FACT AND FICTION, FEAR AND WONDER: The Legacy of Rachel Carson

Abstract

иг~ГнЕ real world around is a recurring phrase in the writings of Rachel Carson. Carson is best known as the author of Silent Spring (1962), the lyrical yet fact-based expose that alerted Americans to the dangers of chemical pesticides in the environment. But Carson's name was already familiar to many in the 1950s and 60s, owing to her best-selling books on the sea and sea life. In those earlier works, Carson evokes a reality that is best apprehended not through facts but as an experience of enchantment and mystery, a sense of wonder or reverence that is more real than facts. Throughout much of her writing, including passages in which she reflects on herself as a writer, Carson clearly delineates reality from factual knowledge. Facts teach us little about the essence of life and ultimate cosmic realities, and can even obscure comprehension of our world. This close association of reality with mystery pervades much of Carson's work. The exception is Silent Spring, where terms such as enchantment and mystery take on a decidedly sinister flavor. Elsewhere portrayed as an inferior form of knowing, factual knowledge is foregrounded in Silent Spring and presented as a corrective to dangerous and destructive forms of enchantment. An analysis of this shift in Carson's writing is helpful in understanding associations of her work both with quasi-religious, apocalyptic fear and with a form of natural wonder and awe that borders on religious.1 In the last few years, the association of Carson with apocalyptic, irrational, fear-driven environmentalism appears to have gained ascendancy in American culture, judging from the numerous and unabated attacks on Carson's work and