SOURCE: "Post-Einsteinian Physics and Literature: Toward a New Poetics," in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Summer, 1989, pp. 19-30.

[In the following essay, Bohnenkamp discusses the effects of Einstein's physics on the modern literary temperament.]

C. P. Snow's now infamous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," popularized the notion that science and literature held two irreconcilable world views and "had almost ceased to communicate at all." It may be true that technology, applied science and literature are often at odds, but not literature and scientific theory. Snow's allegation that "It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art" is preposterous. Even if scientists and writers do not always communicate as well as they might, there is at least a semblance of cultural continuity in any given age; the thinkers in any time share certain assumptions about the laws that govern their particular reality. Thomas S. Kuhn provides the term "paradigm" to describe this gestalt or mindset of a particular era.

It does seem that every three or four hundred years scientific revolutions take place that radically modify our picture of the universe and of ourselves. Kuhn places these paradigm shifts closer together, identifying them as "Copernican, Newtonian, chemical, and Einsteinian." The point, however, is that whatever one calls these changes in the ways in which we perceive things and wherever one places them chronologically, they influence everyone in the culture, literary as well as scientific people. These changes occur, of course, at different rates among different groups and even among different individuals. Literary artists, for example, might be quicker to learn of and adopt new modes of perception because they are risk-takers—unlike literary critics who might have a more vested ideological interest in keeping a previous paradigm in place.

My purpose in this essay is to identify the relationship between the last of Kuhn's paradigms, the Einsteinian, and its literary analogue, the Modern. Certain key ideas evolving from the Einsteinian model and that of quantum mechanics have influenced or paralleled tendencies in modern and contemporary fiction, literary theory and criticism. The influences are not necessarily direct, but an analysis of shared, interpenetrating assumptions will illuminate both the science and the literature.

I will focus especially on fiction because theories of physicists and literary fictions have much in common. Both posit hypothetical worlds. Both are judged at times by their degree of verisimilitude to what we regard as the real world. Some scientific hypotheses are valued to the degree that they can be verified, while fictions are frequently valued to the extent that they conform to a reader's experience of what is real. Both literary and scientific fictions can be esthetically pleasing; both can be disturbing. Much modern fiction is anti-realist, as is much modern science. Both describe worlds that often defy the logic of common sense. Modem literature is often nothing like life, and quantum mechanics tells us that life, the universe, reality are nothing like we think they are. Thus, I would like to suggest a new way of viewing both literary fictions and scientific theories, one which collapses their oppositions and allows them to illuminate one another. In order to do this it is necessary to suspend the idea that either is an exact representation of the phenomenal world.

If one accepts that there are some areas of similarity in the theoretical models projected by scientific theories and in created fictional worlds, then perhaps it is not too improbable to suggest that the laws governing one area, the ones most thoroughly codified (in this case, those of physics), might illuminate the other less systematized field, in this case, literature. A number of concepts evolving from Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics provide metaphorical insights into the literature of our period. Rather than being "odd bedfellows," physics and literature are intertwined and incestuous.

Not long after the turn of the century, Einstein's publication of his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) raised questions that undermined the validity of the Western world's notions of reality, of common sense and of meaning. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist, describes "the feeling that the ground would be cut from science"; Einstein himself felt "as if the ground had been pulled out from under one." Russell McCormach treats this disorientation fictionally in Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist, the story of an aging German physicist, Professor Jakob who, presiding over the paradigm shift from the era of Newtonian causality to that of relativity, experiences such bewilderment and disappointment at the invalidation of his belief system and his life's work that he kills himself.

Radical as were the changes inherent in the Einsteinian paradigm, however, the anxieties they generated were not particularly new. A similar but more prophetic doubt permeates works like Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) "where the world hath neither joy nor love nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," and Thomas Hardy's "Hap" (1866) where "Crass Casualty" and "dicing time" presage the randomness that modern physical theory institutionalizes. Similarly, Kierkegaard was undergoing fear and trembling, and Nietzsche was announcing the death of God, long before the physicists seem to have felt these effects. Yet it is one thing for poets and philosophers to experience existential "angst" and quite another for physicists to feel it. When the ancient verities collapsed for nineteenth-century doubters, they at least had science to fall back on, but when science was seeming to collapse early in the twentieth century, nothing remained.

