Modernism and Cosmology

Absurd Lights

K. Ebury

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137393746
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137393753
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through examining the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, Katherine Ebury shows cosmology had a considerable impact on modernist creative strategies, developing alternative reading models of difficult texts such as Finnegans Wake and 'The Trilogy'.

1

Introduction: Cosmic Modernism

In 1887, when literary modernism and its practitioners were in their infancy, a crisis in modern science began with the Michelson–Morley experiment. James Joyce was about the age of Stephen Dedalus when Portrait begins; Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf, both five years old, were living in England; in Idaho Ezra Pound was just two-years of age; and T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield had not yet been born. Even the oldest member of the modernist movement, W. B. Yeats, had yet to publish his first collection; while the parents of the youngest modernist discussed substantially in this book, Samuel Beckett, had not yet met. Even Albert Einstein himself, the man who would eventually solve the problem caused by this experiment, was only eight years old. The focus of this study is the completely transformed cosmological model which arose out of this crisis in the Newtonian worldview and the effect relativistic cosmology had on modernist literature, especially on the work of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett.

The Michelson–Morley experiment to detect the earth’s motion through the ether, the medium postulated by nineteenth-century science for propagating light, has been called the most famous failed experiment in history (Eddington, 1920, pp. 16–17). A single source of white light was split, sending two light signals off at right angles to each other; each signal was then reflected from a separate mirror and returned to its original place. In order to prove the presence of the ether one of the light signals should have been delayed as it would have been travelling against a current of ether. However, no such delay occurred. This result had several effects: firstly, it led to the emphasis that modern physics came to place upon the speed of light as physical constant; secondly, it undermined the concept of the ether; and, finally, it pointed the way towards relativity, as a possible solution offered was the Lorentz–Fitzgerald contraction, which postulated that objects and distances contracted in the direction of motion. Einstein grew up and developed as a scientist in the aftermath of this fallout and his Special Theory of Relativity, announced by his paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ (1905) addressed the problem directly. Einstein reinterpreted the Lorentz–Fitzgerald contraction to apply to space and time, meaning that, as Arthur Eddington later explained it, ‘physical space and time are found to be closely bound up with this motion of the observer; and only an amorphous combination of the two is left inherent in the external world’ (1920, p. vii).

Put simply, the modernist generation came of age in a period when Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time were proved to be untenable. The science that Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Woolf and others would have learnt at home, at school and at university would have seemed authoritative to them, but might have seemed worryingly fluid and provisional for their teachers; this might be one reason why the physics lecture Joyce depicts in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is so chaotic and absurd, moving rapidly from formulae, to geometry (‘ – So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal’), to platinoid coils and ‘applied science’ without apparent causal connection (2005, pp. 160–1). It is perhaps no coincidence that this surreal lecture by an ‘atheist freemason’, so different to the Dean of Studies in the previous scene, causes Stephen to think of a ‘universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable’ (2005, p. 160). Modernist authors’ scientific knowledge was dated before they came of age and as adult artists each of them wrestled to a greater or lesser extent with an upheaval in science that was directly compared to the Copernican revolution by, for example, by Bertrand Russell (1925, p. 9) or by Arthur Eddington (1929, Unseen World, pp. 84–6). In the following chapters, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett will be examined as test cases for modernist aesthetic responses to a universe that had been newly imagined by scientists, teasing out the reception of the findings of Einstein and others in the literary culture of the day, showing how a number of central popularisations of the ideas of key twentieth-century physicists acted as sources for all three of these authors. The creative assimilation of scientific cosmology, in particular Einstein’s work towards the development of the curved four-dimensional model universe, had a considerable impact on modernist narrative and poetic strategies; close attention to contemporary science and philosophy therefore allows the development of alternative reading models of difficult texts such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Beckett’s ‘The Trilogy’. In particular, the strange textual universes created by these modernist authors reflect a deliberate critique of both Newtonian science and thus of realism, particularly in their blurring of narrative space and time.

The problem caused by the Michelson–Morley experiment was widely known, but Einstein’s solution was only slowly disseminated outside the scientific community. The big impact of Einstein’s Special Relativity was that the observer could no longer claim to experience time and space objectively; scientific objectivity could be attained only through the combination of space and time in a four-dimensional continuum. Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc², is a natural development from this revolution, as motion (specifically the speed of light, represented by c) is built into the relationship of mass and matter with energy. In the General Theory of Relativity, announced in 1915, the year of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Einstein expanded his conclusions to include gravity, the cornerstone of Newtonian physics, concluding that gravity is not a force per se, but rather a special form of acceleration which led to an inherent non-Euclidean distortion or curving of space-time. Space-time is affected to a greater or a lesser degree by the distribution of matter in the universe, as a massive object such as a star can further curve and distort space and time. For instance, in Einstein’s theory there is no such thing as a straight line. Astronomical objects and particles move on curved orbits not because of any external force affecting their movement, but merely because they are following geodesics, which form the natural, shortest pathway in a universe formed of curves.

