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Is There a Fish in This Text?Author(s): Robert ScholesSource: College English, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Nov., 1984), pp. 653-664Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/376925

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Robert Scholes

Is There a Fish in This Text?

Let us begin with two fish stories that are not just fish stories but parables aboutthe relationship between words and things. The first is taken from Ezra Pound'sABC of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934); the secondfrom John Steinbeck's written text for Sea of Cortez (New York: The VikingPress, 1941).

No manis equipped or modern hinkinguntil he has understood he anecdoteofAgassizandthe fish:

A post-graduate tudentequippedwithhonoursanddiplomaswent to Agassiztoreceive the finaland finishing ouches. The greatmanofferedhim a smallfish andtold himto describe it.

Post-GraduateStudent:"That'sonly a sunfish."Agassiz:"I know that. Writea descriptionof it."Aftera few minutesthe studentreturnedwith the descriptionof the IcthusHe-

liodiplodokus,or whatevertermis used to conceal the commonsunfish romvulgarknowledge,familyof Heliichthinkerus, tc., as found n textbooksof the subject.

Agassizagaintold the studentto describethe fish.The studentproduceda four-pageessay. Agassiz then told him to look at the

fish. At the end of threeweeks the fishwas in an advancedstateof decomposition,but the studentknew somethingaboutit. (pp. 17-18)

The Mexicansierrahas "XVII-15-IX"spines in the dorsalfin. These can easilybe counted.But if the sierrastrikeshardon the line so that ourhandsareburned, fthe fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colorspulsingandhis tail beatingthe air, a whole new relationalexternalityhas come intobeing-an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. Theonly way to count the spines of the sierraunaffectedby this secondrelationalreal-ity is to sit in a laboratory,open an evil-smellingar, remove a stiff colorless fishfromnormalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth "'D.XVII-15-IX."There you have recordeda reality which cannot be assailed-probably the least

important ealityconcerningeitherthe fishor yourself.It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickledfish has setdown one truthand has recordedin his experiencemanylies. The fish is not thatcolor, thattexture,thatdead,nordoes he smellthatway. (pp. 2-3)

We can read the Steinbeck as a critique of the Pound, and much of what I haveto say here is simply an amplification of that critique. But the criticism I have in

RobertScholes is Alumni/Alumnae rofessorof Englishat BrownUniversity.Theauthorof Semiot-ics andInterpretationNew Haven, Conn.:Yale UniversityPress, 1982)and co-editorof Fields ofWritingNew York:St. Martin'sPress, 1984),a freshman eader,he has recentlydirected he fresh-manwritingcoursesat BrownUniversityandhasjust been appointed o the new MLAcommissionon Writing ndLiterature.

College English, Volume 46, Number 7, November 1984

653



654 College English

mind is not really directed at Pound himself. He is simply the bait for bigger

game. I am after a whole methodology in the teaching of reading and writing in

America that is based upon the model of Agassiz and the fish, and the imagistic

notion of composition that lies behind it. As a composition teacher-a role he as-sumes frequently in the ABC of Reading-Pound suggests such exercises as the

following:

1. Let the pupilwritethe descriptionof a tree.2. Of a tree withoutmentioning he name of the tree (larch,pine, etc.) so that the

readerwill not mistake t for the descriptionof some other kindof tree. (p. 66)

This is Pound's own extension of the Agassiz method to composition. It is a sys-tem that privileges the eye, the gaze, and assumes the power of an innocent eye:

no names, no studying, no learning-the eye engendering the word. In a word:

imagism.

In Pound's "anecdote of Aggassiz and the fish," it is strongly suggested that

we learn by looking at things. Above all, the student is held to have learned

about the fish by repeatedly gazing at it. The student looks and writes, looks and

writes, until he sees the fish well and truly-as Pound's disciple Hemingway

might have said-and can describe it as it really is. But, using Hemingway's dis-

ciple Steinbeck's perspective, we may ask if he knows the fish as a fisherman

might know the fish. He knows something about a dead and decomposing crea-

ture but he does not know and cannot (in Roland Barthes' phrase) "speak the

fish." He can, however,now

speakand write

Agassizese,for this is what he has

really learned: to produce the sort of writing his teacher wants.

