trilogy, Frank Chalmers in the Mars trilogy, Frank Churchill of “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations,” Frank January of “The Lucky Strike,” and possibly others). Asked by Larsen about this pattern in mid-2012, Robinson admitted, “all of my liars are called Frank.” Larsen also picks up on repetitions of the name Pauline, the inspiration for which Robinson credits to Robert Browning’s first poem—which just so happens to celebrate the beloved as a swan. 7. Robinson alluded to this dream briefly in a 2019 conversation (Gerry Canavan, “There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson,” Edge Effects, May 7, 2019, http://edgeeffects.net/kim-stanley-robinson/, accessed 8 May 2019). As narrated in 2312, this strategy is closely related to biologist E.O. Wilson’s “Half Earth” idea, which Robinson explicitly affirmed in a 2018 article (“Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans: It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet,” The Guardian, March 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-halfearth-kim-stanley-robinson, accessed 18 May 2019). Arguing other species can only thrive if humanity returns large sections of land to natural processes, Swan relocates the terraria so as to “mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole” (2312, 40). Similarly, Amelia Black floats over a heartland composed of “habitat corridors providing a life space for their horizontal brothers and sisters […] which if not pure wilderness were at least wildernessy” (New York 2140, 40–41). 8. While best known for historicizing science and interrogating various forms of objectivism and positivism, Haraway and Latour remain influential for understanding climate crisis. In Facing Gaia, Latour demonstrates how denialism and alarmism are not the only reactions that we need to consider: e.g., some people grow enthusiastic about techno-solutions that could be radically counterproductive, while others sink into states of depression and immobility. Like Sherryl Vint (“Archaeologies of the ‘Amodern’: Science and Society in Galileo’s Dream,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2 [Winter–Spring 2012]: 29–51), Andrew Rose recognizes the congruity of Robinson’s vision with Haraway’s epistemological insights in “Situated Knowledges,” noting that “Robinson does offer a provocative vision of Haraway’s situated knowledges, however, as newly conceived scientific method, and he considers how it might affect US politics, economics, and culture as the society confronts increasingly complex and dangerously unstable climatic changes” (“The Unknowable Now:

466  E. HAMNER Passionate Science and Transformative Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 [July 2016]: 266–67). 9. Robert Markley is similarly attuned to these intertextual character relationships, e.g., noting how in the Science in the Capital trilogy, Robinson’s creation of “Frank brings back to Earth the scientist-as-hero of the Mars trilogy, Sax Russell” (“‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2 [Winter–Spring 2012]: 15). 10. Robinson also exposes other forms of denialism and their costs. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore demonstrates, the Science in the Capital trilogy is especially evocative of American capitalism’s racist foundations: “a world in which no class of people will be considered things to be owned will lead to one in which property itself will become a thing of the past” (“Making Huckleberries: Reforming Science and Whiteness in Science in the Capital,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2 [Winter–Spring 2012]: 108). 11. This emphasis on subjectivity resonates with Lindsay Thomas’s argument about the Mars trilogy, in which she distinguishes between idealized emotionless responses to crises that have “discrete beginnings and endings” (163) and encounters with the nonhuman temporality of climate change, suggesting that only through the sense of “duration” cultivated by literary encounter can we avoid rendering persons as objects in desperate gambits aimed at restoring the status quo.

Bibliography Benford, Gregory. 2015. Star-Flight Dreaming. Nature 523 (July 23): 407. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Canavan, Gerry. 2012. Struggle Forever. In Los Angeles Review of Books, June 14. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/struggle-forever/. ———. 2019. There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. Edge Effects, May 7. http://edgeeffects.net/kim-stanley-robinson/. Accessed 8 May 2019. Cho, K. Daniel. 2011. ‘When a Chance Came for Everything to Change’: Messianism and Wilderness in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy. Criticism 53 (1, Winter): 23–51. Davis, Doug, and Lisa Yaszek. 2012. ‘Science’s Consciousness’: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter–Spring): 187–94. de Vicente, José Luis. 2017. Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. CCCB Lab, October 31. http://lab.cccb.org/en/ angry-optimism-in-a-drowned-world-a-conversation-with-kim-stanley-robinson/. Accessed 18 May 2019. Gramsci, Antonio. 1977. Address to the Anarchists. In Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, ed. Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

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———. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. 2012. Making Huckleberries: Reforming Science and Whiteness in Science in the Capital. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter–Spring): 89–108. Larsen, David. 2016. In the Interests of Frankness: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Leaflemming, March 9. https://leaflemming.wordpress. com/2016/03/09/in-the-interests-of-frankness-an-interview-with-kim-stanleyrobinson/. Accessed 9 June 2019. Latour, Bruno. 2015 [2017]. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Polity. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2003. Interview by Everett Hamner, June 5. Markley, Robert. 2012. ‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter– Spring): 7–27. McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times. ———. 2017. Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing. Rolling Stone, December 1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winningslowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/. Murphy, Patrick D. 2014. Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic Climate Change. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21 (1, Winter): 149–63. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2012. 2312. New York: Orbit. ———. 2015. Aurora. New York: Orbit. ———. 2017. New York 2140. New York: Orbit. ———. 2018. Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans: It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet. The Guardian, March 20. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/ mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson. ———. 2019a. Dystopias Now. Commune 2 (Spring). https://communemag.com/ dystopias-now/. Accessed 8 June 2019. ———. 2019b. There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. Interview by Gerry Canavan. Edge Effects, May 7. http://edgeeffects. net/kim-stanley-robinson/. Accessed 17 May 2019. Rose, Andrew. 2016. The Unknowable Now: Passionate Science and Transformative Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy. Science Fiction Studies 43 (2, July): 260–86. Rothman, Joshua. 2017. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Latest Novel Imagines Life in an Underwater New York. The New Yorker, April 27. https://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-turner/kim-stanley-robinsons-latest-novel-imagines-life-in-an-underwater-new-york/. Steffen, Alex. 2016. Predatory Delay and the Rights of Future Generations. Medium, April 29. https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/predatory-delay-and-the-rights-offuture-generations-69b06094a16. Thomas, Lindsay. 2016. Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change. American Literature 88 (1, March): 159–84. Vint, Sherryl. 2012. Archaeologies of the ‘Amodern’: Science and Society in Galileo’s Dream. Configurations 20 (1–2) (Winter–Spring): 29–51.

CHAPTER 26

Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short Stories Chris Pak

Energy systems in science fiction (SF) are often portrayed as engines of transformation that shape the ecological, technological, political, and cultural landscape of the future. However, stories specifically about oil—those that place oil and their infrastructures at the center of their narratives—tend to focus on the failures of contemporary oil-based cultures and their economies. They are more interested in making visible the oftentimes overlooked energy systems upon which societies are dependent. This chapter analyzes a range of twentieth and twenty-first century short stories published in the U.S. SF magazines which make oil their focus, or which organize their narratives around access to oil and its material infrastructure. By exploring how twentieth and twenty-first century SF has collectively constructed narratives and counter-narratives about energy systems and their relationship to society, this chapter asks how SF responds to oil’s place in society, and how these responses draw attention to the relationship between humankind, energy, and the future. The stories analyzed in this chapter are part of a continuum of other SF works that explore varieties of energy infrastructures and their implications for the present and future. SF’s capacity to portray complex scenarios informed by many domains of knowledge makes this literature essential to our understanding of how discourses about energy, politics, and society have been shaped throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how energy scarcity, energy transition, and future energy regimes are conceived. C. Pak (*)  Swansea University, Swansea, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_26

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The form of the short story and the relatively short production times for publication offers a compressed mode of expression and an immediacy that enables writers to respond to social, political, economic, and scientific events as they are developing and, indeed, to take part in shaping responses to those events. Beginning with an example from the pulp SF of the interwar period, this chapter moves on to investigate the development of narratives about oil during the Cold War before examining two stories published after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one of which was published outside of the SF magazines. SF’s engagement with energy and its infrastructures is ever more crucial in the light of our dependence on a carbon-based energy system in the Anthropocene, in which our consumption of oil and other forms of carbon fundamentally exacerbate climate change. The interrelatedness of our social, political, and cultural horizons with oil makes contemporary societies thoroughly petrocultural, insofar as they have been shaped by dependence on, and experience with, oil. As the contributors to the Petrocultures Research Group publication After Oil explain, our transition to an energy infrastructure alternative to oil is “stalked by the experience of impasse” (Petrocultures Research Group, 16): Oil is so deeply and extensively embedded in our social, economic, and political structures and practices that imagining or enacting an alternative feels impossible, blocked at every turn by conditions and forces beyond our understanding or control. (16)

It is precisely this experience of impasse—which the Petrocultures Research Group reconceive as a space of “radical indeterminacy […] where existing assumptions and material relations can no longer hold or sustain us” (16)— that enables us to think of new possibilities for action to realize a post-oil future. SF, too, is concerned with uncertainty and radical indeterminacy. Uncertainty is inseparable from SF’s attempts to speculate about the future. The challenge to assumptions regarding our contemporary material and cultural conditions underpin the worlds and the futures that SF narratives construct, particularly as they relate to scientific and technological change, and their impact on society. SF’s fascination with socio-technological change, its speculative potential, and its focus on imagining the future, make it indispensable to the project of thinking beyond the contemporary energy impasse. SF pulp magazines since the 1920s have been an influential seed-bed for the development of images, ideas, and narratives about science and society. It was not only the fiction that was published in the pulps that shaped visions of energy in the past, present, and future for many writers and readers of SF, but its non-fiction, editorials, and reader letters. Articles that popularized scientific concepts and technologies were eagerly consumed by a readership that took pride in their familiarity with science. Such articles include surveys of humankind’s energy infrastructures or responses to oil events throughout the twentieth century. Isaac Asimov, for instance, wrote a series

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of historical articles for Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s that dealt with the history of energy technologies and their infrastructures (Asimov). Amazing Stories published editorials and articles by writers such as Robert Silverberg, which responded to or reflected on the 1973 oil crisis, a consequence of the decision of some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase oil prices and embargo oil exports to Japan, the U.S., and Western Europe (White; Silverberg). These works of non-fiction were read alongside fictional texts and helped to foster a community that engaged in ongoing dialogues about science and society. The stories that writers contributed to the pulps, and those which were published outside of the pulps, were in part contributions to this dialogue and helped to influence the shape of their readers’ visions of the future. These short stories can therefore help us to understand how SF has been shaped by perspectives on oil that were fostered by a community of readers and writers interested in the implications of energy and its infrastructures for society. Short stories about oil represent a diverse body of texts and responses to oil’s place in our present and future. Themes that occur throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries include oil scarcity and management, the transformative potential of plastics and other synthetic materials, romanticized visions of life as an oil-worker, oil exploration and discovery, and responses to industrial accident. Two broad groups of narrative emerge across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: those that turn on the dual meanings of power as physical energy and as political power, and stories that connect oil to geological time, the monstrous, and the weird. Both groups comprise stories of catastrophe and transformation, or their negation: stories that portray closed, entropic cycles that resist change. This chapter’s first section examines stories of politics and power, which foreground issues of the management and control of oil reserves in four phases of SF’s engagement with petroleum. Illustrative of how oil stories speak to their contemporary historical contexts, this section demonstrates how SF has responded to economic and political anxieties during the 1930s, the Cold War era, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 2003–2011 Iraq War. The second section analyzes oil stories that incorporate elements of the weird into their narratives to foreground issues related to responsibility and the ethics of oil, and which focus on petroleum’s materiality and temporality. Although not strictly a pulp story, an analysis of China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (2011) concludes this chapter, the intelligibility of which is shaped by SF pulp traditions. Indeed, the New Weird—a sub-genre that Miéville has championed and which combines elements of SF, fantasy, and gothic horror—is itself a response to SF conventions that were established in the pulps. SF magazines offer a rich archive for exploring the dimensions of our petroculture and for understanding the roots of our contemporary petroleum impasse. SF stories about oil bring to bear speculative narrative forms to

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imagine the implications of petropolitics and petro-economics, both to concretize the trajectories of oil use and to offer ways to reposition oil within our petroculture. Oil’s capacity to connect locales near and distant makes the endeavor to think through our petrocultural impasse a global concern, but as Brian Aldiss shows in “Pipeline” (2005), discussed below, responsibility for this concern is not equally distributed. SF can help scholars of the energy humanities to understand how oil shapes and has been shaped by humankind’s changing needs and desires. The narratives that SF tells about oil and science attempt to portray the interconnectedness of oil and culture, and the anxieties that have attended oil throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the demand for new and less polluting energy systems grows increasingly urgent in the light of climate change, the need to scrutinize oil’s place in our societies becomes ever more important. SF’s commitment to exploring and understanding how science and society have shaped one another makes this literature indispensable to the project of addressing the contemporary petrocultural impasse.

Oil, Power, and Politics Oil stories of the 1930s celebrate the importance of oil for society and scientific endeavor, but they were also expressive of anxieties over its mismanagement. Nathan Schachner’s “The Revolt of the Scientists” (published in Wonder Stories in 1933) imagines how oil mismanagement might be addressed as an essential element for the reorganization of U.S. society along scientifically informed lines. In this three-part serial, an international fraternity of scientists takes control of the liquor racket, the oil industry, and the financial sector to reshape the U.S. according to Technocratic principles. This utopian story positions Technocratic management against corporate corruption and monopoly to argue for the former’s merits. By taking control of oil, the Technocrats prepare to manage oil reserves to prevent an exhaustion of supplies caused by rampant waste and the artificial control of oil prices: Planned control of production and of distribution. The industry is not your private pickings; it is a vast public utility. You must pool all your interests, place them in the hands of a Board of trained technicians, strip yourselves of all power. This Board will operate all the oil fields as a common unit, allocate production to satisfy the market, introduce the latest technical methods so as to salvage every cubic foot of gas and every drop of oil that you now recklessly waste, and see to it that the consumer gets the benefit of our efficiency. (Schachner, May 1933, 948)

Technocracy thus offers to redress the abuses of capitalism, which exacerbates an extended Great Depression in the story’s timeline. The solution—a Technocratic regime—is no less democratic than what is in effect corporate control of the government, but it is certainly more enlightened,

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as the story argues, and thus appropriate to the task of reorganizing society according to saner and more humane principles. Indeed, as other scientists learn of the growing power of the Technocratic regime, they gladly—if improbably—quit the employ of their corporate paymasters to join the Technocrats. Fundamental to the Technocrats’ vision of management are technical processes and technologies that enable the comprehensive exploitation of oil reserves. As the Technocrats’ power is challenged by the financial sector in the final part of the serial, the U.S. people rise up and throw their support behind the scientists, in effect giving the Technocrats their consent to remake the U.S. in their own image. Stories such as Schachner’s express faith in the disinterested benevolence of enlightened scientists who prove themselves capable to the task of reshaping the U.S. economy for the benefit of its population, rather than for the corporations who use their power to manage society for their own gain. The Technocrats’ expropriation of oil infrastructures in the second part of the serial, entitled “The Great Oil War,” is based on a new technology they have developed which enables them to solidify oil through a process of “hydrogenation” (Schachner, May 1933, 955–6). By solidifying the oil while still in the pipeline, the technocrats manage to hold the U.S. oil infrastructure hostage, enabling them to assume control of that resource, whereupon they convert the oil back to its fluid state. As Timothy Mitchell argues in Carbon Democracy, the comparative flexibility and ease of transporting oil via pipeline and tanker compared with coal “made energy networks less vulnerable to the political claims of those whose labour kept them running” (38–9). The Technocrats turn to new technologies to disrupt this flow, thus enabling them to gain control of energy production and to negotiate for political power. Crucially, while oil is thus recognized as the essential lubricant that enables U.S. society to function, the question of an alternative energy source that might circumvent the dangers of exhaustion is never raised, despite the superlative scientific genius of the assembled fraternity of scientists. Transition in this story is transition from one model of oil management to another, a reorganization that nevertheless is accompanied by a fundamental transformation of U.S. society by the serial’s conclusion. This outcome expresses confidence in the democratic impulses of the U.S. population and a belief that energy—and the accompanying political and economic power it endows to those who control it—need only be reconfigured to expand the possibility for self-determination to the population as a whole. Many of the stories interested in the relationship among politics, power and oil in the Post-World War II era function in part as exposés of oil economics, portraying the implications of oil economies as a cycle of entrapment and entropy. These stories de-privilege the entrepreneurial appropriation of oil seen in the stories of the 1930s to portray individuals who are incorporated into a system, for which oil functions as the binding force for its parts. Frank Herbert’s three-part serial “Under Pressure” (which appeared in

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Astounding in 1955–1956) was published seven years before his classic serialization, “Dune World,” itself later novelized as Dune in 1965. Although Dune is a commentary on oil scarcity, “Under Pressure” explicitly connects oil to the Cold War context and thus acknowledges how the cultural, psychological, and material conditions of the Cold War were linked to the reorganization of oil production and distribution globally. “Under Pressure” is a submarine thriller that focuses on Cold War psychology, detailing the cyborgian adaptations necessary for submariners to perform their duties. The serial underscores oil’s centrality to the wartime economy of the Cold War, using the submariner theme and a narrative of stealth and the co-optation of oil supplies to comment on how the Cold War creates environments that call on people to adapt themselves in machine-like ways. Writing of the ideological construction of the Cold War in the late 1940s–1950s, Mitchell explains how “ordinary corporate ambition to control resources overseas, in the increasingly difficult context of postwar decolonization and the assertion of national independence, could now be explained by invoking and elaborating this global ‘context’” of the Cold War (122). “Under Pressure” partakes of the language of the strategic necessity of oil to the Cold War, with one character reflecting that “[w]ar demanded the pure substance born in the sediment of a rising continent” (Herbert 56.3 1955, 27). Yet the story portrays war as a form of insanity through the trauma of submariners adapted to an insane world: “you’re not going to argue that war is sane” remarks one character (Herbert 1956, 110), while another explains that “‘I’m nuts in a way which fits me perfectly to my world. That makes my world nuts and me normal. Not sane. Normal. Adapted’” (123). “Under Pressure” can thus be read as a commentary on the Cold War as an alibi for attempts to wrest control of oil at a global scale, and as a metaphor for a ­petroculture that requires people to transform themselves to the conditions created by their energy infrastructures. Recognizing the inertia of infrastructures that circulate oil in the global economy, Sam Nicholson was also unable to entertain any space for the transformation of a contemporary oil infrastructure in his short story, “Oil is not Gold” (published in Omni in 1974). Unlike “Under Pressure,” Nicholson’s story places the emphasis not on the militarization of oil, but the wider economic implications of oil’s global distribution. This corporate detective story concerns a commercial investigator who ensures that a new technology for undersea drilling does not fall into obscurity under the ownership of an oil corporation threatened by the economic implications that enhanced access to oil brings. In one scene the protagonist browbeats a corporate lawyer into signing away the scientist’s contract and describes a “daisy-chain” of oil exports that artificially inflate prices. The protagonist explains that, “[i]n the bad winters of ’76 and ’77 Americans froze to death while the oil cartels played with their daisy chains and laughed all the way to the bank” (Nicholson, 122). “Oil is not Gold” is thus a revenge narrative directed at

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oil corporations which speaks to the 1973 oil crisis. Nevertheless, while the protagonist manages to free the inventor and his invention from the ignominy of obscurity, the narrative exposes but has no solution to the senseless cycle of global oil economics depicted in the text. Unlike “The Revolt of the Scientists,” the inability to offer a solution to this cycle in Nicholson’s story speaks of a sense of individual helplessness in the context of new economic and international relations. “Oil is not Gold” shows how oil is involved in a cycle of oceanic trade that serves no function other than to control the price of oil, with concomitant material implications for the U.S. population. Stories such as Herbert’s and Nicholson’s portray oil as generative of entropic cycles that require adaptation, but which ultimately reveal a world organized not around human needs, but the needs of oil corporations and the military. Their narratives explore the physical and psychological repercussions of oil infrastructures and respond directly to contemporary oil politics. This interest in the circularity of oil politics and economics extends to more recent stories, such as Brian Aldiss’ “Pipeline” (published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2005), published in the context of the 2003–2011 Iraq War. Few stories about oil in SF magazines explore the connection between U.S. international politics and oil-exporting regions in Asia and the Middle-East. “Pipeline” is one of the few examples that bring such postcolonial concerns and oil together. The narrative follows Carl Roddard’s journey across the length of a newly completed pipeline that begins in Turkmenistan, runs through Iran, and ends in Turkey. His journey, “like living in a sci-fi dream” (Aldiss, 61), brings Roddard, Chief Architect of the pipeline, face-to-face with the political tensions over which the megaproject has run roughshod. Despite a kidnapping, military patrols, and much violence, Roddard, curiously unreflective about the political tensions caused by his machinations, is caught in a cycle of power and aggrandizement which prevents him from recognizing or caring about the wider implications of the pipeline project. “Pipeline” is another exposé, in this case of the racism that underpins corporate relationships with oil-producing nations and the exploitation that is commensurate with oil production and distribution. The schizophrenic relationships among corporations, politicians, police, and security services that underpin and are created by international oil extraction and distribution are portrayed as science-fictional.

Stories of Weird Oil The second set of stories, which connect oil to other temporal modes and often to ideas of extinction, are weird stories that focus more on oil’s materiality and its connection with the mysterious and the monstrous than on political and economic power. Stories such as John Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure” (published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1944), first published in 1929 before being republished in the pulps, and Leonard Carpenter’s

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“Recrudescence” (published in Amazing Stories in 1988), evoke oil’s origins in the decayed bodies of dinosaurs and other ancient beings. Formally, Taine and Carpenter combine gothic horror and SF to develop perspectives on the materiality and temporality of oil in ways that anticipate the New Weird. China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (published in The Guardian online in 2011) extends to non-living structures the theme of reanimation seen in the other stories. Collectively, they anticipate and extend the weird connections of oil that Reza Negarestani explores in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (first published in 2008), and which are themselves inspired by Lovecraftian weirdness—a mode of horror developed in stories by H.P. Lovecraft that were published in the pulps from the 1920s–1930s. The narrator of Cyclonopedia asks, “[i]s there anything more Lovecraftian than the building of a new pipeline, winding its blobby flutes” (Negarestani, 72). SF writer and journalist Bruce Sterling anticipated this connection between oil and the weird in his response to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when he claimed that “[c]rude oil is a Lovecraftian substance” and that “[o]il’s energy is entirely necrotic. Oil is the long-entombed dreck of extinct sea creatures, baked in primeval sediments sucked down into the crust of the earth” (Sterling). Lovecraftian horror, Negarestani argues, is “a machine to facilitate the awakening and return of the Old Ones through convoluted compositions of solid and void” (Negarestani, 44). This model of convolutions is used to frame views of the Earth as ridden with pipelines that exhume the Earth from within. Cyclonopedia’s concerns with the destabilizations of oil can be traced back to pulp SF’s exploration of the materiality of oil and the ways in which it connects the contemporary to geological time. Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure” exemplifies how the weird stories considered in this section connect oil to deep time. Oil in this story is both a call to exploitation, wealth, and fame, and the trace of an ancient civilization. An offshore blow-out of oil is accompanied by the fresh corpses of creatures long thought extinct, one of which a seafarer brings to the narrative’s protagonist, Dr. Eric Lane. In search of the reservoir from which this oil came and the source of these anachronisms, an expedition sets forth and discovers a lost world populated by the dying remnants of dinosaur-like creatures— the site of an ancient civilization that has left behind a history in stone and biology. Upon deciphering these inscriptions, the expedition discovers a Frankensteinian narrative of biological experimentation that ultimately failed due to unforeseen evolutionary developments in the experimental subjects. One instance, of a grass that out-competes all organisms, becomes so dangerous that their creators have sacrificed themselves to quarantine the island to protect other life on Earth. The organism is so tenacious that it has lain dormant until disturbed by the expedition, whereupon it threatens to prevent their only means of escape from the island and to spread across the Earth. Oil in “The Greatest Adventure” is a metonymy for a fundamentally non-human otherness and a recalibration of perspective regarding

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humankind’s relationship to Earth and its history. Theories of the generation of the island’s plentiful reserves of oil locate it in a system of tunnels which anticipate Negarestani’s emphasis on the convolutions of oil and its pipelines. The narrative’s focus on oil’s geologic and evolutionary timescales position it not as a source of wealth to be exploited—the expedition captain’s stance— but as a route into participation in Earth’s long history. The plentiful reserves of oil on the island, the remains of countless generations of the genetically engineered creatures, proves to be the only substance that can halt the global spread of the grass at the story’s conclusion. In contrast to the oil stories that appear after the 1950s, oil in “The Greatest Adventure” is positioned as a force for the preservation of extant life on Earth. Reflective of the optimism in the 1930s for oil and its capacity to enable economic growth, but more importantly for its ability to make international travel and scientific investigation possible, “The Greatest Adventure” portrays oil as indispensable to modernity. Published six decades after Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure,” Carpenter’s “Recrudescence” (1988) collapses the deep time of oil’s origins, and a contemporary time measured by oil spills and the legacy of their environmental effects. “Recrudescence” shares with Taine’s story a fixation with the destabilizations of the deep past as it breaks into the contemporary, and an epiphanic narrative that incorporates gothic horror to reframe oil as vital and invasive. Imagining the “virulent life-energy of the hydrocarbons” (Carpenter, 154) as embodying the potential for the resurrection of the paleontological and geological past, “Recrudescence” uses the weird to offer a commentary on the environmental politics of oil. Set in California, Olin Simonsen, a professor of paleontology, receives an invitation from a former student to examine a mysterious fossil discovered at an offshore drilling rig. “Irked” (124) that one of his best students is employed by the fictional oil company Exoco and wary that his expertise might be used to satisfy what he thinks of as corporate greed for profits, Simonsen nevertheless accepts the invitation as motivated by genuine scientific curiosity. Against the background of environmental protest over offshore drilling and nuclear power is a story of revelation concerning the horrific origins of oil and its capacity to transform the climate and life of Earth. The story’s portrayal of the reassertion of an ancient climate is drawn into the orbit of the environmental politics of the 1980s. After visiting the oil rig Simonsen begins to take an interest in local oil politics and visits a protest at Santa Barbara to see for himself its nature unfiltered by media mis-representation. Simonsen meets a colleague who argues for a national reduction of oil consumption, not to address fears of oil scarcity, but to avoid the global impact of energy pollution. His colleague asks whether Simonsen has “‘any idea what it would do to the planet to release all the carbon that’s been locked underground in the form of fossil fuel’” and explains that “‘the increased amounts of carbon gases in the atmosphere would alter Earth’s climate’” (135). While the text acknowledges that some of its characters believe

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the greenhouse effect to be a speculative theory, “Recrudescence” connects the burning of fossil fuels directly to climate change in ways that anticipate contemporary debates over the connection between oil and climate change, and indeed the possibility of anthropogenic climate change itself—evidence for which existed by the time “Recrudescence” was published. Toward the end of the story, a piece of land long buried undersea overlays, like a palimpsest, the contemporary seascape with an ancient, Carboniferous topography. Simonsen reflects that “there was something unwholesome about the notion of an ancient regime superimposing itself on a modern, healthy ecosystem” (151). Carpenter thus literalizes the notion that increased atmospheric carbon could recreate a prehistoric climate, complete with its ecology and accompanied by the revival of monstrous and ancient beings of “weird alien origin” (140). “It was the oil that spawned,” Simonsen observes, the extinct flora and fauna that he discovers: it possesses “an insidious vitality” (140) that connects the contemporary to a longer, hidden history. Echoing Taine’s portrayal of an ancient civilization able to direct evolution, Simonsen meets representatives of a cult at the protest who believe the beings they call the Shapers to have intervened into evolution on Earth. The mysterious fossil proves to be a tile, part of a seal laid down by a parent culture from which the Shapers separated. This seal prevents the Shapers from reanimating themselves from their corpse-like state: the oil itself, “the preserved essence, the vital potential, of whole epochs of Earth’s youth” (137). Oil thus accrues a powerful agency capable of reaching across time to exert its influence on the contemporary. Simonsen’s response to the emergence of the weird is coherent with attitudes to issues of corporate responsibility, crisis, and clean-up in the light of the legacy of oil disasters. Throughout the narrative, multiple such events are alluded to, in particular the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The sense of a lurking threat, embodied by the reemergence of the Shapers and their carboniferous environment, finds its correlative in the lurking dangers of the long-term contamination of the environment and the inadequacy of attempts to clean-up such spills. “Recrudescence” is deeply concerned with the environmental impact of the offshore drilling industry, both on small communities and on wildlife. Simonsen spends time studying the rich ecologies that have formed around the vicinity of the rig and reflects that “[e]ven in tidal waters the open ocean can be more barren of life than a landlocked desert, and yet human activity can create an oasis there” (125), but immediately observes “until the human activity that created is just as casually devastates it” (126). This attention to the environment is coupled with an attention to policy: the government’s haphazard leasing practices, which enabled Exoco to claim a tract of the Santa Maria Basin, are decried at the protest for their “laxness” and “high-handedness” (134). At the story’s conclusion Simonsen’s fantastic account of the Shapers is rejected by all authorities, yet he cannot dismiss the suspicion that Exoco knows of the Shapers and is covering-up their existence.

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Reflecting on Exoco’s “high-deniability profile,” Simonsen acknowledges the clean-up operations in the aftermath of the oil rig’s destruction, which purportedly stemmed the oil spill caused by the reemergence of the ancient topography. He nevertheless points out that “it’s been hard in the months since then to get a trustworthy estimate of the rate of continuing oil seepage from the ocean floor” (157). The narrative ends with his reflection on the lingering psychological and material effects of the disaster: The innocent pleasure she still takes in walking on the beach, for instance— would it continue if she saw, as I do, the strange properties of the bunker oil that now washes southward from Pismo Bay? I’ve seen others notice it and recoil, but none so much as I—repelled by its clinging texture, its rank smell, and the way that, when scraped from your skin, it always seems to leave a smear vaguely resembling the form of a fern leaf, or fish, or claw. (158)

The story’s conclusion thus brings together concerns over the unspoken, long-term effects of oil spills and anxiety over the weird restoration of the ancient environment. “Recrudescence” makes use of the weird to draw associations between gothic fear of the monstrous and concern over the implications of oil extraction and distribution. This early example of a story committed to climate change politics offers its readers a narrative of suspicion regarding corporate control of land for oil extraction, and the governmental policies that enable private interests to transform the climate at the expense of local communities. China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (2011), published not in an SF magazine but in The Guardian online, is a story about revisitations from the past which center on the detritus of oil infrastructures. Unlike Taine and Carpenter, Miéville does not orient “Covehithe” to the deep past, but rather to the emergence of a weird future. While the gothic elements of Taine’s and Carpenter’s stories are ultimately, if barely, contained by their narratives’ conclusions, “Covehithe” depicts a society struggling to normalize the irruption of uncanny revisitations from oil’s recent history. It is not the formerly living but the inanimate that has been given life, namely oil rigs which have been lost to various industrial accidents, most of which have been forgotten because of the invisibility of the infrastructures upon which societies are utterly dependent. These animated rigs traverse the ocean floor, periodically surfacing to drill and deposit their “eggs” on the shoreline, from which new rigs are born. These “petrospectral presences” are rhizomatic in their migrations: “[r]evisitors might come, drill, go back to the water, even come up again, anywhere” (Miéville). Not only are the causes of their reanimation unknown but their movements are entirely unpredictable. Their doubly incomprehensible nature underscores the limits of humankind’s awareness of the immaterial presences that constitute petroculture and petro-economies. Like “Recrudescence,” time is measured by the staccato of oil disasters, but the enigma presented by the animated oil rigs precludes connections that

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might be made to a deep geological past. Instead, their reemergence introduces a new time into the world of the text, one from which humankind is excluded. The description of the reappearance of one rig, The Sea Quest, as “like some impossible dreaming pachyderm,” draws on the Lovecraftian imagination of entities beyond human understanding and gestures to an experience of the world that extends the boundaries of the possible and the unknowable (Miéville). The spectacular intrusion of the oil rigs into human life forces society to acknowledge its dependence on energy infrastructures which have been rendered invisible by familiarity, geographical distribution, and the technological scope of their networks. These infrastructures are thus both visible and invisible. The destruction that they cause to life and property during their perambulations makes them utterly impossible to ignore. Despite their new visibility, their existence remains obscure and unanswerable to humankind’s needs and concerns. The oil rigs’ complete disregard for humankind make this irruption of the weird a reinsertion into daily life of the knowledge of civilization’s fragility to and dependence on the inanimate, a return of the repressed industrial catastrophe, and, more abstractly, to humankind’s position in relation to an uncaring and mysterious universe. The sheer number of oil rigs that have returned underscores the prevalence of industrial disaster and the ease with which such events have been accepted and forgotten. The oil rigs thus become the site of a disruptive and a-rational life that draws attention to the agency of the inanimate and to the way these infrastructures exist invisibly and independently of the human. The frame narrative concerns a father and daughter who infiltrate the eponymous hamlet, which has been requisitioned under exceptional laws, to see one such rig. Their relationship to these entities is one of observation, awe, and fear. The narrator alludes to the transformation of the environment and its resulting impact on societal consciousness when explaining, “[t]ouch the soil, as Dughan did, and as his daughter did too at the sight of him, and it felt greasy, heavy, as if someone had poured cream onto loam” (Miéville). The transformation to daily life inaugurated by the rigs is pervasive, a material presence that renders a new awareness of the fragility of the systems that structure society. The oil rigs are portrayed as creatures possessing a life cycle peculiar to their own existence. Their drilling apparatus enables them to bury their “eggs” on the shoreline, from which new rigs are spawned. Oil thus possesses a vitality that mirrors but does not converge with the organic. These “dramatic instabilities” (Miéville) further stymie any attempt to understand these presences according to categories familiar to science. Indeed, scientific observation and data collection of the rigs, conducted under dangerous conditions, yields no insight into their nature. Recalling the lingering presence of oil in “Recrudescence,” and the convergence of the weird and environmental awareness, “Covehithe” concludes with a reflection on the nearby Church of St. Andrew:

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[H]e looked in the direction of the graveyard, and of St. Andrew’s stubby hall where services continued within the medieval carapace, remains of a grander church fallen apart to time and the civil war and to economics, fallen ultimately with permission. (Miéville)

This description of the ruins of an ancient church aligns it with the likewise derelict oil rigs, and functions in a similar way to the concluding passages of “Recrudescence.” Establishing a connection between the spectacular and the mundane, “Covehithe” suggests that the oil disasters which provide the foundation for the resurrection of the rigs occur because of collective consent— that such disasters will continue to happen unless actively prevented. The rigs’ reemergence demands recognition of the permissiveness with which oil infrastructures have been allowed to operate and oil disasters allowed to occur.

“Oh, the Past—The Past Remains”1 Representations of oil in SF short stories of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries tend to focus attention on the present or near-future (as opposed to the far-future) systems of extraction, distribution, and control. In contrast to stories about the future application of nuclear energy, varieties of fictional and non-fictional sustainable technologies, or entirely speculative energy systems, stories about oil reflect an understanding of petrol-based energy systems as omnipresent and firmly embedded in the contemporary context, whether that context is extended into the near-future or otherwise. The stories analyzed in this chapter are concerned with oil’s place in their respective political, economic, and cultural contexts, and on its capacity to shape the infrastructures that constitute modernity. The changing character of oil stories throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect changes in attitude to oil extraction and distribution, as well as an increasing awareness of the long duration of oil. Stories about the weird dimensions of oil reflect on its potential to connect the past and future, in effect situating humankind in a long history of transformation and extinction, and implying the possibility of a species-level human extinction. The retrospective orientation of weird oil stories, signaled by their attention to the otherness of oil’s origins and to the history of oil events, is characteristic of how oil’s impact on culture is immediate, pervasive, and intrusive. While the stories analyzed in this chapter are by no means exhaustive of SF’s treatments of oil—stories of oil’s transformative potential for manufacturing plastic and other materials, for example, have been excluded from this discussion—they represent two dominant trends in the treatment of oil in short stories published in the SF magazines. SF’s concern with oil and culture centers on two broad themes that are often associated: issues of management and control, and issues of responsibility and ethics. Stories of petropolitics and economics, such as those considered in the first group of stories, argue that oil management and distribution are issues of pressing ethical concern, and that responsibility for its distribution and use is

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often shirked in favor of generating ever-increasing profit. Stories of the weird explore ethical considerations as they relate to issues of scientific understanding and environmental concern, or to the welfare of oil-workers and wider society. These stories attempt to broaden how we conceive of oil’s place in our petroculture and attempt to open spaces for understanding oil not only in instrumental terms, but as possessive of a vitality and history that is independent of the human. All these stories speak to the invisibility of oil infrastructures and attempt to disclose the connections among oil, politics, and culture, and the far-reaching scope of petrol-based infrastructures for shaping science, culture, and the welfare of the human and non-human.

Note 1. Aldiss 66.

Works Cited Aldiss, Brian W. 2005. Pipeline. Asimov’s Science Fiction 29 (9): 54–71. Asimov, Isaac. 1988. Science: The Slave of the Lamp. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 75 (3): 138–147. Carpenter, Leonard. 1988. Recrudescence. Amazing Stories 62 (5): 122–158. Herbert, Frank. 1955. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (3): 6–66. ———. 1955. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (4): 79–126. ———. 1956. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (5): 80–134. ———. 1963. Dune World. Analog: Science Fact Science Fiction: 17–48. ———. 1965. Dune. Kent: New English Library. Miéville, China. 2011. Covehithe. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2011/apr/22/china-Miéville-covehithe-short-story. Accessed 5 August 2019. Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.press. Nicholson, Sam. 1979. Oil Is Not Gold. Omni 1 (7): 94–123. Petrocultures Research Group. 2016. After Oil. Petrocultures: Edmonton. Schachner, Nathan. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists—II the Great Oil War. Wonder Stories, May: 946–961, 985. ———. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists. Wonder Stories, April: 806–821. ———. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists: III the Final Triumph. Wonder Stories, June: 26–39, 87. Silverberg, Robert. 1991. Reflections. Amazing Stories 66 (3): 6–7. Sterling, Bruce. 2004. The Year of Oil. Artforum 43: 4. https://www.artforum.com/ print/200410/the-year-of-oil-45365. Accessed 5 August 2019. Taine, John. 1944. The Greatest Adventure. Famous Fantastic Mysteries 6 (1): 8–87. White, Ted. 1974. Reflections on the Energy Crisis. Amazing Science Fiction 47 (6): 4, 119–122.

CHAPTER 27

Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy Sofia Ahlberg

Following the explosion of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010, an unimaginable sum of approximately 171 million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, affecting 35% of the coast (Watts 189). It took 87 days to stop the leak. Its aftermath, including the dispersal of 1.8 million gallons of toxic chemicals into the waters, is still suffered by ecosystems, coastal residents, human and non-human (Adams). The accident triggered grave concerns about preparedness and responsibility in relation to offshore drilling and extraction policies. New Weird1 author Jeff VanderMeer’s response to the tragedy was to speculate on the transgressive nature of oil which led to his Southern Reach trilogy published in 2014 and consisting of Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. In an article published in The Atlantic, VanderMeer describes a strange dream in which the oil never stopped leaking, a dream that became an inspiration for the novels. Moreover, he points out that by enduring in minute traces in the environment, its consequences are in fact potentially endless. “After the oil spill,” VanderMeer notes, “I knew that at the microscopic level the oil was still infiltrating and contaminating the environment. That just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting you or the places you love.” It is perhaps not surprising that as motif and metaphor for a range of effective and ineffective boundaries, skin appears in VanderMeer’s response to an ­accident in the mining industry. After all, it is an industry that aims to perfect S. Ahlberg (*)  Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_27

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the technologies for piercing the earth’s “skin” while ensuring that what it extracts does not escape. At the same time it must strive to shield the environment from the harmful byproducts of its operations or else hide its failures from view. In VanderMeer’s trilogy, the Southern Reach is an organization set up to investigate a perilous region that appeared somewhere on a remote part of the Florida coast some decades before the story begins. VanderMeer’s reflections on biological damage inform his narrative of events surrounding this place where life forms and physical laws undergo inexplicable shifts that produce mutations with often horrific consequences for those who pass its notoriously enigmatic invisible border. Despite the hazards, Southern Reach has sent many expeditionary teams to learn about this place that comes to be known as Area X and it turns out that, despite appearances, few if any have ever returned. The first novel, Annihilation, details the most recent expedition by an all-female group focused on the perspective of the team’s biologist. At stake in this novel and the trilogy overall is the integrity of the individuated body. An early feature of the biologist’s perspective is that the body comes under the influence of Area X through multiple forms of contamination. Initially, while reading from a strange moss-like form of writing growing out from the wall of a “topographical anomaly” (a spiral tunnel referred to as a tower), the biologist says, “already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground” (24). Then she inhales spores from the lettering (25) and begins displaying unusual physical symptoms she calls “the brightness” which come with a marked empathy toward Area X combined with scientific interest: “The brightness infecting my senses had spread to my chest….a kind of prickling energy and anticipation” (83). One of her symptoms is the insight that the tower is in fact a living thing (41) later concluding, “We were exploring an organism that might contain a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write words on the wall” (51). Arguably, this is one of Area X’s perceptions of itself emerging via the changes it brings to the biologist. Nevertheless, it is the biologist’s own scientific schooling that makes this possible. Key to the significance of this often-recalled phenomenon of the writing growing on the wall is the suggestion that it communicates not via the words but by performatively altering the biology of those who come in contact with it.2 Though the biologist changes, she retains the professional interest of a scientist but also seems to see herself increasingly as open to material and agential influences from the environment she is studying. “The wind was like something alive”; she later notes, “it entered every pore of me” (74). It becomes apparent that she is changing from being the person she was and taking on new qualities due to her physical contact with biological matter from Area X. By the close of the novel the other three expedition members are dead. The biologist, on the other hand, resolves to remain in Area X to learn more about it and perhaps even to discover the fate of her husband who

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was on the previous expedition. The second novel, Authority, centers on the investigative efforts of “Control” (John Rodriguez), director of Southern Reach. It is Control’s role to interview or rather interrogate the biologist. They eventually form an uneasy alliance against the secrecy of Southern Reach as well as the horrors of Area X. She insists on being called Ghost Bird, a name her husband gave her, and we later learn she is a copy of the original biologist produced within Area X in some unimaginable way and sent back for reasons no one can guess. By the end of the trilogy, in Acceptance, when Control and this version of the biologist have escaped the military response to the sudden expansion of Area X by entering more deeply into the region, the reader is obliged to accept that the original biologist has continued to change. The biologist has eventually become something utterly unhuman resembling a mobile landmass with countless eyes (still recognizable to her now more human copy) and a destiny beyond anything mortal. Deepwater Horizon’s extraction method produced a tragic outcome of death and destruction to several ecosystems in the Gulf, but the longerterm consequences of such extraction are what is at stake in Southern Reach. Moreover, for the purpose of this chapter, also at stake is our capacity to better deal with or prevent such tragedies by better appreciating the entanglements between observer and observed, but without eliminating the distinctions between the two. VanderMeer’s vision of skin as an ambiguous interface is a fertile field for reflection on the nature of scientific observation. Skin and various other sorts of embodiedness become a way of underscoring the importance of maintaining distinction between self and other, observer and observed, despite these categories undergoing profound alterations. An insistent pattern of imagery in these novels, thematic as well as topographic, is that of borders and boundaries. As a terrestrial phenomenon, an invisible border is said to mark the edge of Area X, but this is a far more agential boundary than any political or militarily patrolled demarcation on a map. Crossing this border might be compared to passing the event horizon of a black hole. Skin is also a focus as a living boundary defining the extent of a living organism. For example, skin is where the mysterious agency of Area X is discerned as it possibly seeks and certainly finds ways of infiltrating and rerouting the vital and cognitive functions of the biologist. To some researchers at Southern Reach, Area X is “just a phenomenon visited upon humanity, like a weather event” and to others it is an enemy with an “intent and focus” of its own (Acceptance 80). While the mysterious border itself is important in the novels, a key trope is the failure of defining boundaries, human and non-human. What occurs inside Area X has some quality of taking place on a moebius strip that unsettles conventional binary distinctions about self and other, inside and outside, as well as near and far. The motifs of skin and borders, and their undermining of the individual as detached observer, place the problem of scientific objectivity at the heart of the Southern Reach trilogy. Ultimately, in this chapter, I ask what can our literary reflections on Area X teach us about possibilities we have

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for observing widespread phenomena such as global warming that are both objective and subjective in the sense that they are the expression of our post-industrial aspirations. Indeed, any technological solution to global warming will need to be informed by the human causes of the problem that include psychological and social studies. In other words, self-knowledge has an important role to play in this kind of scientific inquiry and arguably other problems as well.

Living Borders Recent new materialist scholarship emphasizes the sentient and potentially intentional nature of matter in ways that resonate with VanderMeer’s presentation of Area X as a manifestation of matter that “Knows what to do with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then withdraw” (Acceptance, emphasis original, 81). This scholarship entails a resistance to or at least a fundamental questioning of borders between culture and nature. The emphasis in scholarly work by Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo challenges the boundedness of subjectivity itself. Similarly, following Judith Butler’s concept of “corporeal vulnerability,” Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott seek to eliminate objectification while exalting the “in-between” of consciousness (1). Their idea that “each thing, each concrescence, is what it is because of its capacity to be affected” (4) is reminiscent of the biologist’s claim that “My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease” (Annihilation 108). Nevertheless, as we shall see, objectification does not undermine the profound connectedness that I argue is a feature of, not an impediment to, scientific inquiry. To be bounded by skin or any other kind of vital and intelligent boundary means to be available as an object among others for the purpose of a potential symbiotic co-adaptation. At the same time, I do not dispute the historical reasons why theorists denounce a certain instrumental anthropocentrism.3 Another scholar frequently grouped together with Alaimo and Bennett is Sara Ahmed, a feminist and gender theorist who critiques boundary formation as a feature of power structures. In a chapter on Kristeva’s work on nation building, Ahmed calls attention to skin as thoroughly localized but with consequences that are spatially widespread. Echoing the biologist’s own self-awareness of her “sole gift or talent,” Ahmed argues that rather than thinking that skin is already there, we must “begin to think of the skin as a surface that is felt only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with others” (101). Far from erasing the ­significance of the boundary in favor of a fluid interrelation between human and the non-human, this reference to skin as living tissue with political and ethical consequences suggests that more awareness should be placed on the potential of borders to mediate and process information. Rather than repudiating the power of language to distinguish culture and the political from nature, as

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some new materialist work suggests, border as process suggests that on the contrary, it lies in our interest to keep these borders in place, if for no other reason to keep questioning them and redefining them. Border making and crossing is an important aspect of knowledge production. How can there be an encounter or discovery and other such phenomena without a provisionally defined inside and outside? VanderMeer draws attention to the operational aspects of breathing, living, agential borders ­ in his trilogy. In these novels, human skin as well as the border surrounding Area X have elements in common. Both operate as living membranes that provoke reflection on the need for a protective buffer as well as a way of filtering and mediating encounters across the boundaries of environments, bodies, and technologies. The border of Area X demarcates a zone in which alternative biological and physical rules seem to apply. Equipment brought back from Area X is seen to have aged faster than its equivalent outside. Grainy video shows ships at sea that accidentally encountered the area when the border came down vanishing, bow first, while those in the stern can hear the cries coming from the bow (Authority 79). The same goes for large numbers of white rabbits filmed as they are forced to cross the border— in freeze-frame, hindquarters alone are revealed as the head and shoulders disappear (Authority 55). It is a border with far more physical efficacy than any line drawn on a map. All participants except leaders who cross into Area X must be placed under hypnosis in order to avoid the extreme trauma of the border of which little is said until the third novel, Acceptance. Then, in a flashback sequence, we learn that crossing the border brings on a bewildering sense of self inhabited by other, or otherness: “Your thoughts dart quick then slow, something stitching between them you cannot identify” (50). At other times, the border and the terrors of Area X are potentially everywhere, in “thousands of transitional environments that no one saw” (157) or, as is noted by an expedition leader, “There is nothing but border. There is no border” (5). In VanderMeer’s trilogy, skin is not simply a planar surface serving tactile perception together with protection from the elements. Rather it is a medium for communication between self and other, or between two descriptive registers, one that aims to evoke subjective experience and another that aims at objectivity though without it being in the service of conventional instrumentality. For the biologist in Annihilation, the outward-looking scrutiny that initially comprises her study of Area X morphs into an examination of the inward changes Area X brings about in her and notably in what she becomes able to perceive. This is not to say that the boundary between her and Area X disappears. Rather, she realizes that the only objective knowledge she can attain must necessarily entail an awareness of Area X’s capacity to affect her subjectivity. From the outset, she is intent on determining if Area X’s influence on her points “to a truthful seeing,” or even an immunity from the possibly elaborate illusions wrought by its “defensive mimicry” (Annihilation 90, 91).

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As already mentioned, there is a tendency in ecological thinking that favors the conditions for merging with the other and thus seeks to negate the boundaries that support human exceptionalism. At the same time some see environmental problems as so systemic and vast that they must be defined as boundless, what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” in reference to “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). At extremes, this approach emphasizes such a radical connectivity among the parts of environmental problems that the result entails a seamlessness between actors and agents that is resistant to analysis and explanation. The biologist identifies the problem when she reflects, “there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts” (Annihilation 93). Her properly scientific response is to “leave it there, compartmentalized” until she can examine her written record of observations and perhaps then “begin to divine the true meaning.” During her interrogation at Southern Reach HQ, the biologist explains that Area X is an ecology far more designed than what can be grasped by human cognition: Have you not understood yet that whatever’s causing this can manipulate the genome, works miracles of mimicry and biology? Knows what to do with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then withdraw. That to it, a smartphone, say, is as basic as a flint arrowhead. (Acceptance, emphasis original, 80–81)

In the above, the biologist signals an awareness that her object of inquiry has in itself some form of subjectivity. In other words, she suspects that the object of her analysis has intentionality of its own. At first, she presents as the sole survivor of the expedition into Area X covered in the first volume of the trilogy, Annihilation. She explains how the spores from the strange mossy writing entered her skin like “a pinprick” (25). The resulting “brightness” that grows in her—her word for a range of bodily and cognitive symptoms— brings with it a profound sensitivity to and affinity with all other life forms. Her infection seems also to provide immunization against injuries caused by the environment. The reader is given to understand that the biologist’s capacity to report on what she sees has been altered by the very thing she is attempting to study. Subject and object have morphed, making it impossible to see where ecosystem begins and researcher ends, as can be seen in the climax of Annihilation when she finally and in a sense fatally confronts the creature responsible for the writing on the wall of the tower: “I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions” (172). Soon she begins to discern that a fundamental property of Area X’s transformations involve assimilation and mimicry which it achieves “all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters” (191).

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The second volume Authority focuses on one of the characters John Rodriguez aka “Control” and his attempt to make sense of Area X. Members of expeditions into Area X either do not return or come back profoundly and terminally altered by exposure to whatever mutant biological processes they have been exposed to on the other side of the border. In fact, it turns out that instead of returning as themselves, cloned copies of them return with no ability to explain what they have learned. Among those profoundly transformed is the biologist herself, an expert in “transitional environments” (Annihilation 11) or places where different ecosystems overlap. Only later does it become clearer, though never perfectly, that the biologist we know in Annihilation has by the third novel Acceptance ceased to be the same person. Indeed, the very notion of anything having stable identity enduring through time is under question at many points in the novels. The biologist of book one surmises that in her own case, “Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words” (Annihilation 190–191). As an example of ecological thinking, the biologist has more in common with what Haraway calls “becoming with” in the sense of developing close relations with “companion species” (When Species Meet 35).

Cognising Membranes When the biologist is at first infected with the brightness, she says she feels “a kind of itchiness come over me” (Annihilation 27), but more significantly her symptoms deepen her already well-developed sensitivity to and expertise in transitional environments. Indeed, more than an appreciation of ecological thought, her epidermal infection can be understood as that which actively selects and transfers cognitive data that is in no way limited to her body, but extends far beyond it. Her perceptions are rendered preternaturally acute, so much so that her scientific understanding struggles to make sense of what she is now able to discern. Here the biologist attempts to describe in her journal what she comes to call her “second skin”: “The fifth morning I rose from the grass and dirt and sand, the brightness had gathered to form a hushed second skin over me, that skin cracking from my opening eyes like the slightest, the briefest, touch of an impossibly thin layer of ice. I could hear the fracturing of its melting as if it came from miles and years away” (Acceptance 158). It is interesting to note here that the imagery used is a familiar symptom of global warming and so it brings into sharp focus a climatic change that she registers with her body. This can be read as VanderMeer’s reminder to the reader that global warming is a discernible feature of our world and we could be even more aware of the long-term consequences if we were properly sensitized. This involves an objective condition for which human beings on a mass scale are responsible. The biologist’s experience of a second skin suggests that in this case knowledge coincides with embodiment. Skin as seen in this representation of the biologist consists of a living set of contours. Unlike Morton’s notion of the hyperobject,

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skin gives something definition, a shape to make something graspable, even though at first it may seem to exceed human comprehension. The itching that the biologist experiences is the troubling of the border between her and the outside world. The irritation caused by the encroachment of the environment that causes it to study her as much as she attempts to submit it to scientific scrutiny: “I felt as if Area X were laughing at me then - every blade of grass, every stray insect, every drop of water” (Annihilation 159). It is useful to once again be reminded of skin as something that comes into existence when “‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with others,” as noted by Ahmed. What needs to be further investigated is what form this encounter takes. The Southern Reach trilogy reveals ways in which skin is an intelligent interface with meaning-making, dialoguing properties. Readers are invited to consider skin as a convergence of objectivity and subjectivity in which both contribute to valid and effective knowledge. This stands as an alternative to the stress often placed on pure objectivity as a means to advance scientific knowledge. Therefore theoretical frameworks are needed that investigate more closely what N. Katherine Hayles sees as our embeddedness within “cognitive assemblages,” (116) information-rich, meta-stable, far-reaching, or localized environments in which much of the decision-making based on interpretation of that environment is distributed. The biologist’s encounter with Area X reveals the points of contact and exchange between a living entity and its living or nonliving surroundings understood in terms of Hayles’ cognitive assemblage. It will help to think of skin not as a pre-existing boundary between the inside and the outside but rather as an assemblage that contains and constitutes the many avenues of exchange and influence between the inside and the outside. Skin is an assemblage since it too is an information-rich, meta-stable region that, as an organ of perception, provides filtered data to the nervous system for further processing. Importantly, cognition according to Hayles does not just passively receive signals, it interprets them, assesses them, and involves cognising actors together with material agents in modifying information flows to promote the aims of the assemblage. Because of these properties, skin does more than package an entity or organism, it also packages that organism’s surrounds, that might recall Erich Hörl’s notion of “environmentality”. VanderMeer shows that the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity remains, even though pressure is brought to bear on it in several ways. Consider for example the confrontation between the biologist who remained in Area X only to transform into a mountain and her Doppelgänger Ghost Bird who returns to Southern Reach: The mountain that was the biologist came up almost to the windowsill, so close she could have jumped down onto what served as its back […] The green-andwhite stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enormous brain. The scars of conflict with other monsters pale and dull against the

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biologist’s skin. It had many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones spread open, the blossoming of many eyes - normal, parietal, and simple - all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky. Her eyes. Ghost Bird’s eyes. (Acceptance 195)

Here, at a climax for Ghost Bird of her encounter with what became of her original, she sees her own eyes looking back at her while at the same time referring to them as “temporary tidal pools” with skin resembling the pockmarked surface of weathered rock. And yet this is not actually a case of indistinguishable and total merging since the biologist is still a distinct creature with an outline, alien though it may be: “Ghost Bird leaned out the window, reached out and pushed through the shimmering layer, so like breaking the surface of a tidal pool to touch what lay within.…and her hands found purchase on that thick, slick skin, among all of those eyes, her eyes, staring up at her” (195). Those “tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water,” refer to the surrounds that both forms of the biologist are familiar with. The mountain is amphibious, an organism that can “transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door in a border” (196). The border between self and other could hardly be more porous than is revealed in this passage. Yet both Ghost Bird and the original biologist are still distinct entities despite this porosity. Skin is a stabilizing structure allowing an entity to be defined, but not over defined. Ghost Bird recognizes her own eyes in the moving mountain among the miniature craters and tidal pools on its skin. An expert in transitional environments, the biologist’s special area of interest was creatures living in coastal tidal pools. The fact that her Doppelgänger is an expression of that scientific interest demonstrates the narrative link between the way we take an interest in the world and the body. The creature’s body is an expression of the original biologist’s passion and scientific curiosity regarding especially tidal pools, which in her previous life she had spent hours studying. Through its filtering and selection processes, skin extends to an organism’s surrounds. Thus, scientific methods are themselves embodied as in the example of the biologist’s interest in tidal pools outlined on the creature’s back in a rejigging of the relationship between the human subject and the environment. This expert in transitional ecologies has mutated into an organism that could be read as a response to her original sense of bewilderment in understanding “something monumental” as an “imagined leviathan” (Annihilation 93). She has become the embodiment of her struggle to understand Area X. As such, the biologist is both subject and object of her inquiry, her scientific inquiry morphing into an extensive, amphibious creature with a thousand eyes capable of seeing herself. VanderMeer’s vision allows for a co-emergence of sorts as a form of information flow. Ghost Bird is the encounter between Area X and Southern Reach. She is a new assemblage so even though a scientist, she does not make scientific discoveries as much as she manifests them in her hybrid physiology.

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Conclusion In the passage of encounter between Ghost Bird and mountain that was the biologist, it is the boundary of skin that constitutes a distinction for an encounter between differences to take place even though it is between two manifestations of the biologist. Here, one version of the biologist is looking at another version of the biologist. The profound differences between them are the result of the context that produced them both: Area X. VanderMeer describes here a scenario in which the subject has the scientific benefit of being separate from the thing observed, while at the same time experiencing a profound connection with the thing observed. The biologist does not see her self as other in the form of a rival or a resource. Instead, she regards what she calls the “brightness” as something that opens her toward the possibility of shared understanding with other cognising systems of intelligent meaning-making: What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee. (Acceptance 189–190)

What began as a “pinprick” develops into an “odd form of communication” as seen in the passage above. Within a cognitive assemblage, skin forms a boundary, a distinction, which, as I have been arguing, is necessary for knowledge production, discovery and encounter. These assemblages are stable, whether they be far-reaching or localized environments. VanderMeer’s trilogy lends an increased embodied awareness of one’s physical presence as part of multiple, entangled assemblages with numerous intersecting boundaries. His is an example of a sophisticated environmental imaginary that can assist in reorienting the place of humans on the planet. Viewing the biologist’s encounter with Area X under these conditions sets up the basis for considering an exciting aspect of where ecological thinking is heading, especially with regard to embodiment and knowledge. In a conversation with VanderMeer about Southern Reach, Timothy Morton suggests that despite the porosity of boundaries, it nevertheless makes sense to retain them: “Things can leak through either way and the boundary isn’t thin or rigid … We can’t really establish in advance the tightness and impermeability of that boundary unless we’re being very anthropocentric” (Hageman). To advance our understanding of boundaries in the form of skin within an ecology of distributed cognition, it may be worthwhile to rely on a less anthropocentric process of deduction, as Morton seems to be suggesting here. In lieu of establishing in advance “the tightness and impermeability of that boundary,” literary practices of encountering via recognition may be better suited

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for engaging with the challenges generated by planetary crisis. The theoretical concepts and deliberative strategies demonstrated in the Southern Reach trilogy by entities from either side of the border of Area X help us to understand better our current predicament. In particular, it will become necessary to face the challenges of negotiating human relations with other distributed networks of signification and meaning-making systems as these will likely frame and determine many future aspects of the human experience as we shed our anthropocentric skin.

