In pre-Romantic times, a treatise on the mollusc or the optic nerve would have been considered part of literature. In the post-Romantic era, literature has looked on science with a much more sceptical eye. Once the arts come to achieve a monopoly on the imagination, so that 'imaginative literature' means poetry and drama rather than history or psychology, scientists like Heisenberg or Schrödinger can be dismissed as dull, uncreative souls. Science deals with the actual, while fiction trades in the possible; and in the bleak conditions of modernity, the subjunctive is always likely to trump the indicative. What doesn't exist seems more precious than what does.

LRB 24 September 2009 | PDF Download