Why thankee Sir!
Excerpt of a book review, which may or may not be pertinent to anything, but is not meant to spam this thread.
Wondrous correctness
GILLIAN BEER
Gillian Beer is at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Herschel Road, Cambridge CB3 9AL, UK.
Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins Penguin: 1998. 313pp.
£20, $26
Unweaving the Rainbow is at its worst in the often impatient and cavalier treatment of evidence from intellectual fields outside science. This ranges from a demeaning reference to John Ruskin, and a simplistic aside concerning the cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman, to a condescending habit of wresting a line from a poem to serve his purpose, as if it had no further complexity or context. So, a fine quotation from the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is pitted against "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" as sounding "much more sincere".
Dawkins accuses his avowedly favourite poets, Keats and Yeats, of typifying an ignorant repudiation of science. If only Keats had turned to Sir Isaac Newton for inspiration, if only Yeats had accorded more value to reason, how much better their poetry would be! The title of his study draws on Keats's poem "Lamia", which is concerned with the peculiarly equivocal appearances of things. Lamia is a woman but she is also a destructive serpent; in both incarnations, however, she is very beautiful. As a serpent she is:
A gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue,
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd
Which is her true nature? Is she, as she claims, an innocent woman bewitched, or is she a guileful serpent disguised? The old sophist Apollonius blasts her with his philosophic gaze and she resolves into a serpent, but she is no longer the beauty of before, now she withers away.
The vigour of Keats's language thrives on precise detail. The poem struggles, with poignant sophistication, to interpret the cost of pursuing knowledge. It works to disabuse the reader from any idealized fancy that beauty will always be rediscovered at the end of enquiry. Keats had begun training as a medical student and understood these issues without sentimentality.
Dawkins wants it both ways. He wants to function as Apollonius, disabusing his reader of the various magical-seeming possibilities of astrology, coincidence, relativism and misleading metaphor. But he also wants to assert the inevitably wonder-enhancing power of scientific insight; he does not want to destroy the beauty of Lamia. He is dismayed by the poet's question:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things
In "Lamia" the question is loaded with the dismay of the poet struggling to locate truth. "Lamia" is no ignorant rejection of natural philosophy's reductionism; it is a painful and sinewy debate, more tough-minded than the softened prose in which Dawkins ends Unweaving the Rainbow : "A Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, might hear the galaxies sing". Or, as Keats recognized, the galaxies may not be singing.
<sidebar>Lamia: woman or serpent? The fruits of scientific enquiry may not always be pleasing to the eye.</sidebar> |
