Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

9. The Spirit of Synecdoche

9 The Spirit of Synecdoche Order and Chaos Contend in the Metaphors of Loren Eiseley jacqueline cason It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms. . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. aristotle, poetics It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. loren eiseley, “the star thrower” 185 The way we read the past shapes our present and future, and the genius of Loren Eiseley’s evolutionary metaphors remains relevant to current cultural and ecological issues. William Zinsser describes the sixties as the “golden era of nonfiction” (56). Eiseley’s books sold well after World War II, when the reading public developed an appetite for works that dealt directly with reality, preferring nonfiction to novels and short stories. W. H. Auden read everything of Eiseley’s he could lay his hands on (15). Yet in spite of a loyal and diverse following, Eiseley has yet to receive critical attention commensurate with his poetic contribution. The son of a traveling salesman during the Great Depression, Eiseley was sensitive to the extravagance of space flight amid poverty. Coming of age, he witnessed a fear of communism, followed by a revolt of the next generation, outraged by Vietnam. After World War II and the bombing of Japan, his fellow writers expressed a pervading sense of apocalyptic despair and a crisis of faith in aesthetic impulses. Katherine Anne Porter, writing in 1950, describes her own puzzlement with a neighbor who was “restoring a beautiful surface to put his books and papers on.” Her neighbor ’s sense of faith, his “deep, right, instinctive, human belief that he and the table were going to be around together for a long time” leads her to contemplate human progress and destiny (194, 195). Artists of Eiseley’s era questioned the uses of technology and grew uneasy about the collaboration of scientists with the government-militaryindustrial complex. Porter’s “The Future Is Now” sums the mood of a time when scientific progress collided with the possibility of nuclear annihilation as paradoxical. Eiseley addresses this paradox in “The Star Thrower”: “Humanity was suddenly entranced by light and fancied it reflected light. Progress was its watchword, and for a time the shadows seemed to recede. The Spirit of Synecdoche 186 Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness presaged the emergence of an entirely new and less tangible terror” (Unexpected 82). Nevertheless, Eiseley deliberately chose the path of Porter’s neighbor�to labor in view of and in spite of the terror of nuclear annihilation. A writer committed to bringing coherence to his own handful of chaos, Eiseley began publishing in the decade of Porter’s essay and continued during the Cold War, the Space Race, Vietnam, and the environmental movement. Reflecting on postwar science, both Porter and Eiseley were in an awkward position of questioning the progress and wisdom of science and technology during an age of medical miracles. And it wasn’t only medicine. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik, starting a race with the United States to claim and exploit the frontiers of space. Amid public faith in scientific solutions, Eiseley questioned the wisdom of science and the moral responsibility of scientists: “To the student of human culture, the rise of science and its dominating role in our society presents a unique phenomenon”; he also observed that “the scientific worker has frequently denied personal responsibility for the way his discoveries are used” (Firmament 131, 135). It was not the institution of science, but scientists, he called to account, defending a tradition of disinterested observation while simultaneously prodding colleagues to recognize the moral implications of their work. Though science was making great strides, Warren Weaver’s 1947 essay, “Science and Complexity,” already anticipated problems of organized complexity : statistics alone cannot address problems “dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole” (6; emphasis added). As interrelated parts in a larger system, “these problems . . . are just too complicated to yield to the old nineteenth-century techniques which were successful on two-, three-, or four-variable problems of simplicity.” Although science has provided an intellectual...