[In the following essay, Levin offers his view of the affinities between modern fiction and science.]

Since my three-word title echoes those two nouns which denote the subject of this symposium, it should be self-evident that my own key-word is the conjunction between them. Not that I would wish to put asunder what has clearly been compounded with so much imagination, industry, and ingenuity. The copula is merely my confession that I have little right to expatiate on the compound. Though I have had frequent opportunity to read and write and talk about various forms of fiction, my encounters with the genre that we have been invited to discuss—enjoyable and instructive as they may have been—have been somewhat casual and slight. As for science, I can only confide that in my case the ordinary layman's interest has been enhanced; if not solidified, by a number of happy associations with professional scientists through academies, common rooms, and personal circumstances. Yet I realize, as I begin to fill in the pages that follow, that I am adopting the simple-minded tactic of the journalist in Pickwick Papers. Having been assigned an article on Chinese Metaphysics, it will be remembered, he looked up both China and Metaphysics in the encyclopedia and thereupon combined the information. As a bug-eyed alien among a galaxy of experts, I feel something of the thrill that must alert the interplanetary voyager. Since the rhythms of my thought are conventionally measured by academic semesters rather than light-years, we may have some degree of mental synchronization to work out among us. Such considerations do not make the adventure less exciting for me; but, not wanting to travel under false colors, it should be clear from the very outset that I view myself as rather a tourist or passenger than a pilot or guide.

Perhaps we may take our chronological bearings by noticing that we now stand within five years of 1984. Reading the newspapers, we may even wish to congratulate ourselves on having come so near to fulfilling George Orwell's projections for intercommunication and cognition: Newspeak and Doublethink. Orwell made his prognostication in 1949, thereby allowing us another lustrum for its fulfillment. One decade afterward, just exactly twenty years ago, C. P. Snow delivered his reverberating pronouncement on The Two Cultures. This, as the problematic formulation of an important issue, has weathered better than F. R. Leavis's virulent counterattack. There has meanwhile been some tendency, I suspect, for scientific and literary sensibilities to come closer together. What could be a better witness to that than science-fiction? Can there be a scholar-teacher or writer-critic here who could not respond correctly to Snow's elementary shibboleth for scientific literacy: the Second Law of Thermodynamics? On the other hand, there must be some who put forth, or lend credence to, fictive postulates that have still to be acknowledged by Snow or Carnot or the canons of physics itself. One of my colleagues who was awarded a Nobel Prize in that field, and who reads extensively beyond it, has testified that Snow's early novel The Search is the only book that conveys what it feels like to be a practicing scientist today. Other scientists have written fiction, Kepler in elaborately phantasmagorical form. Still others, even closer to the Cavendish Laboratory than Lord Snow, have written autobiographical accounts of what has been going on there. But, though James Watson's Double Helix chronicles the discovery of DNA, his underlying themes are human competition and vanity.

Literature, taken in its broadest sense, has acted as an agent for the dissemination of science. Some of the most technical treatises, in the early days, were couched in poetic modes. The Greeks and Romans read Aratus and Lucretius for information about meteors and atoms. Indeed the evocation of Epicurus, at the beginning of De Rerum Naturae, "proceeding far beyond the flaming walls of the firmament," is a more eloquent tribute than any Nobel Prize winner has ever been paid. Dante, in transit through the celestial regions, listens to a lecture from Beatrice on gravity. Chaucer is transported to his House of Fame by an eagle who discourses upon the principles of acoustics. Scientific popularizers, like Fontenelle and Algarotti, wrote as if they were novelists addressing themselves to feminine readers. The scientist himself, when cast as a literary character, has played an equivocal role: a subspecies of the archetypal trickster, a man of many inventions like the elusive Odysseus, a fabulous artificer like Daedalus, who became Joyce's archetype for the artist. Faust was the prototype of the modern mage, though it was never wholly clear whether he had dedicated himself to a disinterested quest for wisdom or to an egoistic cult of experience. His case is shadowed by a primitive taboo against forbidden knowledge, like the parable of Frankenstein—or, for that matter, Adam or Prometheus. Unlike Faust's demonology, Prospero's white magic—what Shakespeare called his "art"—could be entertained as proto-science, a command over nature through an understanding of its inherent properties and hidden interrelations. This was, to be sure, the original purview of alchemy, from which we can trace surviving concepts of chemistry and physics, not to mention Jungian psychology. Yet its consistent failure to live up to its gilt-edged promises made it for several writers—Chaucer, Erasmus, Ben Jonson—a hoax to be exposed. For Balzac it was a characteristic obsession: La Recherche de l'absolu.