It is a parable of all schoolrooms, is it not, and perhaps a parody of them as

well. Agassiz' student seems to be learning about the subject, but what he is

truly learning is to give the teacher what he wants. He seems to be reporting

about a real and solid world in a perfectly transparent language, but actually he

is learning how to produce a specific kind of discourse, controlled by a particular

scientific paradigm, which requires him to be constituted as the subject of that

discourse in a particular way and to speak through that discourse of a world

made visible by the same controlling paradigm. The teacher's power over the

student is plain in Pound's example, and the student's ritual suffering as he en-dures the smell of the decomposing fish and the embarrassment of the teacher's

rebuffs is part of an initiation process he must undergo to enter a scientific com-

munity. As Michel Foucault puts it in The Archeology of Knowledge (trans. A.

M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon, 1972): "First question: who is speak-

ing?":

Who, amongthe totality of speakingindividuals,is accordedthe rightto use this

sort of language?Who is qualifiedto do so? Who derives from it his own specialquality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the as-

surance,at least the presumption hat what he says is true?Whatis the status of

the individuals who-alone-have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition,juridicallydefinedor spontaneouslyaccepted,to proffersucha discourse?(p. 50)

To have the right to speak as a biologist or naturalist, Agassiz's student must be

indoctrinated in a set of discursive procedures. To "speak the fish" as a biolo-



Is There a Fish in This Text? 655

gist or a fishermanor a poet is to speakin a particulardiscourse. Butwe Englishteachers have been slow to acknowledgethis.

The entire edifice of American instruction in writtencompositionrests on aset of assumptions much like Ezra Pound's. We have all been broughtup as

imagists.We assume that a complete self confronts a solid world, perceivingit

directlyand accurately,always capableof capturing t perfectlyin a transparentlanguage.Bring'em back alive;just give us the facts, ma'am; he way it was; tellit like it is; and that's the way it is. Perhapssome of our difficultyin teachingcompositionresults from our operatinguncriticallyon this set of assumptions-all of which have been questionedso thoroughlynow that the whole naive epis-temology uponwhich they rest is lyingin ruins aroundus. In responseto this sit-

uation,we can assumethat ourpracticehas nothing o do with theory,or we can

make the opposite assumption,and try to use the new developmentsin struc-turalistandpost-structuralistheoryas the basis for a new practicein the teach-

ing of composition.Manywill choose the former of these two assumptions,and

perhapsthey will be rightto do so, for it will not be easy to found an American

practice upon these largely European theories. Nevertheless, that is what Iwouldurge uponmy fellow teachersof readingandwriting.

To makethe case for such a project, and in so doingto take a few steps in thedirectionof a more fully developed semiotics of composition,will be my objectin the remainderof this discussion. My method willbe to applya semioticproce-

dure of analysis to Pound'sparableof instruction,returning, ike the student ofAgassiz, to this specimen againand againuntil it stinks in all our nostrils. Likethe student in the parablewe shall have to learn to "see" our object. Pound'sanecdote comes to us in the form of a text. To see it with some degreeof thor-

oughness, then, we must see it "transtextually" (in GerardGenette's termi-nology), as a text related to other texts. First we shall work backwardfromPoundtowardthe texts that he has adaptedin creatinghis own, and then out-ward to some other texts by andaroundAgassiz, concludingwith some texts re-latedmainlyby theirown concernto speak, in someway, the fish.

