Claire Preston. Shakespeare Studies. Volume 49, 2021.
“The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is always with us in science and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind, 1948
In the mid-1920s, while studying physics at Cambridge, J. Robert Oppenheimer was introduced to the theoretician Paul Dirac. A person of deep culture, especially in literature and art, Oppenheimer’s distinctive reputation as an intellectual preceded him among the university’s physicists. “I hear that you write poetry as well as working at physics,” Dirac said. “How on earth can you do two such things at once? In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as can be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry it’s the exact opposite!” Oppenheimer’s reply is unrecorded, but he later wrote that for some physicists any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility”; that for Dirac, whose primary language was mathematical, words were a kind of condescension to the insufficiently numerate. Poetry, or imaginative, tropic writing more broadly, would be simply incomprehensible to Dirac as a scientific vehicle.
An able — if often inelegant — mathematician himself, Oppenheimer’s verbal style was by contrast striking in speech and on paper: a friend noted that he had never heard the word “catharsis” used in a physics discussion, or the neologism “mesoniferous,” until Oppenheimer introduced them. Unlike Dirac, he valued the humanities as necessary to science’s understanding of itself and of the human condition it promoted, and especially the power of language and rhetoric as instruments of scientific precision and clarity. During the war he directed the invention of the atom bomb; afterwards, when he had to explain and justify that project to a non-scientific public, he deployed a glittering rhetorical arsenal that remains the most powerful articulation of science and its aims since Francis Bacon. Never disavowing the inherent evil of his “gadget,” Oppenheimer was the only scientist who afforded adequate rhetorical explication of the bomb itself and of its ethical complexities. As weaponeer and scientific spokesman he invented a new, modernist aesthetic, an atomic sublime, a language oracular, ornate, histrionic, hyperbolic, grave, mathematically precise, stocked with allusions, quotations, and wordplay to articulate the shocking nature of the new weapon to the layman, a set of metaphors that attempted to resolve “the organized misunderstanding of the atom.”
In 1946 Oppenheimer recalled that at Los Alamos “we thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.” It was in such moral musings that he declared (in almost Biblical or perhaps Miltonic cadence) that “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” Twenty years after Hiroshima, he rehearsed the common complaints against modern science: “physics is corrupted by money; microbiology and mathematics by pride; astrophysics and geophysics by access to novel and powerful instruments of exploration; the arts by alienation; and all by our lack of virtue.” Alliteration, anaphora, zeugma, and parallel constructions shape this succinct analysis, all heading like a Shakespearean soliloquy to the dying fall of the last clause. Still later, as director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, he actively mingled the two cultures — rhetorical and scientific — as a kind of post-atomic utopian retreat, one where Einstein could converse with Eliot, Panofsky with Pais.
Even if science and letters were ever truly in the partnership Oppenheimer practiced in his articulations and envisaged in the mid-twentieth century at Princeton, such an alliance is far less marked today than it was in the seventeenth century. The intense, solely literary-rhetorical education enjoyed by all major or middling English natural philosophers in the grammar schools or in the formal university curriculum equipped them with the literary tools and patterns in which they cast their scientific writings. They had no others. Without formal scientific training — and, as importantly, without any established format for writing scientifically — early-modern scientists and their associates tried to tell things that no one ever knew before using the very rhetorical equipment disparaged by Dirac: “poetry,” either as Sidneian imaginative fictions or as verse and other ornate, tropic, figured writing, was the very instrument by which science communicated its findings in a way that everyone could understand. It is for no mere decorative effect that Boyle (following Galileo) configured his summa of competing chemical philosophies in the form of a garden dialogue between characters discussing Aristotelian, Paracelsian, and corpuscularian systems to derive a theory of elemental and “mixed” bodies; or that Margaret Cavendish produced short explanatory atomic poems that function like axioms of intelligent materialism; or that Thomas Browne, experimentally confuting the claim that mercury interferes with the verticity of magnets, discovered in it (also experimentally) a signature of resurrection.