One thing about the new paradigm that so undermined the assumptions of the Newtonian universe was the degree to which it was infected with paradox and uncertainty. Although neither Einstein's theories nor quantum mechanics describes phenomenal reality—their effects are limited to astronomic and sub-atomic systems—they do have profound implications when applied in the "real" world where Newton's Laws are thought to hold. Modern physics calls everyday reality into question, suggests that time and space are fictions, and implies that large areas of experience are simply indeterminate.

Although Einstein's ideas precede and form the basis for quantum physics, it is important to distinguish between them. Einstein retains a belief in meaning and the notion that if we keep seeking we can ultimately know the universe. His later career was spent in search of a Unified Field theory that would unite gravitation and electromagnetism and fully explain the functioning of the universe. A sizable number of physicists follow this line of thought and are pursuing connections amid the surface discontinuities of reality. Quantum theory, in contrast, exhibits much more patience with random statistical and indeterminate realities. Its ideas are less logical, less commonsensical, more paradoxical, but they appear also to be more accurate in their depiction of reality. Einstein never found the Unified Field or proved it mathematically, whereas mathematics does seem to support some of the dizzying scenarios of quantum physics—where currently there are at least eight competing visions of reality: 1) there is no deep reality; 2) reality is created by observation; 3) reality is an undivided wholeness; 4) reality consists in a steadily increasing number of parallel universes; 5) the world obeys a non-human kind of reasoning; 6) the world is made of ordinary objects and is just what it appears to be; 7) consciousness creates reality; and 8) the world is twofold, consisting of actualities and potentialities.

The most disorienting point in the relativistic view of the universe may be the discovery that time and space are neither absolute nor separable, but are locked indivisibly together in a continuum generally designated as space/time. These traditionally stable, fixed entities become relative, subjective. The ways in which we perceive them are inextricably locked into our frame of reference. Time does not flow smoothly from past to present to future; it exists in a block interpenetrated by space or perhaps in a pool or sea—not as a river, the way it is often depicted. The sequentiality and seriality that we experience in it are illusory. Similarly with space. It is neither contiguous nor uniform in Einstein's view. It is not empty nor is it a substance. The "nothing" is "something," but what it is is again dependent upon frame of reference or perspective. The Euclidean coordinates that we project upon reality may map it, but they are not reality itself. Objective reality, as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle underlines, can be pinned down either to position or velocity but not to both; so, the world becomes an elusive quantity. Central to the paradigm of relativity is the notion that reality, instead of lying in the objective world, lies in the act of measuring or perceiving it, in the phenomenological transaction between subject and object. As the implication of the Schrodinger's cat parable shows, however, the reality of an event is not determined until it is measured, and consequently the observer plays a major role in constituting reality. The world "out there" is colored by, if not constituted "in here."

Relativity thus collapses the subject-object dichotomy of the previous paradigm; they merge in a process that Wylie Sypher calls "methexis." In fact, in the new view, any bipolar oppositions collapse, as Bohr's theory of complementarity predicts. If light can be both a particle and a wave without contradiction depending upon the frame of reference from which it is considered, then it follows that other traditional opposites in the Relativistic paradigm also methexize. Einstein has already collapsed the distinctions between time and space, and energy and matter (E = mc²). Extending this further, other dualities merge: subject-object, inside-outside, microcosm-macrocosm, ground and field, self-other, spirit and matter, male-female, etc. Reality becomes unattainable, and indeterminate. Since there are no conceptual models to aid us in visualizing relativistic ideas like the fourth dimension, all we have are metaphors—mathematics in the case of physics. Like language, however, mathematics is ever estranged, distanced from reality. The symbol never quite captures the thing; it only approximates its referent. Matter itself is seen to be a fiction. Things are not solid pieces of stuff; they are not composites in the relativistic view. Instead they are processes, interactions, particles in constant flux engaged in a "cosmic dance" or in unceasing, instantaneous interpenetration and transformation that we perceive as reality. In quantum mechanics, the world is not composed of dead or inanimate objects but is alive, in constant movement, ruled only by the laws of chance and probability.

Einstein, of course, never accepted this latter view, believing to the end that God does not play dice with the universe and seeking the ultimate meaning of it all in the Unified Field. Other more recent hypotheses about the nature of quantum reality do give at least a semblance of order. Two such models are described by Floyd Merrell in Deconstruction Reframed: the holographic model and Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap model. In holography, i.e., laser projection of three-dimensional images, any part of the holographic plate, no matter how small, can regenerate the whole image. Does this macrocosm within the microcosm image best describe the connections in the universe? Or is Chew's "bootstrap" theory more compelling—a theory which depicts the universe as composed not of discrete entities but as a "dynamic web of potential events in which each part contains and mirrors the structure of the whole"?

