CHEMISTRY AND POWER IN RECENT AMERICAN FICTION - The Public Image of Chemistry - page 115

tainly with a rather different setting than either DeLillo or Powers, Pyn-
chon anticipates their conclusion that applied (that is, industrial) chemis-
try has more to tell us about the way modern life is structured than does
any other applied science.
But it takes real understanding of the science to realize this, and to be
able to express it in a literary context. Understanding; but also something
more - something that I can only think of as a kind of materialist aes-
thetic, a delight in the smells and sights and textures and responsiveness
of the substances and fabrics that make up our lives. This, I suspect, is a
rather rare attribute today, and the conjunction of that with the skills
needed to articulate it is rarer still. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the
writers I have discussed are exceptions in contemporary literature; and
moreover they seem likely to remain so while chemistry continues to be
seen as an unfashionable, even a moribund science. If that is a discourag-
ing note on which to close, let us nevertheless note that these three texts
offer a far richer basis than is typically found in today's mass media for
discussing the impacts, origins, benefits, and dangers of technology in
modern life. That debate is being prompted in particular by the emer-
gence of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and fictional explorations
of both these topics have tended to be predicated on lurid extrapolations
into the future. In White Noise , Gain and Gravity's Rainbow we find in-
stead perspectives on chemical technology that are clearly rooted in the
past and the present; it is surely from here that any debate should begin.
References
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Beck, U.: 1992, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity , trans. M. Ritter, Sage, London.
Black, J.D.: 1980, 'Probing a post-Romantic palaeontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow ', Boundary , 2 , 8ii, p. 233.
Caldwell, G.: 1998, 'On the soapbox' (topic review), Boston Sunday Globe , 7 June, C4.
Conroy, M.: 2003, 'From tombstone to tabloid: authority figured in White Noise ', in: H.
Bloom (ed.), Don DeLillo's White Noise , Chelsea House, Broomall, Philadelphia, p.
153.
Debus, A.G.: 1978, Man and Nature in the Renaissance , Cambridge UP, Cambridge.
DeLillo, D.: 1984, White Noise , Viking Penguin, New York.
Donovan, L.A.L.: 1975, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment , Edin-
burgh UP, Edinburgh.