Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science Gillian Beer Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 44, No. 1. (Jan., 1990), pp. 81-99. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0035-9149%28199001%2944%3A1%3C81%3ATOTTRO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London is currently published by The Royal Society. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/rsl.html. 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THE RELATIONS OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE* Girton College, Cambridge, CB3 OJG The theme announced for this lecture, 'the presentation of science through literature' might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presenta- tion. That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scien- tific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably. Victorian writers, scientific and literary, held to the ideal of the 'mother-tongue'; in our own time the variety of professional and personal dialects is emphasised instead. Yet the expectation lingers that it should be possible to translate stably from one to another. This expectation may prove unrealistic. More is to be gained from analysing the transformations that occur when ideas change creative context and encounter fresh readers. The fleeting and discontinu- ous may be as significant in our reading as the secure locking of equivalent meanings. Questions can change their import when posed within different genres. Recognizing scientific reference within works of literature may not be as straight- forward a business as it seems. To put it at its most direct: how do we recognize science once it is in literature? Can such reference to scientific material be drained again of its relations within the literary work and returned to autonomy? Neither literature nor science is an entity and what constitutes literature or science is a matter for agreement in a particular historical period or place. The activities of scientists, and their social and institutional bases, have changed enormously over the past 100years. More, on the face of it, than those of the writer of literature. But the English language now bears a freight of meaning from very diverse national groups across the world. That is an important change. The present internationalism of both science and literature makes for curious crossplays. I shall examine some examples later in this argument. The movement towards mathema- * 'Ibis is the text of the first lecture on literature and science, sponsored by the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy and the Royal Society, and given at the Royal Society on 20 April 1989. 82 Gillian Beer ticization has enhanced hopes of a stable community of meaning for scientists at work; the spread of English makes for often delusive accords between different communities of meaning. In the first part of the lecture I concentrate on some sought-for correspondences between scientific and literary language; in the second part I examine some recent examples of the transformation of scientific materials in literary works. Such analysis reminds us forthwith of the apparent ease with which, in language, we inhabit multiple, often contradictory, epistemologies at the same time, all the time. AUTHORITATIVELANGUAGES In the mid and late 19th century the humanities were still in the ascendant in school and university studies, whereas now the appeal to authority is usually in the direction of science. In that way our present situation differs also from that described 30 years ago by C.P. Snow in The two cultures (1). The language available alike to 19th century creative writers and scientists had been forged out of past literature, the Bible, philosophy, natural theology, the demotic of the streets or the clubs. Scientists as various as James Clerk Maxwell and Charles Lyell habitually seamed their sentences with literary allusion and incorporated literature into the argumentative structures of their work (as Lyell does Ovid and Clerk Maxwell Tennyson.) The first number of the scientificjournal Nature (4 November 1869) opened with a set of aphorisms culled from Goethe and selected by Huxley. Huxley describes the journal's aim as 'to mirror the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call the progress of Science' (2). 'Progress', 'fashioning', 'picture', 'mirroring', 'Nature herself': the securing of enquiry by means of a stable accord with a sacrilized external world is reinforced by the journal's epigraph from Wordsworth: To the solid ground Of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye. 'Ground' in this scientific context condenses the senses 'earth' and 'argument'. That epigraph, with its accompanying image, continues as the bannerhead of the journal, past Maxwell, past Einstein, for almost 100 years. In 1957 it was shorn of its image but it was retained on each volume title page until 1963, when its anachronism must at last have seemed greater than its annealing powers. To the Victorians, whether preoccupied with science or literature or politics - and however conscious they might be of the fickleness of signification- the concept of the mother-tongue was crucial. In the case of English the 'mother-tongue' was idealized as the English of past literature above all. Scientific writers in the Victorian period were immersed in the general language of the tribe, yet needed to formulate their own stable professional dialects with which to communicate with Translation or Transformation? each other. By that means they would be able to change the level of description so as to engage with new theoretical and technical questions. They would also limit the range of possible interpretation, and, it was their hope, misinterpretation. But they were reluctant to allow writing on scientific issues to remain on the linguistic periphery. They thus claimed congruity with poetry, perceived as the authoritative utterance within current language. Victorian middle and upper class language was formed by what we might call a parental diad: not only the mother-tongue but the father-tongue shaped the dominant educational ideology. Classical languages played a central role in the education system, a system reserved almost entirely for boys until the late 19th century and taught to them by men. The practice of Victorian scientists of citing classical writing in their work serves several functions: some social, some illustra- tive, some argumentative. Such allusion effortlessly claimed gender and class community with a selected band of readers; it implied a benign continuity for scientific enquiries with the imaginative past of human society; it could figure the tension between objectivity and affect. In our own time writers on discourse have emphasised the heterogeneity of dialects within the apparently common tongue, the way in which we never can quite securely translate from one professional or social group to another the intensity, or vacuity, of terms. Terms may be precise and full in one domain, meagre in an~ther~transformedin yet another: 'matter' would be a simple example, or 'select'. Words are also subject to ontological decay: what starts precise and bounded may become neutralized, or soggy. When George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda first appeared, both R.H. Hutton and George Saintsbury objected in their reviews to the description of the heroine's 'dynamic glance' as being pedantic and over-scien- tific (3). Hardly the objection that such a clichkd phrase would raise now. Words are impressed with the shared assumptions, with the things not said of each group, just as much as they are with their shared assertions. But none of us is a member of one social and linguistic group only. We live, therefore, in a variety of conflicted epistemologies. Scientific workers strive to contain their procedures within a single epistemological frame, but cannot exempt them from further and other construals. We experience every day, and we condense that experience in speaking and listening, as co-workers, shoppers, friends, researchers, women or men, perhaps parents, lovers, certainly political activists or quietists, members willy-nilly of local, national and global communities at a particular moment in historical time. Some terms transfer across all these zones, particularly those terms that have to do with kinship, commerce, measurement, conflict. They shift scale and energy as they go. Much literature of the late 20th century is proudly parodic, presenting puns as the profoundest rather than the lowest form of wit.