Since the techniques and objectives of empirical research are likely to seem arcane and hieratic to the uninitiated, these have become a target of philistine satire, to be caricatured by Aristophanes with his sophistical think-tank or by Swift in Gulliver's reductio ad absurdum of the Royal Society. The contraptions of the late Rube Goldberg, where unlikely concatenations of home-made machinery are circuitously arranged to bring about what might otherwise have been accomplished by a simple human gesture, may be viewed as a critique of our increasing dependence on push-button gadgetry. The clysters and phlebotomies and embrocations and faddish operations and bedside manners of physicians have made them popular butts on the comic stage from Molière to Shaw. Yet the worldly success of such charlatanism was grounded upon a quasi-religious awe, as Molière himself intimated: an acceptance of quacks as a priesthood conniving, for better or worse, in the powers of life and death. With contrasting reverence, Balzac apotheosized the doctor as humanitarian benefactor in his Médecin de campagne; and, though the husbands of Emma Bovary and Carol Kennicott were mediocre rural practitioners, they were men of bumbling good will; while Sinclair Lewis, with the cooperation of the bacteriologist Paul De Kruif, surveyed the heights and depths of the American medical establishment in his Arrowsmith. The physician, after all, is often the only person of scientific training that most other people ever get to see very much. When, instead of going on his clinical rounds, he isolates himself within a laboratory, his experimentation gets clouded in mystery, and he is perceived as a sinister figure, coldly or madly treating humans as guinea-pigs: Dr. Rappacini, Dr. Heidegger, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau.

Historically, we are well aware that the line of demarcation between science and pseudo-science is difficult to draw, not less so because accepted theories are continually being confuted and discarded. Rationalists have attempted to sharpen it by their satirical exposures. But we also know that science-fiction battens on pseudo-science: that alchemy, astrology, phrenology, mesmerism, and ESP adapt themselves much more aptly to fictitious narration than do the more quantifiable disciplines. Thus Brian Aldiss cites the inspiration of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, whom he terms "the slav dreamers"—he might likewise have mentioned Velikovsky. Precisely because of their illusory assumptions, such mystagogues and gurus are more at ease in the realm of illusion than, let us say, Planck, Rutherford, or the Joliot-Curies would be. This distinction may help to explain why Milton, though he was fairly well abreast of contemporary astronomy, chose to locate the scenes for Paradise Lost in a Ptolemaic rather than a Copernican universe. Even so, he dared allude to Galileo's telescope, the "optic glass" of "the Tuscan artist," and he must have felt something of that tension between Christian dogma and the new cosmology which would be ironically dramatized by Brecht in his Galileo. Hamlet, in his brief metaphysical poem addressed to Ophelia, had made no secret of his own heliocentric skepticism: "Doubt that the sun doth move." The gradual consequence of such anti-geocentric reductionism was to shatter those chains of being which had related man, in his central position, to the correspondent influences of the zodiac and the universal harmony of the spheres—to relocate his earth as a lesser outpost in a plurality of worlds. A second and even more shattering reduction was to come, as we shall be noting, with Darwin. But it was already enough of a shock to raise the question, which would pulsate back and forth from King Lear through Thomas Hardy, of nature's indifference to mankind.

The sense of chilling detachment and emotional deprivation, as it bore upon the novelist, might be brought home by this paragraph closing a chapter from an early story of George Eliot's:

While this poor little heart was bruised with a weight too heavy for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the tides welled to the level of the last expectant week; the sun was making brilliant day to busy nations on the other side of the swift earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships were laboring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest center of quivering life in the waterdrop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty.

Here the pathos is not of the sort that Ruskin would term the pathetic fallacy; for this would assume that nature really cared, that storms would sympathize with the heroine's grief and sunbeams smile upon her happiness. Nor is it to be compared with Pascal's shudder over the eternal silences of the infinite spaces, since a bustling world is going about its callous business around her. It does presume the disappearance of God, and consequently the individual feeling of complete psychological isolation. Little Tina seems farther away from the astronomer than from the lost nestlings. Tennyson would wrestle with the problem throughout "In Memoriam": "Are God and Nature then at strife / That Nature lends such evil dreams?" Or are these ostensible cold facts, on the contrary, the material actualities that scientists would confirm? For the romantic poets, licensed dreamers, science had become the encroaching nightmare, the adversary to be warded off by conjuring up the enchantments of storied tradition once more. Blake's couplets had been incantations, if not auguries:

The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Blake was voicing a mystical reaction to Newtonian rationalism; for, as Marjorie Nicolson has demonstrated in her monograph Newton Demands the Muse (the title being a quotation from a minor poet, Richard Glover), Newton's Opticks had profoundly affected the treatment of light and color in eighteenth-century English poetry. The painter Benjamin Haydon, notwithstanding, recollects a convivial evening when Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors." Wordsworth, who was present, had played an ambivalent part in the ongoing argument between vitalistic beauty and analytical reason; both sides are forcefully stated in "Expostulation and Reply." He could lament, in the mood of George Eliot over her Tina, a heroine going young to her grave and being "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees." (A distinctive feature of Wordsworthian diction is this contrast between the distant and slightly pedantic diurnal and the down-to-earth monosyllables: rocks, stones, trees.)