In thinking about literary-scientific relations, I can hardly claim a strict critical method, nor can I impose an absolute philosophy of the relationship between rhetoric and natural science. This is partly because that connection is implicit and perhaps even unconscious in the default genres and styles that the natural philosophers had at their disposal through intensive humanist training. How, therefore, could Boyle — fussiest of scientific stylists — be expected to think twice about presenting his chemistry in dialogues, familiar letters, and experimental narrations that have the structure of stories? Moreover, the interactions of tropes and natural knowledge are far too varied, enmeshed, and reticulated to allow any straightforward assumptions or conclusions about their application. Taking my cue from Oppenheimer, I approach the articulation of early-modern scientific culture and the nature and extent of early-modern rhetorical science through a very wide array of evidence, often idiosyncratic and even unstable, and generated by many individual voices. The verbal texture of this inventive scientific language resides in poems, catalogues, letters, diaries, notes, drafts, reports, early newspaper and journal articles, and other untidy, often inconclusive sources — in other words, in textual remains that are not always formally polished or even exactly “literary.” Nevertheless, to study the language of early-modern science through such documents extends the frame of the literary as well as the domain of the scientific instrument. If humanist training gave rhetorical form and texture to nascent natural-philosophical disciplines, then the literary armamentarium wielded by early modern scientists — narrative, lexis, genre, trope, and figure — amounts to a literary-scientific technology, a technology of exposition as important as the barometer or the microscope.
Literary technology
Although he recognised the abuses of rhetoric in learning, and especially in the natural sciences, in 1605 Francis Bacon warned against its neglect: without copia, a de-rhetoricized natural philosophy would only wither to barren generalities, “being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method.” In the early-seventeenth century it was already clear that the “penury of language” in English and the other European vernaculars would inhibit scientific development in a period when new ideas were emerging faster than the wordstore was developing, and had long surpassed anything offered by Latin, the ancient lingua franca with its historically limited, ill-equipped scientific vocabulary. Natural historians like John Evelyn and Thomas Browne coined or imported new words, or developed existing ones, with wonderful freedom in order to keep pace with their own enhanced habits of observation, discovery, and analysis. Among some 500 terms still in his original use, Evelyn produced apiary, architectonic, calligrapher, cartoon, celibate, colossal, coniferous, elaboratory, encyclopaedist, experimentist, granite, harangue, ignite, lampoon, monochrome, skewer, paradigmatic, submerged, toxic, wheel-chair, woodcut, and of course many plant names (celery, delphinium, laurustinus, ligustrum, sea kale, spiraea, syringa). Thomas Browne contributed (among nearly 800) ambidextrous, anomalous, antediluvian, approximate/approximation, ascetic, biped, carnivorous, causation, cetaceous, coma, continuum, cryptography, depreciate, disruption, dissemination, electricity, equitable, ferocious, flammability, follicle, hallucination, herbaceous, incisor, incontrovertible, indigenous, indoctrination, invigorate, jocularity, locomotion, medallion, medical, migrant, oviparous, patois, perspire, polarity, prairie, prefix, pubescent, secretion, striated, suicide, therapeutic, transgressive, typographer, ulterior, veterinarian. These words reflect their polymathic investigative interests; like Hooke’s air pump, they were a new apparatus to supply expanding empirical-linguistic need.
But new words alone were insufficient to the emerging landscape of natural knowledge. Bacon had encouraged a broader, specifically rhetorical, inventio: he declared, “whatsoever science is not consonant to presuppositions, must pray in aid of similitudes.” In other words, in addition to an improved neology, he sought tropic aid from the inventive thesaurus of rhetoric to express his natural philosophy. His decision to outline a program of essential investigative tasks for natural philosophers in the position paper known as The Advancement of Learning (1605), and then to embody those undertakings in The New Atlantis (1626), a utopian fiction of a society governed by a spectacularly well-funded scientific institution, demonstrates his commitment to a resourceful, imaginative discourse of science. This conjunction of scientific discussion and its fictional embodiment is, of course, not unique: Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), which imagines a nation given to natural-philosophical observation and invention as a feature of its social structure and of its foreign adventures, was published together with her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. That Bacon’s inauguration of a scientific program specified similitudes as part of its linguistic apparatus, and that Cavendish simultaneously published her treatise and a fictive manifestation of how science might be conducted and encouraged, implicitly recognizes that the way scientists say science is instrumental to the way they do science: rhetorical management cannot be decoupled from experimental and theoretical practice.