The anecdote of Agassiz, the student, and the fish mighthave come to Pound

in any numberof ways, writtenandoral, but there are two versions availabletous in print, which were also available to Pound before he wrote the ABC of

Reading n 1934.They areNathanielSouthgateShaler'srecollectionof his initia-tion into Agassiz's world in 1859, as recorded in The Autobiography ofNathaniel Southgate Shaler (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1907), and SamuelH.Scudder'srecollectionof his very similarexperienceat about the same time, butfirstpublished n Every Saturdaymagazine,4 April, 1874. Bothof these versionsof two very similarexperiences were extracted from their originaltexts by anEnglishprofessorat CornellUniversity,LaneCooper,and published n 1917 n alittle volume called Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His

Methodof Instruction Ithaca,N.Y.: The ComstockPub.).There is a strongpre-sumption hatPoundin fact knew Cooper'slittle volumeanddrew his anecdotefromit. I say thatthe presumptions strong, because it is Cooperwho draws theparallelbetween biology and the study of poetry, between the naturalscientist



656 College English

and the English teacher. As he puts it in his preface, the reason why an Englishteacher should be moved to issue a book on Agassiz is that "I have been taught,and I try to teach others, after a method in essence identical with that employed

by the great naturalist" (p. v).

In his "Introductory Note" Cooper develops this theme further:

Within recent years we have witnessed an extraordinarydevelopmentin certainstudies, which, thoughsuperficiallydifferent romthose pursuedby Agassiz, havean underlyingbond of unitywith them, but which are generallycarriedon withoutreference o principlesgoverning he investigationof every organismand all organiclife. I have in mind,particularly,he spreadof literaryandlinguisticstudyin Amer-ica duringthe last few decades, and the lack of a common standardof judgmentamongthose who engage in such study. Most personsdo not, in fact, discern theclose, thoughnot obvious, relationbetweeninvestigation n biologyor zoology and

the observationandcomparisonof those organic ormswhichwe call formsof liter-atureand works of art. Yet the notion that a poem or a speech shouldpossess theorganicstructure,as it were, of a livingcreature s basic in the thoughtof the greatliterary critics of all time. . . . We study a poem, the work of man's art, in the same

way thatAgassiz made Shalerstudya fish, the work of God's art;the objectin ei-ther case, is to discover the relation between formor structureand function or es-sentialeffect. (pp. 2-4)

Forty years later, when Northrop Frye suggested that the study of literature be

made more like the study of biology, this proposal came as a great shock, even

at Cornell University, where I happened to be studying at the time, and where

Lane Cooper's memory was still green. The shock, I submit, was not so much inthe suggestion that literary study learn from science, as in the different notion of

biology put forward by Frye:

As long as biology thoughtof animaland vegetableformsof life as constituting ts

subject, the differentbranchesof biology were largelyefforts of cataloguing.Assoon as it was the existence of forms of life themselves that had to be explained,the theoryof evolutionandthe conceptsof protoplasmandthe cell pouredinto bi-

ology andcompletelyrevitalized t.It occurs to me thatliterarycriticism s now in such a state of naive inductionas

we find in a primitivescience. (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton,N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1957], p. 15)

Frye drew a careful parallel between biology and literary study, arguing that bi-

ology became a full fledged science when it went beyond close observation of

the individual object to study the systems by which individual objects were in

fact ordered and perceived. Frye was attempting in his own way (as Geoffrey

Hartman noticed long ago) to move toward a structuralism in literary study. It

was this that made his work so startling and refreshing at the time, and it was

this that prepared those Anglo-American critics influenced by Frye to receive

structuralism hospitably when it began to be exported from the continent of Eu-

rope.The shift in literary studies indicated through the different uses of the biolog-

ical analogy by Lane Cooper in 1917 and Northrop Frye in 1957 is only part of

the history we are considering. The scientific metaphor itself conceals something




in the agendasof both Cooperand Frye thatmust also be considered,andin thecase of Cooperthis is especially important.Strippedof its scientificcloak, whatpreciselywas the method of literarystudy that Cooperwas advocatingback in1917?