Goethe had wrong-headedly devised a color-theory of his own, challenging optical instruments and mathematical physics as well as Newton in person. Yet Wordsworth, recollecting his Cambridge days in The Prelude, could pause respectfully before Newton's statue, "The marble index of a mind forever / Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." And in his preface to Lyrical Ballads he pledged that the poet would follow the man of science, whenever the latter's investigations led to a further enlargement of man's consciousness:

The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and respecting beings.

Coleridge, in his retrospective account of the Lyrical Ballads, used the term experiment, possibly for the first time in literary criticism. He recounted the division of labor between the two poets by attributing to Wordsworth "the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature," while relating his contributions to "the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination." At the prosaic extreme was "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," at the exotic "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Shakespeare had struck a happy medium, according to Dr. Johnson: "he approximates the remote and familiarizes the wonderful." Storytellers have always acknowledged the double need to contrive a tale that is interesting—which implies being novel, strange, surprising—and to tell it with credibility, so that it sounds like the truth. But the emphasis has tended to oscillate between romantic and realistic poles, between anomaly and familiarity. Aristotle had set the main direction for the West by stressing the importance of representation, the criterion of verisimilitude, the concept of mimesis, which Richardson would paraphrase as "copying Nature." The course of the modern European novel, as exemplified by Cervantes, was a repudiation of the medieval romance in the light of an advancing realism. In the longest of the essayistic chapters interspersed through Tom Jones, Fielding discusses a topic often considered by his critical predecessors, the Marvellous. "I think," he declares, "that it may very reasonably be required of every writer that he keeps within the bounds of possibility; and still remembers that what is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce possible for man to believe he did perform." Fielding has been credited nonetheless with a work of proto-science-fiction, his facetious Voyage to the Next World.

"Nor is possibility alone sufficient to justify us," Fielding continues, "we must keep within the rules of probability." This Aristotelian approach was pressed harder and harder as belief in the supernatural receded or was displaced by an increasingly naturalistic worldview. The Spinozistic indentification of God with nature made it impossible to hold any further faith in miracles—that is, in events that could not be explained by natural causes. "This impulse to believe in the marvellous gradually becomes weaker," wrote the great romancer Scott, significantly while reviewing the tales of the German fantasist, E.T.A. Hoffmann. The Gothic novel had predicated a revival of wonder; and Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto is haunted by spectral marvels which go unexplained with impunity; but Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho turn out to be all-too-human machinations which can be unmasked by detective-story disclosures. Similarly, the mystery-stories of Charles Brockden Brown beckon us toward pseudo-scientific resolutions; whereas the ironic Hawthorne liked to shade his transcendental enigmas with a penumbra of ambiguity, such as the question of Donatello's ears in The Marble Faun. Generally speaking, so long as western culture has been pervaded by the idea of progress, writers have done whatever they could to keep pace with the march of intellect. Professor Nicolson has shown that the animalcules of Gulliver's Travels would have been unthinkable without the microscope. When Dryden undertook to dramatize Paradise Lost, he began with Adam wakening to consciousness and pronouncing these first words: "Who am I? or from whence? For that I am / (Rising) I know because I think." The initial thought of this primordial man—the realization that he must now exist because he has discovered his identity through the process of thinking—marks him as a sophisticated thinker of Dryden's period, a Cartesian rationalist.

In his programmatic book, L'Avenir de la science, drafted during the revolutionary ardors of 1848 and published somewhat anticlimactically in 1890, the ex-priest Renan proclaimed that science had become a religion, which would be creating the symbols and solving the problems of the future through its "sacerdoce rationaliste, " its community of savants. Many influential men of letters proved willing to accept that secular credo. Just as life was being demystified by science, so it would be demythologized by literature. "In my opinion," remarked Flaubert, "the novel should be scientific—that is to say, should be based on probable generalities." Though the qualification may point back toward Aristotle, Flaubert's rigorous professionalism is reflected in his documentary research and stylistic precision. Sainte-Beuve, in his well known review of Madame Bovary, suggested that the novelist wielded his pen as his surgical father and brother had been handling their scalpels. But the real exemplar was Balzac, who had presented his Comédie humaine as a series of studies in natural history. He had eagerly followed the debate on the interrelationship of animal species between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, to whom Le Père Goriot is dedicated. In the foreward declaring his intentions for the whole series, Balzac proposed a social taxonomy similar to that of the naturalists. However, in addition to the male and female sexes, he introduced a third category, things. What had been mere background was advanced to the foreground; the function of material objects in men's and women's lives became a major component of Balzac's realism; and, as the nineteenth century developed its metropolitan habitats and technological industries, later novelists would more explicitly register the impact of reification.

