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SCIENCE IMAGINED | LITERATURE REALIZED: TRUTH AND FICTION IN CANADA by Marc André Fortin A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD Queen‟s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (January, 2012) Copyright © Marc André Fortin, 2012 Abstract In Canada, writers of long fiction have recently begun to employ representations of science and to use scientific theories to construct narratives that investigate issues of class, race, sexuality, faith, truth and the ontological understanding of human existence. This turn towards science in creative works of art suggests that scientific discourse in the early twenty-first century has become a space from which to respond to questions about the search for truth after the rise of poststructuralist theory and postmodern culture. My work investigates this recent turn towards science in contemporary Canadian literature as a way of reevaluating the idea that science is associated with a teleological movement towards human progress, and to analyze how scientific representations re-imagine faith and ethics from a secular perspective. The recent shift towards science in the literature of Canada in English suggests a questioning of social conditions which place the human within epistemological spectrums between truth and fiction, faith and reason, and the individual and the universal. In my dissertation questions related to belief and truth are bound up in a cross-textual study that looks at how Canadian literature reevaluates important debates among theology, art, and science in order to access a humanist interpretation of different possible realities. My dissertation investigates: The Bone Sharps (2007) by Tim Bowling; Curiosity: A Love Story (2010) by Joan Thomas; The Origin of Species (2008) by Nino Ricci; The Memory Artists (2004) by Jeffrey Moore; Player One: What is to Become of Us (2010) by Douglas Coupland; Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) by Rivka Galchen, and The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) (2010) by Harry Karlinsky. ii Acknowledgements There are many people who have inspired me throughout the years I have spent contemplating, questioning, and writing this work - many who have helped me see things in new and fascinating ways. Thank you to all the friends, folk, and family who helped make my exploration through academia an incredible adventure. Glenn Willmott let me wander in unfamiliar directions while keeping me from getting too lost along the way. Sylvia Söderlind shaped this work from its early origins to the much more evolved state it is in today. Many thanks are due to Asha Varadharajan, Molly Wallace, Sam McKegney, Tracy Ware, Marlene Goldman, Dean Irvine, and Ann Martin. Thank you to all the staff and faculty at Dalhousie and Queen‟s who have made my experience both enjoyable and engaging. I owe special thanks to Alexandra Morrison and to my parents, Bernice and Marcel Fortin, for all of their support in turning this imagined idea into a reality. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Paleontological Disturbances: Tim Bowling‟s The Bone Sharps and Joan Thomas‟s Curiosity: A Love Story .................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 3 Theories of Evolution: Nino Ricci‟s The Origin of Species .......................................... 74 Chapter 4 Jeffrey Moore‟s The Memory Artists: Synaesthesia and the Science and Art of Memory ..................................................................................................................................................... 111 Chapter 5 Douglas Coupland‟s Player One: What is to Become of Us: Science, Religion, and the Spectrum of Faith ......................................................................................................................... 142 Chapter 6 Rivka Galchen‟s Atmospheric Disturbances: A Meteorology of the Mind ................ 167 Chapter 7 Darwin Comes to Canada: Harry Karlinsky‟s The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) ......................................................... 195 Chapter 8 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 226 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 233 iv Chapter 1 Introduction Science and Literature in the Twenty-First Century By studying science through the looking glass of literature you see the philosophy, history, sociology, ethics and the public perception of modern science. Darwin Meets Einstein, Frans W. Saris The question of interpretation has been unduly neglected. So long as we remain in the region of mathematical formulae, everything appears precise, but when we seek to interpret them it turns out that the precision is partly illusory. Until this matter has been cleared up, we cannot tell with any exactitude what any given science is asserting. Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell „I wish our brains were not so good, I wish our skulls were thicker, I wish that Evolution could Have stopped a little quicker; For oh, it was a happy plight, Of liberty and ease, To be a simple Trilobite In the Silurian seas!‟ “Lay of the Trilobite,” May Kendall I: Science, Reason, Belief, and Literature The fields we now call science and literature have had a long historical relationship that has vacillated between equivalence and opposition depending on the 1 epistemological perspectives and politics of truth in the society or culture that defines such terms. Science once simply meant a search for any and all knowledge about the world. At other times it was associated directly with the arts; literature and painting being classified as forms of “science.” It has also been “[c]ontrasted or coupled with conscience, emphasizing the distinction to be drawn between theoretical perception of a truth and moral conviction” (“Science”). Today the popular notion of science is that of specific methodological, institutional, and epistemological practices and theories undertaken by trained individuals; a definition which is usually contrasted with the humanities and the arts. Literature, on the other hand, has been associated with the act of learning, of seeking after knowledge, and the act of producing fictions about the world. The relationship between the epistemological boundaries of science and literature at this moment in history could be defined as difference. Nevertheless, Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini argue, with regard to science and literature, that “counter-trends towards transdisciplinary convergences-in-difference between the discursive, technical, and natural disciplines have been accelerating for several decades” (Routledge, xvi). Scholars have been attempting to re-bridge the ever-widening gap between institutional conceptions of science and literature since the “two cultures”1 controversy that began with the Rede Lecture given by Charles Percy (C.P.) Snow in 1959. In the lecture, entitled “The Two Cultures,” Snow argued that arts and humanities scholars had little 1 F. R. Leavis was the most vocal critic of Snow‟s argument, although numerous scientists and literary critics have since responded. See Daniel Cordle‟s Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science, and the Two Cultures Debate (1999), C. P. Snow‟s Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and F. R. Leavis‟ Two Cultures?: The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962). 2 actual knowledge of difficult scientific principles, such as the second law of thermodynamics. A long-running and wide-ranging debate grew out of Snow‟s lecture, although most attempts at consilience between the humanities and the sciences since have left little trace of a successful merger. This pattern of “convergences-in-difference” has recently emerged in the creative interpretations of science in the literature of Canada. The representation of science and the use of scientific theories as narrative devices in twenty-first century Canadian literature are the focal points of this study. My primary objective is to analyze recent Canadian novels that have created a subgenre of fiction that uses postmodern techniques to investigate the loss of faith in universal truth. I argue that the turn towards science in Canadian literature is evidence of a turn towards a post-secular renewal of faith based on human existence, ethics, and reason in a Darwinian world without purpose or progression towards a specific goal. I describe my corpus as postmodern fiction in order to both critique postmodern narrative construction and to mark a shift in Canadian literature that specifically focuses on the conditions of scientific discourse because this discourse is bound up with questions of truth, boundaries, and the social construction of knowledge. Because there is no consensus on a singular definition of postmodernism, and because many