Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations

in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Dec 2000 by Peter Butko

Peter Swirski. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and

Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary
Knowledge. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press,
2000. xviii, 183 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00, cloth.

At least since the times of C.P. Snow it has been "officially" known
that the natural and social, or human, sciences occupy largely
incongruent spaces in human scientific endeavors. Despite
occasional attempts at connecting them (logical positivism,
psychophysics, cognitive science, and complexity science may come
to mind), the clash of the two cultures seems to be in full swing. A
recent hoax by Alan Sokal, a physicist who successfully published in
a respected social science journal a parody of a philosophical article
about, nota bene, parallels between esoteric natural sciences and
social and cultural phenomena, was by some interpreted as a vicious
and unfair attack in the so-called Science Wars between the natural
sciences and the humanities. To quell this unnecessary conflict
between the two branches of science, sober and meritorious voices
of reason are sorely needed. One such voice is represented by the
book Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in
Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge by Peter
Swirski.

The author is a young Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

at the University of Alberta (the book's dust jacket obsoletely
mentions the University of Toronto) with breathtaking erudition and
intellectual courage. His book has multiple goals. Through two
prominent writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who
were very much interested in contemporaneous science, namely
Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem, the author sets out to analyze
interactions between the humanities, represented by literature, and
the sciences. While the thematic, stylistic or ideological influences of
science on literature have been recognized and are discussed in
many serious critical works, especially those dealing with science
fiction, the actual application of concrete scientific methods to the
analysis of literary works, is much less common. Swirski uses both
approaches and he does so convincingly, with ease and grace.

The book starts with a game-theory analysis of Poe's story "The

Purloined Letter," which is an extremely refreshing and valuable
exercise in itself. As is known, the story describes a game of wits
between a genial criminal and a genial detective, and is very
amenable to scientific analysis, since there is no psychology,
character evolution, nor flowery stylistics. The story is rather a
theoretical construct, resembling a crystal or a borgesian artifact.
Indeed, Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Death and the Compass" deals
with a similar idea: that the outcome of the game, or the quality of
one's move, depends on how well one can anticipate the move of
the opponent. In the next step, Swirski applies the game-theory
formalism to the realworld game between the literary author and
the reader. In the process of writing the author anticipates the
reader's intellectual or emotional response to what has been written
and this anticipation determines what will be written next. Similarly,
the process of reading the reader anticipates the author's next move
and from this anticipatory interplay both players obtain satisfaction.
One might go even further and ask: Is not the game we all play with
our ever-changing environment also the same?

The greatest part of Swirski's attention to Poe, regarding both

importance and space, is given to Poe's stylistically undefinable
piece (essay? poem? philosophy? fiction?) "Eureka." As it turns out,
"Eureka" is not readily available to an eager reader. Even books with
titles that include the words Collected Short Fiction do not contain
"Eureka," despite the fact that Poe seemed extremely proud of this
"philosophical," "artistic," or "intellectual" achievement of his.
Although Swirski dutifully criticizes Poe's lapses of logic, numerous
inconsistencies, and occasional sheer ignorance, he refrains from a
harsher overall judgment. Indeed, he claims: "['Eureka'] is... one of
the most ambitious and far-reaching projects ever attempted in
philosophy" (p. 27). This is an overstatement, to put it mildly. But
"Eureka" does deserve its place in Swirski's book because of its
value as an attempt at interdisciplinary (or omnidisciplinary?) cross-
over, "an epistemological bridge between the imagination of poetry,
the logic of philosophy, and the empiricism of science" (29). Its
goal, it appears, is "to ameliorate the empirical and deductive
methods by infusing them with poetic intuition" (p. 34), which is
commendable and consistent with Poe's romantic spirit. Poe was
foremost a writer and a poet, but he was also a skillful mystifier and
sharp satirist, though only a dilettante philosopher or scientist.
There is no doubt that "Eureka" is an interesting work of literature.
Its rhetoric, esthetic or poetic values may be unquestionable, but its
scientific or epistemological values are not. Swirski's philosophical
expose strongly indicates his adherence to pragmatism: In science,
and literary theory as well, practice is the ultimate judge. It seems
that in the case of "Eureka," Swirski falls victim to Poe's persuasion
and forgets that the value of art is a function of not only the
author's intent, but also of the reader's or viewer's perception. For
an objective evaluation of a piece of art, the artist's ambition or
intent is only one, sometimes even a minor, factor. And, Poe's
ambitious goal notwithstanding, "Eureka" does not fare well under
the objective scrutiny of either science or philosophy.

After the historico-philosophical perspective on Poe, Swirski

discusses the ethico-philosophical dimensions in the work of
Stanislaw Lem, a European genius of science fiction and speculative
fiction. What Poe attempted in the nineteenth century, Lem
accomplished in the twentieth: complete conjugation between
culture (literature) and science, where one fertilizes the other and
the synthesis is beneficial to both. Lem received a solid science
education in medical school, but he greatly expanded his knowledge
through individual study. He was mostly interested in the new
sciences like cybernetics, semiotics, and futurology, even before
these sciences shed the shackles of the restraining communist
ideology in the Eastern part of Europe. Indeed, "it would be hard to
find a Lem novel that does not, in one way or another, concern itself
with questions of representation, communication, message-sending,
interpretation, information, creativity, language, or signaling" (p.
74). Swirski's analysis concentrates on the novel The Invincible,
which is considered the key link in the Lem's oeuvre. It contains
most of the recurrent themes in the novels and stories, such as
machine evolution, communication with an alien culture, ethics,
meaning, and understanding. It would be difficult to analyze just
this one novel in detail, but that is not Swirski's intent. He uses The
Invincible, and tangentially other works by Lem (The Futurological
Congress, Solaris, and, above all, The Perfect Vacuum), as a
springboard for his own speculations on artificial intelligence.
Extrapolation to the near future brings him to questions of esthetics
and meaning in a literature that is not written by man, but by an
electronic machine. This is not science fiction-the first literary
compositions of computers have already been published (e.g.,
Bagabone, Hem 'I Die Now [New York: Vantage, 1984]).

