If I wrote a poem (or any typically short piece of literature) and a scholarly essay (or any generally long work), which of the two are you more likely to pick up and read? If you are like me, the answer would be “neither,” but in a situation in which you are forced to choose, my best guess is that you would pick up the piece of literature that requires the least amount of effort. I mean, honestly, the only people who genuinely pick up excessively long pieces of literature are professors and older people who actually have the time to read them. Everyone else is either forced to read them or kidding themselves; they believe they have a true desire and passion for the art, but do not yet understand literature and simply want to come across as intellectual.
Sure, in order to get better and understand literature people must read more and harder material, however poems, plays, short novels/stories, and other seemingly simple forms of literature can be and are just as hard to understand as philosophical and scholarly writing.
A poem is (to many) a basic way to express themselves in their own creative way. A poem, however also entails more than that. A poem can utilize metaphors, rhyme, heightened language, slang, sounds, and improper grammar. Although a few of these things seem to go against a claim that poems can be difficult to interpret, these characteristics allow poems to convey the true feelings of the writer and make the piece of literature that much harder to understand. Poems are so valuable and enlightening because they are open to multiple interpretations. You may look at a poem, read it, and gather something completely different than what I gather from the poem. The most radical part about this is that the poem in question can be of any length and with whatever level of language it wants. If I were to say something that would appear to have one meaning like, “I looked at him, and I rolled on Friday.” One may think I am plainly talking about the act of physically rolling on that day. Another person may be very keen and know that Friday may very well be the name of a given object or animal (or person). Someone else can very well believe that I am crazy and said something random and irrelevant. From just one nine-word sentence three hypothetical people interpreted the same line in three different ways, and I, the author, never said or confirmed any of the three as being “correct”. All three interpretations are valid, but none refer to what I originally meant when I said that line. The truth is that I was referring to “rolling my eyes.”
Now, in this case I partially cheated because I took advantage of the fact I was speaking and “eye” is identical in sound as “I,” but had I not used that “loophole” there was still more than one way to interpret that line. Plus, I never added what many poems have as well: deeper meanings. These “inside joke” type of things add an extra layer of complexity that places another hurdle for the audience to jump over after they take what they read for face-value, that is the literal meaning.
In case you still do not believe that poems and other brief forms of literature are not the philosophy for the many, but instead are equally and sometimes harder pieces of literature, ponder this question, “would you rather have a final that is ten words or ten pages?” Intuitively, you might jump to have a final that is only ten words, but after contemplation, you would realize that ten words in not so easy and no longer more appealing than that ten-page paper. I’m willing to bet that even if I raised the number of pages to twenty, you would still prefer the twenty-page final. In fact, many of you would continue to take the pages option over the word option until the word option reached a page. The realization with this comes from the understanding that with length, comes a much easier and more accepted way to babble, or to be frank, bullshit. With proper care, or even without care, people can bullshit their way through a paragraph or even a page of that ten-page paper without being caught or penalized. But, with ten-words, every single word better count; it better mean something. Otherwise, it will be seen as garbage and you will be made a fool of.

This is the thing many fail to realize early on: Brevity does not equal effortlessness, nor means that it is self-explanatory. Many individuals and even classes spend hours if not days trying to comprehend a poem. The words on the paper (or nowadays screen) may be simple, but the purpose can be just as profound as the words are simple. Take for example a poem and a poet that many people know or have at least heard of, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The poem is eight lines, and yet several sources have pages full of analysis for the poem. this ranges from every word to the sentence to the poem itself. There are various levels to the complexity of this seemingly simple poem. In case you are unfamiliar with the poem or need a refresher here is a common version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