Cooper offered a method that was essentially hermeneutic: "we study apoem, the work of man's art, in the sameway thatAgassiz made Shalerstudyafish, the workof God's art." The appearanceof God in this equation s no acci-dent but partof its design. Substitute a tree for the fish and Joyce Kilmer'sin-famous poem can be generated by a simple, almost mathematicaloperation:"Poems are made by fools like me,/But only God can make a tree." And whomakes the fools, one wishes to ask? This excessive anthropomorphizingf thecreativeprinciple n the universeis a majorproblem n Westerntheology, but itis a kind

of red herring n the presentdiscourse and we mustabandon t. For ourpurposeswhat is important n Cooper'sformulations its focus on the singleob-ject, fish or text, the meaningof which is guaranteednot by its place in an orderor system, butby the creator whose creature t is andwhose presencein the ob-ject is signifiedby the object's structure.Beforefish or poem, we are in the pres-ence of presence, of metaphysicalpresence, that is, which guaranteesthe ob-ject's meaning. As Cooper himself observes, "Agassiz, considered in hisphilosophicalrelations,was a Platonist,since he clearlybelieved that the formsof natureexpressedthe essentialideas of a divineintelligence"(p. 3).

There is more to Pound's fish thanmeets the eye. He has suppressedthe Pla-

tonism of his model, of course, but his procedure should make us wonder howmuch latentPlatonismthere may be in all attemptsto see the objectas in itself itreally is, whetherthe object be a tree, a fish, or a text. For here is the point atwhich the older criticismand pedagogy is confrontedmost directlyby semiotictheory and practice. Is the object's meaning guaranteed by reference to itscreator's intention in makingit, or is its meaninga function of its position in asystem of objects linked to it by paradigmatic nd syntagmaticprocesses? Tak-ingPound'sanecdote of the fish as our object, I wish to argue that we can inter-pret it best only by taking our eyes off it, denyingit status as a thing in itself,and reading it as intertextually as we can within the limits of the present dis-

course.We can begin by looking at the actualpre-textsthat lie behindPound'stext.

In considering hem we will see what Poundretained,what he suppressed,whathe added, and what he transformed or his own purposes. Before receivinghisfish Nathaniel Shalerwas given a preliminaryoral examination,which revealedthathe knew some Latin and Greek, some French, and a good deal of German.It was also determinedthat he had read Agassiz's Essay on Classification,and"had noted in it the influence of Schelling's views" (p. 19). The exam endedwith a fencing match(quite a literal one, with masks, foils, and swordsin play).Onlyafter all this came the famousfish:

When I sat me downbeforemy tinpan, Agassizbroughtme a smallfish,placingit before me with the rathersternrequirement hatI shouldstudy it, but should onno accounttalk to anyone concerning t, nor readanythingrelated to fishes, until Ihadhis permissionso to do. (Cooper,p. 22)



658 College English

For a week Agassiz refused to hear a reporton the fish. As Shalertells us, "Atfirst this neglect was distressing;but I saw that it was a game, for he was, as I

discernedratherthan saw, covertly watchingme" (p. 22). Shalerlooks, Agassizwatcheshimlooking, and Shaler discerns rather hansees Agassiz watchinghim

looking. Gazes run rampanthere. At the end of the week Shaler made a one-

hour oralreport,to which he received the response, "That is not right."Recog-

nizing that "he was playing a game with me to see if I were capable of doinghard,continuouswork without the supportof a teacher," Shaler went to work

for another week and at last satisfied Agassiz. "The incident of the fish," he

writes, "madean end of my novitiate"(p. 25).At this point I wish to draw a few of the conclusionsthat thejuxtapositionof

Shaler's andPound's versions of the fish incidentmakesavailableto us. First, it

was obviousto Shaler that he was involved in a

power game,a

ritual,a noviti-

ate. Second, the rules of the game-no reading up on the subject, strict con-

centrationon the single object-are remarkablyike the techniquesdevelopedbyI. A. Richardsand the New Critics for the teachingof poetry. Third,the candi-

date, havingread his teacher's essay on classificationbeforebeing given his ob-

ject for analysis, is remarkablyunlike the untutoredundergraduateonfrontinga

poemor the freshmancompositionstudent told to describe a tree. Fourth,in this

version of the fish story, the fish itself is not named, nor is there any writingaboutthe fish beyond the takingof notes. The reportsto Agassiz are made or-

ally, not in the form of written compositionsas they are in Pound's anecdote.

