Powers 1

I discovered Richard Powers only recently. The intellectual division of labor required for graduate school had kept me away -- I was a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature; he is a contemporary American novelist. But his various iterations of the Two Cultures* are partially responsible for my most recent project and my thinking in general.

More than anyone, he articulates the places where the boundary between the natural sciences and the humanities dissolves. Here is one version of this from The Gold Bug Variations (1991), which is (among many other things) about a molecular biologist on the brink of decoding the human genome. This is one of many passages I marked:

     "[Ulrich] is under the spell of physics, where the pursuit of fundamentals pares back a mass of data to simple, elegant expressions. It seems safe to assume that cellular mechanisms, carded back to their core, are also driven by symmetry. But it's not safe; safety and life science are incommensurate. That one can derive twenty from sixty-four with pretty, reciprocal twists may be nature's sheer perversity.

     Botkin lowers herself into the line of fire. 'Grammars are not usually so clean.' Her cheeks contract bittersweetly: don't we always mean more than we say? Why not the we within us?" (444).

In several places in this novel, he draws a parallel between fundamental particles and natural human language. Information is simultaneously material and ideal. However, through the focalization of his scientist-characters, one sometimes loses one's grasp of which things are material and which things are ideal -- sometimes his prose reads downright Deleuzean. But he doesn't come from that tradition: his task is always to get into the mind of the scientist on the threshold of understanding. In other words, Powers tries to speak from the position of science even the despite the fact that he is a novelist by trade.

Powers's erudition is breathtaking, but what he does is to take the heaps of "information" he has accumulated and to turn it into "knowledge" (a binary that he himself uses). What is the good of decoding the mysteries of human life if we don't reflect on where we are going and why? Do we, in other words, really believe that "information" by itself carries with it the ethical or pragmatic imperatives necessary for the future? After all, our genome doesn't seem to behave according to this logic. 

*When I capitalize the term 'Two Cultures,' I'm using it to refer explicitly to the science/humanities split.

Powers, Richard. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.