Carson, Norris, Vonnegut - Capabilities of the Big Brain

In his essay “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” Frank Norris starts a conversation about “the best vehicle of expression” each century offers to contemporary analysts.  From this idea, I developed my reasoning against the usefulness of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that I voiced in class.  Norris writes in his 19^th century voice:

To-day is the day of the novel.  In no other way and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed; and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idiosyncrasy…There is no doubt that the novel will in time “go out” of popular favor as irrevocably as the long poem has gone, and for the reason that it is no longer the right mode of expression (Norris). 

After limited research, I found that Silent Spring appeared in the New York Times serially, and in this context, Carson’s words surely may have found their relevancy.  However, I do believe that the novel has “gone out” of favor as the most effective mode in which the people communicate their society’s injustices.  For this reason, the novel’s images were more effective in recalling the way in which humans beget the earth’s sickness than, perhaps, Carson’s benign and poetic passages.  Obviously, though, Carson’s words are often powerful, as in her final sentence:  “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” (Carson 197).  Such words, though, need to find another voice and another audience – one that will attempt reform. 

            Interestingly, though, Carson emphasizes that the government works secretly against the well being of the individual as well as against the environment; thus, she raises the question of how the individual can disturb and reform this destruction cycle.  Though we discussed in class that Carson’s focus is not upon a way in which humans can change the predicament, Carson impels her reader to want to change in her chapter “The Human Price” by scaring him with frightening facts and suggesting organic solutions.  She emphasizes, though, that a man’s belief that he has the power to affect nature – human, animal, environmental – created the problem in the first place.  In this way, Carson communicates a wish that humans would not try to protect themselves from nature, for though nature can overcome our poisons, we cannot.  Humans merely work against themselves in performing their “solutions” – recalling Vonnegut’s idea of the disadvantageous “big brain”.  Are humans, then, incapable of imagining real, grand solutions.