Gould threads

[May 17, 2003] - The state of the essayist art is hard to gauge. It could be better; it has been worse. Weblogists ply the medium, and give it a new twist, but they probably don’t hold a slender cylinder of flax with flaming wick to the essayists of the Restoration or the days of Victoria. While the doyens of the New York Review of Books or Partisan Review once could get off some zingers, the great cloud of theory now admits no diffusion, and the essays there as in like outlets are much less than illuminating.

If you grant that there is a revival of the form today, you may want to posit paleontologist Stephen J. Gould as one of those who had a hand in the transform. He took the notion of brief, penned rumination off the pedestal of theory and got it down to the nitty gritty, I’d claim. Or at least, he put theory in its place in the order of things.

His work appeared most noticeably in Natural History Magazine over a number of years. Among his leather-bound collections count The Panda’s Thumb, Ever Since Darwin, and the Mismeasure of Man. He built on the age-old naturalist essay tradition that was somewhat forgotten, though never quite gone.

The naturalist essayist dwells on the minutiae, with the goal to uncover something observed before but not seen. I think Jack Kerouac could be numbered in their ranks. The form flies close to the journal, and it can suffer like the journal when the topic is uninteresting or the writer is too self interested.

Gould died about a year ago of cancer. It was a front-page passing, and a head-shaker for me. He had inspired me through his writing, although I’d put those aside in recent years. But oh I recall waiting for Natural History to drop in the mail box, and thumbing through the issue, and waiting for the moment, which was often in the tub on Saturday night, when I could read Gould’s column intently.

Like James Burke, he had a really unique way of writing and thinking on the history of science -- a way that seemed to shed light on the process of progress. Since I was brought up on Progressive milk, this was welcomed much. I had pals in Gouldland - no question: Gould brought interest in the history of science to a broad audience.

Which is all by way of meanderment toward the report: I went to a colloquium dedicated to remembering Gould at Harvard’s Jefferson Hall  in April. The discussion was to center on history, politics and evolution as viewed by Gould. Most of the notes here will focus on the comments of colloquium panelist Garland Allen of Washington University in St Louis. His comments at this mostly heartfelt event were on the main looking for the message that Gould’s work might convey most distinctly to other science historians.

A Gould message, as deigned by Allen: “Go to the original sources.” The conventional wisdom cannot be overcome, if the received versions are read, and not the originals, he said as he weighed the worth of Gould’s efforts.

He noted the talent Gould had for going beyond the standard view. For example, he pointed to the 19^th century paleontologist battles between the Uniformatarians  (viewed in the standard as ‘the good guys’’ and led by Lyell, who influenced history most by influencing Darwin some) and the Catastrophists (the ‘bad guys’ by, again, convention).

Take a close look at the bad guys, and ask why were they bad, Gould bade, in order to  make us rethink our received views.

“Primary sources give you insight into the thinking of people, most of which were not dodos,” said Allen.

Gould noted, despite their overall flaws, upon close reading, that he was somewhat drawn to some of the methods of the catastrophists. This was incorrect, he knew. “I assumed I was wrong,” he wrote.

And, wryly noted Allen, this self doubt  ‘may have been a first.’

“That sort of self doubt didn’t remain with Steve too long,” he said.

So an overall message he draws here from Gould’s work: “Don’t doubt yourself all the time, as we learn to do as grad students.”

Although Gould had an exquisite streak of sardonicty, he was imminently able to take the old scholars at their word, for a purpose. He looked at the pre-Darwin grand theories, he went back and read them, and then in effect, said don’t think of them as ‘misguided pre Darwinists”, but recognizing them as having their own concerns in their world they inhabited.

The rare talent of Gould, as described by Allen, is this: “There is something he wrote in almost everything he wrote for everyone.

Gould could connect baseball, Mickey Mouse, Marx  and more to natural history. But he somehow avoided the insensibility of some polymaths. And taken as a whole, his individual columns, true to his words, avoid “the diffuse incoherence” that is “the incubus of the essay collection.”  He was a tradesman in the paleontological, he carefully and constantly asserted. And the result was a spectacular fireworks of thought.

Last update: 5/19/2003; 1:25:34 PM.