The World Through the Prism of Poetry and Science

In his subterranean forge, the god Hephaestus makes the arms of Achilles, and he’s helped at his work by “golden handmaidens, who looked like real girls and could not only speak and use their limbs but were endowed with intelligence. . . .” How did these metallic automata, skilled and sentient, differ from human beings? Already, here in the “Iliad,” the blurring of distinction between fabricated and organic life provokes shivers of the poetic uncanny. In the “Odyssey,” by contrast, when Odysseus meets his mother in the Underworld and tries to embrace her, he finds that his arms pass through thin air: She, who was once a person, who is now standing before him, has become a phantom, a shade, an illusion.

Which is more real: the robot or the ghost? And what kind of existence does Homer confer upon them through making their pictures in words? What are the bodies of gods and angels made of? When a lover kisses the image of a beloved in a portrait or a photograph, what kind of materiality does the picture possess? When figures haunt you in your dreams, what are these thoughts made of? Is “picture-flesh”--Merleau-Ponty’s phrase for images--real? When viewers write in to soaps to complain about the actors’ behavior, in what dimension of reality do they think the characters live? These are the kinds of puzzles about existence that Daniel Tiffany’s “Toy Medium,” a complex, remarkably original and challenging study, sets stirring.

Tiffany does not set out to answer them by recourse to the usual distinctions between dream and reality, between subjective and objective experience. Instead, he introduces the reader to a vertiginous and dazzling realm, inaugurated by the ancient philosophers--Democritus and Epicurus--continued in the poetic science of Lucretius, further developed by Leibniz and Descartes and profoundly inflected in the 20th century by the discoveries of the new physics.

At one level, he is putting forward bold claims for the truth-telling of lyric poetry; at another, he has undertaken a history of scientific materialist thought, carefully and insistently exposing the vulgar error of mistaking it for realism. The search for the nature of matter, and its early postulation of the invisible atom at its core, broke the links with empirical methods: In this territory of the sphinx, the limits of sensory experience are breached, and the world dissolves into radiance and flux, bodies turn into clouds and blazes of particles. As Bertrand Russell put it, in the physics of relativity, “a piece of matter has become, not a persistent thing with varying states, but a system of interrelated events . . . the prejudice that the real is permanent must be abandoned.” Neither the eyes nor the other senses can offer any guarantees of presence or existence, for in the hidden recesses of quantum theory, nothing is apprehensible.

Materialism’s enduring narrative, Tiffany argues, paradoxically renders matter itself immaterial, and this has the profoundly unsettling consequence of closing the gap between phenomena that do not possess corporeality or substance or mass or gravity and entities that do: For Lucretius, a dream, a thought, a hallucination, an image exist and, possessing being, can affect reality. But that reality can be expressed only through metaphor. As Yeats so famously exclaimed in his poem “Byzantium,” “Spirit after spirit! . . . Those images that yet / Fresh images beget.” This is where poetic language, Tiffany suggests, can play “a more substantial role . . . in the institution of material substance.”

Some contemporary critics, such as Jean-Paul Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, inveigh against the phantasmagoric character that global media have cast on experience and hanker for a revolt against simulacra, virtual realities, and the flux of images that contribute to the general destabilization of the real. Tiffany does not join these Jeremiahs, for he sees the enhanced status of the virtual and the fantastic as rooted in prophetic science and its reconfiguration of the conditions of existence. “Toy Medium” offers not so much an apologia for the materialist vision as a manifesto for the part that poets and the forging of poetic language has played and can play in the new atomic order of reality. He wants to persuade us against accepting a divide between art’s truth and science’s facts. “The view that poetry and scientific materialism are essentially at odds,” he writes, “rests on a superficial knowledge of the history of materialism. This view is not only mistaken, I want to insist; it is dangerously misleading, because it implies that poetry can recover a place in public discourse only as a radical alternative to science, a position inevitably construed as anti-realist--and unrealistic.”

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Using historical and literary techniques of detailed criticism and avoiding psychoanalytic or mystical universalizing, Tiffany demands that we recognize the work of poetic imagination in grasping experience, not fancifully but materially. Not only does poetry make things happen, but real toads truly flourish in its imaginary gardens, for the imaginary has a purchase on the real. That this sounds mystical, or improbable or even plain crazy presents one of the difficulties that he patiently confronts, as he charts the fortunes of scientific theories from Marx’s use of Epicurean materialism in his doctoral thesis to the modern relativity physics of Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger. Lyric poetry, of its essence, reproduces the insubstantial, disembodied nature of physical being in the age of ions, particles and neutrinos, of mass media images beamed by a dozen technologies, of the nebulous teeming presences on the World Wide Web. Of all the arts, Tiffany contends, poetry possesses the most attenuated material presence, words on the page or in the air having neither texture nor substance nor weight.

