This article first appeared in Interface,
the magazine of the MacDiarmid institute, Volume 22, March 2013.
As we prepare to March for Science, I wanted to revisit some of the ideas I explored here 4 years ago, about science, and the humanities, and power. I've reposted this here to start a conversation, largely with myself.
Roald Hoffman is Professor of Humane Letters at
Cornell – a glorious designation for anyone – and a particularly marvellous
title for a person whose life’s work stems from an intense belief in the power
of language (letters) to convey our shared humanity. That he is a Nobel
Laureate, winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1981 for his work concerning
the course of chemical reactions, only adds to this sense that here is a man
for whom the world is a place of wonder.
Nations have etiological myths – stories that
tell and retell how the country or city or culture came into being. This
concept of etiology is used in anthropology and sociology to understand how a
people explain a name or create a mythic history for a place or family. In a
New Zealand context, this might be illustrated by the story of the beautiful
Ruapehu, who left her husband Taranaki for the exciting Tongariro, resulting in
Taranaki exiling himself to the western side of the North Island. Ruapehu
regrets her infidelity, and occasionally sends plumes of smoke and sighs when
she misses him.[1]
People too, have foundational myths – stories they tell about themselves. I
asked Roald Hoffman how he came to write himself into the science story.
But he pushed back – what was important for
Hoffman to express was not why or how he chose to become a scientist, but more
how he came to be a Professor of Humane Letters. Age eighteen, at Columbia, his
undergraduate degree required a core curriculum that included Introduction to
Western Civilisation. It was in those classes – History of Art, Shakespeare,
Classical Japanese Drama – that Hoffman found himself surrounded by a culture
of ideas, of conversation and debate that he loved. “I might have studied
history of art, but that would have been too much for my parents.”[2]
So we have a semi-reluctant chemist who goes on
to win the Nobel Prize; a man who describes his most difficult period as being
when the science was going the best – between the ages of 30-35, when he was
becoming established as a scientist and starting a family – this being
difficult as it was when he had the least time to spend on the arts and
humanities. “But I read good books, not genre fiction.”[3]
Age 40, he started to audit classes in areas of interest at Cornell; literature
and the languages of his past – German, Russian. And he began to write.
The poetry, prose, and drama Hoffman has written
since that starting point have permeated his attitude towards his academic or
scientific writing too. As we chatted, he wondered if one of the traits of his
journal article writing is pedagogical or poetic – his use of repetition. In
poetry, as in teaching, repetition is used for effect, and to cement the
concept in the memory of the student or reader. Hoffman, untraditionally, likes
to use repetition, particularly of drawings, in his journal articles so that
the combination of text and image at the right place is shown in the narrative
of the article. Similarly, he advocates using the active voice – both in
teaching and in writing – to draw the audience in, show the audience that you
(the speaker) care about you (the implied audience). This patterning of
strategies from poetry and teaching into his academic writing is intended to
remove barriers of understanding.
For Hoffman, it is to this issue of understanding
that we must return. Commanding the wisdom of years, he’s of the opinion that
his undergraduate experience, at Columbia in the 1950s, should be the model.
The American ideal of a general education prior to specialisation has, at its
heart, a kind of American egalitarianism – a notion that all who make the
college grade should share a body of knowledge. Hoffman knows there are
problems with this: who decides what is canonical and what is not? How do we
develop core curricula that are adaptive to change without being faddish? But,
like me, he wonders if, in getting rid of the notion of a core curriculum, we
have lost more than we’ve gained. There is the European model that has students
reading the classics at high school, but, as Hoffman says: “to read Madame Bovary at sixteen and to read Madame Bovary at twenty are entirely
different experiences. At twenty, you should have had at least one love
affair.” [4]
And there’s a love affair that can start at
university with the arts – not because one is planning on working in that area
– but because it is the arts – art, literature, music – that tell us what it is
to be human. Hoffman is insistent that it was not his parentage – a civil
engineer, a school teacher – that drew him towards bridging the gap between art
and science, but what he experienced as a young man at university in New York.
“I wish we could communicate to young people the importance of this”, he said
to me. [5]
Hoffman’s history often seems to predicate his
achievement; he’s described as the ‘Holocaust-surviving Nobel Prize winner.’
And I guess at heart my question to him about his etiological myth – the
beginning of his story – may have been a question about that history. But he is
adamant that while the story started in what was then Zloczów, Poland, and is
now Zolochiv, Ukraine, key moments of denouement took place at Columbia in the
mid-1950s, at Cornell in the ‘70s, in his study now as he thinks about
returning to one of his early loves – classical Japanese drama – and trying to
write a Noh play. He is someone who has always looked forwards.
