Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Literature and Science at Manchester University

There's something I don't quite get about these public talks with Martin Amis, Professor of the Creative Writing School at Manchester University. Once more, last night, for 'Literature and Science', the last in this year's series, the huge Whitworth Hall was almost full - and this on a night of frost and threatened snow. It's as though there's a huge public appetite for intellectual debate, as though, despite the softer options of pop culture or the computer or books by the fire, people are prepared, for the sake of real-life debate, to battle through the freezing winds and stand with their toes dropping off at bus stops.

And yet. I dunno... Bear with me while I try to work it out.

Discussing the subject with Amis were psychotherapist Adam Phillips and philosopher John Gray, chaired by a woman I didn't know and who failed to identify herself but later said in passing that she had a scientific background.

The hall was freezing. People kept their coats on. The panel filed onto the stage and were introduced. John Gray, we were told, challenges the whole notion of science as modern and progressive, indeed challenges the whole notion of progress.

Well, I was interested already: this is the subject of some of my writing.

Amis began. He said there was something he felt he should mention before we went any further: the terrible events in Mumbai. You know, I just don't know what to think about the fact that he did this. It seems so right that someone with a public platform should use it to address a matter of current urgency - and some of what he said was interesting, but enough material for another (hot) debate - but there's something about this which is somehow also wrong: the hi-jacking of an agreed intellectual agenda, which is in danger of privileging, however briefly, the hi-jacker himself over that agenda. Not to mention the fact that he began by saying that 'Mumbai' was like a primitive baby-talk form of 'Bombay'...

I think this is my main problem with Amis when he steps away from writing the fiction which I, for one, have stoutly championed: so often when he speaks in public it's in terms of hierarchies. He turned to the subject in hand and immediately presented us with one: historically, he said, literature has been concerned [in response to the growth of science] with the following, in order: gods, demigods, kings and queens, statesmen and soldiers, the middle classes, Everyman and the working classes, down to the present age, the age of irony in literature.

This, our growing understanding that we are not the centre of the universe, may be an accurate assessment of our historical-psychological position, but the terms in which he spoke of it were interesting, and perhaps telling: he spoke of it as a 'descent' of literature, and of literature as 'historically looking downwards'. We still have cosmic yearnings, though, he said, we still aspire if not to godhead then at least to angeldom - and he informed us of another hierarchy, the nine orders of angels, of which we would probably hope to be Seraphim, he said (though perhaps he should speak for himself). The history of literature and science, he said, was one of increasing 'humiliation' - there he is with that word again! - and disappointment for the human species. The place we are now is realizing that we are not even intelligent enough as a species to understand the universe. As a result, a plausible future for the novel is to move inwards, as the ex-sci-fi writer JG Ballard has done, to a concern with the inner world, and with neuroscience and developmental psychology. The place of the novel is to recreate what it is to be human (not quite sure what he meant by that in this context - it could be seen as begging the question), but it was interesting, he said, that while Einstein would read philosophy to know how to think about his own science, Amis understood that not many present-day scientists would do such a thing.

Then in turn, Adam Phillips and John Gray were asked to speak. See, again, there is something about this, the way Amis always goes first, even when he says he doesn't know anything about the subject at hand: the others always end up looking as if they're responding to him whether or not they do, but in any case they mostly do, and yet it's not a proper debate, and so there's your real-life hierarchy right in front of your face.

Adam Phillips asked the question which Amis's speech had raised but failed to address: why is it so disturbing, after all, to discover we're merely animals? (Well, he threw it out at us.) He then presented his view of the science/literature issue from the point of view of psychotherapy. He told us that having been educated in the sixties and seventies he'd grown up with an anti-technological, Lawrentian view of the world, and the great thing for him about literature then was that it did not have any pretensions [as science did] to progress. The issue of science versus literature was not really an issue for him until psychotherapy brought him up against it. Literature is about singularity (of a character or a voice), but science deals in generalities. Freud himself was perplexed because while you can apply certain general principles of psychology theory (eg we all have an Oedipus complex, all children develop in certain stages) each case history is individual and indeed like a story: singularity is asserted and dissolves the theoretical categories. Psychology therefore is symptomatic of the science/literature dichotomy and its debate around progress: it wants to be concerned with generalities but constantly comes up against idiosyncracy. (I think that's the gist of what he said.)

