Narrative Topic and the Contemporary Science Essay ... - JAC Online

116 Journal of Advanced Composition
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 narrati ve, 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 scien tific 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 observ ation 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