What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Why Did the Split Happen in the First Place?

Writing about C.P. Snow I have tended to emphasize what it seemed to me that he had got right, in large part because so many are so vehement about denying it--specifically that there really is a great gap between the sciences and "letters" (literature, art, the humanities), and that the rift has been important in the life of modern society.

However, lately I find myself looking more and more to what Snow did not treat quite so well, like why the divide exists, a question that seems the greater when one considers just how much traffic there once was between science and letters in the past. As Ian Watt explains, the modern novel actually emerged as a quasi-scientific literary form, premised as it was on the objective existence of a physical world knowable through the coordinated use of observation and reason. In the years that followed the great French novelists of the nineteenth century quite consciously drew inspiration from science and scientists--like Balzac, and, acclaiming Balzac the first to have walked that path, the "experimental novelist" Emile Zola, whose naturalism not only made him an immortal of literature, but may be credited with inspiring almost all of the really great American writers of his day, like Frank Norris, and Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, as in England H.G. Wells rose to the rank of literary giant precisely because of his own scientific inclinations and commitments.*

Snow offers no indication of any of this, instead rather hazily suggesting that the matter is in part the bitterness at the way letters has lost stature in modern times as less relevant in a scientific-technological world, exacerbated by the employment problems and lower incomes of its graduates and the way they sour their outlook; or the aesthete's distaste for the ugliness of so much of modernity, in comparison with what they may romantically recall of the past, equating past times with the most beautiful of their creations and only these, and so comparing today's housing blocks to the palaces of ancient times, while forgetting about the slums of those ancient cities. Snow does register that during the twentieth century letters, certainly as represented by Modernists like Eliot and Waugh, gravitated toward reaction, and frankly fascism--but not that this was part of a larger shift, the clearer as world war passed into Cold War, and Modernism into a postmodernism that became all-pervading.

As one may remember from looking at such turns in the past (as in the early nineteenth century, when a triumphant conservatism sought to excise the ghosts of Enlightenment, liberalism, revolution with Counter-Enlightenment, throne and altar, reaction), the supposed menace of Reason was met with weapons of Un-Reason and Anti-Reason. The result was that in the view of those who held power rational thinking had to be abided in the laboratory or the shop floor, but nowhere else, and absolutely not in social life, and the pictures literature paints about it. Indeed, thinking of how Snow presents the literature of "1914-1930" as dominated by Modernist reactionaries, and how this cuts out figures like the then-still very important Wells, I find myself thinking of how the Modernist and postmodernist turn, the way in which literature, led by critics given over body and soul to the Counter-Enlightenment, spoke of reason, progress and humanity only with a sneer, the literary record of the past was revised. Thus did a Balzac or a Zola became a good deal less fashionable, as American letters, certainly, marginalized a Norris or London or Sinclair or Dreiser, and, dispensing with Wells the rationalist social thinker and realist novelist remembered only Wells' science fiction tales, and the darkest and most pessimistic of them at that (knowing him by stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau), then strove to deprive him of whatever reputation remained left to him after. In his obliviousness here Snow is all too conventional--and his work is the poorer for it.

* Balzac was inspired by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, Zola by, besides Balzac, Claude Bernard among others.