In pre-Romantic times, a treatise on the mollusc or the optic nerve would have been considered part of literature.
However, how times have changed.
In the post-Romantic era, literature has looked on science with a much more sceptical eye. Once the arts come to achieve a monopoly on the imagination, so that ‘imaginative literature’ means poetry and drama rather than history or psychology, scientists like Heisenberg or Schrödinger can be dismissed as dull, uncreative souls.
Science deals with the actual, while fiction trades in the possible; and in the bleak conditions of modernity,
literature - the subjunctive expressing what is imagined)e (mood of verbs
is always likely to be deemed to trump, to be better, more enriching than
Science the indicative (mood of verbs expressing simple statement of a fact).
As a result what doesn’t exist seems more precious than what does.
Science, so the story goes, delivers us a world bleached of taste and texture, purged of value and feeling. The task of literature is to restore to the world its plundered body, redeeming it from the reductive schemas of the technocrats. After all, Art is organic, Science is mechanical.
And you know Poetic language is richly connotative,
(an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning)
while scientific language is merely denotative
(the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests}
Science deals with facts, and art with values.
The man/woman of letters spent much of his time seeking to coat unpalatable scientific truths with the sugar of spiritual consolation.
Science’s chilling reports on the material world were not what the spiritual self, hungry transcendent value, wanted to hear.
Newton, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Heisenberg,
Terry Eagleton
- On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd
Harvard, 540 pp, £25.95, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 674 03357 3
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