Writing Modern Science with Fictionality: Understanding Benjamín Labatut’s Generic Experimentation

ABSTRACT Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World presents a challenging read, as it transgresses the boundary between fiction and nonfiction to narrate twentieth-century scientific discoveries. Drawing on the rhetorical approach to fictionality, this article argues that Labatut uses fictionality in four distinct ways to achieve various communicative purposes. Fictionality sometimes illuminates scientific ideas, either by creating formal analogies that help readers apprehend abstract and counterlogical concepts or by setting up occasions for accessible explanations of difficult theories. Other times, fictionality explores the role of singular mental activities in scientific innovation or invites reflections on the profound historical and psychological impacts of scientific discoveries, thus critiquing and complementing conventional scientific discourses. Combining conventional with innovative forms of fictionality, Labatut’s book ultimately defies the stable global–local hierarchy between fictionality and nonfictionality that defines generic fiction and nonfiction alike, showing instead a deep interdependence between extensive fictionality and extensive nonfictionality. Labatut’s generic experimentation illustrates multiple ways in which fictionality and science intersect; it also suggests a profound connection between scientific and literary innovation: embracing limitation, plurality, contradiction, and complementarity, twentieth-century scientific discoveries call for new literary modes where fictionality and nonfictionality intertwine, clash with, and complement each other.