Novelist as scientist

Jane Smiley

When Jane Smiley argues, as she does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that a novelist is like a scientist, who is more likely to be offended. the novelist or the scientist?

On the surface, a novelist and a scientist are very different people. If you ever got a college degree, it was probably either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. A novelist does art. A scientist does, well, science. There have most likely been novelists who did science and scientists who have written novels, but for the most part they think differently. They do different kinds of things.

Still, Smiley may have a point.

A scientist works with a hypothesis. "A novel is a hypothesis," she writes.

Both a novelist and a scientist are observers. They both ask "what if" questions. A chemist may wonder what happens if a little of this chemical is added to a certain chemical compound. A novelist may wonder what happens if a major character dies in the second chapter.

And so there are similarities, as Smiley observes. Even so, scientific results are supposed to be reproducible. What one scientist discovers upon doing an experiment, another scientist is supposed to be able to find when doing the same experiment. Novelists, however, are expected to discover something entirely different each time. Or else we wouldn't pay any attention to them.