Narrative: Common Ground for Literature and Science?

Back when I was a graduate student of biology, I was charmed to hear senior scientists sincerely praising research talks by equally senior peers as "such a good story." At the time, I simply accepted that science involves gripping tales of discovery, mysteries solved through ingenious hypothesis and experiment. Now a literary scholar who teaches communications to graduate science students, I better recognize the importance of narrative in science communication but also, more profoundly, in scientific theories, models, and procedures.

Narrative suggests to me a means of interesting more scientists in the study of Literature and Science, offering common ground that might help alleviate remnants of suspicion and diverging goals that continue to inhibit truly interdisciplinary work. What's more, attending to narrative promises an exciting but also productive endeavor for both humanistic inquiry and for science communication, aligning them more closely at a time when both are under threat.

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The real impediment to collaboration between science and humanities is not lack of interest, as Jay Labinger argues in the previous "State of the Unions" issue of JLS. A more serious problem may be the priority implicitly given to the "Literature" in "Literature and Science." Some scientists are indeed drawn to humanistic enquiry, but it isn't surprising to find so few in a field where research may be about science but rarely forms part of the scientific enterprise. No wonder scientists "attracted to interdisciplinary activities outside their field generally perceive that little or no professional benefit is to be expected therefrom."¹ Another obstacle is the sense, all too common among the scientists I know or teach, that science is demonized or discredited by "the arts." Fair or not, this suspicion lumps those in the humanities with real opponents of science—climate-change "skeptics," anti-Vaxxers, "scientific" creationists, and other such denialists. These two barriers to interdisciplinarity are not unrelated. Because the humanities so dominate the field of Literature and Science studies, much of the research in it is done on humanistic terms. In such circumstances, literary approaches to science—notably "suspicious reading" practices—may seem as alienating and invasive to scientists as E. O. Wilson's dream of consilience can seem to humanists.²

It is time to accept that a truly interdisciplinary exchange will require something other than business as usual in Literature and Science (which does not mean eliminating business as usual). What is needed to attract scientists is real common ground, with direct interest and professional benefit for both them and literary scholars. Such common ground might include strategic political and institutional alliances against anti-intellectualism and cutbacks to public education and blue-sky research. Another approach, already flourishing in some quarters, is the study of narrative using insights and methods from neuroscience. What I'm proposing as common ground—narrative—is more concrete and more directly embedded within the professional practices of both literary and scientific scholars. Because I assume that few literary critics would dispute, in principle at least, the value of narratological studies of science, what follows focuses instead on the interests narrative might hold for scientists.

"Storytelling often has a bad reputation in science," admits Michael Dahlstrom,³ but scientists are increasingly receptive to evidence showing that information communicated in narrative formats "enhances memory, interest, and understanding."⁴ Attesting to this growing receptivity, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)'s recent special issue on science communication includes a consistent focus on the potential uses of storytelling.⁵

Promising as it is, the problem with this "narrative turn" is its tendency to understand "narrative" as a set structure, a preformed story template. Using narrative in science thus becomes a matter of shoehorning scientific facts into preexisting narrative molds. A case in point is biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, who reduces all good communicative acts to the "three-act structure" identified by Aristotle in the Poetics.⁶ An extreme case, Olson exemplifies how most science communicators view the promise of narrative: as a tool for making scientific information more communicable by "impos[ing] upon it the form of a story."⁷ This...