Links on a Chain in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Most of us have probably heard the urban legend about alligators in the sewer systems of major U.S. cities, usually Chicago or New York. The story generally goes like this: A baby alligator gets flushed down the toilet but somehow manages to survive the experience, whereupon it grows into adulthood and mates-presumably with another flushee-thus propagating an entire colony of subterranean man-eaters (sometimes the gators are replaced with aborted human fetuses, a variant used to surreal and arguably ridiculous effect in Harlan Ellison's short story, "Croatoan").
The legend of the flushed alligator reached its pop culture zenith in 1980, when John Sayles penned "Alligator," a self-deprecating exploitation movie, in which such a creature survives the sewers by feeding upon chemically-tainted dog carcasses (discarded into the system by a careless commercial laboratory). Mutated by its staple diet, the alligator grows to immense proportions and, breaking to the surface in a Chicago ghetto, begins eating its way up the socio-economic food chain, eating its way uptown, if you will, until at last crashing a party at the mansion of the mayor himself, who is promptly eaten along with his limo.
It is this technique of starting small before advancing up the food chain, that lies at the core of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; if it seems over-simplistic and cliched, that's because it is, now-40 years of "eco-horror" books and movies (like Sayles' "Alligator") have made it so. Like Sputnik and the atom bomb, Carson's linear, inexorably advancing argument became a catalyst for the sublimated fears of a generation, and a call to action.
A Fable for Tomorrow
The differences between the series of articles which ran in the New Yorker from June 16 through June 30, 1962, and the subsequent book, are both considerable and somehow subtle. Both pieces begin precisely the same way; that is, Carson introduces us to a town, rather, the Town-for it "does not actually exist"-but which serves as a idealized example of the American heartland, the kind of place Ray Bradbury might write about, a place "where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings." Slowly, however, Carson spreads a Shadow, writing to great dramatic effect that, "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, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died...The farmers told of much illness among their families" (The New Yorker, June16, 1962).
There can be little doubt, as a matter of craft, of the utility of such an opening: in a few sparse paragraphs Carson transforms Anytown, U.S.A into Tolkien's Shire, complete with "a checkerboard of prosperous farms" and "hillsides of orchards," and the Shadow out of Mordor which threatens them all. It is a good example, I think, of how a literary work-to borrow Malcolm Gladwell's phrase-can achieve a sort of cultural "stickiness." Peter Benchley's 1974 mega-bestseller Jaws, with its description of the idyllic resort town Amity and a specter somewhere in the spray, opened identically.
Carson ends this section by writing, "What is silencing the voices of spring in countless towns across America? I shall attempt to explain" (The New Yorker, June16, 1962).
Wet Work
We've all seen Jurassic Park-a safe-enough generalization given its gross earnings (according to the IMDb, $350,523,625 as of 1994-14 years ago). And we know how the cloning of dinosaurs as postulated in the movie is, at least in theory, possible. What we don't know and what many popular scientists were called on to explain at the time, is how precisely this could be done in the physical and logistical world of the Petri dish, what those scientists called the actual "wet work" of genetic cloning from mosquitoes preserved in amber. Likewise, few people today (much less in 1962) are more than casually aware of how industrial insecticides and herbicides such as DDT, Aldrin and Endrin actually work, what they are comprised of exactly, how extensively they have been used, nor that they are, like "smart bombs" and land-mines, wildly imprecise and wholly indiscriminant, no matter how carefully targeted; nor that, again, like "smart" weaponry, our over-estimation of their selectivity has only increased the frequency with which they are used.
What makes Silent Spring so compelling is exactly Carson's attention to detail or "wet work." In chapter 3, for example, titled "Elixirs of Death," she describes the effect of pesticides upon living organisms at the cellular level. She broadens her scope in Chapter 4 to include "Surface Waters and Underground Seas," then moves on to Chapter 5, "Realms of the Soil," Chapter 6, "Earth's Green Mantle," and so on until she begins to calculate "The Human Price" in Chapter 12. It could be argued that Carson's language in these chapters and beyond is overwrought, that she too often describes pesticides and "the men" who apply them in the way that, say, a comic book plotter might describe a Super-villain. Yet Carson is no nihilist, not thematically or tonally. She constantly provides evidence of hope, more, she prescribes possible solutions. Writes Carson at the end of Chapter 15: "It would be unrealistic to suppose that all chemical carcinogens can or will be eliminated from the modern world. But a very large proportion are by no means necessities of life. By their elimination the total load of carcinogens would be enormously lightened, and the threat that one in every four will develop cancer would at least be greatly mitigated" (242).
Here as elsewhere, she convinces by adopting a reasoned rather than shrill tone.
Links on a Chain
As creative nonfiction writers we speak of "beads on a string," by which is meant the threading of thematic "mini-arcs" along a spine-like string, or "primary arc." In Spring, Carson does much the same thing, but in keeping with her central theme-this notion, so common, even cliched, now, that everything and everyone are connected, in however minute a way, and that a blight upon one is a blight upon all-she forms not beads, like delicate globules of water, but links-hard, steely, and, unlike beads, utterly inseparable from the rest of the chain. "Inseparable' is indeed the operative word, and Carson's narrative climbs this chain, a food chain, quite literally, hand-over-hand, link upon link, from the cellular world and tiniest river gnats to children, men and women, from what is perceived as insignificant to what is perceived as paramount, like Sayles' chemically-mutated alligator, eating its way uptown-to the point at which its existence effects us all.