Science and Literature

I want to ask three questions this evening. They may at first seem rather remote from our immediate troubles, though I do not think they really are. First, what effect has science in fact had upon literature, for good and for bad? Secondly—and this is perhaps the more important question—what effect ought science to have upon literature? And thirdly, assuming that our culture is becoming, or trying to become, a scientific culture, what is the proper function of literature within it? Even in a time of economic crisis these questions are not merely ornamental, for literature is one of the ways in which a culture expresses its deepest assumptions.

By science I mean chiefly modern natural science. Science is, on the one hand, an attitude and a method: observation, induction and abstraction. It seeks recurrent order, and therefore determinism in some sense. On the other hand, science is an immense accumulation of facts and detailed theories; and it commonly encourages materialism in some sense. I say “in some sense” deliberately, because both words are very treacherous. There is also the case of psychology.

By literature I mean the expression of thoughts and feelings in words. Quite apart from good and bad craftsmanship, or good and bad art, I suggest that there are three broad kinds. First, there is the literature of escape. This is legitimate, but dangerous. It distracts attention from unpleasant reality, and it affords wish-fulfilment, as the fairy story does. We all need relief, particularly in bad times; but relief may become evasion.

Secondly, there is the literature of current needs: propaganda and comment conducted mainly in terms of accepted values. It may deal urgently and usefully with the immediate crisis, but it seldom questions the whole framework within which the crisis has arisen.

Thirdly, there is the literature of creative imagination. This welcomes reality and explores it. It epitomises reality in symbols, and through those symbols reveals essential patterns. It enhances sensibility and understanding. In other words, it reveals new aspects of reality, and in doing so it actually creates new human capacity.

Let us turn, then, to the impact of science upon literature. I shall offer examples rather than a continuous history, and my comments must necessarily be somewhat random. Among the early examples, Dante is an obvious case. He was deeply influenced by the science of his age. The pre-Copernican astronomy gives his universe not only its architecture but also its verisimilitude. The scientific scheme is obsolete; but within the poem it helps to make the imagined world precise and credible.

Bacon is the trumpeter of a new age, the prophet of knowledge as power. In the New Atlantis he imagines what is virtually a republic of science. Milton presents a more troubled case, for in him the new science and the inherited mythology are in conflict.

Rabelais and Swift show another tendency, though without direct influence of science. In Gargantua, when people are lost in the giant’s mouth, the gigantism is worked out with a kind of realism. Swift similarly takes a novel idea and pursues its consequences: the little people of Lilliput, the giants of Brobdingnag, the rational horses and the immortals. The method is fantastic, but the detail is exact enough to put man firmly in his place.

In Shelley there is a medley of science and Greece. Prometheus becomes in part the spirit of science, and science promises a new world. Wordsworth, by contrast, is alarmed and flies back to nature as directly perceived. He protests against the man who would be “botanizing on his mother’s tomb.” What he fears is abstraction, dissection and materialism.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon applies scientific analysis with a characteristic “shuffling” of familiar categories: sickness is treated as crime and crime as sickness. The machines threaten to take power, and the book becomes a warning. Butler is also a prophet of evolution, though for him evolution is bound up with the thought of purpose in life. Meredith again reflects evolution. His nature is more objective than Wordsworth’s nature, and in such an image as the “Warrior Horse” there is a sense of the small effect produced by all our human effort.

Hardy, in Two on a Tower, uses astronomy to produce the fear and fascination of immensity. The moon’s disc, the larger view in which Europe itself dwindles, and the contrast with the little heath bells enlarge our scale of vision and alter the apparent importance of man.

Jules Verne must at least be named; and Rosny, in Un Autre Monde, Les Xipéhuz and other fantasies, imagines worlds superimposed upon our own. Flatland works out the consequences of two-dimensional life, but does not stop at geometry; imaginative filling gives that abstraction the quality of a world.

Shaw is an evolutionist, but he is often hostile to science as an institution, and particularly hostile to the pretensions of scientific medicine. That ambiguity brings us conveniently to contemporary examples.

Wells is, of course, the master. He gives us scientific melodrama in The War of the Worlds, The Star and The Time Machine; elsewhere there is a levitating drug, and there are forms of accelerated or “quick” living. But the best of Wells is not merely melodrama. It is sheer mind-stretching, as in The Country of the Blind. Throughout his work, moreover, he is the prophet of a scientific Utopia.

J. B. S. Haldane, in Possible Worlds, plays with such ideas as the fall of the moon and the future of Venus. He can imagine even the abolition of pain and its reinstatement. J. D. Bernal, in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, imagines living worlds.

Aldous Huxley warns us in Brave New World. He works out the consequences of mechanisation: mass production becoming social regimentation, and mass suggestion penetrating even through the pillow-phone. Industry has become aimless: technocracy and robots.

David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus gives us a rotating universe, strange scenery and such details as yellow water. Human beings themselves are transformed and, in a sense, glorified. Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England shows more directly the influence of psychology. Its mechanism may be implausible—the subterranean light, the fungus and the dependence upon food from the upper earth—but its hypnotised people form a clear symbol of Fascism.

Murray Constantine’s Proud Man again turns to psychology. An angelic or perfected visitor comes among us with a perfect disposition and discovers human beings engaged in self-torture. Here I will unfrock myself.

