Narrative Topic and the Contemporary Science Essay:
A Lesson from Loren Eiseley’s Notebooks
Joseph I. Comprone
The 1970s were supposed to have moved composition teachers beyond the
mechanical, mode-oriented models of the early twentieth and late nineteenth
centuries. The theoretical work of James Kinneavy and Frank D’Angelo,
and the historical revisionism of James Berlin and Robert Connors, have
combined to encourage writing instructors to use a more purpose-oriented
rhetoric.1 Recently, however, this healthy reaction against mechanical
imitation of patterns or modes of writing has been somewhat undercut
by the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement. WAC courses attempt
to expose students to representative writers from the natural and social
sciences as well as the humanities; but because many textbook writers
and teachers do not know the aims of science writing as well as they
do those of the humanities essay, the texts and assignments they produce
often return to the mechanical classifications of mode and surface pattern
that were characteristic of composition readers published prior to 1970.2
In this essay, I wish to suggest two shifts in perspective—one
theoretical, the other practical—that I believe will help turn
WAC courses toward aim and away from mode as a central organizing principle.
Plural Textuality and the Science Essay
To establish a theoretical foundation, I wish to take a cue from the
early work of Frank D’Angelo and Kenneth Burke. In A Conceptual
Theory of Rhetoric, D’Angelo argues that what writing teachers
call “patterns” in texts (exposition, description, narration,
comparison, and the like) are better understood as Aristotelian topics
than as modes. Writers, D’Angelo asserts, actually use these topics
to generate and shape discourse as it is produced, not as empty containers
to be filled with content. Yet, mode-oriented teachers use the “empty
container” model as a basis for their teaching. For example, students
are told to look at comparison essays, to identify the forms a particular
essayist used to accomplish a comparison, and then imitate that formal
pattern, supplying their own content. D’Angelo argues, in contrast,
that students should be asked to use these forms to generate content,
as topics, or places to go for new ways to express content.
But we need to take D’Angelo’s cue a step further if we
are to resolve the WAC problem as I have described it. In A Grammar
of Motives, Kenneth Burke supplies the theory we need to complete this
shift from mode to topic. Burke replaces Aristotle’s definition
of topics as places to go for traditional information and conventional
wisdom with a more psychological perspective. For Burke, all discourse,
scientific or literary, occurs within a dramatic context. As interpreters
or critics, we do not search out intentions as if they were static entities,
existing separate from human conceptual and social processes. Rather,
Burke asserts, we must look at intentionality as a dynamic social-psychological
process, with human agents working their ideas out within vital dramatic
contexts in which texts take on the colorings of writer, discourse community,
and other texts. Burke’s pentad is his way of describing the writing
and reading of texts as a process of shifting dramatic perspective,
alternatively focusing on individual, social, contextual, and psychological
perspectives.
The concept of plural textuality, of each text containing within itself
elements of other texts, is relevant to the practical perspective on
texts that teachers need to consider in WAC courses. To demonstrate
my point, I will single out one writer, Loren Eiseley, because he is
representative of an expanding group of writers whom I shall call “science
essayists.” These writers can help bring plural texts into the
WAC course because their texts combine the textual paradigms of the
sciences and humanities. That is, they combine scientific vocabulary
and inductive and deductive logic with frequent moves into narration
and description and the use of literary figures and schemes. It is as
if these professional scientists, in striving to translate science for
the educated layperson, have been driven by context and purpose to create
hybrid or plural texts.
Several contemporary science essayists (Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks,
Lewis Thomas, for example) base their texts on a marriage of story and
exposition, and composition theorists recently have begun to analyze
the complex ways that expository and narrative forms interact in these
science essays.3 This formal interaction affects readers in complex
ways, turning the scientist’s reliance on a discipline’s
body of knowledge, vocabulary, and methodology into the stuff of story
and myth. For example, Gould and Eiseley transform the history of evolution
into an adventure story parallel in emotional impact and literary imagination
to the Genesis story in the Bible. Such writers are, in effect, re-making
our collective psychology by providing an emotional base for the sober
deductive and inductive findings of science.