Zola, roughly starting out where Balzac left off, and adhering to more radical views of both society and nature, made it his aim to show how men and women were being subordinated to things. A moment ago, when I spoke of naturalists, I took the word as an old-fashioned synonym for biological scientists, whether botanists or zoologists. Zola would not have us take it otherwise; "Le naturalisme, " he announced, ". . . c'est l'anatomie exacte." Taking naturalism as his novelistic slogan was to intensify the rigor of his philosophical determinism. In the mean time the Darwinian theory had intervened, and its anti-anthropocentric reductionism went even farther to undermine the status of human dignity than the astronomical reductions of the Renaissance. Theodore Dreiser's rising tycoon, Frank Cowperwood, learns the lessons of social Darwinism by watching an aquarium and musing: "Things lived by each other—that was it. Lobsters lived on squid and other things. What lived on lobster? Men, of course! Sure, that was it! And what lived on men?" The answer, of course, is "men." Here in The Financier and in its sequel, The Titan, there is a struggle for existence at any rate, a Balzacian will to power. The outlook is more Zolaesque, more prone to concentrate upon more passive victims of the environment, in Dreiser's later masterwork, An American Tragedy. The downwardly mobile family is there envisaged as "one of the anomalies of psychic and social reflex and motivation such as would tax the skill of not only the psychologist but the chemist and the physicist as well, to unravel." The disaffection of the conditioning milieu serves to reinforce "those rearranging chemisms upon which all the morality and immorality of the world is based." Psychology, as well as ethics, is reduced under such conditions to the irredeemable pessimism of a cosmic shrug.

Zola's mentor had been the eminent physiologist Claude Bernard. "The novelist who studies habits complements the physiologist who studies organs," he commented when Bernard was succeeded by Renan at the Académie Française. Zola looked upon himself as such a novelist, and had found his guide in Bernard's Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale. His manifesto, Le Roman expérimental, consists mostly of quotations and paraphrases from that medical treatise, routinely and naïvely making the verbal substitution of romancier for médecin. Zola believed that he had been employing such exact procedures in his twenty-volume sequence, Les Rougon-Macquart, wherein he delineated the patterns of advancement and deterioration through the genealogy of two related families. Now experimentation is controlled observation, as Zola echoed Bernard; yet, in its application to fictional constructs, that notion can be no more than a metaphor. Zola surpassed all previous novelists in his reliance on carefully documented observation; but he had no control over what he observed, whereas his control over what he recorded could be subjective and arbitrary. His presentation of his material, as he elsewhere admitted, was "an aspect of nature viewed through the medium of a temperament." Part of the confusion may derive from the equivocal French noun expérience, which signifies both a laboratory test and an acquaintance with life. A novelist tends to be, in T. S. Eliot's phrasing, "expert beyond experience." He can play God with his characters, if he so wishes, determining their hereditary destinies by any set of doctrinaire presuppositions he chooses to espouse. Actually, Zola had no physiological data of any exactitude. He simply made his story-lines conform to certain genetic theories, currently under challenge and subsequently discredited. Hence his method rested not upon induction but on deduction, the very antithesis of scientific empiricism.

In its formal aspect, there is not very much that seems strikingly experimental in Zola's fiction—as contrasted, for instance, with the novelties of technique and style in Tristram Shandy. Furthermore, the history of ideas can teach us that Sterne's meandering and fragmented monologue parodied the epistemology of Locke, plus the associations and sensations of eighteenth-century psychology. Given the sensitivity of fiction to its cultural climate, it was bound to reflect the growing assimilation of conceptions shaped by and gathered from science. The reaction could be critical, as in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. There the protagonist Bazarov is a chemist and medical student, a thoroughgoing materialist who despises Pushkin and venerates Bunsen, Liebig, and Büchner, who vivisects frogs and preaches nihilism. Inevitably a conflict between generations provokes a duel in which little is resolved. A parallel dialectic was being argued out across Europe on the educational plane. Matthew Arnold's essay, "Literature and Science," was delivered first as a Rede Lecture, seventy-seven years before C. P. Snow would avail himself of that Cambridge platform to propound his views on the two cultures. Arnold in his turn was replying to T. H. Huxley's "Science and Culture," a plea for introducing more of the sciences into the curriculum. Arnold conceded that educated persons ought to know something about their own bodies and about the corporeal world they inhabited. However, he contended that if they were acquainted with the factual results of scientific investigation, they could leave the experimental methods to specialists. It is evident, in retrospect, that Arnold and Huxley did not totally differ in their basic notions of science. Both of them thought of it as a stable body of solid knowledge, still incomplete and needing to be organized, having been accumulated slowly in the past but lately approaching a fruition of certainty.

