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Literature and Chemistry

Elective Affinities

Edited by Margareth Hagen


and Margery Vibe Skagen
Literature and Chemistry

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Liter at u r e a n d
Ch em istry

Elective Affinities

Edited by
Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen

AARHUS UNIVERSITy press | a

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Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities
© The authors and Aarhus University Press 2013
Cover by Jørgen Sparre
Typeset by Anette Ryevad, Ryevad Grafisk
Ebook production: Narayana Press, Denmark

ISSN 0065‑1354 (Acta Jutlandica)


ISSN 0901‑0556 (Humanities Series/14)
ISBN 978 87 7124 175 4

Aarhus University Press


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DK – 8200 Aarhus N
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Published with the financial support of:


Bergen University Fund and Department of Foreign Languages,
University of Bergen

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C onten ts

Introduction

LITERATURE AND CHEMISTRY: ARTS AND


CRAFTS OF TRANSFORMATION  11

Literature and Chemical Sensitivity: Primo Levi

PRIMO LEVI’S CHEMICAL SENSORIUM  39


Robert S. C. Gordon, University of Cambridge

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND CHEMISTRY: PRIMO LEVI AND OLIVER SACKS  53


Margareth Hagen, University of Bergen

From the Literary Lives of Two Epochal


Scientists: Humphry Davy and Ludwig Boltzmann

FROM “THE LIFE OF THE SPINOSIST” TO “LIFE”:


HUMPHRY DAVY, CHEMIST AND POET  77
Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University

AN UNLIKELY CANDIDATE FOR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE:


THE NOSTALGIC LUDWIG BOLTZMANN IN ELDORADO  99
George Rousseau, University of Oxford

Literary and Cinematic Contributions to


the Public Image of Chemistry: Between
Celebration and Denigration

RAYMOND QUENEAU’S “THE SONG OF STYRENE”  121


Pierre Laszlo, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau and University of Liège

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THE INVISIBLE SCIENCE? CHEMISTRY, SCIENCE
FICTION, AND POPULAR CULTURE  139
Folkert Degenring, University of Kassel

IN THE ZONE: THE STRUGATSKII BROTHERS AND THE POETICS


OF POLLUTION IN RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION  151
Muireann Maguire, University of Oxford

Histories of Alchemy

Alchemists and Alchemy in Italian Literature


from its Origins to Galileo Galilei  167
Matteo Pellegrini, University of Padua

ON THE ROLE OF ALCHEMY AND CHEMISTRY IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND


CULTURE FROM PETER THE GREAT TO THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD  185
Lillian Jorunn Helle, University of Bergen

THE LITERARY DISTORTIONS OF ALCHEMY  207


Bernard Joly, CNRS, University of Lille 3

Demonic, Divine or Mystical: Chemistries


of Personal Interaction

DEMONIC AFFINITIES: ON THE CHEMICAL ANALOGY IN


GOETHE’S DIE WAHLVERWANDTSCHAFTEN  231
Frode Helmich Pedersen,University of Bergen

STRINDBERG, CHEMISTRY, AND THE DIVINE  249


Henrik Johnsson, University of Aarhus

THE MYSTICAL POWER OF CHEMISTRY – A BLIND SPOT IN


DAG SOLSTAD’S FIRST NOVEL, IRR! GRØNT!  261
Eivind Tjønneland, University of Bergen

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Poetics of Chemistry and Alchemy

“THE PHOSPHORESCENCE OF PUTREFACTION AND THE SCENT


OF THUNDERSTORMS”: APPROACHING A BAUDELAIREAN
METAPHOR BY WAY OF LITERATURE AND CHEMISTRY  277
Margery Vibe Skagen, University of Bergen

PASTERNAK’S WASSERMANN TEST  301


Brita Lotsberg Bryn, University of Bergen

“DER STEIN DER WEISEN IST BLAU”: ALCHEMISTIC THOUGHT


IN KONRAD BAYER’S LITERARY WORK  317
Michael Grote, University of Bergen

CONTRIBUTORS  335

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Introduction

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LITERATU RE A ND CHE MISTRY: A RTS
AN D C RA FTS OF T RA NSFOR M ATION

Scientia sine conscientia ruina animae1

The present volume represents the continuation of a dialogue between liter‑


ary scholars, historians of culture and science, and chemists that started two
years ago. On the occasion of the UNESCO International Year of Chemistry
2011, the interdisciplinary conference “Literature and Chemistry: Elective
Affinities” was organised by the research group “Literature and Science” at
the Department of Foreign Languages of the University of Bergen (Norway)
on 27‑8 October. The sixteen essays that came out of this event, all excur‑
sions into the mostly uncultivated field of “chemical humanities”, are here
addressed to scholars and students of literature as well as to all readers in‑
terested in the historical and cultural affinities between the natural sciences
and the arts. Covering a wide range of topics, epochs, and approaches, the
essays are loosely organised into six different sections. In the following,
they will be introduced progressively as pertaining to the branch of literary
studies known as “Literature and Science”.
The first section below presents our general approach to the subdiscipline
of literature and science, while the second summarises the recent develop‑
ment of the sub-subdiscipline of literature and chemistry. The five following
sections contextualise the descriptions of the volume’s essays within their
respective subject areas, while the final parts add up the numerous affinities
between the literary and chemical crafts, arguing for the relevance of litera‑
ture and chemistry in the study of the past, present, and future of human
culture.