Notes 1. For a discussion about the slipperiness of this genre and the significance of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy in defining the genre as “a kind of extraterritorial Area X that mobilises boundaries, spins the compass, dethrones the human, hybridises taxonomic categories and bewilderingly shifts beyond any static cartographic plan” (1061), see Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/ Orientation,” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 6 (2017), pp. 1041–1061. 2.  For some readers, this might recall Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, the medium is the message. More precisely, Brian Massumi has declared that skin speaks faster than words, though in the case of VanderMeer’s biologist she seems to “read” via her skin the essentially viral message contained in the substance of the moss faster than the words it forms. 3. For an in-depth discussion on objectivity in all its complexity, not just as the overcoming of subjectivity, see Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity,” Synthese, vol. 138 (2004), pp. 453–473.

Works Cited Adams, Alexandra. 2015. Summary of Information Concerning the Ecological and Economic Impacts of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Disaster. NRDC. Natural Resources Defense Council, June 19. https://www.nrdc.org/resources/summary-information-concerning-ecological-and-economic-impacts-bp-deepwater-horizon-oil. Ahmed, Sara. 2005. The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation. In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, ed. Tina Chanter, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 95–111. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Douglas, Heather. 2004. The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity. Synthese 138: 453–473. Hageman, Andrew. 2016. A Conversation Between Timothy Morton and Jeff VanderMeer. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 24. https://lareviewofbooks. org/article/a-conversation-between-timothy-morton-and-jeff-vandermeer/#!. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

494  S. AHLBERG Hörl, Erich. 2018. The Environmentalitarian Situation: Reflections on the Becoming-Environmental of Thinking, Power, and Capital, trans. Nils F. Schott. Cultural Politics 13 (2): 153–173. Luckhurst, Roger. 2017. The Weird: A Dis/Orientation. Textual Practice 31 (6): 1041–1061. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tuana, Nancy, and Charles Scott. 2016. An Infused Dialogue, Part 1: Borders, Fusions, Influence. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30 (1): 1–14. VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014. Acceptance. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2014. Annihiliation. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2014. Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2015. From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey. The Atlantic, January 28. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2015/01/from-annihilation-to-acceptance-a-writers-surreal-journey/384884/. Watts, Michael. 2014. Oil Frontiers: The Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. In Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, 189–210. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 28

Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer, Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain Jeffrey Gonzalez

Most of the considerable body of writing on Richard Powers’s 1998 novel Gain has focused on its depiction of Clare International, a massive, Proctorand-Gamble style corporation that begins as a small, family-owned business. Powers’s depiction of Clare within the broader history of American capitalism has led critic Ralph Clare (no relation) to assert that the novel marks a limit to what readers can expect from a literary critique of a corporation (Clare 2014, 16). Clare International dominates the story, even though only one of the novel’s two contrapuntal plots focuses directly on the company’s birth, rise, and fall; because of this design, most readers rightly read Gain as an exploration of corporate logic and power (Clare 2014, 158–179; Maliszewski 2008, 162–186; Williams 1999a). Powers tracks the ubiquity of this and other corporations in the contemporary U.S. through the novel’s other narrative, which focuses on Laura Bodey, a 42-year-old divorced mother of two. Laura lives in suburban Lacewood, Illinois, where Clare’s Agricultural Division is headquartered. Powers’s narrator introduces Laura by telling us of Clare’s omnipresence in her hometown: “The town cannot hold a corn boil without its corporate sponsor. The company cuts every other check, writes the headlines, sings the school fight song” (Powers 1998, 6). Its products are also all over her home: the ­narrator mentions medicines, cleaning supplies, “shampoo, antacid, [and] low-fat

J. Gonzalez (*)  Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_28

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chips” (7) all produced by Clare. The reader consistently encounters Laura in relation to Clare, even from this initial appearance. Early in the book, Laura learns that she has ovarian cancer. During her treatment, she encounters accumulating evidence that Clare’s products or chemical activity may be responsible for her illness. First, her daughter Ellen shows her a notice in the town newspaper about high levels of toxic discharge in their county (139). Her ex-husband Don sends her the same article (160). A member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses named Janine Grandy tells Laura that her husband worked at Clare and died of cancer (190). Laura realizes that a friend she has met during her chemotherapy sessions drove a forklift at the Clare plant (192). She sees a newspaper story about three workers at the Clare Agricultural Products Division in Lacewood getting cancer (216). Don tells her that researchers supporting a class-action lawsuit filed against Clare allege that the company’s pesticides trigger cancerous mutation (319–320). These suggestions propose that Clare’s role in shaping Laura’s life is even greater than the narration initially signals to us. Clare not only influences the social experience of her town and decorates her home but also poisons her insidiously and fatally. Yet Powers never confirms this causal link, though most critical discussions of the novel assume it is there (Tabbi 2002, 54; Maxwell 2014, 180).1 The novel’s refusal to confirm causality signals that we should be careful about assigning blame. While Clare does engage in some unethical behavior, nothing in the Clare narrative indicates that the corporation is aware that its products or chemical research are carcinogenic: we do not hear of squelched research or silenced whistleblowers. Still, readers find ways to see Clare as responsible. For example, Joseph Dewey asserts that Laura’s cancer was “most likely caused by the environmental carelessness of Clare Industries,” but no specific activity is singled out in the novel for being particularly careless (2008, 115). Lacking a smoking gun, these readings rely partly on circumstantial evidence and partly on preconceptions about why these two figures, the cancer-victim consumer and the giant corporation, are made promixate by the novel’s design.2 The most likely causes for ovarian cancer are genetic predisposition and nulliparity. Powers gives evidence of the first condition: while Laura protests that no one in her family has had ovarian cancer, we learn that her daughter develops it (and has it caught early) in the novel’s epilogue, as Kathryn Hume and Susan Mizruchi have noted. As I will discuss in more detail shortly, none of Laura’s doctors feel comfortable hypothesizing about the cause of her cancer beyond family history, and one doctor firmly denies that ovarian cancer has environmental causes. Additionally, the sum total of evidence Laura gathers is anecdotal (people who work at Clare, people she sees in town), inconclusive (the emissions in the newspaper), or contested (what she hears from Don).

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The suspension of hard evidence linking Laura’s cancer to Clare belies a straightforward understanding of the narrative juxtaposition, and in this chapter, I want to show how Laura’s storyline contravenes what Jackie Stacey and Judy Segal call the masculinist and individualist conventions of the illness-narrative genre. By focusing attention on Laura’s struggle with cancer and the questions of causality that it raises, I hope to indicate the ways that Powers’s treatment of her illness calls attention to the social, biomedical, and environmental elements of a cancer struggle, rather than focusing on one person’s will, biomedical heroism, or corporate malevolence. This reframing authorizes seeing Gain as a model for a more progressive sort of cancer narrative, one that replaces individualist thinking without minimizing individual struggle. Second, and relatedly, I hope to demonstrate that the novel plays with causality and agency in order to challenge normative thinking about corporations, cancer, and the human. As my summary of the reactions above has shown, it is easy to imagine the corporation within the novel as a singular, malevolent distributor of poison, as such an image reflects liberal-left fears about corporate power in the neoliberal contemporary. Yet the depiction of Laura’s cancer focuses on maintaining a sense of agency in the face of these biological and economic forces. My reading of Power’s novel allows us to probe the ways that the “rhetorical agency” often ascribed to cancer is parallel to the amoral agency socially conferred upon the corporation (Agnew 2018, 277). This paralleling becomes possible through detailed attention to the cancer component of the narrative, and it yields compelling questions about the agency of the consumer-citizen in light of the awesome and impersonal power of the corporation and the cancer cell.

“No One Knows Their Own Body”: Alienation and Laura’s Cancer When we first meet her, Laura has problems: she worries about her teenage children, cannot stand her ex-husband, and has an only fleetingly satisfying relationship with a married man. Still, we are told, presumably from her perspective, that “her life has no problem that five more years couldn’t solve” (Powers 1998, 8). While getting dressed for the funeral of her daughter’s closest friend, Laura recalls the confidence she felt in her own girlhood about scientific progress: she believed “disease is just a passing holdover from when we lived wrong…My parents and their friends: the last generation that will have to die” (13; emphasis in original). Powers traces Laura’s gradual alienation from this optimism and the worldview that generates it. Her ovarian cancer is discovered during a surgery aimed at removing what she thought was a harmless cyst. Her doctor’s discovery that the cyst is a “serous cystadenocarcinoma” (75) leads to debulking surgery and then chemotherapy. Dealing with these consequences and other fallout from her illness forces her to make difficult physical, financial, emotional, and intellectual adjustments.

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Like many individuals in her position, Laura wants to know why she got cancer, and behind this question is an assumption that all cancers have an identifiable cause. Jackie Stacey’s seminal Tetraologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer argues that the revelation of cancer often summons a chronology with strict “narrative structuring”: “linearity, cause and effect and possible closures present themselves almost automatically…the body becomes the site of a narrative teleology that demands a retelling” (1997, 5). The illness disrupts Laura’s understanding of her life, including the cruelly optimistic sense that it will be better in five years. The normative purpose of the illness narrative, Stacey argues, is to document these disruptions and fit them into a “narrative structuring” that makes suffering meaningful. Laura tries to make sense of her illness by blaming herself for her illness. Such doubts are common across many cancer narratives, as Susan Sontag (1979) notably documented in Illness as Metaphor. Near the end of the novel, the narrator traces these thoughts: “she has brought this disease on herself, by being unhappy…because she doubted, took her eyes off the road, let negative thoughts poison her” (Powers 1998, 317). She wistfully acknowledges “carcinogenic amenities” like hairspray and hamburgers (283). In this self-blaming, Laura envisions herself as having made errors that she might have avoided with correct living, even though she understands herself as typical in many ways. Stacey writes that such thinking reveals “the successful condensation of so many deep-rooted beliefs about the body in contemporary culture, in particular fears about the limits and acceptability of its desires,” ones that manifest in our understanding of cancer (1997, 63). Yet these thoughts coexist with the suggestions that she encounters about Clare’s complicity, which also affirm a reason for her cancer—that it was caused by a powerful but neglectful entity. This persistent sense that her cancer has a cause never fully leaves her, even though her doctors consistently say they cannot determine one and Laura’s own research yields similar conclusions. Don recalls Laura maintaining a consistent fatalism during their marriage—he recalls her saying, “you can’t change your number coming up” (Powers 1998, 40)—that periodically re-emerges when she feels like her cancer has no explanation. She swings between feeling this abstract fatalism and insisting on some form of causality throughout her narrative. Both of these poles are unsatisfying, of course, and each only deepens Laura’s sense of frustration after her diagnosis. Her cancer and the questions it presents her with lead to a disquieting sense of overdetermination: she cannot locate herself in relation to the illness that is radically changing her self-definition and lived experience. After her surgery and throughout her chemotherapy, Powers regularly comments on Laura’s struggle to live in her body and the spaces she normally inhabits. In the aftermath of her debulking, the narrator explains, “They send Laura home. Except it isn’t home anymore” (83), due to her post-operative difficulty moving around. After hearing advice to return to “her life,” the

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narrator explains that her current life “feels like nothing she’s ever v­isited” (119). These claims presage other ones: “she cannot say whose life she has been spirited into” (134). Each of these examples emphasizes her sense of being estranged, forced to live inside a version of herself she no longer knows intimately. She generalizes the feeling she now has about her lack of self-knowledge multiple times: “Nobody really knows what’s blossoming inside him” (85); “No one really knows their real body” (114). Lois Agnew observes that “the personification of cancer as a sinister external enemy sometimes obscure[s] the fact that cancer patients are dealing with a disease that has emerged from their own cells” (2018, 290). The narrator’s statements reflect this insight, where Laura’s chemotherapy attacks the body to defend the body from the body. Her inability to feel at home in her house or her body loosens her ­pre-illness sense of personal ownership, and disrupts what had been a comfortable consumer existence. Another refrain throughout Laura’s treatment is how difficult it is for her to eat. Problems with eating are common for chemo patients, and Powers makes these problems an area of focus. Among many other references to this issue, we are told that she “never suspected that a crust of white bread really tastes like chrome” (Powers 1998, 135). During radiation treatments, “food no longer just repulses her. It becomes inconceivable” (241). The novel indicates that Laura has to withdraw (or wants to) from what once had been a form of unproblematic consumption. Cast in those first pages as a quintessential American shopper, she stops being a consumer of the goods she wants to consume.3 Powers stresses this alienation from her pre-cancer self even while he chooses to make her ovarian cancer fairly typical. Laura is diagnosed with epithetheal ovarian cancer, the most common type, and her cancer is discovered at the most common point (Stage C, following her doctor’s prediction). Her medical trajectory is typical, too: her serous cystademocarcinoma was diagnosed after her surgeon saw “a small foraging wet spot” (75) on the smaller of two cysts that she removed, which led to the removal of Laura’s omentum. That Laura does not realize she had any serious symptoms is also typical. Susan Gubar cites this moment in Gain in her memoir about her own ovarian cancer, as it illustrates how “subtle signs of the disease are often not registered or properly interpreted” (2012, 17). The symptoms of ovarian cancer are difficult to distinguish from premenstrual and menopausal pangs or simply the discomforts that become more common in middle age (Gubar 2012, 16–17; Conner and Langford 2003; Montz and Bristow 2005). One reason why ovarian cancer is often fatal is that it continues to spread while these symptoms go unnoticed. Gubar felt that her “body had been betrayed or had betrayed me” (2012, 14), suggesting the relatively common experience Laura has of not realizing she has anything wrong with her, which is of course no less disquieting or alienating for its commonality. While ovarian cancer is the most oft-diagnosed gynecological cancer, it is a disease without a popular cultural presence. Martha Stoddard Holmes has

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written of the “pervasive and public imaginative gap, even a willed opacity, regarding the ovaries and ovarian cancer” (2006, 477). Different than breast or skin cancers, Holmes writes that we cannot envision cancers that impact “bodily interiors” (481)—even a gynecologist cannot reach the ovaries with a hand during an examination; Jane Schulz suggests that ovarian cancer is “written in but not on the body” (2013/14, 75). The sense of alienation from one’s body compounds when one has few images or narratives to help frame expectations. In choosing ovarian cancer for Laura, Powers invites all these forms of disorientation. Laura knows little about her disease: her only reference point is a neighbor who died of ovarian cancer (Powers 1998, 84). The cancer originates in a part of her body she does not know much about. After Laura wakes up from her surgery, Dr. Jenkins mentions her omentum washings. Laura asks, “I have an omentum?” The doctor replies, “Not anymore” (75). The distance she feels from her body leads to one form of disorientation. Her aforementioned desire to locate a cause for her cancer generates another. The scientific framing of cancer as simply an unpredictable biological occurrence is tough for her to swallow. After her initial diagnosis, Laura asks her gynecological surgeon, Dr. Jenkins, what causes ovarian cancer, and Jenkins tells her, “Nobody really knows for certain” (76). An unnamed ovarian cancer specialist gives her a long list of possible causes, so long that Laura stops listening (99). After she asks him about environmental causes, her oncologist Dr. Archer hands her a report stating that little evidence exists regarding external triggers for ovarian cancer (191). She keeps asking and keeps not getting answers. Nonetheless, Laura does not show any rage against her doctors, and while her ex-husband keeps threatening to sue the hospital, Powers does not offer any evidence of malpractice. Gubar notes that many cancer narratives turn into rants against the medical establishment (2012, 52), but while her doctors are ultimately helpless against Laura’s cancer, Gain does not seem to hold them responsible. Nor does Gain fall into the other increasingly common narrative of cancer, the type Judy Segal calls “triumphal cancer stories,” of strong-willed people finding important life lessons in their struggle with the disease (2012, 9). Segal argues that these triumphal cancer stories assert that “cancer has a meaning,” and we might add that the anti-medical establishment narratives do the same thing (2012, 310). One story has a hero; the other has a villain and a victim. Segal asserts that an account without these frames, one simply showing suffering and dying, would constitute an “un-narrative” of cancer, one that builds “up to nothing in particular” and is, as a result, “intolerable” (212, 310). Segal’s statement indicates, perhaps, a key reason why the urge to convert Laura’s cancer into a Clare-induced epidemic is so prevalent: the existence of a villain gives us a narrative with an innocent victim, one whose poisoning produces a warning for those living in corporate-dominated environments. It is the prevalence of these narratives that spurs the automatic

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narrative structuring that Stacey mentions and, as Stacey wrote of her own struggle with cancer, she struggled to think outside of (1997, 63). When Laura considers her own role in causing her cancer seriously, she looks over lists of potentially carcinogenic products and behaviors. At first, no one behavior jumps out to her. While she eventually locates things she has consumed and done that may have been risky, Laura ultimately decides that any relation to carcinogens is essentially unavoidable: “The whole planet, a superfund site. Life causes cancer” (Powers 1998, 284). This last statement reflects her exasperation, but it is consistent with researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee’s characterization of cancer in his masterful The Emperor of All Maladies. Early in the book, Mukherjee announces, “Malignant [or cancerous] growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes” (2011, 6). For Laura, and perhaps many readers, her cancer indicated that something has gone wrong, but she also credits the intolerable possibility that her cancer may not signify anything other than living long enough to get it. In this way, her alienation from the optimism about her life, rooted in the explicability of negative occurrences and an unthinking faith in progress, deepens. Thus we see how important Laura’s cancer itself is to the novel’s examination of the forces that determine her life. In making those other forces visible, Powers evades many of the complaints Segal and Stacey have made about the cancer narrative: its emphasis on a simple good (cancer sufferer) and evil (cancer) struggle; its plucky protagonist showing bravery in the face of pain; the medical establishment often presented as a masculinized hero or the unfeeling villain; its desire to generate a straightforward and uplifting moral meaning from a biological occurrence.4 Instead, Laura’s narrative spirals inward, through the mysteries of her body’s working, and outward, juxtaposed with the storyline about the role that corporations play in composing her environment.

“Oh, There’s a Cluster Here. Believe It”: Laura and Clare’s Complicity Speaking to the novel’s design, Powers told Jeffrey Williams that Gain has “two incommensurable frames,” and he aimed “to show how they entangle without contriving a dramatic confrontation” (Williams 1999b). These hints of Clare’s complicity in Laura’s cancer are one way of indicating the depth of the entanglement between this corporation and this citizen. We have seen that Powers introduces Laura by means of her relationship to Clare, and throughout her consideration of their complicity in her illness, she realizes how deeply her life depends on Clare and corporations like it. Bruce Robbins suggests that this awareness indicates Laura’s shift from considering herself an atomized figure to understanding that she is a part of a polity, even within her home, and as I noted above, this movement from a personal struggle to a

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broader one is one of the great merits of Powers’ use of the cancer-narrative genre (2003, 91). Late in the book, Powers revisits Laura’s feeling of alienation, this time linking it to the omnipresence of corporations in late capitalist America: “She never knew what this place really looked like while she was living in it. Now that she lives elsewhere, she cannot believe what she sees…The world is a registered copyright” (Powers 1998, 304). Throughout Gain, the narration pays attention to just how many consumer goods decorate her living space, while Laura initially does not. For example, when Laura sits down in her kitchen to calculate her five-year survival rate, the narrator mentions “the fake Tiffany lamp” she works under, the “Post-It” she uses, the “Pop Tart rind” she has to clean off, invoking three well-known brands (102). Her sickness and Clare’s possible complicity in it has changed the perspective she had before her diagnosis revealing that her environment is largely composed of corporations that have been invisible to her but impact her profoundly. In one key scene, her growing recognition of corporate omnipresence overlaps with an increasing awareness of how much cancer surrounds her. The correlation tempts her to imagine causation, connections the text itself undermines—while nonetheless offering regular reminders of the co-presence. Not long after a disquieting visit to the library, when a librarian tells her people often turn up to research their cancers, Laura attends the town fair with her two children. Echoing the language the narration uses later to describe Laura’s shift in perspective vis-à-vis commodities, the section begins: “Now that Laura looks, it seems a kind of epidemic…She cannot turn around without running into someone else. Why did she never see these people before?” (213). Laura identifies cancer victims all around her, but we are told this identification is based “on no evidence whatsoever….No proof. Laura just knows” (213). Her daughter Ellen confirms Laura’s take: Ellen is “already convinced. She doesn’t even need to look around” (214). This moment of misrecognition shows how the evidence she has encountered tempts Laura to see an epidemic where there is scant proof of one.5 Her observations here lack the credibility of her realizations about the prevalence of corporate design in her environment—the narration gives us good reasons to believe that Laura is surrounded by corporate commodities, while the lack of “proof” or “evidence” or even real “look[ing] around” punctuate the commentary in the county-fair scene. What is notable, however, is that Laura can see an epidemic, if she looks a certain way: this moment seems as revelatory as her other realizations about corporations. However invested in seeing “a kind of epidemic” she appears to be in this scene, we see her express skepticism shortly thereafter. In a discussion with Don about the class-action lawsuit against Clare, which Laura resists joining, she shows no confidence in the existence of a cluster. Don begins the exchange, with Laura parroting earlier claims by Dr. Archer:

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“You’re part of a cluster.” “Ovarian cancer doesn’t cluster, apparently.” “Oh, there’s a cluster here. Believe it. Haven’t you seen the statistics the paper’s been digging up? We’re way above average, for all kinds of cancers.” She wants to say: The whole country is way above average. She says, ‘The old Rowen marksmanship.’ For years, he compared the way her family argued to a kid who scatters buckshot against the barn wall, then draws a bulls-eye around the densest concentration of hits. (285–286)

Powers gives us two reasons to doubt Don’s position in this argument. First, if he is correct that many kinds of cancers in Lacewood are clustering, they are unlikely to have the same cause. What causes cancers of the blood, for instance, may not necessarily lead to gynecological cancers. Second, the marksmanship line references a well-known logical fallacy known as “the sharpshooter effect.” Science writer Leonard Mlodinow discusses this fallacy in a discussion about persistent misperceptions about causal relationships. Like Don’s allegation about Laura’s family, the apocryphal sharpshooter fires, then draws the target. Mlodoinow explains this fallacy by illustrating the problems with locating cancer clusters. He explains that attempts to determine environmental causes for cancer follow the sharpshooter doing ex post facto targeting: “first some citizens notice cancer; then they define the boundaries of the area at issue” (2009, 184). Because “the development of cancer requires successive mutations,” the presence of the disease can only be generated by “very long exposure” to “highly concentrated carcinogens.” As a result, drawing a straight line between any one carcinogen-producer and a cluster of cancer is a difficult proposition (Mlodoinow 2009, 184). Don’s desire to see a cluster, interestingly, reflects Laura’s similar sentiment in the county-fair scene. As we have seen, readers, too, incline toward seeing the epidemic; however, for each of the indications that Clare may have caused her cancer, Powers provides reasons to disbelieve this connection. Powers’s reputation is as a writer that does his homework, and his handling of Laura’s tumor and its treatment are medically and contextually accurate, even down to the chemo medications Laura takes. He would choose neither cancer nor this cancer without realizing the problems with determining causality that come with it, nor would he credit the thin evidence that Don provides as proof. Instead, we can see the ways the two forces dominating Laura’s experience—cancer and its treatment; the corporation’s omnipresence around her—continue to disorient her, making her see epidemics then denying them, making her feel responsible for her cancer then assuming that it is everywhere. That Laura eventually joins a class-action lawsuit against Clare suggests that she has accepted the suit’s claims. Her struggle with this decision, however, is beset by questions about her relationship to Clare and what assigning it—rather than a specific biological causality—responsibility would mean. She casts the possibility of Clare’s poisoning her as total dominance, which is why

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locating her own agency relative to the corporation is a factor in determining whether she feels Clare is guilty. Her very dependence on corporations complicates her ability to blame Clare for the cancer that’s killing her because, as the narrator tells us, “[e]very hour of her life depends on more corporations than she can count” (Powers 1998, 304). In her mind, her behavior is as important as theirs, as we see in her review of agential decisions to purchase Clare products—“She brought them in, by choice, toted them in a shopping bag. And she’d do it all over again, given the choice. Would have to” (304). This example shows Laura clinging to notions of agency and her own guilty complicity as a consumer in postmodern America. In these two moments, she poses the corporation as a shaper, if not the maker, of her environment. Yet while they have “molded” her life, generating the dependence she notes, she insists on having an active role in this arrangement. The coercion of the consent—she would do it again, she would have to do it again—does not erase her decision-making within the world she inherits. Even at the moment before she decides to join the class-action suit, she struggles to avoid thinking about her relation to agency, rather than biology. Pressuring Laura to enter the suit, Don lists a number of products that lawyers allege have caused cancer.6 What follows occurs immediately after he mentions one she used in her gardening, her most beloved activity: Her plot of earth. Her flowers. Sue them, she thinks. Every penny they are worth. Break them up for parts. And in the next blink: a weird dream of peace. It makes no difference whether this business gave her cancer. They have given her everything else… She must go before the end of the month. Before whatever new deadline [the class action lawsuit has] set for her signature. She must become as light as she feels. As light as this thought. Cease eating, cease turning nutrients into mass… ‘All right,’ she tells him. ‘Okay. Anything.’ (320)

This moment seems less of a confirmation about Clare’s complicity than one about the challenge of living in a capitalist society so suffused by corporations. Initially, Laura is furious if the pesticide is the carcinogen that made her sick. Yet that anger fades quickly. Instead, she wants to stop thinking of the myriad ways that the corporation has “taken her life and molded it.” She has stumbled into a growing awareness of herself as a participant in a larger polity—again, as Robbins has argued, if Laura once thought she was perfectly safe in her home, safe in the conventionality of her behavior, her cancer and the question of Clare’s complicity in it erase the boundary between inside and outside. What the possibility of their complicity has done has awakened her to another layer of determination: she is alienated not only from her body

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by the illness it has generated but also from the ecosystem she had not realized was shaped by something other than her decisions and natural forces. What we see in the passage, then, is that joining the lawsuit is also erasure of her agency—notice the use of the word “must” in the section when she decides to join the suit. Without forceful agency in any reading of her situation, Laura simply follows momentum. After deciding to join the lawsuit, Laura’s vision of Clare and what she wants from it changes. She imagines some acknowledgment of Clare’s guilt: “Paul Loftus, the head of the Ag. Division, visits her. He sits on the edge of her bed and offers her an apology. Franklin Kennibar, the CEO, flies out from Boston. No one knew anything. They will clean everything up” (344). These fantasy apologies coincide with a darker sense of Clare’s role in her life: “Clare comes to take her out for dinner and dancing. A male, in mid-life, handsome, charming, well built, well meaning….But always, the night of romantic dancing turns by evening’s end into desperate caresses, a brutal attack, date rape” (344). Laura’s framing shifts from her earlier insistence on mutual responsibility to one of Clare’s brutality and inhumanity. This image of Clare manifests Laura’s feeling that Clare has robbed her of agency, manipulating her in order to assault her in intimate and vicious ways; it makes her earlier claims that she invited Clare into her life an example of victim-blaming. The pain at this moment crystalizes Gain’s frustration with the ­corporate-dominated US landscape: several other passages in the Clare section use a dystopian tone to discuss the role the corporation will play in the future, as many other critics have noted. Her anger at the corporation emerges because they have played a much larger role in her life than she realized. Feeling similar anger at biology, or fate, is harder to experience or imagine: notice, for instance, that her fantasies involve the corporation being represented by a person—Kennibar, Loftus, the handsome middle-aged male. In envisioning a human face for the corporation, Laura replicates the reductive view of cancer that has emerged in the past century. As Agnew’s useful history of cancer metaphors suggests, we want to imagine cancer as separate from us in order for it to be a thing we can wage a war against, for we do not want to imagine the cancer cell’s destructive capacities as in some ways natural. Doing so would, as Stacey suggests, remind us that the complicated position of the individual undergoing chemotherapy not a war with an external enemy: it “is the self at war with the self” (1997, 62; emphasis in original). Agnew and Mukherjee, echoing Sontag’s seminal discussions of cancer’s representations, each discuss the ways a disease with multiple forms and faces has been condensed into a single, menacing Other, which of course ignores its biological rooting inside the self. It might be that the great insight of Gain is to remind us that Laura faces cells and forces that unwittingly endanger her while also composing her and comprising her—it is a text, then, about overdetermination of two sorts, and asks us less to lay blame or call out tragedy but instead to shudder at the difference between our myths of self-shaping and our actual precarious experience.

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For this reason, the reader can of course draw from Gain the ethical significance of severe public scrutiny of joint-stock, for-profit corporations. If, as recent lawsuits have determined, ovarian cancer can come from consumer products like Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder, the producers of those products must be required to examine the way those products were created and be held responsible for the results. Such actions, as Mollie Painter-Moreland has argued, will never come from the profit-seeking corporation itself, bent as it is on profit and growth; perpetual growth of any sort, as Christopher Kilgore has recently written, “produces malignant carcinogenic growth” (Painter-Morland 2011; Kilgore 2018, 177). I hesitate to follow other writers who have suggested that Clare kills Laura, but that it might have hastened her carcinogenesis (or the cancers of any of the characters she encounters) necessitates the sort of attention to the corporation’s impact that have been marshaled to produce cancer research. Yet her narrative also shows us precisely why consumer anger at corporate dominance never turns over into outright war: Clare employs people, supports town events and the local university, makes products people choose. While this paper focused heavily on Laura’s storyline, the rich body of writing on Clare’s representation in the novel indicates how complicated Clare’s omnipresence in Laura’s life is. Like the cancer, the corporation’s presence seems an indifferent, determining force that’s also an intimate component of her being. Powers’s rich treatment of Laura’s cancer story draws on the resources of the illness narrative but expands its normative purview, eschewing its individualist narrative tendency in favor of one that places an individual who dies of cancer in several broader contexts. Laura begins to understand how strange her biology is and how little she understands of herself, and this alienation gradually expands to her self-conception as a consumer. Cancer cells within her body multiply without her conscious consent; her consent to purchase consumer products may have brought more into her home than she consciously desired to. Neither situation can quite be called antagonistic, simply because neither the cancer cell nor the joint-stock corporation aims at doing anything specific to Laura Bodey. In this way we might see Gain as a text about human vulnerability, which is of course what all illness narratives ultimately explore—except the vulnerability expands not just to the biomedical sphere and the home, but to the late capitalist ecosystem within which we are organisms.

Notes 1. Other readers do not isolate Clare as the cause, but rather corporate capitalism itself or corporations writ large—see Ursula Heise (2002, 762, 765) or Bruce Robbins (2003, 84). 2.  Susan Mizruchi (2010), like Kathryn Hume (2013), asserts that the novel intentionally shies away from a causal relationship. Mizruchi does not, however, look closely at why Powers chooses cancer or why readers are drawn to making the causal link: these are two positions that I want to pursue in this chapter.

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Hume writes that the novel includes “relatively little technical material on cancer” (Hume 2013, 3) but I argue that what is included merits attention in relation to this causal question. 3.  A memorable scene early in the book shows Laura freezing when asked to choose between paper or plastic at the grocery store: she considers the downside to each (“one kills trees…the other releases insidious fumes if burned” [27]), ultimately leaving the decision up to the bagger. In this depiction Laura has no questions about the processed food she buys—something called “Peanut Sheets,” “harvest burgers,” “Thirst-Aid,” “longanberry-kiwi seltzer”—only about what to carry the groceries in (28–29). 4. Ann Jurecic (2012) pushes back forcefully against these characterizations, insisting that they emerge from a hermeneutics of suspicion that overlooks the value of stories about sickness and dying. The impressive Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature double-issue on innovative cancer narratives (primarily about autobiographical accounts of breast cancer) eschewed discussion of the mainstream narratives often derided by literary critics, while implicitly suggesting that writing by marginalized cancer survivors offers a valuable critique of those conventional norms. See Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32/33, eds. Mary K. DeShazer and Anita Helle. 5. Lisa Lynch offers an interesting reading of this scene, arguing that it indicates Laura’s fractured late capitalist ideology. Laura sticks with the medical establishment’s corporation-absolving understanding of her cancer’s causes rather than adopting “grass roots etiology” (2002, 204) that would allow her to join the community of cancer sufferers in Lacewood. Much of Lynch’s analysis is convincing, but her observations about this scene do not register these undermining comments by the narrator. 6. The product he mentions begins with “Atra,” which Derek Woods connected to “atrazine”: he writes “the most likely cause of Bodey’s cancer turns out to be atrazine” (2017, 79), which he must have drawn from Don’s reference (he doesn’t finish the name of the product—all Don says is “Atra,” and Laura’s reaction takes over the narration). Studies exist that propose a relationship between atrazine and ovarian cancer, and as a long-term amateur gardener, Laura would have had a great deal of exposure to Atrazine. Still, even this piece of potential evidence does not confirm suspicions: to get ovarian cancer at 42 from a product she used weekly in three seasons of the year, perhaps only in adulthood, and from a product not deployed near the part of the body where her cancer emerged, is not a rock solid case.

Works Cited Agnew, Lois. 2018. Ecologies of Cancer Rhetoric: The Shifting Terrain of US Cancer Wars, 1920–1980. College English 80 (3): 271–296. Clare, Ralph. 2014. Corporations Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Conner, Kristine, and Lauren Langford. 2003. Ovarian Cancer: Your Guide to Taking Control (Patient-Centered Guides). Boston, MA: O’Reilly Books. Dewey, Joseph. 2008. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: Univ of South Carolina Press.

508  J. GONZALEZ Gubar, Susan. 2012. Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer. New York: W. W. Norton. Heise, Ursula. 2002. Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel. American Literature 70 (4): 747–778. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. 2006. Pink Ribbons and Public Private Parts: On Not Imagining Ovarian Cancer. Literature and Medicine 25 (2): 475–501. Hume, Kathryn. 2013. Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54 (1): 1–17. Jurecic, Ann. 2012. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kilgore, Christopher D. 2018. Bad Networks: From Virus to Cancer in Post-Cyberpunk Narrative. Journal of Modern Literature 40 (2): 165–183. Lynch, Lisa. 2002. The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes’ [Safe] and Richard Powers’ Gain. Journal of Medical Humanities. 23 (3/4): 203–219. Maliszewski, Paul. 2008. The Business of Gain. In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 162–186. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Maxwell, Jason. 2014. Killing Yourself to Live: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Autoimmunity Paradigm. Cultural Critique 88 (1): 160–186. Mizruchi, Susan. 2010. Risk Theory and the Contemporary American Novel. American Literary History 22 (1): 109–135. Mlodinow, Leonard. 2009. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Vintage. Montz, F.J., and Robert E. Bristow. 2005. A Guide to Survivorship for Women with Ovarian Cancer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mukherjee, Siddhartha. 2011. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner. Painter-Morland, Mollie. 2011. Rethinking Responsible Agency in Corporations: Perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari. Journal of Business Ethics 101: 83–95. Powers, Richard. 1998. Gain. New York: Picador. Robbins, Bruce. 2003. Homework: Richard Powers, Walt Whitman, and the Poetry of the Commodity. ARIEL: A Review of Contemporary Literature 34 (1): 77–91. Schulz, Jane E. 2013/14. “Valid/Invalid: Women’s Cancer Narratives and the Phenomenology of Bodily Alteration.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32 (4)/33 (1): 71–87. Segal, Judy Z. 2012. Cancer Experience and Its Narration: An Accidental Study. Literature and Medicine 30 (2): 292–318. Sontag, Susan. 1979. Illness as Narrative. New York: Vintage Books. Stacey, Jackie. 1997. Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. International Library of Sociology. New York and London: Routledge. Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions: Electronic Mediations, vol. 8. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Jeffrey. 1999a. The Issue of Corporations: Richard Powers’ Gain. Cultural Logic 2 (2). http://clogic.eserver.com. Accessed 27 July 2017. ———. 1999b. The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers. Cultural Logic 2 (2). http://clogic.eserver.com. Accessed 27 July 2017. Woods, Derek. 2017. Corporate Chemistry: A Biopolitics of Environment in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Richard Powers’s Gain. American Literary History 29 (1): 72–99.

PART IV

Forms and Genres

CHAPTER 29

“Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion, and Early Twentieth-Century American Theatre Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

One of the questions that has long fascinated those interested in the ­interaction between theatre and science is: how do you convey scientific ideas in a genre that, generally speaking, has no narrative and so relies on showing rather than telling? How is the audience supposed to “get” it? In novels and other forms of narrative prose, the science can be explained and integrated textually in ways not available to the ostensive mode of performance. Theatre relies on a combination of visual and spoken languages, and takes place in real time; the spectator cannot stop the action, go back a few pages, reread at their own pace. Yet this is precisely what gives science-based performance its power. The audience watches, listens, and collaborates in building the performance in a way that epistemologically mimics the process of learning science. The text is dislodged from its dominance as the dense network of sensory inputs involved in performance naturally engages the full range of cognitive faculties. This chapter builds on that sense of shared epistemological work by ­comparing two American plays of the early twentieth century that engage very differently with scientific and medical subject matter: Susan Glaspell’s treatment of heredity, genetics, and evolution in Inheritors (2010a) and Sidney Howard’s dramatization of the quest to identify the cause of yellow fever in Yellow Jack (1934). These two plays illustrate common aspects of

K. E. Shepherd-Barr (*)  University of Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_29

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the interaction of science and theatre as well as ones rarely considered. They show the deep history and tenacity of certain ways of dramatizing science that still persist. They belong, though in vastly different ways, to the Progressive era of theatre in America, a period that has been little studied in terms of how science figured within its culture and ethos. They raise important questions about how gender influences the conceptualization of science on stage. Finally, both plays show how the science being engaged often tells its own, sometimes subversive, story in light of shifting social and historical ­contexts and perspectives. The Progressive era spanned the first three decades of the twentieth ­century and theatre of the time reflected its values, including (as the name suggests) progress in all aspects of society, social justice, equality, reform, and “purposeful human intervention” in the rapid economic growth of the nation rather than unbridled capitalism (Brinkley, Unfinished Nation, II, 556). Not yet overtaken by film in reach and popularity, theatre was at its peak as an instrument of social, economic, and political commentary and change, through individual playwrights, influential playwriting courses (such as George Pierce Baker’s at Harvard and Yale), and theatre organizations and companies such as the Provincetown Players, the Group Theatre, and the Federal Theatre Project. Glaspell helped initiate Progressive-era theatre through her pioneering work with the Provincetown Players in the mid-nineteen teens. She is known for her much-anthologized feminist play Trifles (1916) and its short story incarnation “A Jury of Her Peers,” but she also wrote over fifty short stories, nine novels (some bestselling), fourteen plays, and one biography. Howard was a prominent playwright of the period who wrote factual, information-rich dramas with an overtly moral and didactic purpose; he thought of himself more as a skilled craftsman than an artist (Hirsch, Guide to American Theatre, 197). In John Gassner’s view, some of Howard’s plays lacked “elevation and excitement, as is often the way of considered and reasoned documents in the theatre,” and he concluded that Howard generally “failed to catch fire from the period” (Gassner, Twenty Best Plays, xiv). A contemporary who did “catch fire” by engaging with science and medicine was Sidney Kingsley, who had two sensational Broadway hits in Men in White (1933), which created a working hospital on stage, and Dead End (1935), which exposed the unsanitary conditions in the slums of New York City and was inspired by JS Haldane’s writings (Couch 1995). By comparison, Howard’s highly textual and closely argued plays seem to lack such inventiveness, energy, and force, but his works perhaps better exemplify Progressive-era drama precisely for these weaknesses as well as their strengths. Both Howard and Glaspell won Pulitzer Prizes—Howard also won Academy Awards for two of his screenplays (Arrowsmith and Gone with the Wind)—and were masters of several forms. Glaspell wrote journalism, one-act and full-length plays, novels, and short stories. She first explored the ideas about hybridity in corn that feature in Inheritors in her short story “Pollen” (1919). This story and Inheritors show that she was conceiving of

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heredity not in strictly scientific terms but as something national and racial (as in the “human race”), as well as topographical (the idea of being “native” American). Howard based Yellow Jack on the gripping account of the quest to identify the cause of yellow fever in Paul de Kruif’s bestselling 1926 book Microbe Hunters. Howard’s reliance on de Kruif’s book suggests an essential deference to science and an uncritical retelling of its heroic accomplishments. By contrast, Glaspell represents a more questioning stance. For her, human sacrifice in the name of science is neither justified nor heroic. She questions the authority of science and the assumptions that it engenders progress and can save humanity. Setting Inheritors alongside Yellow Jack troubles the dominant narrative of Progressive-era theatre as unequivocally the moral backbone of society in this period and the beacon of social change and radical reform.

Inheritors: Staging Heredity in Plants and People Inheritors is a complex play. It spans three generations of settlers in the midwest and takes in a broad sweep of American history and government, criticizing the pursuit of westward expansion at the expense of Native Americans who were already there and exposing the country’s faltering commitment to tolerance of difference, freedom of expression, and the right to political dissent. Act I is set in 1879, Acts II and III in 1920. Pointedly, the 1920 protagonists are the hybrid descendants of 1879 characters’ unions, all genetically intertwined, some even (confusingly) given the same first names across generations. Madeline, the central character in the 1920 scenes, is the granddaughter of Silas Morton and the niece of Felix Fejevary, whose son is also called Felix Fejevary. This overlaying and intermingling allows Glaspell to test how well the ideals of the earlier generation have been upheld, and she uses the founding of a new university on land taken from Native Americans as the play’s petri dish. Inheritors engages with a range of scientific material that includes experimentation with corn hybrids; extended discussions of evolution; and a radical environmentalist vision of the earth as sentient. The play is centrally concerned with mechanisms of transmission, whether hereditary or otherwise, and whether of biology or of ideas. “Ain’t it queer how things blow from mind to mind—like seeds. Lord A’mighty—you don’t know where they’ll take hold” (Glaspell, Inheritors, I, 190). Glaspell had already explored this idea in “Pollen,” (1919) featuring a surly, arrogant farmer called Ira (who becomes Ira Morton in Inheritors) whose attempts jealously to guard the superb new strain of hybrid corn that he has created are thwarted by nature: winds carry the pollen across to his neighbors’ fields, where the corns cross-fertilize, thrive, and thus help his fellow men. Ira learns that hybridity is important not just in agriculture but in life, and becomes a better man, empathetic, open-hearted, and socially ­ integrated. The blowing winds may be random but are they entirely without purpose? Inheritors takes up this suggestion of will and agency in nature and explores it in some depth:

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“Sometimes I feel the land itself has got a mind and that the land would rather have had the Indians,” comments Silas. “After you’ve walked a long time over the earth…didn’t you ever feel something coming up from it that’s like thought?” (188). It is logical, then, that Silas dreams of establishing a university. “Plant a college,” he says, because ideas are natural outcrops of the thinking earth, not just of the people on it (189). But planting is not enough; plants must be propagated in order to flourish. This is where Ira comes in. The Ira of Inheritors has suffered deep losses—the deaths of his son (in the trenches of the First World War) and his wife (she died helping an immigrant family in the grip of diphtheria)—and now all he cares about is his corn experiments; he peers at his corn in a “shrewd, greedy way,” alludes to its “golden dust,” and says “gloatingly” that it’s the best he’s ever had (214). Ira signals a negative interpretation of science, its dangerous misuse when it trumps human interaction. Where the Ira of “Pollen” learned humanity from nature and its winds, this Ira rages: “if I could make the wind stand still! I want to turn the wind around” (216). He is referred to as “insane” and “tormented” (217), and “like something touched by an early frost” (222). Voluntary isolation and withdrawal from human contact are clearly bad for us. But this is no vague, sentimental plea for universal love; Glaspell is telling us to think carefully about our alliances and connections and how those networks help others. Like the corn, we only really thrive when we don’t just like “the same kind of people” as ourselves (218). To set this up, Glaspell includes a lengthy discussion of Darwin in the first act. Among other things, he is used by the younger generation to justify the eradication of Native peoples in the Americas. Felix says that “in the struggle for existence, many must go down. The fittest survive,” and this is what “the great new man” (Darwin) teaches. The uneducated Silas shrewdly counters: “Guess I don’t know what you mean—fittest” (191). Felix’s father, a highly educated Hungarian revolutionary exile, tries to explain Darwin but injects a note of Lamarckian will when he says that we have hands not because God gave them to us but because long ago, “before life had taken form as man, there was an impulse to do what had never been done,” there were “adventurers” whose brains and courage took life further than it had ever been, “and that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to do”—and this gives our hands “a history” and a purpose (191–2; italics mine). Silas is amazed at this revelation, at the idea, in his words, that “we made ourselves—made ourselves out of the wanting to be more—created ourselves you might say, by our own courage” (192). He has always known this to be true not because of science but because “the earth told me. The beasts told me” (192). Not only does the earth think, it speaks. Glaspell ­juxtaposes instinctive learning with formal education as equally valid epistemologies, and her interpretation of evolution is typical of American writers: sturdily and reductively progressive (“man’s in the makin’,” 193), afraid of regression, and far more influenced by Spencer and Lamarck than Darwin (ShepherdBarr 2015, pp. 203–36; see also Russett 1976; Papke 2006; Schuller 2017).

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What is less typical for a playwright of this period, when so much of drama looks at urbanization and its effects, is her emphasis on the land, on nativism, and on the wisdom of the soil over that of humans. Inheritors premiered at the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights Theatre in Greenwich Village in March 1921. The play was a popular success with audiences but its critical reception was mixed, one reviewer complaining of its length (over three hours) and the overdone make-up: “a child with a box of paints could make something far more closely resembling a human face” (James Patterson, Billboard, 2 April 1921; quoted in Ben Zvi, 233). Others disliked its overt politics, the New York Times deeming Inheritors a thinly veiled polemic, “painfully dull, pulseless and desultory” (Alexander Woollcott, New York Times, 27 March 1921) and Theatre Arts Magazine declaring it didactic and lacking in action (Kenneth McGowan, Theatre Arts Magazine, July 1921; quoted in Ben Zvi, 233). But Floyd Dell called it “a high moment in American drama” (Floyd Dell, Homecoming, 267) while others noted that its ambitious subject matter was “nothing less than the history of the country and its direction in the future,” and that it pioneered a new historical drama form never before seen in America (Ben Zvi, 233). When Inheritors was published in England in 1924, it was pronounced “the best achievement of the American theatre” (James Agate, Sunday Times, 24 August 1924) and critics repeatedly placed Glaspell alongside Ibsen and Shaw and preferred her to O’Neill (Ben Zvi, 306–7). The play’s successful British premiere in Liverpool in 1925 led quickly to a London transfer, covered extensively by all the major newspapers (Ben Zvi, 309). One explanation for this stark difference in national responses to Inheritors is that Britain already had a strong tradition of political theatre into which Glaspell naturally fit, in contrast to the lack of such a context in the US. Another is that it was not “on” for a playwright, let alone a woman, to ­criticize America’s history and politics on home soil. Inheritors clashed with the conservative bent of America in the immediate post-WWI period, and the play’s championing of hybridity and of racial and ethnic difference put it directly at odds with the eugenics movement, at its peak in the nineteen teens and twenties (Wolff 2009). “The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History” (1916) by Madison Grant was a bestseller throughout this period; the American Eugenics Society was flourishing, and strenuously advocated the sterilization of the unfit. In addition, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917–18 (referred to directly in Act III of Inheritors) restricted freedom of speech and political dissent; the JohnsonReed Immigration Act of 1924 severely curtailed most immigration to the US; and the hasty trial in 1921 of immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti and their execution in 1927 stood globally as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated by the American legal system. They were victims of the first Red Scare, in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and WWI, another important context for Inheritors. Glaspell waded straight into this reactionary political environment with

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her play, asking what it really means to be, as the play repeatedly puts it, “one-hundred-percent-American” (194), genetically, intellectually, and politically. Presciently, in the 1920 scenes she has the college president declare: “I’m not going to have foreign revolutionists come here and block the things I’ve spent my life working for” (207). Glaspell makes much of the university site being on a hill—a prominent motif in the play, frequently mentioned by most of the characters for its beauty and ideal situation for a university because “you can see it from the whole country round” (198). But the reverse is also true: the hill can become a panopticon that can see everyone, watch and monitor the activities of the city around it if it chooses to do so. The right-wing senator scrutinizes the university and puts pressure on the president to suppress an activist professor and student (the president’s own niece). We see the university that undertakes surveillance of its students and faculty members ceasing to be a place of intellectual integrity and freedom. The Verge, the play Glaspell wrote directly after Inheritors, continues this panopticon motif in the form of Claire’s glass-encased greenhouse laboratory and the strange tower to which she retreats, suggesting that both are concrete ways of reversing the policing male gaze. The play’s engagement with science lies in the critique of the dangers of distorting the new field of genetics into eugenics, which emphasized the visible defects of the unfit as keys to their innate, biological flaws (Wolff 2009). Glaspell’s theatre repeatedly suggests that how we handle looking, seeing, and gazing at the surface of things, what conclusions we draw based on our observations of the visible, says everything about us as a people.

Yellow Jack: Staging a Medical Detective Story Unseen organic processes lie at the heart of Howard’s Yellow Jack as well. The play tells the story of tracking down the cause of yellow fever by going through the different milestones in the search. The star of the story is Major Walter Reed, an army medical investigator stationed in Cuba in 1900 to identify the cause of yellow fever and other tropical diseases that are having a devastating impact on the army. Through risky experiments on human subjects, some of whom died, Reed was able to ascertain that the fever is transmitted by certain species of mosquito, not by fomites (infected clothing, bedding, or body fluids). It is a virus which, at high enough concentration, can infect the epithelial cells of the mosquito and replicate, eventually reaching the salivary glands. This means that transmission can only occur within a specific time frame: “mosquitoes only receive sufficient virus if they feed during the first few days of illness, when the viral load is high, and they cannot transmit the disease until nearly a fortnight later” (http://www.aycyas.com/yellowjack. htm). Much of the drama of the play lies in the risky experiments required to gain this understanding. The play proceeds in reverse (like a precursor to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal) through scenes that take us eventually back to Reed’s great breakthrough.

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We begin in 1929 in a London laboratory trying to create a yellow fever ­vaccine, at the expense of many dead monkeys. The next scene is a flashback to a few years earlier when scientists are despairing at not finding an animal that will catch the disease, no matter how often they have tried i­njecting every available species. One colleague, Harkness, even thinks wistfully of injecting people in the village in West Africa where they are working— implying that he views them as animals, which horrifies his colleague Kraemer. Once they realize that another colleague, Stokes, has achieved the “miracle” of fatally transmitting the disease to a monkey, they begin to argue about the next step; Stokes proposes that they do the same on a lot more monkeys, saying that “five hundred monkeys are cheaper than one man” and that they can’t even begin to think of a vaccine “till we’ve seen dozens of monkeys die as this one’s died.” This sense of lives needing to be sacrificed to the cause of science prepares us for the next series of scenes in which those lives become human, as the play moves to 1900 and Reed’s laboratory in the American Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba. They are having no luck figuring out why so many soldiers are dying of the disease until they discover that a soldier has developed it while alone, locked up in a guardhouse for a month. This makes Reed pause, and “the light concentrates upon the tensely thoughtful Reed” as he has a eureka moment: “What was it crawled or jumped or flew through that guardhouse window, bit that one prisoner and went back where it came from?” (39). He infers that it’s a mosquito, and that this particular species is the disease vector. They go to visit Finlay, the old doctor who has known about the mosquito as the source for nineteen years but never been taken seriously. He is understandably bitter at being scorned and takes some persuading, but finally turns over the mosquito eggs he has been cultivating that contain the fever. “You hold the key to yellow fever in your hands,” he tells Reed’s team. (Howard makes Finlay, a Cuban doctor of French-Scottish extraction, a crusty old Scot.) Led by Reed, the men then proceed, against army orders, secretly to experiment on themselves, one after the other, as well as on four unwitting soldiers. This is high drama, suffused with intense discussion and self-conscious awareness of what “science” is, its point, values, aims, and “workmanship.” It is also the story of tough, single-minded men sacrificing themselves in pursuit of science. It is thus typical of the strongly biographical “great men of science” approach to engaging science in the theatre. The play depicts Reed as the hero who conquered yellow fever, a narrative adhered to by US history textbooks as well and reinforced by De Kruif, even though Reed took great care to credit Finlay’s important role. The play and the Hollywood film version a few years later both downplay another of Reed’s great innovations: informed consent, today an indispensable part of any experiment involving human subjects. Evidently that was not dramatic enough. The play’s unquestioning acceptance of vivisection, its frequent racial and ethnic slurs, and its defense of unethical procedures in the greater goal of science not only date it but make it unstageable today. For instance, one of

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the soldiers being experimented upon repeatedly refers to his Jewishness in ways that both assert and deride it: “I may be Jewish but I got guts!” (32). But even if such elements were to be cut, a revival would be unlikely, because what made the play theatrically notable and remarkable in its time—its innovative staging—is now completely standard in theatrical productions. Yellow Jack premiered in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in March 1934 and ran for 79 performances. It was directed by Guthrie McClintic and featured set design by Jo Mielziner. James Stewart was in the original cast playing John O’Hara, one of the soldiers involved as a human subject in Reed’s experiments. Mielziner was at the start of his extraordinary career as one of America’s leading stage designers (his staging of plays by Miller and Williams in particular remain landmarks in theatre history), and Yellow Jack was an early example of his trademark style of moving quickly and seamlessly from scene to scene by using lighting and different levels of flooring instead of realistic scenery to depict place. The opening stage directions explain how this works: The stage is divided into two levels, the upper lifted five feet above the floor of the stage and approached from below by twin flights of steps. These steps curve on either side of the central element of the upper level, a round bay which remains Reed’s laboratory throughout the play…..The production uses nothing of realism beyond the properties [hospital beds, tents, laboratory equipment] which are absolutely essential to the action. Changes of locale are indicated only by alteration in the lighting. The action being continuous, the play flows in a constantly shifting rhythm of light. (Yellow Jack at Internet Archive)

At one point, “the laboratory [Reed’s], its shelves, glassware and microscopes, shines with unearthly effulgence, as from within itself” (55). This illumination of the lab space happens frequently throughout the play, ­ ­suggesting the lab as a living, sentient entity; almost a separate character in the play, similar to the thinking earth of Inheritors or the greenhouse of The Verge. Both Glaspell and Howard (with Mielziner’s help) foreground the agency of the physical space in their staging of science and medicine. This agency is not just a means to conveying science; it is central to the conception of how science and theatre integrate. The “multi-leveled, skeletonized settings and poetic lighting” of the ­production were lauded, but “the lateness of the season, the sombreness, if ultimate hopefulness, of the story, and the large, costly cast militated against a run of more than ten weeks” (Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930–1969, 96). It was also the bottom of the Depression, surely a key factor in the run of any play. Subsequent productions have been rare, though the play was revived in 1947 at the American Repertory Theatre and was made into a Hollywood film in 1938 starring Robert Montgomery, produced by MGM building on their previous success with their film about Louis Pasteur and their reputation for engaging

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successfully with social issues. True to form, the film version “cleaned up, romanticised and re-focused” (http://www.aycyas.com/yellowjack.htm) the story, including the creation of “a completely unnecessary love interest” for O’Hara (played by Montgomery): an army nurse named Frances Blake, entirely erasing the real-life nurse Clara Maass who volunteered not once but twice to be bitten by the mosquito thought to carry the disease and whose death proved that immunity was not automatically conferred on survivors of the disease. Though her full story is side-lined in the play, she is at least present in it and fulfilling a serious medical role, not simply serving as a love interest for the male star as in the film. There is very little criticism on the play, and little information on its ­genesis. In his introduction to 20 Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre, John Gassner describes Yellow Jack (itself not included in the collection) as “a drama which moved away from personal complications, honoring the services of science to society in the battle against yellow fever in Cuba. It was a noble and spirited work, and it belonged to the bolder experiments by virtue of its shifting scenes unified by the omission of intermissions” (xiv). The primary source for information about Yellow Jack is the preface by Howard which was published (in edited form) in the New York Times (“The Preface for ‘Yellow Jack,’ 11 March 1934), in which Howard explains that after reading Microbe Hunters he approached de Kruif and suggested using his chapter on Reed and yellow fever as the basis for a play. But de Kruif was “only mildly intrigued with the idea,” so Howard wrote it alone. Howard begins his Preface by asserting that science and theatre are a ­natural fit: “the things men of science do and how they do them, even when they far outreach my understanding, exceed any other activity of modern life for the drama which is in them.” He argues that such inherently dramatic material is precisely what theatre “so sorely” needs as an alternative to “the repetitions of love and crime.” Theatre needs “real characters and facts,” ­ simply presented, and it will be “as interesting as the morning paper.” Yellow Jack is meant to illustrate how this can be achieved: it presents “a single medical experiment from its inception to its conclusion with no more elaboration either in characterization or in dramatic intervention than would seem essential to presenting its incidents in dramatic form.” That “elaboration” is hardly as minimal as he claims. He lists “certain minor historical liberties” that he has taken and explains that he has allowed himself “full liberty in the assembling of characters and scenes,” including inventing characters and compressing the actual experiment by omitting certain phases of it. He justifies this alteration of the facts in the name of dramatic action and interest and because some of the people involved, and their relatives, are still living. “The play is to be considered rather a celebration than a representation.” This surprisingly candid admission of bias toward a heroic display of medicine directly contrasts the neutral, “let the facts speak for themselves” approach often claimed for documentary theatre (Shepherd-Barr 2006, 63–77).