Perhaps Gould’s and Eiseley’s combination of forms is the
surface representation of deeper and equally new ways of thinking. For
these science essayists, story has become a way of knowing and inventing
material, a place to find content and structure. Imagine Loren Eiseley
hard at work on a field trip, bone-collecting on the prairie or Dakota
badlands, then later sitting down to write about his findings and observations.
Certainly, as a professional scientist (he taught at the Universities
of Kansas and Pennsylvania), Eiseley had to perform the ordinary work
of science: the careful notebook entries, field logs, research reports,
professional articles, and grant requests. However, Eiseley had, as
he wrote, another impulse—an impulse to make a story of what he
found, to fit the particulars located in his fossils and observations
of nature into a larger, narrative picture of natural evolution, of
life and this planet always in a state of becoming. He, in other words,
first went to narrative and story not as a form to contain his content
but as a place, a topic, through which his findings might be renewed
and given larger significance. The scientist’s commitment to fact
and observation never flagged; his desire to be a professional in methodology
and knowledge never decreased. But his many books of popular prose and
poetry indicate that this narrative impulse gradually subsumed all that
he did. In the story topic, Eiseley connects with his readers’
need (to use Robert Frost’s phrase) to become “whole again,
beyond confusion.”
Eiseley’s Rhetorical Motives
Eiseley’s reliance on narrative demands that we first examine
his motives for devoting so much writing space to the narrative topic.
In the Burkean sense, I propose two rhetorical motives as psychological
influences on Eiseley the literary scientist.
First, Eiseley ‘s complete dedication to the paleontologist’s
and anthropologist’s inductive and deductive methods seems always
to be fraught with a writer’s need to communicate, to transform
the data and hypotheses gathered from his observations (gleaned from
field trips or laboratory experiments) into ideas that intelligent laypersons
can comprehend. And for Eiseley comprehension means that these readers
are able to make connections between specific scientific phenomena and
more general ideas about the origin and development of nature and the
story of human species. Eiseley had developed the data for this kind
of essay writing during his earlier explorations of Western plains terrain
and from his analyses of professional and public reaction to specific
cultural events—the Piltdown Man hoax, the big-bang theory, and
other popular controversies.4 Consider these citations from Eiseley’s
recently published Lost Notebooks:
September 1. 1955
It occurs to me that there is a very clear analogy between the way in
which an apartment house (or another building, for that matter) acquires
its biota and the way an oceanic island acquires its plant and animal
population. An apartment house newly built (a recent volcanic island
upthrust from the waves) is destitute at first of a fauna. If it is
remote from neighborhoods where such a fauna may be acquired (islands
far at sea), it may be destitute of insects, silverfish, etc., for a
longer period. As time runs on, however, the chance of immigrants arriving
intensifies. A pair of roaches may arrive in a box (floating timber)
and escape into the basement, and soon the house is populated so extensively
that even the professional exterminators can only keep the population
reduced. [How close] the apartment house may lie to other older ones
or to neighborhood groceries, as in, say, New York, will play a part
in the time involved before population is acquired. Now, to give this
a figurative evolutionary twist, we might imagine each house more self-contained
than it actually is and lasting over more than one geological period.
. . Let us say that in one house roaches have grown adjusted to a given
poison, in another they have developed clever adaptations for evading
the traps set for them by people, or perhaps other insects have been
introduced to combat them. Say, spiders. (92)
May, 1956
Four hundred million years have passed since the vertebrates fought
on the seafloor. They were the last of the great animal phyla (groups)
to appear, and if any creature below the tides knows the place of their
origin it is the starfish. Or it may be that dark, magnificent-lensed
octopod eye remembers us. He is older than we and has changed less.
He was there when we squirmed in the mud, when our mouths were jawless,
when our spine was a rubbery rod, and we were lucky to know light from
darkness. He was there when a fish was something very close to a worm—and
when to say that about a fish was the same thing as saying it about
a man because they were all contained in a mysterious creature with
gill slits, and a nerve cord on its back instead of its front. The nerve
cord is still there, only swollen at one end. With it you interpret
these lines. (109)
In both passages, Eiseley’s narrative captures the general significance
of what was a long series of empirical and theoretical investigations.