John Gray said it was interesting how science got used as part of a project of human redemption/salvation/liberation, and amongst writers who have embraced the idea of science as a way for humanity to lift itself out of the animal condition, the Darwinian HG Wells is the most interesting, and The Island of Doctor Moreau the most interesting of his books. Moreau's attempts to 'bring the animal out of humanity' fail, and it is interesting that despite Wells's personal commitment to the idea that progress in science could be used to elevate humanity, his fables point to a different notion: that [scientific] knowledge can't create human progress (and at the end of his life Wells came to the latter conclusion). Gray talked then about the fact that Stalin had tried to develop a supersoldier who would need less sleep and food and would have fewer responses of sympathy - an experiment which of course also failed (I wasn't quite sure of the thread of his argument here), before saying that on the whole literature has not embraced the idea of human progress through science.

Amis was then asked to comment, and he said something which seemed to me once again to appeal anxiously to hierarchy: that yes, we are animals, but the thing which 'marks us off ' (note that language) from the other animals is our knowledge of death, and the thing about literature is that it gives us immortality. But then he turned his statement into a question: Do we take this as a defining difference?

At this point I started to lose grip of the discussion, sitting there at the back of a cold hall (with people around me putting their scarves back on), and the mics not working properly so that John Gray's voice became a shuffly mumble and it all came over to me as not so much a discussion with a development but a choppy to-and-fro between various hobby horses, Amis (it seemed to me) throwing in smoke bombs of references to pseudoscience (which the others then tried to question or define: Gray: What do we mean by pseudoscience? The alchemists, after all, were the precursors of science; Phillips: Pseudoscience is propaganda) and repressive regimes, in particular the Nazi project, which he said was pseudoscience. (Here was one whiff of proper debate, when Gray countered that the Nazis did claim to be rational and scientific and that a lot of anthropology before then was racist.) There was reference to the fact that at certain periods of history knowledge has been seen as a temptation and/or a form of oppression (Gray) and that Stalin was perjorative about reason, since once you discredit reason you can believe anything is possible, which gives you all sorts of licence (Amis). There was agreement that there is a certain sado-masochism in our attitude to science, ie that we feel we must submit to scientific truth, and Phillips asked why we so value predictability [of which, presumably, science provides at least an illusion]? All this interspersed with little lectures (I began to feel like a second-rate student just not following), on the history of philosophy from Gray, on facts about the Nazis and Stalin from Amis.

I kept thinking, Eh? What? as statements came in apparently inconsequentially and begged far too many questions (Phillips: 'It's a paradox that we're animals who have to learn how to be better animals'; Gray: 'The Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to close off knowledge but also an attempt to close off doubt' (an opposition I thought debatable, but which was simply left hanging); Amis: 'Jewish science ( beg pardon?) - Einstein and others - was a revolt against pseudoscience'.

And then it was opened up to the audience. Someone asked (asked, notice: this was not a debate) what made literature different from science (a question which had not yet been addressed) and Amis said (in the patrician manner which he has in public nowadays) that it was a question of innovation (literature wasn't at all innovative; no literary technique is ever really new, but it will survive because people always want stories and literature is the ideal way to commune with oneself, that's what's human [and presumably not animal - EB] about it. Comma publisher Ra Page (looking ridiculously handsome the way he has grown his beard) said that he thought the panel had been making a category error in blaming science with all their talk of pseudoscience because pseudoscience was simply 'not science'. Well, I didn't think the panel had actually been blaming science, but others must have agreed with him because he got a big clap. John Gray argued that they were not making a category error. A man with an Eastern European accent stood up quivering with passion and said that he wanted to put the record straight: there had been a lot of talk tonight about totalitarian regimes using science, but the truth was that art was often their principle motivator. Amis suavely countered with the statement that the point of literature is that it makes nothing happen: the category error occurs when people mistake fiction for something else, as in the case of Salman Rushdie. Finally Gray came in with the ground-touching statement that all human activities - science and literature (look at the fascist thirties writers) - can be used either for good or bad.

