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Explorations of the interfaces of literature and science over recent decades have consolidated this subdiscipline’s academic status as a necessary and rewarding area of research. In the 1978 manifesto “Literature and Science: The State of the Field”, cultural historian George Rousseau relates its evolution up to that date through the works of literary and intellectual historians attentive to the documentation of scientific influence on creative literature; further, he states the urgent need of cultivating reciprocity and facing that vastly demanding question of “how literature has shaped or can shape scientific development” (Rousseau, p. 587). Since then, the enriching and clarifying consequences of literature and science studies for each of “the two cultures” have become increasingly evident. Authors, readers, and literary scholars find in the different branches of “hard” science, motives, models, and metaphoric instruments for grasping, describing, and plotting seen, unseen, and unforeseen realities. On the other hand, literary rhetoric, philosophy, aesthetics, and histories of science are acknowledged not only as intrinsic tools for scientific communication, but as fundamental methods and theories for understanding the human nature of all science, and the importance of a conscious human engagement with scientific realities.

In spite of acknowledged interdependency, encounters in literature and science are seldom motivated by ongoing disciplinary harmonisation. The differences between the two cultures are not merely obstacles to mutual understanding, they challenge and energize disciplinary identities and provoke innovation. The insertion of scientific discourse in a literary text may be a simple way of creating an impression of rupture, strangeness, or incongruity, introducing that slight but productive alienation which takes nothing for granted, and gives the reader an urge to rediscover and redefine the world. “Scientific discovery can thrive on lack of familiarity”,² states the chemist and science writer Pierre Laszlo, encouraging “the spirit of intellectual nomadism”: an ideal of interdisciplinary border-crossing, modelled on the ventures of nomadic tribes, people and nations, and the cultural and scientific fertilisation they have occasioned throughout history. According to Laszlo, whose writing on chemistry makes use of a variety of approaches and genres from cultural history to essays on aesthetics, and scientific papers, there is not just a border but a chasm separating natural scientists and academics in the humanities:

These are different tribes! […] That they misunderstand one another occasionally is to be expected. The main obstacle is a dissymmetry. It has to do with linguistic competence. It runs deep. Humanists in general lack the technical language, hence the understanding of science, whether astronomy or chemistry. Scientists are not trained to value opinions or viewpoints. For them, any working hypothesis is only as good as its conformity with the data. At a deeper level, scientists are unaware of the dominion from language on the mind.

Notwithstanding the persistent gap between the two cultures, literature and science studies are constant reminders of the once thinkable ideal of universal knowledge, and of the polymathic striving characteristic of many literary and scientific writers of the past. Among the authors discussed in this anthology there are several literary and scientific writers of great, specialised, and varied learning: Mikhail Lomonosov, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Humphry Davy, August Strindberg, Ludwig Boltzmann, Raymond Queneau, Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks. If some have regarded literature and science as different means in a common pursuit, one may ask to what degree they believed in the possibility of infusing – without significant distortion – their scientific knowledge into literary writing. But as Gillian Beer has emphasised, science in literature is not so much translation of stable meanings as transformation:

Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it has entered literature. Once scientific arguments and ideas are read outside the genre of the scientific paper and the institution of the scientific journal, change has already begun. (Beer, p. 90)

In sharp contrast to technical writers’ striving for univocality, everyday language is vague, allowing the play of a vast range of shadow significations alongside each word’s functional meaning. The often deliberate openness of literary language is an obvious indicator of how science changes, becoming inaccurate and plurivocal in new settings. Closer analysis of how specific texts reformulate, transform, or twist scientific material for their own purposes can make us more aware of “the apparent ease with which, in language, we inhabit multiple, often contradictory, epistemologies at the same time, all the time” (Beer, p. 82).

The valorisation of reading and writing literary texts generally implies that there is some knowledge to be gained from sharing the phenomenality of subjective experience. Literature is modelled on inter-subjective communication between subjective writers and readers, encompassing their biographical, social, or most private selves and their imaginary self-projections. Variations between personal and impersonal points of view, engaged and detached gazes, create tensions vital to much modern literature. As with all dichotomies, subject-object dualism has been under fire also in literature and science scholarship. An awareness of the questionable status of the objectivity of natural sciences has been underscored recently by Bruno Latour, who asks “Which language shall we speak with Gaia?”³ and proposes a new empathic scientific language capable of animating the objects of scientific scrutiny:

[T]he Earth is no longer “objective”, it cannot be put at a distance and emptied of all Its humans. Human action is visible everywhere – in the construction of knowledge as well as in the production of the phenomena those sciences are called to register. (Latour, p. 7)⁴

