Parable of the Sunfish
"The Parable of the Sunfish" is an
The Parable
The text of the parable below is excerpted from Pound's ABC of Reading.
A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."
Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."
After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.[1]: 17–18
Context
ABC of Reading
Pound opens ABC of Reading with the following pronouncement:
The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another. No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the sunfish.[1]: 17, emphasis in original
In the parable, a graduate student is sent to noted biologist Louis Agassiz to complete his education, and Agassiz asks the student three times to describe a sunfish specimen. The student replies with, in turn, the common name of the fish, a brief summary of the species, and a four-page essay on the species. Agassiz finally tells the student to "look at the fish" and "[a]t the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it."[1]: 18 The text of the parable itself spans 131 words over sixteen lines and is often reproduced in full when cited.[2][3][4]
Pound contrasts this empiricism against knowledge gained through increasingly abstract definitions. As an example, Pound relates what might happen if a European is asked to define "red". After the initial response that red is a color, Pound imagines asking for a definition of color and having it described in terms of vibration, with vibration then defined in terms of energy, and that successive abstractions eventually reach a level where language has lost its power.
Literary essays
Pound subsequently refers to the parable in two essays: "The Teacher's Mission"[5] and "Mr Housman at Little Bethel".[6] Both were republished in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound[7] and reference Agassiz without including details of the parable. "The Teacher's Mission" in particular provides a straightforward explanation of how Pound wished the parable to be interpreted.
"Mr Housman at Little Bethel"
In January 1934, Pound published a critique of A. E. Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry in the Criterion.[6] As part of the critique, Pound offers an emendation to Housman's claim that "the intelligence" of the eighteenth century involved "some repressing and silencing of poetry".[7]: 68 Pound replies that the root cause was the tendency towards abstract statements, which came about in part because eighteenth century authors "hadn't heard about Professor Agassiz's fish."[7]: 68
"The Teacher's Mission"
Also in 1934, Pound published an essay critiquing existing methods for teaching literature in general and university-level instruction methods in particular. He identifies the root of the problem as abstraction and uses the word "liberty" as an example of a term where a specific, concrete meaning has been lost. Pound finds this situation "inexcusable AFTER the era of 'Agassiz and the fish'" and demands an approach to general education that "parallels ... biological study based on EXAMINATION and COMPARISON of particular specimens."[7]: 60, emphasis in original
Sources
Louis Agassiz was a Swiss-born scientist at Harvard University who, by 1896, had established a reputation for "lock[ing] a student up in a room full of turtle-shells, or lobster-shells, or oyster-shells, without a book or a word to help him, and not let[ting] him out till he had discovered all the truths which the objects contained."[8] Several students of Agassiz who went on to prominence recorded this rite of passage, including Henry Blake, David Starr Jordan, Addison Emery Verrill, and Burt Green Wilder.[9] American literary critic Robert Scholes traces the parable's source to two narratives in particular: those of former students Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and Samuel Hubbard Scudder. Their anecdotes were reprinted in Lane Cooper's Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on his Method of Instruction.[10]: 655–6 Their separate accounts differ markedly from Pound's: both students provide oral reports with a wealth of detail after being initially forbidden from consulting outside sources.[clarification needed]
Shaler's Autobiography
At length on the seventh day, came the question "Well?" and my disgorge of learning to him as he sat on the edge of my table puffing his cigar. At the end of the hour's telling, he swung off and away, saying "That is not right."[11]: 98
Shaler concluded Agassiz was testing him to see if he was capable of "doing hard, continuous work without the support of a teacher" and redoubled his efforts, starting from scratch and, over the course of seven ten-hour days, managed to describe the specimen to Agassiz's satisfaction.[11]: 99
Scudder's "Look at your fish!"
Samuel Hubbard Scudder recorded a similar experience, first published in 1874 as "Look at Your Fish" in Every Saturday magazine.[12] Agassiz again starts his new student off with a fish preserved in alcohol and instructs the student to "look at it", and promises "by and by I will ask what you have seen".[12]: 2 [a] As opposed to Pound's decomposing sunfish, Scudder's account emphasizes the care taken to keep the specimen in good condition:
I was to keep the fish before me in a tin tray, and occasionally moisten the surface with alcohol from the jar ... In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish, and started in search of the Professor – who had, however, left the Museum; and when I returned, after lingering over some of the odd animals stored in the upper apartment, my specimen was dry all over. I dashed the fluid over the fish as if to resuscitate the beast from a fainting fit, and looked with anxiety for a return of the normal sloppy appearance. This little excitement over, nothing was done but to return to a steadfast gaze at my mute companion.[12]: 2
Scudder provides the additional detail that "instruments of all kinds were interdicted", including any magnifying glass.
