Measuring and Art-Science Integration
Professor Keiko Nitta
Department of English and American Literature
Rikkyo University, College of Arts
|
|
William Faulkner, a great American author, who won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, published one of his major novels entitled As I Lay Dying in 1930. In the story, a poor Mississippi farmer, at the death of his wife, brings her body back to her hometown with his children in order to bury her there. In the beginning of the story, the eldest son, a skillful carpenter, makes a coffin for his mother. He cuts boards with a saw, aligns the corners, drives nails, and uses a hand ax to trim the surface. The series of scenes are impressively expressed, yet what is interesting is that he never measures the materials in those scenes. Sawdust is airborne, hammers clang, and materials are processed; however, measurements, supposed to be the foundation of his delicate work, are not part of the author’s realist depiction.
Why? Is it because measuring something lacks impacts dramatic enough for a literary scene? Perhaps. However, if you have ever created something in your daily life, you should be able to imagine that the proper measurement is a significant process that influences the results of the work. Otherwise, another possibility may come to mind----there are some people who do not care about such a precision much or are not quite concerned about its significance. Faulkner might have been such a man. In other words, while a daily activity called measurement is a notable scientific operation that symbolizes scientific strictness, humanists (vis-à-vis natural scientists) sometimes might not be quite particular with this sort of strictness. If so, measurement embodies, in one sense, a boundary between arts and sciences.
Nonetheless, when we attempt to find a salient representation of metrology and measurement in North American literary works, we can encounter limited but striking instances. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), a seminal essay written by Henry Thoreau----a favorite of Mahatma Gandhi----is one of many examples. Thoreau, who emphasized the significance of establishing a foothold of one’s physical life, surveyed the forests, lakes, and plowlands, and also counted the harvests to analyze productivity. In so doing, he considered a balance between labor and speculation, along with ecology and human freedom.
By the way, if we look for literary figures with science and engineering mentalities in Japan, Kenji Miyazawa may be the most prominent instance. In Mihara Trilogy (1928), for example, Miyazawa included his own words in a poem, by which he taught students how to measure rainfall. He created the poem during his trip to Oshima, where he hoped to establish an agricultural school. Today, the Faculty of Agriculture at Iwate University stores measuring instruments including a vernier caliper with which Miyazawa may have learned how to measure objects. Exactly because he expressed the nobility of life in his literature, his legacy of technical education that might have been a helpful instrument for practicing his ideal evokes our deep impression.
Now back to the U.S., probably the most recent novel to feature a measuring instrument is Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus, Against the Day (2006). This story is set in Europe and the U.S. on the eve of World War I. In its historical setting, various innovations of scientific technology together with discoveries of physical laws were applied to weaponry causing new terrors. Among them, a new product, “Silent Frock,” which effaces the presence of its wearer, appears as a prop to imply espionage. The story depicts a female mathematician who has her measured for tailoring the coat. In the scene, a huge caliper is used to measure all around her body with unnecessary insistence. Needless to say, such a treatment is now considered to be tantamount to harassment, but the fact is that throughout modern history, measurement has contributed to the commodification as well as quantification and rating of human beings, and thus has produced a scale to distinguish between normal and abnormal.
These ethical implications signified in the act of measuring are the central benefit provided by the vision of the so-called humanities. However, the novelist Pynchon, said to be nominated for the Nobel Prize several times (like Haruki Murakami), has an interesting career. He studied at the College of Engineering at Cornell University, where he was expected to pursue his career as a physicist. After all, we can conclude that measurement is not so much a boundary demarcating sciences from arts, but a human act reminding the both discipline, in collaboration, of both brightness and darkness of modern civilization. There is no knowledge distinguished as arts or sciences in isolation. Literary representations of measurement suggest such wisdom.
|
|
