Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

8. "The Poetry of Scientific Thinking"

EIGHT liThe Poetry of Scientific Thinking": Steinbeck's Logfrom the Sea ofCortez and Scientific Travel Narrative Stanley Brodwin Together with works by Cook, Humboldt, Forbes, and Darwin, The Log from the Sea of Cortez belongs to literature's great scientific travel narratives . Like the best ofits predecessors, The Log transcends simple narrative description byforming hypotheses and speculating on their relationship to broad naturalfunctions. Steinbeck emulates Darwin in particular by exploring the aesthetic, romantic, and religious as well as scientific aspects of what he observed and felt. Thus Steinbeck rejuvenates the role of the poetnaturalist and recaptures the poetry in scientific thinking, exemplified by his vision of the hypothesis as a work ofart "beautiful and whole" in its own right, capable ofretaining that holistic beauty even when proved wrong. They [Galileo, Einstein] were romantics, just as today the only true poets are found among the physicists, mathematicians and biochemists. -Steinbeck, cited in The Steinbeck Newsletter,S, 1992 I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all. -Travels with Charley, 1961 Shortly after completing his first draft of The Logfrom the Sea ofCortez, subtitled A Leisurely Journal ofTravel and Research, Steinbeck wrote to Pascal Covici on 4 July 1941: Poetry and Scientific Thinking 143 This book is very carefully planned and designed Pat, but I don't think its plan will be immediately apparent. And again there are four levels ofstatement in it and ... few will follow it down to the fourth. I even think that it is a new kind ofwriting. I told you once that I found agreat poetry in scientific thinking. Perhaps I haven't done it but I've tried and it is there to be done. (SLL 232) In this oft-quoted and challenging passage, Steinbeck gives us a revealing epitome concerning his artistic preoccupation with form and structure, so clearly reflected in his work as a whole.1 The "four levels" statement still remains open to critical debate, although I would offer a provisional analysis that the Log does preoccupy itself thematically with four of the most fundamental questions central to the Darwinian "revolution" and the way they were reshaped or reinterpreted : the problem of "means and ends," the meaning of biological and environmental "function," the crucial theological and scientific meaning of teleology, and, finally, a new apprehension of the nature of Time itself.2 Yet whatever the final truth may be, what I am most concerned with here is the broader relationship and aesthetic connection Steinbeck affirms between the poetry of scientific thinking and the complex ways they find formal literary expression in a work of art. This question is trenchantly announced in the very first paragraph of the Log, where Steinbeck asserts not only that "the design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer" but also that this is often unrecognized when it comes to "books of fact." Still, the essential point is that the "impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tidepools and force him to try to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged?" (1). Why, indeed? Steinbeck offers no definitive answer to an impulse that may spring from many factors but suggests one at least graced by both simplicity and common sense: "We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny" (2). But "curiosity" is the initiatory drive; in the end, there must emerge "some structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality" whose construct will in any case be "warped" by the "collective pressure ... of our time and 144 Brodwin race" (2)-words that echo Hippolyte Taine's influential theory of literary naturalism. This theory, first developed by Taine (1828-1893) in his Histoire de la litterature Anglaise (1864; Eng. trans. 1871-1872), is typical of the post-Darwinian impulse to explain cultural and social phenomena from a strictly "scientific" and deterministic perspective. For Taine, three major interrelated factors were responsible for the development and character of any national literature and its most distinctive writers: race, the historical "moment," and the "milieu," or predominant social and physical environment. These...