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The preface is as much a reflection on the nature of theatre, and the c­hallenges of its construction, as an explanation of how this particular play came about. Howard is unsure what kind of play he has written. He says that the play’s subtitle, “A History,” is “pretentious,” and was aimed at preventing people from telling him that it “is not a play.” He muses on “what constitutes a play,” giving three examples that are so different (Oedipus Rex, The Way of the World, and The Emperor Jones) that he has to give up on finding a single definition that fits them all. He wants to “forget about what is known as dramatic technique, if indeed there is or ever has been any such thing.” He ­confesses to getting “stuck” in writing Yellow Jack because he quickly discovered “that neither de Kruif nor I knew enough about either the characters or the events to dramatize them,” and because “the material could not be managed in anything resembling a conventional realistic form.” The temporal aspect was particularly challenging. Straightforwardly linear development would not be true to the reality of medical experiment, which “is a thing of many details, a succession of cautious steps, steps which go more often backward than forward. Therein lies its excitement.” He realized that no form existed that could encompass the story in “realistic production.” His breakthrough came when he happened to see a Chinese theatre in San Francisco and this gave him “the combination” to make Yellow Jack work. For Howard, Chinese theatre was like Elizabethan theatre; both forms “make possible the inherent poetry of the story.” Once he had ditched prosaic realism, he was able to finish the play, and working with Mielziner clinched it. Dispensing with “doors or windows, walls or ceilings, entrances or exits” was liberating; “a play which cannot be done without scenery is probably not worth doing.” The opening stage directions stipulate that the play be done as a “modern approximation of the Elizabethan stage.” The rest of the preface outlines the scientific soundness of the play: the research Howard did into the historical records, consulting the Academy of Medicine in New York and the library of the Surgeon General’s office in Washington, DC. De Kruif’s input was indirect: “when I found myself using the dictionary too hard, I imposed on de Kruif to write an article for my private use. Medical reports rewritten by de Kruif become child’s play.” In other words, Howard relied on this mediation of technical, specialist medical language. He also made visits to get information from participants and their relatives, including the widow of Walter Reed, who showed him Reed’s letters from Cuba, and Dr. Cook, one of the human subjects who lived for three weeks in the filthy house at Camp Lazear as part of the pivotal experiment. He interviewed “a good many dozens of army and ex-army men.” Yet not only was there the problem of memory being inherently subjective and unreliable, but Howard seemed unable to form a clear sense of what Reed and his colleagues were actually like. Uncannily, he discovered that things that he had made up about Reed (bribing a soldier to admit to his whereabouts, then offering to pay him when the soldier turned out to be telling the truth) were actually true. Not only does this justify Howard’s inventions, it further

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illustrates the complicated relationship of fact to fiction and the “gray zone” between them in many plays engaging with science. In this regard, Yellow Jack represents a commonly held position on “science plays” that defers to the science as the main element that must not be compromised, even while seeming to claim equal status for theatricality. Howard’s preface tells us a lot about the play’s origins, and about its expectations. The fact that it appeared in the front pages of the New York Times and at such length gave it a prominence rarely accorded theatrical productions. Clearly, the play was expected to be a sensation. Howard conveys a sense of this portentousness in the final sentences (“as I conclude this preface it is less than three hours before the curtain will rise on its first performance under the profound and poetic direction of Guthrie McClintic”). The modest circumstances of Inheritors stand in marked contrast to this sense of a great event. The two plays inhabited different theatrical spheres with radically different production values, reflecting the budgets of, on the one hand, experimental, off-Broadway theatre and, on the other hand, high-profile, mainstream Broadway productions. But they do have similar structures, spanning events over a long period of time and across generations, and telescoping history. Glaspell uses this span in order to raise questions about how evolution works and whether it is progressive, while Howard’s aim is to show the triumphant march of medical science. Where Inheritors and Yellow Jack diverge most dramatically is in assessing the human cost of progress: for Howard, the few lives lost in the quest to stop yellow fever are worth it; for Glaspell, the plight of indigenous people cleared off their land, of the Indian student protestors at the university, and the conscientious objectors put in solitary confinement for their beliefs all represent human sacrifice to a distorted and tarnished nationalism. In her vision of evolution, no one is dispensable; each is an essential part of the web of life. In Howard’s play, a few lives lost make no evolutionary difference but are humanity’s gain by helping to control a deadly disease. It is tempting to see these different visions as shaped by gender. Glaspell conveys evolution as something intangible, humanity as vitally interconnected and hybrid, and the earth as active, thinking agent rather than passive resource to be colonized and industrialized. This approach is consistent with a distinctly feminist view of nature and the environment as needing ­protection and nurture (Gates, ed., In Nature’s Name, 2002). It is also an extension of the feminism of her other plays of this period, especially Trifles, The Outside, and The Verge, all of which utilize innovative staging and the agentive properties of physical space to convey their ideas. By contrast, Howard’s docudrama foregrounds stereotypically male endeavors and qualities in its seemingly impartial account. Yet this may largely be due to the style of its raw material, Microbe Hunters. De Kruif’s success as a science writer came partly through his unique style which fused the factual and the subjective in a self-consciously virile, masculinist voice that matches his subject matter. His works focus mostly on exceptional men of medicine and science,

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as in Microbe Hunters, Life Among the Doctors, and Men Against Death (focusing on heroic real-life doctors, all male), but also extended to writing a book on testosterone (The Male Hormone, 1945), an eye-watering autobiography (A Sweeping Wind, 1962) that catalogues his prodigious sexual appetites and marital infidelities (and sheds no light on Yellow Jack), and a book called Seven Iron Men in which one patriarchal American family, the Merritt brothers, is crushed by another, the Rockefellers. Here again, context is key. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which American literature and theatre of the so-called “Progressive Era” was dominated by male writers. Male writers were foregrounded and maleness was—quite literally—prized. The Pulitzer Prize was founded on an emphasis on maleness as well on literary quality and moral guidance. Pulitzer’s will stipulated that the prize for the novel be awarded to the work that “shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood” and the prize for drama should go to plays that “shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners” (“Extracts from the Will of Joseph Pulitzer, from the Will dated April 16, 1904,” www.pulitzer. org/page/extracts-will-joseph-pulitzer, accessed 20/08/2019). Even when Pulitzer prizes were awarded to women writers, including Glaspell’s in 1931 for her play Alison’s House, it was on the basis of these values. At first glance, then, Yellow Jack and Inheritors seem to follow ­predictable gender lines: Yellow Jack reflecting its author’s masculinist concerns, Inheritors promoting Glaspell’s feminism. Yet Howard was not so straightforwardly masculinist in his endeavors. He was a versatile dramatist who worked in several genres including comedy, spectacle, romance, war drama, and science theatre. He also collaborated with other writers and adapted their works for the stage and screen, notably the film version of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith (a novel about an ambitious doctor that excoriated the medical profession) and Dodsworth; and he wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. (Coincidentally, De Kruif had already had a hand in the novel Arrowsmith; Lewis relied so heavily on De Kruif’s help with regard to the medical environment, characters, and themes that the latter received 25% of the royalties, even though Lewis was named as the sole author.) By the time of his premature death in 1939 at the age of 48 in a tractor accident on his farm, Howard had written 27 plays and numerous other works. His Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1927) contained “one of the era’s most appealing New Women, a heroine with more sense than any of the men in her life” (Hirsch, Guide to American Theatre, 197). Likewise, Glaspell resists easy categorization. Although Inheritors seems to contain the same feminist ideals as her powerful and pioneering feminist works Trifles and The Verge, it is not an overtly feminist drama (Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography 2000, 176ff.). The play not only charts its heroine’s growing political consciousness (echoing that of Elizabeth Robins’s budding suffragette in Votes for Women! fifteen years earlier), but also shows the personal cost her activism entails as

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well as questioning its efficacy (Ben Zvi and Gainor in Complete Plays, 180). This ambivalence toward feminism is strongly shaped by Glaspell’s thoughts on evolution and genetics. In short, the more deeply you look at them, the more Yellow Jack and Inheritors resist easy categorization along established lines. Though the two seem so different, there is a further dimension to Glaspell’s theatre work that aligns it unexpectedly with Howard’s Yellow Jack. During the brief life of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the 1930s, Glaspell served as its midwest bureau director. Conscious of the highly visible public health campaign in Chicago to eradicate syphilis, she suggested to Arnold Sundgaard that he write a play about the disease for the FTP. The result was Spirochete (1938), a Living Newspaper history-of-medicine play that dramatized the origins and spread of the syphilis bacteria. The FTP was in many senses the poster child of the Progressive theatre movement of the 1930s; the other main example was the Theatre Guild, which grew out of the Washington Square Players and whose leading playwrights and directors included Harold Clurman, Sidney Kingsley, and Eugene O’Neill. These were the theatrical circles in which Glaspell and Howard moved. Spirochete and Yellow Jack have a lot in common, not least the intersection of public health education with entertaining spectacle and rousing narratives of “great men of science.” Closer examination of their plays in light of their engagement with science and medicine might open the way to a broader, and long overdue, reassessment of the theatre of the “Progressive” era. Glaspell’s career shows a sustained interest in engaging with science; Howard’s by comparison was fleeting, opportunistic, and confined to Yellow Jack. Despite this fundamental difference, both Inheritors and Yellow Jack highlight modes of engagement between science and theatre that in many ways serve as templates for today. They also show us the value of looking beneath the surface of the science in the play and studying its many contexts; and they warn us that science cannot be compartmentalized, any more than theatre can.

Works Cited Ben-Zvi, Linda (ed.). 1995. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bordman, Gerald. 1997. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930–1969. New York: Oxford University Press. Brinkley, Alan. 1993. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People Volume Two: From 1865. New York: McGraw-Hill. Couch, Nena (ed.). 1995. Sidney Kingsley: Five Prizewinning Plays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. De Kruif, Paul. 1927. Microbe Hunters. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1945. The Male Hormone. New York: Permabooks. ———. 1962. The Sweeping Wind: A Memoir. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.

524  K. E. SHEPHERD-BARR Gassner, John (ed.). 1939. Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. New York: Crown. Gates, Barbara T. (ed.). 2002. In Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing and Illustration, 1780–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glaspell, Susan. 2010a. Inheritors. In Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. ———. 2010b. “Pollen” (originally published 1919). In Her America: “A Jury of her Peers” and Other Stories by Susan Glaspell, ed. Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press. Hirsch, Foster. 1996. Sidney Howard. In The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, ed. Don Wilmeth with Tice Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, Sidney. 1938. Yellow Jack. Fourth printing. Internet Archive. https:// archive.org/details/yellowjackhistor00howa_0. ———. 1934. The Preface for Yellow Jack. New York Times, March 11. Ozieblo, Barbara. 2000. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Papke, Mary. 2006. Susan Glaspell’s Naturalist Scenarios of Determinism and Blind Faith. In Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, ed. Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1976. Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865– 1912. San Francisco: Freeman. Schuller, Kyla. 2017. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006 [2012]. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett. New York: Columbia University Press. Susan Glaspell Society. Unsigned entry. Yellow Jack (1938 film), posted 4 June 2016. https://andyoucallyourselfascientist.com/?s=yellow+jack. Wilmeth, Don, with Tice Miller. 1996. The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Tamsen. 2009. Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early TwentiethCentury American Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 30

The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-Century Sarah Daw

In her 1949 treatise on poetic composition, The Life of Poetry, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser argues that the “correspondences” between science and poetry “continue to be many,” despite the vastly different social statuses afforded to the two disciplines within Cold War American culture (162). The role of quantum physics in the development of the nuclear bomb had transformed the figure of the theoretical physicist in the American cultural imagination after 1945, from that of the “remote” “freak of intellect”—akin, as Rukeyser describes, to the figure of the poet—into that of the secular God (Rukeyser 1996, 160). Whilst noting this seismic change in the popular perception of physics within Cold War American culture, Rukeyser nevertheless maintains that the affinities between the poet and the physicist, which she first identifies in her 1942 biography of the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, remain pertinent. She goes on to assert that: Art and science have instigated each other from the beginning […] both science and poetry are languages ready to be betrayed in translation; but their roots spread through our tissue, their deepest meanings fertilize us, and reaching our consciousness, they reach each other. They make a meeting-place. There are opposites here; identity is not Aristotelian; it is rather the identity of Whitman and modern science. But it includes a unity. (1996, 162)

S. Daw (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_30

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In this passage, Rukeyser suggests that the unification of the deepest meanings of poetry and science occurs within the human mind. Her “material” description of the acquisition of knowledge, emphasizing the “tissue” of the brain and drawing on botanical metaphor, also reveals an understanding of the human mind and body as interdependently entangled with the material and processes of the wider environment. On the same page of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser continues to stress this monist, “material” depiction of the human relationship to the environment by quoting from George Sarton’s Introduction to the History of Science (published between 1927 and 1948): “the unity of nature, the unity of science, and the unity of mankind – are but three different visages of the same unity” (162). She goes on to repeat Sarton’s suggestion that all of human progress can be understood as a movement toward the comprehension of the “hidden unity” of “mankind,” “science,” and “nature,” and to suggest that it is “our age [the twentieth century], in the promise of its science and its poetry” that has “made available to all people the idea of one world” (1996, 162–163). In this section of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser contends that such depictions of a concealed “unity” underlying “multiplicity” is representative of the “unity” “of modern science” (1996, 162). However, she also simultaneously suggests that the same “unity” in “multiplicity” is present within the poetics of the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman. By bringing “Whitman and modern science” together in this way, Rukeyser is drawing equally on two works of contemporary literary criticism: F. O. Matthiessen’s canon-forming work of American literary criticism American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of science text Science and the Modern World (1925)—a book that also contains a surprising amount of literary criticism. This chapter will explore the intersections of nineteenth-century poetry and “modern science” in Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, drawing particular attention to the creative-critical feedback loops that shape her mid-century theorization of poetry. As this chapter will detail, Rukeyser uses the term “modern science” in the above passage to refer to specific scientific developments in the early years of the twentieth century related to the rise of quantum physics. Her manifesto for contemporary poetics is grounded in a desire to forge a new poetics responsive to this new scientific field, and this aim leads her to utilize contemporaneous texts that explore the philosophical implications of early quantum physics. At the same time, her poetics draws extensively on Matthiessen’s mid-century reevaluation of Transcendentalist poetics. The Life of Poetry combines these two diverse and contemporaneous influences in order to develop an experimental “ecopoetics” that deftly inflects nineteenth-century ideas of “organic form” with twentieth-century scientific insights. The scientifically inflected “organic process” ecopoetics that Rukeyser debuts in The Life of Poetry has also been extremely influential within the field of ecopoetry (Keenaghan 2018, 192). However, as this chapter will go on to

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explore, Rukeyser’s impact within the field has been systematically obscured by the adoption of a number of The Life of Poetry’s principal innovations by Rukeyser’s male contemporaries. In particular, the celebration of Charles Olson’s contributions to the development of contemporary ecopoetry has overlooked the extent to which Olson’s enormously influential “Projective Verse” manifesto, published in 1950, was influenced by Rukeyser’s 1949 text.

Nineteenth-Century Poetics Meets Twentieth-Century Physics The letters that survive between Rukeyser and the American literary critic F. O. Matthiessen suggest that the two began a friendly correspondence sometime in 1940, the year before the publication of Matthiessen’s American Renaissance.1 The two writers’ friendship was clearly rooted in a shared leftist politics, which resulted in Matthiessen’s public defense of Rukeyser’s literary and political reputation in the pages of Partisan Review in 1943, against the editors’ charges of opportunism and neo-Americanism.2 Upon reading American Renaissance in 1941, Rukeyser would undoubtedly have been gratified to encounter Matthiessen’s strong affirmation of the “broad connections” “between poetry and science” (Matthiessen 1968, 614)—already the subject of her own lecture series “The Usable Truth.” This lecture series was debuted from 1940, and would become The Life of Poetry (Kennedy-Epstein 2018, 1150–1153). In a chapter on Walt Whitman’s landscapes, Matthiessen comments on both Whitman’s, and William Wordsworth’s, positive and influential engagements with contemporary science (1968, 614). He then goes on to reference the twentieth-century process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s discussion of the relationship between science and Romantic literature in Science and the Modern World (1925), suggesting that both Whitman and Wordsworth: represent man and nature as deeply interrelated, for reasons given by Whitehead’s explanation, in Science and the Modern World, of the origin of romanticism. As a result of the conception held by the scientists of the late seventeenth century that the universe was a mechanism, the conclusion had been drawn that man must have been introduced into it from the outside, and that he was wholly apart from nature and alien to it. But by the end of the eighteenth century a sensitive man like Wordsworth, stimulated by the newer associationist psychology, had already come to feel the falsity of this assumption. (1968, 614–615)

In the pages of American Renaissance, Matthiessen therefore reproduces Whitehead’s thesis on literary Romanticism’s relationship to Enlightenment science. He then proceeds to emphatically endorse the connection that Whitehead draws in Science and the Modern World between Romanticism

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and his own quantum-influenced “process” philosophy, commenting that: “what was visioned as a romantic dream has been upheld by modern thought. Whitehead affirms that human feeling and inanimate objects are interpenetrated, that Wordsworth was right in bearing emphatic witness ‘that nature cannot be divorced from aesthetic values’” (1968, 615).3 The links that Matthiessen makes in these passages between the imaginative work of the scientist and the poet closely echo the argument that Rukeyser was already making in the almost-completed manuscript of Willard Gibbs. In Gibbs,  she contends that Gibbs’s pioneering work in nineteenth-century thermodynamics had laid the foundations for the twentieth-century quantum revolution, and was resultantly of great relevance to the mid-twentieth-century poet. Matthiessen’s reiteration of Whitehead’s argument that Romantic poetry and twentieth-century science shared epistemological “common ground” is also almost certainly the source of the connection that Rukeyser makes between “Whitman and modern science” in The Life of Poetry. Furthermore, as this chapter will explore, Rukeyser continues to draw heavily on Matthiessen’s work, and on a wide range of “modern science” writing, in developing the new theory of poetics that she outlines in the text. As I have already suggested, Rukeyser’s allusion to “modern science” is a reference to the twentieth-century “quantum revolution” in the field of physics. Rukeyser’s acute awareness of the seismic change that had occurred in the field of physics after 1900, as quantum science emerged to challenge the principles established by classical [Newtonian] mechanics, is evident in her biography of Willard Gibbs. Written concurrently with The Life of Poetry, Willard Gibbs narrates the advent of the quantum revolution in relation to the final stage of Gibbs’s career. In exposing the connections between Gibbs’s work and the new quantum physics, Rukeyser comments: Gibbs entered [the twentieth century] with the consciousness of a great work […] ready for a new summary, among all the earth-shaking summary announcements […] the work leading to the explosive history of radium, and the quantum theory devised by Planck just at the turn of the century. (1988, 335)

The majority of physicists “were not preparing for change” with the advent of quantum physics, Rukeyser writes, and held fast to “their ideas of mechanism [classical mechanics] while they could” (1988, 335). Gibbs, however, was busy reconciling his work in thermodynamics with the field’s newest developments, thereby bringing his life’s work into a “form that could be reconciled with the new physics, reconciled with the twentieth century” (1988, 335). As a result of this foresight and engagement on the part of Gibbs, Rukeyser goes on to outline, quantum theory, in “discarding [many nineteenth-century models] has shown kinship with [the] work of Gibbs, and attention is [now] being directed to Statistical Mechanics [Gibbs’s master work] as the forerunner of work in quanta” (1988, 342). By reading Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry alongside one another, it becomes clear that Rukeyser’s sometimes opaque references to the

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“science” of “our age,” or to “modern science” in the latter text reference the quantum revolution, which redefined the field of physics from 1900 and shaped the course of science and history alike in the first half of the twentieth century. The influence of Gibbs’s work over Rukeyser’s discussion of ­twentieth-century science in The Life of Poetry is also evidenced by her repetition of the terms “relations” and “relationships”. In Willard Gibbs, she frequently uses both terms when discussing the transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics, and in describing the contribution of Gibbs’s work. For example, she repeatedly characterizes Gibbs’s large and lasting theoretical contribution to the discipline of physics as “bringing relationships nearer to order, nearer to unity” (1988, 438), and she describes Gibbs elsewhere as “interested in the relations between facts (or systems)” [italics in original] (1988, 360). In The Life of Poetry, she similarly foregrounds the role of “relations” over “objects,” beginning the section of The Life of Poetry titled “The Life of Symbols” with a series of references to another early twentieth-century philosopher of science, Henri Poincaré. Rukeyser begins this section of the book with the following passage of quotation and discussion: “Science is a system of relations. Poincaré, saying so, says also, ‘It is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural hidden kinship’” (1996, 165). She goes on to note Poincaré’s proclamation, made in his 1908 text The Value of Science, that the “objective value of science […] does not mean: Does science teach us the true nature of things? but […] Does it teach us the true relation of things?” before proceeding to develop this argument in her own prose, commenting: “The search of man is a long process towards this reality, the reality of the relationships” (1996, 165). Both Rukeyser’s language choices in this final sentence, and her depiction of  the dynamic relationship between entities as the subject of philosophical enquiry, contain strong echoes of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy; the title of Whitehead’s seminal philosophical text Process and Reality (1929) is conspicuously referenced in the sentence’s language and phrasing. Rukeyser’s discussion of twentieth-century science in The Life of Poetry therefore contains a Whiteheadian inflection, which is itself refracted through her previous immersion in the work of Gibbs. This complex layering of contemporary scientific influences, including Poincaré’s early twentieth-century philosophy of science writing, Whitehead’s quantum-influenced “process” philosophy, and the fin-de-siècle thermodynamics of Gibbs, characterizes Rukeyser’s manifesto for contemporary poetics. The Life of Poetry is a text acutely responsive to its contemporary scientific context and defined by its attention to the quantum revolution that took place in the field of physics in the early years of the twentieth century. Rukeyser repeatedly references contemporary philosophy of science work that responds to the seismic changes in the field of physics that took place in the early years of the twentieth century. She also incorporates elements of this writing into her experimental theory of poetics, creating a new poetics appropriate to what she regarded as a new scientific age.

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Rukeyser also wrote The Life of Poetry against a background of the ascendance of the New Criticism—an approach to literary analysis that she deliberately engages with in the text in order to condemn. At the core of this censure is a suggestion that the New Criticism failed to either comprehend or incorporate poetry’s relationship to “life” as it was now understood in contemporary science, and more particularly, in new work within the field of physics; Rukeyser asserts: “in poetry, the relations are not formed like crystals on a lattice of words, although the old criticism, (which at the moment is being called the New Criticism) would have us believe so.” The New Critical approach to poetry failed, she argues, because it persisted in “ignoring the most apparent facts of our condition in this period,” and “thinking in terms of a static mechanics” (1996, 166). The reference to classical, or “Newtonian,” mechanics again makes clear that the “most apparent facts of our condition” to which Rukeyser is referring in The Life of Poetry relate to the rise of quantum physics and its attendant epistemologies. Like the physicists she describes as failing to adapt to the quantum revolution in Willard Gibbs, Rukeyser characterizes the New Critics as “holding onto […] ideas of mechanism” (1988, 335). Rather than holding fast to these nineteenth-century scientific frameworks, she instead instructs contemporary poets to embrace the onto-epistemologies espoused by early twentieth-century philosophers of science such as Sarton, Whitehead and Poincaré, and foreshadowed in the nineteenth-century poetics of Emerson and Whitman. In place of a “static mechanics,” Rukeyser advocates a dynamic “unity in multiplicity.”

F. O. Matthiessen and “Organic Form” In reaction to the New Critics’ staid approach to language and poetry, Rukeyser outlines a postwar poetics that combines early t­wentieth-century philosophy of science writing with Matthiessen’s critical readings of nineteenth-century American poetics. It is clear that Rukeyser was deeply ­ influenced by Matthiessen’s critical work: she includes lengthy quotations from American Renaissance in Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry, both of which she was in the midst of writing when Matthiessen’s book was published in 1941. However, the core of American Renaissance’s influence on Rukeyser’s poetics is traceable to the fourth chapter of the text, titled “The Organic Principle.” In this chapter, Matthiessen discusses the influence of British and German Romanticism on the concept of “organic form” outlined by the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman (1968, 134). Matthiessen emphasizes the relationship between poetry and Nature in the work of the Transcendentalists, specifically exploring the writing of Emerson and Thoreau on the role of Nature in the “organic” generation of form. In doing so, he traces what he terms “the organic principle” in the work of

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the Transcendentalists back to Coleridge’s concept of “organic form,” as described in the British Romantic poet’s lectures on Shakespeare (Coleridge 1987, 495). Matthiessen includes the following passage from Coleridge’s lectures: the form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arriving out of the properties of the material […] The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms. (1968, 133–134)

Alongside Coleridge, Matthiessen also quotes from the German idealist philosopher August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who Coleridge draws on in his writing on “organic form” (Frey 2010, 147), reproducing, on the same page of American Renaissance, Schlegel’s contention that: “just as the inner force of a phenomena in nature determines its external structure, so the vitality of a poet’s seminal idea or intuition determines its appropriate expression” (1968, 134). Matthiessen then goes on to trace these Romantic ideas of an “organic” poetic form in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Emerson and Thoreau. However, Matthiessen’s own argument contains a subtle yet significant shift of focus: the work of Coleridge and Schlegel describes the development of form “organically in the mind of the poet,” and has little to do with Nature beyond the metaphorical. In comparison, Mathiessen’s discussion of the work of the Transcendentalists contains a much more literal description of the role played by “material” Nature in influencing the generation of poetic form in the work of the nineteenth-century American poets. Matthiessen does not foreground this distinction between the metaphorical and literal interpretations of the role of Nature in the development of poetic form, instead encouraging the reader to conflate Coleridge’s metaphorical use of the word “organic” in “organic form” with his own far more literal use of the term in describing the influential role of material Nature in the generation of poetry. Referencing Emerson’s directive that the poet “Ask the fact for the form” and Thoreau’s pronouncements that “[a]s naturally as the oak bears an acorn […] man bears a poem,” and “there are two classes of men called poets; the one cultivates life, the other art,” Matthiessen argues for a Transcendentalist “conviction that art must be based organically in nature,” whilst also emphasizing the influence of Coleridge’s and Schlegel’s earlier writings on “organic form” within the work of Emerson and Thoreau (1968, 133–134). Matthiessen’s interpretation of Transcendentalist ideas of “organic form” in American Renaissance is particularly remarkable for the emphasis that he places on the influence of “material” Nature in the generation of poetic form, as opposed to either “divine inspiration” or “universal mind” (Emerson 1983, 67, 237, and 400). His reading of Emerson’s poetics in particular

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privileges the role of a secular, material Nature in the generation of poetic form; for example, he observes that: “before losing himself in the vaguely luminous doctrine of divine inspiration, Emerson enumerated many of the broad hints that material nature has given to the receptive mind and eye of the artist” (1968, 135). He goes on to explicitly state that Emerson had “found verification for another phase of the organic principle – that beauty in art springs from man’s response to the forms of nature,” whilst dismissing Emerson’s conviction in the role of “universal mind” as passing “quickly […] to a realm beyond technical discussion” (1968, 135). Matthiessen therefore readily separates the role of material Nature in the generation of poetry from the role of the Divine or “universal mind” within Emerson’s poetics, prioritizing the former and dismissing the latter as a “vaguely luminous” doctrine of marginal significance for the mid-century scholar. Rukeyser’s references to “organic form” in The Life of Poetry adopt Matthiessen’s material and secular interpretation of the term, as outlined in American Renaissance, whilst also further refining and developing the term. She adapts Matthiessen’s reading of “organic form,” whilst simultaneously reshaping the concept through dialogue with her own extensive knowledge of twentieth-century science writing: The form of a poem is much more organic, closer to other organic form, than has been supposed. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose book On Growth and Form is a source and a monument, says that organic form is, mathematically, a function of time. There is, in the growth of a tree, the story of those years which saw the rings being made: between those wooden rippled rings, we can read the wetness or dryness of the years before the charts were kept. But the tree itself is an image of adjustment to its surroundings. There are many kinds of growth: the inorganic shell or horn presents its past and present in the spiral. (1996, 171)

Rukeyser adopts Matthiessen’s material interpretation of “organic form,” but she also inflects the term through her own extensive knowledge of contemporary science writing, drawing most explicitly on the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917) is a lengthy inaugural work of mathematical biology, which attempts to show that “organic forms” in Nature are “moulded by the requirements of [the] physical laws” of mechanics, through mathematical analysis (Bowler 1983, 157). As Rukeyser’s summary indicates, Thompson’s work emphasized the role of environmental interactions in the development of organic and inorganic forms. He also contentiously argued that a process of continual environmental adjustment deserved a greater emphasis than Darwinian natural selection in dictating the evolution of species (Staddon 2016, 11). Rukeyser probably came across Thompson’s work through her research into the contemporary reception of Gibbs, as both Gibbs and Thompson were interested in the mathematics of surface tension, and Thompson cites Gibbs repeatedly in On Growth and Form (Thompson 1992, 447, 451).4

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However, Rukeyser’s description of the inorganic form found in the “shell” as embodying both the “past and present” of the organism also once again betrays the conceptual influence of Whiteheadian process philosophy. In particular, this construction suggests the influence of Whitehead’s concept of “objective immortality,” which contends that “actual entities”5 that have “perished” continue to shape and determine events within a constantly evolving present moment (Whitehead 1985, xiii, 18–19). Whitehead summarizes “objective immortality” in the following terms in the Preface to Process and Reality: relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living – that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. This is the [...] creative advance of the world. (1985, xiii–xiv)

In Rukeyser’s theorization, the shell form embodies the concept of “objective immortality,” as do the rings of the tree, with both forms materially depicting the organism’s past environmental interactions—or “prehensions,” in Whitehead’s terminology—within the present moment of “creative advance” (1985, 19). Rukeyser goes on to describe the spiral form found in these inorganic structures as a form “found countlessly in nature” and “associated with a process”, providing a further nod to Whitehead’s work (1996, 38). Drawing from both Thompson and Whitehead, then, Rukeyser suggests that form in Nature is generated by the organism’s continuous relational adaption to its environment, with past environmental interactions and present environmental conditions continuously shaping “organic form” within the present moment. She thus draws together Whiteheadian “creative advance” and Thompson’s work on morphology, to create a “process” interpretation of “organic form” that applies equally to the development of form in Nature and in poetry. Like Matthiessen, she privileges the role of material Nature in the generation of poetic form. However, her dynamic interpretation of “organic form” as morphological “process” also demonstrably represents a significant departure from, and development of, Matthiessen’s comparatively static description of the function of material Nature in the generation of form in poetry. The compositional practice that emerges from Rukeyser’s synthesis of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and literary critical texts also foregrounds an interdependent relationship between the human body and a dynamic and “material” environment. In a chapter of American Renaissance on “The Ocean” as an influence on Whitman’s form, Matthiessen describes poetic rhythm as “an organic response to the centres of experience – to the internal pulsations of the body, to its external movements in work and in making love, to such sounds as the wind and the sea” (1968, 564). Rukeyser directly engages with this passage from American Renaissance in The Life of Poetry,

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although she does not provide an explicit reference to Matthiessen’s work at this point. Instead, she obliquely engages Matthiessen’s argument, writing: [Whitman] remembered his body as other poets of his time remembered English verse. Out of his own body and its relation to itself and the sea, he drew his basic rhythms. They are not the rhythms, as has been asserted, of work and lovemaking, but rather of the relation of our breathing to our heartbeat, and these measured against an ideal of water at the shore […] Not out of English prosody but the fluids of organism, not so much from the feet and footbeat except as they too derive from the rhythms of pulse and lung. (1996, 77–78)

Rukeyser again draws on Matthiessen’s material and secular interpretation of the function of Nature in Transcendentalist poetics in these lines. However, her adaption of his argument places additional emphasis on the interdependence of the rhythms of the human’s internal corporeal processes—“our breathing and our heartbeat”—and the rhythm of tidal waves, which she explicitly describes as the “partner” rhythms to the human body’s internal physical processes. Her reference to the “fluids of organism” also echoes Whitehead’s use of the term in characterizing his “process” thought, which he refers to as the “philosophy of organism” (1985, 39). Rukeyser’s inclusion of the phrase further emphasizes the interdependence of matter and processes between the human body and the environment, which in turn facilitates the dynamic relationship between bodily and environmental rhythms—an emphasis that is largely absent from Matthiessen’s account. Rukeyser’s interpretation of Whitman’s poetics therefore places a new emphasis on the interdependent relationship of these two systems: the body and the environment. Furthermore, she goes on to suggest that the interdependent relationship of the human body and the material environment yields the “ideal” poetic meter: Whitman cannot be imitated, Rukeyser suggests, but the twentieth-century poet should utilize his methodology by going “deeper into one’s own sources, including the body” in search of rhythm (1996, 79). By drawing on the energies and rhythms of the body’s corporeal processes, Rukeyser maintains, the poet can develop the “ideal” poetic rhythms—ideal because they reflect those rhythmic patterns present within material Nature, such as that of “water at the shore” (1996, 78). The method of poetic composition that Rukeyser advocates in The Life of Poetry is therefore fundamentally predicated upon a conception of a dynamic and interdependent relationship between the human mind-and-body and the environment. Furthermore, its development once again relies on the inflection of Matthiessen’s material interpretation of Transcendentalist poetics—in this case, Whitman’s—with a contemporary, Whiteheadian “process” understanding of human and environment as a dynamic “one-substance cosmology” (Whitehead 1985, 19).6

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The Life of Poetry and “Projective” Poetics Rukeyser’s emphasis on the role of the poet’s breath and heartbeat in the generation of poetic rhythm calls to mind Charles Olson’s canonized treatise on mid-century poetics, “Projective Verse,” which appeared just a year after The Life of Poetry, in 1950. Reading these two texts together, the similarities in language, argument and phrasing are so pronounced that it becomes clear Olson drew heavily on Rukeyser’s earlier text in developing “Projective Verse.” Some critics have already acknowledged these conspicuous correspondences between Olson’s text and Rukeyser’s: in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015), Peter Middleton writes that “chronology, plus verbal and conceptual echoes, suggests that it is possible that Olson had some idea of Rukeyser’s book in his mind as he began to write ‘Projective Verse’” (2015, 126). Middleton goes on to note that “Rukeyser’s possible contribution to the poetics of the New American Poetry has gone largely unexplored, a neglect reinforced by Olson’s own tendency not to acknowledge intellectual sources about which he was ambivalent” (2015, 126). However, Middleton also argues that the similarities between Rukeyser’s work and Olson’s “lie as much in a shared problematic as in any question of precedence or borrowing” (2015, 126). In what follows, I will suggest that the degree to which Olson borrows from Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry in developing “Projective Verse” deserves further attention. Furthermore, I will contend that a reevaluation of Rukeyser’s contribution to the development of “Projective Verse” is especially significant as a result of the determining influence that Olson’s manifesto has exerted over the development of contemporary ecopoetics.7 As Middleton identifies, the lack of critical acknowledgment of Rukeyser’s contribution to innovations in twentieth-century poetics is “all too characteristic of the treatment of most modern women poets,” and such neglect is entirely characteristic of the historic treatment of Rukeyser’s work (2015, 125–126).8 A more complete acknowledgment of her work’s lasting legacy is, therefore, long overdue. Isolating a number of illustrative instances of comparable language and phrasing in The Life of Poetry and in “Projective Verse” renders Olson’s repeated and substantial borrowing from Rukeyser’s earlier text increasingly clear. For example, in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser describes “the energies that are transferred between people when a poem is given and taken,” and suggests that, in the process of reading poetry, “[h]uman energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader” (1996, 171–173). In “Projective Verse,” Olson similarly contends that “a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to the reader [sic]” (1997, 240). In these sentences, Olson replicates—almost verbatim—Rukeyser’s characterization of the poem as an “energy […] transferred” (1996, 173). He also notably duplicates

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the “triadic relation” between “the poet, the poem and the audience” that Rukeyser outlines as the “giving and taking of the poem,” by tracing the flow of energy from the poet, through the poem, to the audience (1996, 174). Further to these appropriations of Rukeyser’s theorization of the poem and its relationship to both the reader and the environment, Olson also appropriates the Whiteheadian language of “process” that characterizes Rukeyser’s text. In his descriptions of poetic composition in “Projective Verse,” he refers to “the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished,” and elsewhere in the text, he exhorts the projective poet to “USE USE USE the process” at all points in order to “keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs” (1997, 240). The presence of the Whiteheadian terminology of “process” in “Projective Verse” is particularly compelling evidence of Rukeyser’s influence on Olson’s “projective” poetics, as Olson states that he had not read Whitehead himself until 1954 (Charters 1968, 84). However, he had met Rukeyser in 1947, and the two writers had become correspondents following this initial encounter (Charles Olson Research Collection, Boxes II.190 & II.210). It is therefore highly likely that Olson’s use of the language of “process” in his 1950 manifesto came through his contact with Rukeyser, who uses the term “process” extensively in The Life of Poetry and quotes Whitehead explicitly in the earlier Willard Gibbs (1988, 395, 439). Although it is possible that Olson had absorbed these Whiteheadian terms as a result of the widespread circulation of Whitehead’s ideas within contemporary American culture, further close correspondences between Olson’s essay and Rukeyser’s earlier book lend support to the argument that Olson drew heavily and repeatedly on The Life of Poetry in relating the language of “process” to poetic composition. Another particularly illustrative incidence of the affinities between the two texts is found in Olson’s emphasis on the twin roles of the breath and the heartbeat in developing poetic rhythm and form. Rukeyser writes: “the line in poetry – whether it be individual or traditional – is intimately bound with the poet’s breathing. The line cannot go against the breathing-rhythm of the poet,” referring back to her earlier description of a Whitmanian poetics of the “rhythms of pulse and lung” (1996, 78, 117). Olson famously states in “Projective Verse” that “the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes” (1997, 242). Similarly, Rukeyser expresses the formative role of the syllable in generating a poetry that derives from the body’s physical responses “to external motion and rhythm,” writing: “[t]his value depends partly on the rhythm itself; partly on the meter, the segmenting of rhythm into measurable parts; and partly on the sounds, not even the words this time, but of the syllables” (1996, 116). Again, Olson offers an almost identical argument in “Projective Verse,” stating “[i]t would do no harm […] if both rime and meter […] sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable” (1997, 241). He then

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proceeds to evoke the significance of the syllable to the development of contemporary poetry in particular—as Rukeyser does before him in The Life of Poetry—by describing the value of verse as a mnemonic device dependent on not only rhythm and meter but also on “the sounds, not even of the words […] but of the syllables” (1996, 116). A further point of direct comparison between the two texts lies in the evocation of a corporeal poetics that extends beyond the role of the breath. As has been demonstrated, Rukeyser argues for the adoption of a process of poetic composition that derives rhythm from the “breathing” and the “heartbeat” of the poet, thereby reflecting the rhythms of the interior environment of the body and the body’s partner rhythms within the external environment (1996, 78). In Olson’s manifesto, poetic energy, form and content are also described as emerging from the poet’s materially interdependent relationship with the environment. Olson directs the poet to rest in an awareness of the rhythms of their own breath and physiology, maintaining that “if he chooses to speak from these roots,” the poet will be working in “that area where nature has given him size, projective size” (1997, 242).9 He then goes on to advocate a “projective” poetry that he sums up “baldly” as emerging from: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the line” (1997, 242). “Projective” poetics therefore replicates the language and terms of the “organic process” ecopoetics first outlined by Rukeyser in 1949, which develops from a conviction that the poet writes with an understanding of the human’s dynamic, material entanglement with their environment (Keenaghan 2018, 119). Both poets therefore describe the utilization of the writer’s own corporeal processes in the generation of a poetics that ultimately derives from the human’s material interdependence with their environment. This mid-century reinterpretation of “organic form” inflects Matthiessen’s contemporaneous critical reading of the term through Rukeyser’s extensive knowledge of twentieth-century science writing, including Whitehead’s quantum-influenced process philosophy and Thompson’s work on morphology. Rukeyser’s expansion of Matthiessen’s material, secular reading of Transcendentalist “organic form” into the “organic process” ecopoetics that Eric Keenaghan identifies in her work is therefore shaped by a ­quantum-influenced conception of reality that conceives of human and environment as part of the same entanglement of matter and process (2018, 119). Her engagement with early twentieth-century philosophy of science writing facilitates her transformation of Matthiessen’s reading of nineteenth-century poetics into an innovative “ecopoetics” that reimagines the human body as interdependently entangled with a dynamic material environment, and draws on this interconnection to develop new forms of poetry. Rukeyser’s experimental mid-century ecopoetics, as outlined in The Life of Poetry, has also had a significant and lasting influence on the development of contemporary ecopoetics. However, this legacy of her work has been largely

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obscured, as a result of Olson’s appropriation of many of her core interventions: by reproducing and developing a number of The Life of Poetry’s key ideas in “Projective Verse,” Olson helped to establish the place of Rukeyser’s work at the core of twentieth-century poetic development in Britain and the United States, whilst simultaneously concealing the fact that the origins of these ideas lay within her work. The legacy of both Olson’s “Projective Verse,” and the work of his male Black Mountain colleagues, is particularly strong within the field of ecopoetry: Harriet Tarlo establishes that contemporary ecopoetics has consistently acknowledged a debt to Olson’s “projective” poetics, iden­ tifying Olson’s “Projective Verse,” and Robert Duncan’s development of Olson’s “open field” poetics, as two seminal influences within British and American ecopoetry (2013, 113–117).10 Interestingly, in the same essay, Tarlo also detects the legacy of Whitman within the mid-century ecopoetics of Olson and Duncan, and she suggests that Whitman’s work may be an origin point of some of the influential ideas developed in the “projective” poetics of the mid-twentieth century (2013, 124). Acknowledging the influence of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry on the “projective” poetics of Olson and Duncan suggests an alternative genealogy, both re-establishing her work as a substantial influence on their respective projects, and contextualizing the influence of Whitman’s work that Tarlo identifies within mid-twentieth-century ecopoetics. An appreciation of the degree to which Olson’s “Projective Verse” draws on Rukeyser’s work for its language and argument therefore valuably enlarges current critical debates around the development of twentieth-century ecopoetics, and establishes that Rukeyser deserves far more recognition for her role in determining the character and development of transatlantic ecopoetics—as, to a lesser extent, does Matthiessen. As a result, ecopoetry’s debt of influence to the mid-century, for so long ascribed to Olson and his Black Mountain colleagues, must now be reframed to include the experimental and visionary work of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.

Notes



1. Rukeyser and Matthiessen were correspondents, with Matthiessen praising both Willard Gibbs and Rukeyser’s poetry in letters to Rukeyser. 2. Matthiessen publicly defended Rukeyser during the ‘Rukeyser Imbroglio’ in 1943–1944, an episode that saw the Partisan Review launch a savage attack on her character (Rahv et al. 1943, 473). He wrote in to the publication offering a comprehensive defence of Rukeyser’s credentials as a “radical democrat”, only for his letter to be summarily derided by the editors (Matthiessen 1944, 217). Following Matthiessen’s suicide in 1950, Rukeyser wrote the elegy ‘F.O.M.’. 3. For the influence of quantum science within Whitehead’s process philosophy, see (McHenry 2015, 43).

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4. See also (Thompson 1992, 459, 471, and 719). 5. Whitehead’s term for the “final real things of which the world is made up”, and which constitute entities of all sizes, from “God” to “ the most trivial puff of existence” (1985, 18). 6. For more on Whitehead’s influence on Rukeyser’s ecopoetics, see (Daw 2020). 7. For discussion of the significant influence of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” on the development of ecopoetics in Britain and America, see (Tarlo 2013, 113–148). 8.  For discussion of Rukeyser’s reception and neglect, see Kennedy-Epstein (2017, 2018) and Parks (2018, 1232). 9. For more of this reading of Olson’s “trans-corporeal” ecopoetics, see (Daw 2019). 10. See also the discussion in (Hume and Osborne 2018, 3–5).

Works Cited Bowler, Peter J. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Charters, Anne. 1968. Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Berkeley, CA: Oyez. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1987. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Volume Two, ed. R. A. Foakes. Volume Five of The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Daw, Sarah. 2019. ‘If He Chooses to Speak from These Roots’: Entanglement and Uncertainty in Charles Olson’s Quantum Ecopoetics. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 23 (4): 350–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2019.1634617. ———. 2020. ‘There Is No Out There’: Trans-corporeality and Process Philosophy in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness. Feminist Modernist Studies 3 (2): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2020.1794465. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America. Frey, Anne. 2010. British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hume, Angela, and Gillian Osborne. 2018. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Keenaghan, Eric. 2018. There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist Essay ‘Many Keys’. Feminist Modernist Studies 1 (1–2): 186–204. Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. 2017. The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives and the Cold War. Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. https://doi.org/10.26597/ mod.0025. ———. 2018. ‘Bad Influence’ and ‘Willful Subjects’: The Gender Politics of The Life of Poetry. Textual Practice 32 (7): 1149–1164. Matthiessen, F. O. 1944. The Rukeyser Imbroglio (Cont’d). Partisan Review 11 (2, Spring): 217. ———. 1968. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press. McHenry, Leemon B. 2015. The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Middleton, Peter. 2015. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

540  S. DAW Olson, Charles. Charles Olson Research Collection. Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. University of Connecticut Libraries. ———. 1997. Projective Verse. In Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander, 239–249. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Parks, Cecily. 2018. The Anticipation of Ecopoetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry. Textual Practice 32 (7): 1231–1247. Rahv, Philip, William Phillips, and Delmore Schwartz. 1943. Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl. Partisan Review 10 (5, September–October): 471–473. Rukeyser, Muriel. 1996. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press. ———. 1988. Willard Gibbs. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press. Staddon, J.E.R. 2016. Adaptive Behavior and Learning, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarlo, Harriet. 2013. Open Field: Reading Field as Place and Poetics. In Placing Poetry, ed. Ian Davidson and Zoë Skoulding. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. 1992. On Growth and Form, The Complete Revised ed. New York: Dover Publications. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1985. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.

CHAPTER 31

Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel Josie Gill

Introduction In November 2016 two posters appeared on campus at Amherst College in the US, which attempted to link skull size to intelligence and to race (Gazette Staff 2016). Invoking phrenology—the nineteenth-century scientific theory that the size and shape of the head could be linked to mental faculties— the posters compared skulls of different sizes to suggest that there are racial differences in intelligence, racist assertions the college President was forced to refute (Martin 2016). Where once such invocations of long-discredited Victorian racial science would have been the subject of ridicule, the Amherst incident indicated a rise in the use of outdated racial science among the ­‘alt-right,’ which has included the uptake of early twentieth century eugenic ideas (Saini Why race 2019). The US President himself has appeared to draw upon such ideas to assert his own sense of (white) superiority: At a 2018 press conference, Donald Trump asserted that China respected him because he has a ‘very large brain’ (BBC News 2018). The far-right is also drawing on contemporary research in genetics in order to support their belief in the biological reality of race: Population geneticists and experts in ancient DNA are finding increasingly that their research is being misinterpreted by white supremacists online, and used as ‘evidence’ of white racial superiority (Price 2018). While this situation has caused much concern in scientific circles, not least because such groups and their views are entering the mainstream, the political appropriation of contemporary genetics for racial ends has been possible because there continues to be a concern with, and interest in, race and racial J. Gill (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_31

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categorization within genetic science. For, despite the assertion made at the announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000 that ‘the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis’ (Venter 2000), genetic research into race has only accelerated in the first decades of the twenty-first century. No longer the domain of a few racist scholars on the fringes of their profession, a concern to investigate ‘race-based genetic variation’ has returned, and with it, according to Dorothy Roberts, ‘a corresponding explosion of race-based technologies’ (Roberts 2011, xi). As the title of popular science writer Angela Saini’s book Superior: The Return of Race Science makes clear, the contemporary rise of racial research in science nearly always represents a return to the kind of racial thinking which came before, because racial categorization and hierarchies remain so firmly entrenched in culture. Even though there is no scientific proof of the biological reality of race, ‘race, shaped by power, has acquired a power of its own. We have so absorbed our classifications – the trend begun by scientists like Blumenbach – that we happily classify ourselves’ (Saini Superior 2019, 7). While many geneticists using racial concepts consider themselves to be anti-racist in outlook and intent (Bliss 2012, 6–7), the fact that there are so much continuity and correlation between the racial categories and language of the nineteenth century and the present means that, as in the Amherst College case, Victorian racial scientific thinking can be invoked and appear credible to some alongside newer genetic explanations of race in the public sphere. This chapter investigates how the connections between Victorian and contemporary sciences of race are explored in neo-Victorian fiction, a genre defined variously as fiction set in the Victorian era; as contemporary novels that ‘re-envision canonical Victorian texts’ (Carroll 2010, 172) and as fiction that is ‘self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re) discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilman and Llewellyn 2010, 4). Appearing across postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist writing in a range of global contexts, the neo-Victorian novel has become a significant genre of contemporary fiction, fueled by (and in turn feeding into) an increasing fascination with Victoriana among both academic critics and the public alike.1 Representations of nineteenth-century race science within the Neo-Victorian are common: In The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), J.G. Farrell’s tale of colonial India during the rebellion of 1857, Farrell draws upon a number of Victorian archival sources to create characters including the Magistrate, a devotee to phrenology, whom he uses to expose the colonial mindset (Goodman 2015). Phrenology also makes an appearance in Peter Carey’s rewriting of Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997), while Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) offers an extended portrait of a skull collector and racial theorist in the character of Dr. Thomas Potter, based on the nineteenth-century Scottish anatomist Robert Knox. Hari Kunzru’s portrayal of colonial India in The Impressionist (2002), while beginning decisively after the Victorian period in 1903, nevertheless looks back to that

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period in the figure of Reverend Macfarlane, a collector of skulls and craniometrist who is inspired by American monogenist Samuel Morton. Kunal Basu’s Racists (2006) is the tale of two Victorian race scientists—a craniologist and an anthropologist—who create an experiment to prove whose theory of race is correct. Examining representations of Victorian science in the neo-Victorian novel, the literary critic Elodie Rousselot asks, ‘Why do the scientific figures, facts, and phenomena which came to prominence in the Victorian age continue to inspire authors in the twenty-first century?’ (2016, 107). This chapter contends that contemporary fictional representations of Victorian racial science are concerned as much with the racial implications of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science as they are with the Victorian. In the case of Kneale’s English Passengers and Basu’s Racists, the novels which shall be the focus of this chapter, Victorian racial science acts as an explicit reminder of the dangers of race thinking in science, thinking that was returning at the moment the novels were published. However, these novels also raise questions about the genre’s capacity to challenge contemporary scientific developments; for while both Kneale and Basu critique Victorian race science and its champions as a means of undermining its power, their novels also demonstrate the difficulty of fully breaking away from the ingrained Victorian values they otherwise disavow. This is apparent in the forms their novels take, forms that decenter and disrupt certain Victorian narrative conventions (as part of their desire to expose the fallacies of Victorian scientific racism), but that can’t quite escape deeply ingrained modes of imagining race. In what follows I examine how challenges bleed into reproductions and critiques into nostalgia in ways that call into question these novels’ capacity to confront the return of race thinking in contemporary genetics. Rather, their overt anti-racist stances that mask subtly racialized forms mirror what is happening in genetic science today, where scientific racism (past and present) is condemned at the same time the use of (historical) racial concepts and categorization becomes increasingly accepted. The novels demonstrate that the Neo-Victorian is a genre potentially in danger of returning to ‘the misguided theories of the nineteenth century… as a means of avoiding facing equally misguided attitudes in the present’ (Rousselot 2016, 109). Their forms suggest that contemporary literary narrative and language, as much as science itself, struggle to free themselves from the continuance of certain kinds of racial thinking in the present.

Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) English Passengers is about the colonization of Tasmania, told through a focus on two different periods, the 1820s and the 1850s. It moves between these periods, in the first of which Kneale depicts how aboriginal populations came into contact with white settlers, leading to their eventual decimation through violence and disease. The second period consists of the voyage from England

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to Tasmania of a vicar and a doctor on a ship crewed by a gang of Manx smugglers. Narrated by over twenty different characters, the novel not only moves back and forth in time but frequently shifts perspective. The voyage and events on the ship Sincerity are told primarily from the different viewpoints of its Captain, Illiam Quillian Kewley, the vicar and geologist Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, and the doctor Thomas Potter, while events in Tasmania are narrated by Peevay, a mixed race aboriginal man, whose story is interspersed with the voices of various governors, farmers, and colonial settlers. Foregrounding the voice of a colonized person within a non-linear narrative, the novel signals its distance from Victorian fiction in its concern to give narrative space to a non-white character who has no less authority than those of the white colonists. The literary critic Patrick Brantlinger has shown how race in Victorian fiction ‘commonly provided a ready-made taxonomy for characterization,’ evidenced in the minor and peripheral roles often given to black characters (2000, 153). In English Passengers, Peevay’s narrative authority is perhaps greater than that of the white British characters, given the satirical treatment to which many of those characters are subject. Their beliefs, vocations and behaviour are relentlessly mocked as the purpose of the voyage is revealed to be the discovery of the Garden of Eden; Wilson is convinced he will discover the location of Eden in Tasmania and is accompanied on his expedition by Potter, who is there to assist him with the scientific aspects of his quest. Potter, however, has an ulterior motive; he uses the expedition to collect the skulls of aboriginal people in order to advance his scientific theories on race, which he writes up during the course of his travels and which come to form his book The Destiny of Nations. The timelines meet as Potter and Wilson eventually come into contact with an older Peevay who, after discovering Potter has stolen his recently deceased mother’s remains, leads the group on a disastrous search for Eden that eventually results in both Potter’s and Wilson’s demise. The novel displays the typical characteristics associated with the NeoVictorian genre; namely what Munford and Young argue is the genre’s concern to counter ‘the restrictive, disciplinary and discriminatory nature of Victorian ways of representing the world,’ through stories that foreground issues of sex, gender, and race, and the ‘heterogeneous voices of Other Victorians’ as a means of exposing, and in some cases correcting, repressive Victorian values (2009, 4). In English Passengers these repressive values are encapsulated by Potter’s racial science. The Victorian period witnessed the rise of several interlinked scientific theories of race, the result of the growth of biological and human sciences at the end of the eighteenth century (Stepan 1982, xiii). Such theories were also the result of colonial expansion, which sought justification for the enslavement and subjugation of colonized peoples in the new sciences of human origins and development. By the mid-nineteenth century, polygenism—the belief that different human ‘races’ had biologically different origins and thus that racial ‘types’ were fundamentally different from one another—was challenging

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the long-established idea that all humans were descended from Adam, the monogenism rooted in Christian belief to which most scientists had previously adhered (Stepan 1982, 3). Yet whether monogenist or polygenist, and despite their varying arguments and understandings of race, nineteenth-century scientists were near unanimous in their agreement that the white race was superior to the non-white (Stepan 1982, 4). A proliferation of books and pamphlets sought to use science to demonstrate the fundamental principle of the biological and cultural superiority of whites, including Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races (1853), Josiah Clark Nott and George Robert Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), and John Beddoe’s The Races of Britain (1885). Types of Mankind, subtitled ‘Ethnological Researches based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races,’ gives an indication of the growing belief that skulls held the key to establishing differences between the races. Craniometry, phrenology, and physiognomy, all flourished during this period and were deployed by racial scientists intent on proving the natural inferiority of Black people. Kneale uses satire and humor to challenge the racial scientific logic of the craniometrist his novel portrays. The ‘English Passengers’ Wilson and Potter and their respective religious and scientific explanations of humanity are represented as both abhorrent and ridiculous in turn. The first part of the narrative that is told from Potter’s perspective is formed of his musings on ‘The Celtic Type,’ which he describes as ‘(instance: Manx)…altogether inferior in physique to the Saxon, being smaller, darker and lacking in strength…The skull is marked by deep eye sockets, expressing tendencies of servitude. Cranial type: G,’ before he goes on to describe ‘the Norman’ whose ‘complexion is pale, and his hair often inclines to reddishness. His facial shape is typically long and narrow, indicating arrogance. Cranial type: D’ (Kneale 2000, 119, 120). His supposedly scientific observations are based simply on the people (the crew and Wilson) by whom he is surrounded, and are comically informed by his arguments with and prejudices against them. His humorous inability to distinguish at a basic level between the personal, cultural, and scientific escalates through the novel, as his ‘scientific’ writing becomes increasingly subject to his own anecdotal experience and feelings about other characters to comic effect. Having asked Peevay ‘Could one of you tell me…how long it is that your ones’ females carry babies in their bellies? Also do you know what a number is?’ (Kneale 2000, 326), Potter cannot believe that Peevay has deliberately led them toward disaster or worked out that Potter stole his mother’s remains, and he uses his scientific hypothesizing to explain away his fears, ‘Considered own alarm re. half-caste’s accusing look = wholly irrational as = quite impossible that he possesses logical faculty required to reach such conclusion’ (Kneale 2000, 347). Unable to comprehend or allow the evidence before him, Potter’s science becomes an irrational narrative through which he reveals his own failings.