"At the end of the nineteenth century," Stanislaw Lem has observed in The Investigation, "it was universally believed that we knew almost everything there was to know about the material world, that there was nothing left to do except keep our eyes open and establish priorities." No wonder that the simplistic disseminators of such messianic beliefs had expected and even planned a scientific take-over in all fields of human endeavor, as with the positivistic religion of Auguste Comte or the social statics of Herbert Spencer. The exploits of technology, particularly in the United States, urbanized and electrified the ubiquitous landscape. Mark Twain's Sir Boss could stage a confrontation between Yankee know-how and old-world legend; but Huck Finn has been fading into nostalgia, having lighted out from a civilization personified not so much by Aunt Polly as by the teen-age inventor, Tom Swift. The twentieth century seemed to herald a millennium, through its progress-marking expositions and lunar futuramas. It is no accident that the nineteen-twenties, whose lifestyle was shaped by such culture-heroes as Edison, Ford, Burbank, Marconi, and Lindbergh, witnessed the new wave of science-fiction magazines, or that Amazing Stories could flaunt the motto: "Extravagant Fiction Today . . . Cold Fact Tomorrow." When Jules Verne criticized H. G. Wells for unduly fantasizing, for not being plausible enough in backing his pseudo-inventions with corroborative detail, Verne was acknowledging the extent to which he and his followers had been working within the realistic conventions. Conrad evoked "the Realities of the Fantastic" in this very connection; Michel Butor would call for their counterpart, "un fantastique encadré dans un réalisme. " Latterly, with cybernetic systems and nuclear bombs and rockets, reality has been outdoing fantasy and rapidly proceeding from the millennial toward the apocalyptic.

Aldous Huxley, as the literary scion of a scientific dynasty, has commented upon the comparative slowness and uninventiveness of the earlier futurological authors in transcending the undeveloped technologies of their day. To the several examples he has cited, we might add that of Poe in "Mellonta Tauta, " where balloons are still the primary means of aerial transportation in the year 2848—a thousand years after the story's date—and the railways have so expanded that they now utilize twelve tracks rather than two. (That, at least, was an optimistic projection.) "Rooted as they are in the facts of contemporary life," Huxley concluded, "the fantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern science-fiction are incomparably richer, bolder, and sharper than the utopias or millennial imaginings of the past." Those developments which we have chiefly been considering were related to an epoch of positivism in science, which bore a special relation to the epoch of realism in literature, as we have seen. This movement has continued, with due allowance for time-lag, well into the present. Yet, away from its near-certitudes, there has been a quantum leap into the more restless epoch of Heisenberg's uncertainty, Gödel's indeterminacy, Einstein's relativity, and the apprehension of bright planets collapsing into black holes. The old and outmoded ideal was one of steady accumulation and continuous progression, filling in the gaps and rounding out the contours of a single, well-defined system, so that Einstein could affirm that nature had been an open book to Newton. But, as Thomas Kuhn has been demonstrating, science moves in intermittent cycles and in uncharted directions. Obviously the positivists of the nineteenth century were basing their presuppositions on paradigms differing from those envisaged by our twentieth-century relativists, and were therefore offering different models to be culturally absorbed or emulated. All that can be confidently predicted, in the face of another scientific revolution, is an utter change in implicit values and sustaining attitudes.

To revert to the novel again is to perceive an analogous shift. Its turning-point has been Joyce's Ulysses, which earned immediate notoriety as the nec plus ultra of naturalism, but has since been exercising leadership as an introjector of symbolism in fiction. Joyce's youthful surrogate, Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had confessed himself an indifferent member of a college class in physics. Leopold Bloom, the latterday Ulysses, differs from Stephen so diametrically that, when they are finally brought together, they are visualized as respective examples of the artistic and the scientific temperaments. But Bloom, a self-educated common man blandly up-to-date in 1904, can invoke no more than the prevalent commonplaces of popular science. Two physical principles come and go in his mind throughout that crucial day. One is the law of falling bodies ("thirty-two feet per sec"); and the other "parallax," the apparent displacement caused by a change of vantage-point in astronomy. Both have their thematic significances for the symbolic interplay. The chapter that brings the two protagonists tête-à-tête over a belated cup of tea, "Ithaca," has been labelled a catechism; but it is much more like an examination paper in its worked-up factuality. Its questions and answers elicit detailed statistics about the flow of water from the reservoir to Bloom's kitchen tap, or the calorific effect of the stove upon the teapot. When the pair exchange their farewells on the doorstep, the starry night is specified in astronomical terminology. Bloom's final—if not uncontested—resting place, his wife's bed, is designated by longitude and latitude. The last line, inadvertently omitted from many editions, is a small black dot suggesting that the earth itself has been whirling off into "the cold of interstellar space."

