Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodernism and Contemporary American Fiction

1. Deconstructing Quantum Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism

Deconstructing Quantum Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism So much have the popular conceptions of quantum and cosmological theories invaded our intellectual and cultural space that even as prolific and profound a literary critic as George Steiner resents their hypnotic power: “But why should quantum physics have a monopoly on contradiction and difficulty?” (32). Quantum theory as popularly conceived has seized the popular imagination: Einstein was “elected” the most important person of the twentieth century by Time magazine. Such visionary work has obviously infiltrated literary criticism and philosophy in many ways. It is “out there” and is virtually the metanarrative of our time. Much postmodern fiction incorporates underlying concepts and visions of various quantum theories, in so doing creating a new kind of metanarrative as a basis for such fiction. The focus of several contemporary American novelists ’ fiction in structure, style, and story parallels and reflects these quantum quandaries. Of course the very idea of a metanarrative, the kind of overarching ideological tale about progress or liberty that postmodernism, according to JeanFran çois Lyotard, dismisses—“The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (37)—has been also undermined by quantum theory: the “postmodern science—by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information . . . catastrophes, and pragmatic 1  1 1  1   1 1 14 : quir ks of the qua ntum paradoxes—is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical” (60). Lyotard continues: “Quantum theory and microphysics require a far more radical revision of the idea of a continuous and predictable path” (56). Ironically, the quantum realm, which provides the foundation for all quantum theories, remains invisible and inaccessible, so that its very existence undermines altogether the idea of a logical foundation. While Lyotard attacks the metanarrative that rests on “the idea of a continuous and predictable path,” the quantum vision does not and, therefore, offers contradictory and conflicting metanarratives that are as elusive and uncertain as the quantum world itself. The term “metanarrative,” then, has to be seen from such an ironic perspective since the conceptual foundation upon which it rests offers us only more uncertainty, unpredictability, and indeterminacy. The Quantum Realm: An Overview What is the nonscientific reader to make of quantum theories as presented in popular analyses and interpretations? Certainly these ideas fascinate and tantalize , conjuring up an elusive subatomic world of dizzying particles, waves, collisions, fields, antimatter, multiple dimensions, quivering strings, absolute randomness, and spaces as vast and empty as the cosmos itself. We can barely get our minds around such a realm, if at all. New explanations seem to spring up on a daily basis, shifting the focus, questioning theories that already seem to be firmly in place. Many physicists, for instance, both pursue and doubt the very existence of what they are studying. Everything is in flux, including the very nature of the quantum “flux” itself. Thequantumrealmshimmersandquiversinastateonemightcallanindeterminate pulsating flux or, as Amir D. Aczel describes it, “the quantum fuzz” (251). For Brian Greene it’s a “fuzzy, amorphous, probabilistic mixture of all possibilities” (112). Within that realm, anything can happen, and we cannot predict how, when, why, and where things will occur. Particles/waves/fields/ forces, all of which are essentially descriptions of the same quantum phenomena ,sinceallmodernelementaryparticletheoriesarerelativisticquantumfield theories, appear and disappear, each with its own description, each susceptible to imminent dissolution and transformation, created within what John Gribbin calls the “holistic electromagnetic web” (Schrödinger’s Kittens 226), Deconstructing Quantum Theory : 15 in Kenneth Ford’s continuous “creation-annihilation dance” of “perpetual motion” (242, 222), a process that leads to the creation of new “events” and “entities.” David Bohm describes it as an “unending flux of infoldment and unfoldment, with laws which are only vaguely known” (qtd. in Kuberski 92). In trying to describe this process, we come up against both the unknowable “essence” of the quantum realm in all its quivering and erupting randomness as well as the metaphorical nature of language itself. When we choose to describe something as a particle, a wave, a field, a force, or a web, we necessarily exclude other possibilities and images. Similar to Bohr’s notion of complementarity , if we describe something as a particle, we have chosen not to describe it as a wave. In language and logic, these appear to be mutually...