Of Dickens and Darwin

It's rare for scientists and literary authors to cross paths. A scientist often works within the hermetic enclaves of a laboratory, and authors -- well, many never set foot in a laboratory their entire lives. As a result, they generally don't talk to each other.

However, I argue that they do talk to each other, albeit indirectly -- scientists are indeed influenced by literary and humanistic discourse, and scientific principles are reflected in literary works.

For example, critic I. A. Richards argued that positivism, a philosophy of science that maintains that knowledge is only arrived at through direct observation, should serve as an example for literary theory. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, authors who wrote during the Victorian era, appropriated many of the scientific arguments of their day into their works. Eliot and Hardy, in fact, showed interest and fascination with accounts of scientific invention and discovery, and their works implicitly comment on science and its effects on society. Dickens appropriated many of the elements of evolutionary theory into his work: The possibility that creation is through natural order, rather than through the unknown, permeates such novels as Bleak House.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernism influenced both science and literature. The principles of modernist science -- linearity, reductionism, objectivity -- are reflected in modernist literature, which some argue follows the trend in science toward reductionism, or the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts. Modernist literature, too, aspired to reach the rigor of science and to become a serious discipline of study, rather than being merely a leisure activity. Virginia Woolf, for example, was deeply fascinated by astronomy and her pacifist politics and fiction were shaped by advances in astronomy. Marcel Proust's work, because of its deeply psychological facets, has been characterized as presaging evolutionary psychology and modern neo-Darwinism. One aspect of modernist science is the correspondence theory of truth, which states that science has direct access to truth and reality and serves as a mirror to nature. This was also the goal of modernist literature.

That changed when postmodernism appeared, roughly in mid- to late-twentieth century. Postmodern science is a science based on disorder, complexity and indeterminancy, such as chaos theory. It subverts the correspondence theory of truth, and is therefore the antithesis to modernist science.

Here, too, literary authors followed suit and adopted principles of postmodernism. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow exemplifies a non-linear narrative, wherein the author plays insouciantly with the dimension of time. Don DeLillo's White Noise is the quintessential postmodern novel in its illustration of the themes of consumerism, high technology, and fast-paced communication that blur the boundary between representation and reality, hallmark characteristics of postmodernism.

In turn, certain branches of the life sciences seem to have adopted some literary concepts, spawning new dimensions for conceiving of biology. In contrast to modern biology, the foundation of which is the cell doctrine, a postmodern biology emphasizes cellular uncertainty, exhibited by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This new conception states that any attempt to observe a cell, or manipulate it, will, by definition, alter the cell. This to a great degree undermines positivism. If cellular uncertainty holds, it will challenge this long-standing principle.

Scientists and authors absorb the cultural milieu of their time, whether unconsciously or consciously. I believe we are in a new paradigm where the approach to linking science and literature is beyond the term interdisciplinary, and now encompasses a unique, emerging, and multidimensional discipline of its own.

Priya Venkatesan
mail@the-scientist.com

Priya Venkatesan holds a master's degree in genetics from the University of California at Davis and a doctorate in literature from the University of California at San Diego. She is currently a lecturer in the writing program at Dartmouth College.


Links within this article:

P. Venkatesan, "Yin, meet yang," The Scientist, September 28, 2007.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53665/

C. Dickens, Bleak House, Bradbury and Evans, 1852-53.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_House

P.S. Skell, "Why do we invoke Darwin?" The Scientist, August 29, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/2005/08/29/10/1/

I.M. Klotz, "Postmodernist rhetoric does not change fundamental scientific facts," The Scientist, July 22, 1996.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/17116/