Tag Archives: Agassiz

A Pencil Is One of the Best Eyes

This week, I especially enjoyed Robert Scholes’ retelling of the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish (Textual Power, Chapter 8). As the perpetual student, I have had my share of such challenges placed before me by my professors. For example, I remember one film studies professor having our class watch a one-minute clip of a Jean Renoir film again and again. He then asked us to write about it. I did, only to be told afterwards that what I had written wasn’t what the all-knowing professor was looking for (though he never could explain what that was). I had a similar frustrating experience with another professor having to do with my interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. “I can see why you suggested what you did and took the approach that you did, but I was hoping for something just a little bit more,” he said to me. Sadly, I never did get what that little bit more was. These experiences remind me of the story of the boss who tells his subordinate, “Bring me a rock.” About 200 rocks later, the boss says, “Yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind.” All of us, like poor Professor Agassiz’s student, have had to take part in a puzzle or riddle and “guess what the professor” or a boss had in mind (Scholes p. 138).

What impressed me most in the retelling of the fish story (other than Scholes’ joke about the name Stanley Fish) is the part where the post-graduate student gets the idea of drawing the fish. Through drawing, the student begins to see [my emphasis] features in it that he had not noticed before (Scholes, p. 138). Agassiz reinforces the student’s drawing effort by saying, “That is right, a pencil is one of the best eyes” (Scholes p. 138). This pencil idea is an intriguing one; if Agassiz is correct, the act of creating a visual rendering of our subject can illuminate for us what our eyes alone will miss. Is that because drawing slows us down? Does drawing make us notice and record each detail separately and look for connections and relationships between details? Or, is more going on with the use of the pencil in our understanding because of the kinetic and visual types of learning that drawing requires of us?

The study of literature is one in which we notice and record details and look for relationships between details. It is not usually a kinetic or visual kind of learning. Drawing, with pencil in hand, may therefore be a useful tool for our students. You may recall that we explored one possible use of the pencil ever so briefly in our recent discussion of Sonny’s Blues. One idea Professor Sample talked about was to have students create a time and place inventory to explore when and where each part of the story takes place. This visual timeline exercise could be useful, he suggested, to help students consider Wright’s use of flashback in the telling of this story.

There may be many other ways we can help our students use the pencil to draw what they are seeing in literature. Let’s imagine asking our students to approach literary studies, then, with blank poster paper and a spanking new box of 64 Crayola crayons. How might we proceed? Here are a few ideas.

First, let’s consider Sonrisas, Pat Mora’s poem that begins, “I live in a doorway” (Norton anthology, p. 528). We could ask our students to do a color rendering of the doorway and what the speaker hears and sees on either side of it. Color could be so useful in capturing the emotions in this piece. Second, remember that list of verbs that some of our classmates created for William Carlos Williams “The Use of Force”? We could ask students to make a streak of color to represent each verb. That might help them explore the emotions and intensity evoked by those verbs. Or, in the same story, we could ask students to count the number of words spoken by the father, the mother, and Mathilda and then create a bar graph or pie chart to illustrate the final counts. Or, we can ask them to draw a portrait of Mathilda herself, the savage brat, to capture her flushed face, her magnificent blonde hair, her catlike movement.

These drawing techniques may seem at first like elementary-school exercises; students may resist using them on those grounds. However, if we can find a way to get students open up to using drawing as their eyes, they may discover a great deal about the text at hand. After all, drawing is a useful technique in art therapy, and art therapists get adults to draw all the time. Why can’t we? For that matter, why couldn’t we design an interdisciplinary course combining literature studies and studio art? Scholes is definitely onto something here. – Pollyanna Hills