Here the artistic, not the scientific, temperament, was the demiurge that created a fabulous artifact. If Ulysses carried the literal reproduction of daily routine about as far as it could be conveyed in serious prose, it simultaneously opened the way for a renewal of fantasy. Not that the naturalistic movement had ever completely succeeded in grounding the marvellous. Henry James lent his prestigious cachet to the composition of ghost stories. The devil makes an appearance in The Brothers Karamazov, as does an angel in André Gide's Fauxmonnayeurs, and God reveals Himself in G. K. Chesterton's detective-story, The Man Who Was Thursday. The posthumous emergence of Kafka's fables contributed to the vein of anti-realism. That latitude for the imagination which Hawthorne had requested, and on which he based his distinction between the novel and the romance, is manifest in the writing of such contemporaries as J. L. Borges, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon. To collate the three editions of I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926, 1935, 1970) is to observe that this sensitive critic, moving from a quasipositivistic analysis to a neo-romantic defense of poetry, has completely reversed his stand. It may not be impertinent to note that Professor Richards, who had his university training in logic and psychology, has himself become a poet during his elder years. The pace at which the hot facts of our century have outdistanced its anticipatory fictions, has led to suspensions of disbelief far deeper and more widespread than anything Coleridge could have prophesied, in his romantic recoil from the predispositions of eighteenth-century rationalism. A pivotal event was the crisis of 1938, when Orson Welles' broadcast dramatization of an invasion from Mars, as conceived by H. G. Wells, spread panic through whole suburbs of radio listeners.

Another case in the annals of our subject had a genuine cause and an opposite consequence. After the Sputnik entered its first trajectory, as you are doubtless aware, there was a marked—if temporary—decline in the circulation of science-fiction. Reality, on that rare occasion, had come nearer than usual to satisfying man's appetite for amazement. But, although the knowable is necessarily limited, there can be no limits to the unknown; and, for space-opera, the sky itself is not necessarily the limit. The surrounding "mystery of things," to borrow a Shakespearean phrase, is irregularly and sporadically penetrated by reason's lights. This is what makes it so much easier to believe than to doubt, though it is sometimes tempting to speculate or extrapolate; new beliefs are posited upon such speculations and extrapolations, to be either taken on faith or tested by experiment. Whenever institutions or ideologies formed around traditional beliefs are questioned or rejected, then a swarm of esoteric cults seems to creep forth from underground. The Enlightenment, for all its skeptical inclinations, harbored sects of Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Swedenborgians. During the very years of the French Revolution, a minor playwright and advocate who was participating in it, C. G. T. Garnier, published at Amsterdam a collection of thirty-nine volumes: Voyages imaginaires, romanesques, merveilleux, allégoriques, amusants, comiques, et critiques: suivis des songes et visions, et des romans cabalistiques. These included translations of Robinson Crusoe first of all, Gulliver's Travels (with a French sequel), and The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (their once-popular derivate), along with such other pioneering excursions as Voltaire's Micromégas and Holberg's Nils Klim. It is not without significance that they were intermixed with "visions" and supernatural fantasies, and that Garnier also edited Le Cabinet des fées, a forty-one volume collection of fairy tales.

Every work of fiction, in a certain sense, constitutes an extraordinary voyage for its reader. So Tzvetan Todorov maintains in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique, and the sweep of the generalization is strengthened if we apply it a fortiori to Joyce's Ulysses. Travel has furnished a dynamic impetus for civilization itself, and it is their transmigrations which have logged the heterogeneous cultures into an intellectual continuum. It is not surprising when the imaginative curiosity of some selfdispatched voyagers has exceeded any viably geographical itinerary, or when historical explorations—adventurous enough on the surfaces of the earth—have been fancifully extended to subterranean or extraterrestrial regions. Travellers' tales have been proverbially heightened toward comic proportions, what with Lucian, Sir John Mandeville, Cyrano de Bergerac, Baron Münchausen, or Davy Crockett. More humanely, the interest in unexplored territories or in worlds elsewhere has converged with the Utopian quest for better worlds. The retrospective outlook was elegiac and pastoral, centering upon a golden age or an earthly paradise. The future prospect, setting its sights from Bacon's New Atlantis, is postulated as urban and technocratic. The applications of science were largely seen, through the nineteenth century and somewhat beyond, as a means of ameliorating the quality of life, most optimistically in the utopias of Bellamy and Wells. But, with the accelerated automation of the twentieth century, utopias have been giving way to dystopias, like the bleak regimes described by Huxley and Orwell—or, more recently and worst of all, the "cacotopia" of Anthony Burgess, 1985. The idealist, with Plato or More, embodies his ideals in another country, a lost fatherland, a heterocosm. The satirist, disillusioned by his homeland, especially when inhibited by Marxian censorship, can vent his satire on an unmapped domain, as Evgeni Zamyatin did in We. The Ukrainian dissenter, Mykola Rudenko, attests: "It was science-fiction that turned me into a 'renegade'."