The Zloczów Yizkor book[6]
might tell us why. Hoffman was hidden, with his mother and other relatives, in the
attic of the village school, by the teacher, Mikola Dyuk, between the beginning
of 1943 and the liberation of the town by the Red Army on July 18, 1944. The
Zloczów Ghetto was liquidated on April 2, 1943. Hoffman’s father, Hillel
Safran, was leader of a group of Jews who escaped to the forest and joined the
partisans. He did not survive the war.[7]
“Safran's group
continued its preparation for opposition, but its members also were caught by
the Germans, possibly because of informers, and were executed. During the
execution Safran attacked one of the Germans, and wrenched the pistol from his
hand. But during the fight he was shot in the back by a Ukrainian policeman and
was killed on the spot. The remnants of Zloczow's community continued to hide, but the majority of them were discovered and murdered. During the liquidation of one of the bunkers where the Zuckerkandel family and other were sheltered, a gunfight broke out, and according to one of the sources, there were also German casualties.
The Red Army freed Zloczow on July 18, 1944. After a few days a small group of survivors was concentrated there. Almost all of them left the town after a short time, moved to bigger cities in the area, and from there to Poland and from there to Israel and to other countries.”[8]
Reading that history, it is testament to Roald
Hoffman that he has chosen to look forwards, to run towards life. He was given
opportunities at Columbia in the 1950s that germinated in him a life-long
interest in the arts – particularly history of art and literature – and he has
chosen to marry that passion to his career as an eminent chemist. One of his
recent conference papers is titled ‘A little bit of lithium does a lot for
hydrogen;[9]’
“I could have called it something else, but as science language is inherently
complex and rather boring, I try to be colloquial.”[10]
Another article is, also colloquially, called
‘Solid Memory.’[11]
I told him this reminded me, in the rhythm of the words, of Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s memoir of his
life in Russia prior to immigration to the USA in 1940. Finding, later,
Hoffman’s 2008 poem ‘Code, Memory’, alternative title ‘Mnemosyne’s Trail,’[12]
the echo becomes stronger. In ‘Code, Memory’ you (the implied audience, the
implied narrator):
“see the blues flit, conjure up
Hoffman takes the reader through a collection of etiological
myths; a series of vignettes of foundation points of science. We have
“The way lit up in ’53,
two young men just willing
a model into being. Walk
toward them, past a monk
tending peas …”[15]
Giving us Watson and Crick, and Mendel. The poem continues, mixing, lyrically,
beautifully, both Hoffman’s own past – “the butterfly/that lights on torn up
earth/in Srebrenice and Zloczów…”[16]
– and the history of science – “the genes turned off/as we came out of water”[17]
– to an ending that encapsulates both:
“The word sings, in alp
and alkaline phosphatase
and DNA, in nuanced refrain:
this side of memory, or a world
that was; and one that will be.”[18]
Roald Hoffman, Professor of Humane Letters,
indeed.
[2] Roald Hoffman, interview with the author, 11 February 2013.
[3] Hoffman interview.
[4] Hoffman interview.
[5] Hoffman interview.
[6] A Yizkor Book is, literally, a Memory book. These Holocaust
memorial books were compiled by ad hoc groups of survivors to write back into
history the Jewish communities that the Holocaust had tried to destroy. http://www.yivoinstitute.org/index.php?tid=46&aid=254
[7] The Zloczow/Zolochiv Yizkor Book is available here, fully
digitised. http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_poland/pol2_00217.html
[8] Zloczow Yizkor Book, as before.
[10] Hoffman interview.
[11] Available here: http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/sites/all/files/521s_0.pdf
[12] Nabokov had wanted to call his memoir Speak, Mnemosyne, but had been dissuaded from doing so by his
publisher. Mnemosyne was the personification of Memory in the Ancient Greek
pantheon, and mother to the Nine Muses.
[13] Roald Hoffman, ‘Code, Memory,’ The Sigurd Journal 1 (3), 2008. Full text available here: http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/sites/all/files/code%2C-memory.pdf
[14] Butterflies were a passion of Nabokov’s, and feature as a repeated
motif in Speak, Memory and his other
works.
[15] Hoffman, ‘Code, Memory’, 2008.
[16] Hoffman, ‘Code, Memory’, 2008.
[17] Hoffman, ‘Code, Memory’, 2008.
[18] Hoffman, ‘Code, Memory’, 2008.
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