The first passage develops an analogy between apartment house and island,
one achieving its biological population in ways similar to the other
despite very different structures and locales. Rather than review the
facts of these population-building processes in exposition, Eiseley
chooses to give us a temporally arranged, simply styled story in which
we, as readers, are asked to re-imagine these processes over time. As
always with Eiseley, the real protagonists in this story of natural
processes are change and adaptation. Eiseley chooses not simply to tell
his readers about these processes but to help readers experience the
influences of both these processes, and he does so by employing chronological/temporal
narrative from a reflective, personal point of view.
Eiseley’s second rhetorical motive for using the narrative topic
surfaces in the second passage printed above. Again, this motive locates
itself in the space between Eiseley’s fictionalized audience (the
intelligent lay reader in search of larger truths than either science
or literature alone can provide) and the inductive/deductive methods
he uses to observe, record, and interpret nature. The starfish with
its “dark, magnificent-lensed octopod eye” becomes the protagonist
in Eiseley’s little story of creation. His purpose is to give
readers a sense of what evolution and natural selection really mean:
they are not processes that can be simplified into searches for and
arguments about proposed “missing links” or about whether
humans were descendent from apes. For Eiseley, evolution and natural
selection are processes that ought to lead to immense respect for nature’s
capabilities for change, adaptation, and development over and through
time and space. Humans are not simply descendent of other species or
forms; they are complex combinations of the traits and characteristics
of many past and present species. Starfish, fish, and ape had all had
their place in human phylogeny. Perhaps it is better, Eiseley suggests,
to couch these basic truths in dramatic form to communicate their full
impact. Thus, Eiseley tells the complete story and thereby avoids oversimplified
arguments about the implications of evolution and natural selection.
By moving to narrative, Eiseley never leaves behind his emphasis on
change and adaptability. These concepts become what Wolfgang Iser would
call the thematic horizon behind each line and word in his text (96).
Once Eiseley has introduced a scientific principle—say, that
of the essential variation of life through space and time—he looks
around for concrete observations of the natural world that reinforce
it. But simple descriptions of these observations, whether of pigeons
in New York or foxes in Nebraska, no matter how precisely recorded,
never seem to satisfy Eiseley. Entries from his notebooks consistently
demonstrate this disappointment with the conventions of deductive and
inductive science writing. In the Lost Notebooks, for instance, Eiseley
often assembles brief, concrete observations into a pattern leading
to an inevitable deduction. A cluster of notes about pigeons appears
in Lost Notebooks, on different pages. Yet, Eiseley never seems content,
as would the typical science writer writing for specialized journals,
with this straight-line journey from observation to principle and back
again. Instead, the line of inference is broken by what we might call
the “consciousness” of the working scientist, captured in
the many reflective passages in Lost Notebooks. In fact, Eiseley’s
notes on books or lectures that he is considering writing, which make
up the greatest part of these notebooks, are in essence occasions in
which subjective consciousness interrupts the objective recordings
of observations and the drawing of scientific conclusions.
Eiseley describes the motives behind these reflective intrusions in
the following passage, in which he defends his use of the “nature
essay” genre. He begins by explaining how many political systems,
particularly the Russian, denigrate a writer’s “deviation
from the party line” by calling that writer a “mystic.”