A lexical shift that represents this Baconian rhetorical delivery of natural knowledge is the history of the word technology. New in the early-seventeenth century, it originally meant not “mechanical arts” but “terminology” or “discourse.” In its Greek root, techne (an art or craft), early-modern technology implicitly associates linguistic, textual, discursive craft to the doing or making of the manual crafts it accompanies and describes. The literary technology of early-modern science can thus be understood as an effort or activity akin to the performance of empirical science itself. This is a notable semantic evolution in the word — from “parlance” to “applied science” — that conjoins the linguistic with the scientific, the rhetorical with the empirical. The instruments and methods that we conventionally associate with technology, and the institutions and individuals that employed them in the early-modern period, have been explored by historians of science in (for example) classic studies of the air pump, the pendulum, the Accademia Lincei, and the early Royal Society. But precise consideration of science’s “literary technologies,” in Steven Shapin’s well-known phrase, of the instruments by which scientists report findings, make claims, frame experimental practices, advertise ambitions, theorize the nature of phenomena, and appeal for political support, have equal if distinct validity in the history of science. The rhetorical and narrative features of this language allow us to detect and better understand the evolution of investigative practices, the history of investigative subjects, and the shaping of scientific-social behaviors in the form of collaboration, retreat, and solitude. I would claim that if the nature of the scientific undertaking partly determines its rhetorical complexion, its rhetorical character partly frames the meaning, purpose, and consequence of scientific activity. In other words, we must embed the history of scientific or empirical rhetoric in the history of scientific investigative procedure.
Scientific excursions
With the exception of some branches of mathematics, the early-modern sciences abound in rhetorical and literary invention. One rich example of the empirical-rhetorical that has interested me recently is what might be called the philosophical perambulation or excursion. The established modes of the country-house poem, the gallery inspection, the antiquarian survey, the chorography, the satirical exploration, and the laboratory visit all harness the power of elaborate tropes like ekphrasis, meronymy, and topographia to manipulate and replicate acts of observation and of investigation in the form of imagined guided tours. In vivid description, in the listing of attributes, instruments, and procedures, and in the verbal mapping of experimental and display space, these works not only refer to the rising culture of managed specimens and of rigorous observation, but often enact the processes they describe or allude to and, through their rhetorical vehicles, insist on their empirical significance. In short, these works enlist a rhetoric of scrutiny that is itself an empirical practice and a tool.
Among these empirical excursions is one already mentioned: Bacon’s remarkable evocation of a splendid research institution that must surely have induced unappeasable envy in natural philosophers from Oldenburg to Oppenheimer. The extended tour in The New Atlantis through laboratorial spaces is conducted in the form of a list whose sheer length and detail insists on the necessity of experimental practice of every conceivable kind, in physics, biology, medicine, and engineering. It is both insistently observational (look at these endless and endlessly supplied workshops, labs, and projects!) and relentlessly polemical (think of all this work that urgently needs to be done!). It is, however, only a checklist or elenchus of scientific desiderata; it does not particularize or replicate empirical acts. That is to say, the deictic power of showing is used by Bacon to reproduce the technical specifications of apparatus and its enhancements of perception and knowledge, but does not, as some later writing does, show or compel in the mind of the reader imaginative enactments of scientific investigation itself.
Decades later, Bacon’s meronymic array of facilities and equipment was hopefully reprised by John Evelyn and Abraham Cowley in separate evocations of a research institution imagined for the benefit of what would become the Royal Society. Evelyn’s fanciful scheme is rhapsodically pastoral but less specific about the conduct of experimental science there than about the style of its buildings (an imitation of a Carthusian monastery). Its impulse, learned retirement, was pitched in a letter of 1659 to Robert Boyle, only casually mentioning its lavish facilities and huge costs. He imagines it as a setting for Boyle himself, surrounded by “Gentlemen who desire nothing more than to give a good example, preserve science, and cultivate themselves living profitably and sweetly together.” By contrast, Cowley’s pamphlet (1660/1) not only specifies the curriculum, costs, management, and professorial salaries of his philosophical college, but also describes its quadrangles and domestic offices, anatomy theater, celestial observatory, vaults of apparatus, apothecarial and mathematical chambers, and “great Laboratories for Chymical Operations”; he lists a garden “destined only to the tryal of all manner of Experiments concerning plants, as their Melioration, Acceleration, Retardation, Conservation, Composition, Transmutation, Coloration,” and another zoological one for “the exact search into the nature of Animals.” His tour of the college, although it includes movement through a gallery of philosophical memorabilia, rightly disclaims the elaborate grandeur of Bacon’s College of the Six Days’ Work (“a Project for Experiments that can never be Experimented”). Like Bacon’s, nevertheless, his college and Evelyn’s are purely utopian, unrealized.