These paradoxical views of the universe as both discontinuous and as a seamless web do not seem to have troubled or excited physicists quite as much as writers and artists. This may be because these puzzling and paradoxical ideas do not apply directly to phenomenal reality where Newton's laws still work and common sense provides persuasive evidence. Scientists seem to be able to compartmentalize the implications of Einstein's theories and quantum mechanics in the Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian worlds where they originated. Fiction writers, however, seem to have taken these ideas more literally and to have extended them immediately into their fictional worlds. Since their universes are fictional, and since the growing anti-realist mood of the arts at the turn of the century relieved them of the responsibility to mirror the phenomenal world, fiction writers could imaginatively incorporate some of the ideas of the new physics on the level of everyday reality. Although direct experience with physics did not always occur, a general intertextual relationship seems to have existed. The whole paradigm of Western rationalism seems to have been under fire from a number of directions. Anti-Newtonian/Cartesian sentiment was in the air. Some modern writers, among them Joyce, Mann, Durrell, Edmund Wilson, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Evgeny Zamiatin directly acknowledge or reveal the influence of Einstein and relativity upon their thinking, while others only embed it in the epistemological assumptions of their work. They may have created their worlds under the influence of Gestalt or Freudian psychology; they may have dabbled in occultism or Eastern mythology or in primitive religion; they might have come under the sway of Nietzsche; their distensions of time may have been Bergsonian rather than Einsteinian; their unions of subject and object more Swedenborg than Heisenberg. Whatever the case, the metaphysics and the terminology of the contemporary physical paradigm are particularly useful in a literary context.

The development of the novel as a literary form seems to have paralleled the rise of the Newtonian and Darwinian paradigms. In the twentieth century, however, the death of the one heralded the death of the other. If scientists question the phenomenal world, challenge its reality, undermine its laws of cause and effect in their worlds, it is not surprising that fiction writers might do the same thing in theirs. Traditional fictional elements like plot, character, motivation, even meaning, change or recede, much as in modern physics the accustomed underpinnings of Newtonian reality collapsed.

The novel in the twentieth century has metamorphosed into forms more compatible with twentieth-century notions of reality. Modern fiction has been called many things and has taken many experimental forms, but it shares a view of the universe remarkably similar to that of the modern physicist. Modern fictions depict worlds where time and space are fluid and where they interpenetrate, where space is temporalized and time spatialized. Characters lack depth and motivation and are shifting and unstable in the same manner as objects and their backgrounds, which merge and separate ceaselessly. The reader/observer is drawn into the work as a participant; point of view is no longer stable or fixed. Meaning becomes multivocal or indeterminate.

One modern author whose entire body of work parallels the ideas of modern physics is James Joyce. In his early, relatively realistic works like Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, these parallels take the form of his use of the epiphany. Involving the potency of a neutral object and the sensibility of a conscious subject, the epiphany collapses the subject-object duality into an event in which the object is a sentient participant, alive in a sense. One of the mysterious findings of quantum physics is that matter is not inert or dead, but like objects in the epiphany reveals distinct signs of life.

As Joyce's literary experiment continues, his style increasingly parallels the relativistic paradigm. In Dubliners, despite the epiphanies, the style is predominantly naturalistic, but by the time of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hints of stream-of-consciousness appear in its fragmentary diary excerpts and transitionless juxtapositions. These depict an interior world governed by shifting, disjointed, alogical and associational thoughts and feelings which constitute a subjective evocation of space/time given from a single perspective. Although this structure might be better explained in terms of the Freudian subconscious, it bears some affinity to the world of relativistic space/time in its apparent discontinuity.

The discourse of stream-of-consciousness can violate any of the strictures of time and place. The monologist's thoughts can move from place to place, imagined or real; actual events can be juxtaposed with fantasy, or all space/time can be represented in a single mind. If the mind can construct such an inner reality, it can also project it outward in a fictional form. Before the modern physical theories undercut our sense of the reality of the phenomenal world, this projective fiction might have been expected to conform to that world. If the world itself is only what it is because that is the way we perceive it, however, then the imaginative possibilities for fiction become almost infinite. Anything goes. What Einstein's theory does in a sense is to project the non-temporal, non-spatial reality of interiority out into the world, much as a modern novelist like Joyce does in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both of which, not unlike Einstein's theory or that of any scientist, try to encompass the whole of reality.

