Physicists in the Field of Fiction

BCLA: Invention, Leeds, July 2004

Bourdieu’s concepts of field, position-taking and gatekeeping are useful for discussing the relationship between literature and science. What happens when a physicist wishes to become a fiction writer? How does one navigate the entry into the new field and its systems of selection? Who are the gatekeepers and how does one get past them? Which types of subject matter are acceptable and which are not? How does one negotiate the critical reception of one’s first novel into a lasting career?

This paper analyses the entry into the field of fiction writing of two physicists/literati, combining an assessment of the reception of their works with analyses of the works themselves. Their debut novels both hinge on themes springing out of the authors’ original field: Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1993) treats the temporal paradoxes of Einstein’s relativity theory. Andrew Crumey’s Music in a Foreign Language (1994) describes the dialogues on politics and ideology between scholars in the fields of physics and history, and how the world, when regarded through the lens of probability theory, becomes a labyrinth of alternative possibilities. Both debuts were well received, and the authors have continued their fiction careers, gradually deviating from the physics content of their debuts and attempting ‘purer’ literary expression – a position-taking strategy which has led to varying degree of critical success, illustrating the potentially limiting function of gatekeeping in the literary field.

Lightman	Crumey