The First World War meant that these controversial theories of a German scientist were slow to be popularised, especially in Anglophone countries, until they were championed by Eddington, a well-regarded English scientist, who set out to bring relativity into the public domain. Although a pure science discovery, relativity’s revolutionary nature meant that it was not widely discussed until after Eddington’s eclipse expeditions of 1919 provided experimental proof. These expeditions to Brazil and West Africa to take photographs of the stars during an eclipse of the sun were undertaken in order to test the assumption of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that starlight would be bent by the sun’s gravitational field to a much greater degree than predicted by Newton. The proof of this theoretical test vindicated Einstein’s gravitational theory that space was curved in the presence of matter. This observational proof of Einstein’s theories gave impetus for popularisation, quickly strengthened by further proofs such as the spectroscopic discovery that the light of dense stars was displaced towards the red end of the spectrum, proving that their time was moving more slowly due to their mass. Einstein himself became famous overnight; Alan Friedman and Carol Donley emphasise Einstein’s celebrity status as public curiosity about relativity turned him into a ‘popular star’: ‘The London Palladium asked him to appear for a three-week performance’ (1989, p. 12). This popularity is not necessarily due to Einstein’s rhetorical gifts, since articles about Einstein’s lecture series in England in the 1920s remind us that Einstein lectured in German. A Guardian article on ‘Einstein’s London Reception’ leaves the connection between understanding Einstein’s ideas and enjoying his performance ambiguous: ‘One wondered what percentage of the audience were able to follow the exposition in German. They all, as a matter of fact, listened as though they understood and enjoyed every word!’ (Anon. 14 June 1921, p. 7). A further article on Einstein in Manchester again glossed over the difficulty of an exposition of relativity in German through a focus on ‘the excellence of his diction’ and the ‘kindly twinkle’ in his eyes (Anon. 10 June 1921, p. 7). Einstein here is as much spectacle as scientist. Einstein’s cultural capital is best understood today through comparison with Stephen Hawking. Hawking possesses a similar brand of scientific celebrity, with a Radio 4 interview planned for his 70th birthday occasioning an avalanche of possible questions being sent to the BBC: these questions ranged from the scientific to the personal, emphasising his status as celebrity, rather than public intellectual. With Hawking, as with Einstein, public status in popular culture occasions cultural and literary impact. In a similar interdisciplinary study to this one, Literatures of Memory: History, Space and Time in Postwar Writing, Peter Middleton and Tim Woods examine the influence of Hawking’s popularised relativistic physics on a range of contemporary authors, including Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Ondaatje.

From 1919 onwards there was a rush to explain the new theory, inaugurated in 1920 by Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation, which, though not a bestseller, still went through four impressions between 1920 and 1923, and by Einstein’s own Relativity: The Special and The General Theory. As has been described by Michael Whitworth in ‘The Clothbound Universe’, by 1921, according to a special issue of Nature on relativity, nearly a thousand books, pamphlets and papers were in print and new books continued to be published into the 1930s and beyond (1996, p. 53). In the same year, Einstein was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, which cemented his cultural and scientific status; however, Einstein’s prize was not given for relativity, but rather for his work on the photoelectric effect. Walter Isaacson, a recent biographer of Einstein, suggests this was because relativity was regarded by some of the Nobel committee as ‘an inexplicable mass hysteria that would soon deflate’ (2007, p. 313). He reminds us that Einstein was given the 1921 prize, but not until 1922, while the Nobel Committee considered whether relativity deserved the prize; Einstein’s less controversial work on the Photoelectric Effect, which led to the quantum revolution, was considered the best way out of the impasse. Perhaps because of this Einstein chose not to attend the ceremony, but when he later gave his official acceptance speech it was on the subject of relativity. However, to the general public, who were unaware of the many times Einstein had been passed over, or the somewhat bitter circumstances of the award, it must have seemed that his ideas had received the ultimate validation.

Recent research has suggested that the modernist community was perhaps quicker than any other audience to begin to process Einstein’s theories. For example, in an essay on the potential presence of relativistic notions in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, Jeffrey Drouin argues persuasively that Joyce’s awareness of the new physics predated the eclipse expeditions due to his reading of The Egoist. He argues that, ‘In fact, the relativity theories became an essential component of The Egoist’s philosophical orientation nearly two years before Eddington’s address, which probably makes it the first English literary magazine to discuss Einstein’ (2009, n.pag.). He singles out in particular a series of essays from 1918–19 by the editor of The Egoist, Dora Marsden on new ideas of the unity of space and time, entitled ‘The Science of Signs’, which were informed by Einstein’s work. Further, Whitworth argues that relativity theory was most celebrated by modernist intellectuals before the boom of bestselling works, such as Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe, which attempted to address themselves to a truly popular audience (2011, p. 702). He suggests that intellectuals were more critical both of these works and of Einstein’s theory as popularisations became more affordable and began appearing outside the domain of elite culture.