As you can see, all of these words are intelligible. Some publications have different punctuation, and some say ‘June’ instead of ‘day’ and ‘ones’ instead of ‘your.’ Nonetheless, all the words are easy to pronounce and the vocabulary is fairly basic. However, the poem is not as easily digestible. Similar to the example i provided early on, there is a basic interpretation which takes the words for what they tend to mean on a day-to-day basis. This interpretation believes that she is talking about herself, either in the mirror or not, but talking about herself being a nobody nonetheless. And that keen person might say she is stating her name (nobody) and is incredibly glad she ran into another person with such a unique name. additionally, that last person can claim the same as before, the words are nonsense and inconsequential, and Dickinson may just be crazy. Now, going off of the more rational beliefs, Dickinson may very well have drawn inspiration for this poem from inflection and her insecurities, but the meaning drawn from the poem after examination is that Dickinson is glorifying anonymity. The most significant thing about these ”understandings” is that there is no way of confirming that these “understandings” are even true understandings or whether they are misinterpretations.
I know that when I first read this poem, I did not know what to think. I was not sure if I had the right idea, if I was all over the place, if she was all over the place, or if it was never meant to be understood. All of these thoughts still entered my head, even though I had just gone through a month of analyzing other poets and other short forms of literature. I spent weeks learning techniques and conditioning my brain to think a certain way (sometimes this meant not thinking a all), and yet, even after all the practice and note-taking, the comprehensibility of the poem was still challenging for myself and my peers. The poem is only eight lines. It rhymes. It expresses emotion. But still, the meaning is ambiguous. Now, imagine if she had decided to write a novel or a philosophical piece about the benefits of not being known and the dullness of being famous. I’m almost positive that more people would understand what she is discussing and in a shorter period of time. After-all, Dickinson would have an enormous range that she could take advantage of. Whether the work was one page or one hundred pages the concept would still be easier to grasp than that hidden within the forty-three words of the poem.

If you still do not accept the fact that poems and other short forms of literature are not philosophy for the many, think about one of the -if not the-most essential qualities necessary for understanding literature: being literate. In order to even read, let alone judge and try to process literature, you need to be literate. If you cannot understand any words visually, then poetry cannot be accessible to you for the same reasons many feel philosophical and scholarly writing is not accessible: it’s too hard and unreadable. Well, after reading through something I am sure you did not intend on reading through to the end, it is impossible to question if poetry can be just as inaccessible to the many as philosophical and scholarly writing.

In conclusion, there is no way to refute the claim that individuals can still reach a higher level of understanding through poetry and other pieces of literature, even though they are short and simple. Honestly, there is no reason as to why you waste time denying a truth and spent time reading this redundant essay proving how inaccessible poetry can be and at the same time showing how accessible scholarly writing can be. I mean you just read this and I am sure you understand well enough to provide the gist of it to a friend without worry of being wrong. So, stop thinking about where you can try to find holes in my argument: there are other questions to think about.

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It’s the little blinking red light on the dashboard signaling a hiccup in the system. It’s the bridge that collapses under the weight of all the gears churning inside your head. More specifically, it’s the blank look on your face right now asking me what the hell I’m talking about. I suppose now would be more than appropriate — actually, necessary — to clarify what I am describing here, or better yet, what I have been meaning to say thus far. But the very question of what I mean necessitates more than just a response to what I am describing. It also requires communicating my description of something in a way to which others can relate. In other words, what does it mean to get everyone on the same page of something I am describing?

What we end up with are two questions: one, what does it mean when we describe something and what does it mean to translate that description to others? That is to say, what are we really doing when we describe, label, or categorize something as is? We might say we are making a judgment or taking a perspective on an object of interest. Thus, for some, an object of interest may appear a certain way, and for others, that same object may appear in a different way. But how are we to reconcile all the various descriptions, judgments, and perspectives? Is it still the object of interest with which we are really concerned? Or could our very descriptions, our language, and the words we use to somehow encapsulate the object of interest be the actual crux of the matter here?

What emerges from these questions is a divide between language and the objects that language supposedly represents via descriptions, labels, and categories, or simply put, words. And these words, of which we use an innumerable amount and in countless combinations, seem to jeopardize our grasp of the actual object in its essence, or the truth. It is like what Nietzsche says, “With words it is never a question of truth” (116). Our conversations end up being only conversations about our language. So that when one fails to follow the language of what the other is trying to say, it is not the object of the conversation that is obscure, but the colored, contextualized, presupposing, and goal-oriented words we use. And to get lost in the heavily assuming language we use might make us come to a full stop, flashing our little red lights, to show that the language we encounter problematically jars with our own. Or we might try to wrestle with that incongruity, pushing our minds to rebuild the broken bridge between the language we use to describe objects and the languages others use to describe the same object.

Hemingway makes so vivid this idea that every conversation is essentially just us conversing with language about language in his short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” The story stars two waiters who are preparing to close their cafe for the night but are stuck with their last customer — a deaf old man slightly drunk from all his orders of brandy. The waiters exchange many words about this old man as they wait for him to finally pay and leave. Much of the dialogue is written without the conventional “he said,” “she said” labels before or after every verbal piece, so it is often ambiguous as to which of the two waiters is actually speaking. But it turns out that those labels aren’t necessary given that the waiters are marked by their different languages. And by languages, I don’t mean Spanish versus Russian or Bostonian dialect versus Californian dialect. I mean the language that betrays the speaker’s underlying assumptions, motivations, and background, which all in turn shape the way they understand and describe objects.

