Literary Biases in the Sciences and Metacommentary in relation to Toomer’s Cane

Chapter 5 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, ‘Science, Space, and Nature’ further explores the distance and lack of communication in the academic disciplines, namely the humanities and the sciences.  Despite this lack of communication, there are many interesting instances where science and English blend together.  Moran explains that words used in scientific statements or theories can mean different things to different people, because words in a language hold different connotations and biases within them.  Whatever science does to stay neutral and objective, in many cases it can’t separate itself from the culture of the day.  To paraphrase a theory by Richard Rorty, “scientific ideas start out as metaphors, but as people become more comfortable with the idea it starts to be seen as literal presentations of the ‘truth’, in a way that obscures the metaphorical nature of language.”  Moran uses the example of the late nineteenth century phenomenon of ‘Social Darwinism’ as an example of this theory because in short Darwin’s theories were “used to justify the colonial domination of ‘savage’ peoples, the eugenics movement, anti-immigration policies, racial segregation, and other programs that left the ‘unfit’ or poor to their own defenses”.  The most important part of this chapter to me was the idea that “The efforts to contain science within a discipline or professional group can thus never be complete because the “excluded or left-over meaning of words’ can be ‘brought to the surface and put to use by those outside the accord or professional “contract”, as well as by those future readers for whom new historical sequences have intervened.”  This idea that words or theories can be taken and thrown into a societal or mainstream, politicized context is very interesting to me, and I feel it relates to not only the sciences but very often by English authors, such as Toomer.  His work was taken and used in more than one large scale movement and his words were made in some senses politicized, in ways that he wasn’t necessarily planning on or expecting to be done, or in some cases even agreed with (such as the Harlem Renaissance movement, where his work was championed as a literature that could help further their cause, which Toomer was resistant to).  In They Say I Say, chapter 10 discusses metacommentary, which is defined as “a way of commenting on your claims and telling others how-and how not-to think about them.”  This definition seems to tie into Moran’s point about scientific theories being used or misused in other ways, or could relate to Toomer’s situation.  To me the biographical essay is in some form a metacommentary on Cane, because it definitely shapes the way I read and analyze the work itself.  It is important to note that it could possibly not qualify fully as metacommenary since Toomer didn’t write the essay himself.  It is also interesting to contemplate that how even with the use of metacommentary a person’s words or theories can be misconstrued, blown up, or dragged into a bigger narrative, with or without the person’s consent.