Such Victorian prophets as Morris and Butler had sought guidelines for the future by turning back to the past. News from Nowhere supplanted factories with crafts and relocated townspeople in the countryside. Erewhon reverted to its antipodean pastoralism by staging a neo-Luddite revolt and sabotaging the oppressive machines. More currently A Clockwork Orange, if I read its Russo-English dialect correctly, has been protesting against the behavioral engineering of such a utopia as B. F. Skinner's Waiden Two. Since the most violent delinquency may be regarded as an assertion of free will, Mr. Burgess seems to believe, it is morally preferable to a social rehabilitation programmed through conditioned reflexes. A comparable dialectic was provoking its counterstatements more than a hundred years before, when the Goncourt brothers jotted down their reactions to an American writer just translated:

After having read Poe. Something heretofore unnoted in criticism, a new literary world, portents of twentieth-century literature. Science as miracle, algebraic fiction, a lucid and morbid literature. More poetry, imagination with thrusts of analysis. Zadig as police investigator, Cyrano de Bergerac studying astronomy with Arago. Somewhat monomaniacal.—Things playing more roles than people; love yielding to deductions and to other sources of ideas, phrases, stories, and general interest; the basis of the novel displaced and transposed from the heart to the head and from passion to intellect; drama in liquefaction.

The fraternal diarists did not go so far as to prophesy the invention of the hydrogen bomb, but the faceless landscape they foresaw looks very much as if it had been dehumanized by one. Nor can we deny that their preview has, to some extent, come to pass. "Men and landscape interfuse," as Mr. Aldiss perceives so clairvoyantly: "Machines predominate." The Philosophes, though they did not dream of bionic androids, could conceive the human body as a mechanism: La Mettrie's "L' homme machine. " The concentration on things, evinced by Balzac and intensified by Zola, has culminated among the authors of the nouveau roman: for example, in the chosisme of La Jalousie, where Robbe-Grillet's cinematic focus is less upon the men and women within a given room than on the spot left by a crushed centipede on the wall. Comparable to the impressions of the Goncourts were those of the French novelist who became the most successful of Poe's emulators. Jules Verne also sensed a certain coldness in "this positivist of a man," which he blamed on the regimented materialism of Poe's native American surroundings. Yet the latter characteristic, too, was a source of strength and originality, for it had enabled him to confront and dispel all vestiges of the supernatural: "He claims to explain everything by physical law, which he is even ready to invent, if need be."

When Verne went on to deplore Poe's alcoholic tendencies, he failed to recognize that Poe's overemphasis on "ratiocination" was like the heavy drinker's effort to convince his sober interlocutors that he is in a rational frame of mind. It is ironic—in view of such emotional Gallic responses—that, when Poe came to portray his past master of deduction and cerebration, he could not make him other than a Frenchman: M. Auguste Dupin. For the mysteries Poe conjured up there would invariably be éclaircissements, practical solutions to his riddles, enigmas, and parlor tricks. He enjoyed playing the self-appointed debunker of other people's hoaxes, as with "Maelzel's Chess-Play er," where his exposure of an actual person concealed within the machinery of the spurious automaton constituted a Bergsonian victory of the living over the mechanical. (It is still not possible to program a computer for meeting the virtual infinitude of contingencies that could theoretically arise in a game of chess.) Poe's most ambitious undertaking, "Eureka," originally presented as a two-hour lecture on cosmogony, is nothing less than an attempt to solve the riddle of the universe. Prefacing the printed version, Poe offered it to the reader as a prose poem rather than a scientific treatise, for its beauty rather than its truth. There was not much Keatsian equivalence. On the one hand, the pseudo-professional patter borrowed from Alexander von Humboldt and the cosmographers was hardly the stuff of poetry. On the other, Poe was well advised in not pretending to be a scientist. A. H. Quinn, his loyal if pedestrian biographer, managed to extract a letter from Sir Arthur Eddington, making polite allowances for cranky amateurism and for contemporaneous misconception, while conceding some amount of credit to a romantic poet who was sufficiently interested to dabble in questions now under scrutiny by the astrophysicists.