The Royal Society itself, founded just after these proposals were made, was notably vagrant until the early-eighteenth century, and it never did acquire its own laboratorial facilities — practical Enlightenment and modern science found other venues. And like Bacon’s college, Cowley’s proposal is framed as a perambulation through dedicated empirical spaces, offering a model for later satirical visits by Thomas Brown in Amusements Serious and Comical (1700) and Ned Ward in The London-Spy (1698-1700), tours that describe preposterous cures being developed by the Royal College of Physicians, Robert Hooke’s lab and alarming collections at Gresham College, and unidentified virtuosi performing outlandish experiments in their own houses. Bacon, Evelyn, and Cowley are all conducting a kind of polemical tour in which the (expensive) spaces of science are to the fore. They ask us to inspect these spaces with different commitments of observational attention. Cowley, for example, wants us to imagine his college’s significant scientific gallery, a formal display that illustrates scientific achievement; Evelyn, however, writes privately and less descriptively to a correspondent unlikely to need his assistance in understanding what might take place in the dedicated experimental spaces he lists; and Bacon, piling on the examples of his institution’s research facilities in a boundless vista, tends to blind us with the potential science that might be conducted there. Each insists that we observe, but none uses his occasion to describe empirical behavior itself or to command the investigative collaboration of the reader.
A very different excursion, however, does seek that investigative collaboration: James Wright’s description of an imaginary “orbicular room” in the grounds of a country retreat is part of a summer tour of houses of the gentry in Country Conversations (1694); the room is encountered in a perambulation of the whole estate of one Eugenius. Wright explains this room’s construction and position to disclose how the sixteen paintings hung within it are fashioned as mimicking the exact views, as if through windows from each point in the room, of the landscape (with ruins) without. The clever tromp l’oeil runs even to the precise rendition of shadows falling at slightly different angles at each compass bearing, exactly reproducing an early morning at midsummer. This contrived gallery is topographically and astronomically exact, a perspectivally amusing deception engineered to beguile the eye of the visitor. The orbicular room is a fiction invented by Wright, but the detailed explanations of its architecture and its visual chicanery make the essay feel like reportage, and compel us to think about how it might work. “Not observed by everyone that sees [it],” the room’s accurate “decorum” (the witty legerdemain that makes each perspectival painting look like a window and correctly reproduce shadows cast by the sun at different angles) is only apparent to an acute observer like Wright and to readers with reserved excellence of imagination and attention, who collaborate empirically with the author in understanding and admiring the contrivance. 16 This wit reinforces the aptitude for precise notice and analysis that underpins Wright’s exact poetic description in tandem with the good science that allows the deception in the first place. Excursions of this kind allow the rhetoric of description to compel acts of readerly scrutiny that replicate acts of scientific observation.
If some literary-scientific writing is primarily descriptive, and some analogically enacts empirical thought and behavior, another category of writing altogether produces a fictive rhetorical model of scientific conduct that forwards the universal advancement of learning even as it allows the application of tropes in experimental explanation. As Corresponding Secretary of the Royal Society and later as editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665 to 1677), the polyglot Henry Oldenburg fashioned the rhetorical presence of others in the public sphere from the privacy of their personal communications: as the Society’s gatekeeper and intellectual manager he acted as agent or proxy for scientific voices, giving them ideal form and editorially converting them into a kind of fiction, a practical utopian imaginary as powerful as Bacon’s New Atlantis. Utopian fables depend on highly managed and maintained social order, and Oldenburg’s scientific republic — his notion of the institutional form of that republic — is exactly that. He was not a scientist, and yet by letter and by verbal agility he managed the expressions and behavior of querulous scientists and thereby enhanced their work. He promoted cooperation and the exchange of experimental results; he edited scientific reports for clarity; mediated in scientific disputes; and preached an ideal, imagined, virtual republic of learning spread across several continents. He aimed as well to “liberate natural knowledge from inflated and charming language” and to “dismiss the idle chatter of the Scholastics.”