Eiseley then goes on to say,
I cannot resist the observation that this name-calling . . . occasionally
emerges here in some few scientific quarters where there is an unconscious
attachment to an extremely materialistic world view similar to that
which broods with such intensity over the Russian landscape. One may
write . . . a nature essay in the purely literary tradition, expressing
some feeling for the marvelous, or the wonder of life—things perfectly
acceptable when pursued in such old classics as Thoreau or Hudson, and
then awake to discover that a certain element in the “union”
regards one’s activities in this totally separate field as “mystical”
and “alien to the spirit of science.” (Lost Notebooks 98)
Here Eiseley demonstrates a sensitivity to the plural textuality of
his essays and the responses they often draw from colleagues. And he
is determined to make space in his texts for science as story, for the
topics of reflection and narrative that are responsible for both his
triumph and defeat. Those readers who respect Eiseley’s essay
tradition—marked by the texts of Emerson, Thoreau, Hudson, Darwin,
and others—find in his reflective narratives textual forms that
can unite the two cultures; those who denigrate his essays as popular
science find these textual hybrids a watering down of the straight-line
and objectively determined deductions of hard science.5
Narrative as Modern “Topic”
From a rhetorical perspective, Eiseley’s narrative impulse needs
to be related to two historical traditions if it is to be understood
in its full context. The first, described by Ong and Havelock among
others, would relate Eiseley’s narratives to the history of oral
and written literacy. The second would explain a change in the way rhetoricians
have gradually come to consider the concept of topic or topoi as it
has evolved since its inception in Aristotle’s Topica and Rhetoric.
Literacy in Aristotle’s time was still essentially oral. Plato,
in the Republic, had rebelled against the rigidity and the mesmerizing
qualities of oral formulaic poetry by proposing a new, transcendent
rhetoric premised on the dialogue. By encouraging interruptive questioning
(or eristic), Plato’s dialogues proposed a new form of consciousness
in which close attention was paid to the logical and formal connectedness
of discourse and less to immersion in the cultural myths and stories
of oral poetry. Aristotle, by placing his rhetoric in the handbook tradition
that Socrates had so maligned in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, attempted
to codify the principles and conventions of orators in a way that was
easily accessible to individual writers. But he attempted to accomplish
this codification without sacrificing the abstracting and philosophizing
qualities of the Platonic dialogues. To make this synthesis work, Aristotle
had to separate what he felt were the demonstrable certainties of science
(based on deductive geometric proofs) and dialectic (the syllogism)
from the probabilities of rhetoric. The enthymemes of rhetoric could
only accomplish persuasion to probable, not definite, truths. For over
two thousand years, this split between rhetoric and dialectic, between
popular and scientific discourse, has marked Western culture.
What was and is the place of the topics in these two very different
cultural conditions, Aristotle’s and Eiseley’s? Aristotle’s
common and special topics were fashioned to help the discourser construct
probable arguments for general audiences. The discourser—intending
to persuade either a legal, political, or popular assembly of the validity
of an enthymeme (not a syllogism, of course, which was reserved for
the more philosophical and systematic discourse of dialectic)—would
move to common topics of degree, comparison, and authority or testimony
to support an argument. In what was still primarily an oral culture,
Aristotle needed to convince his students that oral discourse should
be grounded in these then new common topics of abstract thought. Plato
and Socrates had established the situation in which abstract reasoning—Socrates’
pursuits of definitions of justice, wisdom, and the ideal state, for
example—could hold sway over the minds of educated citizens, even
while discourse was delivered orally. Aristotle took these abstract
patterns of thought, made them into common topics, and codified them
in a technical or handbook rhetoric. The common topics were actually
located in the minds of the evolving, literate audience, and gradually
replaced among the educated the formulas and mythoi of Homeric poetry.
How, then, does this interpretation of the conditions existing in Aristotle’s
time relate to what I have said earlier about Eiseley and the narrative
topic? I believe that science essayists such as Eiseley are moving discourse
in a direction opposite to what Aristotle had accomplished in his time.
No longer do educated discoursers need to be reminded of the common
patterns of thinking as they write; rather, in a predominantly literate
culture, thinking is subconsciously controlled and organized by established
topics. In fact, the common topics of Aristotle are in constant friction
with the more specialized topics and ways of knowing of modern disciplines.