And then we all got up (after we'd waited for them to leave: not hierarchy, apparently, but a chance for them to get to the book-signing tables) and went off out into the cold again, and the people I spoke to had apparently found it all far less frustrating than I. The Martin Show was over - for that's how it was billed. And you couldn't help wondering: was that why so many people had come?

24 comments:

adele said...

Grateful for this vivid account....I feel as though I were there without the added chilliness!

Tania Hershman said...

Wow, Elizabeth, thank you for putting so much energy into recounting it for us, I too felt like I was there. What a bizarre evenin! When I saw the title of your blog post, I got excited, but then it turns out it was nothing like I imagined. (Jewish science??) I do like the idea that science is about generalities and progress and literature is about singularities and isn't concerned with progress, but I don't like general statements much anyway, so I would say that it doesn't apply to all science and all literature. And don't agree that there is no innovation in literature either, that seems too sad to contemplate, and why should it, or is it, so? Who determines this? The Martin? He sounds highly irritating, pompous, but as you say, the organisers put him up first so they are somewhat to blame. Hmm, food for thought.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Tania, Martin Amis is central to whole series of these events - they are a core element of his professorship at the Writing School.

His statement that lit isn't innovative was a direct contradiction of a statement by the first audience speaker that it was. I also had trouble with his response to the other audience member, that literature doesn't make anything happen. In fact, he had previously stated that reading alters the physical properties of the brain. (So there were a lot of apparent contradictions which never got ironed out)

Elizabeth Baines said...

Sorry, not the Writing School (that's Manchester Metropolitan University). I meant the Centre for New Writing.

Adrian Slatcher said...

I do keep missing these, but can't say I'm that disappointed, I felt that the one I went to was very badly organised, and that they need a proper chair to make them more than just a lecture-with-knobs-on. But your public-service recreation is very valuable! John Gray has some very interesting things to say, whether one agrees with him or not, and - on this subject at least, should have been the centrepiece, not the sidedish.

Tania Hershman said...

Ah, sorry, I didn't realise it was Amis' "thing". Also - where were the scientists in all this? Where was the physicist, to talk about the science aspect? This woman chairing it, doesn't sound like she had much input. Shame.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Tania, I was told afterwards that they did try to get a scientist but didn't manage to.

James said...

Thanks for this - I was there, and I think your description is very accurate.
I am a scientist, I _think_ I followed most of the discussions (but I was close to the front, so could hear and was warmer, though the coat stayed on).
Myself & my partner (also a scientist) were incensed by the rambling nature of the whole affair.
For some form of debate, you need some (at least mildly) opposing views, and yet they had three people with no scientific background, and no understanding of science beyond Freud (who doesn't really count as a scientist in the hypothesis > test sense), and they all broadly agreed with each other - though quite what they were agreeing about I'm less sure.
It's be great to know whether the 'Centre ffor New Writing' thought to contact any one of the many science based departments at the University over the organisation of this.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Presumably they did, James, because as I say I was told they'd tried to get a scientist.

Which perhaps (or perhaps doesn't) relates to Amis's comment that contemporary scientists don't see literature as relevant to them...

sam said...

I am a scientist, and i'm based at the University. Nobody tried to get me....

I went to the talk and left angry and offended. Is this what non-scientists really think of us?

Elizabeth Baines said...

My problem, Sam, is that I couldn't really work out a coherent attitude to science/scientists...

Elizabeth Baines said...

Though PS I have to say I was shocked that Amis's statement about scientists not reading literature seemed to be made with the assumption that we were all non-scientists there.

Tania Hershman said...