Cooper's Louis Agassiz as a Teacher
In 1917, English professor Lane Cooper from Cornell University published a collection of reminiscences of Agassiz. The book included notes from several notable contributors, including Scudder and Cooper, William James, Professor Addison Emery Verrill ("[Agassiz's] plan was to make young students depend on natural objects rather than on statements in books"),[14]: 27 and Professor Edward S. Morse, who wrote that Agassiz's method was "simply to let the student study intimately one object at a time."[14]: 48 (footnote) Cooper prefigures Pound's interest by remarking on the "close, though not obvious, relation between investigation in biology or zoology and the observation and comparison of these organic forms which we call form of literature and works of art",[14]: 2–3 concluding that "We study a poem, the work of man's art, in the same way that Agassiz made Shaler study a fish."[14]: 4 Critic Robert Scholes concludes that Pound had access to this book and used the material within it as the source for the parable that opens ABC of Reading.[10]: 655–6
Interpretation and criticism
Agassiz
Science historian Mary P. Winsor provides extensive commentary on Agassiz's initial assignments for his students. The solution to the "riddle",
Agassiz provides several potential solutions: the
Pound
Pound, echoing Cooper, opens ABC of Reading by stating that the correct method for the study of poetry is "the method of contemporary biologists" and that "No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish."[1] Commentators have summarized Pound's position with the term empiricism, but have divided over whether the parable endorses or indicts the idea.
The simplest interpretations in scientific writing,[17] history of science,[18] and literary criticism[19] take the parable at face value, accepting empiricism and observation as legitimate techniques. For example, when writing about stellar atmospheres, Dimitri Mihalas states that "it is specimens, not facts, that are the ultimate empirical currency that we must use if we wish to purchase a valid theory" before beginning a discussion of Pound's sunfish.[20]: emphasis in original
Moving from acceptance of empiricism to an understanding of its limitations, Christopher Tilley emphasizes in his comments on "scientific archeology" that Pound's student "was not simply learning about 'reality', the sunfish, but a way of approaching that reality – a discourse bound up in a particular thought tradition (empiricism)".[21]: 76 Robert Scholes reaches a similar conclusion, noting that the student "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".[10]: 654
Author
Two critics have also commented on the parable's implications in describing the nature of knowledge in terms of the decay of Pound's fish. Celeste Goodridge notes that Marianne Moore's 1934 review of Pound's Cantos uses a detailed metaphor of a grasshopper wing to describe the conversations therein. In Goodridge's opinion, Moore's "microscopic examination" both undercuts the work as well as "pays homage, in its precision, to Pound's reverence for 'the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism.'"[22]: 73 Goodridge then reproduces the parable in full and comments, "Agassiz teaches Pound that all knowledge is necessarily fragmented and does not constitute a whole."[22]: 74 Knowledge of the fish cannot begin until decay has commenced, reducing the specimen to its constituent parts.
Peter Nicholas Baker reaches a fundamentally different conclusion. He begins the discussion of the parable by first quoting Pound on the topic of genius:
The genius can pay in nugget and in lump gold; it is not necessary that he bring up his knowledge into the mint of consciousness, stamp it either into the coin of conscientiously analyzed form-detail knowledge or into the paper money of words before he transmit it.[23]: emphasis in original
Baker finds the most striking feature of the parable to be the absence of description of the fish. Baker asks: "Do readers of this anecdote learn about the fish, or rather about a certain kind of authoritarian teaching practice?"[24]: 79 Baker claims that Pound's images of coining metal are just as unrealistic as his ideas regarding science and the scientific method. The reader, following Pound's student, reaches knowledge through intuition alone; the decomposing fish, so far as epistemology is concerned, has become "transparent".[24]: 80
Notes
- Lampridae or a Molidae, but a diplodokus is something altogether different. Pound's name, which includes the Greek words for "fish" and "sun," when taxonomical names are typically Latinate, is very likely meant as a joke.[13]
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8112-1893-1.
- ^ Sieburth, Richard (Winter 2007–2008). "Organized Water". Cabinet (28). Retrieved December 6, 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-520-08755-2.
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- ^ a b Pound, Ezra (1934). "Mr Housman at Little Bethel". Criterion.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8112-0157-5.
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- ^ JSTOR 376925.
- ^ OCLC 811936092.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8039-4938-6.
- ^ Colangelo, Jeremy (2018). Agnotologies of Modernism: Knowing the Unknown in Lewis, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce (PhD). The University of Western Ontario.
- ^ OCLC 595601454.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-90214-2.
- OCLC 422299142.
- ^ Whorley, Joshua R. "Observation: the First Necessity of Science" (PDF). Lab Notes for an Animal Biology Class at Seattle Central Community College. Retrieved December 8, 2012.
- ISBN 978-3-8258-6732-4.
- ^ Santos, Sherod (Spring 1987). "Poetry and Attention: J.D. Salinger". New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly. 9 (3): 348.
- ISBN 978-0-7727-5801-9. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
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- ^ ISBN 978-0-87745-239-3.
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- ^ ISBN 978-0-8130-1064-9.