The modern identifying relationship between reader and writer is marked
by acts of translation in which the special ways of knowing that characterize
disciplines are transformed into the educated general reader’s
intuitive sense of the traditional common topics. The science writer
knows that the minds of readers contain the inductive and deductive
paradigms of basic scientific method. But writers such as Eiseley purposely
disappoint those paradigmatic expectations in readers by going to narrative
and to story forms to add what he would call the element of mystery
to an otherwise objective process. But these translations of ways of
knowing must be accomplished without destroying or ignoring the systematic
ways of knowing codified and valorized in the scientific community.
Thus, the “science essay,” as Eiseley calls it, must do
double-duty: it must convince readers that scientific precision and
logic have been maintained in the inquiry upon which the essay is based,
and it must also move the reader, through its literariness, to an acceptance
of the essential incomprehensibility of nature.
For example, consider the natural scientist’s reliance on the
typical introduction (problem definition), methods and materials (description
of experimental methods), results (of experiment, objectively summarized),
and discussion format of the science paper. Is not the rigid adherence
to what belongs where in this discourse—a particularly Ramistic
convention—the scientist’s way of assuring that the layperson
does not too easily translate scientific method into common topics and
ways of knowing? Is not this systematic adherence to a format in which
interpretation never arises until all summary and description of the
experiment and its results are completed a way of enforcing the modern
scientific notion, following Descartes and his skepticism concerning
all inherited ways of knowing, that external reality, not stored linguistic
structures and axioms, should control human inquiry? The format of the
science paper, then, becomes the scientist’s way of empowering
nature, and also a way of assuring that the way scientific communities
do their research is perpetuated.
But, of course, I am here describing ordinary, everyday science. What
Eiseley, Gould, Sacks, Thomas, and their like do is decidedly not ordinary
science. It is extraordinary science, and we can fully understand this
point only by recognizing the complexity of the rhetorical situation
within which these essayists work. They are writing for magazines—Science,
Scientific American, and Natural History, for example-that are read
mostly by well-educated, curious non-specialists. To make the working
of everyday science, in all its complexity and detail, available to
this audience, the science essayist must find a form that is capable
of rendering detailed scientific inquiry and fact in interesting and
significant ways. What better form than story?
By transforming narrative, an established folkloric and oral discourse
tradition, into a modern common topic, science essayists are meeting
their own and their audiences’ needs in two ways. They are satisfying
their own periodic need to break out of conventional modes of inquiry
and expression in order to establish and communicate larger truths.
Oliver Sacks does this whenever the conventional format of the scientific
case study fails to express his sense of the complexity of his human
subjects. Stephen Jay Gould does this whenever the technical language
and communicative formats of his fellow paleontologists seem to fail
to express the astounding overall significance of evolutionary theory
and recent changes in our understanding of natural selection. Loren
Eiseley, as I have said earlier, moves out of the science format and
language into narrative in order to attach a general kind of spiritual
significance to his analyses of particular fossils and to his dialogue
with other anthropologists. These writers are bringing the epistemology
of specialists together with the narrative rhetoric of everyday life.
For them, narrative is a topic, not a mode. Telling the story of science
and nature without denying the efficacy of scientific language and method
is their aim.
Implications for Writing Teachers
What are the implications for writing teachers of this move of narrative
from mode to topic? The following questions might function as the basis
of a complex line of inquiry and pedagogical development.
1) When we teach writing-across-the-curriculum courses, should we avoid
narrative and descriptive modes when teaching science, and avoid the
science format when teaching humanities? Or should we construct sequences
in which these modes are turned into topic? If we do turn these modes
into topics, when and how do we introduce these topics into the composing
processes of students? Might, for example, they be introduced as essayistic
impulses interrupting the ordinary progress of science writing?
2) If we do come to treat the narrative mode as a topic, how do we
relate it to the expository? When should narrative interrupt exposition,
and how are both modes colored by the writer’s aim? And when,
to flip the coin, shall exposition interrupt narrative? A writer, for
example, whose report on a scientific investigation into complex phenomena
is interrupted by a narrative impulse may be fusing conceptions of specialist
and non-specialist audiences. Is that what we want in beginning college
writing courses? Or is that best reserved for more advanced courses?
In other words, do we wish our students to feel the need to express
larger truths in the midst of observing detail while pursuing a scientific
experiment or while tracking data in order to write a report?