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The novel proceeds on the basis that Potter’s science does not need to be countered logically or seriously because it is so illogical; instead Kneale represents Potter’s race science as a distillation of all the other racist Victorian attitudes on display in the novel—in the diaries, travel narratives, newspaper articles and accounts that together constitute the full, pervasive force of Victorian racism and colonial prejudice, and from which Victorian science cannot be separated. Kneale satirizes the characters who write these narratives, demonstrating how, for example, the pseudoscientific interest of Mrs. Gerald Denton—whose memoir of life in Tasmania, ‘On Distant Shores: Recollections of a Colonial Governor’s Wife,’ is presented in extracts—is little different in its overt racism and self-interest than Potter’s scientific writing. Remembering her invitation to a group of aboriginal people to attend a Christmas lunch, Mrs. Denton writes, ‘My hope…was to assemble a small, yet perhaps not unimportant collection of memorabilia of this vanishing race. I could quite imagine the sitting room of our London house in some future time, its walls displaying spears and throwing sticks’ (Kneale 2000, 313). Her concern with ‘this vanishing race’ betrays a lack of care for aboriginal life that is no less barbaric than Potter’s theories and observations, which he records in his notebooks and diary in a kind of pseudoscientific, mathematical shorthand that is simply the condensation of the colonial racism articulated by Mrs. Denton. Arriving at the Cape Colony he writes ‘Town = of greatest interest to self re. notions as possesses quite remarkable variety of types. Among world’s greatest instances? Self spent many hours carefully observing. Soon came to new + unexpected conclusions’ (Kneale 2000, 168). In suggesting that the race science of the period was inseparable from the colonial mission and wider socio-political mores, the novel also recognizes how this thinking was carried into the future, absurd and contradictory as it may have been. After his death, Wilson’s bones end up on display in a museum, marked as an ‘unknown male presumed Tasmanian aborigine’ (Kneale 2000, 454), as Kneale once more uses comedy and irony to suggest that the joke is perhaps on us, calling into question the taken-for-granted legacies of colonial violence, exploitation, and science which inform many current museum displays. Kneale’s ability to tell a story of colonial genocide and race science using humor was much praised by critics and was one of the major reasons for the novel’s success; according to one reviewer, Kneale ‘effortlessly blends the hilarious and the heartbreaking’ (Miller 2001), his novel described by another as the ‘interleaving of high comedy with dramatic terror’ (Poole 2000), a mode that no doubt contributed to his winning the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2000 and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Such readings accord with Kneale’s own ambitions; he has said he was concerned that the book not be ‘a heavy, moralistic tale,’ that he ‘dreaded readers thinking I was lecturing them’ (Thackray Jones 2009) and wanted to make it ‘entertaining and enjoyable’ (Ball 2003). Yet Kneale’s comic tone and satirical approach does not quite mean that the novel evades the ‘celebratory nostalgia

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for an imagined world’ that Sally Shuttleworth detects in some neo-Victorian treatments of science (Shuttleworth 2014, 182). Indeed, reviewers of the novel also celebrated what they identified as its nostalgic evocation of the Victorians: English Passengers was praised as a ‘historical swashbuckler’ (Talese 2000), a ‘Treasure Island-style adventure’ (Sylvester 2000), a novel that ‘deserves to be welcomed into port with a riot of bunting and prizes’ (Poole 2000), and ‘to be savored while curled up in front of a roaring fire’ (Hoffman 2000), all stereotypical invocations of Victorian life. Compared to Dickens (Hill 2000), and Dracula (Poole 2000), Kneale’s novel enjoyed popularity stemming as much from a kind of escapism into an older Victorian world as from its critique of British colonial rule. Indeed, one reviewer’s interpretation of Peevay as Kneale’s attempt to ‘imagine himself into the head of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer’ (Hochschild 2000) appears to miss this critical aspect entirely. It is the comic style of the novel, told through a compendium of different forms of Victorian writing including accounts, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, travel guides and memoirs, that seemed to encourage such readings, a style through which readers could indulge in a dose of Victorian nostalgia at an ostensibly safe distance; from the perspective of a contemporary culture that continues to grapple with the legacy of Victorian science (in entrenched racial classifications in science and culture) but that also places itself firmly in a time where such abuses and attitudes are largely no longer mainstream. In fact, it is in Kneale’s attempt to grapple with the legacies of racial ­science, and his simultaneous positioning of that science as the province of a distant past we have left behind, that the imprint of colonial (racial) scientific norms and standards on his own, contemporary novel is laid bare. English Passengers ends with an epilogue in which Kneale draws a direct connection between Victorian race science and the contemporary, explaining how he drew on the writing of Robert Knox in his characterization of Potter, in order to show the legacy of Knox’s ‘infamous’ theories about the races of mankind (Kneale 2000, 456). The epilogue makes explicit why Victorian racial scientists and their theories were so wrong by calling Knox’s The Races of Men ‘in many ways a precursor of Hitler’s Mein Kampf’ (456). Showing how ­pervasive such thinking became during the nineteenth century, Kneale offers evidence of the flaws in these theories in the example of George Vandiemen, ‘a Tasmanian aboriginal child who was found wandering close to New Norfolk in 1821, having become separated from his family’ (455). Basing the character Tayaleah, Peevay’s half-brother, on George, Kneale describes how a recently arrived British settler sent the child to Lancashire to be educated, where George ‘did well in his studies’ (455) before dying soon after his return to Tasmania. The epilogue, while purporting to add to the novel’s critique of Victorian racism and race thinking, instead registers its legacy. The epilogue ends with ‘a factual document’—George Vandiemen’s school report—in which his teacher praises George’s mathematical ability and in which the teacher

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writes that teaching George confirmed to him that ‘Man is on all parts of the globe the same’ (457). Noting that Europeans at the time believed ‘the highest and rarest form of reason was mathematics,’ Kneale writes, ‘If only the Victorian British had troubled to look a little more carefully at the evidence before them’ (456). The epilogue is clearly intended to reinforce what Kneale has spent the novel portraying—the folly of the hierarchical, scientific racism of the Victorians, which they were unable to see but that we, in the twenty-first century, can see only too well. However, in reproducing the letter which offers the evidence of George Vandiemen’s humanity in his ability to do maths, Kneale appears not to question the enlightenment idea that Blacks were only men (i.e., human) if they could demonstrate ‘mastery of “the arts and sciences”’ (Gates 1985, 8), but instead aligns himself with it, and with the kindly, noble teacher and Tasmanian settler ‘oddly enough, a manx-man’ (455) who sent the child to Britain. It is the ‘good European’ who doesn’t appear to be racist (perhaps one with whom contemporary white readers might identify) who has the last word and whose report on George stands as final proof of George’s humanity in a move that undermines Peevay’s narration and the novel’s apparent criticism of the colonizer’s civilizing mission. Kneale is clearly aware of the flaws in and hypocrisy of the Victorian assumption that certain kinds of educational ability offer proof of humanity: his character Dr. Potter writes in his Destiny of Nations, the colonial government made every attempt to improve those blacks who were captured, and to lead them from idleness to civilized ways. One might suppose these efforts would have been received with gratitude, but no, the aborigines showed themselves nothing less than contemptuous of the goodly teaching given them, and, beneath a thin veneer of civilized conduct, they remained quite as savage as before. (407)

By this point in the novel, it is Peevay’s narration, which consists of a semi-poetic language invented by Kneale, that highlights his humanity in contrast to the ignorant and barbaric ways in which Potter and the British behave. Peevay’s understanding and narration of events—‘So I learned of hospital room, of watching man, of thieves, who were three, and their CART. I learned of window that would not open, and of skin that got cut. This was some discovering. So it was everything in all the world got changed’ (341)— appears unmediated by European ways of knowing and underscores the lack of accuracy of Potter’s account. Kneale demonstrates that it is rather Potter and Wilson who are ‘the very lowest’ (406) in their petty, stupid and selfish behavior, as he allows them to reveal their own deficiencies of ­‘character,’ which are ironically the savage, idle, deceitful, violent characteristics that Potter attributes to aboriginal people in his The Destiny of Nations (406–407). Yet the novel’s end suggests Peevay’s narration is not enough, and it is George Vandiemen’s mathematical performance that undermines Potter’s scientific view, Vandiemen’s ability ‘evidence’ that aboriginal people were

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not idle. Kneale’s archival method reveals the ingrained ‘scientific’ standards and proofs to which colonized people were subject, but also how such proofs continue to have currency in the present. The overt racism of Robert Knox’s ideas about what he termed ‘the darker races’ was premised on their ‘physical and, consequently a psychological inferiority’ (151) attributed to ‘specific characters in the quality of the brain’ (151) and proven not only by their enslavement and colonization, but by the fact that ‘the grand qualities which distinguish man from the animal – the generalizing powers of pure ­reason – the love of perfectibility – the desire to know the unknown’ are ‘mental faculties…deficient, or seem to be so, in all dark races’ (191). While such racist thinking has long been repudiated by scientists, the idea that racial similarities or differences can be linked to intelligence and IQ persists in twenty-first-century genetics, even though the measurement of intelligence (like Knox’s arbitrary ‘pure reason,’ or indeed mathematical ability) has repeatedly been shown to be a measurement of ‘trained capacities,’ ‘arbitrarily standardized on middle-class Whites’ whereas the reality is that ‘no one really knows what intelligence is’ (Montagu 1999, 3). The popularity of the neo-Victorian has prompted literary critics Heilman and Llewelynn to wonder whether the genre is ‘merely a serviceable form that we can manipulate to satiate our appetites for stories with closure unlike real life, or [an opportunity] for the exploration of themes that continue to dominate our political and social lives that can be projected backwards onto our forebears in an attempt to find resolution or to pass the blame?’ (2010, 27). In the case of English Passengers, the answer appears to be a little of both: Kneale’s vast historical novel offers readers an engaging and ‘enjoyable’ story, providing some kind of comforting, if unrealistic, closure, as Peevay meets and joins a group of aboriginals, ending his loneliness and isolation, while the racist and blinkered Potter and Wilson meet their darker fates. The novel also understands that the racial thinking it depicts has a legacy—not only in the fracturing and decimation of colonized communities, but in science where nineteenth-century racist ideas led to eugenic thought in the twentieth century with horrific results. The novel’s telling of this tale is offered as a sufficient response to these developments in the present, from which we can view with disdain and humor the folly of the Victorians, while correcting their oversights by, in Kneale’s case, devoting large amounts of narrative space to an indigenous voice the Victorians would not have prioritized. However, there is a disconnect between how the novel registers this ­legacy and how racial scientific thinking continues to impact contemporary society, a disconnect revealed in Kneale’s claim in the epilogue that Knox’s race theory is ‘a ludicrous notion in modern scientific terms’ (Kneale 2000, 456). This is true, yet ‘modern science’ has not rid itself of race thinking; instead, there has been what Roberts identifies as a ‘speedy resuscitation of biological concepts of race,’ which she locates as part of a continuum where ‘scientists have continually rehabilitated a biological understanding of race

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throughout the scientific and political upheavals of the last three centuries’ (2011, 26, 28). Kneale’s reading of George Vandieman’s humanity, in this context, mirrors the partial acknowledgments and incomplete interrogations that enable today’s anti-racist rhetoric in contemporary genetics to coexist alongside research which employs unscientific racial categorizations with ease. The Neo-Victorian novel, in this frame, rather than simply challenging Victorian norms, appears as a genre which, as Hadley contends, perhaps unknowingly caters to a nostalgia for the very Victorian values represented within it, in particular a growing imperial nostalgia in Britain for a period in which Britain became ‘Great’ (Hadley 2010, 8). While the novel’s overt condemnation of racism is straightforward, the work of changing structures of knowledge and of language, of the moving beyond the dominance of historical Eurocentric sources and scholarship that might enable moving beyond race itself (and the myriad assumption tied to it), is much harder to achieve.

Kunal Basu’s Racists (2006) Racists shares with English Passengers a desire to use Victorian race science as a means of contemplating the character of science in the present and, like Kneale’s novel, does so through a form that only partially challenges the tenets of Victorian racism. Set in the 1850s and 60s, Racists imagines an experiment set up by two competing racial scientists, Samuel Bates, a British craniologist affiliated to the Royal College of Physicians, and Frenchman Jean-Louis Belavoix, an anthropologist and member of the Société Ethnologique de Paris. Their experiment consists of sending two babies—a white girl and a black boy—to an uninhabited island, Arlinda, off the coast of North Africa, along with a mute nurse who is tasked with bringing the children up without language or parenting. For Bates, a monogenist, the experiment is ‘to understand what makes one race superior to another’ (Basu Racists 2006, 26–27), while Belavoix, on the other hand, is a polygenist who believes races are unrelated, skull measurement is pointless, and ‘War is inevitable! If the European doesn’t suppress the Negro, the Negro will suppress the European’ (38). The scientists travel to the island twice a year to observe the children; Bates and his assistant, Quartley, measure the heads and facial features of the children while Belavoix observes their behavior and takes ­copious notes in his notebook. The novel was well received upon its publication in 2006, praised for its ‘cool dissection of the roots of European racism’ (Phillips 2006) and as an ‘accessible book’ because ‘it comes to the race issue without a fixed agenda, no issues to thump out’ (Boston 2006). Indeed, Basu took care to make clear in several interviews and essays that appeared around the time of the novel’s publication that he was not writing from a sense of racial injustice—­ having never experienced racism himself—but out of curiosity (Rao 2006). Of Bates and Belavoix he writes, ‘I construed them as men of their times, not evil characters’ and he cites nineteenth-century novelists Dickens, Dostoevsky,

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and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as his influences (Rao 2006), interesting choices given that novelists such as Dickens were influenced by the racial sciences of the period, the appraisal of heads, skull shape, and facial appearance often evident in his work. While appearing to take an apparently neutral position on the ethics of Victorian racial science—a preference for simply telling the story over imposing contemporary moral judgments—Basu is still concerned with the contemporary, insisting that he wanted to understand why the quest to find racial differences persists in science. Genetic science remains invested in such questions, Basu contends, yet ‘history has shown repeatedly that today’s good science turns out to be tomorrow’s absurdity, from craniology to genetics’ (Basu The Times 2006). The implication here is that contemporary scientific findings about race may well turn out to be as wrong as Victorian ones, but Basu is less interested in the potential impact of genetic racism in the present than in the question of why race remains a topic of scientific investigation. In order to explore the relationship between Victorian and contemporary race science in Racists, Basu employs a detached, ‘scientific’ perspective to imagine a horrific experiment of Victorian race science. While English Passengers presents an abundance of characters and voices moving back and forth across periods, the scope of Racists is much narrower, its narrative more linear and its narration much sparser. Basu has described Racists as ‘a harsh novel in many ways,’ explaining that he had ‘deliberately chosen a harsher, sparser style’ (Rao 2006), a style that forgoes the dense descriptions of the Victorian novel and instead presents characters and events from a cold, ‘objective’ distance. The characters are introduced through a narration which appears aligned with the worldview of the racial scientists; as he looks in the mirror Bates is described as having ‘A cranium of exceptional size, sporting dark eyes and a square jaw’ (Basu, 8), Belavoix has ‘a prominent nose, a head of boyish curls’ (Basu, 10), and of the children we are told ‘that the two are unalike is obvious. The boy shows extreme energy that can turn to sloth without warning…With the girl, it’s being outside that makes all the difference’ (Basu, 18). Like a scientist, the narrator observes the characters, who have similar speech patterns (with the exception of the speechless children and nurse) making it difficult to discern any distinct personalities among them. For example, the novel refuses anything of depth in race scientist Bates, whose head, like Dr. Potter’s in English Passengers, is full of science and science only; ‘“In the Negro, a deficient cranium produces an animal courage – a bent for haste and rashness…the superior cranium of the European, on the other hand, leads to a reasoned courage”’ (58). Only seen and understood through his focus on science and deprived of any strongly humanizing characteristics, Bates is largely unknowable as a character, both to the reader and to the other characters around him, particularly his assistant Quartley who is often focused on trying to understand what Bates is thinking from the way that he looks; ‘Quartley observed his master’s face take on an extra layer of grimness. Lines deepened on his forehead, his eyelids remained still for long

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moments’ (92), but in general he finds it ‘hard to trace anything but science in him’ (64). By reproducing the observational, ostensibly objective scientific perspective of the racial scientist in the style of the novel’s narration, Basu adopts the role of objective scientist observing his racist characters through the lens of time. The effect is to create a comparable distance between the reader and the narrative, forcing the reader to observe, from a seeming distance, the activities of the characters without connecting to them. This perspective appears to forgo any nostalgia for the period or indeed for the Victorian novel, instead placing the reader at the center of a contemporary fictive experiment concerning whether we can ever know ‘what turns inside the skull of the skull doctor’ (51) and by extension understand the unending search for race differences by scientists. The distanced, observational narratorial perspective mirrors the racial scientist characters’ own single-minded (and limited) pursuit of scientific objectivity, which they attempt to achieve through observation. The whole experiment revolves around the scientific gaze as the race scientists develop their theories from the looks, reactions, and behavior of their ‘samples,’ in the ‘pure laboratory of nature’ (41); Belavoix builds a look-out on the island in order ‘to spot the “little savages”’ (61) while for Bates, in addition to skulls measurement, ‘We must know how the children behave – with us and with each other’ (57). In much the same way as the scientists observe the children, the novel’s characters observe one another from a distance, imagining what others are thinking and what motivates them in ways that ultimately mean that the characters are never really able to connect or to know each other. The children remain an unknowable puzzle, and themselves adopt the observational strategies of those examining them: Quartley comes to see himself and the scientists reflected in the children’s behavior, as ‘Peeking through the girl’s door, he saw her pacing, a volume of thoughts written on her young face – a scientist considering her next move’ (132). If the children are like scientists it is not only because they might copy the actions of those around them but because their lack of speech, as well as their nurse’s, turns everyone on Arlinda ‘into observer and observed’ (76). In this sense, Basu’s experiment is a thoroughly modern one, set apart from the detailed and thick characterization of the Victorian novel. The perspective might even be ethical: the voicelessness of the children parallels the lack of voice afforded to black and colonized characters in the Victorian novel, but rather than challenge this perspective through the presentation of fully rounded black characters, Basu instead makes everyone exotic, curious, and unknowable, as if we in the present are colonizing the Victorians. In this way, the novel could be read as challenging the silences and omissions of the Victorians by placing that silence and unknowability at its heart (and perhaps our inability, in the present, to ever fully understand them). Yet its observational, ‘scientific’ form also reproduces certain Victorian narrative qualities in ways that create an ambivalence about the novel’s stance toward the science and Victorian period it investigates. For as it reflects the harshness and cruelty

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of Victorian racial science in its distant narration, it also replicates Victorian biases with ease. Cora Kaplan argues that the values of a neo-Victorian novel can be determined by its style and form and that if there is a tendency to ‘privilege the story of European settlers over that of the non-white or indigenous population of the colonies,’ this might suggest that ‘Victoriana of this kind retroactively counters some Victorian prejudices, but leaves others, if only by default, in place’ (Kaplan 2007, 155). Racists leaves some of these prejudices firmly in place, not least in its focus on the perspective of the white male European scientists, who, even if their inner worlds are restricted, dominate the action and the focalization, with Norah and the children appearing largely as supporting characters. More significant is the Victorian language and focalization of the narration, which appears troublingly invested in the racist viewpoint of the scientists. When the nameless black boy is introduced, ‘they find the boy crouched on the ground excreting worms, each about six inches long, a dozen of them coming out in a looping coil. Seeing Bates, he leaps up, runs and catches hold of his hand, shrieking and blabbering through his full lips like a glib-tongued monkey’ (12). The simian-like boy is contrasted with an equally stereotyped girl, whose gender appears to determine her character: ‘more than an explorer, she appears to be the path’s caretaker – removing a clutch of loose rocks that have slid down the slopes to block their climb’ (17). The narration is far from neutral, but instead, in using words like ‘half-caste’ (3) and viewing the children as animals—‘They ran at her flanks like a pair of obedient dogs’ (78)—the narration could belong to any of the adult characters. It becomes unclear whether the narratorial focalization does or does not encompass free indirect discourse; the use of ‘they’ in the following excerpt prevents its language from being attributed to a single character, even though the perspective could easily be that of Bates, ‘Following the Frenchman out, they spotted the children easily. A dozen paces apart, they stood facing each other at the valley of rocks…Not the children, but two creatures. Hideous’ (144). The final adjective, its own sentence, blurs the narrative frame, as it is unclear from whose perspective the children are ‘hideous.’ While the novel’s title makes clear what the reader is supposed to think of the characters contained within it, its seemingly easy reproduction, within its narration, of the very racist thinking it seeks to question, is a strategy that creates a sense of uneasiness about the neo-Victorian genre’s apparent distance from the period it examines. How does the reproduction of certain Victorian prejudices within a narrative which uses racist language with ease tell us anything more about Victorian racial science than reading a Victorian novel would? Putting race science under the microscope, Basu’s observational style draws attention to the dehumanizing results of a scientific method which ironically makes its objects unknowable, and in making the novel’s characters two-dimensional, he invites his readers to comprehend the flaws of a world in which everything is observed but little truth is known.

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Like English Passengers, the novel offers the reader an uneasy form of closure. The experiment begins to unravel as the scientists struggle to continue funding their twelve-year experiment, and as Quartley and the mute nurse, Norah, fall in love and decide to try to leave the island with the children. Quartley, Norah and the girl escape to live together in England, but the boy is taken by Arab slave traders, screaming, as this occurs, his only word in the novel, ‘Ari’ (208), which it becomes apparent, is the name of the girl. The moment both seems to affirm and to deny the boy’s humanity; it is affirmed through speech and feeling to which the reader has been denied access for the entirety of the novel, but denied by his remaining nameless even as the girl is named. In failing to fully humanize the novel’s only black character, Basu, unlike Kneale, refuses the easy corrections of the neo-Victorian, but like Kneale, suggests at the novel’s end that the race science of his tale would disappear into obscurity, ‘the brilliant century didn’t spare a thought for a failed experiment or two’ (213). Claiming that ‘it took decades more for racial science to stage a return’ (213) the narrator then turns to ‘the real experiment’ which ‘was about to begin…The battle to raise the races together, to have them live among each other, was to start soon in America – the war against the slaving South’ (213). While encouraging the reader to look beyond the historical period of the novel to the future, the question Basu wanted to raise, the question of why scientists continue to seek out differences along racial lines, is left unanswered in the novel. This is perhaps because it remains unanswered by contemporary genetic science, which continues to pursue research into race-based difference without a clear rationale for why this might be a useful thing to do. Indeed, the novel reflects, in its ambivalent reproduction of Victorian racism, how it is possible for race thinking to be at once reproduced and denied, something increasingly apparent in contemporary genetics, which paradoxically reproduces race as biology while positioning itself as intellectually and critically against racism (Gill 2020, 14). In May 2019, the British Conservative MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg published a book titled The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, in which he attempted to change public understanding of the Victorian era as characterized by ‘austere social attitudes and filthy factories’ to an understanding that ‘the Victorians transformed the nation and established Britain as a preeminent global force’ (2019, cover copy). An unashamed celebration of the Victorian, Rees-Mogg’s popular history book forms part of a wider ideological position that is right-wing in the extreme; a believer in a hard Brexit and the rolling back of abortion rights for women, against increasing the minimum wage and same-sex marriage, Rees-Mogg, not surprisingly, lauds the Victorians when his desired policies would move the UK back toward the values dominant in the Victorian era. What is clear from his decision to publish this book is that contemporary politics is (as it has perhaps always been) involved in a struggle to control historical narrative. In the case of Rees-Mogg, this encompasses resistance to critique of an

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era in which he and many others consider that Britain became great. At a moment when the political stakes are high, the neo-Victorian novel is well placed to demonstrate the ease with which nostalgia for the Victorian can turn into the reproduction of that era’s values. Both English Passengers and Racists, in their equivalences, show us how deeply embedded Victorian priorities and forms remain in the contemporary moment, and demonstrate that countering Victorian race thinking and its new incarnations requires as much a questioning and unsettling of certain literary and historical language and convention as it does an explicit, political, anti-racist stance against the return of race science.

Note 1.  Shortlists for the Man Booker Prize in recent years attests to this popularity: numerous neo-Victorian novels have either won or been shortlisted for the prize, including Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelley Gang (2001), Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George (2005), Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013).

Bibliography BBC News. 2018. Donald Trump Says China Respects His ‘Very Large Brain.’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-45664690/donald-trumpsays-china-respects-his-very-large-brain. Accessed 28 Aug 2019. Ball, Magdalena. 2003. An Interview with Matthew Kneale. Compulsive Reader, March 18. http://www.compulsivereader.com/2003/03/18/an-interview-withmatthew-kneale/. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Basu, Kunal. 2006. Racists. London: Phoenix. ———. 2006. Searching Blindly for the Truth in Black and White. The Times Higher Education Supplement, January 6. Bliss, Catherine. 2012. Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boston, Phillipa. 2006. Author Experiments with Issues of Race. Oxford Times. http://kunalbasu.com/interview/racists/Racists%20-%20Interviews%20-%20 Oxford%20Times.jpg. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2000. Race and the Victorian Novel. In Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deidre David, 149–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, Samantha J. 2010. Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian: The NeoVictorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction. Neo-Victorian Studies 3 (2): 172–205. Gates, Henry Louis. 1985. Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes. Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 1–20.

556  J. GILL Gazette Staff. 2016. Racist Posters Comparing Skull Size of Different Races Appear at Amherst College. Daily Hampshire Gazette, November 23. https://www.gazettenet.com/Racist-posters-delineating-intelligence-by-race-appear-at-AmherstCollege-6335210. Accessed 28 Aug 2019. Gill, Josie. 2020. Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel. London: Bloomsbury. Goodman, Sam. 2015. “A Great Beneficial Disease”: Colonial Medicine and Imperial Authority inn J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. Journal of Medical Humanities 36 (2): 141–156. Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Heilman, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hill, Susan. 2000. Mail on Sunday. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Hochschild, Adam. 2000. The Floating Swap Meet. The New York Times, May 28. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/05/28/reviews/000528.28hochsct. html. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Hoffman, Bill. 2000. New York Post. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Kaplan, Cora. 2007. Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism. New York: Colombia University Press. Kneale, Matthew. 2000. English Passengers. London: Hamish Hamilton. Knox, Robert. 1850. The Races of Men: A Fragment. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. Martin, Biddy. 2016. Racist Posters on Campus. Amherst College, https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/president/statements/node/665033. Accessed 28 Aug 2019. Miller, Laura. 2001. English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. Salon, February 21. https://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/kneale/. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Montagu, Ashley. 1999. Introduction. In Race and IQ Expanded Edition, ed. Ashley Montagu, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munford, Rebecca, and Paul Young. 2009. Introduction: Engaging the Victorians. Literature, Interpretation, Theory 20 (1): 1–11. Phillips, Mike. 2006. Experiments in Brutality. The Guardian, January 21. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview17. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Poole, Steve. 2000. All Hands on Deck. The Guardian, March 4. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/04/fiction.bookerprize2000. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Price, Michael. 2018. ‘It’s a Toxic Place.’ How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics. Science, May 22. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/it-s-toxic-place-how-online-world-white-nationalists-distorts-population-genetics. Accessed 28 Aug 2019. Rao, Kavitha. 2006. Science Friction. South China Morning Post, February 26. Rees-Mogg, Jacob. 2019. The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain. London: Penguin. Roberts, Dorothy. 2011. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press.

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Rousselot, Elodie. 2016. Introduction: Neo-Victorian Experiments. Victoriographies 6 (2): 107–111. Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2019. Why Race Science Is on the Rise Again. The Guardian, May 18. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-riseangela-saini. Accessed 28 Aug 2019. Shuttleworth, Sally. 2014. From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 179–192. New York: Routledge. Sylvester, Christopher. 2000. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thackray Jones, Rachel. 2009. Matthew Kneale. British Council Literature. https:// literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/matthew-kneale. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Talese, Nan A. 2000. English Passengers. Publishers Weekly, February 28. https:// www.publishersweekly.com/978–0-385-49743-5. Accessed 8 Sept 2019. Venter, Craig. 2000. ‘Remarks Made by the President, Prime Minister Tony Blair of England (via satellite), Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Dr. Craig Venter, President and Chief Scientific Officer, Celera Genomics Corporation, on the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project’, The East Room, The White House, 26 June 2000, National Human Genome Research Institute. https://clintonwhitehouse3. archives.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/00628_2.html. Accessed 6 Sept 2019.

CHAPTER 32

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q., Afropessimism, Genre Michael Collins

May 30th, 1938 My dear Dr. Du Bois, I am pleased to give you the report of Du Bois’s intelligence test. On February 21, 1938, Miss Dorothy H. Wright, the school examiner, tested and found Du Bois to have an I.Q. of 144. She is mentally the age of a child seven years, eight months old. The test used to determine the I.Q. was the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Tests. Du Bois was quite stimulated the day she was tested. It is Miss Wright’s belief that the results might have been higher. The examiner finds Du Bois to be a very superior child. If you care to have any further report on Du Bois, I will be glad to send it to you.       Sincerely,       Mildred L. Johnson I.Q.—The modes of behaviour appropriate to the most advanced state of technical sophistication are not confined to the sectors in which they are actually required. So thinking submits to the social checks on its performance not merely where they are professionally imposed, but adapts to them its whole complexion… The socialization of mind keeps it boxed in, isolated in a glass case, as long as society itself is imprisoned. M. Collins (*)  King’s College, London, UK © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_32

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Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life In 1938, W.E.B. Du Bois received a brief letter at his office in Atlanta from the headmistress and founder of the Modern School in New York, a prestigious black private institution attended by his six-year-old granddaughter Du Bois Williams. The letter from Mildred Johnson is full of revealing historical and biographic details. First, that New York black private schools in the 1930s, even those committed to the humanist aims of the Ethical Society like The Modern School, had trained I.Q. testers on staff. This points to the extent to which mental testing had been incorporated into the normative structures of primary-level schooling in the USA by the 1930s driven, initially, by the rise of eugenics. Johnson’s description of Du Bois’s granddaughter’s results in an intelligence test is almost blasé, revealing much not because it is exceptional but because it speaks to an utterly normalized education scene. Second, that the test administered was the Stanford-Binet. This test was developed by Lewis Terman in 1916 and characterized around 10–12% of people (a “Talented Tenth” if you will) as lying within the highest three categories of human “mental merit” with marks above 110: “Superior Intelligence,” “Very Superior Intelligence,” and “Genius, or Near Genius”. The phenomenon of the “tenth” was attributable to the method of “deviation from the average” present at the center of assessments of “mental merit” from Francis Galton’s early work in Heredity Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequence (1868) through to contemporary examples such as Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994). Drawn from the work of the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, it was the observation that the quantity of high values in any data set will be mirrored almost precisely by the number at the lowest end with most measurements of an attribute—at least as it related to anthropometry—and would produce the largest number of examples around the mean and about 10% of outliers at each end of the scale. Given that Quetelet’s law of “deviation from the average” was a standard mathematical law in its time, taught in schools, it seems unlikely that W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of the “Talented Tenth” was an arbitrary number, even if it was not a direct reference Galton’s work. The Terman test was notable for the especially negative assessments it gave of African-American people. This was something Du Bois well knew by the 1930s, and Terman himself stated it quite directly in the book that introduced the Stanford-Binet to the world and which any trained I.Q. tester would have read, The Measurement of Intelligence. Terman wrote that an I.Q. on the Stanford-Binet scale of between 80 and 90 (defined as “Dullness, rarely classifiable as feeblemindedness” [79]) […] represent[s] the level of intelligence which is very, very common… among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among… negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will be taken up anew and by experimental methods. (91–92)

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Terman’s vision for this I.Q. population clearly rearticulated Jim Crow ­policies as well as the educational aims of Du Bois’s frequent enemy Booker T. Washington in stating that “Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical… they… can often be made efficient workers” (92). Taking Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) to be the ur-text of intelligence testing, racialist discourse was encoded deeply in the science itself. Galton was entirely frank about this, opening the preface to that work with the claim that “the idea of investigating the subject of hereditary genius occurred to me during the course of a purely ethnological inquiry, into the mental peculiarity of different races” (v). The third point to note is the attention paid by Johnson to Du Bois Williams’s state of “stimulation,” which is to say, her deviation from ­culturally-conditioned behavioral norms for the science of I.Q. testing. Given the racialist dimensions of the Stanford-Binet we can take this to mean her deviation from a normative, learned, “whiteness.” Johnson’s comment points either to the implication that Du Bois Williams approached the test in a youthful spirit of fun, or to a darker implication of coercion. Importantly, it can also be both—the coercive history of race lying transparently on the ­surface of an average child’s life. Situating this complex affect around I.Q. in relation to the anti-racist agendas of Du Bois’s life and work this chapter considers how to read black literature “within” a racialized world of scientific thought, rather than just as a transcendental response to it. Du Bois is useful to us because his engagements are paradigmatic of the modern subject’s uncomfortable, but utterly commonplace, relation to the “neurological modernity” of the I.Q. concept. By “neurological modernity”, I suggest that the “mind” after I.Q. becomes calibrated within a scientific definition of “intelligence” that in normatively “white.” Du Bois writing, via Nina, to Mildred Johnson, to obtain the results of a racist test administered to his “stimulated” granddaughter, was an act of intrusion that was also a sincere act of care and is of a piece with his wider thought on the subject of black survival within a racist world; a pattern that can be well described through the emergent discourse of “Afropessimism.”

Reading Black Writing “Within the Veil” of Science In this chapter I will read W.E.B. Du Bois’s engagement with I.Q. testing through the terms of “Afropessimism,” that is, as a sincere attempt to, at once, acknowledge the racist histories underpinning all thought in the Western world (including, or, perhaps most especially, that of institutionalized science) and to find ongoing means of survival within such a world. I will do so by first outlining Du Bois’s stance in relation to eugenics and I.Q., before moving on to consider how this served as a spur to his specific form of dialectical thinking, and closing with a discussion of why perceiving Du Bois this way helps explain his attraction to genre fiction. By reading “Afropessimistically” I also intend to offer a shift in orientation in the

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study of literature and science from a desire to assert art’s capacity to refute, challenge, or undermine the claims of science toward a consideration of the emotional states attendant upon being within a scientized (and therefore historically white supremacist) world. This does not, exactly, give us consolation. Yet it helps us acknowledge how we might live with the problem and not be given to inhabiting a utopian outside of the problem, an orientation that, as Jared Sexton has remarked, might be unethical toward those for whom “transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.” So, for literature to adopt an ethical relation to its subject it must also not seek to dwell on the outside of science. Du Bois’s awkward embrace of I.Q. reveals the horrible reality that most real bodies in the twentieth century could never live outside the realm of scientific authority that was coming to define the twentieth-century state. ­ Nor, indeed, was a wholesale rejection of I.Q. possible given its dominance as what Jacques Rancière has called a “distribution of the sensible,” an epistemology and an aesthetic of felt experience that organized social life in the twentieth century. To put it another way, by the 1930s “intelligence” had become largely synonymous with “mind” itself and had shed the vestments of its religious, Kantian, or transcendental optimism as well as its earlier meanings as simple “knowledge.” No less a pessimist of the everyday than Theodor Adorno captured in the section from Minima Moralia that serves as one of my epigraphs how I.Q. was a form of mind that seemed to subsume all definitions of thought in the twentieth century, making it inescapable for even those whose idea of critical thinking in no way required it. That is to say, I.Q. becomes an intractable and sprawling “fact” everywhere that thought occurs. As John Carson has shown, the birth of more-or-less the entire discipline of psychology in the late nineteenth century was driven by the rise of a conception of “intelligence” as the central feature of “mind” and a “common attribute… understood as a singular faculty whose power varied across the animal kingdom by degrees” (81) but not, crucially, by kind. The dominant fact of eugenic thinking (certainly as it related to the uniform and measurable value of “mind”) from the early years of the twentieth century to now is not its spectacularity (although confronting this truth of American life always comes with shock for the researcher). What traumatizes is the horror of its routine pervasiveness. Du Bois’s relation to I.Q. testing is paradigmatic here, because it articulates the black subject’s inescapable relation to the condition of white power, the “ethico-onto-epistemological” (Barad) sum of racial rejection. What literature can give an account of are the emotional states that galvanize their own version of the political for those that reside fully within the purview of the scientific state apparatus; a self-awareness that might in time be emancipatory. As Jared Sexton expressed it, “Afropessimism” is a “common sense” that is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of postemancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally,

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the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black – whether non-slave or former-slave – would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux.

This “Afropessimistic” stance differs from readings that would emphasize the resistant, subversive, or transcendent strategies deployed by Du Bois, such as those by Maria Farland. According to Farland, Du Bois’s primary technique for refuting the claims of racist science was that of “transvaluation”—a process by which the relocation of data from one scientific milieu into another genre or form (the example is the novel) produces a change in the meaning of a particular value. The purpose of such an exercise is politically subversive and emancipatory; it bends negative data toward transcendent outcomes. When considering I.Q., though, Du Bois seldom performed such a “transvaluation”. Du Bois Williams’s intelligence was explored at the genius loci of mental test data (an educational institution), and we should not read Du Bois’s request to Mildred Johnson as a necessarily subversive gesture. It is, rather, an acknowledgment that a high I.Q. (real or not) conferred potentiality upon Du Bois Williams, a modicum of safety in an antiblack world, even at the expense of the collective of African Americans for whom such testing was used to reinforce white supremacist systems of domination. The emergent language of “Afropessimism” captures well how Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk performed a political shift in description of black political disablement from a simple spatial exclusion from the public sphere, to the more complexly modern internalization, embodiment, and psychologization of the subject implicit in ideas such as “double consciousness” and “the veil” (Du Bois 1994). I will be thinking through Du Bois’s engagement with I.Q. in light of Jacques Rancière’s observation that the cruel operations of political power do not always hide themselves behind other objects of attention and are, sometimes, rather frankly and unambiguously present in the world in its naked everydayness. Later in this chapter this observation will be brought to bear on the question of why Du Bois generally chose to write fiction, albeit very assuredly “modernist,” through the modes of genre, rather than adopt the experimentalism pursued by his peers. I suggest below that genre fiction foregrounds suspended action and is based on an aesthetic of non-transcendence that can capture the affects of being within a world where one’s sense of progress is always dogged by retrogressive systems of measurement and definition. My argument runs counter to recent critical work that has powerfully demonstrated the history of black engagements in the cultural field of science and has found within scientific culture systems for affecting active resistance, including Farland’s work and Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science, the latter of which focuses its attention on an earlier moment of black expression. In numerous ways, Du Bois was the inheritor and one of the most important practitioners of that tradition, but there remains something specific about “intelligence” as an area of scientific inquiry in the

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twentieth century that feels especially intransigent and resistant to “fugitive” uses. This may account for why, as Catherine Malabou has recently noted, the humanities have generally adopted a defensive formation in relation to I.Q., and have been frequently given to protesting meekly, after the model of Henri Bergson’s neoromanticism, that art and culture are expressions of an especially vital and pseudo-mystical version of consciousness that cannot be captured by intelligence testing.

Normative Eugenicism and Social Activism Du Bois was fascinated by the results of I.Q. tests and believed that reshifting attention from hard heredity to environmental and cultural conditioning would improve the status of African Americans in relation to the metric, but he did not attack the underlying principle of “general intelligence” head on despite the racist history encoded deeply in the metric itself. As Kyla Schuller has argued, Du Bois’s activism was based on what was becoming an outdated and outmoded system of thought in the context of the hard Mendelian, assuredly racist, hereditarianism pursued by powerful eugenicists like Charles Davenport and Lewis Terman; that is, Du Bois adopted a modified version of neo-Lamarckism and sentimentalism “that could draw on emotion as a methodology in order to identify the influence of environment on social well-being and chart how African American families were advancing” (186). In the 1920s Du Bois printed I.Q. scores in the pages of The Crisis to accompany images of “Five Exceptional Negro Children” registering a distinctly pragmatic need to not only speak of black achievement, but find a metric through which it might be represented, albeit one steeped in historical and contemporary violence. Du Bois’s own academic focus on “brains”—implicit in his especial attention to the educational and cultural achievements of black life and his belief in the uplifting power of a “Talented Tenth”—made escaping the allure of I.Q. more-or-less impossible. Unlike other physical measures such as height, weight, strength and so on that were used by eugenicists to differentiate the exceptional from the “unfit,” the fact that I.Q. touches on an individual’s potential for cultural and artistic achievement makes it a form of biopower that could not be circumnavigated by cultural workers or isolated strategically from the cultural sphere. Even among figures we might hope would know better, I.Q. is alluring and unnervingly adhesive, as suggested by its transtemporal persistence in the face of criticisms as excoriating and definitive as Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man in our own era. While Du Bois spoke frequently against the dangers of other hard biological measurements of African Americans, he maintained an abiding respect for I.Q. scores. In a climate in which the I.Q. was taken to be an established fact, to attack “general intelligence” would have challenged a crucial grounding for his belief in the logic and worth of “meritocracy” and “racial uplift” more generally, which, as Daylanne English

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and Kyla Schuller have both noted, united a focus on black achievement with a specifically African-American version of eugenics. His commitment to I.Q. was periodically a source of consternation to fellow antiracist activists. In 1929, Du Bois wrote to Franz Boas requesting he write a short article for The Crisis on three questions: 1. Is there a new American Negro race being developed? 2. What has intelligence testing proven concerning Negro ability? 3.  What recent studies or investigations throw light upon the African Negro? The reply from the eminent anthropologist referred dismissively to the idea of “intelligence” being real, suggesting it was only what “psychologists please to call, intelligence” Even while he may have quibbled with the tests, Du Bois displayed a certainty that ability was measurable and meritocratic advancement possible for those in possession of a high I.Q. He felt entitled to his granddaughter’s biodata, and that of other African Americans under the purview of his research and activist projects, as a way of demonstrating future potentialities. Given the racist history of the intelligence test, the transmission of the measurability of minds from the eugenic fringe to the quotidian world of black primary school education demanded an acceptance by the majority (up to a point) of the ongoing trauma of white supremacy. The move to tabulate achievement on these tests gave birth to the supposition that an individual more able to score highly on an I.Q. or “I.Q.-like” measure was more, truly, “alive,” reifying a commonsensical belief that humanity was gradable as a Gaussian distribution (the famous “bell curve” on a graph) from “bright” and engaged down to a state of intellectual somnambulism. I.Q. itself is evidence of what Saidiya Hartman has poignantly called the afterlife of slavery, “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone… a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (6). This hierarchy was coded into the Enlightenment itself. As Jacques Rancière remarks, the Enlightenment is rooted in a “pedagogical myth” that “divides the world into two. More precisely it divides intelligence into two. It says there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one” (7). After I.Q. this Enlightenment—and so, this “freedom”—occurred in shades. With the image of “the veil” in The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Du Bois demonstrated that spheres of freedom were not just external and spatial; neither were they wholly Manichean. In the era following the official abolition of slavery they were partially permeable, malleable, and either inside us or worn upon bodies. More specifically, among its many metaphorical possibilities “the veil” is an image that focuses its power on the head (one wears a veil) that in turn points to Du Bois’ particular interest in intelligence; a biologization of subjecthood that is also a secularization of the shifting conditions of freedom and unfreedom as things pertaining to bodies and in the world.

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Intelligence testing and psychology measured brains and located that singular organ as the site of consciousness. Consequently, one of the keys to greater freedom resided in the brain. Because it was not simply spatial, freedom rendered as intelligence was even less absolute and unimpeachable, and was subject to continual assessment. Du Bois would have agreed with Francis Galton’s statement in Hereditary Genius that “I look upon social and professional life as a continuous examination” (5). That was pretty obvious to a black man in the early twentieth century. Specifically, for Du Bois, academic competition was a source of great pride, writing famously in The Souls of Black Folk, “That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them in a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads” (2). Since Du Bois and his family served as his own model for the potential of exceptional black people, I.Q. helped to explain academic and cultural success and allowed Du Bois to lay claim to the merit he and his family displayed (English). To say one is “a very exceptional child” is political because it allows one to claim their own achievements, and in the event those achievements are denied, appeal for recourse to a higher sense of justice. The painful trade-off is that Gaussian distribution serves to condemn the greater part of humanity to a state of relative mental mediocrity and, since “intelligence” was understood to be a strong indicator of future achievement, to impose presumptive biological limits on capacities for growth and development. The bell curve is not a spectacular, liberatory form of data display. Its results are, actually, rather depressing. Whether a function of heredity or environment, I.Q. cannot be a basis for radical emancipation, because it is calculated according to a standard deviation from a mean. It is everywhere marked by the needs of its time, since “intelligence” is largely a measure of the adaptive utility of one’s capacities in relation to a socially conservative milieu, as John Dewey would note of academic assessment generally in Democracy and Education (1916).1 As Galton, then Alfred Binet, conceived it, and other revised it, I.Q. was an elitist measure with only small numbers doing well on a scale whose purpose was to evaluate one’s capacity for what the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin called “conscious adaptation”; that is, something like an ability to survive and flourish in the world whose conditions you comprehend and, essentially, must learn to accept.2

Double Consciousness and the Dialectics of “Talent” Like any intellectual attempting to adapt theory and praxis to the changing racial and political landscapes of the U.S. (and the world) from the late nineteenth- to the middle-twentieth centuries, W.E.B. Du Bois’s work was not marked by an absolute consistency of vision or approach. Yet, as a thinker working at the crux of race and class concerns in the period his commitments to what Gregory Michael Dorr and Angela Logan have termed “Assimilationist Eugenics” remained fairly consistent from the earliest years working on The Philadelphia Negro and establishing an empirical school of

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sociology at Atlanta, through to his work with the U.N. and the publication of his “Black Flame” sequence of bildungsromane in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Dorr and Logan; 68–92). It is not a new line to emphasize Du Bois’s conservatism on aspects of social thought; both Shamoon Zamir and Kwame Anthony Appiah have taken this approach to Du Bois. Zamir notes in Dark Voices that “Du Bois was always aristocratic in his bearing and attitudes, never more so than in his early life, when his politics upheld a clear distinction between the patrician and the plebeian classes” (9). From the late 1910s until the 1930s Du Bois evinced a commitment to “scientific” breeding to ameliorate the painful conditions of black life, even stating in a 1922 editorial for the NAACP’s Crisis that “The Negro has not been breeding for an object” and must, therefore begin to breed “for brains, for efficiency, for beauty” (153). Aldon Morris has recently defended Du Bois against claims of class prejudice by remarking that Du Bois’s elitism is always vectored through his social constructionism as a way of speaking of oppression, not innate values: “[his] descriptions of the ‘dumb misery’ of the black masses might in retrospect appear judgmental, elitist, and inappropriately derogatory… [y]et whenever Du Bois dwells on the ignorance or backwardness or primitiveness or underdeveloped nature or ‘childlikeness’ of blacks, he explains it as a consequence of white oppression” (41). In this sense, when he speaks of I.Q. a similar issue is at play; the question of what, as he implies in his letter to Boas, we might learn about disablement through it. Nonetheless, such a tendency in Du Bois’s thought is, of course, a problem. It troublingly mirrors hereditarian claims made by scientific racists and eugenic thinkers and activists of the period, such as Terman or Charles Davenport of the infamous Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office. Importantly, Du Bois’s approach to eugenics distorted the central tenets of what Daniel J. Kevles famously characterized as “popular” eugenics, that is, the white supremacist, racially—purifying, frequently Mendelian, variant favored by racist scientists and conservative anti-immigrationists. Other variants of eugenic thought flourished in the period, including those that emphasized “hybrid vigor” and encouraged interracial couplings, as English notes in Unnatural Selections, and it is these upon which Du Bois most often, though not exclusively, drew. As English writes, “eugenics was not necessarily accompanied by a platform of white supremacy or, for that matter, even racial purity” (17). It is certainly the case that Du Bois’s work for the NAACP participated actively in the popularization of a range of eugenical discourses in the first decades of the century, especially in his use of beautiful baby contests as a cornerstone of his famous “Tenth Crusade” antilynching campaign and in his frequent editorials for Crisis devoted to praising the fitness of the children of the “Talented Tenth.” The object of this deployment of eugenic tropes was to present a counter-claim to a mainstream eugenics set upon emphasizing the inferiority of African-Americans to Anglo-Saxon or Nordic peoples, as English, Dorr, and Logan have all shown.3

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Du Bois’s involvement with these eugenic questions was largely the norm. There is little case to be made that his attraction to it is peculiar or more destructive than, say, Booker T. Washington’s or Charles Davenport’s. It is troubling for its normativity, and remains his least redeemable or liberatory stance. Famously, Du Bois called out white America for its perception of black people as a political and demographic “problem” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) when he wrote that “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question…. How does it feel to be a problem?” (1). Du Bois’s key insight in that work and Black Reconstruction in America (1935) was to show how the experiences of black enslavement and emancipation in America were, at once, the engine that drove modernization and the conditions that led to the development of forms of social control that held back such a process. However, his engagement with marshaling biopower in relation to black people through eugenic pursuits seems to suggest a deeply rooted internalization of this very “problem” as a problem at the demographic level; a psychic disturbance that manifested in his unwillingness to reject “meritocracy”—especially one that tried to prove the superiority of certain individuals scientifically. A key insight of Du Bois’s was to note that the double consciousness of African Americans was dialectical; it meant having to possess a “second sight in this American world” (Du Bois 1994) rooted in the ongoing trauma of relying continually for one’s subsistence, physically and mentally, on tools of survival developed in response to a racist modernity that had not been transcended and frequently returned in new, horrifying, forms. Consequently, such “double consciousness” rendered all forms of uplift and progress haunted by the past; all achievement that integrated black life more greatly into that modern system was in danger of contributing to the further disenfranchisement of other members of the same race. Moreover, this haunting contributed to the melancholic tone of a body of work shot through with instances of frustration, political incapacitation, and defeat. For Jonathan Flatley this means that Du Bois’s work is especially rich in an affective valence and tonal ambiguity, an awareness of “the historicity of one’s affective experience, especially experiences of difficult, potentially depressing, loss” that marks it out generically as “modernist.” Du Bois’s request to his granddaughter’s teacher demands that we call attention to how at times the forms of gratification he sought—biopolitical, potentially hereditarian, essentialist closures such as an I.Q. that might mark Du Bois Williams as one of the meritocratic elite—were not wholly radical or liberatory. They were nonetheless markers of a will to survive and thrive in an unjust world that, while not heroic, offer important insights into African-American life “within the veil” of racist, scientific, modernity. For Du Bois the capacity to perceive, understand, and productively utilize the “Second Sight” that was the historical inheritance of black cultural life was not distributed evenly in the population. The concept of the “Talented Tenth” that Du Bois first outlined in a 1903 article of that

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name was developed in the same frenzied period of production that birthed The Souls of Black Folk, with its own references to the exceptional black “savant,” and must be understood alongside the claims for special sight suggested in that work. Such a position is perfectly in keeping with the version of the Enlightenment mind that shaped Du Bois’s thought. Of course, in an African-American liberationist literary tradition this is an especially pertinent force, because emancipation had been mapped onto education and Enlightenment with certain heroic figures able by chance, work, fate, or circumstance to achieve what to most was continually deferred or denied; namely, freedom. The irony that “Afropessimism” calls our attention to is that the very definition of the “free” subject relies for its meaning on its inverse, the continuing presence of unfreedom as a fact of modernity. However, as Rancière has argued, a truly emancipatory politics must hold to the almost unthinkable supposition of the equality of intelligence, a sense that reason is not a state to come to or that is distributed unevenly, but a universal possession of all. In an age in which “intelligence” was being scientifically tabulated as I.Q. by figures like Lewis Terman, and deemed to be measurable through tests of perception and sensitivity, Du Bois’s characterization of the special ability of certain individuals to “feel” more acutely the environment and history partakes of the theory of the measurability of “general intelligence” and its antidemocratic impulses. In other words, it exists within a version of Enlightenment calibrated to reinforce and extend white power. As Paul Gilroy and others have noted, Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” marks him out as a modern thinker, working through the implications of modernity itself. His theory of the assault on the senses that defines what it is to be black in America places The Souls of Black Folk within the canon of works at the turn of the century directed to considerations of the emerging modern consciousness, especially in the field of sociology where, as Nancy Bentley has remarked, “For thinkers in a number of different disciplines, the textures of everyday experience and perception seemed to hold the secret to acquiring new knowledge” (247–248). Ben Singer has dubbed this emphasis on everyday sensory life a “neurological conception of modernity.” As a modern thinker committed to modern problems Du Bois comes to a problematically biopolitical solution in his acceptance of a unitary, innate “general intelligence” as a necessary tool for unearthing who can benefit from this modernity and who cannot. For Du Bois, the theory of “general intelligence” actually served as the backbone of his antiracist activism. This is Du Bois’s version of “neurological modernity”—the affects created by a modern world that seeks to liberate minds in the name of Enlightenment by first comprehending them through systems of measurement that foreground non-transcendence. What lay “between” the “world” and “W.E.B Du Bois” was a capacity—a trait, an aptitude for feeling, a special speed of responsiveness—that allowed him to perceive the “unasked question.” The utopian dream of the I.Q. concept was that it offered up a universal scale of human potential that allowed Du Bois to successfully plot high-achieving African Americans alongside whites and other

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races on it, seemingly undermining white supremacist claims to the inferiority of black people, and landing a blow against discredited, but no less culturally persistent, polygenetic or racially separatist theories of multiple forms of humanity. Yet, inversely, it performed its own distancing from the masses he attempted in other ways to uplift by relying for its potency on a generalized mediocrity and inability to flourish among that very mass. Navigating this complex affective valence around the politics of intelligence and the everyday was a task that Du Bois would seek most to undertake not in his autobiographical, social scientific, or activist work, but in his fiction, specifically where he engaged genre tropes most overtly. There, through generic and affective intensities, he communicated the complex situation of being a subject within a normatively scientized world calibrated to white power who must attempt to utilize that untenable position as a basis for a social mobility that pervasive antiblackness commonly foreclosed and denied. Exploring this, I will end with a reading of “The Comet” (1920).

The Generic Trauma of “the Comet” “The Comet” first appeared in Darkwater: Voices From within the Veil (1920) and adopts the generic idiom of sci-fi to tell the story of a black, New York City bank messenger, Jim Davis. Following a request from his white boss to go into the “lower vaults” and collect “two volumes of old records” (139), Jim becomes trapped, only to find, on being freed, that human life on earth appears to have been exterminated by noxious gasses from the tail of a passing comet. As Jim moves through the city searching for survivors and a means of exit from the horrors of the post-apocalyptic urban world, he comes across Julia, a wealthy, young, white woman who was also saved from the gasses by her modern work, having been locked in a “dark-room developing pictures of the comet” at the time of the event: “when I came out” says Julia, “I saw the dead!” (143). As they grow closer emotionally over the time of the story, Du Bois raises the possibility that they are the new Adam and Eve, a utopian eugenic experiment in interracial breeding between two “exceptional” individuals, in both the Darwinian sense of their seemingly unique capacity for survival and quick-thinking and in their “modernity” (a “New Woman” and a black New Yorker who is the trusted assistant to the President of a Wall Street bank). The tragic dimension of the story exists within its genre in the fact that the source of their eugenic romance is the death of the masses, as well as the final foreclosure of this future due to pervasive antiblackness. “The Comet” ends, fascinatingly, not with the redemption of the black protagonist through apocalypse, but in a heartbreaking return to the status quo; white power re-established and Jim on a platform, surrounded by a would-be lynch mob. At the denouement, Julia and Jim start “slowly, noiselessly” to “move[…] toward each other – the heavens above, the seas around” in a romanticized moment pointing to the possibility of their sexual union. They begin to intone a version of the mantra that remakes British sovereignty after

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the death of the king, only to be interrupted before a new sovereign order is inaugurated: “The world is dead… Long live the – Honk! Honk! Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up” (149). The “Honk” of the car horn signals the return of Julia’s white family who proceed to inform her and Jim that the world has not been destroyed, “only New York.” With the arrival of the rich, white people to “save” Julia from Jim and the dead world around them the process of rebirth and renewal is foreclosed. “The Comet” is compelling for its structural and philosophical refusal of a future, at least a future of utopian liberation. Du Bois’s story is not, then, unproblematically “Afrofuturist.” In the terms of Kodwo Eshun’s powerful essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” it is not “concerned with the future” so much as “engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (290). As the white people return they assume that Jim, who is indecorously companionate with Julia by this point, has sexually interfered with her. The misunderstanding is cleared up from the perspective of the whites when Julia’s father hands Jim some cash in tip for helping his daughter to survive. As Jim stands contemplating his fate a crowd appears around him. The final image of the text is Jim standing “silently beneath the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed… [in] his other hand… a baby’s filmy cap” (Du Bois 1920; 150). The “corpse of [the] dark baby” is in the arms of a “brown, small, and toil-worn” woman who turns out to be Jim’s lost wife. This is a dialectical image, as it appears to sanction Jim and his wife’s own survival only upon the death of another, in this case their child. The cap of the dead child is paired with the money in his hand that has been paid to him as a tip from the father of the white woman he has saved and appears to him as scant compensation for the mass death around him. While the money offends through its assumption that the humanity Jim shows toward Julia can only emerge from financial need (genuine affection would cross a heavily policed “color line” around interracial desire), the dead child’s cap (a “filmy,” translucent head-covering that recalls another of Du Bois’s metaphors “The Veil”) is a sign of the persistence of black death as a seemingly inescapable condition of Jim’s relative survival within an antiblack world. The dialectical conclusion places full aliveness on a Gaussian scale that is proximate to I.Q.’s division of political speech and power (Jim deviates from the mean of cognitive semi-life) to represent the melancholia felt by even the successful “within the veil.” Darryl A. Smith suggests that this image of Jim upon “a platform”—that is, elevated above the others of his race to some extent (with his wife below him holding a dead baby)—“is almost certainly a symbolic recapitulation of the needless death of Du Bois’s own first-born child years earlier, due to the unresponsiveness of a white doctor” (210) discussed in Chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk. I would agree, but also suggest that the trauma runs deeper than the story’s representative imagery and narrative incidents into the genre and tone of the work as a whole. Specifically, in the context of Du Bois’s engagement with mind and I.Q. that I have described above, “The Comet” turns on the

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sense that any act of black creative imagination and thought in the world of the story is always already haunted by white supremacy; that the protagonist’s mind is not, somehow, his own. This calls us back to Adorno’s special concern with the oozing quality of the I.Q. version of mind in the twentieth century, which comes to saturate thought itself, even outside of its professional jurisdiction. Genre fictions, such as sci-fi, operate through the quality of their second-handedness more than through their originality. For all its presentation of alien worlds and strange, cataclysmic events, generic reproducibility gives to science fiction writing a dispossessed quality, whereby creativity operates “within” a scientific idiom and world (one coded as hegemonically white) and not in terms of its transcendental appeal to an “outside” of the everyday world of scientific authority or through authorial exceptionality. Lauren Berlant laments that genre fiction has seldom been seen by “cultural theorists” who are historically drawn toward the experimentalism of high modernism and depth psychology, as the proper form for expressing trauma: it moves too rapidly, is too easily read and uncomplexly felt. This, then, cannot apparently be appropriate for the affective content of trauma if it is understood in Freudian terms as Nachträglichkeit or “blockage” (Berlant; 81).4 However, for Du Bois, whose dialectical version of mind—“double consciousness”—foregrounds ongoing and persistently traumatic affects within the white world, genre fiction has a crucial, metaphorical, power in being precisely so quotidian a style. “The Comet” is an important example of genre fiction as a response to the ongoing trauma, entrapment, and “treading water” of “neurological modernity” for black subjects. For Du Bois, science fiction operates as a self-reflexive mode that can capture scientific racism’s conventionality in the Progressive Era, its everydayness, popularity, and inescapabilty in the real world, in being a form that consciously lacks a claim to “higher” literary values, exceptionality, and transcendence, performing the effect of being, as Berlant says, “hollowed out by the pressures of overdetermination” (81). Sci-fi is as overabundant, common, and non-emancipatory as science itself. Du Bois’s decision to locate this sci-fi story within a recognizably modern world does a degree of this work by demonstrating through genre how modernity is saturated with the conclusions and cultural logics of white science from which, like Jim finds at the end of the story, it is seemingly impossible to flee. Genre fiction, as an expression of culture and the individual mind in the twentieth century, is suffused with a scientific consciousness; its creativity is within the linguistic, lexical, and affective register of science. The ending of “The Comet” should not come as a shock to the careful reader. The story expresses repeatedly a sense in which all actions happen “within” the domain of science and according to its tenets. A deep irony resides in how the plot revolves around survival and the search for forms of recognizable, common life. This becomes literalized at one point when the two lead characters attempt to reconnect to the world at the “central telephone exchange” (144). The tale then casts Jim and Julia effectively as

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eugenicists, placed in a condition of epistemological inquiry that recalls I.Q. science in its search for intensities as a measure of the value of life. The “mind” of the story—its engagements, tone, linguistic register—is captured within a totality of science, much as Adorno notes of the I.Q. concept’s incorporation of (oozing, bleeding between) all versions of thought itself in the twentieth century; its “adapt[ation] of them to its whole complexion.” Moreover, Julia’s talent as a photographer and Jim’s survival skills mark their possible progeny as a utopian mixed-race eugenic ideal in the minds of liberal readers. Like Gaussian distribution with its structural condemnation of the mass as limited in their capacity for growth and development, Jim and Julia (the young, black man of merit and the “bright” New Woman respectively) pass among the dead that are, according to Du Bois’s own narration, actually “silent and asleep - not dead.” Yet neither are they truly alive. They are described, rather, as somehow “brain” dead. The heightened attention to the question of survival and the instrumentalization of all thought foregrounded by the post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre serves to rearticulate an I.Q. version of mind in which all thought operates as a test of one’s capacities (“I look upon the world” said Galton, “as a continuous assessment”) and in which the majority—black or white—are condemned to the status of cognitive half-life. The color pallete of the tale highlights shades and intensities of black and white. It begins largely in the “dark basement” in “the blackness and silence below that lowest cavern” (139), only to end in the “glare of the electric lights” (150). But this literal Enlightenment gives no solace. Illumination occurs at several moments in the story, but Du Bois does not allow us the consolation of equating that literal Enlightenment with a spectacular initiation into revolutionary awakening. As Julia and Jim stand on top of a tower toward the end of the story, caught in a transcendental reverie and contemplating their possible destiny as the new Adam and Eve, they see what the narrator describes as the Pole Star. He writes, Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that suffused the darkening world… Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star – mystic, wonderful! And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, white sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars. (148)

The Pole Star is a dialectical image too; a “wan bridal veil.” It is both a ritual object for the initiation into a new order of being (Jim and Julia’s romantic and sexual union), and also a form of screen (recalling Du Bois’s own metaphor of the color line as The Veil). The irony is that the Pole Star that guided slaves up to the North in the antebellum period is actually dwarfed moments later by another blinding light, the glaring electrical lamps that augur the return of the rich, white people to the scene and the potential of Jim’s lynching at their hands. It is, in effect, a postemancipation

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image that acknowledges the persistence of white supremacy as a condition of American modernity. In Du Bois’s sci-fi world, romance and the hope of Enlightenment bildung are illusions masking a greater truth. The story reflects a move from the Du Bois of Souls of Black Folk, who noted mournfully that “throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness,” (3) toward a more pessimistic, paranoiac tone that casts the “gauge” of “brightness” itself as a suspicious, delimiting activity performed by the Progressive Era state that condemns the mass to darkness. After all, the “brightness” of the Pole Star is, within the narrative of the story, merely a Romantic diversion, an aesthetic trade-off for the pervasive deadness of the story’s jazz age world. Indeed, the Romantic tone when it appears is frequently undercut in the tale. Julia compares Jim to “the elf-queen” with the otherworldly power and knowledge to “wave life into this dead world again” (147). Yet, this will not be enough. It is merely a reverie that blinds her and the reader to the greater truth. Jim Davis’s exceptional survival in a world that whiteness killed forces him to bear witness to the horror, just as Du Bois’s own exceptional abilities and those of his family gave him consciousness of the roots of his own ideas within a pervasive field of antiblackness that suffused everyday life with melancholia. Here, even a pleasant exchange with his grandchild’s teacher, reporting good news, communicates with a negative dialectical intensity. Du Bois’s positive feelings about Du Bois Williams’s high I.Q. should not mean we forget the systems that lie behind it, at least not while power still lies so fully with one race, with a sensorium of science encoded as “white,” and, as Adorno states, “society itself is imprisoned..” The question remains of whether the answer to this tangle lies in refining newer or more ethical datasets (a “transvaluative” activity), or whether the real promise of Enlightenment can only be enacted through the radical suggestion that Jacques Rancière asks we entertain; abandoning hierarchies and rankings of mind wholly in favor of new, democratic forms of knowledge that proceed from the assumption of universal rights and freedoms.

Notes 1. According to Catherine Malabou, Dewey is one of the few thinkers trained in the American pragmatist tradition (a lineage that includes, of course, Du Bois) able and willing to utterly reject the I.Q. version of mind. She attempts to renovate Dewey’s concept of “creative intelligence” as collective endeavour for the age of neuroplasticity, neurodiversity, and cybernetics. 2. It is important to note that although the “intelligence test” as we know it was a French invention, the French were not in general keen to see it reduced to a single number, a point both W.H. Scheider in “After Binet: French Intelligence Testing, 1900–1950,” Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 28: 111–132 and Kurt Danziger in Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (Sage, 1997) make repeatedly. That special form of abuse had British and American origins.