Hemingway assigns each character a role in this conversation about conversation. We’ve already established that the interlocutors are the two waiters who each speak through their respective colored glasses of reality. But the deaf old man also demands our attention for being two things: deaf and the subject of the waiters’ conversations. The first exchange between the two waiters brings to light the role that deafness plays in this conversation about conversation:

“Last week he [the deaf old man] tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“Why?”

“He was in despair.”

“What about?”

“Nothing.”

“How do you know it was nothing?”

“He has plenty of money.” (Hemingway)

Unable to hear, the old deaf man cannot answer for any of the questions and assumptions the two waiters make about a recent event that supposedly occurred in his life: his attempted suicide. He is like the silent universe that is inevitably mum about the truth, so to speak, to all those who inquire by poking and prodding for the truth. In this way, the deaf old man is the object whose truth will not be known regardless of how much the waiters make an effort to guess what it is.

So far, all that is known about the deaf old man is filtered by the waiters’ interpretations, which are subsequently expressed by their words, their language. That is, what we are left with are mere descriptions of an old man who supposedly tried to commit suicide, was in despair about nothing, and has plenty of money. And this train of thought, going from suicide and despair to nothing and money ends up revealing more about the waiter who spoke rather than the old man.

Readers can never be too sure of what kind of man this deaf old man is. Did he really attempt to commit suicide? Were his motivations truly despair? And was his despair really because of nothing? For all we know, the waiter who made these descriptions could be spinning a narrative to fit the picture he may already have of this deaf old man. In a later section of the dialogue, one of the waiters (it is not clear whether it is the same waiter who made the initial commentary about the old man) claims that the old man “must be eighty years old,” to which the same waiter or the second waiter immediately follow-ups saying, “Anyway I should say he was eighty” (Hemingway). The waiters are actively constructing an idea of this old man with their language, which becomes the truth accepted not only by the waiters accept but also by unsuspecting readers.

As the story progresses, the waiters’ descriptions of the deaf old man begin to reflect more concretely the character and values of each waiter. One of the waiters is in a hurry to close the café and come home to his wife before three in the morning while the other is unhurried and unnerved by any timely obligation. Upon observing the hurried waiter’s successful attempt to finally get the old man to leave the café, the unhurried waiter asks “What is an hour?”, to which the hurried waiter replies, “More to me than to him [the deaf old man]” (Hemingway). In response, the unhurried waiter says, “An hour is the same” (Hemingway). What is so remarkable about this minute exchange is that how well it exemplifies what it means for language to be distinct from that which it describes. The question by itself, “What is an hour?” seems to anticipate on face value, the essence of an hour, of time. But the response that the first waiter gives answer a different question; that is, he answers “What is an hour to me?” His understanding of time is relative to himself, which in effect replaces time, the object of interest, with himself. It is no longer the object that is inspiring its descriptions, but the waiter himself. The unhurried waiter, however, nullifies the label that the hurried waiter assigns to the object of time. That time is more to one than to another is purely arbitrary. For “An hour is the same” to whomever and whenever. There is nothing more to the object that makes it any more special to a particular person. Rather, it is the labels, the language we use, for describing these objects that makes them appear as such.

Perhaps most indicative of this idea of the autonomy of language is the conversation the unhurried waiter has with himself. At this point, the hurried waiter has left the café for home and the unhurried waiter is left musing on how good and necessary it is to have a clean, well-lighted café. Contrary to his hurried colleague’s opinion, the unhurried waiter deplores the absence of such a café, which he thinks leaves him with no dignity and “a nothing that he knew too well” (Hemingway). The idea of nothing makes its entrance again in the latter half of the short story. We’ve already seen it mentioned during the exchange about why the deaf old man was driven to despair. But in this case, the use of the term nothing is different. The waiter calls all things, including man, a nothing and contrasts it with light, cleanness, and order. Though the waiter does not specify what he means by this nothing, he prefaces it earlier while conversing with his colleague saying, “Each night I am reluctant to close up [the café] because there may be some one who needs the café” (Hemingway). There is a twinge of loneliness, a kind of emptiness, in this nothing upon which the waiter constantly dwells. But not much can be said as of yet until further on when the waiter says the following in his head:

