Scientific writing is not intended to be beautiful or to elicit emotional responses in the reader. Just because the writing is difficult for the non-expert to read does not make it bad or poorly written. It remains literary in the sense of being valued for quality of form. Scientific writing conveys information – precisely, accurately, unambiguously – so that it can be readily located, understood and replicated with minimal transmission errors. Its beauty lies both in its clarity and its density. The sheer volume of information packed into a single sentence of scientific writing is both its greatest achievement and its greatest downfall.
I wonder if Nabokov wrote his scientific papers differently from other scientists.
‘Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.’
This sentence in Nabokov’s Ada drills directly into the primitive limbic centres of my brain, recalling a giddying visceral mix of heat, sound, scent and physiology that requires no conscious explanation. A body memory.
But Nabokov, the scientist, also wrote this monster.
‘In a way the initial blunder was Swinhoe’s who while correctly giving a subfamilial ending to the group which Tutt’s intuition and Chapman’s science had recognized (“tribe” Plebeidi which exactly corresponds to the Plebejinae of Stempffer) as different from other “tribes” (i.e., subfamilies) within the Lycaenidae failed to live up to the generic diagnoses which he simply copied from Chapman’s notes in Tutt and tried to combine genitalic data he had not verified or did not understand with the obsolete “naked v. hairy eyes” system (which at Butler’s hands had resulted in probably the most ludicrous assembly of species ever concocted, see for example Butler 1900, Entom. 33: 124), so that in the case of several Indian forms which Chapman had not diagnosed, Swinhoe placed intragenerically allied species in different subfamilies and species belonging to different Tuttian “tribes” in the same subfamily.’
Scientific sentences are nearly always overloaded – to breaking point – with information. It is hard to make a B-double truck as exquisite as a Lamborghini even if, like Nabokov, you are clearly able to. Their function is entirely different. One is the heavy lifter of the intellect, while the other snatches our breath with reckless breakneck speed. Both require immense literary skill to achieve. It is the requirement of the genre, not the skill of the writer, that dictates the abundance of information and the particular style of the form. Small wonder scientists also number among great writers: Nabokov and Asimov, Vernor Vinge, Lewis Carroll and Primo Levi.
‘The corpus of scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments,’ concludes historian of science Charles Bazerman, ‘[and] gives us increasingly immense control of the material world in which we reside. These symbolic representations have literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own.’
The intersection between science and literature is a productive one. Edgar Allan Poe taught himself physics – culminating in that peculiar ‘prose poem’ Eureka, which anticipated concepts of modern physics in a messy mix of mysticism and spirituality. Aldous Huxley, from a family of famous biologists, was said to have declared that ‘even if I could be Shakespeare I think that I should still choose to be Faraday’.
There are so many scientists who ended up successful popular writers: Colleen McCullough, Diana Gabaldon, Toni Jordan and Barbara Kingsolver, to name but a few. But the writers who interest me most are the exceptional writers of science. Not so much the communicators, educators and journalists who popularise the work of scientists for the public, but the scientists themselves who can write for both their academic colleagues and for a broader audience. They synthesise, rather than simplify. These are the writers so skilled they can take us with them on their complicated journeys into understanding the world around us. Perhaps not always an easy stroll in the park. Sometimes the going is rough and our feet struggle to find their place, but our knowledgeable guides are there to turn back, help us find our footing, and continue on, up the mountain, gasping and exhilarated, to witness the view from the peaks.
Their science is their passion, their content, their message and their focus, and their writing – lyrical, persuasive, influential, informative, educative and beautiful – provides the most exquisite manifestation of their thoughts. It is here that we find the nature writers and the science writers, often excluded from the folds of literature because of the topic, rather than their form. It is here that I find the writers, scientists and naturalists who inspired me: Rachel Carson, Gerald Durrell, Jane Goodall, S. J. Gould, Sarah Hrdy, Niko Tinbergen, Dian Fossey, Konrad Lorenz, E. O. Wilson and Isobel Bennett.
And Edith Coleman.
Literature is rarely so much about the reality of a particular place or country, as it is about the myth of a place, the image that people want to portray about their place in the world. The pioneering, wildwest frontier mythology of the United States is a powerful one.
‘America wanted its nature lessons streaked with adventure,’ wrote Thomas F. O’Connell, ‘its landscapes portrayed in high colours and cased in big frames. The time did not seem right for small pictures of nature in day-to-day dress in long-settled and more familiar Eastern neighbourhoods.’
The myth of American nature writing is the land of the blessed – of wild beauty and natural abundance, of Grand Canyons, Rocky Mountains and Valleys of Monuments. A New World emphatically, insistently, better than the Old. Cultural swagger rather than cultural cringe. By contrast, the myth of British nature writing is that of the pastoral – the yeoman farmer at one with the rural nature of hedgerows and meadows. So what is the Australian myth we perpetuate with our writing: the struggling farmer, the bush-weary battler, the determined digger? Nature writing of the battlefield.
The myth of the blessed, the myth of