It is in Ulysses, however, that Joyce's method comes to maturity and shows increasing similarity to the relativist scheme. Joyce's record of a single day, 16 June 1904, has macrocosmic implications. Here Joyce does succeed in his professed aim of getting to the heart of all cities in penetrating to the heart of Dublin. As in the holographic model or the notion that the astronomical and subatomic echo one another, the universal is contained in the particular.

Stuart Gilbert describes the inhabitants of the Joycean world in the following terms:

All these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence.… The law of their being is within them, it is a personal heritage inalienable and autonomous. The meaning of Ulysses, for it has a meaning … is not to be sought in any of the facts of the protagonist or the mental make-up of the characters; it is, rather, implicit in the technique of the various episodes, in nuances of language, in the thousand and one correspondences and illusions with which the work is studded.

Similarly, in some contemporary physical theories, motion and change and the forces that control them are essential, intrinsic properties of things, of matter, but often the exact nature and behavior of these forces and things are indeterminate, beyond analysis, and beyond language. Both in Joyce's universe and in that of quantum mechanics, there are entities and events that make sense and others that are just the way they are and defy explanation. Both Ulysses and the universe are webs of relations falling in and out of patterns perceived differently by subjects with different frames of reference. On the surface, both the novel and the universe may seem discontinuous and disordered, but there are perceivable patterns of meaning. The characters and events in Ulysses obey a logic, but it may not be the logic we are used to.

The relativistic universe is in constant process, flux and transformation, and this is one of the significant messages of Ulysses and its "ineluctable modality of the visible." As Gilbert points out in his discussion of the mysticism of Ulysses, "a flux of transformation pervades the universe but nothing can be added or taken away"; but this universe operates on the principle that "all that exists from the smallest imaginable atom, contains within itself all the elements, the processus of the whole universe." This reflection of the holographic model or the macro/micro model of relativity shows up in the structure of the "Wandering Rocks" episode, which echoes the eighteen-part structure of the whole novel. Like the larger work, it spatializes time and presents its simultaneity, the sections cleverly interpenetrating one another in the fashion of the work as a whole. The wandering or clashing rocks from the Odyssean source themselves appear to illustrate one of the principles of relativity in that they appear to move through an optical illusion that depends upon frame of reference or point of view, an analogue perhaps of the reader's experience in confronting a plastic work like Ulysses.

Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, may not immediately satisfy the criteria of making sense, though it does follow another branch of quantum reality. On the surface this difficult, at times impenetrable, text seems almost meaningless. The characters have virtually hundreds of incarnations. Reality shifts instantaneously throughout all time/all space. HCE, Here Comes Everybody, is all men, Anna Livia Plurabelle all women. Finnegans Wake shifts languages at will. It is dominated by puns, their own kind of linguistic perspectivism, words and phrases that say different things when considered from different frames of reference. More than any other prose literature, Finnegans Wake severs words from their referents and emphasizes their sound. Large areas of the novel are indeterminate in terms of meaning for most readers. The design, like that of the modern conception of the universe, is so intricate, so complex, that it is inexhaustible in its content. Out of a remote corner of Dublin comes all history, all myth, all literature and all time/space. Like the space/time continuum, Finnegans Wake contains all.

Finnegans Wake also includes explicit references to modern physics as William York Tindall has pointed out. In one passage Joyce refers to "Winestain's theories and quantum mechanics" in a lecture by Professor Jones, the eminent spatialist. Jones attempts to assert that space is superior to time but winds up accepting the union of the two in space/time, "the grand continuum of the physicists." Apparently the influence went the other way also, because—as Anthony Zee has noted—the term for one of the hypothetical elementary particles in subatomic physics, the quark, comes from Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark." It seems that Joyce was aware of physical theories, and the reality that underlies Finnegans Wake seems to be a close approximation of the notion that reality is an undivided wholeness where everything is interconnected.