Some lived in it [the nothing] and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. (Hemingway)

The waiter uses the term nada, the Spanish equivalent for nothing, as not simply a thing that exists but surrounds us, is us, and pervades the very language used for acknowledging and declaring allegiance to God. But what’s important to note here is also the phrase “pues nada.” It is recognized as a muletilla, which is a word that serves as a filler or verbal crutch. There is no meaning to a filler word, just as nothing is devoid of any meaning. They are arbitrary terms that illuminate nothing about anything, just as the language and the labels we designate for objects reveal pretty much nothing about the actual object itself.

The very repetition of nada further reinforces this nothingness by rendering the term meaningless and arbitrary. The waiter replaces nearly every significant word in the Lord’s Prayer with nada. But this act of replacement is more than just to emphasize nothingness in human lives, but also to devalue and forget the terms themselves — to strip all significance and meaning from all the terms that previously held so much command and presence and leave the words empty like husks. It is a brilliant demonstration of what we end up with when we acknowledge the divide between language and objects and realize there is no real substance to the terms and the languages we use to describe objects, except for the meaning that we fabricate and pretend to see as true. What we end up pledging allegiance to is neither God nor some heavenly kingdom. Instead, we “Hail nothing full of nothing” because “nothing is with thee” (Hemingway). Humans do not possess anything more than illusions of what is real. As told by Nietzsche, “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (117). Not only have we fabricated our truths, but we’ve gone so far as to forget that they are fabrications! We trap ourselves, it seems, in this cycle of lies — of conversations about conversations — believing ourselves to have hit upon the pot of golden truth.

With so much nothingness in the world and in ourselves, it is no wonder the unhurried waiter loses his dignity, feels lonely, and ultimately, empty. And so, he seeks solace in a clean, well-lighted place and hopes that this diversion from the darkness of nothingness can last, quite frankly, 24/7. And perhaps this is one way Hemingway is telling readers to cope with this fabricated reality in this silent universe. But I beg to differ. It is not so much about finding solace, as if our lives are completely worthless and all our foundations must be broken down, as it is about exploring the breadth of our constructions. We might have a ceiling to our endeavors, but we have such long hallways that are endless and diverse in all the ways we make something out of nothing. It is true that conversations are nothing more than just that: conversations. But our ways of having those conversations are plenty. And questions of “What do you mean?” and “How do you mean?” will continuously appear as little blinking red lights and collapsing bridges, so long as we don’t try to anchor ourselves to the object. Because we can’t. And, well, that’s okay.

Works Cited:

Hemingway, Ernest. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Harry Youtt, n.d. 11 Nov 2016. < http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf >

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” 1873, p. 114-123. 

By Emma Lezberg

“Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” said author Raymond Williams, and it has also become one of the most powerful—not despite its multivalence, but because of it.

First, there’s the meaning of essence, as in “the nature of the thing”. Then, there’s that trickier definition, the one that refers vaguely to those yellow leaves falling past my window, to those cows grazing in the field down the hill, and even, perhaps, to the tiny green shoots cracking the pavement in a parking lot across the street. It’s both the environment and the divine breath that infuses it.

This dexterity gives an author incredible leeway. Nature can be powerful or fragile, Eden or “avenging angel”, sublime or artifice—but whatever it is, it is a concept to be manipulated, even created, at the whim of the writer (Cronon, 48). The tornado threatening Dorothy’s home is menacing foreshadowing, the storm sinking Aeneas’ ships divine wrath, the wind whistling by Pocahontas’ ears a kindred spirit. And the connotations that arise from these uses have real-world effects: depending on how one defines nature, native peoples can be embodiments of a lost harmonious age or, conversely, savages marring pristine wilderness.

To environmental writers whose goal is to alter society’s relationships with nature, the flexibility of this concept has been their biggest ally.

Rachel Carson, a twentieth century scientist, set out to write a book detailing the dangers of chemical pesticides. Whether wittingly or not, her book also turned out to concern the Cold War, feminism, and injustice. That’s what you get when you write about such a malleable, hard-to-pin-down topic as nature.

Silent Spring, Carson’s 1962 masterpiece, begins with a fairy tale called “A Fable for Tomorrow”:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields….

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families….

