Conversation with John Briggs Reprinted from River Oak Review, No. 14 Spring 2000 Special Issue on Literature and Science Question: Literature and science are today usually thought of as inhabiting separate universes. Where did this division emerge, and why do you think that now some are challenging it? JB: You ask when this began. It's difficult to put a date on the split between literature and science, or perhaps more broadly, art and science. Poets, writers and artists probably felt betrayed by science by the time of the Romantics. But in the century before, Pope and other poets were enthusiastic about the Newtonian world and scientific discoveries. The Romantics encountered the ravages of industrial technology and that created some animas toward technology and the science that feeds it, an animas which has persisted. From the perspective of science, the split with the arts was probably slow and subtle, following the development of the scientific ideology which eventually came to see everything that is not experimentally verifiable fact or logical speculation based on fact as somehow soft and suspect. This leads to a deeper issue which might help with the dating. We now live in what I like to call a "scientistic" age. I use the word scientistic so as not to denigrate science itself but rather the science-like pretensions that permeate our culture. Science is characterized by reason, the rational, as opposed to the emotional, the vague, the artistic. (Not that I would at all agree that art is at all vague or even emotional in the simple sense of emotions like fear or pride, etc.) The rational ideal of science exists in the absence of what we have come to regard as aesthetical sensibilities. We believe science is about logic and facts. We believe that to be reasonable. I'll give you a recent example from Science News (vol. 158). The magazine reported on a study of moral reasoning conducted by psychologists at Ohio State University. The researchers gave stories to 154 sixth-graders and 132 college students in India and the U.S. The stories described a robber who contracts a mysterious deadly disease. The scientists wanted to know if the subjects believed in "immanent justice," the notion that the natural world punishes human misdeeds. Sixth-graders and Indian college students showed a significant belief in immanent justice. The researchers concluded, according to the report, that even when children understand the biological basis of illness they "become socialized into acceptance of irrational immanent-justice judgments." Note the word irrational. The psychologists believe that it is irrational to think, as many in India do, that there is a cosmic order that keeps the books on our behavior. Putting the question of Hindu and Buddhist world view aside, it's clear that the psychologists equate a scientific explanation of the world with a rational explanation, and they are willing to insist that if an explanation is not scientific it's not rational. Rather amazing hubris, but that's what we've come to in many, many domains of our discourse. This sort of narrowness wasn't always the case. From the time of the Greeks up through the Middle Ages rationality included the aesthetic idea of harmony. For example, in The Divine Comedy, Dante is guided through the Inferno by Virgil who represents both "reason" and the artist. For a long time to be a rational person meant to take into account the soft and unfactual issues of harmony and inspiration. The age of Kant and the rise of science put an end to the idea of reason as including aesthetics. Consequently, Kant, among others, recognized that aesthetic judgments had been left out of the picture of consciousness being developed in order to rationalize (sorry) science. A whole new category had to be invented to account for what we now call aesthetical perception. The result is that we continue to treat artistic perception--aesthetics--as if it were unconnected to the kind of logical, rational thinking that goes into science. But the true is scientists use aesthetics to guide them all the time. The culture, however, believes that scientists are above that sort of thing. The culture has come to believe that artistic perception is a frill, a pleasant diversion, and emotional sort of high, but not vital for our survival as science is. You ask why some are challenging this artificial division between art and science, or aesthetics and reason. I'm not sure why other people are challenging it, but I know why I am. I happen to think that if we don't bring and artistic sensibility into our rational decisions, into our whole view of the world, into our relationship to nature and to each other, we will be doomed. Art--literature--connects us with the whole; it reveals the harmonies of existence (or reveals the disharmonies which reveals the harmony). Without use of that facility we will surely blowtorch our way into oblivion with our robots and designer genes and we will never even know what happened. There are other influences, too. With quantum mechanics, physics entered a period when there were no sensual images or pictures of what was going on at the most basic level of matter. Physicists became aesthetically starved. With the computer and chaos theory images came back. We can now visualize immense complexity. The new scientific images are both logical and aesthetic. So scientists have begun to reconnect with the sensual nature of reality. Art and literature, of course, have always been there. Art combines the abstract with the sensual. In fact, that's how artistic metaphors usually work. One term is abstract, the other concrete: "Time's winged chariot," for example. Whether through science or through metaphor, we're trying to connect the abstracting capacity of our brain to the flow of whatever no-thing-ness is out there. Come to think of it, I suspect there are a lot of forces at work challenging the split between art and science. Not the least of these, from my perspective, is that the new science, specifically chaos theory and quantum mechanics has discovered that the basic order of nature is--if you'll permit me--metaphoric. In quantum mechanics we find that particles are both particles and waves, that particles can be both separated in space and not separated at the same time. These are perfectly metaphorical ideas. In chaos theory, we find that unpredictable behavior has, despite its chaos, an inherent self-similarity at many scales. Difference that turns out to be similarity is also at the root of metaphor where pieces of literature