“Finding a Form to Accommodate the Mess”. Experimental Science and Storytelling in Thalia Field’s Writing

Abstract

Thalia Field’s writing draws its power and inventiveness from the conversation it conducts between biology and storytelling. On the one hand, Field draws from biology or geology to invent non-human points of views or timescales and thus rethink the units of narrative (character, plot, action). On the other hand, she taps the critical learning garnered by poetry and poetics to point out the failings of science when it misuses its authority and turns a blind eye to its motives. On closer examination, “realist” fiction and scientific method share certain characteristics: omniscient point of view, separation between subject and object, linear causality. To these they owe their great cognitive faculties but also some tragic lapses. Experimental Animals, a polyphonic historical novel depicting the birth of Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine and of the anti-vivisection movement, shows the tragic flaw of physiology to be the denial of experience in the name of experiment and the lack of empathy for objectified animals. Turning to ethology, the science of animal behavior, Bird Lovers, Backyard exposes Konrad Lorenz’s tragic flaw to be a compromised use of storytelling and the projection of human psychology onto animals. Bearing these flaws in mind, Field seeks to write from the right distance, a requirement which accounts for the experimental forms her stories take, an experimentalism that owes more to John Cage than to Bernard or Zola.

Keywords

• Field Thalia
• experimental
• experience
• storytelling
• science
• biology