This gets more and more shocking...Amis said scientists don't read literature? As a former scientist myself and a writer of fiction, I am appalled at that kind of blanket statement. How dare he? Oh, my blood is boiling -Sam, I know exactly how you must have felt. To assume that there were no scientists in the room....Urgh.

Clare Dudman said...

Excellent description, Elizabeth! Sounds like it was better than being there.

I sometimes consider the idea of making my way up to Manchester to see one of these debates, but by the time I decide that I shall they are always full.

The statement that stood out for me from what you've said was: 'the point of literature is that it makes nothing happen'. Did Martin Amis really say that? The point of literature then is that it has no point. If any of us believed that then surely we wouldn't write at all!

I did go to a debate at the Royal Geographical Society in London (organised by English Pen and the MRC) on Creativity in Science and Literature and that was much better. Ian MacEwan and Ruth Padel represented literature and a Nobel Prize winning scientist, Aaron Klug and an AIDS researcher, Sheena McCormack, for the sciences. It was quite tightly focused, and I found it fascinating.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Clare, unless my ears were deceiving me that's what he said. But then the trouble with Amis is that I think, as I've said in previous reports on these talks, he has a novelist's mode of irony and sophistry (well, I think that's what's going on) which is inappropriate in such a context. He makes (I think) ironic and hyperbolic and challenging statements which just don't work in the context, and you just don't know how to take them.

Wish I had been at the PEN event...

Clare Dudman said...

Ah, I see - provocatively ironic... interesting technique. Thank you.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Interesting, but not useful in the context, I think.

Anonymous said...

An excellent summary-but where on Earth did you find people who were not frustrated? everyone around me and around a friend who sat elsewhere was annoyed.This evening was an absurd waste of an opportunity. It starts with the fact that they did not deign to put a scientist nor anyone who could speak for science on the panel. Having a Freudian psychotherapist was salt-rubbing! The chair chose not to keep the discussion anywhere near the advertised theme. Amis used inapposite quotes like a clever but insecure sixth former.
In 10 minutes in the pub a few of us came up with a long list of wasted opportunities, starting with the failure to address the theme. Here are a few more: Dawkins "Weaving the Rainbow..." Keats v. Wordsworth. Coleridge, Dante, Galileo.Goethe:scientist and poet. Milton, Pullman and cosmology, Freud and Jung: influence on literature much greater than original work justified, OK for V. Wolff et al., but why still there after debunking as pseudoscience by evolutionary Biol? Snow, Hoyle. Levi, Borges, Calvino. Ian McEwan "Saturday", Lodge “Thinks" Faulks "Human Stain" Follow this: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/7585/159 and http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/331/7523/1029
R. Powers “ Galatea2.2,Echo Makers”, Ian Banks, Ian M. Banks.
And the university pays him!

Elizabeth Baines said...

John, thanks for this (though I find the link doesn't work). I didn't see the press release, so I had no idea how far the event strayed from the advertised agenda. I now know what was intended:

'The speakers will ask if science has overtaken literature as a way of making sense of the world, They will also discuss topics including the role of imaginative writing in chronicling and critiquing 'scientific' discoveries, and how literature can and should respond to recent controversies in bio-technology and genetic engineering.'

As for the people I spoke to: it is perhaps significant that they weren't scientists, though also to me, (since as a fiction writer I've been concerned in some of my fiction with the significance of science for our psyche and identity), extremely depressing, to say the least.

Anonymous said...

The links are to two articles about "The Human Stain" from the British Medical Journal. They are interesting both individually and as a contrasted pair. Try Googling Faulks + BMJ

Elizabeth Baines said...

Ok, thanks, John!

Elizabeth Baines said...

Btw, Tania, Martin Amis didn't say that contemporary scientist don't read literature, what I registered him as saying was that he wasn't sure, or that he doubted, that they read philosophy in order to understnad their own science (as Einstein did).

Elizabeth Baines said...

However, I see now that I have translated 'philosophy' into 'literature' in these comments, so I misled you, sorry.

Elizabeth Baines said...

And my apologies for that to Martin Amis, too.