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves. (Carson, 1-3)

At face-value, this introduction is straightforward, a simple lesson in causality. The imagined town is utopian, but quite accurately reflects the American rural ideal. The fields are bountiful, the townspeople content, and “white clouds of bloom” signal the fertility of the landscape. Then, with the suddenness of witchcraft or a biblical plague, the fields turn brown, the livestock fall ill, and people begin to die. Turns out, though, that it was not by a divine decree or evil spell; rather, the “white granular powder” that replaced the spores in the air were the cause of the malady.

Wait a minute, you might be thinking: why begin with a fairytale? Sure, the white powder is pesticides, we get that—but this is no way to begin a scientific work!

Carson’s critics contended just that. They pointed to this fairytale introduction to argue that she wasn’t a true scientist and that her book was too emotional and too idealist to present itself as science (Smith 737-738). The counterargument would be that the main chapters in the book delve deeply into the molecular structure of pesticides, scientific studies, and field research, and that the introduction is her way of making her point accessible to a general audience. Still, one must admit that it’s a strange way to begin a scientific book…

But perhaps we’re missing something here. Perhaps the book opens with biblical imagery rather than chemical jargon because it is asking to be analyzed through a literary, sociopolitical lens in addition to a strictly scientific one.

Let’s start at the beginning, then. We said that the “white clouds of bloom” blowing in the wind were signs of fertility and prosperity. Then, suddenly, some “evil spell” was cast, the landscape was “silenced”, people grew ill, and “everywhere was a shadow of death.” What caused this? No “enemy action”, Carson makes a point of saying, but a “white granular powder” falling from above.

This book was published in September 1962, the month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and nuclear threat had been escalating for years beforehand. Even topics unrelated to the Cold War were employing Cold War terminology, as that was the language of the day. Likening any threat to nuclear disaster, the most frightening and cataclysmic danger of all, granted it more urgency. Carson does just that, and the powder falling from the sky and the mysterious illnesses are only the beginning. In Ch. 3, Carson describes how little we know about the ultimate effects of pesticides such as DDT, citing that Food and Drug Administration scientists declared that it is “extremely likely the potential hazard of DDT has been underestimated” and adding that “No one yet knows what the ultimate consequences will be” (Carson, 23). Remind you of certain bombs being dropped and how few tests had been done beforehand? Later in that chapter, she likens effects of chemical pesticides to the effects of radiation, to which we are “rightly appalled” (37). Through this introductory fable and throughout her book, Carson is implying that spraying hazardous pesticides everywhere—treating nature as our enemy, as it were—would lead to a self-imposed result as catastrophic as nuclear disaster itself.

How to deescalate the conflict between humans and nature to avoid self-destruction? To put it in historical terms, détente. Turning to Carson’s concluding chapter, “The Other Road”, she states:

We stand now where two roads diverge…. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one “less traveled by”—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. (277)

Of course Carson is overtly discussing pesticide use, but that’s nuclear terminology if I’ve ever seen it. By the time this book was published, the Cold War had been raging for fifteen years; escalation was clearly the road most traveled by. Straying from that path—détente—was the only way to assure the “preservation of our earth”. Carson is not just discussing pesticides; she’s discussing political issues and the stubborn folly of man, in regards to nature and also in regards to other human beings.

Her book ends with this sentiment:

Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life—with living populations…. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves….

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life—a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways…. [The] practitioners of chemical control…have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation”, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man…. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. (296-297)

Note how little insects are mentioned. Take out those few references and this could easily be a passage arguing against escalation of the Cold War. Politicians, who have “no humility before the forces with which they tamper”, must remember that they “are dealing with life”. They must “cautiously seek to guide” their enemies “into channels favorable” to themselves in order “to achieve a reasonable accommodation”. After all, they are capable of “striking back”. (Mutually assured destruction, anyone?)

What are those “modern and terrible weapons” she mentions: pesticides or nuclear bombs? They could be either, or both.

Although Carson wasn’t an overtly political person or a feminist, many readers ascribe antiwar, ecofeminist viewpoints to her, and it is easy to see why. Throughout her book, Carson argues for an appreciation of the balance of nature—what was considered a feminist ideal—over the harsh “control of nature” that men had championed. Her definition of nature—as both powerful and fragile, but, more importantly, as complex and interconnected—underlies her rhetoric, conceiving a nature that is not to be dominated but to be protected. She calls for humility and recognition of all life, while many politicians and scientists sought only destruction.