are, as Thomas Mann observed, composed with mirrors. PM: Taking off from what you said about quantum mechanics and chaos theory being metaphoric, couldn't it be argued that all science has some metaphoric basis? Or perhaps I mean analogical, building what we would call in literature similes. When Newton saw the universe as like a machine full of levers and pulleys, wasn't that a kind of artistic thinking? And continuing further--what's wrong with that? JB: Yes. I need to define my terms better. What is a metaphor? Technically it's a comparison or juxtaposition of categorically unlike terms. Similes are metaphors that use like or as. Linguists in the early part of the century observed that language is riddled with metaphoric comparisons and expands by means of them. New experiences and objects are grasped linguistically through metaphor. For example, the term gridlock is a rather complex comparison the idea of locking something tight with the idea of the grid of street intersections. The world wide web is a metaphor. Over time, the kind of metaphors that extend language and give it color lose their surprising quality and become merely terms for the objects or experiences in question. Spaceship, catnip, cartwheel, the word "taps" in the headline "Gore Taps Lieberman"--all these were once surprising metaphoric comparisons that have long since turned into mere signifiers for objects or actions. A variation in this theme are metaphors that add color to language and then become clichés. The statement "she's cool," the more recent "wicked cool" or "gnarly" are examples in that vein. I call both metaphors of color and metaphors that extend language "everyday metaphors" in order to distinguish them from other kinds. Everyday metaphors bring vitality to thought because they bring home the similarities lying within unlike things. In the end, however, they do what thought almost always does: they resolve the world into categories, into alleged objects and into knowledge. A second large class of metaphors includes the idea of the world as a machine. This is the Newtonian metaphor you referred to. (Though, actually, Newton's first metaphor was alchemic.) A more recent example is the idea of the brain as a computer. I call these "envisioning metaphors." They are ways of comparing domains we know little about with domains where we feel more confident in our knowledge. Such grand metaphors can be very pregnant with possibility and lead to all kinds of insights and investigations as we try to draw out the comparison in detail. They can also lead to errors. The envisioning metaphor of the atom as a solar system with electrons in orbit around the nucleus led to serious confusions in the early part of the last century. The third large class of metaphors includes the ones found in great literature and perhaps in dreams. The characteristic of literary metaphors that makes them different from either everyday metaphors or envisioning metaphors is that they retain a dynamic that prevents resolution of the metaphoric surprise into some category or knowledge. For example, despite more than a century of commentary, no one has been able to resolve the metaphor of Melville's white whale. What is it? God, the Devil, nothingness, the truth. We know the whale is "like" something but we can't pin down what in is. In fact, the metaphor as Melville unfolds it conspires to prevent us from pinning it down as if the real aim of the whale was to face us with the very mystery of being. I sometimes substitute my own neologism in order to illustrate the action of a literary metaphor. I call it the action, or the experience, of THIS*OTHER-NESS. Think of a traditional metaphor has having two terms, X and Y. X=Y is a metaphor. X is like Y, a simile. In my reformulation "This" (X) is the "other" (Y). The * in my made-up word suggests a dynamic in which the X and Y terms of the metaphor interact with each other, similarity and difference remaining active, not resolved into categorical similarity as they are in everyday and envisioning metaphors. So Moby Dick is a "this" (an albino whale) that is like something "other" (God, the Devil, the Absolute Impossible, etc.). But should we be tempted to resolve the metaphor into a category of knowledge and conclude (as critics have frequently done) that the whale is a symbol for some metaphysical point, Melville is at pains to tell us about the biology of cetaceans. In other words, as the metaphor unfolds we're constantly reminded that all the metaphysical and psychological "otherness" we sense in Moby Dick is really just a "this" (an instance of biology, a dissected specimen of knowledge). But, of course, as the this-ness overwhelms us, the sense of other-ness reemerges. Literary metaphor is wonderfully subversive to thought because it doesn't let us off the hook of the fact that all that we know about the world is, at some level, indistinguishable from all that we don't know about it. In metaphor our categories of knowledge and perception are simultaneously affirmed even as they're unraveled--and raveled as they're denied. The discoveries of quantum mechanics and chaos theory are, I believe, closer to literary metaphor than to envisioning metaphors. Just think of those particles that are also waves or those particles moving from one place to another without any paths of traveling in between. Think of the wonderful beautiful patterns that are embedded in chaos. The fact that these scientific theories force us to think paradoxically, to acknowledge the uncertainty within our certainty, makes them more like poetic experience. The world or the universe as a machine was in envisioning metaphor that became a literal description, one which many people still take literally (certainly geneticists at the pharmaceutical houses still do). However, universe of the quantum is full of black holes. That's not to say that most quantum scientists these days don't simply ignore the poetic features of the theories and concentrate on getting experimental results or reducing atomic interactions into mechanical formulas after all. But there have been physicists like David Bohm, Wolfgang Pauli, or Neils Bohr who saw that the physical, real world is a quite mysterious and elusive phenomenon, for all that it sometimes yields to our powers of reason and conscious thought. I would note here that the great power of literary metaphor and its cousin literary irony have unfortunately gotten buried beneath the reductionisms of the post-structuralist thinking. The post-structuralists shrivel metaphors from all of