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PARTISAN REVIEW
to inform other inquirers as efficiently as possible, it is appropriate to
give the highest priority
to
the explicit, the literal, the cognitive, the
direct. Fancy literary forms would get in the way; imagine how much
harder it would have been if Crick and Watson had tried to explain the
structure of DNA in iambic pentameter. No, I haven't forgotten
Lucretius's scientific poem,
De Rerum Natura-recently
in a new Eng–
lish translation in iambic pentameter, yet! But I stick
to
my guns: the sci–
ence Lucretius presents simply isn't comparable in complexity or
sophistication; and if it had been, the literary form would have been a
serious obstacle to communication.
A series of experiments in mutagenesis were known in the trade as
the "Uncles-and-Aunts" experiments, because the relation involved
was one up and sideways; but they also had an official, less jokey, and
more informative description:
tests of the triplet code by means of
frame-shift mutants in bacteriophage T4.
Still, there is a large element
of convention in the stiff style and toneless tone of much official scien–
tific writing, which serves in part as a badge of respectability, and can
sometimes be a substitute for genuine rigor-a ubiquitous problem
where social-scientific writing is concerned, and perhaps not entirely
insignificant even in the natural sciences.
Sometimes there is a mismatch between the purpose of a text and its
style. When a work of imaginative literature conveys the truths it wants
to get across a bit too obtrusively directly, we may criticize it as "didac–
tic." In
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,
Robert Tressell allows
his hero to make chapter-long socialist speeches; names his fictional
employers "Sweater," "Grinder," and "Didlum"; and makes one of his
ministers a Mr. Bosher, while the other, Mr. Belcher, dies when his inter–
nal gases finally explode!
Similarly, when we describe a scientific article as "rhetorical," it is
usually a criticism of a different but related kind of mismatch. We
expect a scientist, in his professional writings, to tell us what he takes to
be the truth of the matter he has been investigating, and to present the
evidence that this is how things are. But, though a dubious or lazy sci–
entist wanting to persuade others of the
bona fides
of his work may
occasionally succeed by means of rhetorical flourishes, another and per–
haps more effective strategy is to hide behind that blandly neutral offi–
cial style.
If
it weren't for one line about how a "solution" so dilute that
it contains not a single molecule of the supposed "solute" works
because
the water remembers
that it once contained bee venom, a care–
less or inexpert reader would hardly notice anything untoward about
that article of Benveniste's.
