Audubon and Education

In “Myself,” we see the young Audubon as a reluctant student. His father wants him to go to school because “talents and knowledge, added to sound mental training, assisted by honest industry, can never fail, nor be taken from any one once the possessor of such valuable means” (769). Audubon acquiesces, but only to a point: he spends the time he ought to be in school gathering his first collection of “curiosities” gleaned from nature (769). I think it’s scarcely shocking that Audubon prefers learning from nature than from human teachers—but I do think it’s worth noting that this too is an imperfect means of education in Ornithological Biography. I want to trace, in this text in particular but also in some of the others we’ve read, the ways in which Audubon departs from his father’s view of education as an invaluable asset, the ways in which he distrusts the power of both the transmission of learning from expert to novice and learning from experience as methods for attaining a meaningful education. To do so, I want to address each of the categories of learning delineated here: talents, knowledge, and sound mental training (which I take to include training in behaviors and attitudes).

It seems odd to question Audubon’s belief in human educability because his life project is, it seems, an educational one. Ostensibly, Audubon’s goal in cataloging and artistically rendering America’s birds is not only to learn about birds himself but also to share his knowledge with a broader audience. But in Ornithological Biography, his ability to do both of these things is called continually into question. As frequently as Audubon affirms that he has observed these birds himself and drawn his conclusions from empirical evidence he draws attention to the limits of his knowledge and the limits of human beings for acquiring the knowledge he seeks. He “can only observe” that he’s seen one old eagle and has to rely on the suppositions of others (244). He hasn’t been able to ascertain the precise duration of incubation (245). He must cite the statements of others without being able to “vouch for the truth of such statements” (244). The movements of the hummingbird “preclude the possibility of following them” even “with a good glass” (250). If “anxious” is the buzzword of Mississippi River Journal, “suppose” is the buzzword of Ornithological Biography. Just as he repeatedly points out the limits of his knowledge and his ability to pursue it further, he obsessively corrects others. Doing so, he doesn’t just assert his supremacy—he calls into question the knowledge others have generated and can’t quite keep this same question away from the knowledge he himself has generated. Coupled with his doubts about his (and others’) ability to know birds are his doubts of his ability to convey what he knows and his readers’ abilities to learn what he has to teach. While I think it would be easy to write off his doubts on this count as rhetorical devices, I think their insistence is worth taking seriously. His desire to be believed and understood impacts his ability to give the facts as he knows them (268). I think we can understand his consistent anthropomorphism, his repeated similes and analogies, as tactics born of an honest concern as to whether his readers, having not seen what he has seen, will be able to understand what he believes he does. (I’m wondering if the desire to render the birds lifesize is in a part a product of this same anxiety about the possibilities of knowledge transmission.) I take seriously his repeated “Would I could represent to you” as representing doubt in the ability of his text to convey information. Sometimes, this desire to be understood and believed leads him to overstatement (“it never having been observed in the Middle States within the memory of any person now living there,” 270); at other moments, we see him try to reassure himself of the truth of what he has to tell (262).

Audubon is similarly anxious about his ability to achieve his affective goals, the goals I link to his father’s idea of “sound mental training.” Here again he falls back on a rhetoric of inability—“I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions,” for example (263). In addition to beauty, he cannot impart “the pleasure which I have felt whilst watching” (249). Surely, we can read this as a rhetorical device, Audubon claiming that words fail him, but it seems to me that too much is at stake in this failure for this to be solely coy. In the 1826 journal, he imagines himself asking Walter Scott to come to America now because her beauties are already being tainted and diminished. If we take concern for the environment as one rationale for Ornithological Biography, then his ability to convey and impart his feelings has a real and dear price: if he is unable to make others feel as he does, then he is unable to make them act as he does, with concern for the environment. His assertion in his discussion of the hummingbird that “you could not fail to be impressed with the deepest pangs which parental affection feels on the unexpected death of a cherished child” hangs precariously on that “could not fail,” which in its dispelling of doubt raises it (250). He trusts that “so kindly” we all have “been blessed with that intuitive and noble feeling—admiration!” (248). What he doesn’t trust, however, is his ability to activate this feeling in his readers.

Finally, then, on to skills, or what Audubon’s father calls “talents.” While these two aren’t automatically collapsible, I think that in Audubon’s writings they become so. We remarked last class on Audubon’s distaste for teaching. It seems to me that this isn’t just the product of his believing the job beneath his station, but also of the fact that his students never really seem to get any better. His giving of lessons becomes a non-event in the Mississippi River Journal because they never seem to really lead anywhere. Even when he gets to teach his social superiors in the 1826 journal, none of them do particularly good work—they work with enthusiasm, but not skill (191). Either Audubon is a terrible teacher or his students are incapable of learning what he has to teach. Lindsey and Deanna both read “My Style of Drawing Birds” as an attempt at self-fashioning rather than a pedagogical text; this perception fits well with my reading here. Audubon finds himself astonished by people’s inability to learn: he mocks, for example, those presumably learned naturalists who “express [their] astonishment that half-a-crown was asked by the person who had perhaps followed the birds when alive over miles of such swamps” (271). Dr. Brewster, who edits his writing, can’t seem to understand it: he “had Improved the Style and destroyed the Matter” (191). Audubon rejects the idea that others have been skilled enough to come up with methods of capturing birds better than his; he tries another’s idea for catching hummingbirds but “abandoned the scheme,” feeling “confident that it can never have been used with material advantage” (253). One final example of Audubon’s frustration with the ability of others to learn: the Carolina Parrot. (Yes, it’s a leap from birds to people—but is it for Audubon?) Audubon is frustrated that Carolina Parrots are “incapable of articulating words, however much care and attention may be bestowed upon their education” (236). This belief that skills are in fact talents because they are unlearnable ties all the Audubon we’ve read so far together: the journals and “Myself” are of a piece with Ornithological Biography in that all present the skills, knowledge, and affect of a single individual that cannot be fully transmitted to others. His style of drawing birds remains his alone as does, not despite his authoring of Ornithological Biography but rather because of his inability to do so to his satisfaction, his style of knowing birds. His writings on his childhood propensities and talents become the necessary precursors for understanding the innate and unteachable talents that motivate his scientific writing and art. He can attempt to share what he knows, knowing that to some extent he will fail; he can “teach” others while maintaining his own supremacy because of the limits of human educability. But if his texts reveal abiding concerns about the limits of human educability and knowledge transmission, then what gives his work value? If human educability is limited, then Audubon can frame his products as unique, unsurpassable, and unrepeatable, which gives them a value not based on their universal intelligibility but rather based the uniqueness of his knowledge, affect, and skills, which simply cannot be taught or even fully appreciated—rather like, it seems, the birds themselves.