Site Sight Cite
Essays by Members of the Biomes of the World Study Trip, January through March, 2010 Hiram College ,Hiram, Ohio
Introduction
Two novels that formed the core reading for the interdisciplinary course on the 2010 Biomes of the World Study Trip dealt with historic, scientific expeditions. Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World uses the late eighteenth century South American trip of German natural historian Alexander von Humboldt and French biologist Aimé Bonpland to try better to understand the complexity of both physical and metaphysical measuring. Using von Humboldt’s actual diaries, Kehlmann portrays the extent to which it is possible to push human perception. Both scientists in the novel (as well as a third, the mathematician Karl F. Gauss, in a parallel plot) defy the limitations that had been put upon science by millennia of untested ideas that had been accepted as law by undue reverence to tradition.
Sight and the distortions of sight, brought about by physical and mental duress, force all three scientists to challenge age-old perceptions. Driven nearly to death by enormous environmental challenges during their expedition, Bonpland and von Humboldt return to Europe early in the nineteenth century to rectify many crucial misperceptions about the natural world through a rigorous program of publication of their findings..
Similarly, Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal recreates a fictional arctic expedition, based on any of several attempts to discover the fate of the attempt by Sir John Franklin to find a speculative polar shipping route that had obsessed nineteenth century naval exploration. Although her characters are fictional—different from those of Kehlmann—they are based, nevertheless, on the letters and diaries of a wide spectrum of British and American sailors who set out on chimerical journeys, never to return.
Barrett, like Kehlmann, is interested in the self-absorption of explorers who are tempted to defy the evidence that lies before them in pursuit of fame rather than knowledge. Erasmus Wells, the narrator of The Voyage of the Narwhal, is forced by terrible physical and mental privation to realign his perceptions in order to deal with overwhelming proof of the folly of their undertaking. His potential brother-in-law. Zeke, an Ahab-like captain of the ship, wants only to make a name for himself by proving himself a better seaman than Franklin.
At one point Erasmus remembers an example given him by his father, drawn from classical natural history; it is one of the absurd descriptions from ancient science that had long been accepted as truth: where the north wind rises live people who have a single eye centered in their foreheads (128). Erasmus asks himself, “What had his father meant to do, reading those tales to his small sons?” He remembers, then, his father’s admonition that became the formative moment that made of him a natural scientist: Try to see what you see. Then, integrate it with what you’ve already read and heard (128).
The essays in this collection have at their heart that very admonition, “Try to see what you see.” Travel writing presents several challenges to the writing process. There is a temptation, first of all, to see and to write what every other traveler to distant and exotic places has already seen and written. It is akin to the dilemma of the travel photographer. Do I take the photograph that everyone who has ever seen a photo of this place expects to see? Or do I record my own observation of the site? And what is the veracity of that observation, if it has not been shaped by the myriad views of it that I—and many others––have already experienced?
Students on the Biomes of the World Study Trip are asked to produce an enormous amount of writing. In addition to daily journals of observations and essays that synthesized the work of the Biomes biology course, they also produced collaborative blogs for the trip’s website that reflected the intersection of literature, science, and the students’ own monumental, educational journey. The constant attention to the admittedly difficult challenge of trying to reduce to prose what were, at times, life-changing experiences was daunting. Doubtless, the sum of this intense writing commitment spilled over into the course on travel writing.
Hence, the title of this collection: Site Sight Cite. In that, perhaps overly clever homonym, is the challenge that faced the participants on this year’s Study Trip. As you read these essays, take note of the ways in which the essayists have tried to come to terms with the responsibility of recording a site with eyes that are trying to “see what you see,” while at the same time they embrace the obligation to have all of their facts straight. It is a hefty challenge, and each of the student writers represented here had the obligation of writing four “travel” essays using a variety of strategies for achieving the goal. Each author has chosen one of the four required essays to best represent the experience of a personal expedition.
David R. Anderson
August, 2010