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3. For Dorr and Logan, it is notable that Du Bois’s resignation from the research and publishing wing of the NAACP on July 10, 1934 led to “the assimilationist eugenic thrust” disappearing from Crisis and from NAACP contests and pageants, pointing to his especial involvement in this mode of thought and activism in relation to social questions. 4.  Berlant notes that “As an affective concept, [Nachträglichkeit] bridges: a sense of belatedness from having to catch up with the event; a sense of the double-take in relation to what happened in the event…; a sense of being saturated by it in the present [my italics], even as a structure of dislocation; a sense of being hollowed out by the pressures of overdetermination [my italics]; a sense of being frozen out of the future (now defined by the past); and, because ordinary life does go on, a sense of the present that makes no sense with the rest of it…. Living trauma as whiplash, treading water, being stuck, drifting among symptoms” (81).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Mind, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso. Baldwin, J.M. 1909. Darwin and the Humanities. Baltimore: Review Publishing. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bentley, Nancy. 2009. Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Berlant, Laurent. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Boas, Franz. 1929. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 14. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/ mums312-b181-hi223. Carson, J. 2007. The Measure of Merit: Talent, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dewey, J. 1918. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan. Dorr, G.M., and Angela Logan. 2011. Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests. In A Century of Eugenics in America, ed. Paul A. Lombardo. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1920. The Comet. In Darkwater: Voices From within the Veil. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 1922. Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois. The Crisis 24 (4): 153. ———. 1929. Letter to Franz Boas, February 13. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b181i222. ———. 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications. English, Daylanne. 2004. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Eshun, K. 2003. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 287–302. Farland, Maria. 2006. W. E. B. Du Bois, Anthropometric Science, and the Limits of Racial Uplift. American Quarterly 58 (4): 1017–1044.

576  M. COLLINS Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Galton, Francis. 1892. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into It Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man: Revised and Expanded. London: W.W. Norton. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Johnson, Mildred L. 1938. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, May 30. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/ mums312-b086-i134. Accessed 1 May 2019. Kevles, D.J. 1999. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Harvard University Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2019. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains, trans. Carolyn Stead. New York: Columbia University Press. Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Oakland: University of California Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lesson in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Contiuum. Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Schuller, Kyla. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sexton, Jared. 2016. Afropessimism: The Unclear Word. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29. https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02. Terman, L.M. 1916. The Measurement of Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Zamir, Shamoon. 1995. Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888– 1903. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 33

Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge and the Manhattan Project in Comic Books Lindsey Michael Banco

Introduction Given their supposedly marginal cultural status, their ostensibly dubious relationship to facticity, and their apparent distance from one of the twentieth century’s most significant scientific and technological develop­ ments, it is perhaps strange that comic books provide some of the earliest historical accounts of the Manhattan Project. Conducted largely in secret between 1942 and 1945, the Manhattan Project was a U.S. government crash course to develop a functional atomic weapon for use in World War II. Led by the enigmatic theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the gruff general Leslie Groves, fresh from his coordination of the construction of the Pentagon, the project included refinement facilities in Tennessee and Washington, an assembly site on an isolated New Mexico mesa, and an international team of top-flight scientists. The science was esoteric, the technological work was challenging, and the results—the world’s first atomic blast on July 16, 1945—were earth-shattering. The news of this innovative science and its astounding results reverberated around the globe, and the Manhattan Project burst into prominence in American popular culture. At stake in the countless subsequent representations of atomic energy and nuclear weapons, including both historical and fictionalized accounts of the Manhattan Project itself, are the means by which cultural productions depict the strange new L. M. Banco (*)  University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_33

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knowledge produced by this science, the menacing pieces of technology in which this knowledge was embedded, and the new global geopolitical order that emerged. What, then, does the often ephemeral form of comic books have to tell us about how we tell the story of the Manhattan Project? What is it about the Manhattan Project—about the science of nuclear energy and the story of the construction of nuclear weapons—that lends itself to representation in comics? After a brief look at some 1940s nonfictional comics, this chapter examines several recent examples of graphic histories of the atomic bomb, texts that are part of a relatively new trend in comics involving sophisticated, self-aware storytelling and complex visual artistry and whose ideological imports frequently complicate the claims of earlier examples. I am interested in “what can be said and what can be shown” (Chute and DeKoven 2006‚ 772) in nuclear science histories. As Candida Rifkind has suggested, nuclear history rendered in comics form has become an important cultural site linking science education, technology, the vagaries and challenges of historiography, and the intriguing position comics assume on the generic spectrum of history, biography, and autobiography (1–2). My discussion of representations of the Manhattan Project in comics, then, attempts to map out their largely anti-nuclear stance—their concern with the apocalyptic forces unleashed by this new knowledge—against a complex representational and historical background. This background includes the way many of these texts register the echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a post-9/11 context, as well as how they sometimes try to rectify or stabilize the uncertainties produced by their own efforts to narrate this story, in this way and through this medium, at this historical juncture. In this chapter, I examine the larger issue of the representation of nuclear technology through a reading of some of the comics to see how this type of text understands the ideological powers and potentialities of the text-image confluence and, thus, the very question of truth and objectivity.

Nuclear Initiators: Early Atomic Comics The earliest atomic comics engaged directly with the epistemological issues opened up by nuclear science. Between 1946 and 1947, for instance, Picture News, billing itself as “the first news magazine in action pictures, color and dialogue, in the history of the publishing business,” ran for just ten issues but rendered in comics format some of the most storied news items of the period, including the workings and implications of the newly disclosed power of the atom. The first issue of Picture News posed the question “Could science blow the world apart?” (Gavreau and Lehti 1946a [1], 3). One of the responses it provided, from no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw (drawn with a glowing aura), was that it could, “if we don’t watch out” (6). Shaw’s ambiguous answer, and the nuclear duality posed by images in this issue of Picture News juxtaposing apocalypse with world plenty and an energy Arcadia, set an early standard for thinking through the nuclear. Manhattan Project leader

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Robert Oppenheimer, often envisioned as a linchpin of this duality, appears in the second issue of Picture News and, I argue, helps instantiate a vision of how nuclear weapons would come to be imagined and how the story of the Manhattan Project would come to be represented in history.1 Picture News renders textually Oppenheimer’s position as mediator of this dual vision of nuclear energy: one text panel notes that “Dr. Oppenheimer is credited by the war dept. with harnessing the atom for military purposes” (Gavreau and Lehti 1946b [2], 8), while another panel points out that Oppenheimer argued for “a world organization, above national sovereignty, to control the atomic bomb” (9). Juxtaposing the militarization of the atom with a globalist vision of nuclear control functions as a key representational strategy in early depictions of the Manhattan Project narrative, its ambiguous science and technology, and its disjunctive legacy. Meanwhile, the accompanying visual representation of Oppenheimer depicts him, as is common in media and textual representations of scientists more generally, as a visionary: standing by himself, in front of a rapt audience, arms upstretched as he seemingly channels knowledge from the ethereal background (8) (see Fig. 33.1). Invoking Oppenheimer to frame the bomb in this dualist fashion, and to juxtapose his identity as scientist with his cultural role as oracle, is common in histories of the Manhattan Project and biographies of its scientists. That this prevailing representation owes something of its genesis to comic books ought to remind us of the entanglement of this form with one of the twentieth ­ century’s most important narratives: that of the development of nuclear weapons. As a burgeoning recent body of scholarship on comics has argued, the form is important not just because comic book collectors amass documents of

Fig. 33.1  Robert Oppenheimer in Picture News, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 8

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historical import but because comics themselves can function as documents about history.2 Moreover, the scientific knowledge at the core of the story of the atomic bomb—complex, often counterintuitive knowledge characterized by invisibility, instability, and probability—seems to lend itself well to a form in which the visible and the invisible, the visualizable and the unimaginable, are in constant dynamic tension. Very shortly after the momentous revelation of the existence of atomic power, the comics form inaugurated a long line of cultural products that attempt to grapple with this new knowledge. Comics and other forms of ­representation predicated on the visual, as Nina Mickwitz notes, ­“combine iconic and symbolic systems of signification” (Mickwitz 2016, 2) in their attempts to document. Despite their privileged status as visual depictions, though, comics have a complicated relationship with documentation, with accessing history “as it really was,” and with the knowledge that emerges from those notions. Like the issue of Picture News and its influential representation of Oppenheimer, nonfiction comics in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s attempted to explain atomic energy, often contributed to a utopian vision of this new technology, and frequently warned against apocalypse.3 “Educational” comic books from the 1940s and 1950s in this vein include serials such as Science Comics and True Comics, as well as single-issue accounts: Joe Musial’s Dagwood Splits the Atom, the famous 1949 synergistic endeavor between Blondie and the atomic energy industry; and The Atomic Age, a comprehensive survey in comic book format of atomic history up to 1960. These texts are all somewhat self-conscious about the ability comics have or might not have to represent scientific and historical knowledge. Dagwood Splits the Atom, for example, includes a foreword by General Leslie Groves, whose bravado about the truth perhaps masks the uncertainties of expressing them in comics form: “Truth comes from the understanding of facts. Truth comes from knowledge,” he affirms (Groves 1949, n.p.). At the same time, these comics are not reticent about cementing the atomic bomb into the foundation of “national defense,” “global responsibility,” and other jingoistic ideologies. While resistant readings of these comics are certainly possible, and ambiguities abound in these texts over the multiplicity of meanings borne by atomic bombs, they nevertheless help instantiate a claim for the visual apprehension of nuclear technology as a means of acquiring knowledge—a point of stability in a popular form for comprehending a mysterious technology with global implications.

What Powers (Nuclear) Comics? The convergence of text and image, so central to the comics form, bears some unpacking in order to see its implications for understanding the nuclear. There has, first, been much wrangling over the appropriate term for the form that practitioner and theorist Scott McCloud defines as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud 1993, 9).

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Once widely called “comics,” the form supposedly outgrew its mass, pulp roots and became more self-consciously aesthetic and political, growing into the moniker “graphic novel.”4 More recently, scholars such as Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven argue that that term has itself fallen out of favor, in large part because such texts are often not fictional. Chute and DeKoven prefer the term “graphic narrative” for its ability “to encompass a range of types of narrative work in comics” (Chute and DeKoven 2006, 767). When the question is one of narrative—of telling stories—as it is in the recounting of the Manhattan Project, the terms “graphic narrative” or “graphic history” seem appropriate. Importantly, though, a term like “graphic narrative” may itself be problematic in the way it privileges the literary or narrative character of comics over the visual, by turning the visual into a qualifier of the narrative.5 This form of storytelling is persistently (not incidentally) visual and insists upon the juxtaposition of the visual and the textual. For the most part, I use the word “comics” to foreground the richly, and often troublingly, hybrid nature of this kind of storytelling, though I will occasionally use the terms “graphic narrative” or “graphic history” when focusing primarily on the narrative components of these texts. Comics storytelling has no special claim over (or special deficiency in) telling history, but it might have a particular relationship to the history of nuclear weapons worth dwelling upon. As quickly became apparent after World War II, the atomic bomb was considerably more than a piece of military technology; it engendered new geopolitical arrangements, new ways of life, and new possibilities for death. The rapid proliferation of an omnicidal technology was no simple thing to understand, and it urged the rearrangement of social systems both to accommodate the new technology and to resist it. Comics, it is clear, often derive representational power from the disjuncture of, rather than the harmony between, text and image. Chute and DeKoven write: “In comics, the images are not illustrative of the text, but comprise a separate narrative thread that moves forward in time in a different way than the prose text” (ibid., 769). This distinction between parts of the form becomes a tool of critique for creators, an unexpected power that comes from some of the ways one form of representation can interrogate the other at the same time that they work together to tell a story. As McCloud notes, one characteristic of the form that allows it to pose such a challenge is the participatory opportunities granted by its visual layout on the page. The blank space between the images, the gaps McCloud and subsequent comics scholars have called “the gutter,” are powerful spaces. They constitute areas in the narrative where readers have to acknowledge an often unspecified duration of time and imaginatively fill in the gap between images. The gutter becomes just as important—though less stably marked—than the panels themselves, even though the gutters are in fact empty.6 To read across the gutters, then, becomes an act of constructing something from nothing—a type of reading especially congruent with what is often a central trope in accounts of atomic science or narratives of the

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Manhattan Project: the drawing of unfathomable power from invisible realms. Such a trope has affinities with some well-established models for representing nuclear physicists, models long used to characterize scientists in general, like the magician, the alchemist, or the priest. In Manhattan Project narratives, the scientists are often likened to mystical visionaries alongside their identities as logical-minded technicians and thus help characterize midcentury American science’s quest for knowledge as a penetrating but ultimately inscrutable process. The complex relationships between image and text and between visibility and invisibility are key in representations of nuclear science, and the uneasy relationship between words and images in comics often brings into question the Manhattan Project’s relationship to the privileged, visible/invisible knowledge of nuclear physics. What nuclear science can reveal and what it inevitably conceals as part of that revelation has helped enable the discourses and practices of secrecy shrouding atomic weapons programs and nuclear culture more generally. For the U.S. government, nuclear science reveals facets of nature that, as militarily exploitable, need to be concealed by the official mechanisms of secrecy. For U.S. Americans, those who as taxpayers fund nuclear weapons and those who as citizens benefit from or are menaced by those weapons, the doctrines of nuclear secrecy obviate to a significant degree those democratic values—freedom, openness, the notion of informed decision-making—ostensibly being “protected” by nuclear weapons. Such a highly conflicted pose, compelled in part by nuclear science’s competing ontologies of visibility and invisibility, is therefore at stake—in the background, perhaps, but part of “nuclear visibility” (O’Brian 2008, 128) nevertheless—in comics about nuclear history. When these texts generate what Jared Gardner calls “unregulated meanings” (Gardner 2012, 21), though, they do not simply rehearse or reinforce the (in)visibility of nuclear science and technology for their own purposes. They also help produce the kinds of “unregulated audiences” (ibid., 21)—or least some unregulated reading practices—that, collectively, embody the potential to challenge nuclear hegemony.

Ottaviani’s Fallout & Hickman and Pitarra’s Manhattan Projects In November of 2001, shortly after the events of 9/11, Jim Ottaviani and eight graphic artists published Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, a graphic history of the Manhattan Project strongly informed by the power of visual uncertainty. Reportedly inspired by Richard Rhodes’s monumental history The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Ottaviani linked his master’s degree in nuclear engineering and a long-standing interest in science to the work of several comics collaborators, including Janine Johnston, Bernie Mireault, and Jeff Parker. Fallout was part of the beginning of a long series of graphic histories from Ottaviani covering a wide range of scientific topics. The pictorial diversity of Fallout, imparted by the multiplicity of its artists, self-consciously renders the history of the Manhattan Project visually

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unstable. As each successive artist takes over from the one before, the settings, actors, and “set-pieces” that comprise the history of the Manhattan Project are reconstituted anew. The gutters between sections of the text and sometimes between frames on the page become opportunities for readers to create “new” scientists and “new” narrative events—new historical facticity—again and again. From this ongoing process of (re)construction emerges new visions of atomic science, of nuclear technology, and of the global implications of the Manhattan Project. Readers are offered not only varying perspectives on a historical narrative but a new way to think through the history of the second half of the twentieth century, up to and including 9/11. In visually compounding the ambiguity of the Manhattan Project narrative, Fallout also emphasizes the partial nature of the access to truth it can claim, its own status as a tool of narration, and its identity as a construction with a marked distance from the “reality” ostensibly promised by visual instantiations of knowledge. The challenge to the regime of realism proffered by Fallout works instead to undermine verisimilitude and stability as privileged preconditions for historical narrative. A resolutely “subjective” form such as comics, for all its purported triviality, defies the technocratic elitism of this kind of science. Likewise, the form’s insistence on readerly participation— in the suggestiveness of the gutters or the multiplicity of the graphic style—also challenges what nuclear scholar Peter Bacon Hales identifies as “the atomic sublime” (Hales 1991, passim). Hales later elaborated upon this notion by locating it within “Romantic traditions of visual pleasure [and] spectatordom” (Hales 2001, 108) and calling it “a passive consumer spectacle” (ibid., 103) central to the sanitization and legitimation of nuclear weapons. In its repeated insistence on readerly participation, nuclear history comics such as Fallout enact a productive loosening of the received historical narrative. They create a vital unmooring in the face of the potentially unmooring effect on history that the atomic bomb could have—the possibility that the bomb, like the uncanny echo of the first Ground Zero in events such as 9/11, could demolish history itself. Even when graphic narratives incorporate photographs—supposedly transparent windows into objective truth—they bring their own historiographic impulse into question through the excesses of photography, photography’s status as supplement within a textual narrative. The end-papers of Fallout, for instance, which frame the narrative with before-and-after photographs of the Trinity test site, perform a paradoxical function. The “objectivity” of these images establishes Fallout as a documentary narrative invested in provable historical truth even as the photos frame the “subjective” drawings used to depict the Manhattan Project and its scientists. Moreover, the end-papers are extreme close-ups of half-tone images, a “noisy” distortion that brings their documentary abilities into question (see Fig. 33.2). Rendering these images in this way underscores their status as mediated objects and thus posits a distance between reality and the supposedly transparent access to reality such images appear to promise. Readers may need to squint, or perhaps physically reorient the book further away, to see the images clearly—kinesthetic, bodily activities that complicate commonplace assumptions that producing or consuming knowledge, scientific

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Fig. 33.2  Trinity test site in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, end-papers

or otherwise, is only ever an intellectual activity. Such embodied reading practices again remind readers of the ambiguous nature of knowledge—the ways embodiment inserts uncertainty into the privileged category of “evidence”—as well as the material bodies at stake in nuclear technology development. Similarly, its rendering of Oppenheimer himself as a central figure in the narrative of the Manhattan Project allows Fallout to underscore the unpredictability of comics narrative itself. Near the end of the work, an account of Oppenheimer’s security hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission is rendered on pages often divided lengthwise into three columns. The first column features textual reproductions of the testimony of Lloyd Garrison, Oppenheimer’s legal representative, or the dissenting opinion of AEC member Ward Evans supporting Oppenheimer. The third column consists of the Board’s majority decision to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. The middle column often contains only small illustrations of Oppenheimer which place him at the center of forces that are by this historical point largely out of his control. Readers navigating these pages are thus confronted with the near simultaneous and often juxtaposed presentation of opposing views of Oppenheimer and, in the blank spaces on these pages, the place to reconstruct Oppenheimer in various and ever-shifting ways. Despite his central (and, in Fallout, explicitly centered) position in the Manhattan Project narrative, then, this representation of Oppenheimer points to the destabilization of nuclear

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knowledge through the very technique often thought to stabilize truth: the visual convergence of information. At the same time, Fallout contains a number of additional techniques that work to contain the text’s subversiveness, to guarantee its knowledge claims or mollify its eccentricities. Fallout features a disclaimer at the beginning, for instance, which tries to restabilize the text at the same time it points out the text’s instabilities: “Though not a work of history, this book isn’t entirely fiction either. We’ve fabricated some details in service of the story, but the characters said and did (most of) the things you’ll read. And as the notes and references will indicate, many of the quotes and incidents that you’ll think most likely to be made up are the best documented facts” (Ottaviani et al. 2001, 5). The references mentioned in the disclaimer—twenty-six two-column pages, set off at the end of the text and marked by dark borders—are clear indicators of the historical “liberties” the writers and artists have taken. Such a device reveals the text’s capacity to maintain the stabilities of binary categories such as “history” and “fiction” and, in the process, to contain the ambiguities of its own narrative. In the fraught immediacy of the post-9/11 publication date of Fallout, such containment strategies can be comforting. At the same time, “the more apparatus manufactured to guide the reader through the narrative,” as Jared Gardner notes, “the more visible and troubling become the gaps between the panels, the narratives, the words, and the images” (Gardner 2012, 168). This tension between resolving and unsettling makes Fallout a multivalent example indeed of the comics form as purveyor of nuclear knowledge. Even some contemporary atomic comics with little interest in historical verisimilitude are still invested in stabilizing the multivalent meanings of the Manhattan Project narrative. Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra’s The Manhattan Projects (2012, ongoing), for example, takes as its premise the possibility of imagining history in completely different ways and offers a thoroughgoing revision of the Manhattan Project. In addition to its radically revised historical narrative, its apparently open-ended seriality also disrupts the sense of closure mandated by conventional narrative. Yet The Manhattan Projects also works to alleviate the troublingly ambiguous origins of the atomic bomb. In the first volume of the series, Hickman and Pitarra introduce readers to Robert Oppenheimer’s fictional evil twin. From their time together in the womb, Joseph Oppenheimer contrasts his brother Robert’s intelligence and humanity with eccentricity, psychosis, and eventually, full-blown evil. After Robert is tapped by the U.S. government for the top-secret war project, Joseph escapes from his lunatic asylum, murders his brother, consumes his body, and takes his place as the leader of the Manhattan Project. Hickman and Pitarra clearly delineate between the Oppenheimers in this narrative, using mostly blue ink to draw Robert and red ink for Joseph. In maintaining a clear separation between the brothers, the technique reiterates the duality of the figure of the scientist while also simplifying the origins of nuclear technology. Depicting the bomb as a product of the purely evil side of the scientist assuages the

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complexities that so often mark representations of the Manhattan Project and its legacy.7 The origins of nuclear weapons are “explained” as the product of pure evil. Though highly unconventional in its dealing with nuclear history, The Manhattan Projects nevertheless demonstrates the desire, rooted in the process of constructing historical narratives, to resolve ambiguities and arrive at truth. However, in a historical narrative about the development of nuclear weapons— with their profoundly troubling origins and the threats they pose to ontological categories when they threaten human existence—such impulses risk dropping readers back into the atomic sublime. The bomb becomes, in such iterations, a powerful but reassuringly comprehensible and scrutable technology.

Fetter-Form’s Trinity & Elias and Wild’s Atomic Dreams By contrast, a more conventional history—Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012)—does not overtly acknowledge the possibility that the comics form could complicate the ­ work’s status as anything other than a transparent account of history. Even small details, such as its typewritten rather than hand-lettered narrative balloons and panels, evoke an apparently more “objective” 1940s bureaucratic aesthetic consistent with the text’s striving for historical verisimilitude about a World War II governmental project. Despite its robust insistence on its status as a straightforward historical account (which happens to be in graphic form), Trinity nevertheless appears over a decade after Ottaviani’s narrative, an interval marked by a frustratingly intractable “War on Terror” and an evolving self-consciousness about constructing historical narratives.8 Emerging partly out of this self-consciousness and partly out of the kinds of long-standing tropes inaugurated by Picture News, Trinity reinforces popular conceptions of Manhattan Project scientists as “visionaries” and the nuclear knowledge they produce as the product of mystical revelation. The cover of Trinity, for instance, includes a close-up image of Robert Oppenheimer’s eyes and a mushroom cloud above them. As a “seer” rather than a scientist, then, he can virtually imagine the bomb into existence. Trinity sustains the figure of the scientist as mystic throughout the text, depicting Oppenheimer at one point, for instance, shrouded in cigarette smoke that curls up the page and becomes a cloud upon which are projected mythological figures. Shadowed, murkily drawn, and often partially obscured, Oppenheimer as represented in Trinity is perhaps best encapsulated by Fetter-Form’s head-and-shoulders drawing of the physicist with a caption reading: “What this bomb needed was a visionary” (21). Whether mystical, visionary, or merely enigmatic, one of the central historical figures of the Manhattan Project nevertheless stands alongside Fetter-Vorm’s detailed images of the material feats of engineering— the precisely drawn wiring surrounding the test device, the numerous perspectives on the metal tower rising above the desert floor and holding the bomb aloft—to create a sometimes surprising juxtaposition with the abstraction and invisibility at the core of the concept of the atomic bomb.

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As its title suggests, Trinity is narratively oriented around the first bomb test, yet the centrality of that historical moment nevertheless reveals the interplay between how nuclear science and technology reveal and conceal at the same time. Before the bomb’s detonation, Fetter-Vorm supplies a countdown as the arrangement of panels on the page provides progressively closer images of Oppenheimer’s tense face. At zero-hour, the frame contains only Oppenheimer’s pupil, its roundness echoing the number zero spelled out in

Fig. 33.3  Countdown, Trinity, p. 69

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the panel’s caption, and thus apprehends his visionary powers at their zenith (Fetter-Vorm 2012, 69) (see Fig. 33.3) The reader then turns the page to see a two-page splash of a schematic—minutely detailed yet ultimately imaginary—of the inside of the bomb at the moment of detonation (ibid., 70–71) (see Fig. 33.4). This image provides what Peter Bacon Hales might call the “magical entry into the subatomic universe” (Hales 2001, 109). It lays scientific knowledge and magic side by side. In the gaps between panels and pages that construct this part of the narrative, this moment in Trinity makes visible the esoteric knowledge of nuclear physicists, but it does so by reinforcing their identity as visionaries. Furthermore, the imaginary nature of the two-page optical technology—the fact that “[d]iagrams are not the real thing” (Rifkin 2015, 17)—ultimately precludes the access to “pure” scientific knowledge that diagrams often implicitly promise. The six pages following the diagram of the radioactive core depict the subsequent detonation using almost entirely black pages with small, surreal drawings of the initial milliseconds of the world’s first mushroom cloud. In their inscrutability, these images obliterate the detailed scientific knowledge represented by the schematic and immediately replace it with the uncertainty and unknowability of the postatomic world (Fetter-Vorm 2012, 72–75) (see Fig. 33.5). Despite the resemblance of the initial milliseconds of the first mushroom cloud to an eye in the process of opening, despite the insistent visuality of this new realm of knowledge, the knowledge produced

Fig. 33.4  Atomic bomb detonation in Trinity, pp. 70–71

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Fig. 33.5  Milliseconds into the first atomic detonation, Trinity, pp. 72–73

by this new portal is surreal, enigmatic, and as depicted in the pages of this graphic history, largely unreadable. It offers, as Rifkind argues, “competing systems of knowledge production and communication” (Rifkin 2015, 19). As such, Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity functions as an example of a contemporary form deeply interested in the problems and limits of representing scientific knowledge in the nuclear age. A slightly different approach, one which combines Fetter-Vorm’s strivings for historical verisimilitude with the more imaginative flights of fancy of Hickman and Pitarra, might provide another way to explore the uncertainties underpinning the science and history of the atomic bomb: Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild’s Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2009). Elias and Wild use a demon motif throughout the text to signal plainly the evilness of the bomb, but the motif appears alongside concrete markers of historical authenticity. The moment of the Trinity test, for instance, depicts a gruesome demon appearing to rend the fabric of space and time, but Elias and Wild juxtapose this fanciful image with the precise date, time, and place of the first atomic bomb test, offset in an authoritative colored text box (Fig. 33.6) This contrast suggests some of the ontological difficulties and moral dilemmas the bomb raises within the context of history. Similarly, when the Enola Gay lifts off from Tinian Island on August 6, 1945, the demon motif appears and shadows the plane as it brings its deadly cargo to Hiroshima. Atomic Dreams uses this technique to interpose into

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Fig. 33.6  Prior to the Trinity test, Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, n.p. Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild, co-creators, David Miller and Rudy Vasquez, artists

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its 1945 narrative a grim assessment of the fuller implications of the atomic bomb, implications that only became apparent in the decades since the historical event depicted. The figure of the demon—evil incarnate—of course can be said to simplify the moral complexity of the bomb into a single, uncomplicated image, one that like Ottaviani’s textual apparatuses, stabilizes history’s multiplicities. At the same time, however, the technique is itself textually unstable. The contiguity of panels on the page encourages a mythological interpretive structure for thinking about a historical event and its long-term geopolitical repercussions. It defies the linear logic of conventional historiography and works, as comics do, to “create suggestive but subliminal connections which need not correspond to the linear logic of the narrative sequence” (Witek 1989, 28). Like many other examples of graphic histories, Atomic Dreams is a collaborative work, which also helps reveal complexities in the historiographic process—its imbrication in the consensual and the communal. In its challenges to conventional historiographic authority, it reminds readers of the narrative construction of “objective” history. Fanciful as these images may be, they connote historical precision at the same time that they foreground the imaginative and interpretive acts readers perform as they try to make sense of atomic science and history.

Conclusions The problem of representing scientific knowledge in the nuclear age resonates with the visual characteristics of the comics form. The visuality of science comics seems to invoke the purportedly greater objectivity of visual forms such as photography, but comics are resolutely, insistently hand-drawn. Moreover, as Mickwitz notes, “The foregrounding of subjectivity and the disruption of certainty [the comics form] introduces have increasingly become a point of interest, rather than figured as a problem to overcome in thinking around documentary” (Mickwitz 2016, 25)—and, I would add, history. At stake, as always, is Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges” (qtd. ibid., 26). The self-consciously subjective nature of hand-drawn images, as well as their refusal of “an indexical relationship to the referent” (Woo 2010, 175) while maintaining an indexical relationship to the person who drew the picture, grant comics a certain power: that of challenging received historical narrative, transcendent truth, and other products of the potentially problematic cultural investment in objectivity. They also challenge the privileged position of prose text by putting hand-drawn images forward as similarly capable of “re-presenting” reality.9 Comics make the constructedness of scientific narrative visible. As Hillary Chute notes, “Comics openly eschews any aesthetic of transparency; it is a conspicuously artificial form” (Chute 2016, 17). Comics frequently “preempt essentialist notions of both truth and transparency” (Mickwitz 2016, 26), so in their opacity, in their interstitial generic status, they function as a kind of “public history,” a more participatory historiography.

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And as Chute has repeatedly argued, comics also make obvious the bodily materiality of their creators—an ability that, in atomic comics, reminds readers of the physical, individual corporeality at stake in nuclear weapons but often obscured by the abstraction of nuclear physics or the hypotheticals of war games. “Comics works are literally manuscripts,” writes Chute. “[T]hey are written by hand” (Chute 2011, 112). A comics work is distinctive for “the sensual practice it embeds” (Chute 2016, 4), the aesthetic it uses to foreground the body of the artist. The splash pages in works like Fallout and Trinity in part reproduce the spectacularity of atomic explosions and are thus at least partly complicit in the same kinds of distancing effects as those of, say, the mechanical technology of photography. But as sequential art—a form in which gaps between images encourage different kinds of active participation on the part of readers and thus different forms of memorialization—they articulate a presence that helps “give shape to lost histories and bodies” (Chute 2016, 38).10 Comics about the Manhattan Project— as in the final pages of Trinity—deploy their embodiment, their corporeal tissue or parenchyma, to overcome some of that distance and to make visceral the knowledge of atomic war (see Fig. 33.7). Such images of bodily suffering, contrasted as they are in Trinity with the nothingness of historical obliteration, are another way of entering the atomic bomb into the visual record. This kind of encounter with history shows at least some semblance of commemoration, of trying to put things right. Like the dialectic between

Fig. 33.7  Hiroshima bombing, Trinity, pp. 126–127

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remembering and forgetting at the center of memory itself, these images enact a dialectic between the horrors of some future nuclear war—for now, thankfully, still imaginary—and the hope of peace. Acknowledgements   My sincere thanks to Susan Gaines of the Fiction Meets Science research group, who organized an outstanding meeting—Narrating Science: The Power of Stories in the twenty-first Century—in Toronto in 2017. The participants at that meeting, including Catherine Bush, David K. Hecht, David A Kirby, and Joanna Radin, were a delight to hear from and talk to. Special thanks to Priscilla Wald, a formative intellectual influence for me, who also turned out to be an ideal conference participant and one of the kindest, most generous academics I have ever met.

Notes









1. This chapter represents an elaboration on and development of a brief discussion of comics in my book, The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 2. For some of this scholarship on the documentary and historiographic capacities of comics, see Adams; Baetens and Frey; Chapman, Ellin, and Sherif; Chute, Disaster Drawn; Duncan, Smith, and Levitz; Goggin and Hassler-Forest (2010); Mickwitz; Petersen; Pustz; Szasz; Towle; Weber and Rall; Witek. In addition, much of the scholarly work on Art Spiegelman’s well-known Maus (1980) addresses in some form the relationship of comics to history. 3.  This body of nonfiction comics is, of course, in addition to and often in distinction from fictional comics—usually superhero stories—about the atomic bomb. From Donald Duck building an atom bomb in the late 1940s to Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk thanks to a gamma radiation bomb and Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man after a bite from a radioactive spider in the 1960s, these tales entered popular culture with a vengeance. For the most part, I examine nonfictional comics here because of nonfiction’s privileged (though problematic) claims to historical veracity, positivist truth, and transparent access to knowledge. 4. Histories of the comics form are numerous and extensive; for a concise summary, see Beaty, 107–108. 5. For an elaboration on this interpretive risk, see Labio 2011, 125–126. 6. See Peeters (2007) for an elaboration on the representational power of the page’s spatial orientation. 7. The mad Joseph Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project cronies go on to even greater depths of depravity in subsequent entries in the series, conducting a human–alien hybrid project, assassinating John F. Kennedy, and initiating Project Charon—an endeavor aiming for no less than universal omnipotence. 8. Much has been said in the nearly two decades since 9/11 about how the events of that day have affected cultural senses of history—how historiography works, what history is, and so on. One example of such a conversation can be found in a special issue of the Organization of American Historians’ Magazine of History (Volume 25, Issue 3, July 2011), edited by Carl R. Weinberg 2011. 9. For an especially convincing discussion of this capacity of comics, see Chute and DeKoven, “Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” p. 190. 10. The phrase “sequential art” is usually attributed to Eisner (1985).

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References Adams, Jeff. 2008. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Banco, Lindsey. 2016. The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Beaty, Bart. 2011. Introduction. Cinema Journal 50: 106–110. Chapman, Jane L., Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif. 2015. Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chute, Hillary. 2011. Comics Form and Narrating Lives. Profession 11: 107–117. ———. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. Introduction: Graphic Narrative. Modern Fiction Studies 52: 767–782. ———. 2012. Comic Books and Graphic Novels. In The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, ed. David Glover and Scott McCracken, 175–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz. 2009. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York, NY: Continuum. Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. Elias, Jonathan and Jazan Wild. 2009. Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Encino, CA: Carnival Comics. Fetter-Vorm, Jonathan. 2012. Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gavreau, Emile, and John A. Lehti. 1946a. Picture News, vol. 1, iss. 1‚ 1st ed. Bridgeport, CT: 299 Lafayette Street Corporation. ———. 1946b. Picture News, vol. 1, iss. 2, 1st ed. Bridgeport, CT: 299 Lafayette Street Corporation. Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest (eds.). 2010. The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Groves, Leslie. 1949. Original Statement by Gen. Groves. In Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom, ed. Joe Musial. New York, NY: King Features Syndicate. Hales, Peter Bacon. 1991. The Atomic Sublime. American Studies 32: 5–31. ———. 2001. Imagining the Atomic Age: Life and the Atom. In Looking at Life, ed. Erika Doss, 103–119. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hickman, Jonathan, and Nick Pitarra. 2012. The Manhattan Projects. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics. Labio, Catherine. 2011. What’s in a Name? The Academic Study of Comics and the Graphic Novel. Cinema Journal 50: 123–126. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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O’Brian, John. 2008. Editing Armageddon. In Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Elizabeth Legge, and Catherine M. Soussloff, 127–152. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Ottaviani, Jim, Janine Johnston, Steve Lieber, Vince Locke, Bernie Mireault, and Jeff Parker. 2001. Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs. Peeters, Benoit. 2007. Four Conceptions of the Page, trans. Jesse Cohn. ImageTexT 3. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_3/peeters. Accessed 12 Apr 2019. Petersen, Robert S. 2011. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narrative. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Pustz, Matthew (ed.). 2012. Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology. New York, NY: Continuum. Rhodes, Richard. 1986. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Rifkin, Candida. 2015. The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography. Biography 38: 1–22. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. 2012. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World. Reno, NV and Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press. Towle, Benjamin F. 2003. An Examination of Historiography in the Comics Medium. International Journal of Comic Art 5: 262–80. Weber, Wibke, and Hans-Martin Rall. 2017. Authenticity in Comics Journalism: Visual Strategies for Reporting Fact. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8: 376–397. Weinberg, Carl R. (ed.). 2011. Magazine of History (September 11: Ten Years After) 25: 3–56. Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Woo, Benjamin. 2010. Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine. In The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic literature: Critical Essays on the Form, ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest, 166–177. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

CHAPTER 34

“The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis Lorenzo Servitje

In a 2017 interview, documentary filmmaker Sarah Kenney reflects on Surgeon X (2016), a comics series that narrates a dystopian future transformed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which she began in 2014 collaborating with renowned comic artist John Watkiss: “You always want to create an extreme story world. You want it to be somewhere that has a bit of bite to it, if you like. So seeing the ripples of the far-right across Europe, ­bringing that in, and then reading a lot about the antibiotic crisis, bringing all those elements together, I thought I was creating an extreme world.” Post-Trump, post-Brexit, Kenney reevaluates the degree to which our contemporary moment has shifted with respect to her narrative’s presentation of a world in extremis—“Now it doesn’t seem quite as extreme as it did two years ago, which is quite an incredible thing” (Holub 2017). Kenney’s comments reflect two important elements of Surgeon X’s cultural work: the entanglements of politics and microbiology; and, a critique of the problematic present through the lens of the not-so-distant future. While there are many recognizable motifs of science fiction (sf) in the text, Surgeon X is an especially unsettling case of a reality that is, as so many articles in the news media put it, “no longer science fiction.”1 Indeed, Surgeon X’s representation of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) reflects a present that is already profoundly science fictional (Csicsery-Ronay 1992, 29). Who is afraid of AMR? According to surveys investigating lay perceptions and understanding of the phenomenon, not nearly enough of the public is L. Servitje (*)  Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_34

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(WHO 2015; Wellcome Trust 2018) which certainly contributes to the lack of change despite dire predictions from health experts for decades. By some estimates, it is expected to kill more than 10 million people by 2050 (de Kraker et al. 2016). In response to this growing threat, there has been an increasing appearance of science fictional language and imagery describing the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” Surgeon X belongs to a group of British projects, funded by organizations such as National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) and the Wellcome Trust, that have fictionalized this phenomenon in the interest of informing the public (Wellcome Trust 2018). The series, however, does much more than inform the public about a real threat; it goes beyond a kind of fear-mongering rhetoric that some policymakers and medical professionals have criticized as counterproductive (Nerlich 2009, 585). Instead, Surgeon X outlines the real, present social entanglements of the antibiotic apocalypse’s “science fictional” qualities in a juxtaposition of image and text. In other words, it graphically estranges our own antibiotic moment. The comic takes place in England, 2036. Kenney and Watkiss build an uncanny post-antibiotic world: where antibiotics are in short supply and barely function at all. In response, the government has taken to extreme measures: rationing antibiotics based on PCI (“Productivity Contribution Index”) scores, a quantification of a person’s utility to society, which leaves many already marginalized individuals—the foreign, the poor, the disabled, and the elderly—even more vulnerable to death and disease. A collective, aptly named “The Resurgence,” forms to protest and challenge the bio-governmental austerity measures. This results in terrorist bombings, and an increase in divisive conservative and nationalist reactions. The story revolves around Rosa Scott, a brilliant young surgeon who becomes the vigilante “Surgeon X” to treat those who have been denied treatment. As she does so, she increasingly compromises ethical boundaries, becoming the kind of arbiter of life and death that she is reacting against. While AMR is a biomedical reality, there are plenty of qualities that make it seem “like science fiction”: it is an unintended consequence of technoscientific innovation; and, it has the potential to radically change the anthropocentric world as we know it. AMR characterizes microbes’ ability to develop measures to resist antimicrobial treatment through evolution. As a result of the overuse of antibiotics since the mid-twentieth century, bacteria have developed evolutionary mechanisms that give them resistance to the very drugs used to treat them, from first generation antibiotics like penicillin to “last resort drugs” like vancomycin. To compound this evolutionary response, the pipeline of antibiotic production has for the most part run dry: because of economic, technological, and non-renewable limitations—there have been no new antibiotic classes for over three decades. AMR’s consequences do not end with antibiotics’ direct use (treating infections); AMR unravels the antibiotic infrastructure that has allowed for so much innovation in treatment and care on which so much contemporary health and

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longevity depends: chemotherapy, surgery, immunosuppression, to name a few. Consequently, AMR has and will continue to alter social relations and their governance, for instance, dramatically exacerbating social determinants of health that privilege the West and the wealthy. This becomes a pressing issue in the world of the comic where the poor, disabled, and the foreign are further marginalized, even more so under the auspices of government intervention seeking to curtail the diminishing efficacy of the remaining and new antibiotics. In bringing these medical consequences and their expansion into the social to light, Surgeon X draws our attention not only to the problem itself but reveals also how the interdisciplinary study of literature and science can expand our limited and delayed understanding of AMR. Kenney and Watkiss’s comic series is a particularly striking example of an intersection of science and literature, a convergence that can often be reductively circumscribed to a future-oriented reading, providing “what if” scenarios. However, as Istvan Csiscery-Ronay has suggested in his theorization of “science fictionality,” sf can function as a theoretical mode, a form of cognitive estrangement that provides critical distance from the present to rethink its social and technoscientific structures (2008, 2). Science fictionality describes the dialectical relationships between real-world technoscientific change and fictional representations that extrapolate and speculate on that change. As a critical method, then, science fictionality is an awareness of the ways in which science and technology are constantly altering our contemporary culture—a process that is reflected in and informed by sf texts and media. The choice of medium affords Kenney and Watkiss unique opportunities to reflect on AMR’s science fictionality. Kenney suggests that the work “is not prescriptive…The comic book format pares the story down to the minimum, encouraging the reader to imagine the story’s universe and its implications” (Mckenna 2016). Insofar as comics are structured by the gaps between panels, the “gutters” that readers must imaginatively fill in, through their spatialization and the juxtaposition of image and text they can spur more critical, speculative reading engagements, where the reader imagines what happens in between panels. Panels and their layout lend themselves to pausing and reflecting on a specific scene, a face, or the very arrangement of panels rather than just moving to the next narrative event. In these capacities, the combination of image and text encourages working through imaginative conflicts, resolutions, and reflections. As such, it is important to understand Surgeon X as a work of graphic medicine. Defined as the intersection of comics and medical discourse, graphic medicine serves a number of disruptive aims: challenging the assumption of techno-medical progress; putting into question medical objectivity to explore the various ways illness and medicine can be represented; and, contesting the power imbalances at work in medicine (Czerwiec et al. 2015, 2–3, 20). Rather than giving the reader a prescription on how to solve the AMR crisis, Surgeon X presents the raw matter of the post-antibiotic world in a visual way that forces readers to rethink present assumptions about biomedicine in politically, ethically, and socially just ways.

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This chapter deploys an interdisciplinary approach, engaging with current work in graphic medicine, medical sociology, and critical theory to parse how Surgeon X brings into sharp relief these complexities of the AMR crisis. I begin by showing how the comic capitalizes on its medium to reflect on AMR’s massive scale: temporally, as it collapses the spectrum of the past, present, and future; and, spatially, as the comic complicates the relationship between the individual and the collective. I follow by suggesting that this reading of Surgeon X’s play on scale provides a unique perspective on the social determinants of the present ecologies of AMR. Specifically, the comic makes use of cognitive estrangement to draw attention to the biopolitical structures at play in the UK’s fiscal austerity measures and nationalist politics that “make live and let die” (Foucault 2003) by shaping social determinants of health.2 This chapter concludes by addressing how the series’ perspective enables a more nuanced understanding of AMR that accounts for both national specificities and, on a broader scale, the need to reconceptualize the anthropocentric and bellicose way of thinking about microbes in our medicalized culture.

The Spatial and Temporal Scales of AMR While historians of science and STS scholars have challenged the naturalized teleological narratives of technoscientific progress for some time, Surgeon X works with fiction to demythologize the fallacious assumption that science “always finds a way.” Specific to AMR, the text reframes the relationship between biomedical and social developments, namely, where technological innovation fosters its own regression, leading to a recursive process that expands outward to breakdown what we have come to characterize as modern civil social order. Surgeon X brings the past into the future in three unique ways: overlaying the history of antibiotic development into the narrative’s present to address the massive scale of AMR; thematically and iconographically using medical anachronisms such as pre-antibiotic standards of care along with fashioning Rosa along an axis of “heroic medicine”; and, foregrounding the comingling of seemingly older forms of governmental power with modern neoliberal logics of self-governance and administering life at the level of population. The comic educates readers about AMR in the first introduction to Dr. Martha Scott, microbiologist and sister to the main protagonist, Rosa. In a three-page section depicting a lecture given by Martha, she details the relationship between the past, present, and future of AMR (Fig. 34.1). The first panel presents the scene from an audience member’s perspective, where Martha addresses both the future fictional AMR crises and the correlative one proximate to the reader’s contemporary moment: “back in the year 2016—700,000 people a year died from antibiotic resistance infections—now it’s nine million a year” (Kenney and Watkiss 2017, ch. 1).3 Martha’s 2016 figure stems from an oft-cited yet still-contested projection originating from the UK Review of Antimicrobial Resistance (O’Neill 2014).4 In her narrative

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Fig. 34.1  Chapter 1

present, Martha extrapolates the 2014 statistics into 2036. Her closing comment on the page acknowledges that while bacterial resistance is an evolutionary certainty, the “indiscriminate use of antibiotics” accelerated this natural process (ch. 1). The pedagogical setting of the lecture reflects the scene’s purpose: it concisely teaches the reader the basics of AMR, while capitalizing on the comic form to overcome common roadblocks in antibiotic awareness. Here, the comic effectively charges the large mortality figures by scaling them down to the level of an individual human life. The page, in another panel, uses Martha’s face and body at different distances to highlight a problem and possible solution to AMR awareness. The use of the face and body is in line with many works of graphic medicine that uniquely present individual experiences of illness versus the biological signs of disease through embodiment in a juxtaposition of text and image and “expressive anatomy” (Squier 2008, 49; Venkatesan and Saji 2016, 226). Susan Squier suggests that “[in] their attention to human embodiment, and their combination of both words and

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gestures, comics can reveal unvoiced relationships, unarticulated emotions, unspoken possibilities, and even unacknowledged alternative perspectives” (Squier 2008, 130). Figures like “9 Million Dead,” while frightening and spectacular, can carry little rhetorical value—often interpreted as exaggerations, ignored by virtue of the lack of concreteness of statistical abstraction, or perceived as too massive of a problem to tackle (Wellcome Trust 2015, 36). The abstract illustration of Martha in Fig. 34.1—her lack of individual defining qualities—reflects the lack of individual specificity and personal connection people often feel when confronted with catastrophic statistics related to problems like AMR or climate change. It is easy to count her in with nine million dead without giving it much thought. This tendency contributes to a tenet of the dilemma: being a textbook case of a tragedy of the commons, the more people contribute to AMR and the further away the consequences are, the lower the perceived personal risk and connection to the problem.5 So aptly allegorizing this problem of abstraction, Victorian novelist George Eliot writes that in order to empathize, we must feel injury “as a maimed boy feels the crushed limb which for others is merely reckoned in an average of accidents” (2003, 170). The arrangement of panels addresses this issue by visually opposing any inclination to merely reckon an average of infections. The panel that follows below and to the right of Fig. 34.1 frames a close-up of Martha’s emotive face providing visceral grounding to contrast the numerical abstraction of morbidity and mortality statistics (Fig. 34.2). Martha’s face grounds the reader back in the corporeal reality, a visual motif that recurs throughout the comic, such as when Rosa informs a homeless man that they had to amputate his leg to stop the spread of infection (Fig. 34.3); or in the case of Maddie, the young working-class overweight girl, who doesn’t qualify for antibiotics after suffering internal injuries from a terrorist bombing (Figs. 34.4 and 34.5). To grasp the temporal scale of AMR’s history, Kenney and Watkiss visualize Martha’s lecture in a dynamic representation of time. As comics represent time spatially, they can at once present time synchronically (as a whole, all at once) and diachronically (sequentially) (Squier 2015, 46). The panels in the two-page sequence mark notable moments and representative samples of the massive scale and complexity of AMR (Fig. 34.6). In the visualization of Martha’s talk, she invites her audience to “travel back in time” in the first panel, directing readers’ attention to a panel set in London 1928, citing (another) statistic: “No antibiotics, and 43% of all deaths are due to infections” (ch. 1). While the panel is set in the early twentieth century, it is notable that Martha speaks in the present tense, imbuing the past into the narrative’s present. The use of verb tense here reflects the comic medium’s play on synchronic and diachronic time, evident in the arrangement of panels from different time periods. Readers at once see the linear history of antibiotics, from decade to decade, panel to panel, left to right, but also the

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Fig. 34.2  Chapter 1

whole of AMR as a phenomenon that re-arranges temporal registers of the medico-scientific past, present, and future (Fig. 34.6). The top half of the two-page sequence details the first half of the twentieth century. The reference to Fleming’s discovery marks a shift into the pharmacological era, but the reader’s attention is drawn to the right-hand panel through its expanded panel dimensions and its vivid display of battle during the Second World War using high contrast color, when compared with the more muted panels and diffused image of a petri dish in the background, underneath the panels. This emphasis on the war marks this moment as both an industrial and epistemological point of inflection in the antibiotic era. The war was instrumental in creating the conditions for the United States to mine for antibiotic-producing organisms in the soil around the world and produce antibiotics at an industrial scale (Landecker 2015, 4). Antibiotics became an essential weapon of material and metaphorical war. Penicillin was made available to the public in 1945, and during that time it was depicted in news media and war propaganda as a savior of combat injuries, but it was equally if not more effective in maintaining the vitality of military manpower through the

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treatment of venereal disease. Attendant with the industrialization of antibiotics during wartime was the rapid acceleration and circulation of the metaphorical militarization of medicine. While this metaphor emerges in the nineteenth century, during the mid-twentieth century, it becomes attached to wartime propaganda, nationalism, and the emerging “golden age of medicine.” The sequence suggests that this movement toward antibiosis, an antagonistic relationship between organisms, subtended by the militaristic logic of metaphorizing medicine as war was central to the overuse of antibiotics since their inception (Servitje 2019, 316–37). The sequence continues with a second row of panels, representing the recent past of the comic’s world while indexing the contemporary era of the comic’s production. The leftmost panel indicts the agriculture and livestock industry for its use of antibiotics as growth-promoting agents. While Surgeon X’s purview lies within the medical rather than veterinary use of AMR, the

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Fig. 34.4  Chapter 1

Fig. 34.5  Chapter 2

panel is an important reference. Most recent research suggests that the use of antibiotics use for livestock is one of the most significant contributing factors in AMR, as veterinary medicine accounts for the vast majority of antibiotics produced in the United States (Economou and Gousia 2015, 257). The panel is offset a few degrees which replicates the “Dutch angle” commonly used in film to evoke unease, tension, or disorientation. This uneasy effect emphasizes two unsettling two moments in time referenced within the panel: 2010, when antibiotic use and AMR were rampant in medicine and

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Fig. 34.6  Chapter 2

agriculture and husbandry; and 1987, the last year in which a new class of antibiotic was discovered—a frequently cited fact in biomedical and news media publications discussing AMR.6 Tying together the temporalities between the top and bottom rows’ seven panels marking significant moments in AMR’s history lie two text boxes that interrupt the diachronic flow and synchronic arrangement of time from the early to mid-twentieth century in the top row, to the post-2000 era in the bottom row. The box on the left asserts that antibiotics were (are) the fundamental infrastructure of medical practice—they allow for so many treatments and procedures. The box on the right emphatically marks antibiotic development as a climactic moment in contemporary human history. Indeed, the 1950s are often marked as the moment when humankind left the “dark ages of medicine” behind (Brown and Nettleton 2017, 9–10). The diction in both interjecting text boxes sutures AMR’s temporal and spatial dimensions. “Antibiotics became the bedrock of modern medicine…” on the left at once denotes a foundation and infrastructure, while also connoting the distant geological past, which solidifies the themes of social and medical regression. In the right-hand box, “It changed our world” signals AMR’s spatial dimension; namely, how AMR is a global problem, in terms of the ubiquity

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of bacteria and antibiotics, along with being “without borders.” Notably, the second panel from the right on the bottom row references the particular challenges of AMR in the developing world—where antibiotics can be purchased without prescriptions, “like candy” as the text and image suggest. The way AMR develops globally is a resonant theme in the series with its recurrent references to immigration anxieties and black-market trade of pharmaceuticals in the developing world. Taken together, the text boxes’ associative meanings (“bedrock” and “changing the world”) coupled with the layering of the two-page spread’s figure (the paneled period vignettes) and the background (the petri dish) can be best understood as what Hannah Landecker calls the “biology of history”: how events from human history have materialized biological processes, events, and ecologies (2015, 3). The circular stage on which Martha presents her lecture, from the previous page, graphically matches the petri dish in the background, drawing attention to the continuance of her history lesson into both the diegetic present (2036) and the date of the comic’s production (2016). The panels detailing human history—inscribed over and upon the bacterial culture—visually narrate this “double movement,” where AMR at once has a natural history and is itself a biology of history. Landecker explains that with respect to antibiotics “the biology of history ruptures the assumed divisions between human (politics, culture, science), and natural (evolution, geology, ecology) history” (4–5). That is, the history of industrializing bacterial metabolisms and antibiotic production is materially inscribed within the bacterial resistome, the broad collection of antibiotic resistance genes in both pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, which in turn has become the object of study. In the history of science, it is a common assertion that “‘We used to think… but now we know’—we used to think a certain way and then our ideas changed as more became known” (4–5). Resonant with the sf genre and Surgeon X’s seemingly simplistic claim that antibiotics “changed the world,” in the case of AMR, Landecker contends, “we might rather say: ‘We used to think a certain way about antibiosis and pathogens. And then we changed the future.’ What we thought we knew became the biology under study: the solution has become the problem” (4–5).7 To clarify this idea further, Timothy Morton provides an aesthetic to describe this double movement as processual form (“looping”) and conceptual object (“hyperobjects”). Hyperobjects are objects that are so massively distributed in time and space that we cannot experience them immediately or in one locality, climate change being the most obvious example (Morton 2014, 1). The incomprehensibility of AMR’s scale contributes to the difficulty in mobilizing unified action to mitigate its effects and conceptualize a new paradigm for the relationship between humans and microbes, something other than a perpetual war. We can think of AMR as a hyperobject because bacteria share resistance genes through mechanisms like horizontal gene transfer where genes are passed across or within the same generation,

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traversing both pathogenic and non-pathogenic species, making up the vast reservoir of the bacterial resistome. As a biological domain, bacteria make up the second largest biomass on earth.8 Further, because of the ubiquity of antibiotics in agriculture, soil, water sources, people, and an inconceivable number of consumer products,9 they materialize humanity’s fatal entanglements with the mutated ecologies of its own creation. Similar to, albeit more gradual than, the catastrophic interconnectedness of Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle (1963),10 bacteria are linked, and we are linked to them. Understanding AMR as a hyperobject provides a way of interpreting antibiotic ubiquity and the science fictional quality of its temporal “weirdness.” Morton’s line of inquiry follows the juxtaposition Surgeon X poses in terms of the scalar and recursive tensions in AMR as a biology of history. This is not to say that the resistome merely reflects overuse of antibiotics since the mid-twentieth century. Antibiotics have existed in the soil as a competitive and communicative mechanism between bacteria long before human appropriation (Landecker 2015, 18–22). Morton speaks to the ancient origins of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) when he explains that antibiotic resistance has existed in a “future perfect” in the bacterial genome (2016, 82). This is a “weird weirdness,” where the unintended consequences of technological innovation can take the form of positive feedback loops that escalate the system in which they operate. Morton himself suggests that AMR is an “uncanny fallout from the myth of progress” (2016, 6–7).11 Surgeon X mediates Morton’s theorization by presenting antibiotic history sequences that make us sit uncomfortably with a cascade of unintended consequences, as well as with a re-imagining of humankind’s place in this longer history of microbes and molecules; it forces us to stay present with AMR’s longer ­history and future. The presentation of AMR’s scales in Surgeon X achieves another pedagogical aim, completing the text’s reification of abstract biostatistics. An equal but conceptually opposing problem to AMR not being personal enough to everyone, as suggested above with respect to Figs. 34.1 and 34.2, is the fundamental misunderstanding of the scope and mechanism of resistance. Individuals tend to think of AMR too insularly: many surveys indicate the prevalence of the belief that individuals themselves become resistant to the antibiotic, rather than the bacteria (McCullough et al. 2016, 28), somewhat analogous to the idea of drug tolerance. Understanding AMR at scale—across humans and other living and non-living entities—undermines the supremacy of individualism espoused by western, neoliberal ideology. Thinking about AMR in a more communal and ecological way, as opposed to circumscribing the problem to the patient and their prescriber, resonates with the comic’s social critique. The current way of thinking about individuals and social relations is dated, to put it lightly; it is what happens when “human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable…[s] eriously unthinkable: not available to think with” (Haraway 2016, 31).

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Keeping the larger ecology in mind, it is nevertheless important to consider how AMR can reconfigure and reinforce political ideologies and related material effects that affect people differentially. Surgeon X deploys various anachronisms to show how AMR brings the social and medical orders of the past into the present and future. In one specific iteration, the comic poses a critical reflection on the ethics and professional culture of medical practitioners. Rosa Scott herself is a personified anachronism. There are several images, usually in covers of the individual comics, that adorn Rosa as an amalgamed icon of futurity and antiquity.12 Rosa’s actions and dynamic characterization as the novel’s tragic hero compound the pictorial allusions to temporal conflation. She is at once a cutting-edge surgeon, versed in cutting-edge medical technology, but at the same time emblematizes a more archaic medical ethos. Rosa’s defining quality is her willingness to use extreme methods to go against laws and protocols to save a patient’s life, especially those patients that the government deems unqualified for antibiotic therapy. Rosa practices “heroic measures,” high risk, last resort treatments that often cause significant collateral damage or result in death. The ethos of heroic measures itself, while still prevalent in certain forms today, connotes the pre-modern practice of heroic medicine: the aggressive treatment of patients through bloodletting and purging, based on the theory that disease was caused by humoral imbalance, a theory which fell out of favor around the mid-nineteenth century. In this association, Rosa’s internal conflict reflects the broader social conflict that emerges from AMR’s role in the “devolution” of medical care. Part of the cognitive estrangement the comic performs, then, is combining medicine of the future and past to signal the precarity with which AMR threatens our present. Perhaps the most striking example of medicine’s technological regression is the looming threat of amputation.

Amputational Biopolitics Amputation is not merely a world-building element in the post-antibiotic dystopia, a plot device, or a synecdochal portent of medicine’s future. More significantly, amputation codes the political entanglements in the medicalization of society: both in terms of the increase of medicine’s jurisdiction in daily life, and the metaphorical vocabulary of health, disease, and the body deployed to understand state sovereignty and social relations. In the world of the comic, amputations are rampant as evident in Fig. 34.3 where the homeless man becomes just another “statistic.” During one of Rosa’s underground surgeries, when she treats an underworld drug smuggler that provides her with illegal antibiotics, she is forced to collapse a lung, remove several ribs, and excise necrotic tissue, a procedure which a family member and criminal accomplice scorns “sounds fucking medieval—slicing and removing his Ribs” (ch. 3). While in our twenty-first century moment, it is still standard practice although a last resort or sometimes “heroic” practice, amputation connotes an older kind of medicine, where infections in extremities were only stemmed by the severing of a limb.

