Signs of Science: Literature, Science, and Spanish Modernity since 1868

Introduction

Introduction [V]ed aqui la gran linea de demarcaci6n que divide los conocimientos humanos. Ella nos presenta las ciencias empleadas en adquirir y atesorar ideas, y la literatura en enunciarlas .... Jovellanos "Oraci6n sobre la necesidad de unir el estudio de la literatura al de las ciencias" On a recent trip to Madrid, the bus I took from the airport in Barajas to the Plaza de Col6n was caught in the usual morning traffic jam. The irritated driver shouted "iEsto no pasa en Europa!" thereby expressing the commonplace that Spain has not been part of mainstream European culture since the heyday of Felipe II. Though the driver eventually navigated the congested streets successfully, his lament about Spain's supposed backwardness echoes those of Spanish "europeizantes" writ- .ing from the 1700s until our time. Perhaps the most important issue inthe debate overSpain's membership in modem Europe, especially since the Revolution of 1868, has been the place of science in Spanish culture and Spain's role in the history of Western science (see Ernesto and Enrique Garcia Camarero). A distinct dialogue on this subject can be traced from the 1870s polemics between Marcelino Menendez Pelayo and Manuel de la Revilla, through the Generation of 1898 and Jose Ortega y Gasset, to Luis Martin-Santos and Pedro Lain Entralgo. This dialogue calls for interdisciplinary analysis of science and literature and presents a significant avenue of investigation for cultural studies of twentieth-century Spain. The importance of science as a sign of Spanish cultural modernity justifies extensive analysis of two ostensibly disparate discourses, as well as 1 Introduction an effort to read scientific and literary texts as points of contact between those discourses. What is science? Can science be both a praxis and an aesthetic object? What part does it hold in a society? How do cultural representations configure scientific' activity for that culture? Spanish writers' answers to these questions trace the evolving character of modern Spanish thought. In 1908, Ortega y Gasset equated Europe with science, suggesting that if Spain wanted to become "uno de los barrios bajos de mundo," it needed only to remain uncultivated in the sciences (DC 1: 104). Ortega's conflation of science with European modernity was not new: empirical science had become a fundamental sign in Iberian culture during the late nineteenth century, a sign alternately characterized as "modernizing" and "positive" or as "anti-Catholic" and ~'liberal"~a withering epithet. This study explores the literary, philosophical, and rhetorical repercussions of the sign science in a selection of important texts from the period beginning with the Revolution of 1868 and extending through the years of the Franco regime. In his diatribe against British novelist C. P. Snow's famous lecture "The Two Cultures," F. R. Leavis criticizes at length Snow's characterization of scientific activity. Leavis remarks that in one of Snow's novels, The Affair, "science is a mere word, the vocation merely postulated" (46). Leavis argues that better novelists (like Eliot or Lawrence) could have done a great deal wi,th the theme of scientists and their work, whereas Snow fails miserably in his attempt. Leavis's vitriolic arguments have their own problems, but his remark hints at an interesting avenue of investigation: how does the word science take on signifying power in a culture's texts;1 and how does its meaning change both over time and from speaker to speaker? In Snow's writing, the word science functions as an allusion to a monolithic enterprise independent of the language used to describe it and the culture in which it is practiced. Indeed, for Snow, science itself is a culture (hence the title of his lecture). The word science serves Snow as a natural sign, a universally intelligible linguistic marker whose meaning does not derive from convention or context.2 Many Spanish writers have understood and profited from the conventional nature of the sign science in their creation oflit2 Introduction erary, critical, and even scientific texts. Ciencia in Spanish means something like the German Wissenschaft: organized systems of demonstrated propositions, later split into the categories of Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft when it becarp.e desirable to distinguish between "human" and "exact" sciences. While ciencia tends to mean both human practice and the bodies of knowledge resulting from that practice, the boundaries of what qualifies as scientific continually shift both diachronically through time and synchronically throughout a culture. Menendez Pelayo furnishes a remarkable example of how...