3) Might we use the narrative impulse to explain and elaborate upon
what is discovered through scientific observation and experiment into
a curricular sequence in which students use expository aims as they
write and narrative as they speak? Would a student who wants to tell
a story about his or her experiment be better off doing so orally? Does
the answer to this question lie, then, in a carefully sequenced oral
and written pedagogy?
4) What do we want our writing-across-the-curriculum students to be
able to do when they finish our and other teachers’ courses? Should
they have some control over scientific method and the formats that scientists
use to express the result produced by that method? Should students also
be encouraged to step out of that professional role (the ordinary scientist)
into one that will express larger, cross-disciplinary truths? In other
words, are our writing-across-the-curriculum courses part of our students’
general education as well as their introductions to basic communication
skills in various disciplines?
We know, I think, how Eiseley would have answered these questions.
It remains to be seen whether we, as constructors of writing assignments,
can put our students in the place of writers such as Eiseley, Thomas,
Gould, and Sacks, all of whom use the narrative impulse to know and
express their science in a fuller, more complete, and more human way.
To be literate in such a dialogic context means to know and write in
two ways at once: as scientists following a careful methodology and
as storytellers making what we learn understandable and significant
to others. It also means discarding overly mechanical applications of
modal paradigms as we select readings for WAC courses, showing our students
instead how writers such as Eiseley use narrative to help their readers
experience and interpret scientific discoveries.
Perhaps this move away from mode-oriented concepts of form can best
be accomplished by re-thinking the motives behind the uses of narrative
in the modern science essay. Masters of this form—Stephen Jay
Gould, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley, and others—provide
us with texts we can use to give our students a new place to go when
the straight lines of conventional scientific method either block or
limit the complexities of their subjects.
National University of Singapore
Singapore
NOTES
1 Berlin, in his essay on John Genung, and Connors, in his essay on
the modes of discourse, both argue that an oversimplified and mechanical
notion of Alexander Bain’s modes came to dominate late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century American composition teaching. Kinneavy
argues for replacing modes, which are descriptive of written products,
with an emphasis on the more organic and rhetorically situated notion
of aims of discourse. Britton and his colleagues used their research
into British secondary school writing courses to argue that the function
rather than the form of an assignment was far more important to the
learning of students. D’Angelo was the first composition theorist
to argue that what mode-oriented teachers were calling patterns”
were actually functioning as Aristotelian topics in the writing of most
of the professionals whose essays were being used as models in composition
courses.
2Even the better quality WAC readers suggest this reliance on superficial
classification by mode or surface patterns. For example, Fields of Writing
presents its readings under headings such as reflecting, arguing, reporting,
and explaining, with the social and natural sciences and humanities
functioning as subdivisions under each heading. There is little attention
to how different communities and disciplines might have very different
ways of presenting the results of these discourse processes, and not
much is said about how these processes might produce different forms
in a single text. WAC readers with more traditional readings from the
“classics” of different disciplines, such as Cyndia Clegg’s
Critical Reading and Writing Across the Disciplines, are usually more
interested in providing content for student writing than they are in
getting students to use textual forms generatively. Forms of textuality
in relation to writers’ aims are given little attention in Cleggs
methods of inquiry approach to WAC.
3For example, Debra Journet of the University of Louisville has delivered
several excellent papers on Oliver Sacks and science essayists in general
at the 1987 MLA and 1988 CCCC conventions, and I have published articles
in the Journal of Advanced Composition and Freshman English News on
similar topics.
4Eiseley devotes a good deal of space to these current controversies
in The Immense Journey.
5Eiseley carries his defense of “mystical” reflection and
storytelling a step further in Lost Notebooks when he argues that straight
science can address “how” but not “why” questions:
“By the nature of things we are denied a scientific answer to
the question Why? We can only accept the universe as given and proceed
to examine how it seems to operate. Scientists toy successfully by observation
to answer the question How? Upon the Why? scientists can only speculate”
(106).
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The Contemporary Science Essay 123
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