The crucial point in the field of artificial, but also natural, intelligence
is the problem of creativity. Who creates and who simply assembles
pre-existing pieces, such as words, notes, or color shapes, following
some pre-determined (preprogrammed) syntactic rules? It is
obvious that Hemingway's typewriter is not the author of
Hemingway's novels. It is probably less clear who was the real
winner in the famous chess match between the computer Deep Blue
and the world chess champion Kasparov. Who was the author of the
machine's winning strategy: the programmer or the software? But
the most difficult question is who is the author of computer-
generated literature (for which Lem invented a quirky neologism
biterature, from BITic litERATURE). Swirski does not pretend to have
all the answers. The value of his book resides in the thorough
formulations of the questions and in the scientific approach to
possible solutions. His modification of the old Turing test (TT) is
both hilarious and meritorious. Alan Turing was a mathematician
who attempted to answer the question "Can machines think?" by an
imitation-game test. To explain briefly, an interrogator questions
two subjects and, after a certain time or a number of
questions/answers, the interrogator is asked to determine which of
the two subjects is human and which is a computer. If the
computer, one of the two subjects, can successfully hide its identity,
it may be said to think. In answer to some of the drawbacks and
published criticisms of TT, Swirski devises his own version, boldly
named the Swirski test (ST). In ST, the computer is the interrogator
that must determine the sexes of the two test subjects, which may
be males, females, or computers, in any possible permutations. Of
course, ST is not immune to ambivalences, most notably its
dependence on cultural and pragmatic factors, but is not the
question "Can machines think?" itself dependent on cultural and
pragmatic factors? In the opinion of this reviewer, the proposed
Swirski test deserves the attention of psychologists and computer
scientists, and I would wish to see the results.

There are only few places in the book which provoke some, arguably
minor, criticisms. In an extensive quote from Bach and Hamish (p.
11), the labels S and H are used without definition, but the reader's
conjecture that they mean Speaker and Hearer is plausible.

Although Swirski is justifiably critical of Poe's muddled logic and

misleading rhetoric in "Eureka," in at least one case the critic
apparently misinterpreted the author. When Poe affirms that
"perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth," Swirski
deliberates if Poe meant correspondence to the known empirical
facts or a purely logical self-consistency without referral to the real
world. I would give Poe the benefit of doubt and, in the absence of
contrary evidence, assume that the perfect consistency means just
that: consistency with all the facts, which includes both empirical
data and theoretical constructs. It seems that what provoked
Swirski's ire is Poe's misguided belief that science is only interested
in quantitative expansion, while rejecting theoreticians. Swirski
correctly points out that Kepler's theoretical genius would have been
smaller, if apparent at all, without the detailed astronomical data of
Tycho de Brahe. Poe's only fault in this case was that he did not (but
how could he?) predate Thomas Kuhn and his recognition of
scientific progress as consisting of alternating periods of so-called
normal science and of paradigm-shifting scientific revolutions.

In the section titled "The Fact and Method of Unified Inquiry" (p.
46), Swirski briefly and explicitly discusses the methodological and
fundamental differences and similarities between natural and social
sciences. I do not disagree with the author's conclusion that the two
kinds of science are more similar than different, but one might point
out that controlled experiments and reproducibility are the two core
tenets of the natural sciences. Unfortunately, social sciences can
never fully embrace the idea of controlled experimentation (perhaps
fortunately for subjects of such experiments) and, due to the
incessant flow of history, can never fully satisfy the requirement of
reproducibility. Nevertheless, this should not cause social scientists
to doubt the process. Although not routinely acknowledged, the
"poetic intuition" often plays a role in natural scientists' decisions
and the related progress in science. A notorious example is the case
of the cyclic formula of benzene, which allegedly occurred to the
chemist Kekule in a dream.

I have two comments on bibliography. The list of references is

pretty exhaustive, but I think that Philosophy of Chance by
Stanislaw Lem should have been included. In it Lem himself
employed methods of systems theory to analysis of literary works.
My second comment concerns the format of the bibliography. On
one hand it is useful to have the references divided into sections,
such as "Poe: General," "Poe: `Eureka .... "Game Theory," etc.,
which helps in searching the literature in these clusters. On the
other hand, when one reads the text, it is sometimes not obvious in
which section one should look for the given reference. A separate,
complete bibliography in alphabetical order would be helpful.

Swirski concludes his book with a short chapter entitled "No

Discipline Is an Island." It contains his credo that "literature,
philosophy, and science are... inseparable manifestations of the
same creative human instinct that has operated throughout the
ages" (p. 139). His book is an inspiration that contributes greatly in
improving interactions between literary studies and other academic
fields. The difference between Swirski and many famous (or
infamous) exponents of postmodernism is that Swirski is honestly
open to scientific scrutiny. This by itself is a guarantee that his
approach will sooner or later bear fruit and will not wilt in the
incomprehensible mumble in the trenches of the postmodernist
Science Wars.

The final little delight of this scholarly, but entertaining, work awaits
a thorough reader after he finishes the book and closes it. A back-
cover blurb claims that "Peter Swirski, a brilliant literary critic and a
superb translator, deserves wide recognition as a scholar in
American and Polish literatures." In a self-referent manner, this
meta-comment is written by none other than Stanislaw Lem, one of
the book's subjects! And by the way, the statement appears to be
true.

Peter Butko, University of Southern Mississippi

Copyright Canadian Assosciation of Slavists Dec 2000

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