Abstract
This chapter explores the trope of competition in The Information by Martin Amis and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd. These two novels are drawn to the implications of new scientific research in cosmology, genetics and systems theory and initially invite science into the novel, yet when it threatens to overwhelm the space of literature it is promptly and unceremoniously ejected. Beginning with an outline of the Snow/Leavis controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the section on The Information argues that art and science coexist in an ambivalent, yet in some senses fruitful, relationship in the novel. The section on Brazzaville Beach uses Terry Eagleton’s work in The Event of Literature (2012), which sees literature as a type of strategy which mediates between structure and event, to illustrate some of the processes occurring in the interactions between science and literature in Boyd’s novel.
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Notes
- 1.
Patricia Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–59 (p. 34).
- 2.
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15.
- 3.
Snow, 79.
- 4.
Snow, 16.
- 5.
F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).
- 6.
Charles Davy, Towards a Third Culture (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1978 [1961]), 3. See also Harold Gomes Cassidy, The Sciences and The Arts: A New Alliance (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), and Arts v. Science: A Collection of Essays, ed. Alan S. C. Ross (London: Methuen, 1967).
- 7.
E. S. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures’”, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 1–12 (pp. 11–12).
- 8.
Timothy Clark, “Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, 217–237 (p. 237).
- 9.
Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xi.
- 10.
F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? 30.
- 11.
Curtis D. Carbonell, “The Third Culture”, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4334, accessed 17 December 2010.
- 12.
Seán Burke, “The Aesthetic, the Cognitive, and the Ethical: Criticism and Discursive Responsibility”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, 199–216 (p. 214). In some ways Burke takes an Arnoldian position here, with criticism representing the clarity of Hellenism, as opposed to the limiting obedience of Hebraism.
- 13.
Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 158–159.
- 14.
Science has played a role in other novels by Amis, for example Einstein’s Monsters (1987) deals with nuclear weapons and Night Train (1997) with cosmology, but neither pits science and humanities culture against each other in the way that The Information does.
- 15.
Michael S. Gregory, “The Science-Humanities Program (NEXA) at San Francisco State University: The ‘Two Cultures’ Reconsidered”, Leonardo 13 (1980): 298.
- 16.
Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1995), 140. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 17.
David C. Ward, “A Black Comedy of Manners (Review of The Information)”, Virginia Quarterly Review 72 (1996): 562.
- 18.
Richard Menke, “Mimesis and Informatics in The Information”, in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 137–157 (p. 154).
- 19.
Kevin Kelly, “The Third Culture”, Science 279 (1998): 992.
- 20.
Martin Amis in Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee, “No More Illusions: An Interview with Martin Amis”, The Write Stuff 2, http://www.altx.com/interviews/martin.amis.html, accessed 17 December 2010.
- 21.
Amis in Laurence and McGee, 5.
- 22.
Catherine Bernard, “Under the Dark Sun of Melancholia: Writing and Loss in The Information ”, in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond, ed. Gavin Keulks (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117–136 (p. 128).
- 23.
Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (London: Vintage, 2002), xii.
- 24.
Julian Loose in Nicholas Tredell, The Fiction of Martin Amis (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 162.
- 25.
Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel, 38.
- 26.
William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach (London: Penguin, 1991), 3. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 27.
Francis Gilbert, “Invasion of the Fusionists”, New Statesman: Commentary Section, September 18, 1998, 57.
- 28.
Gilbert, “Invasion of the Fusionists”, 57.
- 29.
Blanche D’Alpuget, “The Fall of Chimp”, The New York Times on the Web, June 23, 1991, 3, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-brazzaville.html, accessed 20 February 2013.
- 30.
D’Alpuget, “The Fall of Chimp”, 2–3.
- 31.
Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 223.
- 32.
Eagleton, The Event of Literature , 138.
- 33.
Eagleton, The Event of Literature , 199.
- 34.
Eagleton, The Event of Literature , 200.
- 35.
In Armadillo (1998), Lorimer Black, a loss adjuster with a sleeping disorder, also becomes the object of a scientific study when he checks himself into the ‘Institute for Lucid Dreaming’.
- 36.
Christopher Tayler also notices this tendency towards controlled structure, suggesting that Brazzaville Beach ‘obeys the conventions of novels by William Boyd, in which the world will usually contrive a neatly ironic retort to whatever schemes or patterns the characters try to impose on it’. Christopher Tayler, “A Bit of a Lush”, London Review of Books 24, no. 10 (2002): 21.
Bibliography
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Waugh, Patricia. 1999. Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value. In The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, 33–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Holland, R. (2019). Two Cultures in Competition: Martin Amis’s The Information and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd. In: Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_2
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