1 “Science without conscience ruins the soul”: a scholastic axiom quoted by Rabelais
(p. 109).

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LITERATURE AND SCIENCE: RECIPROCITY
AND RESPECT FOR DIFFERENCES
Explorations of the interfaces of literature and science over recent decades
have consolidated this subdiscipline’s academic status as a necessary and
rewarding area of research. In the 1978 manifesto “Literature and Sci‑
ence: The State of the Field”, cultural historian George Rousseau relates
its evolution up to that date through the works of literary and intellectual
historians attentive to the documentation of scientific influence on creative
literature; further, he states the urgent need of cultivating reciprocity and
facing that vastly demanding question of “how literature has shaped or can
shape scientific development” (Rousseau, p. 587). Since then, the enriching
and clarifying consequences of literature and science studies for each of
“the two cultures” have become increasingly evident. Authors, readers, and
literary scholars find in the different branches of “hard” science, motives,
models, and metaphoric instruments for grasping, describing, and plot‑
ting seen, unseen, and unforeseen realities. On the other hand, literary
rhetoric, philosophy, aesthetics, and histories of science are acknowledged
not only as intrinsic tools for scientific communication, but as fundamental
methods and theories for understanding the human nature of all science,
and the importance of a conscious human engagement with scientific
realities.
In spite of acknowledged interdependency, encounters in literature and
science are seldom motivated by ongoing disciplinary harmonisation. The
differences between the two cultures are not merely obstacles to mutual un‑
derstanding, they challenge and energize disciplinary identities and provoke
innovation. The insertion of scientific discourse in a literary text may be a
simple way of creating an impression of rupture, strangeness, or incongru‑
ity, introducing that slight but productive alienation which takes nothing
for granted, and gives the reader an urge to rediscover and redefine the
world. “Scientific discovery can thrive on lack of familiarity”,2 states the
chemist and science writer Pierre Laszlo, encouraging “the spirit of intel‑
lectual nomadism”: an ideal of interdisciplinary border-crossing, modelled
on the ventures of nomadic tribes, people and nations, and the cultural and
scientific fertilisation they have occasioned throughout history. According
to Laszlo, whose writing on chemistry makes use of a variety of approaches
and genres from cultural history to essays on aesthetics, and scientific pa‑

2 The following quotes are from Pierre Laszlo, “The nomadic state” on the author’s
website: www.pierrelaszlo.com.

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pers, there is not just a border but a chasm separating natural scientists and
academics in the humanities:

These are different tribes! […] That they misunderstand one another occasion‑
ally is to be expected. The main obstacle is a dissymmetry. It has to do with
linguistic competence. It runs deep. Humanists in general lack the technical
language, hence the understanding of science, whether astronomy or chemistry.
Scientists are not trained to value opinions or viewpoints. For them, any work‑
ing hypothesis is only as good as its conformity with the data. At a deeper level,
scientists are unaware of the dominion from language on the mind.

Notwithstanding the persistent gap between the two cultures, literature


and science studies are constant reminders of the once thinkable ideal of
universal knowledge, and of the polymathic striving characteristic of many
literary and scientific writers of the past. Among the authors discussed
in this anthology there are several literary and scientific writers of great,
specialised, and varied learning: Mikhail Lomonosov, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe, Humphry Davy, August Strindberg, Ludwig Boltzmann, Raymond
Queneau, Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks. If some have regarded literature and
science as different means in a common pursuit, one may ask to what
degree they believed in the possibility of infusing  – without significant
distortion – their scientific knowledge into literary writing. But as Gillian
Beer has emphasised, science in literature is not so much translation of
stable meanings as transformation:

Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it has entered literature.
Once scientific arguments and ideas are read outside the genre of the scientific
paper and the institution of the scientific journal, change has already begun.
(Beer, p. 90)

In sharp contrast to technical writers’ striving for univocality, everyday


language is vague, allowing the play of a vast range of shadow significations
alongside each word’s functional meaning. The often deliberate openness of
literary language is an obvious indicator of how science changes, becoming
inaccurate and plurivocal in new settings. Closer analysis of how specific
texts reformulate, transform, or twist scientific material for their own pur‑
poses can make us more aware of “the apparent ease with which, in language,
we inhabit multiple, often contradictory, epistemologies at the same time,
all the time” (Beer, p. 82).

