Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Chemistry has been fantastically lucky to have Levi's advocacy - not so
much because he is a chemist who can write beautifully (that is simply
the recipe for a good science writer) but because he is first and foremost
an artist who, to our good fortune, happened to take up the profession of
chemistry.
3.
Home Truths about Chemistry
But Levi's almost spiritual response to chemistry is unusual now. The
writers on whom I want to focus here are distinguished in having under-
stood that, rather than standing remote from the realities of human exist-
ence, chemistry has become central to it. Their interest in chemistry is
materialistic, for the simple and obvious, although generally overlooked,
reason that our lives are materialistic. Increasingly, we live in a synthetic
environment, a world of new and unfamiliar materials, in which our
foods and clothes and medicines are manufactured in factories and labo-
ratories. I am aware that this is a perspective usually voiced as a criti-
cism, a lament about a world in which 'artificial' and 'synthetic' are
terms of derogation, to be contrasted with the goodness that inheres in
'natural' things. But it was not always so. For Francis Bacon, synthesis
and artifice were the primary aims of science, and his scientific agenda,
which imposed a strong influence on the founders of the Royal Society in
London, was pre-eminently a practical one. Scientists, he said, should be
like bees. “The bee”, he wrote,
extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works
and fashions it by its own efforts. The true labour of philosophy resem-
bles hers, for it neither relies entirely nor principally on the powers of the
mind, nor yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experi-
ments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and
works it in the understanding. [Bacon 1620, p. 349]
The three writers I wish to discuss here - Don DeLillo, Richard Powers,
and Thomas Pynchon - do not exactly celebrate artifice in the way that
Bacon does, but neither, I think, do they present a simple-minded critique
of it. I am unapologetic about the fact that they are all American writers,
because I think that is no coincidence: few national cultures have em-
braced the synthetic to the extent that America has, and DeLillo and