The Relativity that underlies the Joycean universe is also to be found in most fiction in the Modernist mode. Virginia Woolf, for example, suggests the complementarity of the sexes by collapsing the male/female dichotomy in the androgyny of Orlando's central character who changes sex inexplicably half way through the novel, in mid-passage between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Time and space congeal for Orlando as "everything was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something else.… lights and shadows changed and one thing became another." Once one becomes aware of the relativistic paradigm, it becomes difficult not to see it underlying the work of those classic Modernist authors who experimented with the depiction of time and space, who present character and event as non-causal or indeterminate, or who reject the logocentric myth of objectivity. The list zigzags from Proust and Mann to Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov, down to Borges, Garcia-Marquez, Fuentes, and back up through Pynchon, Barth and Burroughs, to name just a few.

All of Modernist literature reflects some association with the relativist mythology, though some genres do so more overtly than others. Science fiction comes to mind immediately in this connection, but another, perhaps more serious genre, one I would call "physics fiction," depends quite heavily, and quite overtly, on the mythology of relativity and quantum mechanics for its material. It is a fiction quite literally "about" physics.

At the same time that the Modernist writers' style began generally to reflect the relativistic paradigm, another group of authors began to rely even more heavily and quite overtly on it, using physics as the matter and controlling metaphor of their work. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain employs a prodigious amount of scientific theory and information to tell the story of Hans Castorp. In the microcosmic world of the International Sanitarium Berghof, Castorp debates as well as realizes the relativity of time. As his vocation changes from engineering to pure research, reality becomes increasingly problematic. The presumed oppositions of reality and fantasy merge, the distinction between sick and well blurs. Castorp confuses the identities of an attractive woman he meets at the sanitarium and a former childhood acquaintance. Mann also published an article on the implications of Einstein's theories at about the same time he was writing the novel.

Edmund Wilson also bases a novel, I Thought of Daisy, on the ideas of relativity as filtered through the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Daisy, the feminine interest in the novel, is like the unattainable object in the modern physical world; her essence is indeterminate, and the narrator describes her from several radically different and self-contradictory perspectives that leave the reader puzzled about what she really is like.

The practice of this kind of "physics fiction" culminates much later in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Thomas Pynchon. His first novel, V like most novels in the Modernist style, embodies the concepts of relativity on a stylistic level. Its title character goes through a number of incarnations but is ultimately indeterminate. The story is told from shifting, multiple points of view and presents the central epistemological problem posed by relativity—the conflict between order and disorder in the universe and the question of whether events in reality are connected and if so to what degree. Pynchon's other works, as many critics have noted, rely heavily on physics for their actual literal and thematic content.

One of Pynchon's early short stories, "Entropy," is a graphic representation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the pre-relativist view that the universe is a closed system inexorably winding down toward maximum disorder, negation, heat death. Entropy is also a prominent theme in his later works, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Appearing in both these works as a literary character is Maxwell's Demon—a hypothetical invention created by the real nineteenth-century physicist, Clerk Maxwell, who designed the concept specifically to challenge the second law of thermodynamics. John P. Leland has described The Crying of Lot 49 as not only being about entropy but as being entropic itself; the same may be said of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's greatest work, which contains literally hundreds of allusions to physics. The title itself refers to the trajectory of a V-2 rocket. The novel contains equations from differential calculus and probability theory. Its whole structure embodies the conflict involved in the paradigm shift from determinism, cause and effect and control, to random chance, statistical probability and freedom. It would be virtually impossible to arrive at a full or, for that matter, adequate understanding of the novel without some grasp of the concepts of post-Einsteinian physics.

Not only Pynchon but a number of other contemporary authors write more or less directly about physics in their fiction. Several critics have pointed this out, most notably Robert Nadeau who treats the influence of modern physics in the work of Pynchon, Fowles, Barth, Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and Don Delillo; equally, N. Katherine Hayles has explored the relationship between scientific field models and the literary techniques of Pynchon, Pirsig, Nabokov and Borges among the contemporaries. To this list might be added Doris Lessing, whose Briefing For a Descent Into Hell (1971) explores the relativity of time and space, the notion of the interconnectedness of everything, and the reflection of the microcosm within the macrocosm in a vision approximating the holographic model. Lessing's more recent work includes a direct foray into science fiction in the multi-volumed Canopus in Argos: The Archives. Joseph McElroy's Plus (1976), the story of a disembodied brain orbiting the earth in a space capsule touches on some of the relativistic questions about subject-object, observer-observed relations, while his Lookout Cartridge (1974) emphasizes randomness and multiple realities in its exploration of subjects like computer circuits and non-local interaction or telepathy. Ron Loewinsohn's 1983 novel, Magnetic Field(s), takes not only its title but also its central concept from physics, ingeniously depicting three versions of reality linked apparently by certain inanimate objects in a complex web of interlocking involvement. Carol Hill's Eleven Million Mile High Dancer (1985), the story of a female astronaut, Amanda Jaworski, is constructed quite directly from the stuff of physics though in a decidedly comic way. The author extends several of the concepts of quantum mechanics into the real world. There is a cat named Schrodinger (without the umlaut) who is neither alive nor dead; allusions to physics are scattered throughout; there is an "Afterword" acknowledging the work's indebtedness to Heinz Pagel's The Cosmic Code and Fritzjof [sic] Capra's The Tao of Physics, two works popularizing the concepts of modern physics.

