Grappling with the Unnarratable: Introduction to Special Issue on Narratologies of Science

Abstract

Grappling with the Unnarratable: Introduction to Special Issue on Narratologies of Science Daniel Aureliano Newman (bio) In the film Ant-Man (2015), Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd) shrinks into the “quantum realm” where “all concepts of time and space become irrelevant.” But the film’s depiction of the subatomic is not as weird as advertised; it is little more than a kaleidoscopic backdrop against which Lang acts and reacts normally. So what kind of story would, or could, unfold in the quantum realm, where the building blocks of narrative—time, causation, and matter—have no recognizable existence? In lieu of answers, I will loosely storyboard an alternative quantum-realm scene based on the structure of a simple Feynman Diagram (Figure 1), where “Scott Lang” might stand in for “particle.” Developed as a shorthand alternative to arduous calculations in Quantum Electrodynamics, Feynman Diagrams have become a key tool for “represent[ing] the different ways interactions could happen” between subatomic particles (Brown 425). Because they seem to depict entities (particles) moving, interacting, and altering each other’s trajectory and identity, the diagrams look like visual narratives. Yet whether this is accurate is unclear; in fact, it is hotly debated what and how Feynman Diagrams represent physical reality (Brown; Meynell; Stöltzner)—if they represent anything at all (David Griffiths, among others, insists that “Feynman diagrams are purely symbolic; they do not represent particle trajectories” [59]). Even if we think the diagram tells a story (“an image containing arrows, explicit or implicit, is a narrative image,” writes Jehad Alshwaikh [10]), it is a counterintuitive [End Page 1] one, to say the least. Though it appears to show particles moving in two spatial dimensions (which is easy enough to translate into narrative), the vertical axis actually represents time (Griffiths 57); thus the particles on the diagram’s righthand side move from future to past! What we call particles, moreover, are not entities in a sense narrative theory would recognize. “Quantum mechanics,” explains Elana Gomel, “sees particles not as miniature objects but as probability wave functions […] [T]he basic ‘stuff’ of the universe is something as intangible as probability!” (18). By this point the story of Scott Lang in the quantum realm should be quite unimaginable. And yet, Feynman Diagrams are constructed and discussed in ways that should awaken a narratologist’s imagination. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. A Feynman Diagram: an electron (e) enters from the bottom left and another from the top right; they exchange a photon (γ) and exit from the bottom right and top left, respectively. David Griffiths. Introduction to Elementary Particles. 57. 2004 [1987]. Copyright Wiley-VCH GmbH. Reproduced with permission. The same could be said for practices, models, and phenomena throughout the natural sciences. Narrative appears to grow even in the most inhospitable environments, and narrative theory often undergoes its significant developments there. Could science reveal new insights about the nature of narrative? How, for example, might narratological conceptions of temporality be expanded by the notion of quantum time—time bundled into discrete packets rather than a “flow” (Rovelli 138–42)? Might our views of character be enriched by Richard Dawkins’s strange notion of the “extended phenotype” (2016)? Might the probabilistic nature of scientific findings require supplementing Gérard Genette’s three categories of temporal [End Page 2] frequency (singulative, repeating, and iterative) with a fourth—say, ‘tendential narrative’—to account for statements like “Shifts in tube length tended to be from short to long, although reversals were not infrequent” (Anderson et al. 1)? Might statistical tools such as path analysis suggest ways of theorizing or visualizing narratives with multiple interacting sequences? Such are the questions motivating this special issue. It’s been nearly twenty-five years since David Herman called for “a more dialectical approach to the problem of the science-narrative nexus,” predicting that “science will not be left unchanged by its encounter with narrative inquiry, but neither will narrative inquiry” (383). The clear answer to this call—to which Herman has been a leading force—has been cognitive narratology. There is, however, minimal strain in this particular nexus of science and narrative, since cognitive science shares many of the traditional (novelistic...