the above classes into metonyms--one thing standing in for another. This fits with a nihilist approach that reduces all texts to cultural causation and elevates the post-structural critic above the text as the one who "knows" that there is no unconditional knowledge to be found. Texts become puzzles for deconstruction by the critic who is more aware than the artist of what is really going on. To some extent, critics have always taken this condescending and pretentious position but the post-structuralists are particularly poisonous in the way they do it. They can't accept the real action of literary metaphor because it would (to paraphrase Blake) put all knowledge, including their nihilistic brand of knowledge, in doubt. Post-structuralism which takes a kind of pseudo-scientific approach to texts, has done considerable damage to the love and understanding of literature, which people naturally have. It is, in fact, an attempt to negate the literary enterprise by turning it into no more than a cultural-political artifact. Post-structuralists are punished, of course, by living in the meaningless, thought-entangled universe they believe in. Unfortunately, they have taken many potentially sensitive readers with them. A lot of what is called post-modernism is an extension of the post-structuralist game in which metaphors become little metonym games. Real literary metaphors cut the ground out from under us so that we can love dirt. I think of Wallace Stevens stanza from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of thewomen about you? Real literary metaphors aren't games, though they may be fun. Perhaps lethal fun, like tricksters. PM: I think I have only one more question: It's rather assumed that writers can draw from nature (Mary Oliver's bird poems, for instance) and that we won't "get it wrong" too badly, because we can rely on our own observations of, say, the egret or the owl. But can artists simply boldly go in search of inspiration into contemporary science? Or is there a chance we'll "get it wrong"? JB: The thing that is absolutely wonderful about science is its ability to open up new domains of perception. Think of the wonderful things we've "seen" physically and mentally because of scientific investigation, from the microscopic to the astronomical, from quavering electrons to solar flares, and chromosomal allynes. But the problem, as I've tried to indicate, is that the perception may become merely knowledge, merely arrangements of categories, followed by the rapid descent into the illusion that we actually know an organism or a phenomenon because we've been able to perceive it scientifically. Lewis Thomas in one of his famous "The Lives of a Cell" illustrates this problem by arguing, that we should agree to stop threatening the world with destruction until we understand completely a particular protozoan aptly named Myxotricha paradoxa, which resides the gut of an Australian termite. Thomas unfolds some of the wondrous things we already know about this little creature and shows that its evolutionary history and interconnection with the other living things make it an inextricable part of biosphere, which we will never understand completely. Nevertheless, we have enough arrogance about our scientific knowledge to imagine that through our knowledge of the human genome we're soon going to get a handle on human problems from cancer to aging. Science or scientism becomes dangerous when it stops being perception and becomes, instead, a projection of certainty. That's where art comes in. Literary writers can heal that tumor (the tumor of scientistic arrogance) through metaphor. Once you bring a scientific perception into conjunction with an artistic perception, the result is that unique combination of knowledge and mystery that I described before. Humility reenters the picture and we're back to appreciating the world rather than deluding ourselves about controlling it. As an illustration, I think of a microfiction piece by Don Shea called "True Love." A man and a woman, who happen to be entomologists, meet at a conference. They're strongly attracted to each other and Shea describes their feelings by making metaphors with the mating habits of the insects they study. The fact is, scientific and technological things make terrific literary metaphors. After all, some scientific notions, like black holes and nuclear core meltdowns are already halfway there. They're just begging us to connect them to the dark interworkings of emotion and thought and thereby reveal the this*other-ness of the world. By the way, I would guess that Mary Oliver's lore about nature isn't entirely her own observation. I imagine she's read some field guides, which add details that help her make the metaphor real--and more than real. In any case, we writers live in a scientistic culture. So we can't escape dealing with science in one way or another. Even in challenging it, we concede that we are a part of it. As storytellers and poets have done since the dawn of time, we make our literary metaphors from the materials we find around us--and much of our current material is technology and science. If we lived in the Middle Ages our material would be scripture and theology. It's the same thing, in the sense. Whatever categories constitute our reality, metaphor turns them into an experience of this*other-ness. For writers, I suppose, that is what would be meant by getting it right. Or, as we like to say, making something "that works." Remember, that theories of sublunary spheres that John Donne incorporated into his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" are now considered scientifically wrong. But it doesn't matter. The metaphor still works even in our present world dominated by different categories of knowledge. When we read Donne's poem we still feel the strange thrill of this*other-ness and find that it is still what we are. Certainly in my own work science is a brooding presence. In my fractal dream fictions the arrogance of scientism and the unbridled belief in knowledge is often a direct subject. But also the self-similarity of the natural world discovered by chaos theory is at work echoing the self-similarity (and difference) of metaphors within the pieces themselves. The pieces loop science back on itself. In the end, I would say that both science and the literary arts are "what is" in the process of questioning its own existence. In my view, the best science leads to a state of mind of profound questioning. I think the same is true of the best art. Nevertheless, they're not the same.