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A prominent visual representation of the procedure operates as an icon of biopolitical tensions at work in 2036 Britain. A recurring health advisory poster warns “Wash your hands or risk losing your limbs.” The poster appears in the background of significant scenes, such as the introduction to Rosa when she worked for the NHS and broke protocol to treat a dying girl (Fig. 34.4). The icon of the severed hand assigns guilt for infection and threatens not only a literal severing of a hand, but more disparagingly a figurative amputation from the social body that deems one as a qualified life: life that is protected by qualifying for a ration of antibiotics. Readers encounter this poster in a full-page blow up at the end of the first comic (Fig. 34.7). Effecting a sense of immediacy of the post-antibiotic world, the full-page announcement simulates for the reader encountering a similar announcement while reading a periodical or magazine. This interjection follows the comic’s opening with a similar, albeit much more overtly politically valanced announcement—“9 Million Dead a Year / We Must All Comply With Fig. 34.7  Chapter 1

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The Antibiotic Preservation Act / Rationing is Rational”—where the focal point is a capsule that doubles as a grave (ch. 1). This compositional doubling serves as a pharmakonological emblem of the antibiotic’s dual nature (Fig. 34.8).13 These representative propaganda/public health advisories are rounded off with an even less subtle poster which tells the public to “KNOW YOUR PCI SCORE,” interpellating them as quantifiable subjects, defined by their numerical value to society (ch. 6). Read within the proverbial state-as-abody metaphor, the visual severance of the hand in Fig. 34.8 represents the excision of an infected individual of the body that threatens the whole. By this same logic, this separation corresponds to the hermetic sealing of the nation from foreign influence—immigration-related or political-economic. In the poster, the wrist is stamped with the imprimatur of state sanction in the form of the Lion Party’s logo. The Lion as an icon itself embodies a mythic, Fig. 34.8  Chapter 1

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seemingly purer, English history—going back to Richard the Lionheart, the great hero of English medieval history, and before him William the Conqueror. In its association to a “toxic nostalgia,” this image echoes Brexit’s nationalistic ethos, resonant with former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s invocation of heraldic charge in 2017, when he called for Brexit as a movement of national renewal: “Let the lion roar,” he proselytized, so that Britain might “win the future” (Earle 2017). That same year the right-wing populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) changed its logo to a roaring lion (Ferrari 2018). In its interruption of the narrative progression, the poster evokes ­real-world correlatives of comparable propaganda. The poster associates disciplinary hygienic measures with the culturally resonant history of World War II propaganda, where text and image are combined to demand that citizens ration and implement exceptional measures. Posters like the wellknown “Loose Lips Sink Ships” utilized fear and guilt to compel security in the Populus, while other posters rhetorically constructed admonitions against unsafe sex and warned soldiers of the personal and military consequences of venereal disease.14 The careless citizen who is unguarded in their communication or the solider who lacks sexual restraint, like the unhygienic individual in the septic world of 2036 Britain, becomes an internal threat. Viewed in this light, the “Wash Your Hands” poster is as much about power as it is health. Amputation reflects a coextension of two forms of power that have been associated with different eras. For Michel Foucault, a temporal shift in the form of governmental power toward the end of the eighteenth century moved from a punitive and deductive juridical power to a productive, affirmative biopolitical model. Juridical power, associated with the pre-modern, punishes and disallows life; it is a form of power that takes life and lets live (Foucault 2003, 240–45). The poster evokes pre-modern sovereign juridical power through its warning of amputation in the imperative mood, recalling corporal forms of punishment like severing a hand for theft, for instance. Less metaphorically, however, it signals visible marking of the body in its failure to follow hygienic discipline, not unlike a scarlet letter. This is not a strictly juridical model per se, rather a form of biopolitical control, as it works indirectly and is not exactly a form of punishment. Birthed from modernity with the emergence of statistics, liberalism, and biology, in biopolitical power, life is produced and affirmed rather than merely taken; biopower targets the population’s life as its object of governance; it makes some live at the expense of letting others die through the shaping of social structures (“regulatory biopolitics”), and co-constitutively through internalized forms of individual self-discipline (“anatomo-politics of the human body”). Biopower is about the individual having self-governance in relation to demographic and statistical norms—birth rates, morbidity, mortality (240–45). The call to wash hands, in this case, signals discipline in the form of a self-enforced hygienic practice. As risk, calculation, preemption, responsibility, and freedom are central to modern biopower, the propaganda poster

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suggests that individuals are solely in control of their own health given their knowledge of AMR. This justification, of course, discounts the social determinants that have calibrated certain people to have more opportunity to be “responsibly” healthy. Moreover, amputation, while being a medical procedure performed for the purposes of curtailing infection—and in this way “producing” health—under the Antibiotic Preservation Act, would negatively affect one’s PCI score by disabling a patient. Consequently, one would be perceptually at risk for future bacterial infection by being disqualified from antibiotic therapy, as their quantified value to society would be diminished post-amputation. In this way, governmental policy over the medical protocols vis-à-vis AMR serve as an indirect mechanism to foster the life of some at the expense of others. The different modes of power invoked in the handwashing campaign can make it easy for readers to reproach the state’s biopolitical intervention, which on the surface can solidify the dichotomy between Rosa as outlaw hero against the unjust state; however, upon closer reflection of its authoritarianism determinations for ostensibly utilitarian aims provides a way to problematize Rosa’s heroic ethos and ethics. Rosa is initially contrasted with other practitioners who blindly follow protocol and governmental guidelines for prioritizing certain patients over others for antibiotic allotment and often resign themselves to doing nothing, noting the futility and harm of extreme measures. While readers can easily sympathize with Rosa’s efforts, as the narrative progresses, her measures become more extreme, unethical to the point where she alone assumes the authority to determine who gets to live and who can be allowed to die or must die. This dramatic irony shows that her rogue medical care ultimately exercises a violent power similar to the Antibiotic Preservation Act. One scene in particular emblematizes this tragic flaw in Rosa’s character. In one of many instances of the medieval world returning to modern London, a multi-drug resistant plague strain infiltrates the city which Rosa attempts to stop. Rosa pursues Vikram, an immigrant and organized criminal who supplies her with black-market drugs, because he is infected with plague and refuses to go into voluntary quarantine. Rosa kills Vikram by injecting a euthanasic agent into his neck: in the sequence, Rosa performs this immediately after Vikram threatens to expose her “secret surgery,” raising the question as to whether Rosa kills him because he is a biological threat to public health or because he a personal threat to her, or some combination of both— he threatens Rosa and, consequently, all the people she could save (ch. 6). While Rosa’s action seems extreme, it is not unlike the PCI score logic of allocating antibiotics for certain populations, for the utilitarian safety of the whole, except it is an even more directly deductive act because she actively takes Vikram’s life rather than refuse care. If, indeed, AMR “brings out the worst in people,” as Rosa reflects when the plague spreads through London, then clearly, she has succumbed to the contagion: by the end of the series her “compass through the dark days ahead” now rests upon the belief that “life is a privilege, not a right” (ch. 6).

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The fusion of seemingly older and newer forms of power in both the handwashing poster and Rosa’s narrative trajectory along with the handwashing poster does not merely suggest that juridical power returns in the future social order; rather, it reveals that the older deductive power exists in another form, where disease can serve as the primary executioner of punishment. What this fictionalized morphology of governing power reveals is that while AMR does, in many ways, bring the past into the present, in other ways, it only makes visible those forms of medical and structural violence that the technological and social developments of the present have occluded.15 The hidden violence revealed in the comic has extant ­correlatives in present-day NHS policies and after the 1990 NHS and Community Care act, post-9–11 politics, and fiscal austerity measures of the early twenty-first century.16 Kenney has stated that PCI was inspired by a proposal to change the way the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) assessed the value of drugs by including a “wider societal benefits” measure (Kenney 2018; Boseley 2014; Cairns et al. 2013), a metric that factors in the different amount of resources a patient contributes to society and the amount they utilize. Numerous researchers and commissions rejected the 2013 proposal, citing, among many other problems, a valuing of patients’ economic productivity and the potential for fostering inequity.17 While this specific proposal was rejected, many of its logics remain operative in British health economics. Consider, most notably, recent campaigns allowing the refusal of treatment for smokers and the obese in England, or the migrant women who have eschewed NHS antenatal care to avoid being reported to the Home Office or made responsible for thousands of pounds in fees (Donnelley 2017; Gentleman 2017). Under these biopolitical stratagems, individuals are encouraged to inculcate disciplinary “healthy” practices enabling them to contribute productively, and thus qualify for the state’s investment in their care; while those who “make poor lifestyle choices”—often more socially and structurally determined rather than freely chosen—are not invested in under the auspices of low utility and, not surprisingly for a UK audience, austerity. Moreover, conversations around AMR in the UK, while given much more attention than in the US, are so frequently focused around economics: how much AMR will cost; what will be the effect on productivity and GDP; how the resulting strains on the system will be funded. And this, in turn, becomes refracted through conservative, nationalist, and neoliberal idioms: either in terms of anti-immigration rhetoric, or in the case of Conservative leader Michael Howard in 2004, framing AMR as a symptom of cultural and economic contamination eroding the core of British politics and institutions, most notably the NHS itself (Brown and Nettleton 2017, 2, 6–8). While these are clear resonances to specific debates and responses to AMR in Britain, it is not enough to say that Kenney and Watkiss were informed by and responding to solely the British zeitgeist; the comic has wider implications.

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The presentation of AMR in Surgeon X asks us to think in broad terms about social, intergenerational, and ecological justice. AMR itself puts policymakers and practitioners in a temporal ethical quandary. At what point do we start rationing antibiotics, and when we do, to whom do we give them? How does one weigh an effective treatment in the present against future shortage and resistance; how does one weigh the present illness of one against the future epidemiology of the masses? The safest recourse would of course be not to use them at all unless a life-threatening emergency presents itself. This course, however, while causing discomfort and distress to many, increases the risk that the morbidities of infectious disease would overwhelm the already taxed healthcare system—and, in many instances, people would be in the exact same precarious position of contracting an infection. These questions are helpful general thoughts on intergenerational justice; however, to further complicate matters in terms of public health ethics and social justice, post-antibiotic stewardship will also have to account for global health disparities, which for instance could mean that wealthy countries will have to develop and invest in antibiotics that must first be allocated to lower-income countries that are disproportionally affected by AMR, among other structural health inequalities (Littmann and Viens 2015). In the vein of Surgeon X’s science fictionality, then, the relationship between health disparities and AMR is not a future but a present problem. Moreover, the problem and solutions lie not solely within the scope of AMR but also are inextricably entangled with class inequalities, social injustice, and the recent trend in divisive nationalist politics, as Kenney herself notes in her 2017 interview. If Surgeon X works through the mode of science fictionality and the comic medium to express the complexities of AMR, then its cultural work lies less in the speculation of a fictional narrative of AMR, and more in reflecting a vivid “culture medium” of our contemporary antibiosis. AMR forces us to rethink individual, national, and anthropocentric insularity. Through media form and genre, Kenney and Watkiss’s series demonstrates a way of engaging with literature and science that animates the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that is necessary to tackle a problem so complex and portentous. If the current trend in the microbiomial turn is any indication of a changes in medico-scientific ­paradigms, then, AMR, in the words of Donna Haraway, demands we “stay with the trouble.” But with the present time festered state-centric movements and neoliberal policies that will only exacerbate AMR, as a globalized world and species, we have clearly not yet fully appreciated the complexity and danger that is already apocalyptic. This antibiotic model that we have been following for the past half-century is the path of most resistance. We must attend to the mutually constitutive assemblage of human and non-human actors, institutions, ideologies, and metaphors, so that we might “unsettle our place in the great chain of being” and transform our responsibilities toward “the bodies within us, and the other bodies in the world” (Fishell 2017, 43). More than educating by way of consciousness-raising of AMR as

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a phenomenon, then, Surgeon X, enmeshes readers in AMR’s ecologies, politics, and temporalities. While no single text or aesthetic form can delineate the subtleties of a biosocial phenomenon like AMR along with the innumerable disciplinary perspectives needed to address it (microbiology, pharmacology, epidemiology, clinical medicine, bioethics, sociology, political science, international relations, science communications, public policy, cultural studies, medical history, health economics—just to name a few), Surgeon X provides a sense of the complexity, magnitude, and social justice implications that AMR brings in its wake. It, moreover, draws attention to how other forms, genres, narratives, and texts—beyond fear-mongering news media or biomedical publications—might encourage us to think critically about the problem in the present and question the widely assumed belief in a technofix. By fictionalizing the future in these dimensions, Surgeon X forces the present moment to its crisis. Because, otherwise, in the case of AMR, indeed, there won’t be time.

Notes







1. See for instance, Gallagher (2015). 2. On cognitive estrangement, see Suvin (1978). 3. The series does not contain page numbers; hereafter, chapter (issue) number will be cited in text parenthetically hereafter. 4. The O’Neill report estimates 10 million will die in 2050, therefore we can extrapolate that Surgeon X is plotting the 9 million death toll projection on the same curve given its setting in 2032. On disputing the 10 million figure, see de Kraker et al. (2016). 5. “Many participants also believed: they do not contribute to the development of resistance and attributed it to the actions of others; and they are at low risk from antibiotic resistance themselves” (McCullough et al. 2016, 31). 6. For example, see Jinks (2017). 7. Emphasis added. Ibid. Elsewhere, I make a similar assertation about the mobile game Superbugs; however, as I show here, the comic and video game medium operate differently, playing with antibiotic temporality in unique ways (Servitje 2019). 8. Plants make up the first. Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 25 (2018): 6507. 9. See Dhillon et al. (2015). 10. Cat’s Cradle revolves around “ice-nine” a fictional compound which freezes any water it touches. As all water is interconnected from large bodies of water, water in the human body, and water in the air as humidity, the compound has the potential to end the world. 11. It is important to note that while provocative, and certainly resonant with AMR’s strange temporality, Morton’s reading here should be qualified, interrogated fully in its interdisciplinary use of science in literary study and critical theory, Devin Griffiths (2016) contends that the link between the environmental resistome and clinical resistance is not so straightforward, and that,

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moreover, the notion “that such genes are lying dormant in the background population, waiting to be ‘switch[ed] on,’ that ancient ‘bacteria already had genes that could switch on resistance to a fatal dose of antibiotics’” mischaracterizes how bacterial evolution (and its study) work. Even in a widely cited review published two years after Dark Ecology and its review by Griffiths, microbiologists are careful about the expansive claims that are made about the resistome (Surette and Wright 2017, 321). Recent microbiological work has sought to focus on assessing risk of transfer of environmental ARG (Crofts et al. 2017). As Griffiths notes, and the studies that Morton cites, along with the most recent reviews in microbiology, ARGs’ ancient existence suggests that they serve multiple functions beyond countering biomedical extermination by naturally appropriated or synthetically produced compounds in the future. 12. The cover of Chapter 2, for instance, places Rosa in a high-tech surgical suite, utilizing robots and lasers. One of the tools, which matches her surgical cap—drawn in such a way to strongly resemble the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor’s headdress and symbol. Thanks to Gillian Andrews for making this connection. 13. The Greek word pharmakon, root of words like pharmacology, means, at once poison and remedy. 14. Hygienic posters during world war two warned of loose women who were inimically framed as “Boobytraps” for syphilis and gonorrhea. See, for instance, National Library of Medicine (2018). 15. See Shapiro (2018). 16. These acts introduced an internal market to the socialized health care system (Paul 2001, 597). 17.  Fuller discussions of ethical, economic, and statistical complexities of ­value-based pricing in NICE’s proposal can be found in M. Paulden et al. (2014) and K. Claxton et al. (2015).

References Bar-On, Yinon M., Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo. 2018. The Biomass Distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (25): 6506–11. Boseley, Sarah. 2014. Watchdog Rejects ‘Social Benefit’ Test on NHS Medicines. The Guardian, January 24. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/24/ societal-benefit-medicines-watchdog-nice. Accessed 29 July 2018. Brown, Nik, and Sarah Nettleton. 2017. ‘There Is Worse to Come’: The Biopolitics of Traumatism in Antimicrobial Resistance (Amr). The Sociological Review Online First (February): 1–16. Cairns, John, Alec Miners, and Allan Wailoo. 2013. Department of Health Proposals for Including Wider Societal Benefits into Value Based Pricing: A Description and Critique. NICE. https://www.nice.org.uk/Media/Default/About/what-we-do/ NICE-guidance/NICE-technology-appraisals/DSU-Wider-Societal-BenefitsBriefing-Paper.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018. Claxton, K., M. Sculpher, S. Palmer, and A.J. Culyer. 2015. Causes for Concern: Is Nice Failing to Uphold Its Responsibilities to All NHS Patients? Health Economics 24 (1, January): 1–7.

618  L. SERVITJE Crofts, Terence S., Andrew J. Gasparrini, and Gautam Dantas. 2017. Next-Generation Approaches to Understand and Combat the Antibiotic Resistome. Nature Reviews Microbiology. Nature Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.1038/ nrmicro.2017.28. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 1992. Futuristic Flu, or the Revenge of the Future. In Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey, 26–45. Atlanta: Georgia Univesity Press. ———. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Czerwiec, M.K., Michael Green, Ian Williams, M. Susan Squier, Kimberly Myers, and Scott Smith. 2015. Graphic Medicine Manifesto. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press. de Kraker, Marlieke E.A., Andrew J. Stewardson, and Stephan Harbarth. 2016. Will 10 Million People Die a Year Due to Antimicrobial Resistance by 2050? PLOS Medicine 13 (11): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002184. Dhillon, G.S., S. Kaur, R. Pulicharla, S.K. Brar, M. Cledon, M. Verma, and R.Y. Surampalli. 2015. Triclosan: Current Status, Occurrence, Environmental Risks and Bioaccumulation Potential. International Journal of Environmental Resources and Public Health 12 (5): 5657–84. Donnelley, Laura. 2017. NHS Provokes Fury with Indefinite Surgery Ban for Smokers and Obese. The Telegraph, October 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2017/10/17/nhs-provokes-fury-indefinite-surgery-ban-smokers-obese/. Accessed 29 July 2018. Earle, Samuel. 2017. The Toxic Nostalgia of Brexit. The Atlantic, October 5. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/brexit-britain-may-johnson-eu/542079/. Accessed 29 July 2018. Economou, Vangelis, and Panagiota Gousia. 2015. Agriculture and Food Animals as a Source of Antimicrobial-Resistant Bacteria. Infection and Drug Resistance 8: 49–61. Eliot, George. 2003. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin. Ferrari, Nick. 2018. UKIP’s Leader Explains Why the Party Is Using a Lion for Its Logo. LBC, October 23, 2017. https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/ nick-ferrari/ukips-leader-explains-logo-lion/. Accessed 29 July 2018. Fishell, Stefaine R. 2017. The Microbial State. Minneapolis: Minnesota. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Gallagher, James. 2015. Analysis: Antibiotic Apocalypse. BBC, November 15. http:// www.bbc.com/news/health-21702647. Accessed 30 July 2017. Gentleman, Amelia. 2017. Pregnant Women Without Legal Status ‘Too Afraid to Seek NHS Care’. The Guardian, March 20. https://www.theguardian.com/ uk-news/2017/mar/20/pregnant-asylum-seekers-refugees-afraid-seek-nhs-maternity-care. Accessed 29 July 2018. Griffiths, Devin. 2016. Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. The British Society for Literature and Science, 208. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/696926. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Holub, Christian. 2017. Surgeon X Writer on the Real-Life Parallels in Her Dystopian Medical Drama. EW, May 3, 2017. http://ew.com/books/2017/05/03/surgeon-x-sara-kenney-antibiotics-politics/. Accessed 29 July 2018.

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Jinks, Tim. 2017. Why Is It So Difficult to Discover New Antibiotics? BBC, October 27, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-41693229. Accessed 29 July 2018. Kenney, Sarah, and John Watkiss. 2017. Surgeon X. Portland: Image Comics. Landecker, Hannah. 2015. Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History. Body & Society 22 (4): 19–52. Littmann, Jasper, and A.M. Viens. 2015. The Ethical Significance of Antimicrobial Resistance. Public Health Ethics 8 (3): 209–24. McCullough, A.R., S. Parekh, J. Rathbone, C.B. Del Mar, and T.C. Hoffmann. 2016. A Systematic Review of the Public’s Knowledge and Beliefs About Antibiotic Resistance. The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 71 (1): 27–33. https://doi. org/10.1093/jac/dkv310. McKenna, Maryn. 2016. Dark New Comic Book Explores a World Without Antibiotics. National Geographic, November 11. https://news.nationalgeographic. com/2016/10/surgeon-x-comic-explores-world-without-antibiotics/. Accessed 29 July 2018. Morton, Timothy. 2014. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. National Library of Medicine. 2018. Exposing Yourself to a “VD” without Taking a Pro means that: You are a Saboteur. NIH National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101439080-img. Accessed 30 July 2018. Nerlich, Brigitte. 2009. “The Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse” and the “War on Superbugs”: Catastrophe Discourse in Microbiology, Its Rhetorical Form and Political Function. Public Understanding of Science 18 (5): 574–88. O’Neill, Jim, and Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. 2014. Tackling DrugResistant Infections Globally: Final Report and Recommendations‚ December. https://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/AMR%20Review%20Paper%20-%20 Tackling%20a%20crisis%20for%20the%20health%20and%20wealth%20of%20 nations_1.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018. Paul, Joyce. 2001. Governmentality and Risk: Setting Priorities in the New NHS. Sociology of Health & Illness 23 (5): 594–614. Paulden, M., J.F. O’Mahony, A.J. Culyer, and C. McCabe. 2014. Some Inconsistencies in Nice’s Consideration of Social Values. Pharmacoeconomics 32 (11): 1043–53. Servitje, Lorenzo. 2019. Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance. Osiris, Special Issue on Science Fiction and History of Science 34: 316–37. Shapiro, Johanna. 2018. “Violence” in Medicine: Necessary and Unnecessary, Intentional and Unintentional. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 13 (1): 7. Squier, Susan. 2008. Literature and Medicine, Future Tense: Making It Graphic. Literature and Medicine 27 (2): 124–52. ———. 2015. The Use of Graphic Medicine for Enganged Scholarship. In Graphic Medicine Manifesto, ed. M.K. Czerwiec, Michael Green, Ian Williams, M. Squier Susan, Kimberly Myers, and Scott Smith, 41–65. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press. Surette, M.D., and Wright, G.D. 2017. Lessons from the Environmental Antibiotic Resistome. Annual Review Microbiology 71: 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev-micro-090816-093420.

620  L. SERVITJE Suvin, Darko. 1978. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: Studies in the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, and Sweetha Saji. 2016. Rhetorics of the Visual: Graphic Medicine, Comics and Its Affordances. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8 (3): 222–31. Wellcome Trust. 2015. Exploring the Consumer Perspective on Antimicrobial Resistance, June. https://wellcome.ac.uk/files/exploring-consumer-perspectiveantimicrobial-resistance-jun15pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018. ———. 2018. Society Awards: Projects We’ve Funded. https://wellcome.ac.uk/ what-we-do/directories/society-awards-people-funded. Accessed 29 July 2018. World Health Organization. 2015. Antibiotic Resistance: Multi-Country Public Awareness Survey.  http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/documents/s22245en/s22245en.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2018.

CHAPTER 35

The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic Sphere in Sinophone Cinema Nathaniel Isaacson

There are strikingly few examples of science fiction or robot narratives in Sinophone cinema, whether in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the PRC, or Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I argue that two of the only examples of Chineselanguage narratives focused on automata from the seemingly disparate worlds of China during the lead-up to the Tiananmen massacre, and from Malaysia in the years between the 1997 and 2008 global economic crises, illustrate both the global significance of the robot as an affective laborer and its local Sinophone resonances. Huang Jianxin’s (黄健新, b. 1954) 1986 film, Dislocation (错位), centers on an engineer who designs a doppelgänger to replace him at company meetings. Enthralled with interminable meetings and socializing at a state-owned enterprise, the doppelgänger attempts to replace the scientist in his romantic life, later seeking to replace his creator entirely. James Lee’s (Lee Thim Heng 李添兴, b. 1973) 2004 film, The Beautiful Washing Machine (美丽的洗衣机), depicts a robotic (or perhaps alien) woman who has a symbiotic relationship with a defunct, second-hand washing machine. The woman serves as a domestic servant for a young bachelor before escaping to join another family where she becomes the object of romantic competition between a widowed father and his son. Through a close reading of these two films, I examine the role of automata in post-socialist and late capitalist Sinophone contexts in order to elucidate N. Isaacson (*)  Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_35

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how their local specificity is interwoven with a set of globally recognizable themes surrounding science, technology, and the economy. In these two films automata serve as allegories for various forms of alienation—in the post-socialist transition to state-capitalism in the PRC and its attendant moment of reflection on Chinese tradition, and in contemporary Malaysia in the context of socioeconomic stresses to the nuclear family. The characters in these stories are alienated from their labor, from their fellow human beings, and from science. This paper considers the translatability and cultural malleability of the figure of the automaton, asking how the automaton speaks to labor conditions under socialism, post-socialism, and the current rendition of neoliberal globalization. I also examine how automata speak to gendered divisions of labor and explore whether Freudian readings of the automaton as “uncanny” [unheimlich] based in a Western European tradition apply to the transforming patriarchal order (often framed in terms of an imagined Confucian tradition) of contemporary China and Sinophone Malaysia. Both films furthermore reflect the spoken and unspoken “scientific” truths that organize productive and reproductive labor. Finally, in their singularity, the films speak to a question for which there are only partial answers: in a part of the world so deeply imbricated in the popular imagination as a nexus of innovation and artificial intelligence, why has Chinese-language cinema had so little to say about the figure of the automaton?

Affective Labor and Robots as Cultural Memes Angela Mitropoulos defines affective labor “as the valorization of human sociability … long circulated as part of a compensatory logic, offered as a humanization of the mechanization of the labor process, in both Fordism and post-Fordism” (2012, 165–66). In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri tie the contemporary proliferation of affective labor to the rise of immaterial labor: jobs whose products include “knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response,” arguing that affective labor encompasses a number of female-gendered forms of work, particularly the repetitious routine of domestic reproductive labor like cooking and cleaning (2004, 108–10). Affective labor is on the one hand a form of “biological production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life,” but it is also relevant to the immaterial labor of paralegals, nurses, and other workers whose duties include the maintenance of human relationships (ibid., 110–11). Both Mitropoulos and Hardt and Negri emphasize the increasing centrality of immaterial, affective labor in the global economy and the implications of this transformation on labor, leisure, and kinship. The Chinese Communist Party’s insistence on the unique character of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” notwithstanding, these forms of labor are central to the PRC economy as well. Increasingly incorporated into the global economy, affective labor in China, especially that performed by women, has seen a concomitant increase since the 1980s (Otis 2008, 16). As I demonstrate below,

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the robot plays a particularly salient role in the metaphorical embodiment of “both technological and social innovation” (Mitropoloulos 2012, 13). In Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination, Minsoo Kang observes that the automaton has occupied an enduring position in the Western imagination, and “functioned as a kind of conceptual chameleon [through which] … Western culture has meditated on both the possibilities and the consequences of the breakdown of the distinction between the normally antithetical categories of the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, the living and the dead” (Kang 2011, 5–7). The robot is a key signifier in the SF cultural field, and in the words of Telotte is “arguably the most powerful image of the sf cinema” (2016, 2–3). Automata figure prominently in meditations on the relationship between human beings and the technologies we create, and in deconstructing the boundaries between consciousness and insentience (Kakoudaki 2014; Kang 2011; Chu 2011; Telotte 2016). In Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film, J.P. Telotte argues that robots “easily speak to issues of labor and machine power” (10). Mitropoulos borrows the concept of oikopolitics (the politics of the household) as developed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, and Elizabeth Povinelli in The Empire of Love in a critique of the ways in which capitalism perseveres “across time and space” by dissolving the barriers ­ between private and political spheres. Noting that “the uncanny has almost invariably assumed the character of a female robot,” Mitropoulos goes on to posit that “the uncanny signals the appearance of a new ‘border war’ around demarcation of what is properly political from that which is posited as natural and, consequently, regarded as an improper subject of political and cultural conflict.” The gendered division of labor often assigns care-taking and emotional tasks to women, and domestic labor is another form of affective labor: “women who work (whether in private or in public, paid or not) deliver a labor that has affective purchase, circulating as an extension of (rather than refusal of or indifference toward) care-giving domestic labor that has to appear as if it is not work at all but freely and naturally given” (Mitropoulos 2012, 160; see also: Hardt and Negri 2004, 110–11). Thus, the woman robot acts as a vector for representing the relationship between shifts in labor and their effect upon the family unit. The “figure of the woman-robot has assumed a literary and psychoanalytic density as emblematic of complex shifts in sexuality, domesticity, gender, technology and work across the previous two centuries” (Mitropoulos 2012, 156). Mitropoulos thus echoes Donna Haraway in identifying cyborgs, robots and other automata as harbingers of a “revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household” (Haraway 2000, 293). In her analysis of the relationship between the intensification of affective labor and its effect upon the constitution of the heteronormative family unit as a microcosm of the nation and a means of maintaining capital in Australia and North America, Mitropoulos argues that rather than fragmenting familial relationships, neoliberalism intensifies the affective

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significance of the family unit. As the contemporary global economy demands that we are constantly productive, and dissolves the barriers between home and work life, the importance of the family unit is reified (in the Marxist sense). Mitropoulos adds, “post-Fordism is defined by a meshing of worktime and the time of life, the demand to be constantly available and always preparing for work. Social networking is also net-working” (Mitropoulos 2012, 165). Globalized and digitized labor has eliminated opportunities for “down time” and the forty-hour workweek, and increased pressure to maintain constant productivity. We are witnessing the dissolution of work into life and life into work. In contemporary China, the line between networking and labor has become so precarious that many job advertisements now note a high tolerance for alcohol as a requirement for employment (Groth 2011, n.p.). Despina Kakoudaki cautions against understanding historical narratives of automata and contemporary robot narratives as part of a single evolutionary teleology, arguing that histories of robots and automata are hindered by a “‘time-line’ approach” that attempts to draw one-to-one correlations between contemporary robots and pre-modern stories of automata (2014, 16). While similar anxieties are operative across the history of representations of automata and other human simulacra, it is important to situate them in their own historical, technological, and cultural contexts. Kakoudaki warns that “stereotypical and repetitive tendencies of the discourse are exacerbated by the critical habit of looking for answers in historical models that reinforce modern stereotypes,” and asks us to “consider the structuring presence of objects without necessarily resorting to readings of gothic and uncanny effects” (ibid., 24). In the post-Mao era work of authors like Wei Yahua (魏雅华 b. 1949) and Tong Enzheng (童恩正 1935–1997), Paola Iovene argues that “the distinction between humans and machines in Wei’s stories is less important than that between mental and manual laborers,” (Iovene 2014, 38) asking her readers to consider which forms of labor are more appropriate for scientists, and which forms of affect are more appropriate for robot servants, problematizing socialist estimation of the physical toil of workers, soldiers, and peasants. The above distinction and the ways that it breaks down in Dislocation and The Beautiful Washing Machine serve as another important analytical lens for this chapter. The field of Chinese SF studies, having grown rapidly over the past decade, has yet to engage in a detailed analysis of the cultural role of the automaton; I hope to stake out an initial, carefully circumscribed, understanding of the unique role of robots in Sinophone cinema in the representation of social divisions of affective labor.

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The Post-Socialist Robot—Huang Jianxin and Urban Alienation Dislocation is fifth-generation1 director Huang Jianxin’s sequel to The Black Cannon Incident, (黑炮事件 1986) a Golden Rooster Award-winning film about a translator who loses his job because of a misunderstanding over a telegram asking the whereabouts of a lost chess piece. Paul Pickowicz identifies Dislocation as the first science fiction film of the post-Cultural Revolution era (Pickowicz 2012, 255). A third film in the series, Samsara (轮回, 1988), centers on an iconoclastic and opportunistic cynic who commits suicide after an argument with his spouse (Yuejin Wang 1996, 35–37). Samsara was one of four film adaptations released in 1988, the eponymously dubbed “year of Wang Shuo.” Huang Jianxin is regularly referred to as a director of urban films and “urban tragicomedies” (Chen Jie, 2002; Li Donglei, 2009). The Black Cannon Incident is deeply critical of the tendency for valuing workers for being “red before expert.” When managerial apparatchiks value the ideological purity of a less skilled counterpart over Zhao Shuxin’s linguistic abilities, a mistranslation of the German word for “ball bearing” (Ger. Kugel 子弹 /轴承) wreaks havoc on an industrial construction project. Harry Kuoshu notes that “by emphasizing translation, Huang reactivates a critique of zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong” (Kuoshu, 50), the notion that China could selectively incorporate Western material culture without fundamentally transforming an essentialized native culture which began to take hold in the late nineteenth century and continues to be a topic of debate to this day. The valuation of ideological purity over technical expertise or scientific knowledge and the association of science with potentially harmful Western values alienate the main character from scientific practice. Dislocation follows the protagonist of Black Cannon Incident, engineer Zhao Shuxin 赵书信 (Liu Zifeng 刘子风), into the near future as he designs a doppelgänger to replace him at company meetings. Zhao hopes that the robot will remediate the alienation from the scientific aspect of his work that he considers important by allowing him to skip out on bureaucratic drudgery. Enthralled with the social aspect of interminable meetings and social engagements at a state-owned enterprise, the doppelgänger displaces Zhao in his romantic life with girlfriend Yang Lijuan 杨丽娟 (Yang Kun 杨昆), eventually seeking to claim his entire life. Paul Pickowicz and Harry Kuoshu have both noted Huang Jianxin’s importance among fifth-generation directors for being the only one among his cohort to concertedly address urban issues, unlike colleagues Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou, and Wu Ziniu, who have largely focused on rural narratives (Pickowicz 2012, 245; Kuoshu 2010, 46). At the same time, Pickowicz identifies Huang as one of Chinese cinema’s most plainly post-socialist fifth-generation directors, and the film as a pointed critique of bureaucratic stagnation in the socialist state (though Huang went on to co-direct the PRC 60th anniversary national hagiography The Founding

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of a Republic and The Founding of a Party in 2009 and 2011).2 The film finished third in Chinese box office earnings for 2009, behind disaster film 2012 and the second installment in the Transformers series. For this reason, Pickowicz argues that Huang Jianxin “anticipated [the] extraordinary turmoil” (Pickowicz 245) of post-Mao urban alienation in a unique manner. Black Cannon Incident critiques the socialist dissolution of the barriers between personal life, political engagement, and productive labor for ideological purposes—the complete incorporation of political, productive, and leisure time was an actively promoted goal of the CCP, carried out through efforts in collectivization and the incorporation of individuals into danwei (单位) work units and xiaozu (小组) small groups for political study. The film might also be read as a sort of anti-science fiction: a cautionary tale about the failure to open up to and properly value outside knowledge and expertise. While Huang Jianxin’s ouvre stands out for its attention to urban alienation, his directorial style echoes the work of his cohort. The film’s message and mode are a clear break from the work of Mao era directors like Xie Jin (谢晋 1923–2008). Whereas Xie Jin’s films “encourage a cathartic and therapeutic purging of pent-up frustrations, and which always identify righteous and heroic figures within the Party who will save the socialist system, the Black Cannon Incident conveys an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and alienation from beginning to end” (Pickowicz 251). Huang Jianxin’s films echo the fifth generation’s break from socialist realism in eschewing both visual and narrative representation of clearly demarcated heroes and villains, and in casting aside the mandate for a morally certain and politically correct dénouement. Visually ambiguous camera work and dream sequences featuring cavernous workspaces and statues of pugilists frozen in combative poses defy jingoistic political interpretations. Dislocation is in many ways an anomaly—one of the only SF films produced in the wake of the Spiritual Pollution campaign of 1983, a conservative backlash against post-Mao liberalization that had a chilling effect on artistic experimentation. Fearing that their work would be criticized as insufficiently scientific, many SF authors curtailed production while other authors and scientists attempted to deflect this criticism by emphasizing the humanistic aspect of SF over its role as a popular science medium. Late 1980s critic Ma Shunjia suggested that SF as a genre could be deployed to help understand what it meant to be human (qtd. in Iovene 2014, 46), and Iovene notes that like The Black Cannon Incident, post-socialist SF often focused on the “tensions between political commitment and technical expertise” (ibid., 48). As much as the film was a product of its particular historical moment, it echoes a number of global concerns about our relationship to ­science and technology, and the implications of artificial intelligence. If The Black Cannon Incident may be read as a retrospective criticism of socialist bureaucracy, the second film in Huang Jianxin’s trilogy might be read as a prospective critique of the rush toward a market economy. Recent

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scholarship by Wang Hui identifying the late 1980s and early 1990s as the advent of “de-politicized politics” (2008) in China also opens the film to interpretation as a critique of an increasingly marketized economy where consumption defines the individual. In the case of post-Mao China, rather than the dissolution of an idyllic division between work and leisure—the healthy balance of mass production and mass consumption that keeps a capitalist economy humming along—we see a moment in which the politically invasive xiaozu and danwei systems that integrated work and community life are gradually supplanted by the concomitance of work and family life under a market economy. This shift was paralleled by overall greater autonomy in marriage selection—neither the family nor political and productive units had as much say in one’s romantic choices. The issues in Dislocation were central to intellectual debates of the 1980s, especially those that centered on romantic love and the role of class background in determining one’s identity (Iovene 44). A number of key themes in Dislocation might be identified as emblematic of late 1980s China’s “cultural fever” of the post-Deng Xiaoping era. The film adaptation of Wang Shuo’s Wanzhu (顽主, Mi Jiashan 米家山, 1988) features a group of self-fashioning profiteers whose labor involves the outsourcing of affect— their Santi (三T) Company offers to replace people in Troubleshooting, Tedium-relief, and Taking the Blame (Wang Shuo 2006, 5). All of these forms of labor commodify the character’s affective (or feigned affective) engagement with their fellow city dwellers. Mirroring the wildly popular satires of Wang Shuo, the father of “hooligan literature,” Dislocation also parodies the newly available opportunities for self-fashioning presented in the post-socialist urban landscape. The film is punctuated by surreal dream sequences. In the opening sequence, reams of politburo directives (中央文件) rain down on the protagonist Zhao Shuxin’s head as he stands on a podium surrounded by an imposing array of microphones. He is then wheeled into an operating room on a stretcher by a team of surgeons in black masks who decapitate him. A second dream sequence tracks through a room filled with plaster of paris sculptures, at the center of which stand the statues of two pugilists sparring with one another. The sequence features Zhao Shuxin, exhausted from interminable meetings and translation duties, falling asleep before cutting to the image of the pugilists, suggesting that his toilsome waking life has stirred up subconscious feelings of physical confrontation. Shuxin is led into the room by a man in a white lab coat, apparently on the way to a third room where humanoid robots are manufactured. Shortly after, a conscious Shuxin is followed to a clothing store by his secretary, where he picks out suits for himself and his robot double. Arranged in awkward stances, the elongated limbs and facial features of the black mannequins in the clothing store and the white statues in the dream sequence are closer to impressionist or cubist art than mimetic representations of the human form. Shuxin’s conscious life takes place in eerily depopulated city and office spaces, where he is constantly monitored

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by secretaries and few interactions occur outside of work. Dolly shots follow him down labyrinthine, winding hallways ranked with redundant doors as he attempts to navigate the faceless bureaucracy that he functions within. Harry Kuoshu reads Dislocation as being as much a critique of the political mechanism of bureaucracy as it is a critique of material technology. The circular, self-serving rhythms of the state machine are visually figured through extensive use of circular imagery like clocks, coffee tables, sofas arranged in circles, spinning wheels, and a perpetual motion machine that swings incessantly on Zhao Shuxin’s desk. According to Kuoshu, in the rhythms of bureaucratic function, “we must take note of the machine analogy. The force is mechanical; it moves on with its own logic and routines and is slow in adjusting to change. The alienating effect of the machines, how they change from the slave to the master of the human being, is also true here” (Kuoshu 2010, 49). Again borrowing from Baudrillard’s description of the increasingly porous boundaries between simulation and reality, we are witnessing the ­dissolution of human beings into machines and machines into human beings. In The Black Cannon Incident and Dislocation, Shuxin is alienated from his scientific labor—first by political concerns, and then by managerial ones.

Uncanny and Unfamiliar In Dislocation, one of the first modifications Zhao Shuxin has to make to his robotic doppelgänger is to outfit him with a reservoir for alcohol. Zhao Shuxin’s automaton simultaneously speaks to the precarious division of labor and leisure in the bureaucracy of the Mao era, and in the anything-goes context of “reform and opening up.” The modification soon backfires when the robot uses his capacity for drink to get Zhao Shuxin’s girlfriend drunk and gives her the key to his apartment. While Zhao Shuxin’s robot is gendered male, it still presents a clear threat to the nuclear family by attempting to supplant Shuxin in his romantic life and refusing to stay within the confines of Shuxin’s apartment house. While the confrontation between Shuxin and the robot could be read as a Freudian conflict of competing sexual desires and threats to the order of the patrilinear family, the robot articulates their difference in terms of the Confucian Five relationships (ruler-subject, father–son, husband–wife, elder brother and younger brother, friend to friend), saying “What are we to one another? Master and slave? Ruler and subject? Or are we equals?” Zhao Shuxin’s inability to answer the question is symptomatic of the fact that despite the 1973–1976 campaign to “Criticize Lin Biao and Criticize Confucius,” post-socialist China remains a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian society; one that often frames these hierarchies in terms of a fungible vision of Confucian social order. Social turmoil and revolutions notwithstanding, hierarchies in labor and political standing persisted. In this instance, the differences between the robot and his human creator are constructed not

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based upon their capacity for autonomous action or reason, but upon their positions within a social hierarchy of desirable and undesirable labor, one that can be explained both in Western psychotherapeutic terms and in Confucian terms. In the popular science fiction boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Iovene argues, the distinction between human beings and robots is less important than the distinction between manual and mental laborers. In the case of Dislocation, this distinction is even finer as the robot’s designer attempts but fails to distinguish between forms of mental labor that he enjoys and those that he finds tedious—interminable meetings, fraternizing, and obligatory drinking sessions. From the moment the robot is turned on, he is capable of imitating Shuxin in almost every way, demonstrating that he can recreate his facial expressions. The robot identifies mechanical behaviors in human beings (for example, clapping during a meeting when they are clearly uninterested), and begs Zhao Shuxin to program him with an inner life of his own, offering to make him leader of the robots if he can do this. Despite Shuxin’s refusal to intentionally endow him with human emotions, the robot shares Shuxin’s disinclination for attending meetings, and he immediately asks Shuxin why either of them should have to do anything they don’t want to do. This leads to the revelation that Shuxin plans on avoiding boring meetings and attending those he has an interest in, and the robot remarks, “this is such a tedious job.” Thus, the crucial distinction between Zhao Shuxin and his robot double is not that between manual and mental labor, but between two forms of mental labor—among them, attending meetings that are worthwhile and those that are boring. In a nod to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Shuxin is about to give the robot a set of rules when he is interrupted—first by a phone call summoning him to a meeting on a public health directive, and then by the arrival of his girlfriend—and he forgets to do so. Thus apparently unconstrained, the robot begins to cultivate a social life according to his own whims. When the robot hides a directive from the central politburo on bureaucratism that Zhao Shuxin was supposed to read, the robot initially refuses to hand over the document, so Shuxin threatens to destroy him. Even after he has handed the document over, Shuxin tells the robot he is going to change his face and send him to do dangerous forms of manual labor as punishment for his transgressions: refusing to perform bureaucratic labor and taking over his love life. Shuxin drifts off to sleep in the back seat of a car as he is chauffeured home from work, and the camera fades into another surreal dream sequence that hints that human artifice is the source of his troubles. He first wanders through an office space populated by office workers frozen in contorted poses—two of them genuflect to one another while another carries a briefcase awkwardly hoisted on his shoulder. He exits the office through an archway, and enters an open, deserted landscape. The landscape resembles the loess plain of the Yellow River Valley in Shaanxi, significant both as

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the “cradle of Chinese civilization” and because Yan’an was where Chairman Mao and the People’s Liberation Army were encamped after the Long March. Yan’an was also where the eponymous Forum on Literature and Art took place in 1942, establishing socialist realism as the dominant narrative mode for the next three decades. Shuxin’s dream is thus a form of “root-seeking,” a visit to the birthplace of both the modern nation-state of the People’s Republic of China, and the cradle of Chinese civilization. Zhao Shuxin wanders through the desert until he encounters the Daoist sage Laozi, seated atop a small mesa watching a commercial on television. Laozi turns the television off, stands, and recites the following passage from the Dao de jing: If [in this manner,] it is disaster indeed on which luck rests, and luck under which disaster crouches—who is to know what the epitome [of being good at regulating government] is? [Hardly anyone.] It is in being without standards! A standard by which a ruler rules will in turn lead to military cunning. Goodness as a governing instrument of a ruler will in turn lead to evil. On the other hand, it is true that the delusion of the people has definitely already been around for a long time. (Dao de jing 58.3–58.6; Wagner 2003, 317–19 (commentary omitted))

This passage from the Dao de jing frames Zhao Shuxin’s predicament and the intervention enacted by the film as a whole in terms of wuwei, the Daoist exhortation to do nothing that is in contradiction with the Dao, remaining in harmony with nature. The passage can be read on the one hand as an exhortation to Zhao Shuxin not to struggle against his fate, but also as a plea for good governance by means of keeping the machinations of government hidden from its subjects.3

Global Shifts in Labor—The Beautiful Washing Machine James Lee’s Malaysian Sinophone art-house film The Beautiful Washing Machine, depicts a robotic (or perhaps alien) woman known simply as The Woman (Len Siew Mee) who has a symbiotic relationship with a defunct, second-hand washing machine. After apparently emerging from the washing machine, The Woman first serves as a domestic servant to Teoh, a young bachelor, before winding up in a similar arrangement with Mr. Wong (Loh Bok Lai), a widower who also happens to own a defunct washing machine— the same model as Teoh’s. We later learn that Mr. Wong’s son-in-law is Yap, Teoh’s co-worker. James Lee describes the work as two different films spliced together—a workplace/bachelor romance, followed by a Cantonese family melodrama with the interlude of a failed attempt at turning the speechless automaton into a prostitute.

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Lee has stated that, “she could be an alien, a ghost, an illegal worker” (Chauly 2004, n.p.). Regardless of which of these three categories The Woman belongs to, she can be understood as an automaton in part because she performs domestic labor automatically, but also because she represents a “technology” that her user is incapable of understanding. In the words of Kevin La Grandeur, “we do not perceive the slippery nature of the dialectical relationship between them and us, between maker and made, master and servant; we do not keep in mind that we are, in terms of systems theory, always and already enmeshed in a networked relationship with our prosthetic inventions” (La Grandeur 2001, 234). That is to say, whether she is alien or mechanical, her “owners” do not perceive their dependence upon her nor are they capable of understanding her design. As in Dislocation, the film’s characters are immersed in a technologically advanced society, but alienated from scientific solutions. The divisions of labor highlighted as problematic in the transition from socialist to post-socialist economic liberalization in Mainland China are at issue in James Lee’s film set in contemporary Malaysia under contemporary conditions of globalization as well—the robot can be read as both a critique of gendered domestic labor and of ethnic divisions in domestic labor as an industrial undertaking. Tilman Bamgärtel argues that the film is one of a number of recent Southeast Asian independent productions addressing “the anxieties of the newly emerging middle class” (Baumgärtel 2012, 5). The automaton also functions in both contexts as a locus for contemplating the difference between human beings and machines. All of the characters in The Beautiful Washing Machine blur the lines between human, automaton, and machine. Male homosocial contact primarily involves mutely exchanging and smoking cigarettes. Long dolly shots follow the characters through the aisles of supermarkets arrayed with factory-produced foodstuffs as they imitate one another in the reproduction of domestic life. A conversation between Yap and his wife about an affair he is having is simply avoided. The longest exchanges of dialogue consist of service-industry talk: selling and servicing the broken washing machine; a manager straightening out an employee’s attitude; and ambient television commercials. Teoh is chastised by his boss for “poor performance at work,” and just like the English phrase, the Chinese phrase (工作表现), connotes both poor execution of labor tasks and lackluster presentation, or affective engagement in said tasks. His boss goes on to inform Teoh that he knows that these work issues are related to relationship problems and to exhort him to work those out as quickly as possible, and again hinting at the dissolution of the barrier between household and workplace. These exchanges of ­professional information are dominated by a constant diegetic hum of air conditioners and other industrial appliances. Human beings’ mechanical engagement in their own alienated labor and the apparent humanity of machines in The Beautiful Washing Machine echoes

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Minsoo Kang’s reading of human beings as growing more machine-like through the repetition of rationalized factory labor in Disraeli’s Coningsby (Kang 2011, 233). Mr. Wong wears a robot mask whenever he experiences sexual impulses—watching gay pornography, watching The Woman wash clothing, and making a pass at her. He is thus most deeply in touch with his biological human instincts when he masquerades as a robot from an animated children’s series. In the first half of the film, Teoh, a young office worker who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend, purchases a used washing machine. Ignoring the advice of the electronics store clerk, Teoh chooses the second-hand washing machine, an obsolete household appliance whose avocado-green shell invokes nostalgia for a bygone era. He discovers that the washing machine does not work and because it is out of warranty it cannot be repaired. A series of calls to repair centers and visits from technicians ensues, but to no avail. The washing machine seemingly chooses when it will and will not function, leading Teoh to plead with it out loud to start working again. The quaintly outdated machine thus becomes another aspect of Teo’s alienation—a ­technology that he is unable to comprehend or repair. He moves it into the living room where “they” watch a commercial for Toh Toh brand ketchup that exhorts viewers to call a hotline for recipes. Teoh calls the hotline and tells the operator that he wants to make the ­recipe for his girlfriend, who also saw the commercial. The Woman seemingly emerges from the machine after Teoh bakes the chicken for her/it. Teoh awakens one night to find that the washing machine has mysteriously begun working and the mute Woman is squatting next to it eating a bowl of instant noodles. Teoh immediately begins assigning her domestic chores, and she complies. The plot of the film is decidedly unscientific: Teoh makes no attempt to investigate where The Woman could have come from, he is apparently unable to troubleshoot and repair the broken washing machine himself. A brief flash of background dialogue that may explain The Woman’s origins is decidedly pseudo-scientific. In an interview on television moments before The Woman appears, a man on a show about UFOs speculates that aliens “could actually be people from a different time zone.” Whether ghost, alien, or migrant laborer, The Woman becomes an object to be possessed, and the subject of Teoh’s scopophilic fantasy. Echoing Zhao Shuxin choosing clothing for his robot double in Dislocation, Teoh takes The Woman to a clothing store where he chooses outfits for her as if she were a doll. In the next sequence, Teoh confronts a man following the two of them through a supermarket in a show of wordless primal dominance, chasing him off. This confrontation is immediately followed by series of shots depicting Teoh watching and photographing The Woman as she performs various household chores wearing high heels and a dress of his choosing. Utterly devoid of dialogue, and interrupted at one point by the woman glaring disapprovingly out across the fourth wall

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of the cinema in response to a camera flash, the ten-minute long sequence is an unsettling disruption of cinema’s male gaze. Teoh attempts to turn her into an ATM by forcing The Woman into prostitution, a business decision that is visually coded by having the characters stand in front of a bank of ATMs in search of solicitors, where they end up bargaining over how much a liaison with her will cost. This venture fails when the first John Teoh finds falls off the bed at a love hotel and is knocked unconscious. The woman flees and the hotel manager steals the John’s belongings. The John and his friends find Teoh in front of the ATM machines where the original transaction took place, and they beat and stab him to death. In the second half of the film, The Woman is adopted as a domestic servant by Mr. Wong. Both Mr. Wong and his wayward son begin an Oedipal competition for The Woman’s affection. Fearing the familial shift brought about by the interloper, Mr. Wong’s daughter accidentally stabs The Woman, and she apparently dies, only to disappear mysteriously. The final shot of the film features her reappearance as a store clerk at the local supermarket, but she is no longer mute. Lee’s description of the second half of the film as a Cantonese family melodrama again points to the female automaton as a vector for anxieties about the relationship between contemporary economic shifts and their threat to the stability of the household. The ways in which the men in the film so readily adopt The Woman as a domestic and potential sexual servant illustrate what Donna Haraway terms the “non-existence of women except as a product of male desire” (Haraway 2000, 299). Like Teoh, Mr. Wong seems to maintain the machine as a material keepsake of his widowed wife and the domestic harmony she represents. The domestic appliance that morphs into a female slave embodies a solution for the young bachelor having a hard time establishing his own nuclear family and the widower trying to maintain his. The Woman’s own desire seemingly parallels the fickle functionality of the washing machine—when Yap forces himself on her, the diegetic hum of Mr. Wong’s washing machine spontaneously beginning a wash cycle is an unsettling indication that she, like her machine counterpart, appears to be “turned on.” The urban landscape of The Beautiful Washing Machine, like Dislocation, is profoundly alienated, almost entirely devoid of people. Much like Huang Jianxin’s futuristic utopia, Lee’s unnamed late capitalist Malaysian city is a hollowed out urban space. In both films, urban alienation has reached its apotheosis through the near-complete elimination of any fellow citizens. Not only are there very few exchanges of information or even casual courtesy; it is as if people outside of the main characters’ immediate circle of colleagues, service-industry exchanges, and nuclear family simply do not exist. The supermarket that Teoh regularly visits, piled high with a cornucopia of consumer goods, is for the most part empty and silent save for the hum of rows of chest freezers. Neither film gives any explicit indication whether the action occurs in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, or any number of other cities.

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Looking Forward: Whither Sinophone SF Cinema? An enduring question for Chinese-language science fiction is its apparent absence during long periods of time in China’s recent history. Even as recent scholarship has filled in many of these gaps, lacunae still remain. The field of Chinese SF cinema is one example, an area almost completely lacking both primary texts and scholarly examination. One common explanation for the paucity of Chinese SF film is the cost of production. However, these two films demonstrate that large budgets are not necessary conditions for quality science fiction cinema. Dislocation makes some use of split screen filming in order to have actor Liu Zifeng (刘子枫) appear as both Zhao Shuxin and his robot double in the same shot. This technique, pioneered by George Melies in the late nineteenth century, is relatively simple. Beyond this, SF elements are signaled mostly through use of diegetic sound and through the inclusion of computer terminals, and a few other bits of “scientific” looking scenery. The Beautiful Washing Machine was filmed on digital video in ten days, and reportedly cost only 50,000 USD to make. The major SF conceit of both films is that two key characters are not human—a conceit that requires no special effects whatsoever. I do not find questions of budgeting or available production tools to be an adequate explanation for the paucity of Sinophone SF cinema. Given that there is relatively little SF cinema throughout the Chinese-speaking world, I also find the notion of the political climate in the PRC to be an insufficient explanation. This question can be answered in part by re-examining the ways examples of Chinese SF cinema are identified as part of the “selective tradition,” (see Milner 2011, 2012) potentially expanding the sample size of films labeled as SF or containing SF elements. Wei Yang has identified a trend in Hong Kong cinema to sublimate SF themes into other locally dominant genres (Yang 2013). That observation appears to pertain here, where themes of the automaton are incorporated into film texts that can be read in one case as a fifth-generation urban film, and in another case as an ad hoc mixture of workplace and family melodrama. Minsoo Kang argues that “for a full understanding of the automaton motif in the Western imagination as a whole, one must take into account both aspects of the mechanical entity, to see how the object functioned in different historical contexts as the representation of both human empowerment and oppression, liberation and segregation, transcendence and debasement. In fact, it is precisely this capacity of the automaton to hold such disparate meanings that makes it such a powerful and enduring conceptual object” (Kang 2011, 305). In both Dislocation and The Beautiful Washing Machine, the automaton again appears as a threat to an already unstable household and economic order. Chinese SF author Han Song has attributed the similarities between Chinese robot stories and western robot stories to what he describes as a derivative tradition still held in the thrall of Asimov’s robot stories (Wen Xinhong 2012). As part of a global selective tradition born in the age of colonial modernity, the family resemblance of robot narratives

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should be little surprise. Given the number of commonalities in these two representations of automata in very different national/historical contexts in the Chinese-speaking world, it is also fair to begin to examine more critically what material conditions facilitate the apparent ease of translation of narratives and automata.

Notes 1. The so-called “Fifth Generation” was the first class of directors to graduate from Beijing Film Academy after instruction resumed in wake of the Cultural Revolution. The class also included Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and a number of other directors nationally recognized for a bold, new cinematic style that broke away from the stale dogma of socialist realism. 2. The film finished third in Chinese box office earnings for 2009, behind disaster film 2012 and the second installment in the Transformers series. 3. The trilogy may be read as an exploration of China’s three main philosophical traditions. Black Cannon Incident is a modern parable of the Confucian principle of “rectification of names” (正名), where mistranslations and the slipperiness of language lead first to the demise of the protagonist and then to the demise of an industrial engineering project. Dislocation illustrates the Daoist principle of wuwei (无为), demonstrating the folly of human artifice. Samsara, named for the Buddhist notion cyclic of reincarnation, features an alienated young man who is deeply unhappy despite being financially well off.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Baumgärtel, Tilman (ed.). 2012. Introduction. In Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, ed. Tilman Baumgärtel, 1–12. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chauly, Bernard. 2004. In Conversation with James Lee. Asia-Europe Foundation. https://culture360.asef.org/magazine/conversation-james-lee/. Accessed Aug 2019. Chen, Jie 陈捷. 2002. Lun Huang Jianxin de chengshi beixiju chuangzuo [On Huang Jianxin’s Urban Tragicomedies] Yishu baijia 5 (3): 125–130. Chu, Seo-Young. 2011. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Groth, Aimee. 2011. Binge Drinking Is Becoming a Requirement for Chinese Execs. Business Insider, August 23. http://www.businessinsider.com/china-drinking-culture-2011-8. Accessed 22 Aug 2019. Haraway, Donna. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 34–65. London: Routlege Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Iovene, Paola. 2014. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kakoudaki, Despina. 2014. Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

636  N. ISAACSON Kang, Minsoo. 2011. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuoshu, Harry H. 2010. Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. La Grandeur, Kevin. 2001. The Persistent Peril of the Artificial Slave. SF Studies 38 (2) (July): 232–252. Lent, John A. 2012. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Independent of What? In Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, ed. Tilman Bamgärtel. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Li, Donglei 李东雷. 2009. Chengshi shenghuo de jilu yu sisuo—lun Huang Jianxin chengshi dianying [Documentation and Thoughts on City Life—On Huang Jianxin’s Urban Films]. Dianying wenxue 18: 33–34. Mitropoulos, Angela. 2012. Uncanny Robots and Affective Labor in the Oikonomia. Cultural Studies Review 18 (1) (March): 153–173. Milner, Andrew. 2011. Science Fiction and the Literary Field. Science fiction Studies 38 (3) (November): 393–411. ———. 2012. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Otis, Eileen. 2008. Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China. American Sociological Review 73 (1) (February): 15–36. Pickowicz, Paul. 2012. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation and Controversy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke University Press. Telotte, J.P. 2016. Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film. New York, NY: Routlege Press. Wagner, Rudolph. 2003. A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. New York: SUNY Press. Wang, Eugene Yuejin. 1996. Samsara: Self and the Crisis of Visual Narrative. In Narratives of Agency: Self-making in China, India and Japan, ed. Wimal Dissanayake, 35–55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Hui 汪晖. 2008. Qu zhengzhi hua de zhengzhi: duan ershi shiji de zhongjie yu 90 niandai [De-Politicized Politics: The End of the Short Twentieth Century and the 1990s]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian. Wang, Shuo. 2006. Wanzhu 顽主 [Troublemakers]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe. Wen, Xinhong. 2012. Fang kehuan zuojia Han Song: Zhongguo kehuan li Asimofu hai you duo yuan? [Interview with Chinese SF Author Han Song: How Far Is Chinese SF from Asimov?]. Zhongguo kexue bao. http://www.chinawriter.com. cn/2012/2012-04-10/123967.html Accessed 22 Aug 2019. Yang, Wei. 2013. Voyage into an Unknown Future: A Genre Analysis of Chinese SF Film in the New Millenium. Science Fiction Studies 40 (1) (March): 133–147.