Two other young authors, Martin Amis in his short-story collection Einstein's Monsters (1987) and Tim O'Brien in The Nuclear Age (1985), take a more adversarial stand. Perhaps blaming the impending nuclear holocaust on the discoveries of Einstein and other physicists, these two present a bleak picture of the future. Amis in his introductory essay, "Thinkability," attacks nuclear weapons, and in stories like "Bujak and the Strong Force" and "The Time Disease" he explores some of the detrimental effects of nuclear physics. Depicting the mental deterioration of a man who has grown up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, O'Brien divides his work into sections entitled "Fission," "Fusion" and "Critical Mass" and in each section there are sub-chapters entitled "Quantum Jumps." In his recent fiction, John Updike also makes extensive reference to contemporary physical theory; Roger's Version (1986) depicts, perhaps ironically, a born-again computer scientist, Dale Kohler, who attempts to find God in the most recent physics with the help of the computer.

Although in varying degrees, theories of physics therefore inform Modernist fiction to the extent that some knowledge of the area on the part of contemporary critics seems prerequisite. To do justice to the literature of today, the old conventional tools are not adequate. The methods of the New Critics, popularized in the 1940s and 50s and still the mainstay in many university classrooms (and high schools), seem particularly counterproductive. Newtonian/Cartesian in their approach, they reify the literary text, transforming it into an esthetic object, a "thing," and posit an ideal, objective reader who can toss aside irrelevancies and through analysis reach the correct meaning of the work. In dense, complex Modernist works this is often impossible.

Much, therefore, is to be said in support of recent critical trends. Here the text is no longer conceived of as a thing, nor is the reader viewed so readily as being able to separate him/herself from it. The reader is no longer thought of as a detached observer of the text, but is actively involved in "writing" it. The text, like Einstein's universe, is regarded as participatory. The meaning of the text, then, is seen to exist at least partially outside it: in the reader, in the values and perceptions of the "interpretive community," or in the interstices and interactions between text and reader, as phenomenologists have it. All these approaches find justification in the ideas of relativity.

Deconstruction, especially the earlier work of Jacques Derrida, also parallels the relativistic view at some key points. It too breaks down binary oppositions: signifier/signified, language/parole, reader/text, literature/philosophy. The deconstructor has the opposed entities "supplement" each other, whereas the relativist has them "complement" one another, but the concepts seem almost identical. The deconstructor's text, with its incompleteness, fluidity and indeterminacy, parallels the universe of quantum mechanics. In the same way that the observer participates in the composition of the relativistic universe, the deconstructing reader conspires in the writing of the text.

Although such developments in post-structuralist literary theory have extended the Einsteinian paradigm into literary criticism, I would urge that we do so in an even more systematic and consistent way.

A post-Einsteinian literary criticism would be outside ideology in its perspectivism. It would, of course, assume a perspective, but also acknowledge the subjectivity of its positions, their partiality. It would accept the multivocal nature of literary texts, as well as the hypothetical quality of interpretation, its fictionality. It would assert interpretations as dynamic models, tentative creative works themselves, dropping in the process the quest for interpretive truth. It would operate on the principle of complementarity and admit that a text can be or say two or more things at the same time depending on how one looks at it. Most important of all, such criticism would adopt the terminology of quantum mechanics and relativity to escape some of the vague, mystifying jargon of some post-structuralist theorizing. The paradigms of relativity and quantum mechanics provide us with a physics; now we need to develop a poetics that knowingly takes advantage of that model. After all, we should recall that Aristotle—the first great theoretician—was a "scientist" who constructed his "Poetics" in accordance with the laws of nature as he perceived them.