A modernist disdain for popular expositions of relativity is evident especially powerfully between the pages of The Criterion, a key periodical for modernism. Although in May 1923 Eliot wrote to Eddington, asking if he would be interested in writing for The Criterion (2009, pp. 158–9), by the middle of the decade we see him turn against relativity, and especially against popular expositions of the theory, attempting to commission multiple negative reviews of the latest popular science for the periodical. He also contacted the philosopher R. B. Braithwaite in a failed attempt to persuade him to write a pamphlet rejecting scientific popularisation under the title ‘Sentimental physics’ (2013, pp. 617–18). Eliot commissioned a review of Eddington’s Stars and Atoms from Geoffrey Sainsbury in 1927. Sainsbury’s review focuses heavily on style, suggesting an anxiety that relativity might be losing its avant-garde appeal:

It is a very common idea that science is dull, and that a scientific book can therefore make little appeal to the general reader unless its dullness is relieved by occasional quotations from Tennyson to make it pretty, or facetious remarks to make it gay. Professor Eddington does not interlard his text with poetry, but he seems to feel that a vein of jocularity must run through his pages to save them from over-seriousness. No doubt the majority of readers like his fun well enough. But to the more fastidious mind it is not good enough of its kind, and, militating against any real scientific atmosphere or style, it is a slight but continual irritation…

If Professor Eddington wishes to write a book which will be stimulating to the modern literary mind, let him set his teeth and write something a good deal more grim and forcible, even at the risk of a little uncouthness. Let him not seek to redeem science with extraneous and inferior ornament, but look forward to the day when it may be said that science is literary style (1927, pp. 569–70).

Here Sainsbury criticises Eddington for seeking to ‘adorn’ science with ‘extraneous or inferior ornament’, which reminds us of Pound’s earlier injunction, in ‘A Few Don’ts for Imagistes’, ‘To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’ (1968, p. 3). A ‘grim and forcible’ modern style, a style without humour or intertextual reference to poetry, is advocated to make relativistic cosmology modernist. His distinction between ‘the majority of readers’ and the ‘more fastidious mind’ suggests precisely an anxiety to keep relativity in the domain of elite culture. Sainsbury also suggests that the continuing modernist aesthetic response to relativity is conditional upon these more difficult popularisations of the theory that he imagines; the moment when ‘it may be said that science is literary style’ can only come from purer, more serious popularisations.

However, the irony is that, if Eddington made no concessions to the reader, the difficult mathematics of relativity would have been inaccessible to Sainsbury and Eliot alike. In fact, no modernist artist had sufficient education to follow the mathematics of Einstein’s theory. Therefore, despite anxieties about how relativity and its cosmology were mediated, modernists, even Eliot himself, required and used popularisations of relativity. Apart from the works of Jeans and Eddington, which seem to have been known to all the major modernist authors and many other contemporary intellectuals, research conducted by Whitworth, Albright and others has shown that key texts used by modernist authors included the works of the French physicist Henri Poincaré (Beckett, Joyce and Yeats); Lyndon Bolton’s An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity (Yeats); Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (Yeats, Joyce, Eliot and, very probably, Woolf) and Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Yeats, Stein and Woolf). To these should be added A. V. Vasiliev’s Space, Time and Motion, which was drawn upon by Yeats and which is referenced in his essay ‘Bishop Berkeley’ (1961, p. 401). Additionally, the work of J. W. Dunne, an Irish-born aeronautical engineer and amateur philosopher, who wrote more unusual quasi-scientific works influenced by the new physics, An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1939), was also read by Yeats, Joyce, O’Brien and perhaps Eliot.¹

Further, despite Sainsbury’s fear that Eddington’s work was not difficult or serious enough, many of these different types of popularising works, although they explained the new physics, actually also capitalised on its difficulty. As Holly Henry points out in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science, public interest in this science was associated with its tantalising obscurity and ‘part of Einstein’s popularity was born of sheer confusion’ (2003, p. 28). In this sense, the contemporary reader’s experience of popularisations of the new physics and their experience of modernist literature may be connected both through difficulty and through the didactic potential of such difficulty. For example, Alistair Cormack suggests of Yeats’s A Vision that ‘We are in a process of being taught to read the work as we proceed through it’ and this insight is equally applicable to other works such as Ulysses or The Cantos (2008, p. 138). Similarly, in the opening of The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington suggests that slowly adjusting to the symbols which must be used in the new physics is like a child gradually learning to read for the first time. As Gillian Beer suggests in ‘Eddington and the Idiom of Modernism’, Eddington’s scientific popularisations ‘train the reader in how to read modern physics: trust themes not objects, form not substance, and incommensurable narrative not single stories’ (1995, p. 312). However, what Beer does not point out is that both modernism and contemporary popularisations of the new physics simultaneously teach readers how to read them and demonstrate that no full and complete reading is possible.

Russell shares Eddington’s sense of the importance of difficulty, writing that ‘Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract’ (2001, p. 85); in fact, as B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Cosmic Modernism
• 2 Yeatsian Cosmology
• 3 Joycean Cosmologies
• 4 Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in the Wake
• 5 The Beckettian Cosmos
• 6 Stars and Atoms in ‘The Trilogy’
• Epilogue: International Modernism
• Notes
• References
• Index