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The valorisation of reading and writing literary texts generally implies
that there is some knowledge to be gained from sharing the phenomenality
of subjective experience. Literature is modelled on inter-subjective commu‑
nication between subjective writers and readers, encompassing their bio‑
graphical, social, or most private selves and their imaginary self-projections.
Variations between personal and impersonal points of view, engaged and
detached gazes, create tensions vital to much modern literature. As with all
dichotomies, subject-object dualism has been under fire also in literature and
science scholarship. An awareness of the questionable status of the objectivity
of natural sciences has been underscored recently by Bruno Latour, who asks
“Which language shall we speak with Gaia?”3 and proposes a new empathic
scientific language capable of animating the objects of scientific scrutiny:

[T]he Earth is no longer “objective”, it cannot be put at a distance and emptied


of all Its humans. Human action is visible everywhere – in the construction of
knowledge as well as in the production of the phenomena those sciences are
called to register. (Latour, p. 7)4

We will not dispute the necessity of levelling humankind and nature in a


future inter-subjective scientific discourse; we will, however, look to the
debate between philosopher Paul Ricoeur and neuroscientist and founder
of “neuroesthetics” Jean-Pierre Changeux as a reminder of the necessity
of maintaining some clear distinctions when it comes to literary and phil‑
osophical discourses on subjective experience. Responding critically to
Changeux’s attempt to define aesthetics with the tools and technologies of

3 This was the title of Bruno Latour’s lecture for the Holberg Prize Symposium held
in Bergen June 4th 2013.
4 “As the whole history of science – and Serres himself for a large part in his earlier
work – has often shown, it is difficult to follow the emergence of any scientific con‑
cept without taking into account the vast cultural background that allows scientists
to first animate them, and then, but only later, to de-animate them. Although the
official philosophy of science takes the last movement as the only important and
rational one, just the opposite is true: animation is the essential phenomenon; de-
animation a superficial, ancillary, polemical and more often than not a vindicatory
one. One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that “there are people who still
believe in animism”, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated
world of mere stuff; and this, just at the moment when they themselves multiply the
agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move
in geostory, the more this belief seems difficult to understand” (Latour, p. 9).

14 literature and chemistry

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neuroscience, and art as productions of the physical-chemical machinery of
the brain, Ricoeur simply reminds us of the semantic distinction between
the brain as an object of science – its neurons, synapses, neurotransmit‑
ters, etc. – and “my brain” as it is inhabited by my subjective thinking. The
lived body cannot be reduced to the body of scientific study.5 It is crucial
both to avoid confusing the two different discursive orders and to develop
a third order which respects, distinguishes, and articulates the differences
between the electro-chemical processes on one level and consciousness
on another. “The brain thinks” is a typical example of semantic confusion
between scientific and phenomenological discourses: “The brain does not
think”, replies Ricoeur, “I think”.
In contexts of interdisciplinary rivalry, scientific generalisation and ob‑
jectivisation are automatically associated with reductionism. But in the same
way as scientists have been told that they need to be more conscious of their
dependency on language, culture, and society, scientists have often accused
literature and science scholars of dilettantism. Some see them as high-flying
theoretical misreaders of scientists’ hard-earned laboratory knowledge. Ac‑
cusations of reductionism are also heard within the humanities against the
literary scholar forgetful of disciplinary essentials in his or her search for a
common ground with the hard sciences.
This anthology’s main focus is on the presence of chemistry in literature;
it presents various examples of how alchemical and chemical doctrines and
concrete chemical phenomena are transferred and metamorphosed into
narrative, poetic, cinematic, aesthetical, ethical, and metaphysical processes
and representations. A truly reciprocal investigation, not only of chemistry
in literature, but also of literature in chemistry, lies beyond the framework
and ambition of its authors, the majority of which are primarily literary
scholars, not trained chemists. In the chapters of this book, specialists in
literature, cultural history, history of science, and chemistry interpret verbal
and visual media belonging to different languages and ages from different
theoretical viewpoints, but they all share a basic understanding of literature
and science as a sub-discipline of literary studies. Their principle concern
is the literary text, analysed and contextualised by an informed reader in‑
teracting with the object of his or her investigation.
Different metaphors have been used to evoke the dynamic and fertilising
relationships between literature and science: dialogue, encounter, nomad‑

5 “[L]e mental vécu implique le corporel, mais en un sens du mot corps irréductible
au corps objectif tel qu’il est connu des sciences de la nature” (Ricoeur, p. 11‑12).

Introduction15

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