In these roles, he schooled some of the greatest of seventeenth-century scientists in an ideology of intellectual transaction and collaboration, often refining and improving their delivery of results and conclusions. In effect, he established some early norms of natural-philosophical discourse, as well as a public rhetoric of scientific behavior. Boyle employed an architectural metaphor for Oldenburg’s mainly epistolary labours: as an information broker or intelligencer he was gathering “not only large and well squar’d stones & Timbers,” but also “Sparrs & Laths and smaller Stones, and even irregular Fragments” on which to “Erect a Solid and useful Philosophy.” The conceit recognizes that communication and experiment are co-extensive but not immediately coherent, that findings in natural knowledge had to be mortared by language. Oldenburg’s entrepreneurial information network exemplifies yet another strand of the literary-scientific continuum, one that rhetorically tessellates piecemeal and incomplete discoveries within a coherent discursive landscape, and amalgamates individuals themselves in a framework of civil scientific behavior within an epistolary, fictive philosophical college designed to advance science itself.
In 1946 an American journalist wondered whether, “in spite of our vast and ever-growing vocabulary, we have finally created an object that transcends all possible description.” The object was, of course, the atom bomb, a scientific marvel that seemed finally to have defeated the power of language to describe or comprehend it. And yet science continues to generate words to match its most current speculations. The quark (itself a loan from Joyce) has flavor, charm, strangeness, and colour; nibbles, bits, and bytes have colonized computer engineering, as has the Miltonic-sounding curse of dimensionality, a frustrating asymptote in a perpetually degrading classifier; and freshman physics students at Harvard get comic help from limericks.
These terms and compositions retain some of the inventive energy of early modern science, and I end with a jocund comparison between two scientists separated by 250 years who cast their physics in verse:
Margaret Cavendish, “Of Earth” (explaining the weight of matter):
Why Earth’s not apt to move, but slow and dull,
Is Atomes flat no Vacuum hath but full.
That Forme admits no empty place to bide;
All parts are fill’d, having no hollow side.
And where no Vacuum is, Motion is slow,
Having no empty places for to go.
Though Atomes all are small, as small may bee,
Yet by their Formes, Motion doth disagree.
For Atomes sharp do make themselves a Way,
Cutting through other Atomes as they stray.
But Atomes flat will dull, and lazy lay,
Having no Edge or point to make a Way.
These personified, vital atoms have shape and character, even to possessing human traits like sloth. Flat atoms are dullards: they are packed together and neither move nor admit movement but must be sliced through by sharp, pointy, determined atoms, which are active and energetic. Cavendish’s atomic world consists of bodies whose dispositions regulate the nature of matter, and earth is here explained as “heavy,” almost like a Galenic humoral label. This short poem, like many in Poems and Fancies (1653), not only visualizes a universe of willful atoms with purposes of different sorts, but acts as a kind of metrical mnemonic for understanding her theory of matter. It is not very different from Einstein’s railway carriage and a beam of light demonstrating special relativity, or Schrodinger’s cat as a thought-experiment illuminating quantum indeterminacy. All these, to misuse Dirac’s formulation, try to tell people something no one ever knew before in an accessible way.
The didactic impulse behind such fictions is taken to a hilarious extreme by the inventive Dr David Morin, whose limericks are designed to help undergraduates studying physics. To grasp the idea of the relativistic dilation of time, he writes:
The effects of dilation of time
Are magical, strange, and sublime.
In your frame, this verse,
Which you’ll see is not terse,
Can be read in the same amount of time it takes someone else in
another frame to read a similar sort of rhyme.
Morin wittily harnesses the resources of meter to exemplify a relativistic phenomenon — a simple joke but a highly effective one in which a conventional verse-form serves and enacts a scientific claim. Both Cavendish and Morin, like the early modern and modern natural philosophers, adapt the riches of fiction, trope, genre, and meter to make a discursive representation of new science.