The predominant intention of "Eureka," which could not be adjudged as either true or false, was to unify the concepts of spirit and matter, of time and space, through a single-minded commitment to the integrity of the imagination. Paul Valéry's oracular essay about it may tell us more about himself than Poe: how, on discovering it at the age of twenty, while vacillating between a career in letters and one in mathematics, it struck him with all the force of a cosmic vocation ("voilà mon premier univers"). And the testimonial concludes by rounding an interdisciplinary circle: "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE!" It will always be there." The more we learn about intelligence, the more we respect its permutations and varieties, and the less we feel inclined to subdivide it crudely into two categorical opposites. "There is no science without fancy and no art without facts," as Vladimir Nabokov has written in Ada, that amorphous novel which includes—among so many other outlandish things—a burlesque of what the author (himself a part-time entomologist) preferred to label "physics-fiction." What we consider occult is by definition what we do not understand, and this may well expose our own ignorance in contradistinction to the expertise of the genuine professionals. But science, unsupported by direct conversance with the experimental evidence, has no more positive standing in our minds than magic; hobbits have much the same espistemological status as robots; and there is a philosophical inference to be drawn from the intermingling of science-fiction with fantasy, not excluding religious allegory and medievalized folklore, on our bookshelves and in our conference. Carlyle's formula, "natural supernaturalism," has been fruitfully revived by M. H. Abrams, and it might well be transferred from romanticism to a newer blend of pantheism, not so much a mystique as a resurrection of miracles without the intervention of an established God.

"Not everyone can be Lord God tout court, a creator of autonomous worlds, and a writer most certainly cannot," Stanislaw Lem has warned us, in a recent review of a nonexistent book. The more improbable the writer's world, the less explainable is its relation to ours—or rather, the Lord's. Science abhors transcendence, naturally enough, and transposes the supernatural to the paranormal. When the Brobdingnagian professors who examined Gulliver ended by classifying him as a freak of nature, lusus naturae, Swift's ironic conclusion was that they were "disdaining the old evasion of occult causes" and finding "a wonderful solution of all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge." In other words, they were getting rid of the problem by sweeping it under the rug. The rigorous empiricist would take the stance of Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo. All that is not deduced from phenomena is hypothesis, and hypotheses—be they metaphysical, physical, mechanical, or occult—have no place in experimental philosophy." I cite the famous dictum in Newton's original Latin because the verb is suggestively linked to my subject-matter. Fingo here is best translated "fabricate." Thus it has the same ambiguous connotations as the Greek poiesis, which can mean either making something or making something up. Even more to the point, its participial substantive is the etymological precedent for our word fiction. Newton equated hypothesizing with fabrication or fiction: "I do not fabricate hypotheses." The Newtonian scholar, Alexandre Koyré, has pointed out that on inconsistent occasions Newton himself made use of hypothetical propositions, but that he consistently reserved the specific expression for pejorative comment on the researches of rival scientists. Modern scientific procedure, as formulated by Henri Poincaré in La Science et l'hypothèse, while concurring with Newton on the necessity for experimental verification, would concede that hypotheses could perform heuristic functions.

In that respect, the ultimate cosmos of science is not so far removed from the artificial microcosms of literature. "A fictive covering," Wallace Stevens has written, "Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind." And within the domain of fiction, as we have been taking notice, the fabrications of science are not so far removed from the fantasies of the literary—or, beyond the self-consciously literary, the traditional and popular—imagination. The Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp, has worked out a Morphology of the Folktale which, since it breaks down narrative into its most elemental components and schematized relationships, need not vary much from one genre to another. It could be applied almost as readily to the sophistications of Proust as to the simplicities of the brothers Grimm. The dean of American folklorists, Stith Thompson, from a very different angle of observation, has compiled his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Since he has ordered his vast range of materials by a thematic scheme of classification, it is revealing to observe the principal themes: cosmogony, the creation of life, arcane knowledge, magical transactions, otherworldly journeys, ogres and ordeals, raising the dead, foreseeing and controlling the future. What are these folkloristic categories but the standard situations of science-fiction? Of course, we must allow for a certain amount of temporal adaptation. Pseudo-science may be counted upon to have modernized the technique of necromancy; but thaumaturgy continues to work its recurrent wonders, no more wonderful when manifested in witches' cauldrons than in physicists' cyclotrons. Personally, I remain enough of a skeptical rationalist to feel somewhat uneasy over the cultural currents that have been remystifying and remythologizing our precarious century. Our technorevolutions seem to foster, not so much a rule of reason, as an efflorescence of credulity. Perhaps the last word should be left to P. T. Barnum.