Now let us look at Scudder'sreporton his very similarexperience.Scudder,who wanted to study nice clean insects, was nevertheless given a

fish, a haemulon,to study. Scuddermakes much of the fish's disagreeablesmell,

its "ghastly" and "hideous" appearance, and the limitations under which he

worked:"I mightnot use a magnifying-glass;nstrumentsof all kindswere inter-

dicted" (p. 43). At last, he got the idea of drawing he fish, andbeganto see fea-

tures in it he had not noticed before. For this he was rewardedby Agassiz, who

told him, "That is right, a pencil is one of the best of eyes" (p. 43). But, when

questioned,he did not satisfy the master. He was told he hadn't seen "one of

the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your

eyes as the fish itself; look again, look again!"and, as Scuddertells us, he wasthen left to his "misery." When he hadn't found the missing "conspicuousfea-

ture" by the end of the afternoon of his second day with the fish he was told to

go home and report in the morningfor an examination without looking at the

fish. He says that he walked home, spent a wakefulnight, and returned n the

morning o face "a manwho seemed to be quiteas anxiousas I thatI shouldsee

for myself what he saw. 'Do you perhapsmean,' I asked, 'thatthe fish has sym-metrical sides with paired organs?'" To which the "thoroughly pleased Pro-

fessor Agassiz" replied, "of course!of course!" (p. 45).Fromthis version too some conclusions may be drawn. This has less the air

of an initiation than Shaler's experience, and more that of a puzzle or riddle:guess what the professor has in mind! Here, too, the examination is oral, not

written.It is Poundwho has broughtwriting nto his exemplaryfable. Seeing is

emphasizedhere, too, but the finalproblemis not exactly a problemin vision.




Scudder is in fact told to solve the problem without looking at the fish. Andsolve it he does. But bilateral symmetryis a feature of a classificationsystemratherthan a simple fact of nature.It cannot be "seen" apartfrom the conceptthat gives it status, and it certainlycannot be drawneasily in the case of fish,since their flat shape leads us normallyto draweither one side of a fish or theother. Scudder'sanecdote would seem, then, to illus.rate superblythe principlethat vision is always mediated, that the concept enables the perception."Seeing" itself is not a simplefunction but a complexone, and scientificseeingis always dependent upon instruments.If not the microscope,then the pencil; ifnot the pencil, then the conceptualsystem, which is itself, of course, an instru-

ment, an apparatus that enables a certain sort of vision. Shaler had read

Agassiz's Essay on Classificationbefore he was given his fish. It is, by the way,

an essay on the classificationof fish, not simplyon classification n general.Andwhat of Scudder?What did he do duringhis sleepless night?Did hejust lie there

thinkingof fish? Or did he talk to anyone aboutthem?Mighthe have consulted

Agassiz's own essay on the classificationof fishes?Whence came his miraculousvision of a fish with "symmetricalsides andpairedorgans"?Whatorgansdid he"see" and how did he see them? He does not tell us. Pound,of course, tells usmore. Let us return to him like a good student to his ghastly fish and examinehimyet anothertime, for as he says himself,

TheproperMETHOD or studyingpoetryandgood letters is the method of con-temporarybiologists, that is carefulfirst-hand xaminationof the matter, and con-

tinualCOMPARISON f one 'slide' or specimenwithanother.(p. 17)