CHAPTER 36

Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia Carlos Rojas What kind of idea is Superman Holey Weenie? Just think, he is injured, with a hole in that area below the waist that supermen treat as the most lofty site. That has become a very vulnerable cavity—an entry-point into an experience of illness, and an object of painful obsession. Luo Yijun, Superman Kuang (364)

Luo Yijun’s 駱以軍 2018 novel Superman Kuang (Kuang chaoren 匡超人) is a story about a very sick man in contemporary Taiwan. It opens with a detailed description of an interior space that, as will later be revealed, suggestively mirrors the narrator’s own somatic symptoms. More specifically, the first chapter begins with a scene in which the narrator arrives at an establishment called Russian Restaurant accompanied by a young woman named Fei Wen and two other unidentified men. The group is initially seated at a table near the bathroom, and the narrator notes the presence of a strong smell: “I detected (or perhaps it was just my imagination) a sharp odor resembling the scent produced by water after a rain, but I couldn’t determine whether it was fresh or putrid.” In the same paragraph, the narrator continues to dwell on the room’s literal and metaphorical scents, observing that the entire restaurant was suffused by “a distinctive moldy scent,” and that the patrons had “an ineffable scent of loneliness” (Luo 2018: 21).1 The narrator recalls how the restaurant used to have a freezer compartment in the basement, where diners could enjoy their meal bundled up in coats in subzero temperatures while onlookers observed them through the freezer’s glass walls (“like observing penguins in a zoo”). Then, after a double paragraph break, the final portion of the narrative abruptly shifts to a C. Rojas (*)  Duke University, Durham, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_36

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description of how the narrator and his companions find themselves locked inside a “small and completely dark room”—which may or may not be the freezer compartment mentioned earlier in the chapter. The narrator claims he has no idea how he and his companions ended up in this space, but then he is suddenly distracted by an unanticipated smell: “I detected a familiar odor, and felt as though my brain were splitting open. Another motor inside my head whirred into action, at which point I realized that this was the smell of semen. Fuck! How could this smell be appearing at this time, in this situation?” (27). The narrator speculates that Fei Wen must have taken advantage of the darkness to masturbate or fellate one of the narrator’s male companions, and furthermore recalls how she had once done the same to him in a dark karaoke bar several years earlier. Although in some respects this opening chapter seems oddly disconnected from the remainder of the novel (for instance, neither the Russian Restaurant nor Fei Wen is mentioned again), in other respects the chapter, with its emphasis on dark, underground recesses and mysterious odors, succinctly anticipates the central conceit of the novel as a whole: that the narrator discovers that he has developed a mysterious “black hole” (heidong 黑洞) on the lower region that he affectionately calls his “weenie” (jiji 雞雞).2 While the precise etiology of the lesion is never specified, it is nevertheless clear that it is exceedingly painful, though the narrator postpones seeking medical treatment until his condition is so far advanced that it is producing a putrid, necrotic stench. This phallic “black hole” quickly becomes an object of fascination, and comes to serve as a locus around which he constructs a peculiar alter ego that he calls “Superman Holey Weenie” (pojiji chaoren 破雞雞超人). Ironically named after the “hole” that the narrator has on his “weenie,” the fictional Superman Holey Weenie is a figure of illness incarnate—reflecting a process by which an infirmity that would normally be viewed as embarrassing and debilitating is instead transformed into a source of symbolic empowerment and creative inspiration. The Superman Holey Weenie persona also intersects with a number of other fictional personas who similarly function as the narrator’s alter egos, including a figure inspired by the character of the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), in the Ming-dynasty classic Journey to the West (Xiyouji 西遊記). With its repeated shifts back and forth between the narrative’s primary diegetic plane and a series of embedded narratives, Superman Kuang has a distinctively metatextual quality. This tendency is introduced in the first chapter when, after recalling the restaurant’s basement freezer compartment, the narrator suddenly breaks from the primary diegesis to offer a metatextual commentary about the novel itself: Perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but on the off-chance that my novel is still circulating years from now, I’m concerned that future readers might assume that this Moscow Restaurant that I’m describing is located in Harbin, Qiqihar,

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Hailar, or some other city located along the northern border of Manchuria—as a result of which my description might fail to convey the illusion I’m attempting to invoke. No, the truth is that I’m writing about a city called Taipei, which is a temporary capital on a southern island. (23)

He then proceeds to speculate that if future archeologists were to find the remains of this restaurant in the city’s geological substratum, they would inevitably conclude that the owner must be some sort of “weirdo” who was simply running the establishment for his own personal amusement. This metatextual observation not only underscores the work’s status as a fictional narrative but also emphasizes its real-world backdrop, specifically the narrative’s association with Taipei, which is presented as having a distinctly transient and interstitial status (“a temporary capital on a southern island”). One of contemporary Taiwan’s most critically acclaimed authors, Luo Yijun writes in a frenetic style that could be viewed as a cross between Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. Like many of Luo’s works, Superman Kuang emphasizes the narrative’s distinctively Taiwanese setting while at the same time interweaving a wide array of international allusions, including not only cultural allusions but also scientific topics ranging from medicine to astrophysics, information technology to cybernetics. Here, I’m particularly interested in the novel’s thematization of topics of medicine and disease—but not for what the novel says about science in the abstract, but rather for how it invokes and uses a variety of scientific terms and concepts. In particular, Luo’s work implicitly uses a variation on the sick man of Asia trope to explore how a site of apparent weakness can be rhetorically transformed into a positive locus of identity. Below, I begin by considering a set of Chinese literary discourses of medicine and illness against which Luo Yijun’s novel is positioned, and particularly the early modern trope of China as the sick man of Asia. I argue that the sick man of Asia discourse reflects the interest, in early twentieth-century China, in importing a variety of modern medical conceptual paradigms—which, in China, were typically coded as “Western”—and using them to advance a local agenda of national strengthening. At the same time, however, many of these same paradigms had rather ambiguous implications when they were transposed into cultural metaphors, suggesting that the process of targeting sociopolitical “pathogens” could easily slip into a process of attacking nominally “healthy” elements of the Chinese body politic itself. After considering early twentieth-century discourses of medicine and illness, I return to a discussion of Luo Yijun’s novel and examine the way in which it pivots around a transformation of a peculiar illness into a site of symbolic empowerment and creative transformation. The novel draws extensively on Chinese literary traditions (not to mention a vast assortment of international texts and phenomena), but at its heart it remains very concerned with the specific space of Taipei, Taiwan. To the extent that early twentieth-century Chinese reformers

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were concerned about China’s position in the shadow of Western imperialism, Luo Yijun reflects a parallel concern with Taipei’s status as a “temporary capital on a southern island,” positioned in the shadows of multiple different imperial formations.

The Sick Man of Asia The now-familiar sick man of Asia formulation originated from a broader set of Western-language discourses informed by imperialist ideologies and the metaphorical conceit of the body politic.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, it was common to refer to the Ottoman Empire as the Sick Man of Europe, and a variety of other nations were also described as “sick,” including Turkey, Persia, Morocco, and China.4 The first Chinese writer to use this sick man trope to describe China appears to have been the late Qing scholar and translator Yan Fu, who in 1895 published an article in the Tianjin newspaper Zhibao in which he noted that “a nation is like a human body,” and then proceeded to ask whether it could be said that “contemporary China resembles a sick man?” (1986: vol. 1, 5–15). Coincidentally, it was also in 1895 that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II is credited with having been the first to use the illness-inspired yellow peril metaphor (“die gelbe Gefahr” in German) to refer to East Asians. Although the Kaiser initially used this epithet to describe Japan (following Japan’s defeat of China in the first Sino-Japanese War), other Western critics subsequently used the phrase primarily to describe China, reflecting an anxiety that vast hordes of Chinese people might overrun their lands. The sick man and yellow peril metaphors are almost precise mirror images of one another: one compares the Chinese nation to a diseased body (the sick man of Asia) while the other likens the Chinese people to an infectious disease (the yellow peril metaphor tropes not only on the view of Asians as a “yellow” race, but also on contemporary anxieties about yellow fever, a deadly infectious disease that was common in the nineteenth century). The implication, accordingly, was that the sociopolitical dysfunction associated with China could impact and spread to the broader international community, thereby transforming the nation’s figurative sickness into a source of potential strength (as in the comparison to a virulent infectious disease). These two metaphors were put into dialogue with one another as early as 1896, in an anonymous English-language article titled “China’s True Condition,” which was first published in the Shanghai newspaper North China Daily News, and was republished the following month in the Chineselanguage Shiwu bao. The first paragraph of the English version of the article opens with a reference to the sick man trope and concludes with a version of the yellow peril trope: “China has long been the sick man of the Far East, but since the [Sino-Japanese] war all the world has seen for the first time how very sick the sick man is…. China did not deceive us; the war only revealed the rottenness which every honest observer knew to be there. The world sees

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these things in their true proportions now; Europe and Lord Wolseley are at present relieved from a fear of a warlike, yellow, and innumerable host overrunning our Western civilization” (1896). Actually, the convergence of these two tropes in the “China’s True Condition” article illustrates a discursive logic that was already embedded within the sick man trope itself. That is to say, although the article implies that the yellow peril and the sick man tropes denote mutually contradictory conditions (i.e., the West initially viewed China as a threat [“a fear of a warlike, yellow, and innumerable host .. ”] but subsequently realized that in reality the nation was actually “very sick”), in fact the sick man trope already contained within itself both of these contravalent implications: the latter trope’s weakness always already contained the possibility that a designation of weakness might be transformed into an affirmation of strength. While Westerners initially used the sick man of Asia formulation in a pejorative fashion, Chinese reformers subsequently transformed it into a rallying cry for national reform, and in doing so they engaged in a practice that Nietzsche has called ressentiment—referring to the practice of taking a condition of empirical weakness and transforming it into a site of symbolic power. Aiming his critique specifically at Christianity, with its well-known advocacy of “turning the other cheek,” Nietzsche identified a rhetorical strategy wherein an entire ideological framework is developed around a strategic affirmation of what might otherwise be perceived as weakness. In constructing a reformist discourse and national identity around a rhetorical affirmation of China’s weak and diseased condition, early twentieth-century reformers were engaging in precisely this sort of strategy. The sick man of Asia trope, and its attendant focus on the diseased state of the Chinese nation, remained a persistent theme in early twentieth-century Chinese literature. In fact, it was this emphasis on China’s figurative weakness that the U.S.-based Chinese literature scholar C. T. Hsia would later call an “obsession with China,” which he described as a collective obsession with the nation’s perceived weakness and infirmity. Hsia uses this assessment to critique the tendency of Chinese authors to focus narrowly on a set of provincial concerns, which, he argues, stands in stark contrast to Western authors who tend to focus on more universal concerns. Ironically, in critiquing Chinese writers’ collective fascination with the nation’s putative illness, Hsia himself uses a metaphor of disease to describe this condition, contending that China was “afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity” (Hsia 1971: 533–534). Even as Hsia criticizes modern Chinese authors’ tendency to focus on China’s figuratively diseased state, his concept of an “obsession with China” could itself be seen as a symptom of a parallel focus on China’s figurative illness (“spiritual disease”). Hsia’s diagnosis of Chinese authors’ obsession with China, in other words, could be viewed as a symptom of his own parallel obsession with China. Although Hsia was critiquing a rhetorical tendency that extended

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throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the phenomenon he identified was particularly prominent in the case of the May Fourth Movement—a reformist movement that took its name from the May Fourth, 1919 student protests of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which the students perceived to be deeply prejudicial toward China and which went to advocate a variety of cultural and sociopolitical reforms. One of the best-known narratives about the May Fourth Movement’s link between medicine and literature relates to the author Lu Xun. Widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun recalls, in the 1923 preface to his first collection of stories, Call to Arms (Nahan 吶喊), enduring a traumatizing childhood experience in which he realized that traditional Chinese medical treatments were unable to cure his ailing father. He subsequently traveled to Japan in 1903 to study medicine (and specifically modern biomedicine), but while he was there he had an epiphany when, at the end of one of his school classes, his instructor was showing the students some slides from the ongoing Russo-Japanese War. When the instructor showed an image of a group of Chinese in northern China gathered around to watch a fellow Chinese be executed by the Japanese for allegedly spying for the Russians, Lu Xun says he was so shocked by what he perceived to be the apathetic expressions on the faces of the spectators that he immediately decided to drop out of medical school and instead devote himself to helping his countrymen by trying to heal not their bodies but rather their spirits (1996: vol. 1, 415–421). Although Lu Xun claims that his subsequent investment in literature was a displacement of his earlier determination to study biomedicine (which itself is presented as having been a displacement of his initial faith in traditional Chinese medical remedies), it is nevertheless clear that medical concerns continued to play a prominent role in Lu Xun’s writings, as well as the broader discursive environment within which he was positioned. For instance, themes of illness and treatment are central to some of Lu Xun’s best-known stories, such as “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji” 狂人日記; 1918), which revolves around mental illness (the story’s fictional preface states that the diary kept by the work’s eponymous “madman” is being preserved in the hope that it might be useful to medical researchers), and “Medicine” (“Yao” 藥; 1923), which describes an unsuccessful attempt to cure a boy’s tuberculosis by using a traditional folk remedy consisting of a steamed bun soaked in human blood (the boy in the story ultimately dies from tuberculosis, as did Lu Xun himself, thirteen years later). In both of these works, moreover, depictions of illness are used to reflect on a broader set of societal dysfunctions. For instance, in “Diary of a Madman,” the diarist’s (putative) mental illness appears to be a form of paranoid schizophrenia, and specifically a conviction that everyone around him has cannibalistic tendencies. Traditional interpretations of the story typically view the diarist’s “madness” as a form of unexpected lucidity, whereby the diarist is suddenly able to perceive, in a

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metaphorical manner, a set of self-destructive tendencies that plague traditional Chinese society. Similarly, in “Medicine,” not only does the bloodsoaked steamed bun fail to cure the boy’s tuberculosis, but furthermore it is also revealed that the blood in question was obtained from a revolutionary who had been executed on account of his political activities. In depicting the decision to feed the tubercular boy the revolutionary’s blood, the story is similarly using the metaphor of cannibalism to criticize China’s conservative and repressive tendencies. More abstractly, many works by Lu Xun and his contemporaries also incorporate modern medical concepts, particularly ones associated with microbiology. It was a microbiology class that Lu Xun was taking on the day in 1906 when he was shown the execution slide that led him to decide to shift his focus from medicine to literature. In fact, Lu Xun’s enrollment in medical school coincided with a more general paradigm shift in medical knowledge that led to the emergence of modern biomedicine, and in no sector was this paradigm shift more dramatic than in microbiology. Beginning in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, a series of interrelated discoveries radically transformed contemporary understandings of infection, vaccination, and immune response. Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries followed these scientific developments closely, mobilizing attendant concepts not only for their medical implications but also for their more abstract significance. For instance, in the 1915 inaugural issue of the Youth Magazine (an influential May Fourth literary journal in which Lu Xun published many of his early stories),5 the journal’s founding editor Chen Duxiu published a manifesto titled “Call to Youth,” in which he used a set of microbiological metaphors to describe the Chinese youth who were the journal’s intended readership: Youth have the same relationship to society that fresh and vital cells have to the human body. In the metabolic process, old and rotten cells are constantly being weeded out, thereby creating openings that are promptly filled with fresh and vital cells. If this metabolic process functions correctly, the organism will remain healthy, but if the old and rotten cells are allowed to accumulate, the organism will die. (Chen 1915: 1.1)6

A year later, when the journal changed its name to New Youth, Chen Duxiu published another manifesto, in which he attempted to distinguish between what he called “new youth” (xin qingnian 新青年) and “old youth” (jiu qingnian 舊青年), concluding that it was on account of the decrepit state of the nation’s youth that “everyone calls China the sick man of Asia, and indeed there are hardly any of our youth who would not fall into the category of ‘sick men’” (in Xin qingnian 1916a: 2.1). Although in these two manifestos Chen Duxiu invokes these cellular metaphors in a rather abstract fashion, later in the same 1916 issue in which Chen published his second “new youth” manifesto, he also wrote another article offering a detailed introduction of the work of “two contemporary

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scientists,” one of whom was the Russian-born French microbiologist Élie Metchnikoff, who had won the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on the immune system (1916b: 2.1). In particular, Chen stresses Metchnikoff’s discovery of the immunological function of white blood cells, or what Metchnikoff called phagocytes—including not only these cells’ role in identifying and figuratively devouring harmful pathogens, but also the fact that various immune system disorders can result in a situation where these white blood cells mistakenly target the body’s own healthy tissue. This description of Metchnikoff’s interest in autoimmune disorders mirrors the issue that Chen had raised in the journal’s inaugural issue, in which he had expressed concern that the society’s “metabolic processes” might fail to target and eliminate “old and rotten” elements (and, Chen implies, might instead even begin targeting the “fresh and vital” elements themselves). In June of 1918, meanwhile, another prominent May Fourth reformer, Hu Shi, guest-edited a special issue of New Youth on the works of Henrik Ibsen, including a detailed analysis of Ibsen’s play Enemy of the People. The play’s protagonist, Doctor Stockman, discovers that his town’s medicinal hot springs are contaminated with an infectious pathogen and then attempts to convince the town’s leaders that they need to shut down the hot springs. The town leaders, however, resist Stockman’s advice on the grounds that shutting down the hot springs would undermine one of the town’s primary sources of income. In his summary of the play, Hu Shi offers an elaborate medical analogy comparing Stockman to the immune system’s white blood cells, which work tirelessly to root out unhealthy pathogens: It is as if [Ibsen] were saying, “People’s bodies all rely on the innumerable white blood cells in their bloodstream to be perpetually battling the harmful microbes that enter the body, and to make certain that they are all completely eliminated. Only then can the body be healthy and the spirit complete.” The health of the society and of the nation depend completely on these white blood cells, which are never satisfied, never content, and at every moment are battling the evil and the filthy elements in society. Only then can there be hope for social improvement and advancement. (Hu 1986: vol. 6, 9–28)

Not only is this metaphor not explicitly referenced in Ibsen’s original play, but furthermore the way Hu Shi applies the metaphor seems to be at odds with the play’s own plot. In particular, Hu Shi’s immunological metaphor stresses that the white blood cells function as a large aggregate (“innumerable white blood cells”), whereas Ibsen’s play repeatedly emphasizes Stockman’s position as the only individual advocating that the hot springs be closed down. (Stockman’s motto is that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”) In this respect, a more apt application of the immunological metaphor would be to compare the townspeople to white blood cells, for they unite together to attack Dr. Stockman, whom they perceive to be “the enemy of the people.”

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Lu Xun’s signature short story “Diary of a Madman” appeared in the May 1918 issue of New Youth immediately preceding Hu Shi’s special issue on Ibsen. Lu Xun explicitly discusses Metchnikoff’s concept of phagocytosis elsewhere—for instance, in a 1925 article in which he critiques what he calls China’s “disease of canonicity,” comparing China’s Confucian classics to the accumulation of waste material in the body, and noting that in his writings on the immune system Metchnikoff had contended that this accumulation of waste material in the body could trigger an autoimmune reaction in which the body’s white blood cells may begin consuming the body’s own healthy tissue (Lu Xun 1925: 127–132). However, in “Diary of a Madman” Lu Xun is more concerned with the abstract metaphor of consumption itself. Although the theme of cannibalism is typically interpreted to be a critique of Chinese society’s involutive tendencies, if the story is read in the context of the contemporary cluster of microbiological allusions by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and others, there emerges an equally suggestive line of interpretation whereby cannibalism is comparable to the phagocytotic function of the body’s own immune system, which is constantly balanced on the knifeedge between a “proper” focus on malignant pathogens and a “cannibalistic” attack on healthy tissue belonging to the body (or body politic) itself. The implication is that just as the trope of illness can be remobilized via a logic of ressentiment, and transformed from a figure of weakness into one of strength, the body’s immunological system can similarly be transformed from a defense against disease into a disease-like state in its own right. Together, these intertwined metaphors of the sick man and of the immune system captured China’s attempts to negotiate its relationship with the West in the early twentieth century, a period when China was widely perceived as being in a position of relative weakness vis-à-vis the West, even as it attempted to productively transpose that weakness into strength.

Superman Holey Weenie Published precisely a century after Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and Hu Shi’s special issue on Ibsen, Luo Yijun’s 2018 novel Superman Kuang similarly mobilizes the figure of disease as an elaborate metaphor. The narrator’s genital lesion is first introduced about a third of the way through the novel. Titled “Beautiful Monkey King” (Mei houwang), the chapter in question is preceded by a sequence in which a local deity by the name of Tudi (literally, “Earth”) suddenly appears before the narrator, as though he had just stepped out of a “hole” (dong 洞) that had opened up in the earth. The following “Beautiful Monkey King” chapter describes various legendary characters from Journey to the West (including the protagonist Sun Wukong, the “Monkey King”) somehow entering the narrator’s life in contemporary Taiwan. The chapter runs for more than a hundred pages and is printed on a gray paper that is visually distinct from that of the rest of the novel, making it appear as though it stands as a text embedded within the larger text.

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The “Beautiful Monkey King” chapter is immediately followed by a chapter titled “Superman Holey Weenie,” which similarly revolves around a mysterious “hole” (dong 洞) that becomes a site of extraordinary generative potential. In particular, the narrator introduces, for the first time, the mysterious lesion that he discovers on his genitals: A hole opened up in my scrotum. At first the nature of the wound was rather indeterminate, and I simply felt the sort of piercing agony as though someone were making an incision at the base of my manhood. I went to a Western pharmacy to buy the sort of ointment that you use for burns and knife wounds, and applied it to the affected area. However, its condition appeared to deteriorate, until one day when I was sitting in a chair I looked down and examined the area more carefully, and noticed that through the lesion I could see bright red flesh, combined with fat-like whitish pus. It was still expanding and changing shape. It was like when you’re watching a weather report on TV and see description of a new typhoon forming in the Pacific, that whirl-shaped wound expanded from the size of a one-yuan coin to that of a fifty-yuan coin. When I went outside, I felt an acute sense of shame, and I had to walk with my legs spread apart, like the legs of a compass. (196)

When the narrator’s friends learn about his condition, they joke that he should write a series of adventure stories revolving around the fictional “Superman Holey Weenie,” including topics such as “Superman Holey Weenie rescues an airplane that was about to be hijacked by terrorists,” “Superman Holey Weenie makes China’s smog disappear for a day,” “Superman Holey Weenie grants the dreams of students in a rural school,” “Superman Holey Weenie and Fan Bingbing are trapped beneath a collapsed building in a television reality show, and they later fall in love,” and “Superman Holey Weenie meets a member of the Aisin Gioro clan, who wants to bring the clan back into power and feels that [Superman Holey Weenie] is a Li Lianying figure sent by heaven to help him accomplish this objective, and therefore the two of them proceed to engage in secret activities in Beijing” (197). Sure enough, a couple of pages later—after the narrator has visited several more doctors, but found that they are capable neither of curing his condition nor of specifying what precisely is causing it—the narrative shifts abruptly from a first-person account told in the voice of the narrator, to a third-person narrative describing this fictional superhero: Superman Holey Weenie woke up with a topsy-turvy feeling that time has disappeared. However, to say that he “woke up” seems to imply that he had previously been either sound asleep or dreaming, but his experience was not all like this, and instead his was a case of “originally not being present at all.” But is there a more erudite type of description? Or hope, or promise? Or a small-scale genesis, he suddenly appeared out of nowhere in this picture: an entire jolty train car full of people standing and sitting, all ashy and without personality. He was among them, but no one found this at all strange. Of course, they were

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all on their cell phones. If you were to look in from outside, you might assume that humanity (or at least this group of a hundred-odd men and women, adults and children, who were assembled inside this metal train car) had evolved into a vegetative state—or a species of fungus, like moss—whereby they only expend energy on an extremely small sliver of their cerebral cortex, or on tiny rapid-fire movements between the retina and the eyeball. However Superman Holey Weenie was actually experiencing a change in medium—this involving not time, rather that the experience of “rupture.” Actually, in the story of his creation and birth, these people on their cell phones were all already gray corpses. (200)

Superman Holey Weenie is presented as a figure of pure potentiality, a transformation of the narrator’s painful wound into a site of fungible identity and creative transformation. This figure, furthermore, is presented as being not constrained by time, but rather as being the product of a process of “rupture” itself—with “rupture” (po 破) being precisely the term used for “holey” in the Chinese version of the Superman Holey Weenie moniker (pojiji chaoren). The narrator’s illness-inspired fabulation, it turns out, is infectious, and on one occasion several of his friends gather together and coin superhero personas based on their respective infirmities and disabilities. For instance, there is a “Superman Single Kidney” (Yi ke shen chaoren 一顆腎超人), a “Superman Extraordinarily High Liver Index” (Ganzhishu wuxiangao chaoren 肝指數無 限高超人), a “Superman myasthenia gravis” (Chongzhengjiwuli chaoren 重症 肌无力超人), and a “Superman Ankylosing spondylitis” (Jiangzhixing jichuiyan 僵直性脊椎炎) (255–257). The result is an eccentric community of invalids and misfits, who each transform their physical infirmity into a site of symbolic empowerment. This focus on the generative potential of the narrator’s genital lesion is pursued in different ways throughout the remainder of the novel, with one of the more interesting variants being proposed at the end, when the narrator remarks: How should I put this? That sense of disability that resulted from the process of “developing a very deep hole in the middle of the body’s central axis” was different from the sense of incompleteness and the feeling of having a phantom limb that one develops after having one’s hand or foot amputated; and it was also different from the shift in the body’s center of gravity and the feeling of acute gloom that eunuchs, in the past, experienced after the removal of their body’s source of testosterone production … Instead, that hole on his weenie resembled a living being, and every day it leads toward a realm about which you have no knowledge—that of antimatter or the dark universe. It leads to another dimension, and it nimbly becomes larger and deeper. (426)

Here, the narrator invokes the sense of generative loss experienced by both Chinese eunuchs and amputees, yet at the same time differentiates his sense of loss from theirs. Instead, he describes his genital lesion as a “living being”

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and, in a metaphor repeatedly elaborated in the novel, compares the hole on his scrotum to a celestial black hole that may create a wormhole into other dimensions and parallel universes. At one point, the narrator uses another allusion to the Ming-dynasty novel Journey to the West to bring together the twin themes of (Westernderived) science, medicine, and culture, and the sort of ressentiment-driven transfiguration of values. The narrator mentions a mainland Chinese internet novel titled Biography of Wukong (Wukong zhuan 悟空傳), the premise of which is that early on during their “journey to the West,” Monkey King Sun Wukong actually killed the monk Tripitaka, and the journey was aborted. Consequently, all of what we know about the journey, from the original Ming-dynasty novel Journey to the West, never took place in real life, and instead it was merely the product of a “closed circuit implanted into his brain, which kept replaying endlessly” (386).7 The narrator then asks whether this counterfactual might be applied to our understanding of modern China’s relationship with the West: That is to say, the entire twentieth century we assume we have experienced— including the process of obtaining all different sorts of novels, poems, movies, news reports, philosophy from the West … perhaps it has all been just an illusion, and there was never any such journey to the West? (386)

Here, Luo Yijun’s narrator takes the internet novel’s rewriting of Journey to the West, with its account of the Tang monk Tripitaka’s journey to “the West” (i.e., what is now called South Asia, to obtain some Buddhist scriptures), and transposes it into a reconsideration of modern China’s journey to “the West” (i.e., Europe and America, to obtain Western texts that could assist China’s process of modernization). Moreover, while Luo Yijun’s novel focuses on modern-day China’s quest for Western scriptures in the form of literary and philosophical texts, the same point could also be made about China’s pursuit of other areas of Western knowledge, including medical and scientific knowledge. Journey to the West is, at its heart, a story about transcultural appropriation. It offers a fictional account of a seminal moment in the early introduction of Buddhism to China, but the contemporary internet novel’s rewriting of the story turns this conceit on its head, suggesting that the entire “journey to the West” is an internal fabulation. Similarly, the dominant narrative of China’s modernization has involved a similar focus on a process of cultural appropriation from Europe and America. In this passage, however, Luo Yijun’s narrator asks whether this dominant narrative, together with the assumptions about identity and alterity on which it relies, might similarly be an imaginary projection, a result of a construction of alterity into order to strategically consolidate a sense of collective identity. Applied to Luo Yijun’s novel, the implication is that the narrator’s genital lesion is initially viewed as

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a figure of radical alterity (a “black hole”), but then is embraced as the locus of the narrator’s alter ego (“Superman Holey Weenie”)—and as such, it then becomes reconfigured as a highly productive portal into alternate spaces and dimensions.

Coda David Der-wei Wang’s preface to Luo Yijun’s novel indicates that it was originally going to be titled Superman Holey Weenie (pojiji chaoren), but it was subsequently changed to Superman Kuang (3–14). Given that Superman Holey Weenie is the name of the protagonist’s alter ego, it would seem reasonable to assume that Superman Kuang is the protagonist’s actual name. In fact, however, the main body of the novel never references the name Superman Kuang (Kuang chaoren), and therefore there is no way to confirm (based on the contents of the novel itself) whether or not this is meant to be the narrator’s real name. As many commentators have observed, Kuang chaoren is actually the name of a character in Wu Jingzi’s satirical Qing-dynasty novel The Scholars (儒林外史 Rulin waishi), a work that is referenced repeatedly in Luo Yijun’s work.8 Although the precise relationship between Kuang chaoren (“Superman Kuang”) and Pojiji chaoren (“Superman Holey Weenie”) is not specified within the novel, the novel’s eventual title is aptly chosen and speaks directly to the themes discussed above. In particular, while the Chinese character kuang 匡 does not appear anywhere in the main body of Luo Yijun’s novel, it nevertheless appears many times in The Scholars—where, with only one exception, it is invariably used as a surname. The first time this Chinese character appears in Wu Jingzi’s novel, however, it is in the binome kuangji 匡濟, which is short for kuangshi jishi 匡時濟世, which means roughly “to make the best of times.” In the latter phrase, kuang functions as a verb, meaning roughly “to save,” while also resonating with another meaning of the character, which is “to rectify.” The implication, accordingly, is that already imbedded within the surname of the fictional character from whom Superman Holey Weenie borrows his name, we can find the two logical processes on which the superhero’s identity is grounded: namely, to transform misfortune into good fortune (“making the best of times”), and thereby to “rectify” one’s putative liabilities. Moreover, it is precisely this process of transforming weakness into strength in order to “rectify” the deficiencies of one’s contemporary national condition that characterized the sick man of Asia discourse in late imperial and republican-era China, from which Luo Yijun’s novel seems to take inspiration.

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Notes 1. In each of these references to scents, smells, and odors, the same Chinese character (wei 味) is used, in combination with other characters. 2. The term in question, jiji, literally means “chicken chicken,” with “chicken” (or “cock”) being a common term for “penis” in Chinese. 3.  Several of the points in this section are developed in greater detail in my book Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation. 2015. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 4.  The metaphor had been applied to Turkey as early as 1844, and in a letter to Lord John Russell in 1953, Sir G. H. Seymour, the British envoy to St. Petersburg, quotes Tsar Nicholas I describing the Ottoman Empire as “a sick man—a very sick man.” See Trevor Royle. 1999. Crimea: The Great Crimean War: 1854–1856. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 5. Initially, the journal was published under the title Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi 青年雜誌) but in 1916 it changed its title to New Youth (Xin qingnian 新 青年). 6. For a translation of this essay, see Chen Tu-hsiu, “Call to Youth,” in S. Y. Teng and J. K. Fairbank. 1954. China’s Responses to the West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 240–243. 7. The novel referred to here is Wukong zhuan 悟空傳 [A biography of Wukong], which was originally published under the penname Jin Hezai 今何在 and serialized over the internet, and was subsequently published by Yuanshen chubanshe in 2012. 8. The character’s original name is actually Kuang Jiong 匡迥, and his style name (hao 號) is Chaoren 超人 (which translates literally as “super man”).

Works Cited Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀. 1915. Jinggao qingnian 敬告青年 [Call to Youth]. Qingnian zazhi 青年雜誌 [Youth Magazine] (a.k.a., Xin qingnian) 1.1. Chen Duxiu. 1916a. Xin qingnian 新青年 [New Youth]. Xin qingnian 2.1. Chen Duxiu. 1916b. Dangdai er da kexuejia de sixiang 當代二大科學家的思想 [The Thought of Two Contemporary Scientists]. Xin qingnian 2.1. David Der-wei Wang 王德威. 2018. Dong de gushi: Yuedu Kuang Chaoren de sanzhong fangfa 洞的故事:閱讀《匡超人》的三種方法 [A Story of a Hole: Three Ways of Reading Superman Kuang]. In Luo Yijun, Kuang chaoren, 3–14. Hsia, C.T. 1971. Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature. In History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 533–554. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hu Shi 胡適. 1986 [1918]. Yibusheng zhuyi 易卜生主義 [Ibsenism]. In Hu Shi zuopinji 胡適作品集 [Hu Shi’s Selected Works], vol. 6, 9–28. Taipei: Yuanliu chubanshe. Lu Xun 魯迅. 1996 [1923]. Nahan zixu 吶喊自序 [Preface to Call to Arms]. In Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [Lu Xun Collected Works], vol. 1, 415–421. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Lu Xun. 1996 [1925]. Shisi nian de dujing 十四年的讀經 [Reading Canon of the Fourteenth Year (of the Republic)]. In Lu Xun quanji, vol. 3, 127–132.

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Luo Yijun 駱以軍. 2018. Kuang chaoren 匡超人 [Superman Kuang]. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing House. Rojas, Carlos. 2015. Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Royle, Trevor. 1999. Crimea: The Great Crimean War: 1854–1856. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Yan Fu. 1986. Yan Fu ji 嚴復集 [Works of Yan Fu], ed. Wang Shi. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. “Zhongguo shiqing” 中國實情 [China’s True Condition]. 1896. Zhang Kunde 張坤德, trans., Shiwu bao 時務報 [The Chinese Progress], vol. 10 (Nov. 5, 1896) [cited in the text as “the First Day of the 10th Month of Guangxu, Year 22”].

CHAPTER 37

Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief History of Seven Killings Lindsay Thomas

Lately, it seems, critics have turned to the network as a heuristic for ­novelistic length. For example, scholars have described novels as varied as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as “network novels” (Pressman 2006; Jagoda 2016; Levine 2015; Armstrong and Tennenhouse 2015).1 While the designation of “network novel” is not exclusive to long novels—critics have also recently referred to shorter works like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, and Jean Toomer’s Cane as networks or as networked—the network is a model that scholars today summon when describing long novels across any period of literary history.2 This tendency is related to what Patrick Jagoda calls our contemporary “network imaginary,” the result of the historical convergence of interrelated scientific, technological, and geopolitical developments toward the end of the twentieth century that “imbued a generalized network concept with the explanatory power and reach that it has achieved in the early twenty-first century” (Jagoda 2016, p. 10). These scientific developments include the creation of what is now called network science, a field crossing many disciplines in the social and natural sciences that uses network models to study complex systems. The systems that researchers model are highly varied, including,

L. Thomas (*)  University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_37

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for example, communications technologies, relationships among people in groups, and the interactions among genes, proteins, and metabolites in cells. However, modeling these idiosyncratic phenomena as networks offers new insight into the properties of and relationships between elements constituting these systems. As Jagoda emphasizes throughout his book, thanks in part to network science, networks are our de rigeur form for understanding complex systems today.3 This chapter begins from this association of networks and long novels. Although length is widely used as a classification mechanism for prose ­fiction especially (short stories, novellas, novels), and although it often plays a structuring role in pedagogical practice (“How many pages can I ask students to read in two days?”), literary critics don’t have a great vocabulary for the concept.4 As Catherine Gallagher has observed, although a novel is defined at a basic level as “A lengthy fictional prose narrative,” “lengthy” is “the most thoroughly neglected word in the definition” (2000, p. 229). This chapter posits that one way of paying attention to length is through social network analysis. In other words, I take the critics who have called long novels networks seriously by seeing what happens when we model the connections between characters in novels as social networks. Moreover, I show how ­analyzing novelistic length through social network analysis can help us to understand what formal features tend to characterize long novels. This is a step toward developing a concept of length that moves beyond page- and word-counts. As I will suggest in the second section of this chapter, such a concept is valuable for literary studies because it could provide a way of connecting a seemingly innocuous fact about novels—their length—to how these novels are evaluated and read. Using social network analysis to examine novels means employing quantitative methods. Such methods—and their attendant prestige—have long been associated with scientific inquiry, including network science. Historians of science and, more recently, scholars in literary and cultural studies have written compelling accounts of the rise of quantitative methods and their association with objectivity, and of the cultural practice of quantification as a way to accrue political power and dehumanize people.5 Similarly, critiques of the use of quantitative analysis in literary studies have often hinged on the perceived objectivity or “scientism” of quantitative methods and the recalcitrance of the discipline or even of literature itself to such modes of thought.6 While what follows is in part a quantitative analysis of several literary texts, I am less interested in objectivity or the production of facts than I am in experimentation. The experiment I play out here leads to the generation of a hypothesis; it does not test that hypothesis. Furthermore, our tendency to classify novels according to length demonstrates how our understanding of novelistic form is to some extent already quantitative. This chapter’s experiment lends some precision to this quantification.

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In what follows, I use software developed by Markus Luczak-Roesch, Adam Grener, and Emma Fenton to algorithmically create networks of characters from a small sample set of six contemporary U.S. novels of varying lengths, and I then apply some basic metrics from social network analysis to compare the network models of these novels to one another. My sample set includes David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) (Table 37.1).7 I have chosen these novels because they include both long (Infinite Jest, Cryptonomicon, A Little Life, A Brief History) and short contemporary U.S. novels (Goon Squad, The Intuitionist), as well as novels that critics have described as “network novels” (Cryptonomicon, A Brief History, Goon Squad), and novels that have not been described this way (Infinite Jest, The Intuitionist, A Little Life). This sample set, while a toy example and obviously not representative of contemporary U.S. literature, gives me a starting point for making observations that suggest future avenues of exploration.8 As we will see, James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings emerges as an outlier among this set because of the density of its repeated connections among characters. At approximately 688 pages and 242,397 words, James’s novel is a long metamodernist work of historical fiction that is perhaps best described as networked. Radiating out from the attempted murder of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica on December 3, 1976, and told from the perspectives of many different characters, it recounts the (fictional) stories of the eventual deaths of the seven men involved in the plot to kill Marley (or the Singer, as he is known in the novel). The novel involves 76 characters and takes place on five days spread out over the course of fifteen years, from 1976 to 1991, in Kingston, Montego Bay, New York, and Miami. When compared to the other long novels in the sample, characters in A Brief History interact with, talk to and about, and think about each other more than characters in the other novels I model, especially the long novels. I call the measurement of these connections character co-occurrence. I show how measuring character co-occurrence demonstrates the potential for using social network analysis to determine what aspects of novelistic form tend to correspond with length, as well as for tracing how length, understood in specific ways informed by social

Table 37.1 The sample set; word counts are from electronic editions, and page counts are from U.S. hardcover editions

Title Infinite Jest Cryptonomicon A Little Life A Brief History of Seven Killings The Intuitionist A Visit from the Goon Squad

Year 1996 1999 2015 2014 1999 2010

Words 557,859 402,383 305,713 242,397 84,546 78,090

Pages 1079 918 814 688 272 340

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network analysis, inflects close readings of individual novels. While other critics have made the case for modeling literary texts as networks because doing so gives them conceptual purchase on the connections among large numbers of texts, I argue we can use this method to understand what characterizes novelistic length, both at a macro- and a micro-scale, beyond page- and word-counts.9

The Models: Measuring Character Co-occurrence Modeling novels allows us to ask different kinds of questions of these texts, but every model is a simplification and therefore requires compromises. In order to understand the compromises involved in modeling a novel as a social network, it is important to understand how the tool I used to create network models works. The software requires two inputs: a plain-text version of the novel under consideration, and a list of characters in that novel.10 From those inputs, the program returns a variety of outputs, including a social network of the characters in the novel.11 The software creates this network by breaking the novel into consecutive 1000-word slices and using the list of character names to identify all of the characters that appear in each slice. The social network then depicts those characters that appear together in any 1000-word slice as connected. The nodes of the network are the characters, and the edges—or the links between nodes—are weighted according to the number of co-occurrences of any two characters. For example, we can see in Fig. 37.1 that the number of links between the characters Josey Wales and the Singer in A Brief History of Seven Killings, the two characters with the highest number

Fig. 37.1  Detail from the social network of A Brief History of Seven Killings

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of total connections, is 43. This means the names of these characters occur together in 43, 1000-word slices of the novel. As is perhaps already apparent, choosing to model a novel as a social network entails certain assumptions about what exactly you are modeling. As the editorial board of the journal Network Science writes, performing network analysis requires an “ontological commitment” to a few basic features of network abstraction, including “individual elements; pair-wise relationships between those elements; and a global or macro-patterning that can be considered as network structure” (Brandes et al. 2013, p. 5). In order to model the connections between characters in these novels, for example, I must make decisions about who counts as a character. While such decisions were easier to make for some novels in the sample set, like A Brief History of Seven Killings, because of the availability of ready-made character lists, for other novels it was more difficult. In Cryptonomicon, for example, should we consider historical figures who appear in characters’ stories or memories to be characters themselves? Should we consider people who only appear once in A Little Life—at a dinner party, say—to be characters? How about those who appear only in the memories of other characters, or in flashback scenes?12 Furthermore, as I will explain in more detail below, the software I used to create the social network for each novel incorporates certain decisions about how to measure connections between characters, decisions that have a profound effect on the resulting models but that by no means constitute the only way to measure such connections. While we might assume that social networks of characters in novels would model the interactions among characters, this is not exactly true of the social networks created using Luczak-Roesch et al’s software.13 Rather, these networks model something like proximity or closeness. But since characters count as “appearing” together in the same slice of the novel simply if their names occur in the same 1000-word slice of the novel, what this software produces is not a model of characters’ actual interactions, but rather a model of who characters think or talk about. Sometimes this includes people they are talking to at the moment, but sometimes characters think or talk about people who aren’t physically present in the scene. This becomes clear, for instance, when we examine the nodes in the social network for A Brief History with the highest degrees, or the most unique connections to other nodes. As we might expect, the node representing Josey Wales, a main character, has the highest degree at 44; more unexpected, perhaps, is the node with the second-highest degree: the Singer, at 41. The Singer is at the center of the novel insofar as his attempted murder structures it, but he only appears in a handful of the novel’s scenes and says a handful of lines. Although he isn’t often physically present, many characters talk and think about him throughout the novel (41 characters, to be exact); he is a highly connected character in this way.

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Such observations become more revealing, however, when we compare the networks to one another. I call the method of comparison I introduce here character co-occurrence.14 It describes the average weight of an edge in a novel’s social network, or the average number of times any given character name appears with another character name in a 1000-word slice of the novel. It thus provides an indication of how often characters’ names appear close to one another throughout the novel, or the frequency of their co-occurrences. We can also think of this measurement as providing an abstraction of the overall closeness between characters in a novel. While “character co-occurrence” may sound like an overly technical way of t­alking about closeness, what I mean to draw our attention to here is precisely the proximity—whether physical, psychological, emotional, or textual—that closeness implies. Table 37.2 lists the total number of words and characters for each novel in the corpus, whether I’ve classified the novel as long, and the values for the size, total strength, and character co-occurrence of the social networks for each novel.15 The size column lists the total number of edges, or links between nodes, of each graph; each edge in a graph is only counted once, no matter its weight. This gives us the number of actual connections for each graph. The total strength column lists the sum of the weight of each edge in each graph (i.e., in a graph with three nodes, if the total weight of all the edges for n1 = 4, n2 = 3, and n3 = 2, the total strength of the graph is 4 + 3 + 2, or 9). Finally, the character co-occurrence, or the average weight of an edge in each graph, is derived by dividing the total strength of each graph by its size.16 Focusing on the character co-occurrence column, we can see that A Brief History of Seven Killings is an outlier when compared to the other long novels in this small corpus (Infinite Jest, Cryptonomicon, and A Little Life). At 6.967, its character co-occurrence—the average weight of any edge in its social network—is over three times as large as the same values for the other novels I’ve classified as long. As an average value, however, this number is somewhat misleading because it doesn’t give a good sense of the variation Table 37.2  Social network metrics Title Infinite Jest Cryptonomicon A Little Life A Brief History of Seven Killings The Intuitionist A Visit from the Goon Squad

Words

Long novel

Characters

Size

Total strength Character co-occurrence

557,859 402,383 305,713 242,397

yes yes yes yes

138 128 196 76

972 835 1930 424

1944 1670 3860 2954

2 2 2 6.967

84,546 78,090

no no

35 57

223 291

1632 1924

7.318 6.612

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between the nodes with the heaviest edges (lots of repeated connections) and those with lighter edges (fewer repeated connections). As we might expect of a social network model of a novel, there are a few nodes in the graph for A Brief History with adjacent edges that have very high weights and many more with adjacent edges that have very low weights. Figure 37.2 displays the strength distribution for all of the nodes in the network with a total strength greater than 10. The ten “heaviest” nodes—which themselves include a large range of strengths, from Josey Wales (387) to Alex Pierce (84)—account for 61.18% of the total strength of the graph, and the five heaviest nodes account for 42.86% of the total strength. When we compare these values to those of other novels in the corpus and adjust for the number of characters in each novel, we see that the distribution of strength values among what we might call the main characters in A Brief History’s social network is also unique. Figure 37.3 displays the total strength for the heaviest 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes in each network; these nodes represent those characters in each novel that are most connected to other characters. The strength of the top seven nodes in the network for A Brief

Fig. 37.2  The strength of the adjacent edges for each node with a strength value greater than 10 in the social network for A Brief History of Seven Killings

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Fig. 37.3  Strength values for the top 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes in each network

History of Seven Killings, which constitute roughly 10% of its total number of characters, is 51.56% of the network’s total strength; the strength of its top 15% of characters (11 nodes) is 63.57% of the network’s total strength; and the strength of its top 20% of characters (14 nodes) is 70.18% of its total strength. As we can see in Fig. 37.3, no other network has such a high concentration of strength among its most heavily weighted nodes. This measure provides further information when interpreting the novel’s character ­co-occurrence: not only do the characters in A Brief History of Seven Killings have, on average, more repeated co-occurrences, but the main characters in the novel have lots of repeated co-occurrences, more than other novels in the sample set.

Discussion: Why Measure Character Co-occurrence? While we cannot draw definite conclusions from this small experiment, it does suggest character co-occurrence as a starting point for further analysis. We might continue such analysis in at least two directions. The first involves expanding the number of novels in the sample set by several orders of magnitude in order to achieve a more representative or meaningful sample of contemporary U.S. novels. While there are technical barriers to doing so, such an expanded sample set would allow us to understand exactly how atypical A Brief History of Seven Killings’s character co-occurrence value is.17 We could, for instance, use correlation metrics—statistical tests for determining likely degrees of relationship between two or more variables—to determine whether

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and how the classification of a novel as long correlates with its total number of characters, the size of its social network, the network’s total strength, and its character co-occurrence. Computing such metrics for a large sample set would help us better understand the relationship between novelistic length and character co-occurrence. Do long novels generally have low character co-occurrence values? If so, character co-occurrence may prove a useful “narratological building block,” to use Dennis Tenen’s vocabulary, for constructing a computational model of novelistic length (2018, p. 123). Such a model could also include other elements, including formal qualities such as wordor page-length, number of characters, and measurements of the amounts of “stuff” in a novel’s world, as well as social qualities such as common words critics have used to describe the novels in the set and the literary prizes each have won or for which they have been nominated.18 With such a model in hand, we would be well-positioned to articulate an expanded concept of novelistic length that we could test against many texts; we could discover, for instance, if there are short novels that “behave” in certain ways like long novels. More importantly, we would also potentially better understand the social value of length in the context of the contemporary U.S. literary marketplace. Are long novels, or novels identified as “long” in some way by our model, more likely to be written by men? Are such novels written by men more likely to be nominated for literary prizes? And are certain long novels more likely to be described as “complex” or “difficult” than others, and if so, what might this indicate about the meaning of such evaluative terms? Answering such questions would help us develop a concept of length, a seemingly straightforward fact about a novel, that is instead, like the concept of genre, both formal and social, both intrinsic to a literary work itself and an index of a sociological phenomenon. While the direction for future research described above uses social n ­ etwork analysis as a building block in constructing a larger computational model of novelistic length, a second direction would encourage us to connect the quantitative metrics derived from social networks of novels to the experience of reading these novels. For example, this direction would take the potential uniqueness of A Brief History of Seven Killings’s character ­co-occurrence value as its starting point to ask how this metric might relate to the novel itself. If A Brief History is, because of its high character co-occurrence, ­unusually concerned with closeness, how is this reflected in the novel? By way of conclusion, I offer a brief example in answer to this question. As discussed earlier, the chapters in A Brief History of Seven Killings are each told from the first-person perspective of a specific character. On the whole, the novel is concerned with how the past haunts the present.19 Because each chapter is narrated from the first-person perspective of its central character, the past is often felt in this novel as a live presence, one that is, more often than not, embodied by this character themselves or by the other characters the central character in each chapter encounters or remembers.

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This haunting happens literally in the novel through the character of Sir Arthur George Jennings, an actual ghost of Jamaica’s white colonial past who appears to some characters throughout the novel before they die. Another character, Dorcas Palmer, attempts to evade this closeness of the past by outrunning it. Dorcas—the name is an allusion to Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), another novel that occupies the perspectives of many different characters and that is concerned with how the past haunts the present—is the second pseudonym Nina Burgess, a witness to the Singer’s attempted murder, takes on when, fearing for her life, she emigrates to the United States. In section four, “White Lines/Kids in America,” which takes place in 1985, Dorcas is working in New York City as an in-home caregiver. She is hired to take care of Ken, a man who suffers from short-term memory loss and who can’t remember more than a few hours at a time. No one tells Dorcas Ken has this condition when she shows up for her first day on the job, and so Dorcas agrees to follow Ken when he suggests leaving the house, and they travel from his home in Manhattan to hers in the Bronx. Their journey takes them through progressively smaller and more intimate spaces, from the spaciousness of Ken’s Park Avenue apartment with its fake “slave-era furniture,” to the crowded space of the train where “none of the groups [on the train] could resist looking at us,” and finally to Dorcas’s living room where they share a drink and listen to records (James 2014, pp. 504, 505). There, surrounded by her many books, they have a surprisingly personal conversation, one in which Dorcas responds to Ken’s repeated cajoling to tell him about herself by revealing that Dorcas is not her real name. She tells him how she has assumed the identity of someone who was hit by a car in 1979, a feat she was able to pull off because she had “a story long enough and boring enough that they will do anything just to get you out of the line [at the social services office]” (James 2014, p. 560). After Dorcas reveals this fact to Ken, he begins to forget where he is and who she is. He goes into her bathroom, a smaller space still, and starts to panic, and she calls his family. They finally explain his condition to her, and while they offer to tell her agency to assign her to a different client, she agrees to continue taking care of Ken precisely because of his condition—because he won’t ever be able to remember her. What are we to make of this strange interaction between Dorcas and Ken? There are many moments throughout the afternoon we spend with them in which Dorcas questions why she so easily gets along with Ken, a wealthy white American who, as she puts it, instantly acts too “familiar” with her, but who she nevertheless invites inside her apartment. She is especially surprised with herself because she has always maintained that she isn’t “like all these people he watch on Donahue. All these people with their private business that they dying to tell thirteen million people” (James 2014, pp. 557, 558). Yet she does reveal her “private business” to him. In fact, Ken is the only person to whom we see Dorcas, or Kim before her, or Millicent later, reveal that she is living under an assumed name. He can do what she wishes she, and the rest

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of the world, could: forget her past. This is what attracts Dorcas to the job and what allows for the intimacy between them. This fleeting intimacy is just one of the many models of closeness the novel offers, almost all of which fail or fade or end (or begin, for that matter) in violence. Not only do we spend pages and pages within the heads, as it were, of the characters who narrate the book’s chapters, but these characters also spend a lot of time thinking about, talking to, having sex with, joking with, eating with, taking care of, walking with, driving with, and committing violence with and to one another. Much of the novel’s plot, for example, involves following the seven men involved in the attempted murder of the Singer as they are then murdered in turn; the plot only advances in these sections through intimate scenes of violence, when one character murders another. For all of its sprawl, James’s novel is surprisingly intimate in that its characters spend a lot of time in close physical, psychological, or emotional proximity to one another. In this way, the novel’s unusually high character co-occurrence value provides an occasion for considering the role of closeness more closely. The feeling of closeness many characters experience in the novel is one of claustrophobia, of a too-closeness to other people, to our past, to ourselves—but it’s also one of the desire for such closeness, at any cost. Intimacy, James demonstrates, is about repetition. The novel, like the measure of character co-occurrence I have explored here, models a variety of intimacy that maps not onto the depth of connection but onto iteration: the repetition of proximity, the return of trauma, the tendency of characters to haunt one another other as they haunt the same 1000 words.

Notes



1. For a comprehensive bibliography of works that turn to the network to analyze texts of all kinds, see Jagoda (2017). 2. See Jagoda (2016), especially the introduction, “Network Aesthetics,” Ngai (2012), and Beal (2012). 3. For a concise summary of the development of network science in the latter half of the twentieth century, see the introduction to Jagoda (2016). The association between networks and complexity also holds for those studies that use the term “network” or “network novel” to analyze long novels. Jessica Pressman, for example, calls House of Leaves “substantial” and “complex” (2006, p. 107). Jagoda argues maximalist novels like Cryptonomicon and Underworld “animate complexity in order to both enable and limit knowledge” (2016, p. 44), and Caroline Levine emphasizes that Bleak House is “a novel that casts social relations as a complex heaping of networks” (2015, p. 115). 4. While discussion of the length of novels, and long novels in particular, is in many ways foundational to studies of the novel, critics have tended to focus on the experience of temporality or duration that reading lengthy novels affords while taking the fact that they are long for granted. See, for example, Lukács (1920), Genette (1979), and more recently, Dames (2007), Zemka (2012), and Thomas (2016). Critics have also emphasized the size and scale of long novels: see Mendelson (1976), Ercolino (2014), and Jagoda (2016).

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5. Two well-known works on quantification and objectivity from the history of science are Porter (1996), Daston and Galison (2007). For more recent work on quantification from literary, cultural, and media studies, see Wilson (2016), Johnson (2018), and Wernimont (2018). 6. For a recent argument against the use of quantitative (or at least statistical) methods in literary studies on these terms, see Da (2019). 7. For more on this software see Luczak-Roesch et al. (2018). 8. In many disciplines, a “toy problem” or “toy model” is a simplified problem or physical model used to illustrate a particular component of a larger complex system or series of tasks. Researchers in artificial intelligence, for example, have used chess as a toy problem for teaching algorithms to learn different kinds of problem-solving and decision-making skills. 9. For an example of work that uses social network analysis to examine a large number of texts, see So and Long (2013). 10. This list can include character nicknames or alternate names. For example, the character who goes by Doctor Love in A Brief History is also called Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas or just Luis. All of these names can be associated with one another so that they are all counted as Doctor Love. 11.  The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/vuw-sim-stia/ lit-cascades. 12. I used ready-made character lists for Infinite Jest, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I then cross-referenced with the text of each novel and edited to include missing characters, character nicknames, and alternate names (I found complete character lists for Infinite Jest and Goon Squad online, and A Brief History includes a “cast of characters” at the beginning of the novel). I was not able to find complete character lists for The Intuitionist, Cryptonomicon, or A Little Life. For these novels, I used Stanford’s Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to capture all of the proper names in each novel; I then cross-referenced these lists of people with the text of each novel, deleting names who I decided not to include as characters (historical figures who did not participate in the narrative or action of the plot, for example, or errors that the NER package had made), and combining and customizing some names on the list to include character nicknames and alternate names. See https://github.com/lcthomas/network-analysis-novels for this code. The software is also designed, however, to run in an unsupervised way, without a pre-defined list of characters, although capturing networks of characters specifically would still be difficult. For more on using the software in an unsupervised fashion, see Luczak-Roesch et al. (2018). 13. For a method of extracting social networks from novels that uses “character interaction” as its metric, see Elson et al. (2010). 14. Dennis Tenen has referred to such metrics as “narratological prime[s],” or “foundational building block[s]” we can use in building models of complex literary phenomena like length (2018, p. 123). 15. “Size,” and “strength” are standard metrics in social network analysis; “character co-occurrence,” as discussed above, is my own addition. See https:// github.com/lcthomas/modeling-long-novels for the code I used to apply these metrics and create the following tables and figures.

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16. Character co-occurrence is similar to the density of a network, a standard metric in network analysis, but with one important difference. The density of a network describes the ratio of its actual connections (the size of the network) to its potential connections, or how many links between nodes there could possibly be. Density, in other words, gives us a sense of how many connections exist between nodes compared to how many such connections could exist if every node were connected to every other node. It doesn’t account for the frequency of connection, however, which is what the character co-occurrence value, as the average weight of each edge, measures. 17. Beyond securing tractable datasets of contemporary novels, the laborious process of creating character lists to use as input for Luczak-Roesch et al’s software is the main impediment to scaling up this method for producing social networks of novels. There are automated ways of extracting character networks from literary texts, however. For a comprehensive survey of many of these methods and recommendations on the most promising methods, see Labatut and Bost (2019). 18. See Tenen (2018) for a discussion of how to measure the comparative density of fictional space and the stuff in it. 19. For more on the novel’s hauntology and how it depicts the effects of violence and trauma especially, see Harrison (2017), and Walonen (2018). For more on the novel’s interest in how past trauma informs the present, and in surviving this trauma, see Adams (2018).

Bibliography Adams, Caryn Rae. 2018. Uncomfortable Truths: Lifewriting, Trauma and Survivance in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (For Isabel Grosvenor). Journal of West Indian Literature 26: 96–109. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. 2015. The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction. In A Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke, 306–20. Malden, MA: Wiley. Beal, Wesley. 2012. The Form and Politics of Networks in Jean Toomer’s Cane. American Literary History 24: 658–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajs043. Brandes, Ulrik, Garry Robins, Ann McCranie, and Stanley Wasserman. 2013. What Is Network Science? Network Science 1: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/ nws.2013.2. Da, Nan Z. 2019. The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies. Critical Inquiry 45: 601–39. https://doi.org/10.1086/702594. Dames, Nicholas. 2007. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books. Elson, David, Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen McKeown. 2010. Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 138–47. Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P10-1015.

666  L. THOMAS Ercolino, Stefano. 2014. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbox to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, trans. Albert Sbragia. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Gallagher, Catherine. 2000. Formalism and Time. Modern Language Quarterly 61: 229–51. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-61-1-229. Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Genette, Gérard. 1979 [2002]. Order, Duration, and Frequency. In Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson, 25–34. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Harrison, Sheri-Marie. 2017. Global Sisyphus: Rereading the Jamaican 1960s Through A Brief History of Seven Killings. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 21: 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4272013. Jagoda, Patrick. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. Networks in Literature and Media. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.135. James, Marlon. 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. Markup BodiesBlack [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads. Social Text 36: 57–79. https://doi. org/10.1215/01642472-7145658. Labatut, Vincent, and Xavier Bost. 2019. Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks: A Survey. ACM Computing Surveys 52. https://doi. org/10.1145/3344548. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Luczak-Roesch, Markus, Adam Grener, and Emma Fenton. 2018. Not-so-Distant Reading: A Dynamic Network Approach to Literature. IT—Information Technology 60: 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2017-0023. Lukács, Georg. 1920 [1971]. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mendelson, Edward. 1976. Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon. MLN 91: 1267–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/2907136. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s the Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social. In American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, 367–92. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pressman, Jessica. 2006. House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel. Studies in American Fiction 34: 107–28. So, Richard Jean, and Hoyt Long. 2013. Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism. Boundary 2 (40): 147–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/019036592151839. Tenen, Dennis Yi. 2018. Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space. New Literary History 49: 119–47. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0005.