However, the pictures that language makes and passes down endure far beyond the life of the theory that they served to illustrate: The atoms of Epicurus no longer resemble the atom of Heisenberg, but the image has lasted, for it still meets the needs of the concept. Similarly, the ether, the object of thrilling speculative theories in the work of Newton and Descartes and right up to the spiritualist experiments of the Victorians, still satisfyingly communicates the state of ethereality, even though the empty air into which the astronauts float when they repair satellites or telescopes has been evasively renamed “the interstellar medium.” Tiffany proposes, with subtlety as well as passionate engagement, that “pictures of unreal things are tools that help produce a sense of reality.”

As it pursues its unexpected and passionate argument, “Toy Medium” assembles a wunderkammer of exhibits--from dolls to rainbows and lunar halos, Surrealist mannequins, weeping icons and Fascist dance, atomic blasts and cloud chamber photographs, a treatise on the snowflake written by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1611, the discoveries of the microscope and Robert Hooke’s dazzling radiant images of “prismatic frozen urine,” Wallace Stevens’ meteorological lexicon and Marianne Moore’s bestiary. This material often has an intrinsic fascination and beauty, which would make “Toy Medium” worth reading but, having assembled it, Tiffany also makes a strong case for its cogency and relevance to his story.

His customary approach is to overturn traditional assumptions without apology: The description of poetry as a toy and lyric poetry in particular a “toy medium” carries no pejorative dinky connotation, for dolls are marvelous beings in his repertory of materialism’s wonders. Citing Descartes, who wanted to be a doll maker--to make “a dancing man, a flying pigeon, and a spaniel that chased a pheasant”--and quoting from Baudelaire’s essay on the morality of the plaything, from Rilke’s prose masterpiece “Some Reflections on Dolls,” and Walter Benjamin on the all-engulfing importance of “images [that] arise out of an old toy chest,” Tiffany leaves us in no doubt of the centrality of such intricate artifacts’ eerie life to the imagination’s creative engagement with experience.

But he takes this even further: the eidolon, or phantom posited by Lucretius, foreshadows the phantasmic state of being found today on stage, screen and stadium. According to this ancient theory of “radiant species,” objects radiated their image through the air and entered the eye of the beholder. Lucretius prophetically writes, “These images are like a skin, or film. . . .” and compares them to husks and birth sacs, to the sloughed hides of snakes and the carcasses of molting insects: “All things project such likenesses of themselves. . . .” In this system, visibility entails material reality of the image as well as its subject. All this might again seem fantastic, or even outlandish, but it coheres with the narrative conventions increasingly adopted by today’s writers, in fiction as well as poetry. Salman Rushdie, in “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” beams his heroine rock star ubiquitously about, as if she were an image capable of infinite replication. When Tiffany declares, “The importance of beginning to think about ordinary pictures as dolls cannot be overstated,” he does seem to be overreaching--until one considers how stars such as Princess Diana and Leonardo DiCaprio occupy the dreams of so many thousands of viewers.

The riddle central to “Toy Medium,” however, makes a quantum leap and asks, “How is a doll like a meteor?” Few people, I think, could give an answer. But the inquiry into the nature of matter inspired investigation of both: Unweaving the rainbow was central to the scientific project of Newton, while Kepler’s delightful and pioneering disquisition on the snowflake looked beyond appearances to invisible interior structures that were in themselves essentially ephemeral, insubstantial--”almost nothing.” Descartes’ intellectual adventures led him, as it were naturally, from work on the weather (in his “Meteorology”) to analyses of the visible (in his “Optics”) to probing invisible mechanisms, as in the automated life of fountains and statues, and thence to the nature of consciousness.

At this point, lyric poetry’s own history diverges from the story of physics; a Blakean and Romantic tendency, made explicit in Keats’ protest against that very “unweaving of the rainbow,” clove apart science and poetry. “Toy Medium’s” chosen poets are consequently mostly later lyricists--including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso--whose imagery channels the vision of materialist physics and widens its compass of themes. He even discovers in Moore’s celebrated evocation of a fish an impossible condition of being that reproduces Schrodinger’s riddling conundrum about the cat in the poisoned box: “the creature in this traumatic . . . milieu is both dead and alive, ‘mixed or smeared out in equal parts.’ ”

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Tiffany observes certain turbulent outer rings of the materialist viewpoint. He reviews the unholy nexus of irrationality, spectacular illusion and automation in Mary Wigman’s feminist choreography and the Nazi propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl, with whom Wigman collaborated. In a chapter on the nuclear bomb and its poetic interpreters, Tiffany approaches the question of anti-humanist ethics, but he stops short of unraveling the problematic implications; contemporary theories of beauty still cannot account for the contradictions in such visions of radiance, sublimity and power as nuclear fission produces.

A growing number of the most interesting critics writing today (Gillian Beer in “Darwin’s Plots,” for example) address the convergence of science and literature in order to uncover the ways that both discourses engender metaphors that draw the contours of the moral horizon. “Toy Medium” makes a profound contribution to this important strand of inquiry, which strikes at the very heart of language and meaning. It’s not a book that can be read lightly, for it gives the synapses of the common reader (this one included) uncommon work to do. But it contains much penetrating thought, some truly wonderful visionary connections, and Tiffany’s oracular summons to lyric poetry to help form the universe we inhabit and take its place at our side as “an indispensable guide to reality” sounds less like an illusion than a dream of real substance.