Poundpresentsthe anecdote to us as an anecdote,which allows him a racon-teur's license to improvehis material, andimproveit he does, for he is a superbraconteurand a well-schooled rhetorician. First he gives us an arrestinggener-alization: "No man. ..." Then he introduces an alazon in the form of a disci-

pulus gloriosus with "honors and diplomas" seeking "final and finishing ouch-es." Agassiz, a "great" man is our eiron, offeringa smallfish to the proud stu-dent, who remarksin his pridefulness,"That's only a sunfish." Only! He willrue thatonly, will be not? The student returns n a matterof minuteswith a text-

book description of a fish with a Latin name. Here Pound, who often had noquarrelwith eitherlearningor Latin, makesfun of the name as obfuscatory. Heassociatesthe student,not the teacher,with this name by an intricatemetonymythatincludesa partialhomonymitybetweenthe student's diplomasand the nameHeliodiplodokus.We may speculatethat Pound vaguely rememberedScudder'shaemulonin inventing the Heliodiplodokus, but he is merely having fun. Onecould have had fun with Scudder'soriginalfish, too, for the haemulon s betterknown as the "grunt," because of the noise it makes when taken out of thewater. But how could a student of Agassiz ever learn about the reason for thecommonnameby simply examininga dead fish?It does not gruntwhen removed

from the alcohol bottle. We are back to the question of what it means to knowthe fish, but Poundis our fish for the momentand we must continue to play him.

Pound's student next producesa four-pageessay, perhapsbecause of Pound'sinterest in writing, perhaps simply as a way of making his efforts concrete.



660 College English

Pound's fish decomposes badly, while Shaler's and Scudder's do not, because

they keep them wet and replace them in their alcohol bottles every night like

goodlittle students,but it certainlymakesa fine storythisway, a far betterstorythan those of Scudderand Shaler themselves. Pound's studentsuffers these in-

dignities for three weeks, Shaler for two, and Scudder for only three days.Pound'sexaggeration mprovesthe tale, of course, and is of the essence of theanecdotalmode. One suspects, however, that Shaler has "improved"his mate-rial in this respect, too; that for him Scudderis a pre-text. The story grows in

each retelling, like many fish stories. But what should we, looking at Pound,

lookingat Agassiz, looking at Shaler, looking at Scudder,looking at their fish,learnfromall this?

We may ask ourselves what is the reality, the truthbehind the incident, but

we will find no readyanswer. Pound's distortionsare clear

enough,but what is

he distorting?Shaler,boxer andfencer, gives us an initiationritual.Scudder,the

fastidiousentomologist, gives us a puzzle. Both studentspass their tests and goon to become professors themselves. Whatwe see is a stage in their learningadiscourse (as Foucaultputs it, or, in ThomasS. Kuhn'sterminology,acquiringa

paradigm).Pound, the imagist, gives us a recipe for imagism: ook at the objectand writeaboutthe way it looks withoutnaming t andyou will capture ts truth.

Each one sees what his own discourse lets him see. And what do we see? Why,the truth,of course.

"Whatis Truth;saidjesting Pilate; And would not stay for an Answer"-so

grumblesthe father of British empiricism,Francis Bacon, in the opening sen-tence of his Essayes, but those who stay with Bacon himself to learnwhat truth

is may not be satisfied. Observing n passing that poets lie for pleasure's sake,

Bacon goes on to tell us that "This same Truth, s a Naked, andOpenday light,that doth not shew, the Masques and Mummeries,and Triumphsof the world,halfe so stately, and daintily,as Candle-lights."In short,Bacon himselfcan an-

swer Pilate's question with nothingbetter than a metaphor-Truth is a Naked

andOpen day light-as if he were himselfa lying poet whose languagecould not

finda nakedandopen way of sayingwhattruth s. The question s answered n a

more satisfying (more truthful?)way by one morecomfortable n a jester's cap

and bells thanPontiusPilate:

What s truth?A movingarmyof metaphors,metonymiesandanthropomorphisms,in shorta summaof humanrelationships hat are being poeticallyand rhetoricallysublimated,transposed,and beautifieduntil after long andrepeateduse, a peopleconsidersthem as solid, canonical,and unavoidable.Truthsare illusionswhose il-lusionarynaturehas been forgotten. . . . (F. W. Nietzsche, "On TruthandLies")

To tell the truth, to capture reality in writing, is a noble aim, and to teach

such skill were to make instruction in composition a high calling indeed. But

such workis not easy. I proposeto consider some of the difficultiesby takingan

example or two from Agassiz, since he has been put before us by Pound andCooperas an exemplarof both instructionand accurateperception.Confronted

with a new phenomenonin his own experience,how did he perceive it? In what

termsdid he write aboutsuch a thinghimself?




