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

The Contemporary Science Essay 117
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.s
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 anew, 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.