37  MODELING LONG NOVELS: NETWORK ANALYSIS … 

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Thomas, Lindsay. 2016. Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change. American Literature 88: 159–84. Walonen, Michael K. 2018. Violence, Diasporic Transnationalism, and Neo-Imperialism in A Brief History of Seven Killings. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-7249076. Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2018. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Sarah. 2016. Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois. American Literary History 28: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv062. Zemka, Sue. 2012. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Index

0-9 1984 (novel), 123, 263 A abstract, 408 abstraction, 84, 89, 92, 451, 464 abstraction (modes of), 99, 104, 106, 107 abstract value, 452 addiction, 415, 418 Adorno, Theodor, 50, 560, 562, 572–574 advertise, 417 advertisements, 37, 38, 417 advertiser, 40 advertising, 38, 387 advertising dollars, 386 aesthetics, 81, 87, 89–91, 248, 250, 267, 278, 349, 437–439, 441, 443, 445 aesthetic sphere, 284 aesthetic tradition, 30 aesthetic values, 528 aesthetic vision, 268 affect/affective, 89, 92, 210, 214–216, 245, 250–254, 383, 397, 423, 487, 621, 623, 624, 627, 631 affective labor, 621–624 affective space, 310

affect studies, 155 affordances, 196, 215, 245 “Afrofuturist”, 571 African descent, 408 Agamben, Giorgio, 53, 132, 435 Agnew, Lois, 499 agricultural market, 384 Ahmed, Sara, 486, 490 AI assistants, 411 Alaimo, Stacey, 157, 486 Aldiss, Brian, 472, 475 Aldrin, Buzz, 36, 39 allegory/allegorical, 133, 134, 137, 140, 299, 300, 442, 451, 459, 460 Allen, Grant, 332, 437–439, 441 alternative energy, 473 ambiguity, 278, 423, 430 ambiguous, 100, 107, 108 American Eugenics Society, 515 American Social Science Association, 192 Anatomic, 89 Anders, William, 42 androids, 125 animal studies, 156, 158 Annihilation, 486, 487 Anthropocene, 50, 51, 53, 60, 80, 105, 450, 455, 459, 470 anthropology, 81, 82, 158, 185 antibiotics, 617

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2

669

670  Index antimicrobial resistance (AMR)/antibiotics, 597–610, 613–616 apocalypse, 311, 314 apocalyptic, 570 Apollo, 32, 36, 40 Apollo 11, 31, 32, 36–38, 40, 42 Apollo Amerika, 32, 37–39 Apollovision, 37, 39 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 567 Arendt, Hannah, 60, 122, 131, 623 Arista, Noelani, 390 Armstrong, Neil, 36, 39 Armstrong, Tim, 121, 125 Arnold, Matthew, 163, 167 Around the Moon, 34, 35 Arrival (film), 263 artificial intelligence (AI), 107, 125, 294, 390, 455–459, 464, 622, 626 artificial labourer, 411 artificial meat, 377 artificial wombs, 403 Asimov, Isaac, 125, 470, 629, 634 atomic, 49 atomic bomb, 366, 451 Atomic Dreams (comic), 586, 589, 591 atomistic eating imaginary, 381 Atwood, Margaret, 158, 376, 377, 380, 381, 387, 412, 450 Auschwitz, 48–51, 55, 60 automation, 320 automatism, 125 Autonomous, 398, 412 autopathographies, 156 B Babel-17 (novel), 264, 269, 273–279 Bacigalupi, Paolo, 398 Back of the Turtle, 412 bacteria, 313, 314, 598, 601, 607, 608, 613, 617 Barad, Karen, 53 bare life, 132, 435, 436 Barrow, John, 146 Barry, Lynda, 130, 138–140 Barthes, Roland, 100 Basu, Kunal, 543, 550–554 Bates, Samuel, 550, 552

Baudrillard, Jean, 420, 628 Beatty, Paul, 124 Beckett, Samuel, 284 Beddoe, John, 545 before BiteLabs, 376 Begg, Proudfoot, 437, 438 behaviorism, 117–126 behaviorist conditioning, 117, 123 logical behaviorism, 117, 125 neobehaviorism, 119 programmability of behavior, 117, 125 radical behaviorism, 119 Bellamy, Brent, 87 Beloved, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 54 Bentley, Nancy, 569 Benwell, Bethan, 252, 258 Bergson, Henri, 119, 564 Berlant, Lauren, 129, 572 Bernes, Jasper, 293 Bezos, Jeff, 227 Bhopal, 157 Binet, Alfred, 566 bioart, 376 biocapitalism, 135, 359, 384–386, 388 bioeconomy, 378, 381 bioinformatic, 154, 354, 357, 359 biological bodies, 410 biological classification, 376 biological labour, 399 biological materials, 399–401 biological matter, 400, 403, 405 biological sciences, 285, 289, 544 biological subject, 405 biological thing, 403 biologists, 390 biologization, 386 biology/biological, 145–147, 149, 153– 155, 164, 168, 270, 283, 287–290, 294, 296–298, 314, 347, 351, 377, 380, 381, 387, 400, 401, 434–436, 440, 442, 445, 446, 484, 488, 532, 607, 608 biomedical, 156, 346, 349, 355, 357, 359, 402, 497, 598, 600, 606, 616, 617 biomedical anti-interiority, 415, 416, 418, 419, 421, 422, 424, 426–429

Index

biomedical gaze, 349, 359 biomedical industry, 211, 402 biomedical regimes, 405 biomedical research, 203 biomedical science, 201 biomedical therapy, 399 biomedicine, 599 bionics, 289 biophilanthropy, 437, 446 biopolitics/biopolitical, 129–138, 140, 141, 350, 357, 378, 381, 384, 435, 437, 439, 442–446, 568, 569, 600, 609, 612 biopower, 130, 133, 136, 137, 140, 434–436, 444–446, 568, 612 biosocial, 293 biotech, 386–388, 411 biotech industries, 399 biotechnical process, 399 biotechnological age, 384 biotechnological innovation, 378, 380 biotechnological issues, 409 biotechnological models, 381 biotechnological practice, 401, 405 biotechnological speculation, 375 biotechnology, 224, 347, 398, 404, 405, 407, 410, 411 and commodification of biology, 406, 407, 411 biotech sci-fi, 150 biotech start-up, 375 BiteLabs, 375–377, 381, 384–387 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 122 Black Reconstruction in America, 568 Bladerunner (film), 410 Bleak House, 653 Bloch, Felix, 365 blogs, 254 Blom, Ina, 40 Blumenberg, Hans, 41, 42 Boas, Franz, 565 Bohr, Niels, 335–340, 363–365, 368, 369, 371 BookTube videos, 254 border, 130, 317, 357, 404, 489–491, 493 border war, 623 Borman, Frank, 41 Bosselman, Beulah Chamberlain, 135

  671

Bould, Mark, 263, 264, 269 boundary, 483, 485–488, 490, 492 Boyer, Dominic, 82 Boym, Svetlana, 50, 51 Bragg, Benjamin, 146 Brain, Tega, 108 Brave New World, 122 A Brief History of Seven Killings, 655, 657–661 Brin, David, 233, 234 Brin, Sergey, 376, 378, 386, 387 British Romanticism, 530, 531 Broderick, Damian, 247, 248, 250, 252, 257 Brooks, Cleanth, 119 Brown, Adrienne Maree, 225, 236, 258 Brown, Kate, 58 Buckley, Kerry F., 118, 121 Bulnes, José María, 285, 286 Burgess, Anthony, 123, 124 Burke, Kenneth, 333, 338 Burn, Stephen J., 424, 425, 431 Burri, Regula Valérie, 156 Burtynsky, Edward, 63, 64 Butler, Octavia E., 249, 255, 456 C Cacho, Lisa, 131–133 Calvino, Italo, 31, 36, 87 Canaday, John, 364 cancer, 266, 345, 346, 416, 417, 496–506 Cane, 653 Canguilhem, Georges, 289, 297 Čapek, Karel, 410, 411 capitalism, 79, 82, 83, 88, 91, 102, 113, 114, 153, 249, 386, 387, 399, 407, 410, 452, 459, 466, 472, 495, 502, 504, 506, 621, 623, 627, 633 capitalist production, 378 Carey, Peter, 542 Cariou, Warren, 68 Carpenter, Leonard, 475–479 Carson, John, 562 Carson, Rachel, 312, 314 Cartesian, 52 Cartesian humanity, 56 Caruth, Cathy, 49

672  Index Cassirer, Ernst, 327–329 Cat’s Cradle, 608 celebrity-as-commodity, 386 celebrity meat, 381, 384, 385, 387 Césaire, Aimé, 389, 391 Chadwick, James, 364 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 47 Chambers, Becky, 256 character co-occurrence, 655, 658, 660, 661 charity organization society (COS), 192 Charnock, Anna, 398 Charnock, Anne, 412 chattel slavery, 406, 407, 409 chemical regimes, 381 Chen, Mel, 383 Chen-Morris, Raz, 41 Chernobyl, 47–50, 60, 157 ChickieNobs, 376, 380 China, 230, 541, 621, 622, 624, 625, 627, 628, 630, 631, 634, 635, 639–643, 645 Chinese, 30, 621, 622, 624–626, 631, 634, 635 Chinese civilization, 630 Chomsky, Noam, 119, 270 Churchill, Winston, 376, 377, 380, 381 Cities of Salt (novel), 66 civilization, 136, 434, 437, 439, 442, 443 Clare, Ralph, 421, 495 Clarke, Bruce, 294, 296 Clasen, Mathias, 313 cli-fi, 450 climate, 47, 48, 50, 60, 459 climate apathy, 463 climate calamity, 451 climate catastrophes, 450 climate change, 53, 86, 91, 94, 229, 235, 387, 391, 411, 449, 451, 452, 454, 466, 470, 472, 478, 479 climate destruction, 455 global warming, 80 climate chaos, 450 climate collapse, 255 climate denialism, 451, 460, 461 climate disaster, 459 climate emergency, 459

climate fiction, 80 A Clockwork Orange (novel), 123, 124 Clough, Patricia, 295 Clynes, Manfred E., 290 cognition, 51, 52, 60. See also poznanie cognitive, 511 cognitive estrangement, 249, 257, 600, 609, 616 cognitive science, 119, 284, 418 Cold War, 39, 278, 309, 311, 470, 471, 474, 525 Collis, Stephen, 87 colonial, 381 colonization, 390 comics, 597, 599, 602, 609 commercialize, 426 commodification of biology, 407, 411 commodity chain, 385 commodity citizen, 384 commodity value, 385 complementarity, 335, 338 computation, computational, 97, 105, 272, 288, 289 computer science, 154, 155, 284, 296 computing, 97, 100, 108, 109 Concordia University Initiative for Indigenous Futures, 390 Connelly, William E., 294 Connor, Steven, 310 Conrad, Joseph, 319 consumer, consumerism, 205, 207, 346– 348, 356, 375, 384, 392, 403, 405, 406, 409, 416–419, 421, 424–427, 439, 442, 504 consumer cannibal, 385 consumption, 377, 386 contemporary poetics, 529 contemporary scientific findings, 551 Cooper, Melinda, 399, 403, 409 corporate anthropology, 84 corporate power, 497 corporation, corporate, 40, 79, 87, 400, 403, 406, 407, 411, 428, 453, 504–506 Cottrell, Fred, 82, 83 Count Zero, 249 “Covehithe”, 471, 476, 479–481 creations of synthetic biology, 410

Index

Cressy, David, 33, 43 Crichton, Michael, 257, 309, 312, 314–316, 319 Crick, Francis, 295 Cruddy, 130, 136, 138, 140, 141 cruel optimism, 451, 463, 464 cryptography, 289 Cryptonomicon, 653, 655, 657, 658 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, 243, 246, 247, 597, 599 Cultural Revolution, 625, 635 cultural studies, 93, 152, 155, 245, 252, 253 cultured beef, 381 cultured meat, 376, 378, 380, 381, 385, 387 cybernetic biology, 293 cybernetic discourses, 288 cybernetic ferment, 289 cybernetic metaphors, 288 cybernetics, 284, 287–296 cybernetic science, 293 cyborg, 287, 290 “Cyborg—Frees Man to Explore”, 290 “Cyborgs and Space”, 290 Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, 88, 476 D Dakota Access Pipeline, 79 Damasio, Antonio, 155 Danielewski, Mark Z., 653 Dao de jing, 630 Daoist, 630, 635 Darkwater, 565 Darwin, Charles, 164–166, 168, 170, 175, 176, 436, 445 Darwin, Erasmus, 145 Daston, Lorraine, 101, 118, 224, 310 Davenport, Charles, 153, 564, 567, 568 Davies, Paul, 316 Davies, Will, 419 death, 130–136, 138, 140, 141, 383, 416, 422, 423, 431, 460, 462, 633 death and dying, 129, 345, 346, 348, 354–356, 359 Debeir, Jean-Claude, 83

  673

de Certeau, Michel, 253, 258 de Cervantes, Miguel, 285, 288, 289, 292, 298–300 Deepwater Horizon, 485 degeneration, 288, 357 degradation, 383 de Kruif, Paul, 513, 517, 520, 521 Delany, Samuel R., 250, 263, 264, 273, 274, 276–279 Delbrück, Max, 363 Deléage, Jean-Paul, 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 29 DeLillo, Don, 412, 415, 419, 420, 422, 430, 653 Democracy and Education, 566 Denis, Vincent, 227, 231, 232 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 158 Descartes, René, 51, 290 “Descent of Man”, 163, 164, 175, 176 design network, 387 Deutsch, Karl, 288 Dewey, John, 184, 438, 566 Diamanti, Jeff, 90, 91 Dibbell, Carola, 398, 401 Dickens, Charles, 653 Dickinson, Adam, 88, 89 digital, 101, 108, 109, 114 digital humanities, 154, 155 digitalization, 104, 105 digitalized information, 101 Dirac, Paul, 365, 371 disease, 149–151, 156, 204, 205, 211, 213, 218, 273, 345–347, 357, 392, 421, 426, 428, 431, 543, 598, 601, 604, 609, 612, 614, 615, 639 “Disembodied Cuisine”, 377, 378 DNA, 213, 294, 296, 356, 402, 407, 410, 411, 445, 455, 456, 541 Doctor Faustus, 365 Doctor Salt, 430 Donovan, Gerard, 430 Don Quixote de la Mancha, 285 Don Quixote (novel), 285–288, 292, 298–300 Dorr, Gregory Michael, 566, 567 Dowling, Linda, 170–172 Dreams Before the Start of Time, 398, 412 Dreamscapes of Modernity, 246, 397

674  Index Drexler, Eric, 151 drugs, drug use, 211, 347, 355, 380, 415–419, 421–429, 431 Dr. Zhivago, 52 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), 135, 416 Du Bois, W.E.B., 433, 444, 559–574 Dufresne, David, 68 Dugas, Gaetan, 151 Dumit, Joseph, 156 dying, 500 dynamics of knowing, 389 dystopia, 121–123, 125, 376, 400, 401, 405 dystopian literature, 117 E Earle, John, 166 Earthrise, 41 Ebola virus, 317, 319, 320 ecofeminist politics, 291 ecological degradation, 388 ecology/ecological, 109, 356, 450, 452–455, 461–464, 489, 491, 492 economically precarious, 401 economic hardships, 401 economic hierarchies, 401 economic language, 407 economic process, 385 economics, 465 economic system, 377, 401 economic value, 388 economies of flesh, 386 economy/economic, 132–135, 137, 138, 140, 347, 350, 354–356, 359, 386, 388, 451–455, 462–464, 469, 473, 474, 477, 479, 481 economy of precarity, 400 ecopoetics, 526, 537 ecosystems, 450, 454, 505 Eco, Umberto, 292 Edelman, Lee, 129 Egan, Jennifer, 653, 655 Ehrenfest, Paul, 365, 368 Einstein, Albert, 264, 329, 333, 365, 369, 371 element, 60 Eliot, T.S., 293, 334

Elkins, Charles, 221, 223 Ellison, Ralph, 293 empirical, 417, 431 empiricism, 34, 41, 149, 183, 184, 186, 328, 330 energy, 49, 52, 54, 57–59, 79–94, 450, 469–471, 473, 535, 537 atomic, 58 Energiewende (energy transition), 79 energy determinism, 92 energy humanities, 80–85, 87, 90, 93, 472 energy infrastructures, superstructures, and systems, 81–83, 90, 469, 470, 472, 474, 480, 481 “energy literature”, 84 energy periodization, 90, 91 renewable energy, 79 “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”, 82 English, Daylanne, 564 English (discipline), 163, 355 English departments, 163, 167, 169 English Passengers, 542–544, 547, 549–551, 554, 555 Enlightenment, 133, 387, 390, 391, 527, 548, 565, 569, 573, 574 enslave, 406, 442 enslaved women, 410 enslavement, 390, 408, 409 “Entropy” (short story), 91, 92 environment, 47, 48, 55, 157, 290, 291, 293, 295, 297, 376, 378, 388, 436, 440, 441, 445 environmental activism and politics, 255, 375, 477. See also environmental racism environmental carelessness, 496 environmental causes, 496, 500, 503 environmental collapse, 312 environmental concerns, 312 environmental devastation, 392, 457 environmental effects, 477 environmental elements, 497 environmental harms, 381 environmental humanities, 153, 157 environmental impact, 478 environmentalists, 312 environmentally friendly, 375

Index

environmental media, 157 environmental problem, 378 environmental protection, 388 environmental protest, 477 environmental racism, 255 environmental sciences, 157 environmental studies, 156–158 environmental systems, 287 environmental unsustainability, 376 epidemic, 151, 309, 311, 317, 500, 502, 503 epidemiology, 151 Eshun, Kodwo, 571 Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18, 515 Ethan Frome, 130, 136, 139–141 ethical biocapital, 378 ethico-aesthetic, 378 ethnographers, 158 ethnographic, 252, 253 ethnography, 402. See also ethnographic ethological cybernetics, 289 Etkind, Alexander, 54 eugenic ideas, 541 eugenics, 132, 136, 355, 357, 433–435, 437, 439–446, 463, 560, 561, 565, 567 eugenic aesthetics, 434, 435, 442, 443, 445 eugenic thought, 549 everyware, 104 evolution/evolutionary, 82, 89, 149, 155, 158, 164, 165, 167, 168, 173–175, 287, 297, 298, 358, 434, 436–439, 441, 444, 445, 521 Lamarckian, 434, 436–444 evolutionary science, 163–165, 170, 173 exodus, 131, 133, 140 experimental economies of technoscience, 376 experimental systems in sciences, 376 exploitation of imprisoned laborers, 406 extinction, 136, 451, 460 extractivism, 105, 109 F Facebook, 254, 258 Fallout (comic), 582–585, 592

  675

Farland, Maria, 563 Farrell, J.G., 542 Faulkner, William, 433 Faulk, Sebastian, 155 Faust, 365, 368, 371, 372 Faye, Jan, 336, 338 February (novel), 67, 68 Febvre, Lucien, 310 feeling, 35, 129, 135, 138–140, 330– 332, 334, 345, 353, 354, 423, 439, 441, 445, 528 Felski, Rita, 195, 244, 251, 253, 257, 258 feminism, 248, 252, 256, 293, 376, 521 ecofemism, ecofeminist, 291 feminist sci-fi, 147 feminist theory, 157 feminist writing, 542 Fenton, Emma, 655 Ferber, Michael, 33 Fetter-Vorm, Jonathan, 586–589 Feynman, Richard, 152 film, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 418, 450, 621, 622, 625–627, 630–635 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 284 Flamethrowers, 84 Flatley, Jonathan, 568 Fleck, Ludwig, 149, 150 Flexner, Abraham, 192 Flusser, Vilém, 101, 111–113 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 417, 428 Fort McMoney (film), 68 Fortun, Mike, 347, 350 Fortune’s Pawn (novel), 258 Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 83, 84 fossil fuel, 79, 83–94, 449, 450, 477, 478 fossil economy, 83 “fossil fuel fiction”, 80 oil, 79, 478 petroleum, 80, 91, 471 Foucault, Michel, 29, 129, 130, 133, 135, 136, 140, 141, 150, 277, 292, 298–300, 434, 435, 446, 600, 612 Frankenheimer, John, 123, 124 Frankenstein, 145–148, 246, 277

676  Index Franklin, Sarah, 150, 153, 378, 380 Franzen, Jonathan, 415, 419, 430 Freedman, Carl, 249 Freudenthal, Elizabeth, 415, 416, 419 Freud, Sigmund, 118, 119, 277, 572, 622 From the Earth to the Moon, 34, 35 Fugitive Science, 563 fugitive slaves, 406 Fuller, Danielle, 252, 256, 257 “future-generating machines”, 376 futurism, futuristic, 222, 223, 291 G Gaedtke, Andrew, 121 Gal, Ofer, 41 Galatea 2.2, 429 Galilei, Galileo, 41, 43, 458 Galison, Peter, 101, 118, 224, 310 Gallagher, Catherine, 654 Galloway, Alexander, 102, 103, 154, 155, 288 Galton, Francis, 433, 434, 439, 560, 561, 566, 573 Galvani, Luigi, 145 Gamow, George, 364, 368, 372 Gang, Joshua, 119, 126 Gaskill, Nicholas, 438, 441 Gassner, John, 512, 519 Gates, David, 424 Gaussian distribution, 566 gender, 34, 86, 131, 134, 141, 151, 252, 255, 256, 258, 376, 382, 399, 402, 456, 521, 544, 553, 622, 623, 628, 631 gendered approach, 386 gendered bodies/populations, 132, 541 gendered structures, 386 gendered subjects, 383 gendered violence, 384 Generosity: An Enhancement, 429, 430 genetic identity, 401, 410 genetic privacy, 217 genetics, 217, 270, 346, 347, 350–352, 356, 389, 401, 402, 404, 426, 439–441, 443, 445, 457, 541, 543, 549–551, 554

epigenetics, 445, 446 genetic engineering, 380, 398 genome, 347 Mendelian, 434, 439–445, 564, 567 Genette, Gérard, 456, 465 genocide, 136, 354, 355, 357 genome, 404 genre/genus, 376, 391 genre, 31, 80, 86–88, 93, 134, 138, 243, 244, 246–256, 389, 429, 437, 442, 444, 450, 459, 561, 563, 570–573, 626, 634 genre of the human, 383, 386 genres/mythoi, 391 genres of fiction, 389 genres of life, 384 genres of speculation, 377 genres of speculative art, 376 genres of the life and knowledge, 392 genres of thought, 377 genre-specific narrative of the human, 391 geological, 146 geontopower, 59 German Romanticism, 530 Ghosh, Amitav, 51, 81, 85–89 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 525, 528, 529, 532 Gibson, James J., 196 Gibson, William, 229, 249 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 433, 441–444 Gilroy, Paul, 569 Glad, John, 51 Glaspell, Susan, 511, 521 Gliddon, George Robert, 545 Glissant, Edouard, 111 global extractive, 381 global food shortages, 387 global health, 309 globalise, 247 globalization, 409, 416, 622, 631 globalized trade, 409 global medical market, 384 Global North & Global South, 89, 90, 320, 401, 403, 406 global pharmacy, 398, 412 global warming, 80, 86, 90–92, 452, 455 Glynn, Alan, 430

Index

Gobineau, Arthur de, 164, 545 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 31, 33, 34, 36, 40, 43 Goffman, Erving, 120 Golden Age, 228, 248 Golden Age Science Fiction, 222, 226, 227, 231, 233, 238 Goodreads, 254, 258 Google/Youtube Hangouts on Air, 258 Google+, 258 Google Burger, 376–379, 387 Gossett, Thomas, 167, 169 gothic, 277, 624 Gould, Stephen Jay, 326, 564 Graff, Gerald, 166 Gramsci, Antonio, 451, 464 graphic medicine, 599–601 Gravity’s Rainbow, 124 Great Acceleration, 81, 91 Grener, Adam, 655 Gruzd, Anatoly, 255 Gubar, Susan, 499 Guillory, John, 258 Gulag, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54 Gulf Oil, 39 Gunn, James, 250 Gutting, Gary, 328 H Habila, Helon, 85 hackers, 109–112, 155 Hacking, Ian, 290 Haeckel, Ernst, 164 Haran, Joan, 258 Haraway, Donna, 158, 290, 291, 378, 380, 388, 389, 392, 457, 458, 465, 489, 608, 615, 623, 633 Hardt, Michael, 130, 131, 133, 622, 623 Harpham, Geoffrey, 165 Harriman, E.H., 153 Hartman, Saidiya, 565 “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?”, 121 Hayles, N. Katherine, 278, 490 Heinlein, Robert, 152, 223 Heisenberg, Werner, 364, 365, 371 Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 32 Hémery, Daniel, 83

  677

hemorrhagic diseases, 310, 316 hemorrhagic illnesses, 320 hemorrhagic viruses, 316 Heng, Rachel, 399 Herbert, Frank, 473–475 Hereditary Genius, 560, 561, 566 heredity/hereditary, 434–437, 439–445 Herland, 442–444 hermeneutics of suspicion, 195 Herz, Christopher, 430 Hieroglyph, 227 Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, 221, 226, 227, 230 Hieroglyph theory, 226 higher education, 184, 186 Hiroshima, 47, 49–51, 60, 451 histories of scientific development, 397 history, 201, 202, 211, 214 history of science, 29, 149, 152, 153, 245, 607 HIV/AIDS, 150, 151, 211, 309, 317, 318, 357 HIV infection, 400 Hjelmstad, Keith, 227, 228 Hoijer, Harry, 266–268 Holmes, Martha Stoddard, 499, 500 Holmqvist, Ninni, 398 Holocaust, 50 Homann, Renate, 284 Hörisch, Jochen, 29 hormone therapy, 380 horror, 204 House of Leaves, 653 Howard, Sidney, 511, 520, 521 Hull, Clark L., 118, 123 human, 389 human capital, 407, 408 human genetic materials, 381 humanism, 295 humanity, 545 human meat, 384 human meat imaginary, 376 human-ness, 376 human sciences, 544 Hunt, Nancy Rose, 321 Hunt, Theodore, 187 Huxley, Aldous, 122, 391 hypermediate, 36

678  Index hyperobject, 53, 90, 459, 488, 489, 607, 608 hyposubject, 53

Iser, Wolfgang, 243, 251 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 150, 401 Ito, Joichi, 389–391

I I Am Legend, 309, 311, 312, 315 ideology critique, 195 Ifowodo, Ogaga, 89 imagination, imaginary, 30, 43, 80, 84, 86–88, 91, 92, 133, 145–148, 150–152, 158, 159, 245, 246, 257, 258, 290, 397, 398, 405, 450, 525, 622, 623, 634 Imago, 249 Imarisha, Walidah, 225, 236, 258 imperial formations, 640 imperialism, 66 imperishables, 56, 59, 60 incantation, incantatory fictions, 222, 225, 226, 233, 234, 237 incantatory, 221 indigeneity, 248 indigenous, 68, 89, 256, 549, 553 inductive criticism, 189, 190 infamous theory, 547 inferiority of black people, 545 Infinite Jest, 418, 419, 655, 658 information, 288, 289, 292, 293, 295, 296, 386, 409 information culture, 154, 155 information sciences, 154, 155 information systems, 154 information technology, 287 information theory, 284, 288, 289, 294 infrastructure, 91 Inheritors (1921), 511, 512, 521 intelligence, 562 Internet, 416. See also online Internet of Things, 411 In the Black, 258 In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization Through the Ages, 83 Intrusion, 430 invasion of Iraq, 470, 476 in-vitro meat, 376–378, 381, 383, 387, 388, 391 Iossifidis, Miranda, 258 Iraq War, 471, 475

J Jack Maggs, 542 Jagoda, Patrick, 653 James, Henry, 164, 169–171 James, Marlon, 655 Jameson, Fredric, 80, 91, 122, 249, 257 James, William, 118, 325, 327, 332, 340, 341 Jasanoff, Sheila, 244–246, 397, 398, 407, 411 Jenkins, Henry, 258 Jianxin, Huang, 621, 625, 626, 633 Johnson, Brian David, 224, 235 Johnson, Mildred L., 559–561, 563 Johnson & Johnson, 506 Jones, Duncan, 401 Jones, Steve, 255 Journey to the Center of the Earth, 246 judicial criticism, 189, 191, 192 K Kahn, Herman, 223, 224 Kant, Immanuel, 168, 176, 562 Kassanoff, Jennie, 164, 172, 174 Kauffman, Stuart, 325, 326, 339 Kay, Alan, 100 Kay, Lily, 351 Keenan, Thomas, 349 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 295 Kennedy, John F., 36 Kerouac, Jack, 91, 92, 415 Kevles, Daniel J., 567 Kharkov Physical Institute, 58 Kilgore, Christopher, 506 Kim, Sang-Hyun, 245, 246 King, Thomas, 89, 412 Kingsley, Sidney, 512 Kirn, Walter, 430 Kite, Suzanne, 390 Kline, Nathan S., 290 Kline, Ronald, 287 Kneale, Matthew, 542, 543, 545–550, 554

Index

Knox, Robert, 545, 547, 549 Kolyma, 48, 50, 55–60 Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy), 50, 51 Kowalski, Charles, 347 Krah, Hans, 30, 34 Kriwet, Ferdinand, 31, 32, 36–42 Kuhn, Thomas, 148, 149 Kunzru, Hari, 542 Kurchatov, Ivan, 58 Kushner, Rachel, 84 L lab-grown meat, 378, 386 laboratorium, 411 labour, 398, 399, 403, 405–411, 459, 622–624, 626–632 labour-power, 399, 405, 407 Lacks, Deborah, 214, 215 Lacks, Henrietta, 201–203, 207, 210–216 Lai, Larissa, 256 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 436 Landecker, Hannah, 380, 386, 403, 607, 608 Landis, Geoffrey, 227, 231, 232 Land of Oil and Water (film), 68 Langer, Susanne K., 327, 328, 330–332, 334, 340, 341 language/languaging, 38, 42, 100, 102, 107, 137, 139, 154, 163–176, 218, 249, 250, 263–269, 272–279, 284, 287, 291–293, 295–299, 351, 352, 356, 408, 418, 423, 502, 525, 529, 530, 535–538, 553, 621, 622, 634, 635 Larsen, Nella, 433 Latour, Bruno, 51, 146, 457, 465 La Tregua, 48 Lee Thim Heng, 621 Le Guin, Ursula K., 222, 223, 267, 455 LeMenager, Stephanie, 64, 65, 73, 75, 85 length, 654 length (novel), 653, 661 Levi, Primo, 48, 50–52, 58, 60 Levinson, Marjorie, 284 Lévy, Pierre, 103 Lewis, Jason Edward, 390

  679

Lewis, Wyndham, 120 Life Among the Doctors, 522 life-extension technologies, 398 Life of Poetry, 293 Life Support, 402 linguistics, 164, 166, 174, 187, 263– 277, 279, 292, 295, 296, 351, 625 literary, 156, 485 literary effect, 189–191, 357 literary facts, 188, 189, 196 literary feeling, 184, 196 literary modernism, 120, 174 literary storytelling, 397 literary studies, 120, 133, 145, 147, 149, 154, 155, 183–188, 204, 252, 284, 288, 300, 654. See also literary study literary study, 30, 81, 187 A Little Life, 655, 657, 658 live television, 376 living labor, 384 Living Oil, 64, 73 living technology, 403 Lodge, David, 429 Logan, Angela, 566, 567 Long, Elizabeth, 244, 251, 253, 257, 258 Longfellow, Brenda, 68 Long novels, 661 Lost (TV series), 124 Lovecraft, H.P., 476 Love, Heather K., 120 Luckhurst, Roger, 246–248, 251 Luczak-Roesch, Markus, 655, 657 Luhmann, Niklas, 284, 285, 293, 294, 296, 300 Luisi, Pier Luigi, 294 Lukács, Georg, 299 lunar exploration, 30, 31, 34, 36, 41 lunar travel, 30, 31 Lyell, Charles, 166 M Macdonald, Graeme, 84–87 “Machine and Organism”, 289 machine, machinery, 284, 287, 290, 291, 293, 297, 345, 348, 350, 359, 403, 407, 458, 461, 462 Macht, David, 417

680  Index MacLeod, Ken, 430 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 348, 349, 352 Malabou, Catherine, 564 Malaysia, 621, 622, 630, 631, 633 Mallon, Mary (aka Typhoid Mary), 151 Malm, Andreas, 80, 83, 84, 91, 92 Manhattan Project, 364 Manhattan Projects (comic), 578, 585, 586 “Manifesto for Cyborgs”, 290 manufactured biological beings, 411 manufactured labourers, 412 manufacture slaves, 410 market economy, 400 Marlowe, Christopher, 365 Marriot, James, 65, 69–74 Mars Trilogy, 87 Martens, Garth, 87 Marxism, 130, 140, 249, 624 Marx, Karl, 83, 94 Marx, Leo, 157, 228, 310, 312, 313 Masure, Anthony, 103 material infrastructure, 469 material-symbolic boundaries, 382 Matheson, Richard, 309, 311–315 matrix/matrices, 103, 104, 383 Matthiessen, F.O., 525–528, 530–534, 537, 538 Maturana, Humberto, 283–289, 293–298 May Fourth Movement, 642, 644 Mbembe, Achille, 132, 133 McArthur, Neil, 68 McCarthy, Tom, 84 McClintic, Guthrie, 518 McEwan, Ian, 429 McGrath, John, 67 McKibben, Bill, 449–451, 459, 464 media, 32, 33, 36–42, 79, 148, 156, 203, 215, 216, 245, 247, 252, 255, 257, 416, 431, 450 mediate, 31, 32, 39–42, 148, 158 mediation, 31, 35–37, 39–42, 101, 147, 157, 347 medical device company, 409 medical ethics, 202 medical humanities, 156

medicalization, 135, 141, 417, 420, 422, 423, 426, 428, 429 medicalize, 134, 136, 140, 359, 418, 426 medical science, 521 medical system, 411 medical therapy, 398 medical waste, 410 medications/meds, 211, 416–419, 421, 423–429 medicine, 147, 150, 184, 194, 203, 204, 210, 215, 403, 416, 418, 419, 421, 424, 428–430, 519, 639, 642 Meetup, 254 Meitner, Lise, 365 Men Against Death, 522 Mengele, Josef, 349 mental illness, 417–419, 430, 642 metamedia, 101 meta-medium, 100 metamodernist, 655 metaphor, 185, 271, 290, 293, 295, 346, 347, 349–352, 354, 356, 359, 407, 408, 428, 450, 459, 461, 463, 483, 505, 526, 531, 623 Microbe Hunters, 513, 521, 522 microphone, 311, 627 microscope, 310, 311, 315, 553 Mielziner, Jo, 518, 520 Miéville, China, 471, 476, 479, 480 Milburn, Colin, 151, 153, 156 Milgram, Stanley, 119 Mills, John A., 119 mind, 272, 276 Minima Moralia, 562 Minio-Paluello, Mika, 65, 69–74 Mitchell, Timothy, 473 modernism, 32, 80, 81, 90, 92, 126, 174, 288, 293, 299, 329 modernism and modernist literature, 117, 121 modernity, 569 Modern Language Association (MLA), 166 Mody, Cyrus, 311 montage, 37–39, 211, 214 Montero, Rose, 399, 412 Moon, 401 Moore, Lisa, 67

Index

Morales, Alejandro, 151 Morgan, Benjamin, 437, 438, 446 morphology, 537 Morris, Aldon, 567 Morrison, Toni, 120, 662 “Mortal Kombat”, 346 Morton, Timothy, 53, 90, 94, 488, 489, 492, 607, 608, 616, 617 Morus, Iwan Rhys, 245 Moulton, Richard Green, 185 Mount Tambora, 146 Moylanv, Tom, 249 Mrdjenovich, Adam, 347 Mukherjee, Siddhartha, 501 Müller, F. Max, 164–166, 168, 169, 172, 174, 176 multimedia, 31, 32, 36, 37 multispecies, 158 multispecies studies, 156, 158 Multitude, 130 Munif, Abel Rahman, 66 Muñoz, Jose, 138 Murdoch, Dugald, 336 Murphy, Michelle, 132, 133 Murray, Charles, 560 Musk, Elon, 79 N Nano Supermarket, 388 nanotechnology, 151, 152 nanovision, 152 Nanovision: Engineering the Future, 151 NASA/TREK, 254, 258 Nash, Roderick, 157 National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), 598 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 203 Nationality, 167 Native Americans, 513 naturally artificial meat, 376 nature, 552 necropolitics, 54, 132 Ned McCobb’s Daughter, 522 Negarestani, Reza, 88, 476, 477 Negri, Antonio, 130, 131, 133, 622, 623 neoliberal consumerism, 419

  681

neoliberal, neoliberalism, 130–132, 140, 347, 390, 416, 417, 419, 424, 425, 429, 497, 600, 608, 614, 615, 622, 623 Neo-Victorian, 542, 543, 549, 554 Neo-Victorian fiction, 542 Neo-Victorian genre, 544, 553 Neo-Victorian novel, 541–543, 550, 555 Neruda, Pablo, 87 Netenjacob, Egon, 39 netlennyi (trans. imperishables), 55 network novel, 653 networks, 137, 154, 155, 185, 216, 244, 295, 297, 357, 511, 514, 624, 631, 653, 654 neuroaesthetics, 155 neuronovel, 415, 418, 429 neuroscience, 155, 418, 425, 431 neuroscientists, 155 Never Let Me Go, 401 New Criticism, 117, 188, 530 New Harvest, 378, 381, 387 Newitz, Annalee, 398, 412 new media, 154 new media artist, 390 new media studies, 152 new technology, 398, 399 New Weird, 471, 476 New Yorker, The, 37 New York Times, 519 NextNature, 387, 388 Nicholson, Sam, 474, 475 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 31, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 641 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 249 Nixon, Richard, 38 Nixon, Rob, 157 Noble, Safiya, 386 nonhuman, 245, 359, 387, 390, 454, 455, 457, 462, 466, 476, 482 nonhuman animals, 383 Nott, Josiah Clark, 545 nuclear, 60 nuclear war, 593 atomic bomb, 578, 580, 583, 585, 589, 591, 592 Manhattan Project, 582–584, 586, 592

682  Index O objective, 529, 533, 551, 552 objectivity, 118, 189, 191–193, 195, 216, 485 Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, 225, 236, 237, 258 Offshore (film), 68 oil, 63–75, 80, 81, 84–91, 93, 469–482 oil crisis (1973), 80, 471 oil infrastructures, 473, 474, 479 “Oil is not Gold”, 474, 475 Oil! (novel), 85 Oil on Water, 85 Oil (photographs), 63 oil politics, 477 oil refineries, 405 Okorafor, Nnedi, 89, 256 Binti, 256, 258 Olson, Charles, 525, 527, 535–539 Once in Blockadia, 87 Oncomouse, 380 ongoing progress, 398 online, 244, 252, 254–256 On the Road, 91, 92, 415 ontology, 291 Open Work: Form and Indeterminacy in Contemporary Poetics, 292 operational agents, 99, 103, 104 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 364 Order of Things, 292 organic form, 526, 530–533, 537 organisms, 283–287, 289–292, 295– 297, 299 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 80, 90, 471 Orwell, George, 123, 124, 249, 263 Oryx and Crake, 376, 380, 381 P Paik, Nam June, 40, 41 Painter-Morland, Mollie, 506 Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, The, 42 Pamela, 653 pandemic, 151, 309, 316, 400 Parable of the Sower, 255 Paris, Edward Thomas, 146

Parisi, Luciana, 295, 296 Parsons, Talcott, 296 Pasternak, Boris, 53 Patchett, Ann, 430 Pauli, Wolfgang, 365, 368, 369 Paulson, William, 295 Pavlov, Ivan, 118, 122 Pechawis, Archer, 390 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 101 Penfield, Wilder, 332 Penley, Constance, 254, 258 people of colour, 406 perception, 208, 247, 265, 267, 275, 297, 328, 352, 484, 487, 489, 490, 525, 536 performance, 511 Periodic Table, 58 periodizing literature, 91, 92 persons bound, 408 PETA, 375, 376, 383, 384, 386 petrochemicals, 89 petroculture, 470, 471 Petrocultures Research Group, 470 petrofiction, 66, 85 petro-literature, 81 “petro-magic-realism”, 87 “petro-realism”, 87 petro-modernity, 64, 80 petrorealism, 87 pharmaceutical industry, 409 pharmaceuticals, 212, 415–418, 421, 425, 607 psychopharmaceuticals, 415, 419, 428 psychopharmacology, 417, 419, 424, 427, 429, 430 “pharmacological fiction”, 430 pharmacology, 430, 431 Pharmakon, 430 phenomenology, 244, 251, 284 philology/philological, 163–168, 170, 172–176, 187 philosophy of mind, 119–121 physicist, 460, 525, 528 physics, 325, 326, 336, 364, 365, 370–372, 525, 527–530 classical physics, 365, 369–371 quantum physics, 149, 294, 363–365, 368–372, 525, 526, 528, 530 theoretical physics, 368, 371, 372

Index

physiological aesthetics, 327, 332 Picture News (comic serial), 578–580, 586 Pinker, Steven, 265 Piot, Peter, 317 “Pipeline”, 472, 475 pluralism, 269, 330 podcasts, 254 poem, 43 “Poem To My Litter”, 346, 355, 359 poet, 32, 41, 88, 293 poetics, 250 poetry/poem, 29, 31–34, 42, 86, 89, 271, 273, 274, 278, 292, 346, 347, 350–352, 354, 355, 357–359, 525, 526, 528–530, 534–538 auto-poetry, 359 ecopoetics, 526, 527, 535, 537–539 poetic form, 346, 347, 537 Poincaré, Henri, 529, 530 political economy, 382 political process, 385 Porush, David, 293 positivism, positivist science, 184, 188, 266 post-animal bioeconomy, 377, 381 post-apocalyptic, 380 postcolonial, 89, 90, 252, 542 postcolonial science studies, 377 posthuman, 152, 295 Post, Mark, 376, 378, 381, 387 postmodern, postmodernism, 80, 81, 90–92, 244, 246, 294, 416, 419, 420, 424, 425, 429, 542 postmodern superstructure, 91 Pound, Ezra, 293, 329 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 59 Powers, Richard, 429, 430, 450, 495–504, 506 poznanie, 52, 60 precision medicine, 346, 347, 356, 357, 359 Preston, Richard, 309, 316–320 Prigogine, Ilya, 326 Pripyat, 48–50 Pripyat River, 48 Procter, James, 252, 258 profit medicine, 409

  683

progress, 81, 84, 192, 193, 245, 433, 435, 438, 439, 441, 442, 497, 501, 526 Progressive Era, 512, 513, 522 Project Hieroglyph, 222, 225, 226, 231, 233, 236, 237 Prologue for the Age of Consequence, 87 Promethean modernity, 56 Provincetown Players, 512 Provincetown Players’ Playwrights Theatre, 515 “Prozac Nation”, 418 Pruitt, Sarah “China Makes Historic Landing on ‘Dark Side’ of the Moon”, 43 psychiatric pharmaceuticals, 425 psychiatric treatment, 126 psychiatry, 415, 417, 420, 425, 426, 429 New Psychiatry, 417, 418, 420 psychiatric, 423, 425 psychology, 117–119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 421, 425, 450, 459, 527, 562 “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”, 118 psychopharmacology, 126 Puar, Jasbir, 132, 133 pure research, 186, 192 Pynchon, Thomas, 91, 92, 124 Q quantification, 274 quantifying, 217 quantitative, 210, 271 quantitative analysis, 654 quantum computers, 455 quantum mechanics, 338, 529 Copenhagen interpretation, 335 quantum theory, 369 queer, 132, 248, 256, 293, 444, 458 queer theory, 157 Quine, W.V.O, 119, 279 R race/racial, 86, 132, 136, 147, 151, 163–165, 167, 168, 173, 174, 202, 204, 212–215, 252, 255, 256, 376,

684  Index 382, 383, 399, 401, 434, 435, 437, 439, 442–445, 515, 542, 544, 545, 551, 554 race-based technologies, 542 race science, racial science, 167, 541– 543, 547, 551, 553–555, 563 race scientists, racial scientists, 545, 549–554 race thinking, 554, 555 racial and gender injustice, 399 racialized, 131–134, 136, 151, 293 racialized approach, 386 racialized bodies/populations, 131, 132 racialized chattel slavery, 399 racialized exploitation, 399 racialized labour, 411 racialized others, 385 racialized structure, 386 racial scientific logic, 545 racial scientific thinking, 542, 549 racism, 167–169, 213–215, 217, 433, 440, 475, 541, 546, 547, 551, 553 Racists, 543, 550, 551, 553, 555 radical subject, 291 radio, 32, 37–41, 273, 420, 422 Radway, Janice, 257, 258 Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, 347 Rancière, Jacques, 562, 563, 565, 569, 574 RAND Corporation, 222–224 raw materials, 399 reader-response, 244, 245, 252 reading, 80, 85, 90, 91, 141, 155, 203, 349, 359, 434, 438, 442, 445, 496, 497, 505 realism, 86, 87, 156, 215, 425, 450–452, 459, 460, 626, 630, 635 “Recrudescence”, 476–481 Recuber, Timothy, 254, 255 Reed, Walter, 520 Rees, Amanda, 245 relativity, 264–267, 270, 274 relativity, theory of, 371, 372 Renan, Ernest, 164 reproductive technology, 398, 412 Requiem for a Dream, 415 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 147, 149, 376, 377, 437 Richards, I.A., 119

Richardson, Samuel, 653 Richmond, Mary, 185 Ricoeur, Paul, 251 Ritvo, Max, 345–348, 350, 351, 354, 355, 357, 359 Robbins, Bruce, 501 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 87, 235, 248, 450, 451, 455–466 robots, 125, 151, 287, 410, 621–625, 627–632, 634 Rockefeller, John D., 153 Romanticism, Romantic, 90, 295, 527, 528 Romantic literature, 527 Romantic poetry, 31, 284 Roosevelt, Theodore, 169 Rose, Nikolas, 135, 356 Roth, Marco, 415 Ruhl, Sarah, 345, 346, 348, 354 Rukeyser, Muriel, 293, 525, 526, 528–530, 532–538 R.U.R, 410 Rusert, Britt, 563 Russell, Bertrand, 121, 276, 277, 334 Ryle, Gilbert, 119, 120 S Sacco and Vanzetti, 515 Sagan, Dorion, 294 Said, Edward, 50 Salt Fish Girl, 256 Sapir, Edward, 263–270, 272–274, 276 Sarton, George, 526, 530 Satin Island, 84 Saturday, 429 Saunders, Barry, 349 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 173, 174, 263, 333 scale, 600, 602 “Scan”, 350 Schachner, Nathan, 472, 473 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 531 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 172 Schleicher, August, 165, 170 Schneidman, Edwin, 135 Schoenberg, Arnold, 313 Schrödinger, Erwin, 146 Schuller, Kyla, 565

Index

Schulz, Jane, 500 science, 397, 398, 402, 403, 411, 412 science and technology, 397, 398, 407, 411, 626 science and technology studies (STS), 152, 158, 245, 257, 387, 397 science fiction, 87, 88, 93, 122, 148, 150–152, 156, 221–223, 232, 237, 238, 264, 269, 272, 277, 279, 376, 381, 387–389, 392, 449, 456, 459, 464, 469–472, 475, 476, 479, 481, 572, 597–599, 608, 615, 621, 625, 626, 629, 634 sciences of mind, 415–418, 421, 424, 427, 429, 430 science studies, 149, 190, 245 scientific charity, 185, 191–193, 196 scientific criticism, 184–189, 191, 192, 195, 196 scientific designs, 377, 380, 390 scientific explanations, 545 scientific genres of knowledge, 389 scientific history, 397 scientific hypothesising, 545 scientific inquiry, 290, 391 scientific investigation, 551 scientific knowledge, 391 scientific life, 383 scientific market, 384 scientific method, 99, 184–186, 190, 553 scientific norms and standards, 547 scientific objectivity, 552 scientific observations, 545 scientific perspective, 552 scientific practice, 377, 388 scientific “progress”, 411 scientific racism, 543, 548 scientific research, 380, 402 scientific theory, 541, 544 sci-fi, 272, 570, 572–574 Scott, Charles, 486 secularism, 525, 537 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 253 Sedo, DeNel, 252, 255–257 Segal, Judy, 500 Selby Jr., Hubert, 415 Self-Destruction: A Study of the Suicidal Impulse, 135 Selisker, Scott, 123, 126

  685

sense data, 328 sensibility, 267 Serres, Michel, 291, 292 Sex, or The Unbearable, 129 Sexton, Jared, 562 sexual contact, 400 sexual exploitation, 402 sexuality, 129, 132, 137, 147, 151, 256, 383, 623 sexualized, 131, 133, 134 sexualized bodies/populations, 132 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism, 188 Shalamov, Varlam, 48, 50–60 Shelley, Mary, 145–149, 246, 277 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, 365 Sheraton, 173 “Sick man of Asia”, 639–641, 649 side effects, 355, 423 Silent Spring, 312 Silicon Valley, 222, 226, 232, 236, 375, 389 Simondon, Gilbert, 106, 108 Simulacra and Simulation, 420 Sinclair, Upton, 85 Singer, Ben, 569 Singh, Vandana, 233–237 Singularity, 389, 390 Sinha, Indra, 157 skin, 351, 385, 408, 483, 485–487, 489–493, 548 Skinner, B.F., 119–122, 125 Skloot, Rebecca, 201–203, 207, 208, 210–216 slave, 405–409, 439, 442 slavery, 405–410, 412 Slaves of the State, 406 slave states, 410 Smalley, Richard, 151 Smil, Vaclav, 80 Smith, Darryl A., 571 Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 416 Snooty Baronet, 121 Snow, C.P., 184, 185, 328, 329, 335 Snyder, Matthew, 230 Sobchack, Vivian, 248 social attitudes, 554 social casework, 193, 194

686  Index social categories, 388 social classification, 376 social dynamics, 389 social evidence, 191, 194, 196 social factors, 403 social facts, 185 social histories, 377 social inequality, 384, 386 Socialist Register, 290 social justice, 157, 248 social life, 383 social media, 204, 216, 388 social network, 656–658 social network analysis, 654, 655 social obfuscation, 384 social problem, 378 social sciences, 81, 82, 86, 146, 185, 191, 192, 196, 208, 264, 278, 283, 284, 291, 294, 434, 440 social welfare, 191 social work, 192, 194, 195 social worlds, 382 sociology, 120, 192, 245 sociotechnical imaginary, 245, 397–399, 405, 407, 410, 411 solarpunk, 93, 257 solution, 388 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 51 Sontag, Susan, 498 Souls of Black Folk, 574 sound (or hearing), 345, 348, 353, 634 Southern Reach, 484, 485, 490, 491, 493 Southern Reach Trilogy, 21, 483, 485, 490 space, 151 space exploration, 30 space travel, 30, 34, 38. See also lunar exploration; lunar travel; space exploration Spahr, Juliana, 653 species, 356–359, 376, 434, 436–439, 444, 451, 454, 455, 457, 458, 463–465 speculative art-science, 387 speculative bioart, 376 speculative biotechnology, 410 speculative design, 387

speculative dimensions, 381 speculative fiction, 93, 376, 387, 397, 398, 411 speculative narrative, 471 speculative scientific pursuits, 389 speculative storytelling, 398 speculative world, 388 Squier, Susan, 156, 601, 602 Stacey, Jackie, 498 Stalin, Josef, 51, 57 Stanford, Leland, 153 state-capitalism, 622 State of Wonder, 430 Stein, Gertrude, 32, 121, 125 Steinbeck, John, 433 stem cells, 377, 381, 402 Stengers, Isabelle, 326, 341, 356 Stenson, Fred, 85 Stephenson, Neal, 155, 221, 222, 225, 227, 231, 233–235, 237, 269, 653, 655 Sterling, Bruce, 233, 234, 237, 476 Stewart, James, 518 suicide, 130, 132–141, 625 queer suicide, 132 race suicide, 136, 433 suicide plot, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141 superstructure, 91 Surgeon X, 597–600, 604, 607–609, 615, 616 Suvin, Darko, 246, 249, 250, 257 symbiotic, 458 SymbioticA, 376–378, 383 symbol, 30, 40, 204, 244, 247, 328, 331 symbolic attributes, 33 symbolic position, 34 symbolic significance, 36 symbolic value, 30 sympathetic criticism, sympathetic reading, 189, 190 sympathy, 192 symptoms, 417–423, 425–427, 499, 628 Synthese, 288 synthetic biology, 224, 378, 398, 399, 411 synthetic life, 411 systemic racism, 402, 405

Index

T Taine, Hippolyte, 164, 167 Taine, John, 475–479 Tears in Rain, 399, 412 Technocrats, 472, 473 technoculture, 452 technoculture studies, 152 techno-ecologies, 377 techno-fetishism, 386 technofuturism, 244 technological change, 399 technology, 289, 292, 387–390, 397–399, 401, 403, 405, 407 technomodernity, 249 techno-optimism, 247 technoscience, 79, 243, 244, 246–252, 254, 257, 387, 388 technoscientific futures, 377 techno-transcendentalism, 463 techno-utopian vision, 377 techno-utopic, 377 telescope, 34, 35, 41, 310 television, 32, 37–40, 204, 216, 315, 401, 416, 422, 630–632. See also TV Tenen, Dennis, 661 Terman, Lewis, 560, 561, 564, 567, 569 Terranova, Tiziana, 295 Thacker, Eugene, 154, 155, 288 The Andromeda Strain, 309, 314–316, 319 The Art of Being Ruled, 120 The Back of the Turtle, 89 The Bell Curve, 560 “The Blegdamsvej Faust”, 363–370, 372 The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (play), 67 “The Comet”, 570–572 The Concept of Mind, 119 The Corrections, 415, 419, 424, 426, 428, 429 “The Curve”, 346, 351, 352 The Dark Fields, 430 The Echo-Maker, 429 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 86 “The Greatest Adventure”, 475–477 “The Great Oil War”, 473 The Happiness Industry, 419

  687

The Heart Goes Last, 412 The Home, Its Work and Influence, 442 The Hot Zone, 309, 316–318, 320 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, 201–204, 207–209, 216 The Impressionist, 542 The Inequality of the Human Races, 545 The Intuitionist, 655 “The Little Girl of Pompeii” (poem), 60 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, 256 The Manchurian Candidate, 123 The Mismeasure of Man, 564 The Modern Study of Literature, 188 The Oil Lamp, 89 The Oil Road (travelogue), 65, 69–74 The Only Ones, 398–401, 403, 411 theoretical biology, 283, 288, 296 The Periodic Table, 54 The Philadelphia Negro, 566 The Polymers, 88 The Pulitzer Prize, 522 The Races of Britain, 545 The Races of Men, 545, 547 “The Revolt of the Scientists”, 472, 475 The Sellout (novel), 124 The Siege of Krishnapur, 542 The Souls of Black Folk, 563, 565, 566, 568, 569, 571 The Structure of Poetry, 292 The Suicide Club, 399 The Transformation, 653 The Truce, 48, 54 The Unit, 398 The Windup Girl, 398 Thiel, Peter, 224, 230 Thinks…, 429 Thirty Years that Shook Physics, 364 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 532, 533, 537 Thorazine (chlorpromazine), 417 Thumbsucker, 430 Thurtle, Philip, 153 tissue-engineered meat, 378 Tolstoy, Leo, 51 Toomer, Jean, 653 “To the Rising Full Moon”, 31, 33 Transcendentalism, 526, 530, 531, 534, 537

688  Index trauma, 202, 461 trauma studies, 155 triangulation, 97, 98, 103–107, 109, 113 Trinity (comic), 586–589, 592 Trump, Donald, 230 Tuana, Nancy, 486 Tumblrs, 254 Turner, James, 173 Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, 211 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 204, 214, 357 TV, 39–42 Twitter, 254, 258 Types of Mankind, 545 typhoid, 151 U Underground Airlines, 398, 399, 405, 406, 411 “Under Pressure”, 473, 474 Underworld, 653 unmediate, 34, 40–42 Unnatural Selections, 567 unscientific racial categorisations, 550 Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narratives, and Future Histories, 258 Uribe, Ricardo B., 297 Uses of Literature, 258 utopia, 121, 122, 140, 141, 442, 443, 451, 452, 464, 472, 633 utopian promise, 409 V Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 153 VanderMeer, Jeff, 483–485, 487, 490–492 Vandiemen, George, 547, 548, 550 Varela, Francisco, 283–288, 293–297 Veblen, Thorstein, 184, 195 venture capital, 452 Verne, Jules, 31, 34–36, 43, 246 Victorian, 547, 551, 553 Victorian racial science, 541, 543, 547, 550, 551 Vietnam, 37 Vietnam War, 8

Vint, Sherryl, 246–248, 251 Virno, Paolo, 131, 133, 140 vision (or sight), 310, 315, 352, 397, 398, 505 visions of a better future, 398 visions of desirable futures, 397, 398 visions of sociotechnical change, 398 A Visit from the Goon Squad, 653, 655 visual(ity), 310, 320 Vogl, Joseph, 29, 41 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 365–372 Vonnegut, Kurt, 608 von Weizsäcker, C.F., 335, 336, 339, 363, 365 Vora, Kalindi, 402, 403 A Voyage to the North Pole, 146 W Waldby, Catherine, 378, 384, 399, 403, 409 Wald, Priscilla, 136, 150–152, 216 Walden Two, 122 Wallace, David Foster, 418, 655 Walter, W. Grey, 287 Warner, Michael, 166 War of the Worlds, 246 Washburn, Emelyne, 166 Washington, Booker T., 561, 568 Wasserman test, 149 Watson, John B., 118, 119, 121, 123 Weaver, Warren, 264, 270–273, 276–278 Wegener, Frederick, 174 weird fiction (the weird), 471, 477–481 weirdness, 476 Weizman, Eyal, 349 Wellcome Trust, 203, 598, 602 Wellek, Rene, 187, 195 Wells, H.G., 246 Wendell, Barrett, 164, 167–169 Wenzel, Jennifer, 87 West, Rebecca, 122, 123 Westfahl, Gary, 226 Westworld, 125, 411 Wharton, Edith, 130, 136–138, 153, 163–167, 169–176, 433 “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”, 289

Index

Whitehead, Alfred North, 325–327, 331–334, 340, 526–530, 533, 534, 536–539 Whitehead, Colson, 655 White, Leslie, 82, 83 white male European scientists, 553 White Noise, 415, 419–421, 423–425, 428, 429 white supremacy, 565 “whitish-yellow skin”, 380 Whitney, William Dwight, 166, 173 Who By Fire, 85 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 263–270, 272–278 Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 24 Wiener, Norbert, 270, 272, 273, 278, 287, 290 Wientzen, Timothy, 122, 123 Wikis, 254 Willard Gibbs, 528–530, 536 Williams, Rosalind, 310 Wilson, E.O., 290 Wimsatt, William K., 119 Winter, Ben H., 398, 406 Winters’s speculative setting, 407 Wise, Dennis, 406 Wittenborn, Dirk, 430

  689

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 119 Wolfe, Alan, 294 Wolfe, Cary, 284 Wright, Jay, 325, 327–330, 332–334, 336–341 Wundt, Wilhelm, 118 Wynter, Sylvia, 295, 296, 383, 389, 391 X Xun, Lu, 642, 643, 645 Y Yaeger, Patricia, 84, 85, 91 Yanagihara, Hanya, 655 Yellow Jack, 511 yellow peril, 640 Yijun, Luo, 637, 639, 645, 648, 649 Youtube, 254 Z Zamir, Shamoon, 567 Zero K, 412 Zimbardo, Philip, 119