In 1846Agassiz visited Philadelphia,where we are told he encounteredblackAmericans or the firsttime. His biographer,EdwardLurie(in LouisAgassiz, ALife in Science [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960])has given us abriefextractfrom a letterhe wrote to his motheruponthatoccasion:

I hardlydareto tell you the painful mpressionI received, so mucharethe feelingsthey gave me contrary o all our ideas of the brotherhoodof manandunique originof ourspecies. But truthbeforeall. The morepity I felt at the sightof this degradedanddegeneraterace the more . . . impossible t becomesfor me to repressthe feel-ingthatthey are not of the same bloodwe are. (p. 257)

In public essays he repeated the same themes, arguingthat blacks were bynaturesubmissive,obsequious,andimitative,andthat "whiterelationswithcol-ored people would be conducted more intelligently if the fundamental dif-ferences between humantypes were realized and understood"(Lurie's summa-ry, pp. 260, 262).

"Many an eye/He trained to Truth's exact severity," said the poet JamesRussellLowell in his encomiasticverses uponthe greatman. And "Truthbeforeall," said Agassiz to his mother,but what is truth?Whatdid Agassiz see whenhe looked at black Americans?Whathe saw was surely not an unmediatedvi-sion. It was, in fact, what many other "cultivated"individualsof his time saw,but he was not an ordinary ndividual.He was a scientist, a zoologist, and hisviews carriedweight. He developed a theory of humanity,assertingthat therewere eightdistinct

types-Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol,AmericanIndian,Negro,Hottentot, Malayan,and Australian-insisting that these types were distinct inorigin,with "theirdifferences,"as Lurieputs it, "stampedon themfrom the be-ginning." In the decade leading up to the Civil Warthese views were of morethanpassinginterest. His biographer,n fact, comes to the followingmelancholyconclusion:"within ten years Agassiz hadprovidedracialsupremacistswithpri-mary arguments. . . . That Agassiz permitted his reputation to support doctrinesof social andracialinequalitywas indeedtragic"(p. 265).

Truthbefore all, said Agassiz, but what is truth?For Agassiz, truthhad, asLane Cooperpointed out, a very Platonic cast. This emergesclearly in his re-

sponse to Darwin's work, where his refusal to accept the theory of evolutiongraduallyunderminedhis standingas a scientist. He became a forerunnerof ourcontemporary"creationscientists," in fact, and did everythinghe could to rec-oncile scientificfindingswith received religioustruths. In the Essay on Classifi-cationitself, he had arguedthatrealitywas regularly oundto agreewith a prioriconceptionsof it, which, he maintained,demonstrated hat the human and theDivine intellects were linkedby "an identity of operations"(see Lurie,p. 283).This view led him to assert that all species were absolute,fixed fromtheircrea-tion, andhence to reject all fossil evidencefor evolution. Therewere no variantsfromspecies, he claimed, asserting at a meeting of the Boston Society for Natu-

ralHistorythat, "in 6,000fishes, he had not seen a variety"(Lurie, p. 297).We are back to lookingat fish again,but on a granderscale, andwe mustask

a question:why couldn't Agassiz see the evidence in fish and fossils that manyother scientists of his time saw in them? The answer, as ThomasKuhn elabo-



662 College English

rates it for us in so many passages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is

because vision depends upon expectations to a considerable degree. Because

Agassizrefusedto accept the paradigm hiftin his discipline,he could not "see"

the evidence that mighthave persuadedhim to accept the shift. We "see" and"are" in discourse.