The question remains: if we allege that Carson was purposely bringing the Cold War into her book about pesticides, why would she do so? The fact that Cold War terminology was effective in conveying a sense of urgency is not the only reason. Ultimately, the two issues are related. Those who wanted to blow up the Soviet Union would also be blowing up our atmosphere, and as long as the world’s superpowers were focused on one-upping each other, they would not be able to work together to tackle environmental issues. As modern political and environmental activist Van Jones argues, “It takes all of us to save all of us.” Disposability is at the heart of the issue. To Carson, there is no disposable aspect of nature—everything is connected in the “fabric of life”—and there is no disposable human life either. Acting as if there is will only put us in more danger. The fates of man and nature are inextricably linked.

This is an ecofeminist concept: the idea that male domination has harmed both marginalized groups and the environment, and that it will take the nurture of women to heal this rupture between humans and nature. According to Smith, “through her use of metaphors about the balance of nature—precisely the language that so incensed many of her critics—Carson crafted a vision of nature that would resonate well with the philosophy of ecofeminism that began to develop a decade after Silent Spring was published” (734). Although calling Carson an ecofeminist would be anachronistic, her focus on preserving this “balance” and her insistence that all life is connected are right in line with ecofeminist views.

Yes, Silent Spring is anti-pesticides. But, more broadly, it is anti-domination, suggesting that what drives men to harm each other, to harm women, to seek uncompromising control in many spheres is also what drives them to harm the earth.

This is the heart of the argument. And now, as with all arguments like these, we must take a step back and channel our inner skepticism. Hold on, you might be thinking. We can extrapolate as much as we want from this text, but did Carson really mean to include all these sociopolitical messages in Silent Spring? Her first priority must have been to challenge the chemical industry, and she surely anticipated that critics would question her scientific qualifications. After all, she was a female scientist without a Ph.D., best known for her poetic books on marine biology (Smith 735). To be taken most seriously, wouldn’t her most logical course of action have been to focus on the science, to make her case against pesticides as objectively as possible? What if she really did intend to only write about pesticides, and other morals crept in inadvertently?

And that’s just it. I would imagine that she meant to draw this connection, that she recognized the “compromise” thread underlying potential solutions to many societal and environmental problems (why else start with the fairytale?), but here’s the key: it doesn’t matter if this connection were purposefully fashioned. The implications are present in Silent Spring whether or not such political ideas ever crossed Carson’s mind. By employing images like “white granular powder” falling from the sky and using phrases like “enemy action” and “most modern and terrible weapons”, the text is pointing to nuclear threat whether its author intended it or not. By its focus on “sharing our earth” and achieving “accommodation” and balance, the text is championing what would later be called ecofeminism, even if its author weren’t a feminist. And by connecting these two, by arguing against rash “control” and for “high-minded humility”, the text is urging readers to recognize the human arrogance underlying so many sociopolitical issues—even if she really did only aim to discuss pesticides. Language has an autonomy of its own, independent of its purported subject (in this case, pesticides), and sometimes even independent of its author’s intentions.

In fact, the under-the-surface nature of these secondary messages may have done the book a great service. Had Silent Spring made these connections less subtly—like the little-known book Our Synthetic Environment, published a few months prior and on largely the same topic—Carson’s book may not have had the impact that it did (Smith 745). But embedded in the connotations of its words, the text presented these implications to readers without turning them off as being too “political”.  Silent Spring was a bestseller and succeeded in getting the harmful pesticide DDT banned, but it also led to the creation of modern ecological study. It changed the way people viewed the relationship between man and the concept of nature, and connected for perhaps the first time environmental injustice with social injustice. This may have been the book’s most far-reaching legacy.

Not every word has quite the dexterity that “nature” does—not every word can be invoked to argue such a wide variety of stances—but all language, as a cultural invention, always points back to the society that gave it birth. There is no way to describe concepts like disaster or equilibrium without invoking societal implications, just as there is no way to describe nature that is completely neutral and without connotations. That’s how a book about pesticides ends up discussing international politics and equal rights…and how an essay on a book about pesticides ends up discussing language itself.

 

WORK CITED

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Print.

Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Print.

Jones, Van. “Green Jobs Not Jails.” Confronting Climate Change. Williams College, Williamstown MA. 28 Sept. 2016. Lecture.

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“Marvel’s ‘Luke Cage’ and the Trojan Horse of Fiction” by Victoria Wang

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