We will not dispute the necessity of levelling humankind and nature in a future inter-subjective scientific discourse; we will, however, look to the debate between philosopher Paul Ricoeur and neuroscientist and founder of “neuroesthetics” Jean-Pierre Changeux as a reminder of the necessity of maintaining some clear distinctions when it comes to literary and philosophical discourses on subjective experience. Responding critically to Changeux’s attempt to define aesthetics with the tools and technologies of neuroscience, and art as productions of the physical-chemical machinery of the brain, Ricoeur simply reminds us of the semantic distinction between the brain as an object of science – its neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, etc. – and “my brain” as it is inhabited by my subjective thinking. The lived body cannot be reduced to the body of scientific study.⁵ It is crucial both to avoid confusing the two different discursive orders and to develop a third order which respects, distinguishes, and articulates the differences between the electro-chemical processes on one level and consciousness on another. “The brain thinks” is a typical example of semantic confusion between scientific and phenomenological discourses: “The brain does not think”, replies Ricoeur, “I think”.

In contexts of interdisciplinary rivalry, scientific generalisation and objectivisation are automatically associated with reductionism. But in the same way as scientists have been told that they need to be more conscious of their dependency on language, culture, and society, scientists have often accused literature and science scholars of dilettantism. Some see them as high-flying theoretical misreaders of scientists’ hard-earned laboratory knowledge. Accusations of reductionism are also heard within the humanities against the literary scholar forgetful of disciplinary essentials in his or her search for a common ground with the hard sciences.

This anthology’s main focus is on the presence of chemistry in literature; it presents various examples of how alchemical and chemical doctrines and concrete chemical phenomena are transferred and metamorphosed into narrative, poetic, cinematic, aesthetical, ethical, and metaphysical processes and representations. A truly reciprocal investigation, not only of chemistry in literature, but also of literature in chemistry, lies beyond the framework and ambition of its authors, the majority of which are primarily literary scholars, not trained chemists. In the chapters of this book, specialists in literature, cultural history, history of science, and chemistry interpret verbal and visual media belonging to different languages and ages from different theoretical viewpoints, but they all share a basic understanding of literature and science as a sub-discipline of literary studies. Their principle concern is the literary text, analysed and contextualised by an informed reader interacting with the object of his or her investigation.

Different metaphors have been used to evoke the dynamic and fertilising relationships between literature and science: dialogue, encounter, nomadism, border-crossing, sharing of tools, transfer, and transformation, among many others. Inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s open-ended work of selfinquiry, his ever accumulating multi-topical essays, and the conviction he demonstrates that you best learn to know yourself (and your right measure) by addressing otherness, we will propose a most basic and traditional apparatus of chemistry to illustrate our approach to the field emblematically.

Literature and chemistry are different disciplines, but they can be tried against each other, they can be compared. Our practice in this particular interdisciplinary zone may be considered a pragmatic essaying of lesser known intellectual and imaginary combinations, preferably in the undogmatic and dialogical spirit of Montaigne. In his Essais, the humanist scholar examines himself, assesses and tries out his literary and philosophical heritage by addressing close and distant, practical and theoretical topics that often pertain to contradictory discourses and doctrines. Ceaselessly confronting truths, alternating discursive registers, bringing together knowledge of all sorts, he remains respectful of differences and wary of absolute conclusions. Montaigne’s famous medallion inscribed with the phrase “What do I know?” bears on its reverse side the image of scales, alluding to skepticism and skeptical aphorisms the essayist had inscribed in the beams of his library.⁶ Applicable to our literature and chemistry studies, the scales or “assay balance”⁷ represents the experimental craft of measuring, testing, and comparing the composition, taste, and touch of all possible substances, as well as their worth, weight, and usefulness, and also the loss and gain of a specimen’s transport from one context to another. The scales can remind us of the huge task that is yet to be done, the unfinished, precarious state of the art. It symbolises the search for accuracy but also an awareness of indeterminacy. The balance evokes the trial of strength the Montaignean essayist and knowledge-seeker undergoes in confrontation with unfamiliar thoughts, theories, and truths. In motion, it may represent the fluctuating, overlapping, and unstable power balance of literature and science in history, the evolutions and oscillations in literary and scientific theory, and indeed the swing and movement of all things. To scale is to ponder; it is not to equalise but to estimate carefully the analogous and incongruous aspects of different matters, of measurable and immeasurable truths, in the hope of acquiring – as in the art of chemistry – new insights of separation and combination.

An assayer’s balance. The illustration is from Lazarus Ercker’s “Assaying book” Aula Subterranea (1574).