The lesson to be drawnfrom this exampleof Agassiz and the fish is thatwhat

the studentneeds from the teacher is help in seeing discourse structuresthem-

selves in all their fullness and theirpower. The way to see the fish and to write

the fish is first to see how one's discourse writes the fish. And the way to see

one discourseis to see more than one. To write the fish in manymodes is finallyto see that one will never catch the fish in any one discourse. As teachers of

writingwe have a special responsibilityto help our studentsgain awarenessof

discoursestructuresand the ways in which they both enable and constrainour

vision. And the only way to do this is to readand write in a rangeof discursivemodes.

Havingmadethis point, I wish to adda necessary qualification.The existence

of specific discursivecodes seems to me beyond argument,and their constrain-

ing effect on the actual practice of writing a necessary corollary of their exis-

tence-but it would be unwarranted o assume from this that such constraints

are absolute and fixed. Codes change. Discursive practice modifies discursive

systems, which are never completely closed. In short, there is always roomfor

creativityin any discursive order,but it is attainedby mastering he practiceof

the discourse to a degree that enables new utterances to be formed, which in

turn become a partof the body of discursivemodelsandfinallyeffect changesin

the code itself.

I wouldlike to concludeby offeringan exampleof creativityat workin what has

been widely recognizedas one of the most rigiddiscursivesystems ever to oper-

ate in English literature: Augustan poetry, with its heroic couplets and poetic

diction, so severely criticizedby Wordsworthand othersas unnatural,artificial,

and totally incapable of seeing or writing "the fish," offering us instead such

locutions as "finny tribe" and "scaly breed." The indictment s certainlycor-

rect, up to a point, but in acknowledging t we shouldalso recognizethatthereisnothing especially fishy about such scientific statements as Scudder's "sym-

metricalsides with pairedorgans." Every discourseis a net that capturessome

aspects of its objects at the necessary cost of allowing others to slip through.

Even "finnytribe" captures somethingof the realityof fish. But let us look at

the actualpracticeof an Augustanpoet. Here is a teenage versifierof some tal-

ent working in the pastoral mode. He has, in fact, just committed a "scaly

breed" two lines before, but he goes on:

Ourplenteous streamsa variousrace supplyThe bright-eyedperchwith fins of Tyriandye,

The silver eel in shiningvolumesrolled,The yellow carpin scales bedroppedwith gold,Swift trouts,diversifiedwith crimson stains,

And pikes, the tyrantsof the watery plains. (lines 141-146)



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coil, roll, and hence, scroll. Whenparchmentscrolls gave way to bound booksthe word volume was extended to rectangularbooks as well as rolled scrolls.

Pope's "shining volumes rolled" is a clever archaism, restoring to the word

"volume" its sense of scroll. In "WindsorForest" some learningattaches to theeel, even as political power attaches to the pike. In The Dunciad the learningwhich is rejected by those Index-learnerswho do not read theirvolumes is sig-nifiedby the absence of the volumes in this new imageof the eel of science. The

eel of science is an eel and not some other kind of fish because only the eel

comes in the form of a volume. The eel, of course, is also slipperyand hard to

hold, but Index-learning, utoredby Dullness, can reduce both the lustreand the

slipperinessof those shiningvolumes, and holdthe eel of science by the tail.I am suggestingthat what we are normallycontentto accept as hiddenwithin

the black box calledcreativity

can here beglimpsed

as an intertextualprocess,the suppressionof which generatesthe power of the finalimage.The startlingor

surprising spects of the imageof the eel of science in The Dunciad-which is to

say the unexpectednessthatgives it a highlevel of informationand hence much

of its poetical quality-is achieved by Pope's erasureof some parts of his train

of thought,crudelymeasurablehere by the disappearanceor non-appearance f

the word "volumes." This train of thoughtitself is an aspect of Pope's masteryof his discipline,his knowledgeof languages,his recollectionof pre-texts, in this

case one of his own, and his habitof searching or imagesto give substanceto a

developing low of thought.

Some beautiesyet no Preceptscan declare,For there's a happinessas well as care.

MusicresemblesPoetry, in each

Are namelessgraceswhich no methodsteach,And which a master-hand lonecan reach.

("Essay on Criticism," ines 141-145)

scholes is there fish in the text

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