Hilton’s Lost Horizon combines the psychological, the mystical and the scientific. J. C. Powys’s Morwyn, on the other hand, hates science and associates scientists with sadists. Its mechanism—the meteor fall and the use of gravity at the centre—is faulty. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, with its underground race, belongs in the background here. M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud imagines a gas cloud destroying all life, and derives its force from the description of a dead world.

Then there is what has been called “scientifiction”: Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories and the like. Here we encounter subterranean races, intelligent reptiles, voyages in time and life on the subatomic scale. The scientific ingenuity may be considerable, but the human factor is commonly crude. Régis Messac, writing on Micromégas, is fascinated by fantasies of the very big and the very little: giants whose heads are inconveniently high, and forms of life governed by subatomic laws. His Quinzinzinzili and La Cité des Asphyxiés may stand as further examples.

What, then, is the upshot of these examples? Several distinct kinds of scientific influence upon literature appear. First, there is the prophecy of wisdom and power: mechanical power, certainly, but also man’s greatness and potentiality. Science seems to promise that man may understand his world and deliberately remake it.

Secondly, there is revulsion against science and prophecy of disaster. Literature dwells upon man’s littleness and inconsequence, the ruin of individuality, the menace of determinism and the deplorable effects of industrialism. Materialism is deplored; and writers become obsessed with mere size and number.

Thirdly, science may produce a kind of natural piety toward the universe: reverence for its aloofness, and also for its immense potentiality.

There is also a danger of atrophy in what used to be called “man’s proper study”—man himself. Interest in galaxies, mechanisms and remote futures may weaken our interest in actual human beings. Along with this comes the cult of the marvellous, a new sort of “realism,” and a deliberate objectivity.

Finally, science has affected literary style. It encourages prose that is unemotional and unrhetorical, dry, concise and abstract.

At this point a qualification is needed. We naturally name Jules Verne and Wells; and we may point to the amazing stories. But the actual amount of literature profoundly transformed by science is still very small. And whether Wells and the amazing stories are properly scientific literature is itself a question.

We may now ask how science ought to benefit literature. Let us begin with escape literature. Escape is not necessarily bad, but it is minor. Science can afford it new satisfactions: wonder, power and aloofness. But even escape fantasy needs to be plausible within its own assumptions.

The same requirement applies to creative literature. It must have plausibility, or else its serious intention becomes farcical. In general creative literature, science should in manner keep it in touch with the actual; in matter, it should afford new themes and a fuller understanding both of man and of the world.

There is then the special form of scientific fantasy. Its task is to perform particular mind-stretchings. To do this honestly it must remain abreast of exploration.

Beyond fantasy there is myth. A myth is a symbol of the pattern of a whole culture; in this respect it may be compared with the epic poem. It must “open windows” beyond the habits and assumptions of ordinary life. The myth of a scientific culture cannot but assimilate science. And yet it must beware of passing scientific fashions.

What, finally, is the function of literature within a scientific culture? First, literature may offer suggestive speculation in terms of the culture itself.

Secondly, literature must criticise the culture. In particular it must correct the specialist’s fallacy. The specialist is inevitably tempted to mistake an abstraction for the whole reality, materialism for a complete philosophy, determinism for a complete account of conduct, magnitude for importance, and myopic detail for understanding.

Literature must therefore stress the higher human capacities—the capacities which the sciences cannot yet adequately tackle and which, for that very reason, the scientific specialist may fail even to notice.

The appropriate literary style, I should say, will be unconventional but restrained. It will learn not only from natural science but from social science, history and philosophy. We may ask whether the very study of nature can itself become an escape. Certainly anthropology and astronomy may be used as escapes from the immediate human world. One thinks of Meredith and Hardy.

Science cannot describe the mind. We may say that man consists of electrons and atoms; but where, in that account, is mind? And where is what we rather vaguely call the spiritual? The correlates are needed: necessity and requirement—but necessity and requirement of what? That remains an open question.

Some writers behave as though God whispered directly into their ears. My advice to them would be: do not under-prophesy; do not overstep the mark; and do not be overawed by any scientist, however subtle. Some scientific ideas are right, after all.

We can escape from reality and remain sane. There may even be an emotional purgation of science by writing.

Science lacks the bitterness of mere religion; but science itself is dangerous. The amount of good done—some people’s good—may get awry. Hence the oscillation between pessimism and optimism. Scientific notions may be recruited to support racial superiority; and there is the myth of Communism—of one that is coming.

The facts of science are so contradictory in appearance, and so numerous, that they have not yet been synthesised. We have isolated discussions—Maugham upon sadism, Shakespeare upon the whole of human nature, Priestley’s Midnight on the Desert—but the specialists remain specialists. A thousand years ago the learned world possessed far fewer facts and perhaps a more manageable, though largely false, synthesis. We possess enormously more truth in detail and very little agreement about the whole.

So we return to our starting point. We must first define what we mean by science, and recognise examples of unscientific literature. We must then consider the possibility of a genuinely scientific drama. If the scientist himself could speak as an artist, would he give us merely another Jules Verne, or something more?

Literature must indeed prophesy, but it should prophesy modestly—and, in the end, prophesy in hope.